Modes of Raiding

I think normal-mode guilds cannot afford to be casual anymore given the difficulty level of current tiers. Flex raiding coming in 5.4 has the potential to improve this frustration, particularly for casual guilds but it also has the potential to dramatically shrink the recruitment pool for normal-mode guilds.

This is not to say that casual players shouldn't be raiding, or any of that elitist nonsense. Of course everyone has a right to raid, as much as they have a right to access any level of content in the game. And I'm alway glad when more people get to play the way they want.

However - I feel that more and more, the content is being driven to a smaller and smaller subset of people. This sort of targeting is great, as the content is now more focused to the right audience but it comes at a pretty steep cost.

Back in the day

Let's look back at Vanilla/TBC content, when raids were linear, fights were balanced around class composition and finding attuned characters made recruiting a living hell for guilds. Wrath eased this by removing attunements, allowing for guilds to raid with 10 people, normalizing abilities and fights to "bring the player not the character" and providing a very quick catch-up mechanism though badge (now valor) gear. This worked well, but tiers were forgettable and grew old rather quickly as the new tier of badge gear invalidated the old raids immediately.

Cataclysm took this to an extreme where nobody even ran older raids once the next tier launched, and as Tier 12 and 13 both has fewer bosses than Tier 11, the whole thing was terribly lopsided. Cataclysm might been the worst raiding in WoW history. The difficulty curve for Tier 11 was very high, and while Tier 12 and 13 was normalized (re: nerfed by 20% a month in) a bit, it still felt too much for casual guilds to progress through. LFR provided the answer there, by allowing completely casual people to raid and see content.

Mists combines a lot of these ideas - there is still no attunement, valor gear is a bit more difficult to get but is less effective than current tier raiding, and there is no immediate "catch up" mechanism. Guilds that progressed first have an advantage but it's not overwhelming - players and guilds have to work pretty hard to catch up and LFR feels like it's a thing on the side, another gearing avenue, and normal/heroic raids remain the benchmarking of raiding. I'm quite happy here. It feels like a good medium level of compromise between the various aspects of raiding.

Movin' on up!

One of the things I liked about LFR as compared to normal mode is that LFR introduced and inspired people to do normal raids. When I moved back to Moon Guard, I've met a few people through PUGs who have started raiding for the first time after they grew bored of LFR and they're good players. I think LFR was intended to inspire people to move up the difficulty ladder and I'm certain that these people will slowly train and become very good raiders in their own time.

This also allowed the design team to make sure fights weren't forgiving. Encounters like Horridon, Council, Durumu, Iron Qon, and Lei Shen were brutally hard in the first few weeks. I was playing with some amazing people, and we took 3 weeks to clear the  tier and that was after putting in 12 hours a week, every week rather than our usual 9.

Things Cost More on the Ladder

When people move into normal modes from LFR, particularly in a group that's progressing, the difficulty and gear check can be a huge roadblock. And Blizzard has explicitly stated that they expect you to work on your gear outside of normal mode raids - i.e., through LFR, though Valor purchases, through upgrades, crafted materials, heroic scenarios... there are a lot of avenues so each week, regardless of progression, each team grows stronger. iLevel is a very real consideration with these bosses as raw throughput is the line between enrage and kill sometimes.

So - in light of all this, when an LFR player who is used to more-or-less queue and raid and kill has to move into normal modes, there is this daily maintenance involved.

You have to do a bit of research, you need to stay current with your gear, you  better be hitting your weekly caps with charms and valor, and you better be practicing your class. If you aren't, it's going to be difficult for the team to progress.

That's all there is to it. I don't begrudge it, I enjoy this increased level of responsibility and I like that there is a "you must be this tall to raid" barrier and it generally only takes me a small amount of time in game to accomplish this. But it does mean that if your team isn't willing to do the work, you will have a hard time playing the game.

But Wait! There's More!

So what am I going on about? Flex raids. I know why they are coming, I support the developers in their goals of making content accessible, and I appreciate just how hard it is to raid with twelve people on your roster.

But the nature of it such that I fear it will stem that upward transition. People will go from LFR to flex rather than normal, simply because of the lower level of commitment required. Flex is designed to handle a wide variety of play-styles, particularly the casual style, and it won't require as much from raiders as normal modes by definition.

My main concern with this, is that flex-raids will cause the already shrinking pool of raiders to contract even more. As you can gain achievements in flex, it further strips away a reason to step up to normal mode. 

Fear is the Mind Killer

Naturally, it's a silly thing to worry about, and if people are happy doing flex-raids, so be it. And I know that greater diversity and choice is a better thing for the game in the long run, and if the commitment required to raid normal modes is so high that it infringes on people's ability to raid and enjoy the game - then so be it, let them move on.

And there is always the possibility that flex raiders will grow out of the difficulty level. If people progress from LFR to normal mode, then there's hope that people will do the same from flex. There is another rung on the ladder and the glass ceiling is really just a time commitment.

The whole thing really has put me in two minds. One part of me is very glad and happy to see more flexibility in raiding for people, as human resources are the most complicated part of raiding. But another part of me is worried that this will make recruitment even more difficult than it already is.

Here's hoping I'm wrong.

Can you tell I'm tearing my hair out trying to find people to raid?

This thing on?

Oh, hello.

It's been a while, eh? Two months is the longest break I've taken from this blog in a long, long time.

What have I done in the time away? Nothing much, really. I worked on some home projects, I've gotten together with my collaborator and we're working seriously on our first real game development project, I've managed to cobble an outline together for my novel that I'm very excited about. I've even rejoined my old dungeons and dragons group that players just about every week on Thursday nights and that is a great way to kick up my heels and hang out with friends I haven't seen because of my raid commitments for a long time. Hanging out with my son also takes up a lot of time, and I'm really enjoying the summer, going to the playground with him, hiking in the parks or taking him to the various zoos, gardens and museums in New York.

And.... I've managed to continue puttering about WoW without joining another hardcore raiding guild. I'm kind of glad on the one hand and kind of missing it a lot on another. It's a weird thing to game in an old and familiar if very casual way.

I transferred back to the Alliance side on my old server and my old friends and I started raiding a couple of nights, quite casually, and it's very slow going compared to what the rest of the expansion has been like.... but it's not without its charm.

For one, playing with old, familiar faces is great. I love hearing Thistle and Washburne and Kaelie and Sticky and Issacc on vent. They're all awesome and it feels like home to be raiding with them again. We've also met a couple of new friends who're quite awesome to raid with, very funny and nice and good players to boot. For another, I'm enjoying returning to a leading role that I've missed in my last two guilds - true, tanks always have some level of authority but I'm enjoying running raids again.

The not so good is the difference in playstyle between hardcore raiders and the more casual raiding that we're doing now. It's not that the players are better or worse, it's just different. There's a difference in attitude, there's a difference in the approach to problems, in the approach to wipes - I have a great appreciation for what hardcore raiding taught me, which was the value of quick recoveries and repeated attempts to learn rhythm and fix problems.

More than any of that, though, is the value of wiping. I had well over a hundred wipes on Heroic Amber Shaper when we killed it. Nobody was frustrated by those attempts, even when those wipes were coming 7 or 8 minutes into a fight near the end, as we were experimenting with ways of minimizing phase 3.

In a more casual environment, a dozen wipes feels like too much and I wonder if I'm not just pushing too hard and maybe I should just lay back on the throttle a bit.

Anyway, I'm really only playing 2 nights a week and not having a steady raid team certainly hurts. We typically wind up picking up at least PUGs every week it looks like, and that isn't helping matters any.

But. All that aside,  I'm enjoying the game. I don't have any delusions of chasing a US top 200 ranking or anything anymore, but with 2 nights a week, I'm looking to get together a group that clears through normal modes and hanging out with friends.

Of course, if we should find that our skill and gear level improves, I would not say no to pushing a bit harder on the accelerator and start pulling heroic bosses now and again. But not at the cost of the new stuff I've added into my life.

Someone has to get that gear, after all. 5.4 looks to only be a couple of months away....

If you want to raid with us Tuesday and Wednesday nights from 9pm to 12am CST, I'm looking for a tank and healer and maybe some ranged DPS. ;-)

Looking For A Guild Made Me Happy

I know my last post was super-mega-ultra emo and sad, but I'm honestly not that broken up about it. While I miss my guildies dearly, I know I'm in the vast minority of players to have been in not one but two fantastic raiding guilds full of mature, awesome progression oriented people that killed Heroic bosses in current content. That's a victory if I've ever heard of one. And the fact that I still talk to people from both guilds off-line is just icing on the cake. I play this game to make friends apparently.

In addition, the last two weeks have been really intense. First, I was nervous when my posts on the recruitment forums got no replies. Then I was overwhelmed with replies, and spoke with a lot of awesome people and began to eye offers as they came rolling in. Frankly, I was astonished at the response and felt obligated to reply and at least speak with everyone who contacted me because, well, it doesn't happen very often.

And because it's nice to play the part of being the courted one instead of courting all the time. :-)

After a few fantastic offers, I took up with Warfare of Frostwolf (Horde side) and transferred in to raid with them. If you're in the market for a guild, I would look there - they have some amazing leadership at the head, and the crowd is amazingly progression oriented with very efficient raids that waste no time. I spent two nights with these guys, progressing on Heroic Tsulong and it was a lot of fun, even if the fight is hectic as all Hell on 25 Heroic. Then, the third night was used to knock out no less than 6 heroic bosses between Terrace and Heart of Fear, including first time kills of both Amber-Shaper and Lei-Shi for me. That speed clear was one of the best runs I've been involved in - fast, efficient, and clean; even if I did cause a wipe or two.

Unfortunately, they raid 3 nights back to back but don't stop till 1:30am my time - which was kicking my ass by the end of the first week. I wrote a very long and polite letter explaining why I needed to keep looking but wound up explaining it all over BattleNet anyway, as we caught up in game before the GM had read the letter.

During this time, I'd been talking with a couple of people from Methodical over game chat as well as e-mail and Twitter, and when I realized Warfare wasn't working out for me, they were the next guild on my list. Another transfer of faction and server later, I wound up running in to do a couple of bosses last night in the tail-end of raiding week. What should've been a quick and easy clean-up kill on Heroic Elegon wound up taking about a half-hour because I was so nervous from first-date jitters that I kept wiping the group. They were very polite to not t just swap me out.

So, here I sit, waiting for Tuesday to see how this goes.

But - and here's the thing - if that was all, it would've been awesome enough, but instead, I also had a couple of folks contact me outside of the recruitment thing just to chat and talk about various ideas, being old and raiding, finding the right guild, all from reading my last post. This is the first time that has happened, that people searched me out to talk about something I'd written. Thanks to those of you who reached out, both in-game, or over-email; it meant a lot to me.

Anyway. Tomorrow is the start of a new  raid-week. My hopes of getting a second Feat of Strength are now all but vapor, since we have 2 weeks of raiding left to us, it seems, but so be it.

Tier 14 - you have been a bitch of an experience. Messy, needy, annoying, frustrating, tantalizing, teasing, infuriating and at times, downright cruel - but you know what? You're one of the top Tiers I've ever raided. I'll miss you.

Catching Up

There is so much going on in game, and at the same time, so little. This will be rambling, I guess!

After a weird week of suck on my part, we're back on track with killing new bosses and progression is chuggling along. I expect we'll get to 6 heroic bosses within a month or so - definitely before the next patch, and that makes me happy. I'd love to spend at least a whole week on Heroic Ragnaros with a rock-solid group before the next patch comes, just to experience it. But that's some ways away for us, we're just starting to collect heroic gear now.

Our main issue is still that last one or two floating spot that becomes difficult to juggle.

I was informed that one of our core raiders who has been with us for over two years now, is going to be retiring after Deathwing. Which is awesome, he's excited to move on with his life and stuff, and I wish him the best, but it does leave a rather large hole in our roster, and not just in terms of a slot to be replaced,  but in terms of a person who was our friend for a long, long time. We'll fill the slot, but we can't replace the person.

Last night, our decked out and geared hunter's PC overheated to the point of making the game unplayable for her and she bowed out until she can afford a replacement machine but we brought in someone who was benched for the night and were able to do stuff.

I hope she's able to come back soon but we'll do what we can in the meantime. The issue becomes that if I do recruit another person to replace this hunter, I'll wind up in a situation where I'll have to play musical chairs again (and after the fiasco I went through last month with a raider upset about progression vs. gearing, I really don't want to deal with it again.)

Our Legendary continues to build, our first collector is about a third of the way through the Cinders and the second person collecting Embers is about two weeks from getting the Branch and we have a third person lined up for it after that. We'll get one Legendary out, I think, maybe get to phase 2 of the second one if 4.3 doesn't come out till late December. But still, it's nice to have it accessible - even if the process if fairly dull to collect mat rather than a series of awesome events like the extra boss.

Speaking of Legendaries, I'm seriously considering leveling a rogue just so I can do the quest-line in 4.3 - it looks freaking awesome. We only have one raiding rogue, and I'd be glad to build a second set of daggers. I love the sneaky, underhanded, do whatever it takes to win, not evil but not good by any measure, anti-hero protagonists like the new Prince of the Black Dragonflight is shaping out to be. Let's hope he is elevated to becoming the new aspect and reinvigorating the Flight and transforming them into what they were meant to be!

Of course, there is no tank legendary on the horizon, and I'll just cry about that over here after I've seen Valy'nar, Shadowmourne, and Dragonwrath crafted for other classes and specs. I look forward to crafting Father's Fangs for our resident rogue in the future.

After playing this game for so long, I just want one Legendary I can use on my main. I'll whine about this later, I have a feeling I have more to say on this topic.

PuG Blues

Man, this is the longest gap I've taken from writing in some time. Mostly because I've been kind of glum in game as raids haven't been very engaging - not that I don't want to raid, but our raid group has been having some trouble gathering up and actually raiding and it's starting to wear on me.

I feel like we're just in this hanging phase, where all we need are a couple of good, solid, three-day weeks to push through to Ragnaros. This is exactly what it was like when we were on Nefarian - except that was one bsoss and here we have an entire raid to learn. Our core is kicking ass as usual, it's the last couple of slots that worry me. We've been picking up people, and if I look at the roster, there are 21 people who could conceivably raid... and yet I'm PuGing at least one slot every week.

There are a lot of things that happen when you have to bring in someone new.

1. You have to let your entire raid comp adjust to this new person, personality wise. We're a nerdy, smart, funny, laid-back group and we've had people join who immediately began poking, poking, poking at someone's performance, I think jokingly, and it got to be an issue. While I'm trying to figure out DPS distribution, I don't want us to be distracted by people management.

2. Things are just going to take longer. Even if they've done everything, they might not just gather up scorpions to AoE and then move out as stacks grow. Maybe they kill Shannox a completely different way, or they're used to being on the top with Beth'tilac and don't know how to manage adds on the bottom. Or worse, they don't know the fight at all and now the raid is sitting there for five minutes while you explain their role to them and suffer wipes while this person gets up to par. We're not to a point in Firelands where we can just cruise through a boss with a person down. And there is nothing worse - nothing worse - than explaining complicated things to one person while eight other people sit on their hands doing nothing.

3. The rest of your raid suffers from having to adjust around this person. Maybe you're moving people's roles around, maybe someone is playing an off-spec, and you go through all of the above with your own people. Admittedly this is less onerous, but it is still an issue where the alt-spec gear might not be up to par, or the person might be rusty or less adept with that spec, and you're wasting more time getting them used to the fight in a different role.

4. You have no reliability. The person might just have joined to get the sword from Shannox and then drops group right after the boss dies. Or they were in your raid because their own guild benched them, but suddenly asked them to swap in as one of their members left. Or maybe they forgot that they had another obligation and when you said "10 server" they thought you meant "10'o clock their time" which is an hour after you started. Sorry. And now you're stuck a boss or two in with no hope of finding someone to come into a locked instance.

5. The night is shorter because of it. You might have wasted time at the start of raid finding someone and by the time you zoned in it was 15 - 20 minutes past your start time. Now you're pulling, and explaining at the same time, and maybe someone gets confused typing or talking and half your raid just got punted off the ledge. Or you wiped. Or even if you get to the boss quickly, instead of just pulling, you're sitting there explaining again. Now it's 50 minutes after raid time was supposed to start and you do your first pull on Shannox. At this rate, you're looking at no progression work at all, and by the time Beth'tilac dies your raid is so shot and grumbly from relearning downed fights, that you might as well go see if your faction has BH just so you can come back in tomorrow with fresh brains. And you better hope like hell someone will show up tomorrow to fill that PuG slot because your odds are slim that they'll show up again.

6. You have absolutely no way to separate the good from bad. This is probably the worst problem. You can look at their armory, you can look at their gear, you can look at prior raid experience, you can even check the dates of their achievements on kills to make sure they killed Nefarian when he was far more difficult - but all of that won't guarantee a good player. Maybe they were carried through, maybe it's their girlfriend's account, maybe they're having a bad night or swapped spec because you needed a DPS and they went Shadow just to step in and haven't actually played Shadow in months. That vetting you did, checking their amazing gear, raid experience and availability for length of time just went to crap and you might not even realize it until you get to a boss.

All of that said, I'm just grateful to those who PuG with us for two things.

1. I've met some of my favorite raiders through PuGing. Three members of my core right now are people who responded to my "LF1M" calls on LFG. That's what keeps me PuGing - knowing that there are amazing people out there, looking for a chance to raid, and every time I PuG with someone, I don't know if they're going to be the next core member of my raid group.

2. I do get to go into Firelands and kill things. This is started to feel a lot like late summer from last year when we were literally begging for people to get a raid, any raid, off the ground. And other guilds are struggling far more than we are just to get started. So the fact that these PuGs let us raid and kill things is enough to make me very grateful for them.

What makes this worse is that I actually quite like Firelands and would love to get to work on it with a good, consistent team. I am enjoying these raids so much, both T11 and T12 have been fantastic raids to work on.

But. The patch is relatively young still and if our record is anything to go by, I think we'll clear the normal modes and at least a couple of hard modes before 4.3 drops, though our progression rate might move at the pace of our guild's namesake.

I hope you're having some luck out there! And if you're looking to raid, poke that link.

H. R. is my least favorite R.

I haven't been talking about raiding much lately because I haven't been able to do much raiding (well, real raiding, which is Firelands) lately. When 4.2 dropped, we went in to Firelands the first two weeks and had a lot of trouble. One of our healers was severely under geared and we had a lot of trouble keeping the raid alive.

This week, we decided we'd go do some hard-mode/T11 clearing for some gear and upgrades and then go back into Firelands for the second night, and then the roster issues rose up again. Next week I'm on vacation and that means the earliest chance I'll have to see Firelands again is 7/26. Which is not a pleasant thought. It's not that I'm trying to compete with the guilds on my server - most of them have pushed forward fairly quickly and many congratulations to them, however, it's frustrating to be side-lined.

Last night we wound up PuGging to go clear some raid achievements because hey, 2 missing raiders means I don't want to wipe for hours on Shannox, so we cleared all of T11 (which, BTW, seems easier than Zandalari these days) and Halfus on Heroic.

Our roster is growing more stable, slowly, one person by one person. We picked up one semi-regular friend from another guild which is super-awesome, and last night, yet another PuG who was raiding with us last night wanted to join after the night ended, and I hope his attendance will be stable.

Right now a third - solid, geared, aware, and reliable - healer or tank would make life a lot easier. That's the big gap in our roster right now. My co-tank has swapped to healing and one of our top DPS has taken to tanking, but I miss her epic DPS (though she's a fine tank as well) and their off-spec gear sets are not as well-tuned to these roles as their main-spec sets are, naturally.

There are maybe three or four other raiders who are on the roster, and they are all awesome and I would love to see them attend consistently, but their real-life obligations make them hit-and-miss and I can understand that, and they know that if I do find stable positions they would become bench-warmers, but these HR problems continue to crop up, and I hear about it even from the very top-end guilds on my server who never used to have a problem with their rosters.

I'm wondering if I'm noticing it so much because of the smaller size of our guild (before we formed Turtles, we were in fairly large guilds with many people and often had folks to step in to fill raid (even if they were sometimes less than ideal, which is a completely separate issue)). Or is this a Cataclysm issue? Is there just a lot of burnout with Cataclysm in general? I don't know.

There is also the time factor. I do think that the new encounters are just, plain, harder, and the biggest resource they require to clear is not gear (though it helps) but time to practice and learn. So many guilds are doing at least three nights, and often four hours per night. We're doing six hours a week, total. I can't help but stare at that fact and wonder if it's a factor in our stalling progress.

Solving HR problems is the hardest thing for me - thankfully my GM is amazing at recruitment and when we find good people PuGing with us, she is relentless at getting them to accept a Guild Invitation. I don't know how anyone can resist her pursuit. It's like the adds on Maloriak casting Fixate - she just doesn't let go  until you say yes! The problem is finding good people who are reliable.

Anyway. This post is just a ball of QQ and I didn't intend for it to be that - I'm trying to remain optimistic and it was actually a pretty fun night to kick back, crack a beer and just steamroll T11 while picking up achievements and yak with friends. Isn't that what raiding is supposed to be about, anyway?

Next week, I'm off to Cape Cod at a beach house with my wife and baby, so the only thing I'll be raiding is the Oyster bar. Lots of yummy, briny Oysters to shuck and slurp, while reading lots of books and dreaming of Dagon sleeping off the coast of New England.

You guys have fun, and I'll see you when I get back, unless I get inspired and write from vacation-land.

Patch Day Jitters

It's 4.2 day and I'm excited to have a new zone, quests, new raid, and three-nights to attack it with, all in the same week! Excitement abounds and I can't wait to go home and revel in the disconnecting, crashing, buggy hell that is Patch Day Raiding! But who cares, after all? This is what we're looking forward to!

Evidently, I've been looking forward to 4.2 for some time with anticipation, excitement, hope - and no small amount of trepidation.

There is a small worm twisting in my thoughts, a dark cloud behind that silver lining, and I can't keep a bitter note from ringing through this excitement. I don't exactly know what it is that is making me nervous, what's to happen will happen and much of it is out of my control.

After the recruitment hell of 4.0 and 4.1, I'm worried about going through that all over again, especially with summer looming. The guild leveling thing is an issue that murders me dead every time I PUG someone awesome, check their recruitment status and they tell me they don't want to leave their level 25 guild. Most of my guildies are playing alts in other guilds or servers (and to be fair, I'm hiding on an alt myself lately), and I'm just worried that 4.2 will be no different from 4.1 for me, and I'll have to beg, cajole, plead and drag people to fill a raid team.

On another hand, while I'm not very competitive on the raiding ladder (I think the best we crawled up to was the mid-teens in ranking last tier after we killed Nef?) I don't really want to fall too far behind either. When I see people walking around in raid gear and titles and mounts, I start to get a bit ornery and grumpy and jealous because I know I can play at that level, and what's holding us back isn't gear, or ability, but the pure logistics of filling a raid.

Anyway.

The last tier of raiding just about broke me. It is the closest I've come to quitting the game out of sheer frustration. I've written about all my issues before, and I won't rehash them again. Running raids and guilds isn't always fun, or joyous. There are certainly moments when you realize why you suffer and struggle through it, and those moments just about make up for all the shit.

But standing here, at the mouth of a new patch, staring down three or four months of raids - I'm worried. I don't know if I have the stamina to go through this again.

Exhausted

I went through this last year after we killed the Lich King and it's happened again now, where a lot of folks are just done with raiding and nobody logs in. It is so frustrating to deal with this kind of thing after working so hard, and it's not like I haven't set expectations - everyone knows I wanted to progress into heroics but this week has seen a steep, steep drop-off in attendance. 40 - 50% of the raid just didn't show up. And I'm left scratching my head.

Am I doing something wrong?

Tier 11 done - again

My first major project on this blog is now finished. I wanted to write detailed and full guides to doing every boss in Tier 11 and I posted the last of it yesterday.

It's very gratifying to wrap up writing projects, and I hope the guides will be of some use to people, particularly the guilds going into T11 after 4.2. I will likely do a pass over all the bosses in one post as an addendum after the nerfs hit but the guides should work fine after 4.2 as well. If anything, they'll play things a bit too cautiously and that's never a bad thing.

Whew. I'm kind of exhausted after that and I'm surprised how much I thought about having to finish this up - but I'm glad it's done. Here is everything:

• How To: Nefarian
• How To: Chimaeron & Maloriak
• How To: Atramedes & Trash
• How To: Magmaw & Omnotron
• How To: Conclave & Al'Akir
• How To: Cho'gall
• How To: Ascendant Council
• How To: Valiona & Theralion
• How To: Halfus

I'm hoping to be more timely with the Firelands guides - I'll probably wind up writing them up as we kill bosses.

Speaking of killing bosses in Firelands, we seem to have had a steep drop-off in raiding interest since killing Nefarian and I'm looking for some folks who actually want to continue raiding consistently and pushing into heroics - I play Alliance side on Moon Guard and raid twice a week (Tuesday and Wednesday nights from 7 to 10 server, which is Central).

You should come help me kill Ragnaros. Hit me up here, or on our guild forums.

A return to stability?

After the mess of patch week madness last week and despite the finals-week chaos of this week, we managed to get in a regular six hours of raiding and killed 7 bosses this week. I was hoping for a full set of previously killed bosses (11) but I'll take what I can get. The good news is, we managed to stumble on a couple of good folks through PuGing again. Despite my last complaint about Moon Guard PuGing - we do also run into very good players.Our guild began as a rag-tag PuG group back in February of 2010, after all.

Have I mentioned how happy I am that LFG is trying to build server-groups before expanding its search? It is fantastic to see familiar names and faces when I hit that Random Heroic button. So, after the current round of recruitment, our roster is a bit over-full, which makes me happy and comfortable. I like knowing that if someone can't make it, I have an option or two to fill in that slot.

Quickly Catching Up & Recruitment

The reason for the lack of posts lately is a minor bout of surgery I had a couple of weeks ago and now I've run out of archived entries to post. I'm in a bit of discomfort, and it's making it hard for me to do much more than sleep, veg in front of the television or WoW, and a day at work is enough to wipe me out. I'm hoping to be back to a regular posting schedule soon, as there's a lot to talk about.

We finished up Cho'gall last week and are going to start hitting Al'Akir this week. 4.1 is coming out, and I am really excited to pick up the Amani War Bear (mount number 97!). I have finally gotten my warlock all ready for raiding and am enjoying the crap out of her. I'm terrified of starting our pulls on Nefarian (hopefully) next week.

On the PvP side of things, my Paladin's 2's Arena team cracked a thousand rating after 2 weeks of matches, and I think I might have a 3's team going soon. A friend is almost done leveling her Shadow Priest and I'll be doing 2's on my Warlock with her. We're even talking about recruiting for a Rated Battleground team.

Speaking of recruitment, we're about to loose two long-term members to real-life attrition and I've been trying to recruit like crazy to no avail. If you have any characters Alliance side on Moon Guard and are looking to raid, please contact me here or in game (on Innana or Merricat) or you can apply directly through our website. We're ideally looking for a (non-druid) healer and a DPS but we're flexible and we'll make room for the right people.

Rewarded (and not)

My prize books arrived from Blizzard today from the writing contest and it was pretty neat to see all the names signed on it so I wanted to share them:

Don't mind my messy work desk.

This has been motivating me to write more of my fiction stuff so my time in game is diminishing a bit - and our current roster problems and having to PUG constantly isn't helping matters. Wiping for 2 hours of Maloriak sub 10% on Tuesday due to lag and then just being unable to juggle the mechanics last night so we gave up and wiped on Atramedes instead.

The last two nights of raids were no picnic. These fights are fun, and relatively simple, and the patch left everyone's DPS in the 20k+ range on certain fights so I have no idea what the problem is.

Does anyone playing Alliance side on Moon Guard want to raid with me?

Anyway. While that weighs on my mind, I'm not too worried about it. Today, I have a prize I won out of thousands of entries and I'm feeling pretty good about it. :-)

PuG - how to and how not to

I was puttering around on my Forsaken Death Knight yesterday afternoon and as I tend to do while puttering, I left myself in the Raid Browser as Tank/DPS on the unlikely chance that someone might need me.

You see, with my raiding and guild obligations Alliance side, I don't really want to commit to a Horde guild as I will always put my Alliance guild and toons first, so I don't think it's fair for me to join a guild with an alt. I can see it working out if I can find a raiding guild that does weekend work only or something, and while I don't mind PuGing - it can lead to fun and excitement and meeting great people - in the end of the day, I play this game to raid with friends.

So anyway, I was herbing away when I get a whisper - "Tank for ICC 10? Marrowgar is down." I do my usual Litmus Test - pop the person's name into Wow-head and peruse their gear/raid stats, and he'd done 8 or 9 bosses in ICC a few times, so I figure he is a professional PuGer. I accept his invite, zone in, click "Accept" when I'm asked to enter into the lockout and am sealed to this raid.

Happily I put on my tank gear, take my flask, eat my food, log into Vent, and start jumping up and down, ready to pull. That's when I realize with slow dawning horror that this will not be productive. That I have, in fact, thrown away my raid lockout for nothing. For one, my co-tank with massively better gear than me but in the same spec as me is doing far less damage than I am. The Raid Lead isn't leading so much as telling people when to pull. The DPS is non-existent and there are two healers, one of whom drops raid after one pull of the boss that lasts seven minutes to get to phase 2 at which point I explode the second I stop chaining cool downs.

Mind bogglingly, the raid leader then says he has time for one more pull and I just about have to induce a stroke in myself to keep from punching that press to talk key and screaming, "What the fuck?"

Disgusting.

Later in the night, my normal Alliance raid was short three people due to massive log-in issues that plagued my entire Battlegroup and I wound up PuGing and did a mixed bag of Heroic and Normal mode kills. I actually wound up with a couple of upgrades that I had been looking for, for a long time. And as usual, after we had killed 9 bosses in 2 hours at the end of the night, the PuGers whispered me kindly, asking me if we were looking for recruits.

Why can't I PuG for my guild's counterparts Horde side? Anyone on Moon Guard need a part-time Tank/DPS DK? I swear I don't suck.

On top of that, some roster issues are starting to nag on me, wherein I've had our Shadow Priest sub-healing hard modes for our Resto-Shaman who's on a sabbatical and he's getting antsy to get back to his normal spec and is tired of keeping up two gear sets, so I've sent an e-mail off to the Shammy to see what her status is.

Little, minor issues like these are starting to pile up. I might need an officer meeting soon to sort this shit out!

Thinking About Cataclysm

Man, dog days of summer indeed. I had 4 people absent this week, and wound up recruiting three new recruits, all of whom have been awesome. I'm a little worried about having maybe one or two too many people, but I'd rather have choice than be short and have to PuG.

Even with 4 subs, we still managed to get 11/12 in one night and taught Lich King to the 3 new recruits. So, not a bad week of raiding at all. Since Malygos was the weekly and I realized we'd never actually done You Don't Have An Eternity, we decided to knock that out and called it a week. I've also been kind of burning out on ICC so next week I set up Ulda 10 hard modes for an off night, let's see how many folks show up for that. Maybe we can wrap up our Rusted Protodrakes achievement (One Light In The Dark!) and get a few more folks the Starcaller title from Algalon, maybe.

I've also been thinking of promoting someone in the guild up to Officer status to help us out - he's one of our most reliable and knowledgeable people and he loves the game passionately, and I have a lot of trust for him. Will need to talk to our GM and pitch her the idea before speaking with him.

Anyway. Moving on.

With Cataclysm coming up, I've been encouraging folks to figure out what they want to level first and what role they want to play at 85. Because I know I've been thinking of switching to Retribution full time. That would be a HUGE change for me. I've always tanked but the last few months of play have been interesting in that they make me appreciate the game from a different side (DPS) and I've been enjoying it tremendously.

I'm not 100% sold on the idea, but it is something I'm considering seriously. I think it'd be a lot of fun.

But the thing is... I said almost the exact same thing regarding my main at the end of TBC. I thought my Bear Druid would be my main and tank as main spec in WotLK but I just fell in love with my Paladin after 3.0 hit live and completely switched over to him.

As it is, these are my alts ranked in scale of interest I have for playing them:

1. Death Knight for Frost DPS - based on the new talent trees released, they look to be in a really interesting place and with their ultra-fast locked GCD style of play, could be a lot of fun
2. Druid who mostly heals as a Tree now, and with the promised changes, might become an even more OP healer
3. My 72ish Warlock is just a joy in PvP and in PvE as Affliction and I love the aesthetic of the class, plus, it'll give me a chance to race change her to Worgen and be a foxy warlock
4. There is my mage at 80 who mostly serves to make me flasks and stuff, but he was my first character in WoW and maybe I could swap to him in Cata as we don't have any mages in our guild right now
5. And finally, I *could* just finish leveling my 65 Warrior if I wanted to go Fury and top meters all day long

And so, my poor Paladin with close to 6k Achievement points and my most progressed character is competing for attention against all these classes.