Above is not yet the official logo of Years Behind, the retro raiding project, but one of the ones being considered by Wargallow our fearless project leader.  I call it a project and not a guild because in essence, this is an experiment.  We don’t yet know how successful raiding the old world content will be, and each of us are very much active in the leadership of our respective classic guilds.

However all things seem to be rolling along nicely, with the guild finally getting a few bank tabs and a tabard depicting representing Hogger…  the FIRST raid boss.  Right now we are pooling resources and gathering up as many old world trappings as we can find.  I’ve donated my collection of Zul’Gurub Voodoo Dolls, as well as some various faction and quest items.  Getting ready for the retro raid has become one of my driving focuses while in game.  I’ve prepared many times for an impending patch, but never quite in this fashion.

You can’t skimp on the tank

When I was first presented with this concept, I knew that without a doubt if possible I would want to tank it.  When I raided the old world content originally it was as a hunter, and as I leveled and geared up Belghast, I tanked for anyone that would take me.  However I never actually achieved many of the goals that I wanted to.  I never completed tier 1 or tier 2, I never owned a Quel’Serrar, I never really tanked much more than the first few bosses in AQ40.  I just feel like part of my tanking Pedigree is missing, since I have experienced all the content, but as the wrong class.

My little warrior Bobbinn, had been sitting there inactive and acting as a banker for some time.  As a result her gear was in a completely horrendous state, so I knew that I would have to regear the character from the ground up.  For this reason, I almost considered shifting focus to pushing up my rogue, Gloam since he was at least fully outfitted in heirloom gear.  In fact I had started to run him through Blackrock Depths for gear, but in the process of doing so a sign from the random loot generator gods appeared.  In the middle of the quarry in BRD, Stockade Pauldrons, which in their day were the best defensive shoulders available.  Stupid as it might sound, this pretty much told me I should be working on the warrior instead.

Getting to 440

The primary goal in gearing a tank is to first get to the defense soft cap, aka the point at which you can no longer receive critical blows through normal means.  I knew that this was going to be a tall order, since in classic wow we got the benefit of “classic” Anticipation, that when fully talented was worth 20 defense.  This meant that in the “retroraid” world, I was going to need to make up for that loss of defense through other means.  Prior to Blackwing Lair it was fairly hard to stay defense capped, as both Valor and to a lesser extent Might attempted to be “Jack of All Trades” gear sets for the warrior.

Years Behind has set the goal of raiding the content as level 60 characters, however we have NOT set the goal of raiding the content in only the gear available to us back then.  What this means in practice is that there are a good number of defense enchants that are available for level 60 items, and the addition of the random “Of The Champion” type gear which on level 60 gear gives 32 Stamina, 21 Strength, and 21 Defense.

The problem with the later is that on Argent Dawn, the “champion” gear has been going for some pretty ridiculous sums ranging anywhere from 100g-200g per item.  Since I live in a habitual “broke” state in game, I knew that this was not going to be an option for me.  So instead I went after a favorite amongst twink tanks back in the day.  Many of my friends thought I was somewhat nuts, when I carefully collected the various pieces of the Advanced Armorsmithing tome, but I knew sooner or later it would come in handy.  While cost prohibitive in classic wow, with little effort I was able to craft Enchanted Thorium Breastplate, Enchanted Thorium Helm, and Enchanted Thorium Leggings which will serve as my base to build upon.

Zul’gurub used to be a hotbed for starter tanking gear, and I have a good number of friends who either enjoy ripping apart old world content or are “a-faction-ados” in need of more rep to hit exalted.  As a result it has been pretty easy for me to get a few overpowered friends to clear Zul’gurub for me for gear.  I’ve been cautious of gaining too much experience, so as a result I have kept Bobbinn safely out of XP range until it is boss time, only running her in long enough for the kill.  These Zul’Gurub runs gave me a strong number of upgrades, to start to fill out my tanking set. After two runs I had managed to accumulate: Overlord’s Embrace, Overlord’s Onyx Band, Overlord’s Crimson Band, Bloodlord’s Defender, and my first decent tanking trinket Zandalarian Hero Badge.

At the suggestion of a guild member I accepted the offer to do a run through on AQ20 as well, and the result of it were a few more pieces of gear.  The biggest of them was Buru’s Skull Fragment.  This was a shield that eluded me on Belghast in classical wow.  Each time it dropped, there was always someone along on a main, that I passed it to, or another alt with better dice.  So I have to admit, that I was borderline giddy when it dropped.  In addition this I managed to pick up Polished Obsidian Pauldrons, which in theory was a downgrade from my Stockade Pauldrons.  However if you notice, the new shoulders are a level 60 item, meaning they are eligible for Heavy Knothide Armor Kit…  which in turn makes the item a net gain overall.  Last gem from AQ20, was the Head of Ossirian the Unscarred which netted a pretty nice tanking neck: Pendant of the Shifting Sands.

Gear: The Outfitting

Now that I had managed to amass a good number of tanking items my focus shifted to looking into the various enchants that were available for me.  Like I said in a subheading above, you can’t skimp on the tank.  All the other raid members can show up to our first Molten Core outing wearing whatever the hell they could mash together, but in order for us to have a successful run you have to have a solidly geared main tank.  Looking down through the various slots, here is a list of the enchants that I compiled for a 60 retro tank.

• Head: Presence of Might – This is the default old world head enchant, obtainable with some hassle at friendly with Zandalar.
• Shoulders: Heavy Knothide Armor Kit – one of the few enchants available that actually gives us any real benefit.  The other option for elemental resistance fights is Chromatic Mantle of the Dawn from revered with Argent Dawn.
• Back: Enchant Cloak – Steelweave – your best tanking option, and its available on any item you could be wearing since its lvl 35 and above.
• Chest: Enchant Chest – Defense – considering we are at a defense debt I am pretty much stacking it on every slot available.  When I get a lvl 60 chest will upgrade to Enchant Chest – Greater Defense.
• Wrist: Enchant Bracer – Major Defense – once again defense is the winner.  This is a rareish enchant, as it was farmed out in Netherstorm.
• Hands: Scroll of Enchant Gloves – Threat – This is my current goal, but Scroll of Enchant Gloves – Major Strength and Scroll of Enchant Gloves – Superior Agility both seem like solid options as well.
• Legs: Clefthide Leg Armor – Currently the best enchant available to me, but when I get lvl 60 legs will upgrade to Nethercleft Leg Armor.
• Feet: Enchant Boots – Fortitude – Can never have too much stamina, another good option is Enchant Boots – Boar’s Speed but its a rarer enchant.
• Shield: Enchant Shield – Major Stamina – again going with the stamina route.  If you are concerned about threat Thorium Shield Spike is a viable option as well.
• Weapon: Enchant Weapon – Mongoose – expensive but well worth it, king of tanking enchants.  Another very solid option would be Enchant Weapon – Crusader as it will heal and buff your strength.

With a Roadmap in place this gave me a shopping list of what to obtain.  I managed to pick up two Primal Hakkari Idol during my ZG runs, and after some scrounging a couple of Punctured Voodoo Doll.  For most players that will be the most difficult of the enchants, the rest rely mostly on older enchanting materials and should be fairly reasonable.  For me, as an enchanter I had the majority of it ratholed away.

Another Dragonslayer

One of my big regrets as a tank is that I never actually got to tank with my Quel’Serrar when it mattered.  I managed to get my Foror’s Compendium of Dragon Slaying a few months before Wrath came out, and while I used it on a few guild Karazhan runs, I never really got to enjoy the sheer awesome power of the weapon.  So as I stared down the barrel of another 60s tank, I knew without a doubt I had to obtain another Foror’s book.  After several weeks of nightly Dire Maul runs prior to raid time, and checking both the Alliance and Horde auction houses, I gathered up the required insanity points to post on the Argent Dawn forums.

I’ve been a known entity on the forums for years, and for the most part the organization of our retro raid has been held entirely there.  So I thought maybe someone had a book collecting dust in their vault and would take pity on me.  Surprisingly, after several days and a few bumps the thread hit paydirt.  Trynd from House of Arathor, posted saying he had one that he had been holding onto for awhile, which he out of an amazing act of kindness just mailed to me free gratis.  I had never met the man before, but I have to say he is one of me heroes now.

Last night I managed to accomplish the goal of forging Quel’Serrar for the second time.  I am pretty pumped about tanking the old world dungeons with this truly epic weapon.  It does however crack me up exactly how oversized it is on a gnome female.  My friend commented last night, that they need to add a sparks animation as it drags the ground while slung to your hip.  I do remember how cool the gnome animations were with the big blade, so looking forward to bringing it down swiftly with a twirling flourish on the baddies.

The title to this post sounds rather more ominous than it deserves, but I loved the song, and love the phrase.  Another week is passing and this is my first blog post.  I’ve found myself in a slump lately.  When I started this crazy experiment I had more topics to write about than I had time to write them.  Now as I sit here trying to drum up anything worthy of discussing, I realize that it’s become much harder.

I’m finding myself in a pretty “blah” place as far as the game goes right now.  I’m enjoying Ulduar still, and I am happy that we are making progress.  But the prospect of more content on the horizon looms over my head like the sword of Damocles.  I know without a doubt that we have more time needed before we reach the end of Ulduar than we have weeks left before the patch.  So as I look at what is coming down the pipe, I know eventually we will have to move forward.

This is the big frustration with living in the “medium-core” space (as one of our raid council members put it), you are constantly trying to temper both ends of the spectrum.  We have our more hardcore members, who actively want every single achievement, are pushing with full gusto to do hard modes, and burn through content as fast as we can.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have the players who either want to stop and smell the roses, have specific goals like obtaining X item, or only have enough playtime to show up just in time for the raid. 

Being a “casual but focused” raid means we are constantly trying to steer between the two very different pillars.  If you move too slowly, you risk losing your best players to bigger raids.  If you move too fast, you end up tearing yourselves apart at the seams while forcibly dragging players who don’t want to move.  So as raid leaders we walk this razor thin line, attempting to make everyone acceptably happy in the process…  but at the same time having to swallow many of your own hopes and aspirations in the process.

So I think a good chunk of my malaise towards posting lately is that I am myself going through a bit of a burnout from all the opposing forces surrounding me.  I think it mostly started when the first news of the new patch surfaced, my impending class nerfs, and a brand new dungeon that feels like another hamster wheel presented before us to keep the most hardcore of players from going to other games.  I am sure I will enjoy it when it arrives, but my present disdain of the argent tournament is not helping my excitement at all.

Goblin Engineering

One of the topics that has spurred more than a bit of interest in me is the supposed “leak” of new mask textures from the last few PTR releases.  I believe MMO Champion broke the news first with their provocative topic titled:  Goblins and Worgens are the new races of the Expansion.  Two new halloween mask textures made their way into the 07/17 PTR build, and they featured a good number of curious things.  Firstly the quality of the textures shown represented something we had never seen in the existing Worgen or Goblin models.  On the Worgen side, they represented a “female” Worgen model, something that doesn’t exist in the game today even when the female humans in Grizzly Hills transform.

This started the forum crowds murmuring about the likelihood of whether or not these were legitimate racials, or if this was yet another Blizzard red herring.  A few days later, in build 10123 other masks began appearing.  So added to the pile were Murlocs, Vrykul, Ogres, and Naga.  So of course, this began the chant of players claiming that the new races were simply a figment of our collective imagination.  I am not sure if I am ready to call this as over, or to call it as a conspiracy to cover up a mistake.  However one thing you can notice immediately, is that the second set of masks do not match the level of detail as shown within the first two.  The Murloc, Naga, and Female Ogre masks are all extremely low resolution as compared to the high level of detail shown within the Goblin and Worgen masks.  Part of me wants to believe that we really DID get a glimpse of the new racial models, and that the resulting additional masks were an attempt to diffuse a mistake.

I’ve said for awhile now within guild conversations that I felt this expansion would lead to new races being introduced.  In MMO gaming, after awhile companies tend to get into patterns for releases, and I feel that blizzard has probably already hit it’s stride.  For sake of balancing the game, it is far to destructive to introduce both new races and classes at the same time.  So I feel that from this point on, Blizzard will introduce an expansion that provides new races and starting zones to grow its player base, then follow it with an expansion that introduces new classes to play.  This pattern gives one expansion to bring up a new crop of players, and then the next to reward these new players and old ones alike with new kinds of game play at its most basic level.  So following this pattern, it means that this next expansion would introduce new races…  which in turn fits the leak.

The Beta List

There has been a list of “expansions” floating around the internet for years now.  The very first time it came to my attention was shortly before the announcements surrounding Burning Crusade.  Much like Nostradamas and his quatrains, it seemed to predict the progression of Azeroth.  For the sake of explaination I am reposting the list here.  I’ll make no guarantee as to its validity, but it has in fact been floating around the collective web since before the original Naxxramas patch, which is roughly when I first saw it.

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

As you can see, for the most part the list has been accurate to this point.  Some of the final names of the zones have been different, but the wide majority of both the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones have been dead on.  If the list continues to predict the future, then the next expansion would in fact be related to the Maelstrom as many have speculated, which strongly fits with the recent trademark of the name Cataclysm.  In the above list, the area slotted as the staring zone for the expansion is Gilneas.

Gilneas is rumored to have fallen to the influences of the Worgen.  So while the zone levels do not fit with the pattern of a starting zone, it would seem that the next expansion will in fact let us peer beyond the Greymane wall into the cloistered realm.  As far as the Goblins go, it has been long rumored that the “Sea” expansion, will let us visit the goblin continent of Undermine.  We know it has been designed based on whiteboard drawings from the Warcraft Behind the Scenes DVD.  So if the next expansion is in fact the Maelstrom, it would be the “sea” expansion and more than likely have a good deal of involvement with the Goblins as well.

So when you take the combined speculative powers of all of the above, combined with the supposed “leak” of the racial masks you can get to the point where you begin to believe that we will be playing wolves and gobbos in the next expansion.  Granted this is all a colossal feat of Imagineering, with only the most flimsy of evidence… it could happen.  After you have leapt to the conclusion, the next question you have to ask yourself is which faction will get which of the new races.

Without a doubt, in these are the new races then the Goblins will be a Horde race.  My reasoning here is pretty simple.  Goblins and Gnomes hate each other.  This has been a construct of the wow mythos since the days of beta.  The engineering might of the gnomes and the goblins will forever be pit against each other, and that in itself is reason along to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they would end up wearing red.  But if you need further reasons, I give you this.  The horde has no “small race”.  Burning Crusade gave alliance their first “big race” with the Draenei, so in the Great Blizzard Homogenization I figure the next expansion will give the Horde their first “stunty”.  Granted I would have rather it been Iron Dwarves…  but Goblins would have been a close second.

So by elimination this leaves Worgen as being the new Alliance race, which also makes a certain amount of sense if you stop to evaluate it.  There are many bits of non-canon lore suggesting that the individuals locked behind the Greymane wall too suffer from the same Worgen curse as the inhabitants of Pyrewood Village.  Pyrewood itself is our first step on the delusional road that leads us to believing the Worgen to be Alliance sympathizers.  This Village by day is a normal run of the mill alliance town, which registers as hostile to horde players.  Every race needs a foil, so you already have the ready enemies just a zone away in the Forsaken.  It would be an easy fit for the Forsaken and Worgen forces to be opposed to each other.  Lastly in the Great Homogenization, this would give the alliance our very first REAL “Montrous Humanoid”, to use the Dungeons and Dragons term.

Granted everything I just said, is for all intents and purposes, utter bullshit.  I am by no means a lore afficianado, I haven’t even read quest text since about level 40…  so in truth I have no leg to stand on.  However this all makes a kooky kind of sense to me based on the patterns we have already seen from Blizzard.  Worgen would present the alliance with a new Shaman race, but Goblins however I really don’t see solving the paladin racial issue.  I am anxiously awaiting BlizzCon just so we can finally get some real information to replace all of this hysteria that currently abounds.  Granted I just probably fed a good number of conspiracy theorists with my blog post, but hopefully some of you Loremasters out there can tell me just how wrong I am.

As you might guess from the logo, Tales of the Aggronaut has passed the 40,000 unique readers mark on Google analytics.  As a result, I decided to steal from the iconography Warhammer 40,000 logo, in honor of the milestone.  Over the last few weeks, real life has slowed my postings down to a crawl, but I thank all of you out there for sticking with me.  I continue to gain readership each day, and I am completely amazed that anyone is willing to read my half-baked rambles on a regular basis.

This week has been busier than most.  With a house guest from Mississippi I have missed more raids this week than I have ever missed during the lifespan of the Duranub Raiding Company.  As fate would have it, I managed to make both of our 10 man outings, but completely missed both of our 25 man raids.  So between last week and the cleaning/home improvement ramp-up to having a house guest, and this week the actual act of playing host…  I am completely worn out.  Looking forward to a long weekend of doing a whole lot of nothing.

In the past I have posted a few emotion wrapped rambles about how expendable I was feeling at the beginning of Ulduar.  Prior to that, I posted about the bittersweet feeling of when your raid group does just fine without you.  Because of the insanity of this week I have to say that I was thoroughly thrilled that my raid was able to pull together and perform extremely well without their main tank.  From what I hear we saw some pretty phenomenal performances from various players as they stepped up to fill the void left by the raid mascot…  me.  Awesome job to everyone.

You can’t go back… can you?

Expansions are an exciting time, with the advent of new content to conquer, but with each also comes a certain sadness for me.  I know in the back of my mind that I will never again experience the content in the same way as I once did.  Sure I can go back and run Molten Core, but it is rather sad and wrong that I can now solo what once took a group of 40 players working together to conquer.  We can never again experience the camaraderie of 40 players focused on one singular goal…  or can we?

The 3.2 expansion brings with it a new feature to the game, the ability to for a fee lock your character so that it will no longer receive experience in any fashion.  The goal of this addition is without a doubt to be able to create PVP twinks at the various brackets, and there will be much rejoicing amongst players as they know that they can safely run instances to acquire gear without ever pushing beyond that much vaunted bracket.  However this feature also allows for an unanticipated option.

Real Retro Raiding

With the new feature we will be able to lock characters at level 60, and experience the older content in a similar fashion to the nostalgic days of WoW.  On Argent Dawn, one of our regular community organizers Wargallow, has suggested just this.  His plan is to create a group of 25+ level 60 characters for the purpose of running old world content the way it was originally meant to be experienced.  For the time being, any level 60 character is welcome, and I am presently planning on playing my dwarf rogue Gloam.

Will this usher in the era of “Twink Raiding”?  I guess only time will tell, but I feel this is a brilliant way to experience content that either you are nostalgic about or managed to miss the first time around.  While it is enjoyable to push through the older content with a group of over-level and overpowered friends, for me at least it has always been bittersweet.  I remember the epic feeling of experiencing molten core for the first time, and the joy I felt when I completed my Giantstalker set.  Maybe we can recapture a small bit of this.

This weekend I will be spending it pushing my rogue to 60 off and on, and looking forward to the hopefully good times to come.  I look forward to meeting new players, and helping to nurture this fledgling group as it gets off the ground.  The only sadness I feel as I look forward is the fact that my gnome warrior Bobbinn is ineligible, as on a whim I dinged 61 all so many months ago.

Ragnaros, we come for you!

There is one lesson I should have learned years ago.  Never pick on someone for something, because sooner or later you are doomed to do the exact same thing.  A few weeks back I was picking on Ariedan from Wordy Warrior a bit for her lack of updates.  Then over the course of the last week I’ve had a pretty significant lapse in my postings.  I guess for lack of a better term, life happened.

Last week and this past weekend almost all of my time was devoted to minor home improvement projects, and cleaning.  Why on earth would I wear myself out doing this?  Well, we had a house guest coming this week, and among other things our house needed a good deal of TLC to get to a state fit for company.  As a result I am very much feeling my age.  Getting up and out of bed sounds like a bowl of rice crispies as my back straightens, followed by a chorus of groans.  However the house looks better than it has in years, and I am praying I will be able to maintain it.  My general state of “worn the hell out”, combined with limited time has thrown a severe case of “lack of giving a shit” when it comes to the frequency of my blogging.  So apologies for the lapse. 

One more oddball thing while I am on my traditional “real life” section of the blog post.  My local newspaper just launched this HORRIBLE google maps mash-up application where they attempt to show all the businesses in the Tulsa area as tiny indistinguishable dots on a map.  They made the mistake of showing the top searches on the right hand side of the page.  When my co-worker first hit the website, the first few phases were expectable… but number 5 in the list was “Can of Corn”.  So it has been our goal to try and keep this gem at number one.  So if you are bored, please hit this site and bump “Can of Corn” a few times for us.

Emo Aborted

Tuesday afternoon I was primed to make a rather self-indulgent and emo post about the rigors of raid leadership and the insanity it takes to try and lead at all.  Tuesday in 25 man Ulduar had a very “herding cats” feel to it, making me address all the things I dislike about the 25 man raid dynamic.  It hadn’t quite gotten to the point of my cyclical internal battle of “why don’t you just quit 25 mans and do nothing but 10s”, but we were probably teetering dangerously on the edge of that slope.  So you can probably only imagine the load of crap that would have been contained within the body of that post.  However I got tired, and busy and the post never made its way onto the digital page. 

Wednesday and Thursday happened, and both days restored my faith in humanity and the reason why I began leading in the first place.  First I have to start with my beloved 10 man group.  Even if the rest of the week had been complete and total crap, just getting through another Wednesday with my 10 man team is usually enough to push me through even the worst of Thursdays.  I’ve bragged on my folks so many times over the last few weeks it is probably getting annoying, but alas I have to do it again.

Wednesday night went by the books in every way.  We did our normal Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya clear to get to the bosses we would be working on this week.  While there we went ahead and pushed through and downed Hodir, making great time doing it.  From there we went to Freya and downed her in a single shot.

It was at this point that I made the judgment call, since we only had an hour of time left, I didn’t feel we really had enough time to adequately work on Thorim, so instead we began to backtrack.  We picked up Assembly of Iron, then moved to Razorscale, and still had time left for an Ignis the Furnace Master oneshot.  So for the second week in a row, in our 3 hour window we had cleared all of the bosses previously downed.  I am pretty damned proud of us downing 9 ulduar bosses in a single night.  This gave us plenty of time to come back in last night, and work out the kinks on Thorim.

Last night we managed to work through the issues we were having with Thorim very quickly in spite of some backseat driving going on in ventrilo.  I believe it was within 4 tries that we had to the second phase and managed to down him that attempt.  Among other things I got a shiny pair of ram shoulders (Valorous Siegebreaker Pauldrons), and we had plenty of time to start work on Mimiron.  In the few attempts before we called it, we managed to get him halfway into phase 3, so I fully feel that next week we will down him since we will be prioritizing his encounter.  Last week I posted about how wonderfully our team has meshed together, and I have to say things keep getting better as we learn to work as a cohesive force.

Hall of Winter Defrosted

Thursday we continued on in Ulduar 25 man.  Riding high on the weds night fun I was looking forward to the 25 man raid once more.  On Tuesday we had only managed to make it through Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya > Assembly of Iron, which on the day seemed like a letdown, but looking back now seems pretty good.  So as a warm-up we started the night with Razorscale, which went down the smoothest we have seen yet…  we have to find a way to get folks paying attention faster so we can finally knock Heroic: A Quick Shave out.

After this interlude we moved forward to the real focus of the night, Hodir.  It took us a total of 6 tries from start to finish to down him, but when we did it felt pretty stable.  In fact we managed to pick up Heroic: I Have the Coolest Friends in the process, and I personally picked up Heroic: Staying Buffed All Winter at some point throughout the attempts.  After Hodir, we moved on and cleaned up Ignis the Furnace Master which had always given us trouble in the past.

All in all it was a great week of raiding for Duranub and House Stalwart.

A few months back I made a post in the BA shared topic regarding the distribution of Fragment of Val’anyr without our raid.  In that post I laid out the basic decision path we were planning on taking, and after a vote of the healers Elnore, our healing lead was unanimously chosen.  Being a very good writer herself, I told her that I thought it would be cool if she did a guest post outlining how she felt about being chosen for the honor of our first legendary weapon.  This afternoon I received the results of this prompting.  I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did.

On Why I Raid, Leadership, and Val’anyr

As a raid, we very nearly have what I think of as the absolute perfect progression speed—just finishing up the Big Bad of the last expansion as the next thing comes out.  We have yet to farm any Big Bads.  I maybe wish we were a tiny bit faster, since we sometimes miss a boss or a hard mode here or there, but two nights a week is what our real lives can give up to raiding, so two nights it is.  I find that I’m content visiting the things we miss later, as an overlevelled tourist; for instance, since we formed quite late in BC, we never got to Black Temple or Sunwell, but we just spent a very entertaining, somewhat ad-libbed Sunday evening doing just that.  And who of the envelope-pushing raid groups of BC could say “I solo-healed most of BT?”

What I am saying, I suppose, is that what I raid for is not progression or best-in-slots.  I care about gear only to the point of staying above the threshold where I remain useful.  I just want a challenge, be it new content, needing to try a crazy strategy to account for a class mechanic we’re short on, or seeing just how far you can get with how few people in an old instance.  I just want teammates I trust to take on that challenge with me.  Bonus points if our defeat of that challenge is rewarded by an awesome cinematic.

When I was approached to help form Duranub, I agreed not because I was sure I could do a good job—I was frankly terrified that I wouldn’t, since my previous leadership experience was exactly two raid nights as healing officer during my previous raid’s death throes and an essentially responsibility-free officership in my guild—but because I knew that the other officers and I would make a good team.

And for the most part we do, and so do the elders (the next rank down) and so do the raid members.  But when I learned that Ulduar would have a legendary healing mace, the raid was having a tough time.  The summer was coming, most officers and several other pivotal members were either dealing with important real life things or having real life explode in their faces, and attendance and attention levels were slipping to the point that we tended to wipe to dumb mistakes and low DPS levels.  I questioned whether we would ever kill Yogg-Saron, let alone do it well enough to allow for throwing a bunch of shards in his mouth. I questioned whether I even wanted to play the game long enough to see it.

But because our first shard could fall at any time, we talked about it anyway, and decided all the shards would go to one person, and that the healers would vote on who that would be.  And perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised when it was me, unanimous except for my own vote.  I was burning out, I felt like I had been failing for a long time, and a large part of me wanted to see it go to anyone else.  There were definitely others who were drooling over it more.  But I have to admit that in the five years I’ve been playing, nothing has ever felt quite like the moment the officer who’d tallied the votes announced my name, and the raid channel, the healer channel, and my tell window all flooded with gratses.  I got all misty-eyed and wordless, and I feel a bit like that again each time another shard drops.  Which probably doesn’t sound much like the Elnore my fellow raiders know, but there you go.

That was several months ago now, and there are still off nights, and disagreements, and the occasional ugly thing said when it shouldn’t be.  There are nights I dread logging in because I’m worried we will be short healing and that I’ll spend the whole night feeling both responsible and unbearably helpless to fix it.  Leading can strain friendships, and I still fantasize about quitting sometimes, about being in some other raid where all I’d have to do is show up and spam my assignment.  I am looking forward to a vacation in August, where I will be unable to log in for a whole week.  That Tuesday will be the first raid I have missed since before Wrath was released and only my second in Duranub history, I am pretty sure.  I suppose it is overdue.

But there is no question of whether I’ll come back.  The thing is, for all that being a raid officer is much more stressful than being a raider was, it is also more rewarding. You get to see that for all the frustration, there are also people who offer to play even though they’re sick, who amaze me with what they can do with their character, who know just when to cheerlead or crack a joke, or who go out of their way to craft an epic or two for the new undergeared mage, There are nights when the Steelbreaker tank is learning and the Molgeim tank dies and the Brundir tank disconnects and we only have one battle rez, but we pull off the kill anyway.  Because my raid is awesome.  (See above, where I play for the challenge and the meeting of it as a team, heh.)

Tuesday night, a shard dropped off of XT, and we had the standard ceremonial just-for-me auction. (We use a version of WebDKP, and I pay per shard.)  It brought me up to six, six shards that aren’t really a weapon to me, or even necessarily a future weapon, though I am much more confident that we will get that far than I used to be.  Those six shards are my continued responsibility, a weight and a humbling and an honor, the hard work and trust of my raid.

And my raid is awesome.

Anyone who has played with me for long knows that I have this dark trait…  I tend to obsess over the acquisition of various items.  I’ve written about this fact a few times, and the way that certain items seem to evade me.  For example I ran Karazhan every week for well over a year without ever seeing the Barbed Choker of Discipline drop, only to have it drop the very first time I attended Kara on my Alt-adin.  The Shoulderguards of the Bold were similarly coy, in that it took around 30 runnings of the dungeon to finally see them drop.

So in truth, it should have been no shock for me, that while every other group I knew was getting them almost every week… Duranub had yet to see a Titanguard drop.  It had even become a point of teasing, as friends from other raid groups linked them the one they just won on their alts.  When our offtank recently left, she got the cursed sword on her very first running post-duranub Flame Leviathan kill. 

Bitterness Pool

One of my previous raiding incarnations, the infamous Late Night Raiders had a concept known as the “bitterness pool”.  Each week we would put up money, betting that the item we wanted would not drop.  When an item dropped, that player paid their bet into the pool split up amongst the “winners” who did not get the drop they were after.  I had joked many times, and was somewhat serious about starting up one of these again.  Feeling that certainly I could start recouping some of my repair expenses by with the fact that Titanguard hated me.

Last night I would have been a major loser.  On my 12th time killing Flame Leviathan, the rusting bucket of bolts finally made good with my sword.  Sure in the grand scheme of things, it was not a massive upgrade over my Stoneguard, and in truth it looks way worse…  however things like this become a point of honor for me.  I had to beat the RNG at all costs, and walk away with my sword with an orbital docking ring. 

The odd thing about knowing practically every enchant, is that you simply don’t know any enchanters anymore.  So there was a good deal of hoop jumping trying to track down a player in my expanded circle of acquaintances that unlike Duranub, had gotten some enchanting drops.  After 30 minutes of networking, I located and acquired my Blade Ward enchant.  My sword is ready for battle and looking forward to giving it a good test.  Hopefully we can push through to Thorim and maybe get Ornquist our tankadin a Legacy of Thunder.

Above Average

All in all the night was a pretty good one.  The raid formed without much haranguing, and getting my sought after drop from the very first boss definitely set the tone of the evening on a positive note.  We had some great showings from a few dps, and some truly lackluster from others.  In the grand scheme of things it worked out to us having a pretty median night.  Healing was more than a bit weak, for reasons I have yet to fully figure out, but it was adequate for us to get in and blaze a path to the boss we needed to work on.

Auriaya once again posed some issues for us, mostly on count of the odd healing discrepancies we were having.  My connection seemed to be laggier than normal which also posed some problems.  In general I run about 19 ms ping to Argent Dawn, but all of last night I sat in the range of 90-300ms pings, with a few crippling lag spikes and a few disconnects.  It seemed to be something upstream from me however, as another of our raiders would lock up at exactly the same times.

It was a good loot night all around, with only 2 items going to DE, which itself explains the severe shortage of Abyss Crystal in the guild bank.  Maybe going to have to start implementing a minor charge on mats to afford the purchase of whatever we need like @Nibuca suggested.  It is probably a good thing that we have not started a bitterness pool, as one of our priests would have had to pay out handsomely as well considering we finally saw our first Rapture drop and we had the good luck to get another Fragment of Val’anyr.  Probably the most important occurrence last night is we finally had someone to soak up all the accursed paladin loot.

Warrior Pride

Now for a completely divergent direction, I want to talk about some comments Ghostwalker made a few weeks back.  In these comments and a few others in the past, he has stated that he believes there should be fewer warrior tanks.  That in the grand scheme of things blizzard would like to see an equal distribution of all tanking and healing classes.  Reading his statements you get the impression that warriors are getting a few necessary “fixes” withheld in order to make them less popular.  This is probably not what Ghostwalker wanted the community to take from it, but its my feeling that in essence that is what is happening.

The problem with this gem of social engineering is that Warriors tend to be a pretty stubborn lot.  For those of us who have been in wow since the beginning, the class warrior equated to tanking.  So by that lot, if you entered the game wanting nothing than to be the best raid tank you could be, the only logical choice was to roll a warrior.  As a group warriors have a class loyalty that seems to be only rivaled by that of healing priests, and those insane pre-bc ferals.  So with that in mind, to say that there should be fewer warrior tanks just seems like a slap in the face.

I am confident that recent changes are going to screw us over (block changes and parry/dodge changes), but at the end of the day I am still going to be a warrior tank, and still going to be the main tank for our raid.  Where I start to get sensitive is when I am forced to question whether or not my choice of class is in effect harming our raid progression as a whole.  I do everything I humanly can to be the best tank I can be, even going so far as switching from a fun fury build, to dual tank specs to help out the raid as a whole. 

I can accept the fact that warriors are no longer the pinnacle of tanking, but by the same token I do not feel that it is fair to be forced to work twice as hard as a paladin or death knight to achieve the same level of tanking.  I realize we are no longer the golden boy that we once were, and that raids no longer need more than one of us.  However I do not feel that the time of the warrior tank is an outdated practice either.  As always myself, and the legion of other warrior tanks will adapt to the changes and bring with us years of tanking experience.  I just hope my class loyalty won’t hurt our raid in the long run.

  It’s been a week since my last blog post, and I am really feeling horrible over the massive lapse.  I would love to say it is purely due to the fact that I have had quite a bit on my plate, which I have.   That however does not really cover it entirely.  I just have lacked the basic “oomph” to sit down at the keyboard and compose anything worth reading.  So what you are getting now may or may not be worth reading, just be warned.

I am going to blame the root cause of my lapse on the holiday.  Through a concordance of events brought on my the shitty economy, I was forced to take a furlough day as part of the normal 4th vacation.  The result gave me a nice long 4 day weekend, and a very compressed 3 day work week.  So last week I really did not have the time to do my normal lunch time posting, and while on vacation I lacked the fundamental “give a shit” to actually think cogent thoughts.

I think a good part of it as well is as the week drug on there were so many things to write about.  There have been so many announcements of late that reflect some pretty ground breaking changes to the way the game will be played from now on.  The end result has been at least for me a bit of a “deer caught in the headlights” effect.  Too many things to write about, is often times just as bad as nothing to write about.  So cover me, as I attempt to charge into something that makes sense.

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this Wall

Last week brought forth the announcement of many things, but probably the most shocking was the Faction-Change service. The quick summary of this is that players will be able to, for a fee, change the faction of one of their characters.  As part of this, they will be able to choose which class they will be transitioning too pending its a valid race/class combination, so no Human Shaman or Tauren Paladins.  This undoes several stances that blizzard has taken in the past on this concept, and pushes them one step in the right direction as far as I am concerned.  However my notion is this, why stop there…  why not take the step I have been waiting for and finally tear down the faction wall.

The Faction Wall is the artificial barrier between the alliance and horde factions restricting players form interacting in anything but the most basic or violent ways.  This barrier has been one of my biggest complaints about the game in general over time.  Previous titles like the Everquest series have always allowed players from opposite factions to group together for a common cause, even giving players in EQ2 the ability to formally defect to the other faction without any severe character changes.  The invisible wall between factions allows for both sides of the fence to benefit from the server population as a whole, instead of creating the ever present horde “underprivileged” that comes from generally lower populations.

This concept really strikes a chord for me because of the past history of my guild House Stalwart.  As a group we began to organize, months prior to the release of WoW on a game agnostic forum.  We gathered together all the players from multiple games, to unite under one banner for the new game we all planned to switch to.  However as we decided which characters we would be playing, there was a clear divide between players who were definitely alliance and those who were most certainly horde.

As a hedge fix we tried to start two guilds on two different servers, planning tentatively to split time between the two.  However as we all got higher in levels, each became more attached to one server or another.  The result caused the lions share of players to end up in House Stalwart on Argent Dawn, and a much smaller number to remain on Silverhand in the Burning Scar.  The Horde faction was eventually forced to merge into a larger guild, due to a simple lack of warm bodies available to do anything.  The artificial wall between the factions had successfully cleaved our gaming group in two.

Were the faction boundary not artificially imposed upon the game, we would still have remained a strong unified force.  Sure each of us would be forced to bank in a different town than some of the guild, but the end result would be that both horde and alliance players could group and quest together relieving the burden somewhat of under population.  To this day I still have a good number of friends that play horde on my server, and have rolled alts in an vague attempt to play with them.  However I know, that I will never fully integrate into that society because my home is still alliance.  But it would have been amazing, were our two guilds able to help one another out.

Warders beware

In other news, my 10 man Ulduar group is still going well.  We seem to have finally found a stable group that works really well together.  Gone are the days of not knowing who I would invite for the last half of the raid, and in it’s place is a stable group of 10 players who work well together.  I can not put into words how much fun I am having with these folks.  First we have the amazing healing trio of Aigie the priest, Ysinnia the tree, and Elemiuse the resto shaman.  Add onto it the tanking team of myself, Ornquist the Tankadin, and our swing hitting Euron the Deathknight who can deliver serious dps or survivability depending on the situation.  Layer onto this already potent mix our dual mage threats Dallian and Pinkygirl, the best hunter on the planet Thalen, and our resident crack dealer Kinral, and we have without a doubt the most versatile group I have managed to run with.

The most amazing thing is that this group has seemingly fallen into place entirely by accident.  After weeks of various spots in the run being a complete and total crapshoot, this lineup has just finally stuck.  Sure I could have cherry picked a some higher DPS in a few places, or min-maxed the balance to the nth degree, but what this group brings to the table that shatters everything else is amazing teamwork.  The group just meshes, has excellent situational awareness, and is able to think of its feet.  Every week I truly look forward to the 10 man nights with great gusto.

In the few weeks with this arrangement we have made short work of Auriaya, Hodir, and last night Freya.  In addition to this we put in some very solid tries on Thorim so I have no doubt we will be able to down him soon.  I am giving you notice now Mimiron, we are coming for you soon.  I guess finally our 10 man feels like it has some legs on it, and for that I am extremely happy.  I can only hope that soon our 25 man group will solidify like this, and those nights would feel more enjoyable and far less like herding cats.

Yes I realize that it can by no stretch of the word be deemed as spring anymore, but it was the most evocative title I could come up with.  I’ve been going through a good deal of “cleaning” in real life, trying to get the house in order and backyard in a state that is anything other than a disgrace to our crystal clear blue pool.  The whole process has put me in a mood to “clean house” in the virtual world as well.

There are a good deal of chores that, if you are like me, you just put off until you otherwise can’t anymore.  Two things that have been sticking out like a sore thumb is the maintenance of member ranks, and the maintenance of the guild bank.  These on top of some much needed maintenance to over overall policies, are in dire need of attention.  Like everything, I thought I would attempt to post some of my thoughts in order to spur all of you into tackling those items you have been leaving alone too.

Ushering out the Old

House Stalwart does not remove members, and this has been a point of pride for me.  We have members who have quite literally not been online in 4 years, and these are individuals I know in person.  However it is a simple fact that accounts that have not been active in some time are just a treasure waiting for an account hacker to find.  If one of these nefarious individuals were to get a hold of a privileged account, you could find yourself in a position with all of your guilds worldly positions gone in a blink of an eye.  I don’t know anyone who keeps an accurate record of all of the guild banks tabs, so as a result you would most likely be unable to recover the majority of it from blizzard.

This said I have implemented a guild rank called “inactive” that is one up from the default rank of the guild.  Once a month roughly, I have been going through the accounts in our guild looking for any account that has been active for a year.  When this occurs I bump them down to the inactive rank, which has no rights whatsoever to the guild bank, or guild permissions in general.  The problem with this process is I have been extremely lax when it referred to inactive officers.

We currently have several officers who are either on hiatus, or otherwise unaccounted for and each of them is a true disaster waiting to happen.  So as a result tonight when I get home, I am demoting every officer that is currently inactive, and promoting a few new ones to take their places. The guild is a living entity, and its important that you prune your ranks from time to time to make sure that it stays safe and current.  While I know personally I am most liable to leave close friends with the honorific title of “Regent” (our officer rank), it is important that you push these things aside and do what is best for the guild.

Checking Permissions

Another activity that should be considered is deciding whether or not your permission scheme for your guild is too strict or too lax for your current situation.  For us we have 2 tabs that are considered to be “Free For All”, and the last 4 tabs to be officer access only.   For the most part this works well, and our default rank of yeoman, has no access to any of the tabs at all.  This gives new members a bit of a trial period before they can wreak havoc.  You might ask why this permission less default rank is so important.

Stalwart is very much a unique entity.  We are one of the remaining “day one” guilds on the US Argent Dawn server, however we have never really had a “traditional” recruitment policy.  Simply put, we are both always recruiting and never recruiting.  House Stalwart is only open to players who already know a member, and all of our members of any long standing have the ability to do guild invites.  This has lead us to grow in a very organic method, and while we are flush with raiders, kept a very tight knit family atmosphere. 

Every so often one of our members is a poor judge of character, and as a result this default permission less rank acts as a safety net between the guild as a whole and new members.  So as part of your guild spring cleaning I urge you to map out exactly what your permissions are, and determine whether or not they still meet the needs of your guild.  It is almost every day that you can read on the forums about some poor guild being robbed blind by a less than honorable individual.  It is important as you the guild leader and officers to set up a scheme to protect against such attacks from outside…  and in the case of hacking, making sure that when someone is compromised they can only do so much damage.

Clearing the Clutter

Our guild bank overruneth…  quite literally.  We seem to always be short on the items that players actually need, and long on the miscellaneous crap that nobody seems to need.  If you are not watching it, things like the 15 stacks of Pygmy Suckerfish can creep in and just take up needless space.  So as a result it is once more time to clear out the clutter and debris from the corners of the bank.

Lucky for us, we have had a member step up and offer her services to help us sift through what is good and auction house the rest.  But the basic idea is to get together with your officers and determine, which items are actually needed, or rare enough to warrant saving, and which items are now outdated or simply junk.  The old items should either be offloaded to an individual alt bank, or shipped to the auction house as fodder for the guild bank funds.  For example, we have had some blues stacking up in the bank that have quite literally been there since January.  If no one is using them, then there is no need to keep them around, and as such should be auction housed before they become “last years fashions”.

Another prime example is that we tend to keep ready eat stat food on hand, as we have several cooks in the guild.  Problem is, we have a good number of outlands recipes that nobody actually wants.  So our basic idea is to make these into care packages for players in the guild who have alts in the level ranges of this food.  This serves two purposes.  Firstly it clears out the bank freeing up space for better items, and secondly it gives players a little added benefit to level those characters.

Everyone wants Free Enchants

One of the problems that we have been having is that we simply cannot keep enchanting materials on hand.  They seem to fly out the door faster than they arrive. The key issues, is that very few people actually donate the materials, and everyone wants to tap upon the resources sitting in the guild bank.  This has lead me to become a pit bull when it comes to enchanting material requests, forcing me to check the logs and see whether or not this is a player who has been actively donating to the guild bank or not.

One of our procedural tweaks we are looking at is to auto loot all green items to a disenchanter for breaking down and storing in the guild bank.  In the past we have always let greens go to the luck of the draw, to help players out with repair bills.  However as the donation of materials has come to a halt, we have literally 2-3 players carrying the entire raids material needs.  It is completely unfair to ask a handful of players to support the whole guild.

This however is a symptom of a larger issue that I don’t quite know how to deal with.  As with everything in life, 10 percent of the players do 90 percent of the work.  This carries to guild bank donations as well, and other than imposing some kind of a formal system I am really not sure how to fix this issue.  I would be curious to find out how other players handle the guild bank, and requests for items.  More importantly, I would be interested to know how guilds handle the restocking of the bank once items are taken.

Material Sharing only works when everyone shares

As you all noticed, I did not manage to get a blog post up yesterday.  For some reason it seems to often be Thursday that I massively fail at getting one out the door.  Around here it was fairly busy, and I was furiously working on something that caused me to not even pop my head out long enough to eat lunch.  So needless to say thinking of anything to write about was quickly replaced with, must survive day so I can get some food.

Stubborn is an Art form

Over the last few weeks we have managed to accumulate some new blood for the raid, both in the form of players who are ready to step up to the plate and perform, and those who will need some gearing help.  This has been like a breath of fresh air for us all, and provided some much needed balance.  Duranub continues the slogan used by one of our former incarnations, the Late Night Raiders…  a durable pack of nubs.  However, I think we should probably change this to somehow indicate just how stubborn we are.

Blizzard may preach the motto of take the player not the class, but we have as a whole proven the truism and faults of that statement.  In general, duranub has HORRIBLE class balance.  We’ve had too many protection warrior tanks, too many healing priests, a truly silly number of mages, and in the past more than half of our dps comprised of melee.  We have struggled through a complete and total lack of balance, on all grouping fronts, making us work much harder to progress than we really need to.  Combine this with the fact that we only have 5 hours of raid time per week to devote to our 25 mans, it gives us a progression speed that at times feels like cold molasses.

The Shifting Sands

This past week we had a few things shift into place.  Firstly we lost one of our protection warriors to a guild with some easier progression.  I’ve always had mixed feelings regarding leaving a raid, considering I have turned down numerous raid spots with “easymode” farmed gear to continue to tank for my friends.  In the case of our warrior, they very much signed up to tank.  However due to the specifics of Ulduar, and various sundry connection issues were relegated to a swing tank role, spending most of their time dpsing.  This lead to an unhappy raid life, and as a result they moved on to tank another tanking position.

While this would have normally been a crippling blow to a raid, an odd concordance of events saw one of our past raiders become available on their already 10/25 Naxx geared Tankadin.  So while we lost one of our seasoned players, we brought another one back into the fold and added some much needed balance to the tanking camp.  Having already tanked my 10 man on Wednesday and our 25 man on Thursday, I have to say Ornquist is doing an amazing job assimilating into an already complex raid. 

We don’t exactly have a good track record with past Tankadins.  Our first was an adept tank, but turned out to be very mercenary and sold his skills to the highest bidder, along with some BoE loot on the Auction House.  Our second was an impetuous child, and left nothing but drama in his wake, eventually taking his toys and going home when we didn’t allow him to switch mains for the 4th time.  So all those past experiences behind us, I am just praying Orn is “the one”.

Adding it all up

When you take the tanking balance and throw in that we just added more healing diversity, in the form of a new tree druid, resto shaman, and some prospects for paladins, we wind up all the sudden with a better class balance than we have ever had in Wrath.  The change is balance is very noticeable.  All the sudden all of the fights seem more manageable.  Tanking and Healing both have become much more stable, and in spite of new players having to learn/re-learn the fights we had an amazing week.

Wednesday night my 10 man group had without a doubt our most successful single night ever.  We had a bit of trouble locking down healing, but when players finally became available we got underway about 45 minutes after our normal start time.  We pushed through the content, and even with some re-education on the part of new healers and a new tank we made an extremely fast path through the zone.  At the end of the night we had spent roughly 2 hours in the zone and cleared Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya. 

This sets us up to give Hodir some serious work on Monday, and hopefully some tries on Freya as well.  More than anything I think it was the fresh players giving us a better mix of classes that allowed us to start moving a at fast clip once more.  Blizzard might preach, take the player not the class, but in practice it means…  take the class or you are going to fight your ass off and suffer retarded repair bills and retarded difficulty.

Cat Scratch Fever

Tuesday we were able too clear a good deal of content in our 25 man raid.  We had a few issues, firstly the hardship imposed by a tank leaving with short notice meant we had to push one of our deathknights who has been in a primary dps role since ulduar, into tanking once more.  This combined with an influx of new players who had either not seen the fights, or not done them the way we do, caused several encounters to be far more difficult than they should have been.  However we still managed to clear Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn which left the path to Auriaya wide open for Thursday.

Last night instead of doing a farmed encounter as a warm-up, we dove straight into attempts on the catwoman.  We had a good deal of early bobbles, but these were mostly caused by the fact that we were completely changing the way the fight would be tanked with the addition of a new, stronger, AOE tank.  After several wipes we settled on the pull strategy of me tanking the titan like normal, our newly acquired tankadin handling 3 of the adds, while our deathknight pulled a single cat to the side in order to reduce the total damage the pack of 3 would be dealing to our tankadin.

Once we locked down on this, immediately we could get through the pull with little difficulty.  I believe we managed to get her down to 50% or so on our first try with this strategy. The second piece of the puzzle that clicked into place, was not so politely at times, reminding the players to clump up on top of the tankadin at all times.  This allowed us to avoid the shadow dot placed by the feral defenders and mitigated a good deal of the pounces.  All the sudden the fight became more healable and before I knew it we were staring down the barrel of 20% life left on the titan.

It was somewhere about here that bad things started happening.  For some reason, on many new boss kills for Duranub, we have what I call a race to the bottom.  About 5-6% we began a slow wipe of the raid, we lost healers, the main tank (me), and slowly each of the two off tanks.  Finally a deft use of evasion bought us the time that the remaining dps needed to push her down all the way.  It was far from pretty, but by god I will take it.  I think next week will go much smoother, as from 50%-20% people really seemed to speed up.  As a whole we were extremely low on dps, considering some of our heaviest hitters were out of town.  So once you put them back in the mix I think we will have a farmable fight.

Cloak of the Makers – Unbreakable Chestguard – Sandals of the Ancient Keeper

I managed to pick up the chest piece which I thought was extremely awesome.  I am not sure what has happened but for some reason over the last few weeks the gear has just finally began dropping.  Granted we have not even seen the much coveted Titanguard, somehow without me really noticing it, I have upgraded almost all my slots to ulduar gear.  In the last few weeks I’ve managed to pick up… Titanstone Pendant – Saronite Plated Legguards – Shieldwall of the Breaker – Greaves of the Stonewarder.  All of which has greatly buffed my survival and it combined with the fact that our healing has regulated a bit, make me feel far less squishy.

Stealth Nerf:  Repairs?

Okay it has been a truly great week for myself and Duranub, but there has been one hidden benefit of it all.  I’ve complained about the insane amount my repair bills have been.  Prior to this week they had been roughly 20g per death, which by any count was insane.  In fact I have had people writing in to argue with me, that formulaically that would be impossible…  however regardless of what math and logic tell us, they were in fact 20 freakin gold per death.  Tuesday evening a miracle happened.

I’ve gotten in the habit of repairing every time I run back into the instance after a wipe, this helps me not think about the hundreds of gold the night will be costing me.  After our very first wipe of the night, I looked down and noticed something strange.  My repair bill, was only 9g, and this trend has continued.  I seem to have had my repair insanity nerfed… which is an awesome thing.

Granted I am still hurting for cash, after months of 20g per death being the norm, but maybe just maybe I can begin to make a little bit of leeway.  After asking around, this seems to have only really effected plate wearers, as the only player that really noticed a difference was one of my tankadin friends.  If anyone has found reference to this phenomena I would love to see it in writing, but as of this posting I have not found any mention of a repair bill nerf. 

I just hope the trend continues

Well once again its a Wednesday, which is quickly becoming my favorite day of the week.  Why you might ask?  For the last few weeks we have been running 10 man Ulduar on Wednesday nights, and there is a certain package of hope when confronting a fresh instance.  For me, the 10 man dynamic makes for a much more enjoyable grouping experience.  While we are still serious about what we are doing, the 10 man group I run with always seems so much more laid back than our 25 man raid. 

I think most of this is simply logistics, trying to get 24 other players all moving in the same direction is as I have related before, like herding cats.  In the 10 man dynamic, we tend to take a group of players that as a whole work better together, and are closer friends.  So the banter is quick and friendly, and the pace is a bit swifter.  If there is a god, we will be able to pull together the group at the normal start time and maybe just maybe get Hodir down and start working on Freya.

Things in the 25 man front are looking more hopeful as well.  Last night was a bit rough, but mostly because we had some Ulduar virgins with us.  But the positive of this is we had some fresh blood finally coming in.  We managed to lose one of our tanks this week, but in a very serendipitous fashion I found a replacement in one of the stalwarts returning to the game.  In the grand scheme of things, adding a Tankadin to our stable, will mean much better balance.  In addition to this, we added several new healers…  that weren’t priest!  You all know my love of priests, but adding some more druids and shaman to the raid will help balance out the healing as a whole.

What is a HitList?

This topic is something I probably should have covered in my recent GroupCraft series of posts, but it honestly did not fit cleanly into the topics.  One of the important things I covered in those posts, was that you should have a clear focus and a stated purpose.  When I hit maximum level I switch my focus to gearing my character, since my goal with any character is to get them to a “raidable” state.  So one of the methods that I employ to decide which instances I should run is to create a “HitList”.

Loosely defined, a HitList is a list of items you wish to acquire for your character and which boss/instance they drop in.  I generally sort my list by equipment slot, and from time to time I will choose a primary focus and an alternate.  This requires a good deal of research and there are many options on how to do this.  If you are a DPS based class your easiest option for figuring out where items drop is MaxDPS.  This website allows you to constrain what tiers of gear you have available, and then presents you with a list of options allowing for things like crafted gear and badge gear.

Another older resource that still has alot of good in it is Kaliban’s Class Loot lists.  During Burning Crusade, I practically lived on this site when it came to gearing my characters.  The layout of the website really is designed to support the collection of gear as you are leveling up, as the various dungeons are arranged by level order.  However you can still view the various dungeons normal and heroic loot tables by class.  They used to have this great flash gear chooser, that allowed you to constrain things based on what stats you were looking for, but it appears to be long dead.

Wowhead is a bit like Hard Mode for gear choosing, and by that I mean you are flooded with so much raw information that it takes a good deal of work to dissect it all.  Basically when I attempt to choose gear from Wowhead I use a series of constraints to limit down the data.  For an example of this process here is a link that I would use to look at Tanking Helms.  Let me walk you through the process I used to arrive at it…

• I selected from the browse menu:  Items > Armor > Plate > Head in order to only return only results for plate helms.
• I constrain by level required, as we are looking for gear to ready us for heroics and raiding, we only want level 80 gear…  so I type 80 in the first box for “Required Level:”
• I only want to return items usable by my class… so I selected Warrior
• I am going to add a filter, that will allow me to sort out any gear that simply does not make sense for me to use.  In order to do this, you either want to constrain by a stat you would NEVER use, or constrain by a stat that you would ALWAYS use.  For a warrior, I want to filter out any gear with spellpower on it, as this is the immediate designator that the gear was designed for a Paladin.  For a healing priest, filtering out Hit gear is a good idea for another example.
• Lastly I am going to use the “Create a Weight Scale” Optional tool.  To open the UI for this, you click the text.  From the dialog boxes I chose the preset for Warrior, Protection (Tanking), and left the default of Rare gems.  If you are doing this on a search NOT constrained to a specific slot, it is good to check the “Group by slot” box.

Click apply filter, and you are given a much shorter list of items to choose from.  Additionally, if you are looking for only Epic or Rare gear, you can change your selection for that as well.  The source column will give you in a quick glance where the item drops from.  Generally I keep a notepad document open and scribble down all the selections that I am making per slot.

Once you have your list of items and where they drop, you will start to see patterns in the list.  Certain zones will have more items you need than others, so as a rule those are the zones that you should be attacking first.  Now that you know where things drop that you need, you can start trying to get into groups going to those dungeons.  If you apply a focused approach to gearing, you can do what I have done many time and go from being a fresh level 80, to being a heroic ready player in a week or less of systematic gearing.

Elemental Mastery

Well it appears that I have inspired another friend to start blogging, and I have to say she has blown my website design completely out of the water.  The player in question is non other than Audrae, the friend of mine who drew the Chibi Belghast that adorns this sites header.  Completely Elemental is her take on the world of warcraft world, from the perspective of an elemental shaman. 

It’s a fledgling blog, so there is not a ton of content yet, but as always Rae expresses herself well.  I highly suggest you add her to list of blogs to read.  Normally I would say add her to your RSS reader, but in this case the site design is so beautifully rendered that it always seems like a crime NOT to read it from the website itself.  Considering the fact that she is feeming to post more today, I am hoping that she can keep up with the rigors of regular posting.

Now… I have to redesign my site