Now that’s what I call a Paladin!

SO! Hi, my name is Apple, and I’m a holy paladin.

Hi, Apple.

The past week or so, especially the past couple days, when I’ve tried to queue, have been… frustrating. There was the horrific all-DK Nexus group. There was the AN group that lost not one, but TWO tanks between the last trash pull and Anub. (the first tank pulled the trash before I’d finished running from the pond, and by the time I got him in LoS, he was dead. The rest of us hightailed it out the doorway to bug them, and he “mysteriously” D/C’d. The second tank didn’t wait for me to finish drinking, and pulled Anub before I was down on the platform, locking me out. He stayed long enough to say “heals?” and to hear my reply of “you locked me out by pulling before I got there.” and then dropped mid-combat.) There was the Old Kingdom group where I’d been questing, and was low on mana when the queue popped – the tank asked “ready?” and without waiting for an answer, ran off and aggro’d the first trash. I calmly kept drinking, saw him die, said “dude, don’t pull when the healer’s not ready” and dropped group. I did NOT have the patience for that shit.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I had a couple good runs. These would be the runs that Kurn tanked for me on her warrior, however, and she’s very good about healer awareness. Probably because she’s, y’know, a healer. But for the most part, thus far, I’ve mostly… kept myself busy in other ways.

The past two days, I’ve come along to Heroic Magister’s Terrace with a guildie or two – we’re farming the orb and the pet, and Ose (the one organising it) is farming the mount. It’s pretty fun, and I still get XP from it. ;) My friend Megs (from Sholazar Safari) and I have done a couple mount runs for her shaman, just the two of us. Farming ZG isn’t too bad – I actually got to DPS, which is a fun change from time to time, though I wouldn’t want to do it normally. Megs and I also discovered that Draenei are too tall to use the back door to Kara, even under the influence of pygmy oil, and that one lv 80 enhancement shaman and one lv 73 holy paladin can actually take out Attumen, the first boss in Karazhan. He did not drop the mount, but I did get the Drape of the Righteous, which was, in general, much nicer than my dinky green back, and is quite pretty. It was a -3 int change, but dammit, it’s PRETTY! And the mana regen is nice to have.

Killing Attumen was, to me, the first real proof of my chops as a healer. Sure, Megs used a heal on herself once or twice, but she’s not specced for healing (well, she IS, but it’s her offspec), and she had to concentrate on burning him down. I popped… probably every CD I had that would be useful. I was OOM for a good chunk of the fight. And we GOT HIM. It was a very proud moment. This was, like, three days ago and I’m still preening.

And then last night, I got to stay up later than usual because I went in to work at 12 instead of 10. So what did I do? I quested. Now, you probably can guess HOW FEW quests I have finished, considering 98% of my levelling has been through random dungeons. I got my “250 quests completed” achieve last night. At level 73. :) But except for a brief break to run Magister’s Terrace and ZG, what I did last night was the Wrathgate questline, from the first quest (being sent to Wintergarde from Star’s Rest, I believe) to the last (Battle for the Undercity). It was a very triumphant moment for me, on a couple of counts – one, it was the last real proof I needed that I CAN; as a Healadin wearing an assortment of cloth, leather, mail, and plate; solo PvE content. I will never stop thanking Kurn for pointing me in the direction of a good rotation, and while my DPS is obviously not phenomenal, I can hold my own, even against two or three mobs.

The second is that… to me, the Wrathgate quest is just one of Those Quests: The quests that, as a lore-loving RP nerd, I really just NEED to do. And I still remember the first time I did the questline – it was, granted, on the PTR, after Ulduar had already gone live, on a level 80 premade DK. It wasn’t a new questline by any stretch. But I hadn’t seen the info for it, I hadn’t watched the cinematic, I didn’t even know about the part where you go to the Undercity. I was in awe of Bolvar’s amazing presence and command, and then I was SO PROUD when he requested ME SPECIFICALLY to come to the Wrathgate front. Yes, I was actually proud, even though I knew logically that hundreds of thousands of people had done this quest already and had seen the same words and run the same errands and killed the same mobs. Don’t judge me. :P And then he entrusted the command of the base camp TO ME when he led the attack on the Wrathgate. Sure, in some ways it was disappointing, but SOMEONE needed to hold down the fort, someone he could trust. Someone he trusted to LEAD if something should happen to him. And that someone was me.

And then I watched the cinematic that I wasn’t expecting. The Horde and Alliance forces fighting, Bolvar and Saurfang the Younger quipping in an almost brotherly way, triumphant music, and then the moment when the Lich King emerged, and I could see the golds and blues of the Alliance mixed in with the blacks and reds of the Horde, and it was GOOD. I’ve always been a fan of peace between the factions – probably one reason I love both Jaina and Thrall so much. But then… disaster struck, and they were betrayed by the Forsaken, and I cried. And then I had the chance to go and kill the bastard responsible, with Varian and Jaina (and for once, I wasn’t annoyed at Varian’s presence), and it was AMAZING and breathtaking and WONDERFUL.

So, y’know, that’s a quest chain I just HAVE to do. And I did it, in one night, and I got to go to bed happy.

This post has veered a bit off its original course of “Let’s tell everyone how much I love the Wrathgate quests” and then the one I changed to which was “Let’s tell everyone my tiny little stories of Pally triumph.” But that’s okay. This is how it is for me – everything’s tied in to everything else. I kept my sister-in-arms alive while she killed Attumen single-handedly, and finally felt like a PROPER Paladin, even in my sissy priest robes. And then, still riding on that high, I went and I saved people and led armies and exacted justice (and a little bit of vengeance), all as a proper Paladin. And even before that, I healed people who sucked, who didn’t listen, who decided they could rogue tank while the tank… tanked the rest of the mobs, even though I wanted to just let them die. And, true to form, as a slightly snarky dwarf, I even told Kael’thalas that a huge fucking crystal in his chest isn’t a “setback”, it’s a HUGE FUCKING CRYSTAL IN HIS CHEST.

So, really, that’s what this post is about, just like I said at the beginning.

My name is Apple, and I’m a Paladin.