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.

Long Time No See!

It's been a while since I wrote!

There are a couple of themes that are going around the blogs that I read lately that I'd love to respond to  but I don't really know how to. Either I'm not affected by them as strongly as the writers, or I feel like what I have to say is so private that I'd either e-mail the person directly or maybe just silent because I don't know the person well enough.

It's an odd time. Raids are quietly falling silent, people don't log in anymore, guilds are falling out of the game, or scaling back their commitments and I kind of see myself doing the same to some degree, but I still enjoy the game. I'm excited about arenas and pushing my team ranking up. I'm excited for whenever we start doing Heroic raids. I'm excited to farm Madness for more loots as we have a fairly repeatable and reliable strategy for killing him now.

I am absolutely loving being a paladin tank lately. We are the most imbalanced and over powered tank class in the game right now and I love it!

And yet, the game seems distant lately. I don't exactly know why. Some of it is the content being old, some of it is the anticipation I have for MoP, I'd rather play MoP than drag my heels in Cataclysm any longer, honestly, and part of it is wondering if I'm missing something when I read about other people dropping the raiding game or the game completely in some cases.

Why do I keep playing, then? People are leaving, apparently in droves based on forum posts and such, for Star Wars, and while I have some dim interest in the game, it's not enough for me to keep up two subscriptions at the same time. I might wind up playing it to fill in time anyway, but I'm not excited about it.

I tried RIFT and was burned by barely playing the game until I canceled it three months in. LOTRO was the only other game I played consistently but it has changed a lot, and for the worse I think, since it went F2P and the audience it has picked up since then. I miss the quiet, mature audience it had before then even if the game was far more populated after the transition. I don't know how it is now, I haven't played it in a long time. Besides, there was no end-game there to speak of.

Anyway. I keep playing WoW because my friends are playing, because I'm enjoying the game, the raiding is great, the PvP is fun, but I guess I just wish I had something to do with my alts other than the same things I'm doing with my main. I don't know. Maybe I'm just... not burned out, exactly, but bored?  I'm done with the leveling game. I love raiding, I love Arena, but the rest of the time I have to convince myself to log in.

MoP can't get here fast enough, or I'm going to have to play SW just to stay amused. Any SW guilds recruiting? :-P

Petition Bump

I know my blog is on the low (low) end of readership in the WoWoBloGoSphere, and I'm sure anyone seeing this link here must have seen it already, but just in case someone hasn't seen this yet, there is a small petition for Blizzard to make amends for providing a platform for homophobic language at BlizzCon - about 500 folks so far, but I'm hopeful more people will sign. If you support this kind of thing, please take a look and add your name to the list if it fits with your .

If for no other reason than that at least there's a list of names that winds up on Mike Morhaime's desk of people who don't appreciate homophobia mixed in with their gaming entertainment.

And I hope my anguished defense of heavy metal in the face of the homophobic rant wasn't misconstrued.

Dungeons

Is there anything more fun than running the new dungeons?

They're lovely, designed with a depth of detail that we saw in raids but was missing from prior 5-mans, a length that feels "just right" in theory, and with boss-fights that are rarely tank and spank.

My favorite dungeon is probably Halls of Origination but Lost City comes a very, very close second, and I love Vortex Pinnacle and Grim Batol as well.

The other two dungeons - Stonecore and Blackrock Descent - are also good, but not as amazing as the first four. I especially love the storytelling in Blackrock Descent, even if I get a bit annoyed at Raz for all the rep-stealing he does. Speaking of rep-stealing, it's a fun mini game during the bombing runs in Grim Batol, to get the mob clumbs low but not to kill them so that all that lovely, lovely rep doesn't evaporate in a puff of dragon-breath.

I'm really glad to have a couple of dungeons in Blackrock to go beat on because of the nostalgia. I didn't play in Vanilla, but as a first-time leveler during TBC, I remember standing around that summoning stone on that floating chunk of rock and watching that black drake fly around and above us, a lot. It was gratifying to finallyfly in on my own black mount and scare off that silly little whelp.

The only dungeon that feels a bit retread-dungeon-ey is, sadly, Throne of Tides - I like it a lot, but the color-scheme is so Wrath of the Lich King that I kind of blot out all the cool stuff going on in there. The Kraken cut-scene should also be trimmed with a option to re-watch, but I'm not sure how to make that happen.

Speaking of retreads, I've been enjoying the ever-loving-hell out of Heroic: Deadmines, though I haven't had the pleasure of poking through Heroic: Shadowfang Keep yet. As a life-long member of the Alliance (more or less) I never had the level of nostalgia attached to that place as, back in the day, it was pretty easy to skip that dungeon entirely, the way it was tucked all the way fuck out of in the middle of nowhere as far as lowby-alliance-leveling was concerned.

One of the things I love about all these dungeons is that they are so rarely tank-and-spank. I've been running all the dungeons as both Retribution and Protection spec, and no matter what, I find myself doing cool stuff. Using Repentance on trash pulls, running in and out of fire all the time, managing boss-mechanics, staying on top of interrupts, switch-killing or picking up adds - dungeons are exciting.

It's too early to pick favorite bosses yet. But I'm enjoying the game a lot. So much I want to talk about!

Woah!

So, I was going to write about how awesome it is to raid right now in the buffed post-patch period and how much I'm enjoying raid-tanking as a Paladin right now, but, then, I saw this...

O_o

I was a finalist in the Blizzard 2010 Global Writing Contest!

I came this close to winning the contest! So exciting! Eeeek! I wish I could go to BlizzCon to meet the other writers and staff and stuff. But still - wow, this is the highest scale recognition of my writing so far.

I think it's a sign of some sort... but regardless, I'm so giddy and excited right now.

Sexism and Racism in my Warcraft

Every time I turn around lately, I seem to be running into stereotypes about Warcraft that I would love to deny but I just can't. Warcraft players are immature, racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynists and I want to say, no. My guild isn't. My friends aren't.

Maybe we're a subset, because goddamn, the rest of the community is an exercise in depression.

There are guilds out there that reject you as a raider if you're a woman (read their application requirements). Which. I don't know. The name and the aggressively anti-gender attitude is upsetting but whatever. Their loss. I'd certainly never apply or play with them.

We're so used to terms like "rape" and "fag" being used in PvP and Raiding environments that we just accept them now and create a hostile environment for people who're hurt by them.

When I see people writing feminist blogs about Warcraft and the issues at hand, when I see other blog entries grappling with the impact that casual use of worlds like rape - which, by the way, in a word, promises horrific and very specific violence against a particular gender - I don't understand why the rest of the Warcraft community doesn't want to stand up and say, "Fuck this, I'm not going to tolerate someone using these terms in my guild, in my raid, in my presence, period."

And the thing is, if that happens in my raid, I can step up and tell that person to shut up and if they contest me on it, I will kick them. Hell, before I do a thing, my Guild Leader who's an amazing feminist woman herself, will probably have that person on their ass outside the instance portal.

We won't tolerate homophobia, or sexism, or misogyny in our raids, not because we play with a lot of women, and not because we have people of all sexualities in our raids, but because it's just fucking wrong.

Guild raids are a controlled environment, I'm in a raid with my guildies, and my friends, and they'll back me up. Things are different when you PuG. If I'm in a PuG where I see a lot of this happening, I will drop and go find a non hostile environment. But a few weeks ago, I ran into a different kind of environment and my reaction there was really unexpected.

Halfway through an ICC 25, someone began to sing a Skinhead songs. If you're interested, it was the words to a song called, "The White Man Marches On" that this person wanted to share with us. Look them up.

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach and no matter how much I want to say now that I pressed that push to talk and said, "Kick him or I'll drop," I sat there petrified instead. A second of stunned silence passed and then Vent broke up with scattered giggles, a few people moaned that "now some bleeding hearts will drop raid" and then the Raid Lead chuckled, and said, "Someone is griefing us, let's just keep going."

And they went on with jokes that were maybe less overt but no less hurtful.

Now, I've been gaybashed in the real world, I've been racially attacked, never physically, but I've had someone walk up to me and a friend of mine and threatened to fuck us fags up if they ever saw us on campus again just because they thought we were gay. Right after 9/11 my family faced a fair amount of discrimination in small upstate-NY towns. My Caucasian wife of six years is frequently assumed to be alone when we're out together.

This sort of experience - vocal violence, aggressive discrimination, casual but unintentional racism - is not something new to me. I felt like I knew how to handle myself in these circumstances, in these situations, but in that raid, I didn't.

I shut down. I didn't say anything. It was just so bleak and depressing. Nobody else said anything about it other than to build on it without being quite so outrageous. I don't know why it bugged me so much, or the way it affected me, but really, I felt even more emasculated that I didn't do or say anything, so I stood there for a bit while they kept pulling trash, and then I just dropped raid and logged out.

Maybe it was the level of violence that the song was promising. Maybe it was something about the casual way in which twenty-four other people took this threat. I don't know.

This doesn't take a lot of effort to work out. Language has power, it affects us in profound ways, and if you don't stand up for your friends and colleagues, then you're letting these insensitive people victimize them.

I don't want to see this sort of sexist and racist and homophobic behavior continue. I don't know that I can really make a difference other than to control the limited environment in which I have influence, but Goddamnit, I'm sick of the casual way these words are used. When words become a casual part of speech and language, they become acceptable, and the person hearing those words is forced to accept them as part of a chain of abuse.

These things are not casual. They never were.

Writing in a hurry

As some of you might know, Blizzard's annual writing contest was running for the last few weeks/months and as the last couple of years, I planned to submit but this time, I actually made a run of it. I had an idea in mind, and I worked out the general arc and characters, and wrote about 2000 words - roughly the first third of it - a couple of weeks ago and kept mulling the rest of it over and over, thinking I had until the end of the month to wrap it up.

Some providence inspired me to check on the date yesterday morning and I realized with a shock that the submission deadline was in fact last night at midnight.

I spent my lunch break at work desperately churning out another 2000 words to get two-thirds of the way and then work and an after-work engagement kept me busy. I got home around nine, logged into game, ran into Halls of Reflection for inspiration and with the music of that dungeon over my headphones, wrote the rest of it (with some encouragement from a couple of guildies) and then gave it a quick draft and posted it off just before midnight.

I'm pretty pleased with the story, and if I might take a segue from Warcraft for a second, it is the first new short story that I've started and finished in some time. Writing has been a hobby of mine for a while and I've had some minor success with it (a couple of short plays I wrote wound up in a tiny off-broadway production, and a couple of short-stories I wrote wound up in some small-time press magazines) but I've been going through some serious writers block for a bit over a year now and this was a very gratifying way to break through that wall.

After submitting the story and getting a confirmation letter back from Blizzard, I sent the story out to a few friends and it seems to be doing well with them, so I have my fingers crossed.

I'm feeling pretty pumped to continue working on some of my own material and if anything should come of this Blizzard submission, well, I certainly wouldn't mind writing for my favorite game, as you might imagine. :-)

Leveling Whine

So, I've got four max-level characters right now, 3 of them are Alliance side, and 1 Horde side. I also have two characters ~71 that I'm trying to cap before Cataclysm.

My problem is that I'm mostly burned out on the questlines in Northrend and as I'm leveling a Warlock and the Warrior as Arms, it's pretty hard to get queues in any reasonable amount of amount, and BG Experience isn't exactly great.

So I'm stuck with two characters who're staring at a long, long grind, and when Ghostcrawler says Cataclysm will bring a much-needed reduction in XP to get from 70 - 80, I'm wondering if I should just park them here and wait for the nerf.

But here's my issue - I need to level my warrior to 80 just so I have coverage for a couple of professions for my main. He's my miner/skinner and I have a Jewelcrafter and a Leatherworker, both of whom are difficult and expensive to level up with the gathering component. I already have a level-cap'd Alchemist, Tailor, Jewelcrafter, Enchanter, Leatherworker, and Herbalist so some of those are covered but I'd love to get my Jewelcrafting leveling quickly and make some money from some good cuts early on.

And to do that, I'll need to level my warrior through Northrend before the nerf. And I am just not up to that grind.

My guild and 24 Hour Maintainance

I feel like we just can't build momentum. We have an awesome week and suddenly, poof, one raid day down the drain due to circumstances beyond our control and the week after this one, college starts rolling and we're going to loose a couple of folks to moving, scheduling, etc.

It would be nice to just build off the momentum of one week and keep rolling into another week of content. But, ah, well. Worst case, we'll just do a normal full-clear and maybe get another LK kill and achievement out of the way.

With summer taking its last few breaths and Autumn about to rear its head again (and I for one am about to have a profoundly busy and complicated autumn, but I'll write about that later...) I'm looking forward, looking at our stable of raiders and socials and hoping we have enough backup to keep raiding through the slump and hit Cataclysm with more folks than we need.

We are in good shape right now, but I'm a pretty profound Negative Nancy and always hedging my bets. That said, I'm super-excited to log in as Cataclysm drops, form epic 5-mans and hit the new dungeons with my guildies. :-)

This Friday is the 5-month anniversary of our guild being created. It's shocking to me how much we've achieved in such a short amount of time, especially with the amount of recruiting we've had to do, the number of raid weeks we've had to pug as much as half a raid, and people we've geared up and taught all the fights to only to have them vanish in the middle of the night or burn out... and here we are, 9/12 hard-modes with only 6 hours of raids a week, and sometimes even less than that.

I'm looking forward to hitting the 6-month mark! An achievement for most raiding guilds!

Speaking of awesome guild, one of our members who's a drummer in a small metal band composed a brutal song about our guild killing the Lich King (I'll link to it once he uploads it somewhere public) which has inspired me to write something as well! We'll see what comes out of it.

I'll say it again - forming this guild saved WoW for me. Nothing compares to doing what I love best with some of my best in-world friends and zero drama.

Le Roi Est Mort

It's good to be the King(slayer). Here's how we got there (not the actual strat, our phase 3 was still pretty messy and I want to clean it up before I post a strategy.)

With our second extension, we walked up to the Frozen Throne.

For the first time, we had a full guild run, on a fresh night with our three best healers, two tanks who knew the fight well, three ranged DPS pushing 9k on stand'n'cast fights and two melee DPS, only one of whom was here for the first time.

I was feeling good about it.

We spent 15 minutes talking about the whole fight, and then pulled. Phase 1: easy. Phase 2: just about perfect. We have a valk spawn just at transition and pick up a healer, the healer drops due to being in the AoE as the Valk slowly flew out and we started loosing people in the transition as tanks failed to pick up the adds fast enough and we hit Phase 3 down three or four folks and then exploded.

At that point, my feeling good went up to, "The cat's in the bag."

Every attempt there after was cleaner, and cleaner and we got to Phase 3 every single time. An hour in, on our fourth or fifth attempt, we wiped in Phase 2 for the first time due to a messy Defile and I called a 10 minute bio/walk/afk break, took a much needed stretch, walked about the apartment, and then when I sat down again, I broke down how to go from Phase 2 into transition - we stop at 43%, wait for the next Valk, kill it, move to the edge, and transition.

Bang. Phase 2 transition with no deaths, very clean. We pop hero, tanks grab the adds, DPS burns like crazy the phase transition goes perfectly and we hit phase 3 with only one spirit up and no deaths.

Lichy starts casting Soul Siphon on our ranged over and over which gibs us a bit on Vile Spirits but we manage. Defile dodging in Phase 3 is a piece of cake. His health plummets pretty fast - 40% gets to 30% and then sinks to 20% and suddenly Hammer of Wrath lights up before I realize it... and then inexplicably healers start to OOM.

We start loosing people in Frostmourn. Tanks start chaining CDs as he starts to soft-enrage and suddenly we loose our OT and I realize it's down to me, two healers and one DPS.

Behind LK I see our Holy Priest blossom into an angel and LK starts to cast Vile Spirits. 11%. With DP on CD, I pop wings, pop trinkets, and call for everyone to start DPSing, healers too. 11% dissolves to 10%, then painfully crawls down, 10.8%, 10.7%, 10.6%. The spirits are starting to come down and I'm out of CDs. 10.5%

Raid chat is going nuts. Vent starts going crazy.

I move him away from the spirits. 10.5%. 10.4%. My brain tells me to watch for any CDs, my finger hovers over Holy Wrath to hold off the Vile Spirits for another second when BANG. I'm dead.

0.4% to go? Really? What? How? We had ages to go on Enrage, I had AD up still, what happened? My heart sinks.

But then I realize he hasn't despawned and someone on Vent is screaming "We did it!"

I look up from a frantic scan of combat log and see him start his monologue - " No question remains unanswered. No doubts linger..."

Vent. Explodes.

After much squealing, /hi5ing and so forth, we collect loot, and with an hour and change left on our raid timer, we go do the weekly, try to pull the entire first room in Military Quarter and... because I forgot to rebuff RF after the rez, we then wipe on Naxx trash.

It's good to be brought back down to earth sometimes.

To make up for it, two days later, we decided to go in on our second raid night of the week and delivered what I had been promising the guild once we cleared through Lich King - an Algalon kill.

Half the raid had never seen him. First attempt was great but our Starkiller DC'd. Second attempt, he DC's again, I ask our lovely Elemental Shaman to switch to kill stars, but we still wipe to enrage at 5%. We swap out our DCing Boomkin from Australia for another healer, switch a healer out to shadow to kill stars, and then bang, down goes Algalon with a good 40+ seconds on the enrage.

After Lich King, the Algalon fight seems ridiculously easy.

We preened around Dalaran for a while with our second set of shiny new titles (Starcaller) and then went back in to Ulda and cleared all the way down to Yogg, doing a handful of hard modes along the way, and as it was an hour over raid time at that point, we called it after a messy swipe at Yogg with Freya down as our Keeper to guard our Sanity.

A bunch of us are one achievement away the Rusted Protdrake (One Light, wouldn't you know it)so maybe we'll knock that out one of these nights.

I'm very pleased with the way things are with the guild right now. I'd love to continue this sort of progression for the next few weeks in ICC Hard Modes and hopefully we'll see 3.3.5 on live servers in a couple weeks, and that will carry us through to Cataclysm.

My goal for the day Cataclysm drops?

Hover over the gates of Stormwind on a Bloodbathed Vanquisher with a Bane of the Fallen King title.

Almost There Is An Inch Too Far

Someone needed to leave early last night so we got about an hour and a half of work in on Arthas, and it was pretty productive.

Phase 1 is a piece of cake, the transitions are almost effortless at this point, and Phase 2 is getting a hell of a lot cleaner. Even on messy Phase 2 attempts we can pretty reliable dodge Defiles and kill the Val'kyr before they drop someone off the edge.

We finally broke through to 40% last night, got through the transition okay, with one raging spirit still up but we totally fucked up the positioning into Phase 3 and wiped after the first Vile Spirits and that was on our last attempt.

So, after the person left, we pretty much 9-man'd 7 bosses in about an hour and called it a night. Next week we'll go back in on Lich King again on Tuesday. My team is giving me a lot of latitude here, and they are hungry for a kill, so I'm glad to have them with me. No one is complaining, no one is bitching, we're all here to be supportive and do our best.

--

Warning: Sloppy emo whining ahead...

I don't know what else to say about this fight. I've wanted to kill this son of a bitch for ages. When the raid opened in December, I was RL for a guild that was trying to do so much that it didn't get ANYTHING done and I was raiding 4, 5 nights a week and was on the path to burnout and insanity trying to fit 18 people into one 10-man or run 2 10-mans with alts.

When Frost Wing opened, I went Horde side to join a guild, that was very professional, but it lack any sense of fun or camaraderie and I felt like I was just a number which is no fun for me. I lost all responsibility, but I also lost everything else that was fun about raiding.

When I came back, it was mid-March and joined up with some friends from the old guild, and we didn't get a stable raiding core together until about a month ago. And even now we regularly have people dropping out due to emergencies and issues, which is understandable, but when my two most geared healers are offline, and I'm relying on an under-geared druid playing his off-spec to pre-HoT Infests - and he is a damned good healer! - it's frustrating.

I feel like this is the third time I'm starting from scratch on my journey to killing Arthas. And now that the end of the road is in sight, I feel like I keep snatching for the ribbon that marks the end and just keep missing it with the tip of my fingers.

I'm ready. I'm eager. I just want to kill him and I think I want him dead so much, it's making me desperately hungry. I know I shouldn't be this attached to a kill for a game, but I want this very much. I want this, for myself, but more than anything, for my team, for my friends who've stood by me while I went on my Horde Adventure... I owe this to you guys.

We're almost there. The lights in the house on the mountain are on, warm and inviting, we just need to get through the last bit of snow in our way, just get over that last hill and we'll be Kingslayers, drinking mead and sitting with our feet up in that house on the mountain top and I'll buy all the rounds all night long.

The Lich King Makes Me Aware Of Something

Lich King is getting there. My team has put in some good time on him by now and I can smell blood in the water. People are eager and discussing the fight in GChat without any prompting from me and that's always a good sign.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about my gear since facing up to the King, and I think I need to reevaluate a lot of my normal tanking set and tweak it for Lich King (and eventually, hard modes) which requires a lot more survivability than I was anticipating. Part of this was also inspired by Rhidach's post on Righteous Defense, about the stats revealing from the latest Armory Data Mining efforts.

I'm going to scale back on my threat a bit and start going for a bit more armor, a bit more Stamina, and a tiny bit less mitigation.

What does that mean?

It means getting rid of all of my DefenseRating+Stam gems and replacing them with pure Stam unless I have a huge Stam socket bonus.

It means getting rid of all my Strength+Stam gems and replacing them with Agility+Stam gems for the bonus armor.

It means replacing my Armsman enchant with Stamina.

It means replacing my +10 stats with stamina.

I might also finally cave and get the Pillars of Might crafted. And I might also buy the off-set hands, even though that's going to kill my Hit Rating.

But if I do that, my threat will go in the toilet and I don't always have a rogue or a hunter to Tricks/MD me, so unless in 25s, where I can always depend on those, I think I have to stick with SOME level of threat.

I guess I've been so heavily invested in my Retribution set lately that I've sort of neglected my Protection set for a while. I've even taking to having the other Paladin Tank and a Death Knight who's also spec'd for tanking but usually goes DPS tank so I can go Ret on farm kills (which is, essentially, all content but the King). So, while doing 10k DPS as Ret is fun and all, I need to focus on my real passion and make sure my gear is as good as it can get for Lich King.

Nothing major, but these minor little things might let me stay alive an extra second through a cooldown less Soul Reaper if I absolutely need to tank him through it while the other tank is running away to drop a defile or something.

Anyway. It's interesting how harder encounter make you reevaluate your gear set that you've been comfortable in for ages. Lich King has been the most fun in raids I've had in a while. And I'm proud of my team for sticking with it without complaints or issues.

I hope to report back tomorrow with a kill shot. Wish us luck. :-)

The King, However, Is Still Alive

So, we faced up to Arthas last night.

We cleared up Phase 1 after 1 wipe and consistently got to phase 2 after that. The Transition is a bit messy, but I have some thoughts on how to clean that up. I don't want to go into too much detail about what we did since I'm just learning the fight now and once I have a strat down, I'll type it all out.

We only spent about an hour and change on him, so it wasn't nearly enough time, and I think I will extend the raid lockout into next week, though what I really want is to clear up the achievements (I think we only have 4 or 5 left to do).

But. Putting in time with the King is important and I want to maintain progression momentum. And I know we need more time on him. We just do. Once Phase 2 clears up, I'm confident we'll coast to a smooth kill in a couple of weeks, just like we did with Sindragosa.

We wiped on her for two weeks in a row before killing her this week very smoothly in three attempts, and I think the time you put in does good, you put in attempts, you learn the rhythm of the fight, you go to sleep and process it over, you think about it during the day or remember the sequence of events better or whatever, so the next time you come in you're much more ready for it.

But the issue is, when a boss is that difficult, how do you keep coming back week after week for more? How long do you beat your face on a boss before it gets tedious? How do you keep coming back and motivating and encouraging people to keep coming back?

Well, I'm trying very hard to do that.

I typically tend to be a chatterbox as my guild will tell you, but I think it helps to take a minute or two after every raid to talk over how it went (though I tend to take 5 - 10 minutes *cough*), congratulate everyone on progression, encourage them to show up, set expectations, and also, review the progression plan! I go over our plan on a regular basis, let everyone know what I want to do and discuss any questions.

I think it helps keep the guild engaged, and hopefully, they feel like a part of a team. That does a lot more for morale than all the cold-hearted efficiency you can muster, and people will show up time and time again to progress, and be loyal because you're showing your own loyalty to them.

I typed this as part of a comment in another thread on wow.com but I think it fits in here as well:

Encourage your raiders, talk to them, treat them like a team, motivate them, and engage them. Make coming to progression content a privilege and most of all, make them feel appreciated. I never get tired of saying, "Thank you for coming," and I mean it. I couldn't raid without every single person who logs in and stands next to me to raid - and I want my raiders to know that.

I'm really happy to be in the guild that I'm in, with all the people I'm in it with. They're good players, but more importantly, they're good friends.

Good luck to us all! I can't wait to down him and move on to hard modes.

The Queen Is Dead

Tuesday night, it all came together.

The funny thing was, we had 2 PuGs last week that we replaced with guildies this week, and I said to myself, I said, "Joachim, we're going to spend some time catching these folks up to Phase 3, so be ready for a few wipes."

"But Joachim," I said to myself, I said, "I don't understand, we just spent a while learning the fight, I don't have the patience to sit through two hours of wipes again!"

But of course, you do what you have to do, so I girded my loins, took a breath, skipped Plague and Blood wing entirely, and dove right into the Frost wing. We approached Dreamwalker with our usual swagger and realized that we'd done her on 9-man before, so we could easily get Portal Jockey, and I volunteered to catch the 3rd portal (we typically have 3 healers, 2 taking every portal, our magnificent Guild Leader heals the raid on her Holy Priest, while we use one tank to tank everything, 1 DPS on the Suppressors and everyone else eats everything else).

Since we could obviously afford 1 extra DPS doing nothing I decided to take the portal. Of course, I never realized the portals move around so when the 2nd set of portals spawned on the other side of the room, I missed them while killing a Blazing Skeleton and there went the achievement. Oh, well. Next week.

After the Elevator Boss and Spider Room of WTF we came up to Sindi, and pulled. First two attempts were cluster fucks. People spreading tombs everywhere in the air phase, people not LoSing the Frost Bombs and I hit that vent button, like I meant it, and I said, "I don't know what the hell is going on. And I don't care. Now shape up, or ELSE!"

Else what? I dunno. But the threat worked. And the next attempt we get to phase 3 with no deaths or anything. So I go, FINALLY! And get ready to start calling out names for people to move and do what they need to do but.... after about two tomb runs I realize I don't need to because everyone, including the 2 folks who've never seen this phase, and doing everything right!

People move out, ranged switches over to explode one, then clip their debuff on the other, people give each other room, when we get a double tomb at one point, nobody panics and they clean up both of them. At about a minute to go, while I'm LoSing, we loose the tank but somehow I was still 2nd on the meter so she rushes up the stairs at me, I pull her into place away from the raid, raid gets to her side, I realize her health is down to 1% and two more seconds later, she's keeling over, and the raid is spamming achievements.

It was a good night. We went and cleared through a few more bosses before calling it a night. Tonight, we kill Putricide, and then the blood wing, before going in to work on the Lich King.

I am fucking excited. And really proud of my boys and girls. Way to go, my turtles. Way to go.

The Sindragosa Blues (again)

Sorry I've been away. Was on vacation and then work ate my life.

Anyway. Now that we have a (relatively) stable group, we've been working on Sindy for two weeks now, last night was our first serious series of attempts and we got her to ~10% on our best try.

Previously, Icy Grip was the bane of our raids, people would die and I'd gnash my teeth but after much thought, I changed our positioning to hold Sindy horizontal to the stairs and have people just DPS and heal from the stairs things worked out very well. It gave people a very specific point to run towards (up the stairs) and dropping blocks on the stairs makes Ice Bomb dodging trivial.

So, ever since the first attempt last night, I saw that Phase 1 and 2 are down rock solid, we barely ever lost a person to Icy Grip, and we got her into Phase 3 right after her 3rd air phase with 3 full time healers.

But people seem to panic on phase 3.

We manage to hold it together for about 2 or 3 blocks, I assigned 2 melee burn 'em down, people clipped their debuffs, tank swaps happened whenever the other tank's debuff dropped, and then either an Icy Grip or a misplaced block would disrupt the process and then we'd fall behind and never catch up to switching to the boss because blocks start coming too soon and then, we hit enrage with anywhere from 15% - 20% left to go.

Our best attempt got her to 14% or so, I think, which was still a solid million and a half hit points.

I think our current strat will work, we just need to spend a little bit more time on her and focus our energy.

On a side-note, I'm especially pleased with the guild's membership right now. Lots of friends, both old and new, and only one or two trouble spots that I think will settle down soon. It's good to be in such company in pre-Cata days.

The PuG Raid: ICC Through Rotface

So, as per my last post, you might imagine me being relegated to the PuG raid completely, standing alone on the steps of Tanks For Everything, with a sandwich board around my neck - "Will Tank For Emblems of Frost " - but you'd be wrong. Sort of.

My current guild is a collection of old friends that forms most of a really good group and a new PuG or two that we've met and grown fond of, who have thrown their lot in with us. However, that still leaves us short a few folks to field a team of our own, so I'm more likely standing at the Landing, begging for another DPS slot or two to be filled up.

Even with a few DPS, some of whom are occasionally new to ICC, we manage to make pretty good progress. Last night, in about two hours, we cleared through RotFace on 10s, for example, including some silly wipes that shouldn't have happened at all, and without them, we could probably have done it in about an hour and a half, which is about ideal.

So, how is this accomplished? With two healers and six DPS.

The Two Heal Raid

We have been running with an amazing holy priest and an awesome resto shaman to pull this off for ages, and with both healers being used to the fights, we can easily two-heal all the content up to Festergut and Rotface's doorstep. Six DPS also allows you to do things like easily clean up the Boned and I've Gone And Made A Mess very easily, and we always clear up Deathwhisper's first phase in about 2 add phases which is super fast.

In the Plague wing, I still see people wipe on the dogs in the Plagueworks, so here's how I do it:

Precious: One Big Gay Pile on the tanks. Yeah, melee will bitch about their DPS being curbed due to standing in front, whatever, just make one big pile so the adds all come to the same spot and your healers or DPS won't get eaten when they sprout agro, this lets you burn them down as they spawn with a ton of AoE and incidental damage will just kill the boss anyway. Tanks swap as per normal, etc.

Stinky: The opposite of the big gay pile - ranged and healers stay at maximum range, and melee run out to the ranged group just before the Devastate to avoid his AoE. Paladin tanks can pop party-wall here but shouldn't be neccessary if Melee are quick on their feet and get out of range. This way healers can get tanks up quickly, and as melee get healed, they can run back in. Tank swaps, etc, as per normal.

Festergut and Rotface: You can do these bosses with 2 healers, but 3 are just a nice security to have since the enrage meters are really not a danger for Festergut anymore with so much 251 gear in our hands, and Rotface is more about control than zerg-speed-burn anyway.

Fester is easy, so I'll just give a few tips on how I do Rotface as people are still wiping on him a lot:

• If you're injected, get to the Ooze tank. Stop what you're doing, and move. Your job now is to make sure your ooze gets to the big ooze, drop that spell, don't finish your rotation, get your ooze out there. This is even more important as the injection rate speeds up. With 3 healers, you shouldn't have an issue even dropping that big heal you've got queued up - trust the other two healers to pick up the slack.
• When Rotface starts to cast Slime Spray, get the hell out of his way. There's no reason to finish whatever you're doing, you have a 1.5 second cast to just even run through him if nothing else, so no reason to get hit and make the healers heal unnecessary damage.
• Watch the ooze chunks when the Big Ooze explodes. Don't just collapse blindly after x-seconds or whatever, let the ooze explosion chunks hit and then move into position.

Also, some general tips for kiting the Big Ooze:

• If you're tanking the Big Ooze, be aware that some AoE will build agro on the Big Ooze. You're not just beating the healers but also any stray AoE that might hit the Ooze. Watch Omen.
  
• I've tanked this fight on my bear and my paladin, here are notes from both. Both classes are equally capable of tanking and I'm sure DKs can do it just as easily with Icy Touch spam, Death Coil and Dark Command. Frost Tanks also get Howling Blast.
  
• Bear tanking: I found this to be the easiest as I could keep FFF ticking on every CD without ever stopping my run, and that build a lot of threat. Just keep running, kite smart, and Rotface will be dead before you know it.
• Paladins also have an easy time with Avenger's Shield, Hand of Reckoning, Judgment, and when you have a lot of range, Exorcism. It also helps if you take responsibility for cleansing the infected folks so healers have one less thing to do. You're running with Decursive or something similar, right? *arched eyebrow*
  
• If you need to run through ooze, make sure you're getting a snare removing buff like Hand of Freedom or something. Watch your health, and be smart about when you go in to take damage, as slime spray might also hit you.
• If you get injected, get cleansed immediately and try to hook the slime into the big ooze by stopping short, turning towards the big ooze, and then turning around again away from the big ooze so the small slime swings around you and winds up in the big ooze.

I'll talk about Dreamwalker and the Blood Princes once I get more experience running PuGs through them. Of the end-bosses, I imagine Blood Queen will be the easiest of the 3, and Putricide will be less difficult than Sindragosa.

Good luck out there, folks!

Inbetween Guilds

So I'm kind of in-between guilds right now.

A long, long time ago (until June of last year) I was in mostly RP/casual raiding guilds. They were fun and happy affairs where logging in was enough of a reason to celebrate, friends would regale you with greetings, smiley faces were thrown about hither and yon, every fucking achievement was reason to throw a parade and clearing Naxx was reason enough to pat people's backs.

Then I joined a 25-man raiding guild. And was abused and beaten and cried and cut myself and all that emo stuff, but eventually I got better and did awesome, and led raids, and tanked with my fucking face. Well, not really, I was a paladin, and tanked with my fucking shield.

That guild transitioned from a 25-man group into a 10-man group with 25s in an alliance and that went south because we didn't get along with an officer in the other guild, drama drama drama, and the guild split. We went back to doing 10s, I tried being nice and running two balanced groups of 10s and that was about as successful as you might imagine. After putting in 12 hours into Ice Crown and barely squeaking by Rotface, I punched myself in the testicles, RAGEQUIT, switched factions, and joining a dedicated 10s group that was doing awesome progression.

Long story short, that didn't work out, I transfered back, a few old friends from my 10s group all piled into a small guild to raid together aaaaaaaaand here we sit. In the In Between State.

This is the zone of the PuG raid.

This is the zone of meeting people, making friends, socializing, realizing how diverse your server population is. This is the zone of, "I'm undergeared and I've never seen this fight and I want to learn and I'm really earnest and polite and kind but my DPS kind of blows screaming chunks of shit at the moon and you will take me anyway because what choice do you have?"

And... and... oh god, I want it to end. I want a dedicated group of raiders who are in my guild and know the fights and have the gear and I want to kill Arthas already.

Please, please, help me. I don't want to PuG really nice people who stand in fire until my Nourish button breaks. I don't want to see my tank DPS be number three on recount and wipe on enrages. Please rescue me from this zone.

I don't want to be an InBetweener. TAKE ME WITH YOU!

Raiding Less (and why that's better)

I was standing in Dalaran staring into the fountain newly decorated with garish gold statues and thinking deep thoughts as usual about what an egotistical bastard Tirion was for erecting a statue of himself in the middle of the city when I saw an old friend wander by.

We said hello, and began to talk, mostly about raiding as that's what everyone seem to be into lately, and as we wandered northward, I invited her to come along with my raids as we often have gaps in ranged DPS and she is a good warlock.

We stopped to peer into the most displaced well in the midst of a busy boulevard, "As long as you run at a normal pace."

I blinked, "Normal pace?"

"Oh, you know," she sighed, leaning against the bricks, as mammoths, unicorns, bears, kodos and other horrible things went whizzing by, "I was running with this other big guild on the server and they just kept pulling the whole time with nary a pause. Kind of stressful."

"Huh," I said, swallowing the compulsion to push her into the well just to hear her yelp, because I'm really ten years old, "Well, I set a reasonable stride. I think."

She shrugged, and then we waved farewell, she went on to the bank in the north and I wandered into the smithy, to hem and haw at various tier pieces, and began to think about the pace of my runs.

See, when I run a raid, people laugh a little because I tend to cover things very, very quickly over vent and end with a brisk, "Gogo!" even as I toss a shield into a mob pack or charge a boss' face.

I know it's funny, but I'm really doing it to make a point. Trash should take minimal time. Once you're through a dungeon more than twice, you should know what the pulls are, you should know know how many packs to pull, the patrol patterns, all of that jazz. The tanks should be pulling continuously unless the healers ask for a slowdown. Dead folks should get raised as the pulls happen, and rebuffs aren't important.

I first learned that you can run as quickly as this whilst studying this video by Kyth of StratFu fame (BTW, I think I have a small crush on Kyth) but have adopted it to most of my dungeoneering, whether 5-mans or raids.

When I walk into a 5-man, my gear level is at a place where I feel comfortable saying, "I'm just going to chain-pull the dungeon, please tell me to slow down if you need room." And then 10-15 minutes later, almost every dungeon in the game is done.

And I for one think this is great.

Another major killer is downtime for AFKs - having set points are great for this. As Blizzard has really adopted the wing structure for raids this expansion, I usually don't take a break in the middle of a wing. If we're flying along, I'll take a break every other wing. Or whatever. It's a lot more structured that way and people feel accomplished and ready to take on the new wing when they get back.

Of course, learning a boss is different, I'm mostly talking about farm content here. Once you know a dungeon, you as a raid leader should give your tanks permission to pull aggressively and tanks should pull aggressively, and healers should coordinate to make sure raid heals are covered at all times - there is no need to pause between packs of mobs if your DPS and healers are keeping up with you without a problem. Chain-pull, get to the bosses, don't linger over the "is everyone ready?" and just get shit down.

I typically throw up a /readycheck when we reach a boss and as soon as the last person checks off, I'll shout out any last minute instructions, "I'll take left side, Issacc take right side, melee clear all adds before switching to boss, on phase transition wait for her to be moved off the platform before ripping your CDs, ranged open up, GoGo!" And if ranged doesn't open up, I'll just throw a shield and get it started. My raids have NO ROOM for dillydallying.

Pull hard, pull fast, pull clean, don't wipe, and someone tell Tirion he's an egotistical bastard for sitting frozen in an iceblock all fight long and then taking credit at the end for everything.

Sick bastard.

Sindragosa

The once noble prime-consort of the Blue Dragonflight, Sindragosa was killed by Neltharion and left to die in the glaciers of Icecrown. Full of hatred for everyone that let her die, Sindragosa's bones lay buried for thousands of years until she was raised by the Lich King as the ultimate Frost Wyrm.

You might have seen her trying to aggro you through the log-in screen for the last fifteen months or so. She also tried to murder you in the Pit of Saron before Jaina or Tyrande yanked you to safety. Now, finally, in Icecrown Citadel we have a chance to strike back at her for all the endless cycles of flap-flap-roar as we waited for the crawling queue numbers to tick down to zero.

After possibly the most annoying trash in the entire raid (I actually liked most of the trash in ICC until I encountered this colossal waste of time and mana), the murder of some frost-wyrm hatchlings (which - explain to me the point of baby dragon skeletons? They're dead so it's not like they're going to grow up to be eviler or anything... I mean, they're cute and all, but still. WTF?) and two mini-boss dragons - one of whom is Rhimefang of Pit fame and another dragon with a name but if she's a named mob from somewhere I'm forgetting it - you finally get to pull the boss... oh, no, wait, she'll actually agro as soon as the second dragon dies. Nevermind.

Also, holy run on sentence, batman.

Pro-tip: Pull the second dragon to the stairs so the raid has time to adjust positioning and the tank doing the pull can get into place without a freakout-scramble-clusterfuck.

Thankfully after that first pull (and wipe) she'll fly up above the platform, patiently waiting for you to descent onto the platform below the stairs.

Anyway. We put in about 2 hours and change on her last night, including a ten minute break where I ran and grabbed my Frost-resist set, realized I hadn't touched it since Hodir, and re-gem'd with Dragoneye's and Epic gems on the spot. Our DPS is generally pretty fucking awesome, and they were epic as always last night, but we still kept running into multiple sub-5% enrage-wipes.

The primary culprit was the 3rd phase unleashed magic mechanic and the tanks (the raid lead, Alex is the main tank, and the bum who's writing this blog, me, helps out) were swapping every time a tomb came down. At the end, we were trying to clean-up even the smallest clip on the DoT pulse to try to get the tombs down faster - trust me, when you wipe at 440k with the entire raid alive due to hitting the enrage, you'll gnash your teeth, fist-pound your keyboard and bemoan getting clipped by the DoT just before you stepped around the tomb.

Anyway, the raid timer ticked down, we were a half hour over the time we normally run so the raid was called and I had a severe case of the blue balls.

She's going down next week. But I still look like I have blueberries danging from my scrotum.