The Journey Continues

Fellow greetings again Internet. I know I have not been very active on this blog and I do apologize for the inconvenience. As it currently stands, I have taken up the duty of keeping up with writing raid tactics and our Guild’s insider blog on tankspot.com, which sadly eats most of the time I have for writing blogs. However, I currently find myself sitting in Dalaran and having plenty of time to spare before our next raid so I decided to start up my Writer and and put some words down.

First, for those who are interested you can check our Increment Insider blog at our tankspot. For those who insisted on screenies of our progression should find plenty in there. Progression-wise we are currently holding at 9/12 in ICC25 HMs. A fact we are very proud of and have had several experimental goes at three different HMs; Professor Putricide, Sindragosa, and Halion just to see which we would like to commit our time to.

A lot of news filter in about Cataclysm almost every day. Many times I’ve gazed upon them and thought to myself “that deserves a mention in my blog” but there are so many that it is impossible to keep up and in the end, this blog isn’t really about publishing latest news. Just what seems important to me. On that note, details about the new Tier 11 gear sets have been released, with a couple of screenshots.

The part that strikes me about these sets is the fact that tanks might again care about the Tier bonuses, which we clearly did not need to do towards the end of Wrath. Sure, they were a nice addition but was somewhat mellowed by the fact that Blizzard decided to add much more sexier gear pieces to both the frost vendor and drops from ICC. Looking at the Tier 11 bonuses I feel a certain excitement as a tank, a feeling that these might almost be a must-have thing.

Warrior’s Earthen Battleplate:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Shield Slam ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Shield Wall ability by 50%.

Death Knight’s Magma Plated Battle Armor:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Death Strike ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Icebound Fortitude ability by 50%.

I do wish Blizzard would get out of their habit of adding a threat boost to our tanking sets and more complicated elements, like added health regenerated by our Death Strike. The whole concept of threat has a very controversial feel for me. I wouldn’t want to make it trivial but nor do I want to generally worry about it. Some tanks have whispered about the return to TBC’s type aggro where tanks where holding aggro was the single-most hardest thing to do in the game.

That’s ridiculous in my opinion and I’m glad to report Blizzard has officially agreed with me on numerous occasions. Tanks should have all the tools they need for holding aggro, if they use all their respected abilities properly. If you’re only spamming one button through the entire encounter you deserve to lose aggro but otherwise, for players who know what they are doing, it shouldn’t be an issue and not warrant threat bonuses in Tier sets. To me the pleasure of tanking is in pulling, positioning, taking the hit and surviving it so rest of the raid can do their jobs.

Likewise, for me  Tier sets represent an addition to your abilities, not their completion. Seeing that Shield Wall’s duration goes up by 50% is awesome and means I can survive for much longer. Seeing a threat modifier in the sets just means threat would be partially gimped prior to getting the set. That type of sets also inevitably lead situation during the next upgrade process, when you will not have that ability, thus making your performance rather poor until you get the two new pieces, or worse the next set will not have it at all and you run on half power for the rest of the patch.

Ruby Sanctum Explored

Time to breath a little bit of more life into this blog and no better time than, when you have a lot of thoughts to comment with. I will begin with this look into the finished product that is the Ruby Sanctum, last raid instance to be published in this expansion. I wrote a lot about before during the PTR so I will not bother going through all of that again.

Rather, I decided to provide a look through a new medium that I am exploring, which is video capture. With the LK down on 25-man, we are feeling good about our guild. Makes you comfortable that as a group, you have helped the guild build back up from the deep gutter that we were in, only couple of months ago. With that knowledge giving us a big boost of confidence, we are coming up with a few new projects and my favorite pet is the video capture of our encounters.

It has already started and through a lot of trial and error I have released two video captures. They are both from Ruby Sanctum, as it provided a perfect testing ground for a new editor. The two videos are our first 10-man and 25-man kills. No heroic tries yet, but chances are we will be going for those in the near future. Depends how we divide our raiding time between the ICC hard modes and the Ruby Sanctum.

Personally, I did not find the normal modes that difficult. Naturally, he hits a lot harder on 25-man difficulty and the challenge is primarily on surviving, especially in the Twilight realm where everyone is moving and healers have a lot to deal with. But any decent group will not have a lot trouble with this encounter. As of fact, most of us in the group agreed that the trash mobs in Ruby Sanctum are a lot more annoying than the bosses themselves.

Anyway, here are the links to my two vids, first the 10-man Halion and then the 25-man version. Hope you enjoy.

25-man Lich King

The atmosphere is almost tangible, when finally all the hard work and effort pays off, as the encounter is defeated and the Lich King falls to the ground. It validates all the decisions and paths that we have taken as a guild, letting us know that we did it right. The right people were at the right place and at the right time.

Now it is time to look for future the horizon, raise the par even more and begin tackling the hard modes of Icecrown Citadel, while at the same time bring in those who couldn't fit into last night's kill, so we can all enjoy it.

Heroes of the Alliance, I salute you.

Glance at Heroic Modes

So the Lich King is dead and understandably, come next lockdown and we were all eager to sink our teeth into the heroic modes of Icecrown Citadel. But even with a lot of research on the previous days, I do not think any of us were quite prepared for them. After all, we knew they would be harder, but would they really be that much harder? In a word, yes, the heroic modes are an incredibly refreshing experience after the easy normal modes and we were really taken back just by the Lord Marrowgar encounter. I am going to go through the first wing of bosses, just reviewing some of our experiences and the changes to the bosses.

Lord Marrowgar

In a twisted way, for me, this is actually the hardest of the first four encounters. In simplest terms, the damage that the raid takes has gone up and is by no means trivial anymore. Both the bonestorm and fires are big killers, and the fight is actually all about avoiding as much as possible of it. Just on a plate tank, we recorded over 10k ticks from the whirlwind and our resto shaman reported that he can at best take 2-3 ticks of it before quickly dying.

We eventually went with a 1 tank, 4 healers, and 5 dps setup. One tank should be quite capable of tanking Marrowgar alone, and in fact, it simplifies the tank’s job when he avoids the fires. When bonestorms were imminent (5 seconds or so) the raid would quickly spread, healers divided between the two sides. This is so that when Marrowgar charges someone, he will only hit max 1-2 people, who quickly move out of the way. If you have good ranged dps, they will absolutely shine on this fight, because they are able to break spikes even from middle of fire.

Lady Deathwhisper

After Lord Marrowgar, we were suddenly taken back at just how much simpler Deathwhisper is. Essentially, the big change is during the last phase. The only change to the first phase seems to be a bigger mana pool and she will CC a random person, like on 25-man normal mode. It might have been just me, but also seemed that there were also a lot more martyrs among the adds. In several cases, we had easily three risen martyrs to deal with and dps really need to watch for them.

The second phase, unlike normal mode is tanked by the stairs, at the entrance because Deathwhisper continues to periodically summon one add. She will also summon one vile spirit, which must be avoided at all cost because it explodes with an 20 yard AoE and hits really hard. It always goes for a specific person, so that person should kite it around for a few seconds.

For tanks, Deathwhisper is more of a challenge because she is immune to taunts. We sort of went heads first into it and had no defining tactics for it. Because our stacks grew so high, the person tanking the boss, would also have to tank the add and once the stacks fell off, the second tank had to get tricks in order to catch up quickly. We got her down, but I am thinking there must be an easier way to control the stacks and get a much more cleaner kill.

The Gunship Battle

Out of all the encounters, this one really is a joke. There is a little bit more damage from missiles and axes, but in general, you will hardly notice that it is on heroic mode. Like always we sent two hardcore melee dps over to the other ship, along with a tank and the mage, even with a bigger health pool, went down like a rock. The only hiccup we had was apparently an axe thrower, who for some strange, unforeseeable reason, enraged and started hitting really hard, causing our resto shaman to die total of three times, giving us a whole lot of hilarity once we finally docked.

Deathbringer Saurfang

We actually did not get many good tries on this boss because we were running out of time at this point, causing us to miss the kill but I am fairly confident we unlocked the necessary mechanic to get him down as soon as we get our next attempts. The trick with Saurfang is controlling the adds. There is a lot more damage during the encounter, but it is still doable with just two healers. Make sure you have one holy paladin and one raid healer; priest, druid, or shaman, all are good choices. The healers need to pay good attention to the marks of the fallen, for there will be more of them (thanks to Saurfang’s bigger health pool) and none of the targets are allowed to die, or the boss will heal 20%.

But with competent players, the real challenge of the fight lies with the beasts. When they spawn, they move wicked fast and basically one-shot any nontank. You need to device a strategy to keep them in control, which is why you need really good ranged dps to kill them out. Melee dps can help out, but only if they do not pull aggro on them and the beast is not rooted. A rooted beast hits anything within melee range, which is usually an eager melee dps.

Death knights are ideal for using chain of ice and I found the best tactic is to actually spam roots on one beast, while the second is slowed and zerged down by the combined ranged dps. Once the first one dies, they finish the second one off and the ideally, neither of the two beasts never get far from the boss to begin with.

All and all, we had a lot of fun doing these heroic modes and if you’re any like us, finding the normal modes boring, you should enjoy the heroics a lot more also. The changes aren’t truly severe, but there are more actual mechanics to overcome and the margin for poor performance has been almost completely removed. If you are focused, the encounters should not be overwhelming but wipe fest starts the minute you lose your concentration.

Good luck everyone.

Blood Tanking

After weeks of waiting, Ghostcrawler has finally dropped the bomb on death knight tanks and how we will fundamentally change in Cataclysm; we will all be converted into the Blood tree. Yes, you heard me right, we are finally getting a dedicated tanking tree, in the same spirit as paladins and warriors have the Protection tree. A lot of people did not believe such a thing could happen and even personally, I was skeptical, though I hoped, and seems Blizzard has prove us all wrong, for better or for worse. Ghostcrawler will be posting more news on the death knight changes, tomorrow on 8th of April which is when we will be getting more details but we can still collect our thoughts on this change.

After all, this is probably the biggest change to the class that we will see. The actual details of how the class will work are interesting, but just this knowledge, of one, the dedicated tree, changes everything for us and it is not difficult to begin seeing the consequences up ahead.

Was this a surprise? Not really. If you look at the history behind DK tanking in WotLK, there has always been one, the best tanking tree and it has usually always been Blood. Sure, all three trees are viable but Blood has always been the best, thanks to self-healing abilities that it provides and that really is the bottom line when tanking big and hard hitting encounters. It is difficult to describe just how valuable that is sometimes.

Originally, when the class was released, death knights were balanced as having larger health pools and the ability to regenerate it with their special abilities. Much like druid tanks, we needed it because we did not carry shields for extra mitigation. This is something I hope Blizzard can bring back to us, not how we were overpowered back then, but a level of equilibrium between the classes. Today DKs are squishy and it takes a lot of experience and skill to play the class because we rely heavily on our cooldowns to provide what other classes get for granted. Relying solely on death strikes to equal it out is a bad idea, at least in the current game because the fact that you can regenerate %5 (or ever 10%) of your hit points AFTER a boss takes away 80% of them with one hit, is not helpful. But perhaps this is an element that will balance out better in Cataclysm, where we are being told health loss is not quite such unforgiving. Death strike becomes only truly useful in a setting where attacks nibble your health down at a slower rate, where there is more chances to resist the loss and the road from 100 to zero takes longer.

Another big question becomes, how will they now balance the tanking elements from all three trees into one. In its current configuration, the Blood tree has a big drawback, which is AoE. Even a deep frost spec requires a special glyph to speed it up to the level that warriors and paladins run it. Compared to them, in standard AoE setting, we are crawling because we need to setup diseases before we can actually create viable threat. With a total revamp of the trees, this can of course be solved rather easily and my guess is we will perhaps get a glimpse of the mechanic that they are working on. However, regardless of how it is fixed, the point is, it needs to be fixed.

What about dual-wielding? Again, we will see tomorrow but I think we can safely assume DW is an element that will continue to stay in the frost tree. It could become a viable tanking spec, if the necessary talents are somewhere very low in the frost tree and Ghostcrawler did not provide any hints as to the state of this possibility. We shall see what information they decide to provide us tomorrow.

Run! Forest! Run!

I had my first come back to my death knight character last night, after a long break doing other things, and there is no place like Icecrown Citadel to have you wake up call. My first Rotface (tankspot vid) encounter was a fun experience, particularly since our MT was a warrior, thus falling on me to kite the oozes.

Usually when you’re the less experienced in the bunch, you tend to be given the safe assignments, but mine was pleasantly enjoyable.

For those of you who do not know the encounter, essentially the idea is that while the MT tanks the boss in the middle of the room, the OT stays on the room’s edges. The reason for this is that periodically the boss will drop Mutated Infection on a random person. When it is removed, it drops a small ooze, which cannot be tanked or taunted.

The idea is to get two removed at the same spot, so that in close proximity, they unite into one big ooze. This ooze is tauntable, which is the OT’s job. It will one shot you dead if it catches you, so you need to move and keep kiting it around the room. More small oozes will drop and they must be dragged in front of the big ooze, so it will swallow them and eventually, after five small ones, explode.

It required a few takes, but eventually, we got it and was just, simply a whole lot of fun.

The challenge is basically just the fact that a) quarter of the room is constantly flooded with slime that slows you down and b) towards the end of the fight, smaller oozes will show up at an accelerated rate. We had an extra big ooze on the floor total of three times. It can be bad, since the OT needs to then out run them both, but if you can get them to collide, one of them will instantly explode, since they still act like smaller oozes.

Welcome back to Azeroth Durithim :)

Priest Transformed

It has been a long time coming, but finally my priest has arrived in Northrend. The relief is tangible after a long haul in vanilla and Outland. The last was not as bad, but still frustrating enough. I have said it before and I will say it again, the best feature about Cataclysm, World of Warcraft's next upcoming expansion, is the fact that much of the vanilla world will be remade entirely. Personally, I cannot think what really is worse about playing this game, than leveling alts through useless content.

Sure you get quest rewards, you can do dungeons, you gain professions and all that, but in the end, 95% of it is pointless and you can do without. Just spam quests as fast as you can and break through it into greener pastures. Only in Northrend, does it finally start making sense, as the gear and rewards you get begin to not only look good, but also provide a useful function.

Anyway, enough about ranting. Achn has made it to Northrend and the fun has really started. You may have also noticed that he has gone through a serious transformation; not only his name but exterior has been altered. Achn is no more, and instead before us, is Barunn, son of Ironforge. I made the decision for the race change primarily because I wanted the dwarf casting animations, which are way cooler than that of a human. Made me sad to see Achn disappear, but I am still happy with the end result.

So much has changed, but for the better I think. Me and Ylinya, whom have since the beginning, leveled together, have already started our first dungeons, Utgarde Keep and Nexus. So far, everything has gone swell and we are on our way to max level. For me, Northrend has again provided with a play challenge, much like when doing Outland dungeons did. I have reached such spells as Prayer of Mending and Penance, both high end and only now, finally getting to use them, does the class seem to truly come together.

It is a fun experience to go through and I imagine, once heroics become involved, the game will again change to a certain extend. We will see, just how much, one we get that there.

Tribute to Insanity

It was a rather happy and proud moment for us all that evening, when the achievement finally glowed on all our screens; the Tribute to Insanity. It took us a bit by surprise, as none of us were really aiming for it, at first. On the contrary, I was pessimistic about our run when I foolishly died tanking Gormok in the beginning, however, it turned out to be the best run we have had.

That makes it the third 10-man group, within the Pro Finlandia guild that has reached the achievement and none of us can but feel proud because of it. It was nice timing as well, since patch 3.3 is arriving shortly and seems like a good way to end one chapter, and start a new one.

Thanks for the photoshop-enchanced image goes to Heidi, my partner and love, a.k.a Atheqa.

Busting Leveling Myths

Indeed one of my favorite TV shows and day-off activities, is debunking persisting myths about subjects that interest me. As it is, for me, World of Warcraft is a paradise for old preconceptions that may or may have been true at one time or another. Not surprisingly, once put into circulation, they almost never die. Even after long periods of time, you can guarantee someone, somewhere is still convinced they are true.

This time, I am focusing on leveling guides. Zygor anyone? I was actually an avid user of Zygor for a long time. I thought there was nothing as good in the world, at the time, than Zygor that helped me level easily and quickly through the dry content. However, recently, after not using it for some time have come to question my old logic.

Is using a leveling guide, even as advanced as Zygor really necessary? I do not believe it is. One of the selling points of these products is that they promise it is possible to level at incredible speeds. I believe someone level from 1 to 80 in no more than a week. This may or may not be true, I am not even convinced it is, since there is very little convincing evidence to examine, but even if you work under the hypothesis that it is, so what?

The requirements for leveling at that speed are mind boggling and certainly, the part of a leveling guide plays very little in that role. More than likely, what you really is two or more characters, armed from tip to toe with heirlooms, dual-boxing with recruite-a-friend bonus, and nonstop playing from day to day.

However, this is outside the capability of most average gamers, which the World of Warcraft population is mainly made of. It is true, leveling guides have streamlined the quests that are best for leveling, and the order in which to accomplish them. However, recently leveling various classes, as well previous experience, tells me that this streamlining provides only a marginal benefit.

This is simply because your time is mainly consumed by the quest mechanics themselves - namely by those quests that require you to kill X-type mobs for Y times Z drops. Sometimes these are easy, but often times the drop rates are so low, or luck not your side, that you end up killing dozens for just a few of the items.

Believe it or not, this is the single reason that questing takes a long time. The rest of the factors are controllable with some practical reasoning. The only real tool, I believe everyone needs, is just Questhelper or a similar helper addon that provides the direction and location of the quest objectives. My own favorite is Carbonite, especially now that it is free. While Zygor provides this function, it is not enough to justify paying for it in my books.

Here are some of simple guidelines that I follow when leveling. They are easy to remember and represent just simple commonsense.

1. Get yourself a quest helper addon.
2. Arm yourself with as many heirlooms as you can. Not only do they provide total 20% XP bonus, but also act as blues of your level, raising your performance.
3. Always start by locating a zone of your level, preferably one where your level is at the bottom of its level bracket.
4. Locate a major quest hub within that zone, pick all the quests you can get, filter out group and dungeon quests, check your quest helper and mentally picture a route across the map that you can take which lets you complete them all.
5. Make your route, return to the hub, return all the quests, and just rinse and repeat.
6. Keep in mind that in vanilla WoW, there are two zones for every level. Some zones even have overlapping level brackets, so you can quest in several zones to avoid the quests that would be particularly difficult for your current level.
7. An occasional dungeon is not a bad idea. Gives you an opportunity to gather better gear, other than what the AH has to offer, and also lets you complete a rare dungeon quest

Finally, do not forget the fact that we are not all born equal. It is wrong, yet a reality in World of Warcraft. Some classes level more easily and quicker than others. A case of study can be found in my warlock and mage characters. I am currently in process of doing the same quests on my warlock that, not too long ago, I completed on my mage.

However, playing my warlock is just so much more easier. I can kill more mobs, with less effort and less downtime, than I could ever with my mage. Hunter and shadow priests fall under this same sentiment. Death knights, particularly if specced DPS in the blood tree, are also a joy to play because of the amount of self-healing and no need to drink for mana.

Does not sound complicated does it? That is because it isn't and yet, still just as effective as using a leveling guide. If anything, for me, it seems leveling guides just remove the necessity of thinking for yourself. Helps people, without skill, level more without actually acquiring the skill and knowledge they later need at top levels.

I am not saying everyone has to be an elite player at max level. But a lot of people overlook the fact that leveling provides valuable practice for beginners to learn the mechanics of the game. Even such simple things as flight points, boat routes, and portals are not obvious to some. Even worse, automated game play produces people who think too much for granted. Like people who sit in Stormwind and spam the trade channel for stockade boosts because they are too lazy to do a few quests that would provide the same effect, in the same amount of time they wasted in futile complaint.

The Priest

Figured, recently had a lot ranting posts and that has just got to change. Aye, it is a personal blog but in the end I write for two reason, the pleasure of writing and the pleasure of reading. For me, a writing only becomes meaningful when someone picks it up and reads it. So, to not utterly neglect my readers I am gonna jump into one of my recent passions; playing a priest.

Specifically, I enjoy my role as a healer and in a reasonably short time I have managed to raise my priest's level a notch of 13 levels. It is a complete role reversal for me, since I am, until now, mostly used to tanking on my death knight. This gives my priest a unique perspective because many do not get to look at it from both directions. Tanks have ideas about healers, and healers have plenty of ideas about tanks, at least as far as what they would hope for them to be.

It is a fascinating interaction between the two as they communicate, though the relationship is not always layered with roses. Tanks can often be fairly arrogant in terms of how they expect the group's healer to perform, while neglecting all the small things that they themselves could do to make the healer's job easier; like staying in range, do not break LOS, be reasonable in your pulls, use cooldowns to mitigate damage input, etc. I recently healed through Maraudon and a persisting annoyance was the tank, first pulling a bunch of flouric creatures and then turning a corner.

He did not do this out of spite of course, but simply did not understand the job of a healer, and I know personally I have been guilty of many such prejudices. The key is to make sure you both communicate properly and educate each other to learn how to play better. A good such example, for me, was in Halls of Lightning. We wiped once on General Bjarngrim while going for the achiement, Lightning Struck.

The simple reason was, with so much incoming damage, once I had to kite him during a whirlwind, I passed beyond our healer's range and it was all it took. He advanced and tried to save the moment, but though valiant, I died. Afterwards while buffing up at the entryway, we examined what went wrong and agreed that he would have to position himself closer, since I could not avoid running around the small space I have to kite the crazy goliath.

I believe this is one of the bigger lessons of the game, to learn how to communicate because the simple fact is, no matter how awesome you are, maybe above all of your peers in finesse and skill, truth remains that no man is an island and to succeed in World of Warcraft, you need team work - and never forget, you always need the team more than it needs you.

Equipment for the Job

I am something of a nightowl so I’m going to touch on some thoughts I’ve had tonight; concerning pvp gear when applied to pve environment. I have only been on Blade’s Edge server now for maybe a week but upon my very arrival I noticed the huge trend that people would carry pvp gear into instances. And I am not talking normal lvl 70-80 dungeons, but heroics. The first heroic I ran was Halls of Lightning and in that case I had two dps guys (the other was probably a girl though) proudly present that they had over 2k dps.

I remember exchanging looks with my fellow shaman there because we had just finished scanning their gear and it was just full of pvp stuff. The truth was revealed to be a lot less awesome than the two claim and I, as a tank, actually dealt more dps than either of them and that is always a bad sign.

True, we ran the length of the instance, without huge difficulties but it did had that feeling dragging along, like when you’re carrying something heavy. I have since found this trend seems to span lots of guilds and I am truly puzzled by it.

Is there a publically acknowledged WoW guru giving everyone this advice or something? If there is, guys, you need to stop taking his advice now!

Here is the rub children; when the good designers at Blizzard sit down to come up with new gear they have a certain quota of stats to share, depending on the level of the item. Pvp gear is set apart from normal pve gear by the presence of a stat called Resilience. It is very important for pvp environment but completely useless when you are running instances, or worse, raids, and whenever there is resilience on a piece of equipment it replaces a stat that is on the contrary useful for a pve player.

I am sure it is a very sexy idea and I know I had similar thoughts when I first considered my death knight’s offspec. After all, running battlegrounds is not that hard and considering the grind and level of difficulty in gaining good enough gear from heroics, it is not a surprise that easily acquired pvp gear has its appeal. But what comes easy also goes easy.

Also, not only are you hurting your own performance but that of your team. Some heroics are quite difficult and demanding. They are fairly simple if tactics are dealt properly and people are good enough geared, but 1-2 dps wearing poor pvp gear will make it all the more harder and will only add to their frustration when the group wipes and denies everyone the chance for emblems, leaving you only with a big repair bill.

When talking about this to the average person, the common reply is that they are wearing the pvp gear until they get better. Some argue that it is very difficult to gain access to good enough gear. Aye, it seems like it at first but in truth, it is not. Here are two good advices I give to my guild members almost everyday:

1) Craftables

There are a surprising number of very good items that you can craft with the help of a proper craft profession. You can find people able to craft these items from all over the place; your guild, trade channel, or might even be one yourself. Look up saronite and titansteel in wowwiki.com and I am certain there is something for everyone.

2) Reputation

I currently have six factions listed in my game, which I consider to be valuable for reputation. Each is easily found and each has a quartermaster. Again, check the list of items they sell (easily from wowwiki.com) and you find that they sell a large variety of superb items. They are good because most require revered or exalted to get, but some can be had with just an honored status.

Most of the reputation items take tenacity to acquire. Start by completing every quest for that faction and then finish by completing daily quests, and if you are up for it, wear their tabard while doing level 80 dungeons or heroics.

That’s it for the night. Now I am going to hit the sack. Hope this was useful to you guys and remember, gearing up might feel tedious and frustrating, but it is also part of the fun.