Monday, April 21, 2008

The weekend that was...


The past weekend was extremely fruitful in many ways. Mainly because I got a minor gear overhaul, not in small part due to the badge vendor finally getting unlocked. So it began with one more run of Heroic MgT for my trinket, I have most of the stratergy down for that place and know almost all the pulls, so its far less painful than it used to be. We got to the third boss, got her down and another dang Vial of the Sunwell, this has been the 6-7th time the stupid trinket has dropped.....this slew of bad luck is beginning to get to me.


So I went to our friday night raid, we went into SSC and 2 shotted both Lurker and Leo. We are stuck there at the moment due to a lack of resist set for one of our tanks and a paladin tank for Tidewalker. So what did we do after finishing our raid rather early, went to Hyjal for fun times.


We went in (for the second time) and tanked the overwhelming waves that come. We had 4 tanks, 2 druids and 2 warriors. We on our final attempt got as far as the final wave. This netted us a couple of Hearts of Darkness, one epic and loads of fun. A couple more times and we will be seeing the first boss easily and this is with our guild still not fully geared, there are barely a few folks with even one piece of T5 gear. I know a lot of folks will berate this decision, but being a newly formed guild we just want to have a bit of fun and learn to raid well with each other, cause come next expansion we want to able to handily tackle the raiding content and fast. To tank the mobs that come in the waves, might I suggest the hurricane pull, Cast Barksin--->Cast Hurricane--->Bear form. Without any pally tanks Hyjal can be tough so we improvise.


So that was an eventful night, went to bed, had a nice full day with friends, came home for our Saturday night raid. But wait a minute we were 3 folks short, we cancel the raid and discuss how to increase raid attendance and have opened recruitment for a few classes, none of them for tanking. So after the hour long officer discussion I got a group together for a Heroic MgT run, it netted me a Rod of the Blazing Light and the oh-so beautiful Commendation of Kael'thas. I figured that every time the vial dropped it was because I had a healer in the group who didn't have that damn trinket, so this time I took a healer who I had helped in getting the trinket and it worked....try it folks, it may work for you. That trinket alone took my unbuffed HP in bear form to over 17k....yummy.


Got up on Sunday, did my usual morning routine, went and had lunch, came back in time for our ZA raid. Scheduled at 12 ST, by 11:30 ST there still weren't any invites being sent. Concerned I asked in Officer chat to find out that it had been delayed for an hour because of the badge vendor being at 99%. Fine...delay the raid for something silly....*rubs hands together*, I went and got myself a nethercleft leg armor crafted for 125g, 2 x Solid Stars of Elune for 46g total, picked up my badges, all 170 of them, and went to the Isle.


Oh the nasties...the nasties. There were a buttload of folks parked directly over the badge vendor, including half the alliance on our server and if that was unexpected then to add to the problem they were all flagged. Not only that, they were patrolling the Greengill coast to kill any flagged Horde players from completing the quest for the badge vendor. Now be it Horde or Alliance, that is a self-defeating thing to do. Due to the large number of folk there I lagged and my computer dc-ed and blanked out.....ummm..ok. So I restarted the computer, logged in and there was no one near the badge vendor for miles....???What? Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I went ahead, got my Tameless Breeches and the Ring of the Stalwart Protector, stepped back and a minute later there were literally hundreds of folks back there, apparently what I had witnessed was a glitch, but boy did it make my job easy, instead of having to avoid clicking a flagged alliance, I simply got my gear by walking up to the vendor.


I gemmed my leggings and put the armor kit. I put on my new gear and headed to ZA. With my new gear I sat at a pretty 17.8k HP, 31k armor, 38% dodge unbuffed in bear form. Now a full 1k ahead of my corresponding warrior Main tank, this was awesome.


So we went into ZA, got the first 2 bosses in one shot along with their chests...woohoo(I had over 800dps on the Eagle boss to come in top 3 dps). Then we got the 3rd boss in one shot. This is as far as I had been, and it was here that our one-shot streak ended. By the way, as a result of my new gear, I didn't go below 50% of my health at all and as a result never once benefitted from the evasive maneuvers from the trinket I just got, still wondering if its a good thing or a bad thing. But as a result of this gear I took exactly half the damage the warrior tank took against Narlokk the bear boss. Anyway against dragonhawk, I had a tough job of keeping the dragonhawks under control which imo is a hard task. So we finally got him on our 4th attempt, even though I died on that attempt, it was not before all the dragonhawks had been dispatched with, leaving my raid free to dps down the boss. Following which we got the Hex Lord and the quest fetched me a neat 5 BoJ and finally Zul'Jin, whom I have to say isn't really that hard with a good group, but the Eagle Phase is a nightmare for melee dps. I popped out and used Tranquility once to help out, but besides that it was a nightmare. Though the run did net me a Hood of the Third Eye for my healing set, which might I say is looking quite nice, easily in the 1400+ range.


So that rounds up the events that happened in the weekend that was. I am a content bear for now.


WWS Report for SSC(Friday): http://wowwebstats.com/akinrsxahefqs

WWS Report for ZA(Sunday): http://wowwebstats.com/q6cu4koleozea?m

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Apologies and success




I know that lately I have been anything if not regular with updating my blog. Work ramped up leaving me very much separated from what I enjoy to do.....besides gaming that is. But the week hasn't been deviod of any news. As you may all know I joined a guild which was slightly behind my old guild in terms of progress but now that is no longer the case.




With my new guild I went into SSC 2 days in a row and we downed 2 new bosses, Lurker Below and Leo the blind. Ok I have already downed Lurker before but Leo was a new one for me as well and to top it off it was a result of my suggestions that we actually got him. We initially had 3 tanks for the fight even though its largely unnecessary, whereby each tank was assigned a zone and if Leo ended in their zone during whirlwind, then it was that tanks job to drag him back to the middle and tank him there. Unfortunately the other 2 tanks (besides me) were prot warriors and they had no chance in hell in killing their inner demons on time. This did give me the opportunity to go kill them each time....gleefully might I add, but it hurt our raid and left me as the only viable tank.






After my talking with the other tank, we decided that he tank with more dps gear and that I remain in tank gear just in case. The third tank was told to go fully dps. With this setup we got Leo on our 3rd attempt of the night. Woohoo.




Besides that our guild's only ZA group cleared ZA and now I'm planning on leading another group to accomplish the same.




Also my new guild leader asked me to become a Class Lead and an Officer, which I accepted after seeing the specs and gearing options taken by our guild's feral druids. This may mean I will have to learn more about the other 2 specs and also give out the reason for my success as a druid tank but meh.




On other unrelated news during our last attempt at Mags I dished out 700dps in tank gear, now I know us ferals are OP in PvE, tank and spank in the same spec. I really wanna see my dps with my dps gear. Anyway thats all I got for you folks this week. I will be writing something later on as well. Until then ciao.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Change


In case you guys were pondering over my absence over the last week, there is a good cause for it. Well for a while now me and a couple others in my guild, which is casual in nature, have been pushing and pushing for some reforms to improve the guild's performance and chances at downing bosses. The reason we felt that was necessary was primarily because we continue to wipe on content way behind us due to lack of discipline and what can only be surmised as greed.


The lack of discipline is fairly easy to place, but the greed is the one thing that irks me more than anything else. There had been a point when our progression was moving along really well, we had Gruul's down to a one shot and were making attempts at Magtheridon, not to mention those attempts were improving. Then at some point dozens of people decided that they no longer want to raid on their mains, since that class was boring (mind you the same class they had 70 levels to play through and decide whether they liked them), this was further compounded by the fact that their mains had already been geared with the T4 drops and more from Gruul's. Now as one of my guildies who was obviously as displeased with this change as I was said "We were supposed to gear everyone up and move forward together as a guild, rather than gear every tom dick and harry and their dozen alts." What makes it worse is that I have yet to get my T4 shoulders despite them having dropped over 20 of those tokens. How? Because we roll to determine loot winners, being casual and all, as a result alts have continued to get gear over me due to my persistently bad rolls.


The gear irks me some because I didn't get the upgrades that could help me further on, but what pisses me off even more is that because of this influx of under geared alts, we started to wipe on Gruul and had issues with post nerf Mag, despite downing him successfully pre-nerf several times. This was a blatant abuse of our casual nature and of our looting rules. I made several suggestions to have a cooldown period on changing alts to mains, giving loot to mains over alts, putting wowwebstats for people to see how they perform and to take interest in trying to improve themselves etc. I didn't ask for a DKP system or not including underperformers, instead I asked for some changes that could benefit us over the long run. What I got was a rant from the officers telling me that I am pushing the guild in a hardcore direction. This was the proverbial "last straw".


I took a break from my guild forums for a couple of days and mulled over my course of action. I realized that I want to raid, I also want to raid effectively, loot doesn't matter to me and I am ok with it being distributed albeit fairly. A guild concerned with progression will need to make the executive decision to gear a tank at some point or forgo progression altogether imo and hence my lack of concern. I also don't wish to push my guild into a direction its evidently not ready for. The kicker is that I don't want to cut away all ties from this guild because I have been somewhat responsible for its nature and I want to stay part of something that is a break away from a break. I enjoy hanging out with the folks there, I may not necessarily agree with the officers but they are all fine people and we get along fabulously when not discussing raiding. So how can I have the cake and eat it too? How do I make a decision on this evident turmoil I am facing?


I move Argonaut to another guild, a guild concerned with raiding, a guild that gets 25 people for all its raids. I keep Arjun in my current guild. I realized that I enjoy raiding and tanking in particular but being in the company of friends is something that is irreplaceable. So I talked to an officer in game about my decision, followed by a post on the forums informing the guild of the same. I didn't gquit immediately but allowed the information to sink in before making the jump, since in my heart of hearts I was waiting for anything that could sway me to stay. Utopia this ain't. I moved Argonaut over the weekend to my new guild "Nocturnal". The folks are nice but raiding is definitely their primary concern. They are an up and coming guild who have formed a mere weeks ago and have already made more progress than my previous guild. The warrior tank is also from my old guild and an officer since he is a RL friend of the GM and an able tank. He and I have tanked together since the time we used to wipe on Moroes and are as a result very well situated to tank together because of our abundance of communication.


What amazes me most about their progress is that there are folks who aren't nearly as well geared but they have what I assume is popularly termed as raid discipline. They don't make amateur mistakes, infact I would go out on a limb and say my old guild outgeared the bulk of the folks here and yet we used to wipe on trivial content. Be it the hunter who refused to replace his greens through quest rewards while sporting 4/5 T4 or the altaholics who had T4 on all his alts. These guys are very serious about their goal, which is End game. Being the best geared Druid Tank I am also expected to be one of the guild's main tanks and also dps when my tanking services aren't as much in demand. On the whole this place could be a new learning experience for me and hopefully leave me better for it. I guess we take what we can get.