4 years ago:
Once there was a young Moonkin, naïve and perhaps misguided. She raided in a spec that, at best, left her at the bottom of both the DPS and the healing meters. Slowly, she gathered T1 and T2 gear, though the 1 spec only (resto) set left much to be desired. But she never wavered, wearing what little craftable spell damage leather that was available in a mash of gear sets of both healing and spell damage back before the days of spell power.
It wasn't uncommon for her to spend a fight doing nothing but decursing or helping to heal a random offtank. With 40 man raids, a pocket decursing druid was common. Heavily dependent on the 2 minute mana pot cooldown, no innervate or mana regen to speak of, our Sad Oomkin was often caught simply standing there, waiting the last 30 seconds for the next mana pot, utterly useless.
Enter the SA Doomkin. 2 Expansion packs later and my how things have changed. A member of the elite ranged DPS core of Parabola, a 10 man progression guild on the Bladefist server, our Doomkin has crawled up from the obscurity of the 40 man raid, gone through server and faction changes, and apparently a sex reassignment surgery (Female NE druid to Male Tauren druid) to a position in the server first 10 man (or any man, for that matter) Lich King killing guild. No longer sad and OOM, she's (for despite the apparent masculinity of the toon, she's still representing the fairer sex of gamers) matured into an 18k armor/3k SP sporting Panzerkin of Doom, raining blows and fallen stars down upon her enemies.
For the titling purposes of this blog, I am the Doomkin that is Socially Awkward. This stems from many things, mostly that I'm socially awkward myself, but also that Moonkins in general don't fit in. Also, I've been the solitary female raider in our guild until recently. I was the only chick there for the first Lich King kill. This unique situation occasionally leads me to say things on vent like "It's like that guy that comes out of your staff, Ed," and then realizing a second too late what it really sounded like. Not that I'm some prissy woman raider; I take pride in my loving nickname of .... Well, this is probably a good time to mention that I'm a foul mouthed tom boy who feels completely comfortable with a mostly male guild. My vulgarity knows no bounds, so if you've an issue with the harsher of the four letter words, including my most favorite word starting with c (coincidentally also my nickname in the guild and out), then kindly GTFO.
I'm used to a male dominated environment, since my majors in college were/are scientific areas still dominated by men. Thus I have no problems with vulgar vent chatter and no qualms with telling a guilding what a fucking, cock sucking douche bag he's being.
However, there are a few other things that fit in for the initials of SA. One of the most important for a raider these days would be Situationally Aware. I pride myself on being aware of my raid surroundings and rarely getting owned by falling balls of ice, puddles of inky doom, and generally not standing in the giant big.
I'm sure I'll come up with other SA attributes, but for now, I'm just Socially Awkward and Situationally Aware.
