First Day Playing WoW (Day 3)

*cough* I think I might've missed a few days here, but hey, I didn't have to do these sequentially.

So, my first day playing WoW - it was July of 2007. I know this because July is when my company goes on a summer-shutdown meaning the offices close and everyone takes two weeks off to go do other stuff. As programmers, we usually use this time to do a lot of testing while all the users are gone without fear of breaking something but for whatever reason that year I remember not having a lot to do so I worked from home quite a bit.

Tanking: Then And Now

I've been thinking about class balance lately as I look at my own raid team and I thought back to my raiding career over the last couple of years. This is going to be a bit long and rambling, but hopefully productive. :-)

When I started raiding, I was very good friends with a Holy Paladin who healed my bear through all the TBC heroics, Kara and Z'A. A Holy Paladin/Bear combo was pretty beastly in TBC raiding. Bears had massive armor and health (more than any other class) and Holy Paladins could keep spot healing them all day long. Back then, we were the only class that would eat Crushing Blows (unless one of the shield tanks missed keeping a buff up) and the Paladin would just land a big heal to cover it. We could keep a boss going till enrage fairly easily. During this time my tanking partners rotated a lot but I raided a lot with another paladin tank (who were strictly AoE or main tanks and made terrible off-tanks just due to the amount of agro that Holy Shield generated.)

Home Again

My brief hiatus from Warcraft was a very good thing. I feel refreshed and alert and excited to play again. The game is interesting again, and logging back into Stormwind after 11 days felt like coming home from vacation - you miss the time off, but you're also glad to wrap familiar blankets around yourself.

I immediately picked up the Fishing, Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies and did them, before guildies logged in and we did a random or two and then some chit-chat later, I logged off. Tuesday and Wednesday we raided, much much much more successfully than the last few weeks when we struggled with easy bosses, we just sort of steamrolled past content that would give us a pause even two weeks ago like Maloriak or Atramedes.

Last night, we even picked up our first kill of Valiona and Theralion after three pulls, once a PuG helped us refine our strat a little bit and we managed to recruit a couple of them into the guild. I don't know why we put the drakes off for so long - such an easy fight. And we're going back in tonight to see if we can wrap up Chimeron once and for all, while getting some time in on Ascendant Council.

Burnout

It's funny how fast things can go from being okay to just total crap.

This week's raids have been the worst in months. Struggling to get even simple bosses down, and just a total lack of communication until I have to ask the same question eight times to get answers from people. The kind of nights you just want to end. And then after an hour of trying to pull things together, someone's connection craps out and you just want to log out and never log in again.

So I called raid, and told everyone I was canceling raids for next week as well. We'll regroup on the 15th - with whoever doesn't leave the guild by then - and see how things go from there. I'm also going to just not log in during this time and try to focus on other stuff. I have a lot of writing on my plate anyway.

Xariona? I hardly knew her.

Late Saturday night, I was farming on my warrior, my friend Thistle was committing mass genocide against Crocolisks to fill her Money Bin with gold, our resident Resto druid was leveling her fishing and our Shadow Priest was leveling his Death Knight in Deepholm.

It was a sleepy night, not much chatter going on, everyone was doing their own thing, as it was close to 2 AM. Suddenly the green chat lights up, "Rare in DH," says the Death Knight, "Get down here now!"

Anniversary!

Today, Raiding After Dark is a year old!

I could go back and do a sum-total of words written, but I doubt it'll be significant since I only had 57 entries which amounts to posting once a week, more or less, not a lot to brag about or anything, but consistent. Maybe I'll double my rate for the next year!

But anyway. I'm going to use this opportunity to reflect on my last year in Warcraft.

Why do I blog? (Day 2)

Continuing on the track of 20 (non-consecutive) days of posting...

I talked about this earlier, but initially, I started writing in a blog mostly to catalog my raiding experiences so I could  review them over time and see how I had been progressing. It's kind of funny to think that I've been blogging for nearly a year now about Warcraft, but have more-or-less completely stopped blogging on my old Livejournal. But that's a pretty boring answer. Let's see if I can dive a bit deeper and find some other, more meaningful reason...

February of last year was an odd time in my WoW career. After six months of hard-core raiding, I was getting a bit burned out on guild management as an officer, raid management and dealing with the stress of being part of a 50-plus member guild and managing two different raid groups on four different raid nights. I finally quit, moved Horde-side to play with the guild of an old friend and immediately found myself isolated.

Introduce Myself (Day 1)

I didn't want this to just turn into me venting about guild/raid issues so I decided to follow up on Spellbound's writing challenge so I can write about Warcraft but also on things tangential to my normal vectors (I like math).

So - today I have to introduce myself. I hate talking about myself. But.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to give myself a regular writing outlet. I have been writing stories and essays as far back as I can remember, it has been the one true passion in my life. But I loose sight of it a lot. I went to a technical school and work as a programmer. I get diverted by music a lot and make some clumsy efforts at song writing. I minored in art because I wanted to be a draftsman and painter. But I believe at my core, what I do best, is write.

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. :-)

Creeping Progress: Early Blackwing Descent

Enough with the dungeons. Let's talk about raids. We've been raiding for two weeks, now, and currently sit at 4/12 and I wanted to review my thoughts about the the current style and mood of raiding, and so forth.

General Impressions
The titanic health-pool on all bosses seems excessive but I can see why it's there. With heroic and early raid gear, we're seeing bosses die in about 7 or 8 minutes depending on the figh which seems like a long time - I remember when we were doing Herioc Blood Princes a seven-minute fight seemed like an eternity. And then I remember doing Sindragosa back in February of last year and realize - hey, we used to wipe to enrage on that fight and the enrage on her was 10 minutes!

Also, tank damage is less brutal but raid damage is far more brutal. Healers are doing the majority of the heavy lifting here and I don't envy them. Effective reduction of raid-damage is a major factor in most fights if you want to keep healers from OOMing and the DPS wind up having to do a lot of dodging/juggling of mechanics (keeping out of fire on Halfus with Storm up, keeping out of all the incidental damage on Omnitron, etc.) which lowers DPS overall but increases healer efficiency.