Yor’shaj down…about a month ago…yeah I’m just that lazy…

I wasn’t able to film our kill, however I took the time to put together an extremely realistic comic strip. Enjoy. It’s exactly how it happened…

Disco Inferno

Warlord Zon’ozz down baby. Yea baby.

Feels like a bit of a retro kill though, we really should have had him the first week. We were at the enrage timer on the first week, but wasted a lot of time and a lot of wipes to improper handling of the disco phase. Bottom line, I realized, it doesn’t really matter at all how you do it as long as you kill a couple of tentacles FAST. None of this run around multidotting everything and leaving 7 of them alive at 100k health while you tunnel the boss retardedness.

Ended up going through everyone in the raid and telling them exactly where they should be standing, as well as what tentacles they should be killing in what order. Literally. Took about 30 minutes to set up. First try ended up at around 5 minutes, had a bouncer mess up. Then had a few early bounce problems due to DC and lag, etc… then killed the boss on the 6th pull. So yea, it turns out, just kill half the tentacles, THEN kill the other half, and the boss is easy as cake.

I managed to fraps what our kill looked like. I’ve linked it in the video below. It actually took us about 6 minutes, but I editted out the boring parts. :)

Lolchok Down!!!

Been a long time since I’ve had the real time, and energy, to write something. Don’t expect this to be too creative though. I’ve been spending my creativity on things other than WoW lately. So sorry about that.

But I lol’d today so hard that I figured I had to post something. For those of you that didn’t know, they made a boss, that’s basically easier than the normal mode version of the boss. I mean you just split him into 2 groups and then 12-man each boss. The enrage timer is a joke. Entirely. Went with 8 healers, 4 in each group, just to be safe (disc priest effective health shield spam ftw), and I don’t think the healers ended up under half mana at any point in the encounter. Enrage timer felt so far away. You kind of just stand still, smash, and then you have 4 seconds to stack on a crystal. After the crystal you have another 5 seconds to /rofl before you just repeat it. And then…err…you’re done. Basically.

Boss is hard though, I mean, you have to soak 300k damage on some character other than a tank…rogues being totally retardedly OP for this we should have just brought 2 of them. But I didn’t feel like changing the raid composition too much because I’m lazy, so we just had a bunch of fire mages chain-proc cauterize, which, by the way, has a completely fucking OP 1-minute cd. It’s ridiculous. It’s like back in WOTLK they made a lot of mechanics pierce through immunity effects like iceblock and bubble, and now that fire mages are a viable raiding spec again, they can literally completely ignore a mechanic once a minute… it’s ridiculous. Like dispersion, but better more or less. Then they can lolblock before dying if they feel like it. I mean at least make cauterize proc hypothermia. Then again…that wouldn’t make much sense would it?

Anyways yea. That’s Lolchok for you. Not sure if anyone filmed it and it wasn’t worth a screenshot. But here’s an artist’s rendition of what this boss (these bosses) feel like:

If you’re having trouble with these guys, very easy tips.

1. Bring more healers and shower the raid in shields, DPS really isn’t needed at all, healers won’t go oom, and the effective health can keep basically anyone alive.
2. Make sure people STAY IN RANGE FOR AOE before running to crystals. You have tons of time to get to crystals after.
3. Don’t stand closer to the boss then the designated second soaking rogue/mage/spriest/whatever else. If you do you’re not only a fucking idiot, but you’re probably going to be a fucking dead idiot.

On another note, the other bosses feel much more serious. Started thinking about the upcoming encounters and doing a little bit of raiding on them. Both are much more healing intense, as well as much more DPS intense. We managed to sort out the tentacle phase of one boss. Just a bit of bouncing and GTFO WITH DEBUFF and I’m sure he’ll go down this week or next. And then the slime boss. There was some progress there. We realized that if you let yellow, green, and red hit the boss at the same time you might as well just bend over and pull down your pants…

Another comment in relation to General Vezax’s daddy, AI had a super duper raid today. They put in a ton of hours and a ton of wipes and managed to come up with a world top 20 (on 25 man) kill of this guy. Really great stuff. I bet it wasn’t easy, I definitely couldn’t have done that much progression in one sitting. Really good stamina and focus I guess, they earned that kill. So gz to them! Especially on the creative use of shadow priests to make the bouncing damage more manageable. I feel like I’ll end up doing something similar with fire mages when I get back to the instance on Sunday. Hopefully Blizzard doesn’t follow my suggestion to nerf cauterize just yet… =P

Ragnaros 25man HC down..!!

It took us some time to get there, but we finally managed to down this fucker. From my point of view, he is one of the most difficult encounters blizzard offered us so far, because it needs both great dps and no loss of focus from each member. We were working on him even from pre-nerf and did every possible mistake, because as i stated above in this fight every single person MUST be focused. Combat resses are precious! However, you learn from your mistakes, dont you ? Yes, you do, this is sth we all learned as our kill was a very clear kill without any deaths, ok… you got me… we had one death, but one death counts as no deaths ;p

Furthermore, we all knew that rag’s death was coming the past few weeks, especially this wednesday, that we hit on every single try phase 4. So, we knew that everyone figured out what was happening in that phase and it was only matter of time till the boss dies. Yesterday we even had a 0,2% wipe (yes i know, that really sux ;p) , but on the bright side, when people saw that percentage, agreed to go a bit over time because everyone BELIEVED that we can do it and ofc we did it.

Its mostly about raid’s spirit, if everyone in the raid believes in him then every boss can be defeated. Why is that ? because with self-confidence,  focus and good intructions from a rl the player gets an extra “self-buff”. This self buff is called “i can do it”.  How many times in your life you could do something but you didnt believe that you could actually do it, and finally you never did it ? Its like a beautiful girl sitting in the bar. A mediocre man, is looking at a beatiful girl sitting in the bar. He tries to figure out in his mind a  way to talk to her, he admires her nice body and in the end he says : “bah, she is too good for me” and he never goes to talk to her. Do you know statisticaly what happens in this particular situation ? 90% of similar events, this beautiful girl ends up with a UNGLIER guy that the previous one. Do you know  why ? because this unglier guy had more self-confidence than the previous one and went to that girl, talked to her and hanged out with her.

So, this is the key, HIGH MORALE, SELF-CONFIDENCE, and you can do everything. Gear is not everything. Did paragon have many legendaries when they killed rag on hc ? the answer is NO! they had zero legendaries and worst gear than us. Why did they kill it first? because they believed in themselves. They know that they are the best and they admit it!

To sum up, why did we kill ragnaros the last patche’s week? Simply, because we didnt believe we could do it and thus we failed numerous times at the same mechanics etc. Lets head towards the new patch with better morale and aim for the top.

In 2 days 4.3 hits and we are against some new encounters, new mechanics and a dragon as a final boss to kill. Good luck to every guild , and let a new boss-race begin!

/merlin

Legendary Wipes

So we got our first “Branch of Nordrassil” today, it’s not a bad 378 weapon to be honest. Reasonable itemization and all that. I thought it was really strange what they did with the quest chain though, so strange that I thought it might be worth commenting on.

So as I’m sure everyone knows, players have to gather 25 of those formerly-blue BOE eternal embers which were hotfixed after 1 day to become BOP and epic quality (Really Blizz? Seems sort of fail that you put this hotfix in and then absolutely refused to transfer ANY eternal embers between characters, even if they were obtained before the hotfix.) Anyways, once you gather all those items there’s some long RP-stuff going on in Northrend. (Note to all players on this quest: DO NOT FORGET TO UNEQUIP YOUR SIGNET OF THE KIRIN TOR BEFORE DOWNING HEROIC 25M BOSSES – IT NERFS DPS LOL.)

Anyways, after this RP you have to go and get the quest item from the Firelands, which involves unlocking a portal and defeating a miniboss. Sounds like Shadowmourne right? Except that you don’t have to actually kill ANY of the bosses. And you also don’t have to even complete the quest items in a single attempt. You can pick up the items you need, in one or multiple attempts, combine them, then go and empower them. Once you’ve looted the empowered item – that’s it you’re done. Don’t even bother killing the boss on normal mode. Simply wipe it up and move on to the next boss. It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes today to clear all the trash to all of the bosses in the instance, and then go and complete that chain of the quest with normal mode wipes. At least in ICC players had to be able to KILL Putricide, Blood Queen, and Sindragosa in order to get the legendary. The fights were at least a tiny bit harder while completing the quest since one raid member had to do something “special” while the raid downed the boss. Here in firelands a guild can simply wipe as much as much as they like to finish the quest, then go down bosses normally. Thankfully guilds will still be required to kill Ragnaros in order to complete the item and get legendary status, so none of those 6/7 normal mode guilds will be getting them. At least not quite yet.

Another funny thing happened today. That mini-boss on then legendary quest? So fun. I know what to do next time someone talks back to me in a raid. Bring them there and cast dispel and then /rofl as they go flying. I totally love the idea of a complete retard check on that boss. It’s epic. LOVE IT!

An Analogy

It just occurred to me today, something that totally captures our style of raiding. Ideally, we want to play something like this:

In reality, when we raid it looks more like this:

Notice the difference? Let’s all take a moment to reflect how we can grow up a bit and mature our game.

Actually, on second thought, I think these toddlers actually play better than us:

I’m not really sure what my point is with this last video, just found it entertaining. And no I’m not some sort of perv who likes watching little kids play with each other…

While cruising YouTube not being a perv, I came across a video of Soulsbane as a kid:

Ignore the censored part they included with the boy in his boxers for no reason…Brazilians are weird.

The angry gnome’s anger…

I should start this post by apologizing. I’ve been particularly upset lately regarding WoW, mostly because of raiding. It’s not about our progress or anything, I’m happy with anything around the top 500 or so. It’s also not got to do with raid performance, unlike many of you may think. I’ve been content with under-performing raids in the past. Honestly, I’m upset for a couple of reasons, but it can all generally be summed up as I’m upset with the attitude of our raiders. But as I said, I should apologize. I’ve been getting extra frustrated with everyone, and instead of communicating clearly what has been bothering me in a calm manner, I’ve been lashing out at almost every raider as a result. That’s not to say that the way a lot of people are behaving is ok. Because it’s not. But how I reacted is just as bad, if not worse. Allow me to elaborate on this.

Things That Upset Me:

1. This content is easy, we should be facerolling it. That’s the attitude of most raiders right now, at least as far as I can tell. And that sort of attitude doesn’t lend itself to improvement, or criticism well. It also leads to a lot of disappointment. In general, I’m really tired of raiders saying they’ve “given up” or “we were already wiping at that point” during attempts. That’s counterproductive. Until we’ve called for a wipe over ventrillo, everyone should be PRACTICING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO MAKE THE MOST OUT OF THAT PARTICULAR ATTEMPT. Rather than assuming everything should be “faceroll”, players should practice and improve to the point where they don’t make any mistakes. Practice, practice, practice. Learn as much as you can. Don’t just get frustrated that the bosses aren’t dying instantly. In fact, if you look at a lot of guilds, they take a lot of time slowly adjusting strategies and learning fights before they down a boss. Many of our members forget that a lot of raiding is in fact about learning such that in the future the boss can be a one-shot.

2. I didn’t make a mistake. That’s the most common phrase I’ve heard from players who, well, to be frank, made mistakes. Missed taunts and cooldowns. Out of position DPS and healers. Wrong DPS priority targets. Most of the time, when something goes wrong, everybody denies they played any part in this. If there is a living spinner in the air, channeling on someone at nearly full health for more than 10 seconds, all of the range DPS are to blame. They should make these a priority. If a spider reaches one of the adds at very low health, all of the range DPS are to blame. They can EASILY turn and cast one or two instants on the spider to finish it off. A number of times people don’t take blame themselves, even though they share in the responsibility of the action. There has been an increasing tendency to blame others. Cover each others backs, be comrades, don’t be selfish and blind to your friends.

3. What does that ability do? Are you fucking kidding me? There’s a dungeon journal. There are still websites, tactics videos, and forums on the interwebz. This has to be the one thing that drives me the most insane. I can’t believe that people are still so irresponsible as not to read up on boss mechanics and understand them. I hate it. I find it insulting. I can’t stand it. It makes me want to never raid again. And there’s no excuse. All of this stuff (at least 90+% of it) is in game right now. With the exception of a few mechanics, everything can be found in game. If something isn’t in the dungeon journal, then perhaps there’s a reason not to know. But if that’s the case, then it’s my job as well as everyone else’s to learn what it does and adapt as quickly as possible. But dungeon journal crap? Really? No excuse. One day before the patch was live in Europe the final dungeon journal info was posted on mmo-champion. I went and read up on all bosses. Then researched all heroic changes. I imagined that at the very least our raiders would do the same, read up on mechanics, figure out what is going on. It takes maybe 10 minutes per boss to do this. That’s about an hour of preparation time for raiders. Plenty of people have spent more than an hour on standby this patch, or AFKed in Stormwind. Is it really too much to ask that people be prepared for boss mechanics?

4. But this other guild does it this way… Really? Who the fuck cares. This is another thing that drives me absolutely mad. I’ve gone through every boss encounter that we’ve learned and checked logs of what’s going on. I’ve watched every video available on the web as soon as it was, until at least 10 videos of each encounter were up. There are several ways that guilds approach each mechanic of each fight. I really don’t care how some particular other guild did it. There are lots and LOTS of different ways to down a boss, and different raid compositions with which to get it done. For every encounter we’ve done so far, I’ve started with a moderate tactic. We’ve done some conservative tanking and healing assignments, and begun by aiming to survive as long as possible. The idea isn’t that we’ll go in and 2-shot the boss. The idea is that we get used to and deal with all of the mechanics properly. As time passes we adjust ourselves to be less conservative and output more DPS, until we kill the boss. However I’m SO FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING PEOPLE SUGGEST THINGS BECAUSE OTHER GUILDS HAVE DONE THEM. Method used 3 DKs and 3 hunters. AI used 2 boomkins and a hunter. WHO THE FUCK CARES? Some other nameless guild had a DK soloing the adds, and then a hunter on another set alone. NOBODY CARES. All of these classes and combinations are capable of doing the job. We need to calm down, and practice a few times to try to get things proper. I’m not saying that the tactic I suggest or start with is the best one in the world. On the contrary, it’s probably not optimal. But we should adapt our strategy based on what is actually causing wipes, and adjust to improve them. People don’t get that though. They just push and suggest. It was at its worst with Shannox. We started with the proper tactic, and then everyone continuously QQed and spread rumours about how other guilds did it. We wasted hours. Then people kept on saying we shouldn’t stop DPSing the adds and focus on the boss on Rhyolith. And now everyone is coming up with 100 different things that we COULD do on Beth’. Bottom line, we have 1-2 people on each spawn of spiders and healers who keep people alive. The upstairs team gets the boss under 80% (this isn’t hard at all, DPS were able to take 8% off EASILY in one upstairs phase with only 4 up, so with 3 upstairs phases this puts the boss around 76%. So that’s perfectly fine. However, the entire evening, where we were wiping BEFORE EVEN REACHING PHASE 2, people were whispering me and telling me we need to send 5, even 6 DPS upstairs. As long as those 4 DPS can each take 6% off the boss over the course of 3 phases, it’s fine. Our real reason for wiping, for the first half of the night, was fails on the broodling intercept and spiderling teams. Then, after that FINALLY got sorted, we had extremely poor DPS on spinners and drones. People were constantly moving; out of position and running around wasting DPS time for no reason. In reality, we wasted a lot of time tonight, and a lot of my patience went along with it. The same way we spent hours 3-tanking Shannox, hours on Rhyolith DPSing the adds too much and the boss not enough, now we have spent hours on this boss not analyzing what’s wrong. The fact that we spend so much time discussing what other guilds are doing, and not what we are doing wrong ourselves, is both counterproductive and exasperating.

Too long didn’t read version? I’m pissed for the following reasons:

1. Pride and lack of focus.
2. Denial and blindness when it comes to performance.
3. Laziness in preparation.
4. Looking at others rather than reflecting upon ourselves.

I’m going to take a step back and breathe. I’m going to be patient, and relaxed, and focused during raids. I’m going to ask that people however, spend more time focusing on each of our attempts. Look at what is going on, look at what is wiping us. Look at your surroundings. Learn and practice. Improve. We’ll do our best to progress as best we can.

Huntsman and the Fox

Allow me to being this post by quoting the renound Oscar Wilde (who according to wikipedia was an irish poet and playwrite). He once said and/or wrote:

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

That’s probably what Shannox is saying to himself right now. After laughing at us all Wednesday, he got his face pwned by reason and intellect on our first Thursday pull.
____________________________________________________________________________________________

We walked into firelands this week with everyone already distributing loot. They were talking about which boss we were going to do second, what we were going to do with crystallized fire drops, even preemptively clearing trash towards the next boss since Shannox was going to be such a pushover. By the time we were ready to actually pull the boss, nobody was listening to a single word I was saying. Avoid traps, move away from the dogs, stay away from rageface, kite away from riplimb. All of this was totally completely ignored.

The evening started with about 3-5 wipes using a proper tactic. We had two tanks, one on the boss, and one on the dog. The tanks were asked to trap the dog when the spear landed, and then once the dog broke free and recovered the spear, to kite the boss away from the dog. After all, this was the most logical way to approach the fight. It made sense. It was the easiest way to do it on normal mode. We failed miserably. People were getting hit by any and all traps. Hell even tanks were getting hit by immolation traps and getting 2-shot by the boss. It was a total uncoordinated mess. Clearly everyone had been so distracted by how faceroll normal mode was that they decided to ignore all mechanics.

And then the idiocy truly began…

Someone mentioned that 2-tanking the fight was not possible. WorldofLogs and 200 American server kills be damned, there was “no way” to reset the bleed stacks on the tanks using “this tactic” because “this tactic” – referring to trapping the dog with the spear down, and moving the boss away from the dog, was wrong. I tried to reason, and asked for patience and focus. I explained it logically. We have distances between the dog and the boss, the trap and the spear, and the spear and the boss, and then the boss and the offtank. We wanted to maximize the travel time between these points. Although it appeared logical, people disagreed. I started to bend, waver, and very quickly gave in. I was too clever; clever enough that I didn’t even understand a single word of what I was saying. I abandoned logic. I gave in to the mob. We were going to brute force the boss.

We took a third tank, and traded aggro on the boss. This allowed the Shannox tanks to drop their stacks. Since we had two tanks on the boss, some of our healers strongly insisted that the entire raid should stop moving. So the tanks refused to move. With the tanks not moving, the off-tank never managed to reset his stacks properly. He would run across the entire map and get smacked by an enrage. We weren’t even using traps for the dog at this point, people had found some retarded online blog which called the traps “unnecessary”. And so they became unnecessary, because some idiot had said so on the interwebz. Our new tactic became, and I quote, “When the boss throws the spear, just run the fuck away!” (referring to the offtank). And so he ran the fuck away, and the boss and dog enraged and starting killing tanks.

Well clearly the 3-tank tactic was working as intended. It was just that resetting the riplimb stacks wouldn’t be possible. Someone mentioned that they’d managed to tank it on 10 man normal resetting their stacks properly, but this cry to reason was quickly ignored. We were going to power through this boss if it was the last thing we did. “Obviously, since Riplimb has only 16 million hp, he must be meant to be killed.” And so the raid further devolved into madness…

A new tactic evolved, from the shambles of our previous (and embarrassing) wipes. By our 20th pull of the evening we were now dragging Riplimb through all the immolation traps and burning him down. Rageface was being reset on the crystal prison traps (fairly successfully at this point to be entirely honest). And the boss was being burned down in his stationary position between killing Riplimb with a combination multi-dot cleave damage and direct focus. And the craziest part, the ludicrous thing imaginable happened: the tactic appeared to be working. We had managed to survive for a full 7 minutes on one of our attempts. We dealt 140 million damage. Unfortunately we had killed the dog 3 times that attempt, meaning 48 million damage was wasted. In 7 minutes we had taken the boss down to under 25%, while killing the dog 3 times. People were talking about how this was the “proper” tactic, because it had worked. We had managed to reset stacks, to survive for some time. Only a few brave souls dared to speak and say we would have killed the boss had we not been conducting a choreographed ballad to idiocy. In fact, we had 3 attempts that evening where we would have killed the boss if the tank stacks could reset properly without killing the dog.

Brute force had lost. Shannox laughed at us. His dogs grew fat on our flesh. Intelligence and reason were shunned Wednesday evening; they had no place, found no home, in our hearts or minds.

And then, I had a dream. A dream that one day every noob shall be exalted with all factions, every boss and instance shall be nerfed hard, the tough instances will be made easy, and the crooked lines walked by tanks will be made straight, and the glory of the Designers shall be revealed, and all raiders shall see it together. That day may not be far off. But until that day, when all content becomes trivial, people need to stfu, stop QQing, and L2P.

The very next day we logged back online. I donned my paladin in all the panoply of war and we cleared the trash. We pulled the boss. We used our brains, and not our brawn. We pulled with our brilliance and not our backs. A rogue cleared some traps. The main tank moved the boss away from the dog. I pranced around like a prissy little ballerina* and reset my stacks before riplimb was even close to err…ripping my limbs I guess. And so the boss was downed, not by a display of brute force, but of brute reason. The logical approach we had so quickly abandoned and shunned proved to be the key to killing the boss with ease, a day late, but with ease none the less. So let this be a reminder to everyone that logic, reason, and strategy are how to succeed in life. Let us never again become the fool who rams himself face-first into a door hoping to break through it, rather than taking the time to find the handle and slide it open.

*Special thanks go out to Hyade who chased me around while prancing about like an idiot. <3

Summer Heat

Things are starting to heat up this summer. With the release of patch 4.2 just in time for the hottest months, we’ve got a few important things going on.

First of all, Firelands 25 normal is cleared. Congratulations are in order. Everyone did a splendid job and managed to clear through the instance. It took us a little longer than expected, needing a full 14 hours (or 3 and a half raid nights), but we did spend a lot of time farming reputation from extra trash packs, etc… Also more than half the raiding hours were without my leadership as well, which makes it doubly satisfying to know that you’re all capable of raiding productively even without a clear leader. I’d like to thank everyone who stepped in to fill my shoes and take over the various aspects of invites, strategies, positioning, and those ever-important ventrillo reminders that people seem to enjoy getting. Thanks a lot to everyone involved, and to all those warming the bench (or cooling the bench I should say), in case we needed them to help out. Ragnaros himself was a lot of fun, as was the rest of the instance. Let’s get ready to start on heroic modes now.

Another thing that I noticed about this patch, so I thought I’d comment on it, is that they really decided to tone back on interrupts during boss encounters. Alysrazor is really the only encounter where interrupts play a key role, and apparently also there will be one heroic encounter where the adds channel a stun, but other than that melee seem to be entirely off the hook for interrupting except on trash. So interrupt those cauterizing bastard naga and enjoy the boss tunnelvision while it lasts. I assume 4.3 will bring more interesting melee mechanics than the “target dummy simulator” that several bosses are for them.

The second big thing this post is about is the summer. Apparently we have some of the most popular in real-life WoW players in the entire world. An overwhelmingly large number of our members have reported that they will be summering with members of the opposite sex, traveling on vacations, or just hanging out on the beach. Several has requested additional time off from raiding to ‘get their groove on’ so to speak. As we’ve always been fairly relaxed about real life commitments such as exams and dates, we’ll continue to be somewhat forgiving in our recruitment and gameplay policies. That being said, I expect all you slackers to spend your time gearing up farming VPs for tier gear, and studying boss mechanics when you get back from your vacation. I’m sure this patch will be with us for at least another 4-5 months, so by the time you all get back from your luxury summer plans we’ll be knee deep in hard modes, so you should be ready to be useful to us. But as always, real-life > WoW. So enjoy yourselves and I look forward to seeing many of you back in the game in a month or two. However that’s no excuse for the rest of you to slack. I hope to see the majority of you in raids throughout the summer!

On a more minor note, welcome to all our new trialists and guild members. While some of you do awesome DPS and execute mechanics perfectly, others make me cringe at the site of watching you play. In fact I doubt some of you have ever killed the pre-cataclysm version of Hogger, as I have yet to see the needed skills involving DPS, kiting, and running and screaming like a little girl while he chases you down with his mace. Just a friendly reminder that I expect recruits to be benchmarking themselves against our better members, not our worse members. I’m bad. Just because you outDPSed me you shouldn’t be proud. You should really be pushing for a top-10, if not top-5 DPS spot. If you are barely beating me, or actually underneath me, then you should be ashamed. I spent literally 0 time playing my class properly on any of these new 4.2 encounters. The entirety of my focus was on positioning, abilities, and overall raid performance. Other than that I was spamming incinerates. So remember, don’t try to be like me (I’m sitting here trying to rationalize future strategies for heroic modes and stuff), you should try to be like one of the awesome DPS sitting at the top of our meters and getting top-world rankings on several encounters. Now I realize that some of you are held back by gear, but that being said, I’ve seen a blue/359-ish geared hunter pull 17k DPS single target in a raid with no bonus damage mechanics. So if you’re sitting under 17k there is probably a problem, especially if it’s a multi-dot encounter. Take a couple of minutes of time to practice your rotation on a dummy, and check with elitistjerks to make sure that you’re properly itemizing. Farm your valor point gear, and remember you can just do reputation runs to get the friendly/honored epics from avengers of hyjal vendors.

Sorry if I scared everyone with the contents of this post, or with my attitude lately. I haven’t been sleeping too well and whatnot, and have also been busy. But things are going great and I’m happy to be here, and I hope the rest of you are all happy as well. Let’s have a productive patch ahead of us, and hopefully I can post more crap in this stupid blog.

Last Few Months

So…I sort of suck at blogging. To be honest this is kind of the lowest-priority thing in my life at the moment. Just so much stuff going on, and between raiding and administrative stuff I don’t really find a lot of time for WoW lately. I suppose it’s just a busy time for me, and I suspect things will get a lot better towards the end of the summer and as winter approaches again. I just thought I’d take this time now to post a few things.

1. Seriously great job guys. We started out this expansion really strong, and spent a lot of time within the top 200, rarely dropping lower in rankings. Things went really great. Everyone performed really well. Then we had a little bit of a slowdown, one of our members and a strong part of the community was banned for silly reasons. This hurt the guild, not only in raid performance but in spirit. He will be sorely missed. However in spite of this great loss, we were able to salvage the raid tier and continue to progress, only a couple of weeks behind where we had been before. We’ve gotten basically every server 2nd kill possible, and we managed to unlock and kill the hard-mode only boss of the tier well before the release of the next tier. Considering we don’t maintain a real required attendance policy, we’re very relaxed in terms of vacations and breaks from the game, and we don’t spend as much time raiding as we could, we’ve done really well to secure a spot comfortably within the blue-zone of top 500 guilds. I think we’re roughly 350 ranked at the time of writing this, which is fairly respectable. So I wanted to let everyone know that I think we’ve done a wonderful job as a guild, and although I know we’re probably capable of pushing a little harder and performing a little better, we should be proud of what we’ve done.

2. In the spirit of pushing a little harder on the next tier, I thought I’d post a friendly reminder to all guild members, as well as any perspective trials: we’re here for progression raiding, in addition to having fun. I know a lot of members have sort of been relaxed, and we’ve spent a lot of time slowing down, doing more PvP, focusing on farm content and cutting down raid nights. Part of this has been because people were getting somewhat burned out from the full raiding schedule, and wanted to spend more evenings away from the game with friends since the weather has been getting warmer in most places. Also, don’t forget the fact that current content has gotten somewhat boring. It’s all the same mechanics and bosses for MONTHS now for a lot of us, so it’s not too interesting at all. But 4.2 is about to hit, and with that will be exciting new bosses (at least Blizz said they would be exciting), which means there’ll be more interesting stuff to raid, and more challenging stuff as well. I just wanted to give everyone a friendly reminder to be prepared in terms of consumables and gold for repairs and enchantments. As always we’ll be providing a lot from the guild bank to make everyone’s lives easier, but just in case we have run out of something I’d like everyone to be ready with whatever it is they need to raid successfully on progression content. We had a fairly good tier 11, and I’d like to get back into raiding progression in tier 12 without the “slack” that we’ve all been infected with taking too much of a toll.

On that note, I hope everyone enjoys their summer and has a great time both in, and out of WoW in the coming months.

Cheers,
Pav