When you get lapped it's hard to see just how far behind you are

Any runners out there? Not particularly good ones? Isn't getting lapped painful? It doesn't matter if it's a tenth of a mile track (my school had a tiny track) or a quarter mile; it just feels bad. But oddly, after the first one, the pain doesn't change much. It's hard to keep track after that. You're definitely losing and counting won't make you not be losing.

The other day I learned that prot paladins have started stacking haste. I'd never heard of this. It's something new to Pandaria. Clearly I've not done much reading on mechanics these days, by which I mean the past year or so, missing all sorts of important information. It's almost ironic. I can just picture myself laughing at a tank who thinks that DPS gear is good for him, and for a long time I'd have the facts on my side. Now I'd be that ignorant tank who thinks he should be stacking avoidance. Well supposedly we were supposed to stack stam anyway, but I always (usually) thought effective health was a load of shit.

I'd been a bit down about my potential prospects in PvP. I've not had anything near a fair fight in a few years. It's been a sort of downward spiral; at some point I stopped doing PvP, fell behind on gear, and never got into the habit again. Yet I had some hope; I could die my way through losing BGs to some gear, eventually. With my mostly altless playing these days I'd have time for it. That hundred thousand difference in health could go away, as could the vast gulf in damage.

I'd just killed Garr the Darkener in the Dread Wastes. He was kind enough to drop the pet this time. I headed for the other guy, a tough fight. There was a warlock there already. He had about 600k more health. That's when I started doing the mental arithmetic and trying to decide if that's closer to double or triple my health. I decided to see how the fight went for him, since it was tricky for me. It took a few seconds. I flew off to where I was going to farm rep for the Black Prince and spotted a rare on the way. I ran into the cave to fight it and a few seconds later the warlock showed up. I bubbled, stunned him, and ran until I was out of combat. That's my world PvP these days, not even bothering to pretend that I stand a change, just running for it and hoping they're too busy taking my kill.

I once had a fishing pole fight outside Everlook. I was on my shaman and had the overpowered Horde-only fishing pole. It was my fight to lose. And lose I did, because seals aren't weapon-based; they were a buff on the player. The paladin hit a lot harder, relatively speaking - it was a fight with fishing poles after all. We stayed far enough out that the guards wouldn't aggro. Just the two of us hitting each other with fishing poles.

I'd fought at Tarren Mill. Even after battlegrounds it still somehow turned into a battle ground. Someone would come to gank us and swarms of lowbies would gang up on them. There weren't so many AoE attacks back then, so we could just keeping biting at their ankles, figuratively-speaking, since we were Horde, not gnomes, and had no goblins yet.

I was in a farming group deep in the hives under Silithus when we ran into an Alliance group. It was no place for a fight, too many elites, too little space. We hastily backed away. I tried to drop another totem; we didn't have totemic recall back then. I was too slow. A single ball of fire went out from my searing totem. We died after putting up a moderately okay fight. The hives weren't properly linked to the zone and we reverted to the default graveyard for the Horde: the Barrens. The smart move was to use the spirit res and take a flight path; the debuff would probably be gone by then. The dumb move was to run, from the Barrens to Thousand Needles, to Tanaris, Un'Goro Crater, and finally into Silithus. I took the... well you guess.

People tended not to cause too much trouble at the cultist areas in Silithus. We all had stuff to do and some of that stuff involved fighting things that could easily kill us. This meant that we didn't want a fight, but if one started, we weren't going to waste time trying to do any more PvE. It instantly escalated into a full-scale war. We didn't need any sand for that, just something we wanted to do and someone getting in the way of us doing it.

We were about to win that arena fight. I had the match in my hand. Blessing of protection on the priest and the warrior would finish off the enemy who was attacking her. She'd heal up and then we'd have a wonderful 3 v some number that is not as big as three. I got it backward. I put blessing of protection on our warrior, preventing him from finishing them off. Our priest died. They healed up. One misclick and the entire match was lost. I'm not sure I ever recovered from that. Maybe from there it was straight downhill. Surely what they did to Alterac Valley did not help.

Before long I was thinking how next expansion I'd try again with PvP, with a nice reset to get me into things again. It never happened. I'd start late and that meant starting at the bottom of a mountain facing enemies who'd walked uphill up a hill, and despite what an old Pandaren would probably claim, they were the stronger for it.

At this point, I'm glad to even know what SoO even stands for.