A Slice of Guild Chat from the Release of Warlords of Draenor

Darkfall guild chat this evening:

Warlords of Draenor is live!

<Me finishes off a Pandaria Master Pet Tamer.>

Rogue: I'm gonna level so fast!
<Rogue gets achieve for turning in Shado-Pan quests>

Warlock: I've never seen a new expansion on release day. I'm gonna go see it!
Me: I plan to avoid spawn camping ridiculousness, and just hang out here in Pandaria pet battling for a bit.

<Me finishes off Thundering Pandaren Spirit Pet Tamer.>

Rogue: The first quest giver is bugged.
Rogue: Blizz has had 3 months to beta test this. I can't believe it is so broken.
Warlock: I can't move.
Me: LOL
Warlock: I can't even hearth.
Me: Welcome to the new Expansion, same as the old expansion. Shit be broken.

<Me finishes off another Pandaria Master Pet Tamer.>

<Warlock logs off and logs on an alt in Org.>

Rogue: Whoa, this place is so crowded.
<Rogue goes offline.>
Warlock-alt: I think the EK server went down. The Blasted Lands was super lagged.

World Server is Down.

Ruins

I look at my draft posts, and all I can think of is the Indiana Jones movies. My draft folder is some sort of jungle ruins situation. Half written posts that are overgrown with twice re-written posts. Watch out for those old posts about tanking or Timeless Isle, those poison darts are still potent. Is that a giant image post of the legendary cloak questline, but with only half of the captions done, rolling towards me like a giant boulder of doom?

Perhaps my analogy falters.

Regardless, I keep thinking that if I can just rescue a few of them, and start posting some WoW stuff again maybe I'll have any sort of motivation to play again. I suspect my cause and effect is reversed though.

I do know that if I look at all those half written drafts I can see when and why I stopped caring about WoW. It mostly boils down to the stress of trying to lead a guild and a raid, the tension between flex and having to cut down to a normal raid, Timeless Isle, the horrible thought of trying to get on the gear treadmill with my alts (let alone the new boosted 90, which *still* doesn't feel like a real character), and just not feeling like Blizz actually wanted me as a customer.

I know the new expansion is coming up soon. I know the next major patch is really soon. But I'm only feeling an obligation to log on, no actual desire.


Maybe it'd be better to leave those ruins buried under the jungle.

Current Progression

 

This past week we had a pretty good set of raids. I decided to pug even though we only had 5 people online. We actually had heals and tanks so we just needed to get some dps. It worked out, we had different pugs every day of our three raid nights, but they were all pretty good. Oddly, the pugs we picked up on Sunday night were better quality, both gear and skill, then the ones that we had on Tuesday. I can't tell if that was because people weren't busy on Sunday night, or if better people respond when I say we're starting on Malkorok.

Either way, after a rough start on Tuesday we killed Nazgrim on Thursday. On Sunday night we got some pretty well geared people who were done with their guild raids for the week. It took us a bunch of wipes to get the coordination to cover all the purple puddles, but once everyone knew the plan we were good.

We also had a really easy time killing Spoils of Pandaria. It took us one wipe and then we annihilated it. I think a big part of that was that I and the other tank had practiced it when we ran it on Flex three the week before. Both of us had the crate opening rhythm down. Despite that I was still afraid that it would be a wipe when I had trouble opening the first couple of crates on the Mogu side. Fortunately we were able to recover and get everything opened up and then dead in time.

We headed to Thok after knocking over Spoils, and had a couple of good pulls on him. I am confident that we'd have gotten him the next pull, but we ran out of raid time and people had to go to sleep. Sadly our last wipe was my over-aggro fault. Turns out that I'm really looking forward to the removal of Vengeance in the Warlords expansion. Right now it's a bit of a clunky mechanic that can make tank swaps, especially the initial tank swap, really hairy.

It was a pretty good raid. I know that several Darkfall people hadn't been there when we first killed Malkorok, so they got a new kill for that. I was lucky enough to get the nice tanking boots that Malk drops: the Malkorok's Giant Stompers, but warforged for extra awesomeness. And I remain pleased with our speedy kill of Spoils. 

Burnout? Not Today!

 

I had been feeling more than a bit burned out lately. It's the end of the expansion, and it felt like Darkfall was falling apart like it did at the end of Wrath. A bunch of people have stopped logging on and other people have gquit or stealth server transferred. I'd been super stressed and worrying about attrition and progression and generally dreading logging on to raid.

At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, Darkfall had a lot of attrition and turnover and, both personally and as a guild, didn't end up killing the Lich King until much later. It was pretty rough, but DraNgNon and I ended up having a good time by pugging our way through Ulduar to get the achieves and fast protodrake. That was a tremendous amount of fun. It also facilitated the swap of my main to Mornara and polishing my tanking skills. Additionally I honed my raid leading skills, by getting us and a half-regular merry band through Ulduar.

Fortunately I was recently reminded that despite the guild issues the end of Wrath was a lot of fun. I still have many fond memories of Ulduar. And I actually don't mind pugging, even if every so often there is someone who is all "zomg a female tank!!!" I'm pretty good at shrugging that off as long as there are no sexist comments following on to it.  

So I'm feeling revitalized and ready to raid. I'd prefer to have a full Darkfall raid to run with, however, if people aren't going to be around I'm cool with pugging and killing bosses. 

Thoughts On Tanking and Role Models

 

For most of this expansion I've been tanking with a pally co-tank. It has been pretty nice. My pally co-tank is excellent and fun to tank beside. We've been tanking together long enough that we only need a minimum of vent communication to deal with most issues that arise.

However, the other night the pally was out and our dps warrior was convinced to strap on a sword and board. It was odd, but not in a bad way. It was odd because this warrior used to be the main tank of Darkfall back in Burning Crusade.  

When I first started tanking, there were several tanks that I really looked up to. I watched these tanks to try to learn how they were so awesome.  At that time in BC and early Wrath they were warriors and a few bears. At that time Ironspike was a big burly Tauren Warrior.  He's since changed race and gender (and character name) and is a little Blood Elf girl. It's odd that not only is Morn more burly, but since he does dps most of the time now Morn's tanking gear is better, too.  

It was odd and gratifying to be tanking next to Iron. I'd looked up to him a lot in BC and now I was tanking next to him.  It was really weird though, because we hadn't tanked together before.  We both knew the boss fights and did perfectly fine with the mechanics. However, the flow wasn't there. He is currently used to tanking with his monk, and we don't know each other's rhythm.  

Yes, there is a rhythm to tanking. Making sure your CDs are used at the right times for the boss abilities is basic. Rhythm is more about choosing when to use minor defensive abilities vs threat abilities. If you've not tanked with your co-tank before you don't know how much relative threat they put out. Or just when they will taunt, so you have to save an extra CD or threat ability in case they taunt early or late or in case they drop lots of threat at the start of the fight. It's nothing serious, but it is a learning curve.  

More recently our warlock's pally has been filling in for our missing OT. It's interesting to tank with a different pally. It's also fun to watch someone relearn the fights with a different class and spec. I was amused when he did Norushen for the first time on normal; he had an unpleasant surprise with how much stronger normal Norushen purity test realm is than flex. Fortunately I had a battle rez ready for just that situation. 

I've also been tanking next to Hellbovine, and have been having fun with that too. Warrior charge is so annoyingly OP for getting initial aggro on trash packs. It's sometimes hard to not feel useless when he has all the Vengeance. Still it's a lot of fun to tank with him, though.

Ahead of the Curve: Lei Shen

Last night Darkfall killed Lei Shen for the first time! We had killed the first 11 bosses last week, and then saved the lockout to work on him this week. We decided to save the lock when we thought the patch might be next week. I and several others really wanted the Ahead of the Curve Achieve.

Of course when we all got Ahead of the Curve, Darkfall got the guild achieve for killing everything in Throne of Thunder:

As I knew it would be the hard part of this fight was the intermissions. Of course, there were some ridiculous wipes early on to Fusion Slash punting you a lot farther in Normal than it does in LFR. But aside from that and a people learning how far away they need to be from Thunderstruck all the learning and work in the fight came from the intermissions.

We eventually went with putting both tanks together and having a mistweaver monk and warlock together for each of the two person quadrants. One three person quadrant was holy priest and two ranged, while the last quadrant was 2 shamans and a dps warrior. It was dicey at times, but that setup managed to keep us all alive through the first intermission.

We squeaked through the second intermission with two deaths right at the end, but fortunately had a battle rez to get one dps back up. The third phase was a mess of wind blowing us every which way while we all tried to dodge Lightning Whip, and pretty much everyone yelling "Die Die DIE!" as the last few percent of his health ticked down.

Once you kill him it's pretty neat how the whole room is burned out.

Iron Qon and Twin Consorts dead

Darkfall had a nice week of raiding this week. We are kind of in the middle of changing up our raid nights. So we had a raid on Wednesday from 10 to midnight server. We kept our usual times on Tuesday and Thursday, but the raid didn't actually start up until 9:30 because of various people being late. Regrettably DraNgNon and I were some of those people on Thursday.

Anway, on Tuesday we smashed through the first seven bosses. Morn won Bo-Ris, Horror in the Night from a coin when we killed Horridon. Sadly Durumu didn't drop his awesome tanking ring, either generally or when I used a coin.

Wednesday I was expecting to pick up after Durumu and kill all the things so that we'd get some tries on Iron Qon. We did handily kill Primordius, but then we had a series of annoying wipes on Dark Animus. We didn't have the same group as when we first killed it so the new person had to learn the fight. Apparently both the new person and old people had trouble with the concept of don't dps the adds until it is your turn. I was boggling a bit, though I will say that no one made the same mistake twice. We did kill Animus in time to get a pull or two in on Iron Qon, so we had a chance to see the wind phase, and lament the lack of a warlock for portals. Morn was lucky enough to be top on EP/GP when the Dark Animus dropped the DK chest token.

Thursday we came in and kicked ass.

Iron Qon we had a miraculous kill on our third or fourth pull of the night. I was expecting a long slow wipe when both healers went down near the start of the wind phase. I used Raise Ally on the first one to die, but could only be sad when the other one died moments later. However, in the spirit of learning the fight we kept going. It really seems to be the case that once you're through the wind phase it's not so bad a fight. I admit that the last phase was a bit hairy. If we'd not had two shaman and a druid to cast off spec heals we'd have died horribly during Qon's ground pounding. I'm pretty sure that we just squeaked out a kill before the next round of AoE that would have wiped us all.

Twin Consorts was pretty trivial. The fight is quite similar to LFR, just with harder hitting abilities and slightly more crap to avoid. Our dps warrior was detailed to run the patterns, mostly because he'd tried it a few times on LFR and also had heroic leap to get into position quickly without running through all the aoe. It actually took us two tries to kill her. The first time we pulled while our frost DK was offline with router issues. Despite that we almost killed them before the berserk, but there was a little bit of confusion about what was happening in the dusk phase. Once our frost DK got his router back in order we came back and handily collected loot.

Then we had a bit of time left over to work on Lei Shen. We had two or three pulls on him. As I was expecting we can use a bit of work on the phases, but mostly we have them down. The hard part of course is the intermissions. Needing to have two platforms that only have two people on them is rough. We'll get him next week though.

Dark Animus Dead

Last Thursday night Darkfall headed into Throne of Thunder. Tuesday the raid had killed the first half of the bosses; everything including Ji-Kun. Thursday night we blasted through and handily killed both Durumu and Primordius. Then we cleared trash and went on to work on Dark Animus.

We hadn't actually pulled him at all previously. We'd killed Primordius, but run out of raid time before we got to Animus. Despite not having pulled Dark Animus at all we had time to kill him and then have a try on Iron Quon as well.

Dark Animus is a pretty fun fight. The hardest part was just getting the coordination down for all the annoying small animus golems. Those things barely tap you if there is one but practically smash you flat if there are two.

We pursued the strategy of getting the broken Large Animus filled first, with eachthe tanks' two little animus. Meanwhile the third large golem on the other side of the room was getting filled with two other small animus from melee. As soon as both my small animus were dead I grabbed one and brought it near a massive to be killed. That massive was brought to the center of the room and the remaining small animus were brought to it to be killed one at a time. Then the massive was fully filled up from broken small one before a broken small animus next to dark animus was punched and the Dark Animus was brought to life. The only mildly tricky part after we'd gotten through the initial grabbing of small animus was making sure everyone was ready for Interrupting Jolt.

Fun with Friends!

Once again Darkfall is racking up the guild achieves:

One hundred scenarios as a guild is pretty excellent. A lot of these are completed after Heroic Scenarios came out. Because you can't just queue randomly for a H scenario I see, almost every evening, at least one if not two or three heroic scenario groups forming up.

Durumu and Primordius Dead!

This week we didn't extend our lockout. Instead we just blasted through the first five bosses on Tuesday. Due to a couple of turtle kicking issues we spent a little too much time on Tortos and didn't have time to get to Ji-Kun. So when Thursday came around we had all that annoying trash before Ji-Kun to clear. It was actually hilarious. There were more than a few butt aggros, but we did make it to Ji-Kun. The big bird died quite speedily again.

Then we moved on to Durumu. Last week we'd had time to do a few pulls on him. Just enough to get horribly murdered by the colored lights. Fortunately this week after a few messups with red beams we actually pulled out a kill. It was rather epic because for the last 10% of his health both of our dedicated healers were dead. The hybrid classes made it work by tossing just enough heals out that the raid lived and the boss died.

After Durumu was dead we moved on to Primordius. First Saurok Gollum was actually pretty easy. If we'd not had both me and the other tank lag out and DC during the fight, as well as the monk healer I really think we would have one shot him. As it was we had a 20 minute unplanned bio break as three people (who live near each other) all had their internet crap out. Fortunately they managed to get back online and we just slaughtered Primordius.

As I said before I am really surprised and impressed how fast we're killing bosses now that we're past Horridon. This is the second week in a row where we've killed two new bosses. And while I think that Darkfall is awesome I also am absolutely convinced that Horridon sucks dirty donkey balls.

Guild achieves

Darkfall has gotten a few guild achieves lately.

The other night I realized that we hadn't killed Nalak or Oondasta with enough guildies in the same raid. So when I saw a Nalak run forming up before our ToT run I had everyone run out to hit him. With tag to faction, it's rather trivial to get the guild achieve for killing him.

A few days later we did the same thing with Oondasta. Since Oon isn't near ToT it was a pain to get 8 people online and out there. We managed it with a few alts and a small bit of dualboxing.

I'm not sure when we managed to get the Master Pandaria Crafter. I had no idea we were so close on that one. Clearly several people have been cranking out the epics.

Megaera and Ji-Kun Dead

Last week after we killed Tortos I realized that this week would end up being a really short week, what with Fourth of July wiping out any raid on Thursday night. So I let everyone know that we'd be extending the raid lockout, and working on Megaera. I generally only like to extend raid lockouts for really special occasions. We're mostly de'ing the loot from Jin'rokh, but losing the chance to get hand tokens from Troll Council would kind of suck. However, with such a short raid week I figured it would be worth it.

The strategy for Megaera is almost the same for normal mode as for LFR. The only addition is that the heads out on the water spit crap at the non-tanks so they need to avoid things. We didn't kill the frost head at all so we only had to deal with cinders and acid bomb. There were a few snafus with the acid bomb. I tried to call it out, but a lot of the time my screen is entirely filled with hydra breath. But once the raid got used to moving out of it we had a pretty fast kill.

After Megaera we moved on to Ji-Kun. Amazingly we killed the giant bird thing on the second pull. I was quite frankly shocked and give most of the credit to our fabulous nest team. They were super awesome, and we had at most one baby bird trying to attack us. We also had some fabulous healing from the healer who didn't go with the away team. He managed to keep all seven of the rest of us alive through quills and all the crap on the ground.

Morn even won the leg token that dropped from Ji-Kun.

After Ji-Kun we had time to clear up to Durumu and do a few pulls on him. We need to work on the light beams coordination.

My conclusion from the night's work is that Horridon is a giant cock block. Tortos is too, but not nearly as bad as Horridon. I mean that fight took us weeks to master, with more than 50 wipes. But Megaera dies in 5 or 6 pulls and we kill Ji-Kun on our second try? That's not anything other than Horridon being a bastard.

Flex Raiding

I honestly cannot wait until flex raids are here.

Initially I was a bit dubious about them. Yet another raid format is going to be a pain. Do I now have to run three different instances of the same raid every week? Well, no, I don't usually run LFR, so I'm not seeing that I'll be forced to run anything more than I have time or inclination for. I do understand that raid groups working for any sort of server first ranking will make their raiders run all three lockouts. The chance to get your set bonus faster is really too good to pass up. Fortunately, that sort of rush doesn't apply to me.

I know there will be people who see that the loot from flex raids is not as good as in normal and want to run normal instead. Also the loot for the flex raids is going to be done the same way as in LFR currently. I was originally thinking that was a bad way to hand out loot and really didn't allow the raid leader any sort of control or ability to provide incentive for raiders to show up regularly.

However, I've now thought about the whole situation a bit more. I think that flex raids will solve a lot of problems.

The major bonus from flex raids, of course, is that you can bring whoever you have. Darkfall's common and constant problem is that we'll have anywhere from 12 to 16 or more people online at raid time. That isn't enough to try to pug for a 25man, but it is enough that it really sucks to decide who to have sit out. That large a bench just makes everyone feel bad.

Another bonus is that since you can bring anywhere from 10 to 24 people you don't need to worry as much about setting up the raid to have a 'perfect' class balance. Got three DKs? Bring them all plus everyone else who wants to show up. The need to have specific classes and class balance is something that I really don't like about 10s. Something I like and miss about running 25s is that you can bring doubles (or more) of a class/spec. I still fondly remember running Old Hyjal with 4 or 5 mages in the 25man raid.

I'm also no longer unpleased with the LFR-style looting that will happen in the flex raids. Originally I didn't like it because I'm a fan of master looting and using EPGP for handing out loot. I also really hate it when I use a charm and get a piece of loot I already have. However, I think that having separate loot for each person outweighs that. With personal loot instead of raid loot, having 8 people on the same token or wanting the same armor type does not matter. Everyone has their own chance at loot, and someone else getting loot doesn't take any away from you.

I would like to see that you could trade the loot you get in lfr or flex raids to other people who were in the same boss kill. It would be super nice if you could trade a doubled item you received to someone else who could use it. I'd also like the ability to trade it to someone to de if you got something that you and everyone else who could use it already had, but I can see not allowing that.

Either way I'm super excited for flex raids. I think that they will really help Darkfall and the other guilds like us that were really hurt by the marginalization of 25man raids.

Horridon Dead!

Almost two weeks ago Darkfall killed Horridon. I'm so pleased. He's such an annoying goddamn dino. Actually the most annoying part is the seemingly endless waves of trolls. Anyway, giant dino dead!

We started off the night by having a nice one-shot of Jin'rokh. He was dead before the 3rd lightning storm. Which was super fortunate, because someone had dropped a lightning fissure or two where the 4th puddle would have spawned.

Last night we also had our regular OT back. He dabbled with playing a lock and not tanking, but I think he's back to tanking. He's leveling up a druid to be his tank, but is currently playing his monk. It was great to have him back. Though I must say that the massive AoE threat the monks generate with their beer throwing is annoying.

Also, I was mean or lazy (take your pick) and made our returned OT gather the spirits on the windy bridges. This usually worked pretty well. The Monk Roll ability will get him safely through the floating punting spirits so he never got punted off the bridge and could speedily bring back the spirit we needed to kill. However, that same Roll did get him killed on three different times as he rolled his way off the edge of the bridge. The first time was funny, but by the third time he was doing this I needed a breather to catch my breath from laughing so hard I was crying.

Once we got through the trash and were at Horridon we had a relatively speedy kill. We had a couple of goofy wipes and then a wipe where both tanks died to heavy dino trampling. But once the healers had seen the whole fight we got it on the next try.

Darkfall is 8/8H Dragon Soul

I extended our raid lockout from last week to give us the maximum time to work on the last two heroic bosses in Dragon Soul this week. It was definitely the right decision, because we managed to get them down tonight. I would have preferred to kill them Tuesday night, but it took us a while to work out the kinks in our strategy for Spine. Specifically how we were maneuvering to toss extra bloods off when we rolled.

We'd been regularly getting to the third plate on Spine before dying horribly on Tuesday night. So I was not surprised that on our second pull tonight we just slaughtered Spine. It was a pretty messy kill, we had three people down at the end, and had used our battle rez and a both Shaman had popped as well. Kuan in particular popped at just the perfect time. Just in time to help slaughter the last tendon, but after the exploding Hideous Amalgamation had gone by, so there was as little strain on the healers as possible.

Heroic Madness is a lot easier that Spine, but still pretty challenging. The fight as a whole felt faster paced than normal. I'll check later to see if the timers are really that much faster or if the increased health of everything just makes things seem to be happening faster. We had several wipes while people learned to run for the parasite and not explode everyone else. And I did need to emphatically remind people to not pad their dps by hitting other arm and wing tentacles early.

Our successful kill I had us save Lust until Kalec's platform. Even with three heals we were only getting a second impale on that platform, and having lust then let us get away with one impale. With the new Glyph of Icebound Fortitude I had my own major damage reduction cooldown up for every platform, which greatly decreased the coordination requirements.

After the kill I had everyone line up for a fabulous screen shot. Complete with new titles and our rogue's legendary dagger wings.

I'm amused by the racial make up of the raid. We're an oddly orc-heavy raid. All the melee dps and tanks are orcs. Both main healers are blood elves. The off-healer is our lone tauren. And the three remaining ranged dps are orc, blood elf and our lone troll (Kuanchichi). It seems like a raid that is actually representative of the horde.

Since we'd had a Life-Binder's Handmaiden drop we all went back to Orgrimmar to get a pretty pic of that. Everyone hopped on their favorite fabulous mount.

I am super proud of the raid and the guild for killing all eight heroic bosses in Dragon Soul. There was a lot of work put in by a lot of people, and this was a really great way to end the expansion.

Heroic Blackhorn Dead and Blazing Drake

Last night Darkfall continued our Dragon Soul raid. My plan was to spend as much time as we needed on Blackhorn and kill him on heroic. We'd made some excellent progress on Tuesday and I was excited about killing him.

It turns out that our work on Tuesday paid off. We had a single unfortunate wipe when partners got confused about what little purple swirlies to take and two people each took a swirlie by themselves. Which lead to not enough people in the Onslaught. But then we got that sorted out and slaughtered him on the very next attempt.

It was a close thing, the boat was down to 3% health. However, once we got to the second phase it was a pretty easy fight. I'll credit the second phase smoothness to fabulous healers who didn't explode the raid, and awesome dps who absolutely murdered Goriona and Blackhorn. The tank swaps with Goriona and Blackhorn both still up were pretty smooth, too.

Having killed Blackhorn so quickly we then had the whole rest of the raid before us. Since Blackhorn had gone so swimmingly I suggested that we spend some time on Spine. We decided to take a short break so that the new gear could be gemmed, enchanted, and reforged, because we'd need all the help we could get on Spine.

Our Spine attempts were ridiculous to start. One good thing is that when the raid dies from Blood Corruption: Death, you don't take any durability loss. This is a really good thing, because while the healers were figuring out how to make that buff show up with the highest priority in their UI we died to it a lot. It was utterly hilarious. We'd be killing corruptions and starting to roll the dragon and then BOOM! Everyone was dead! We were all laughing really hard.

But we did start making some progress. By the time we called it for the night and swapped back to normal mode to polish off Spine and Madness we were getting the first plate off in two tendons. Our deaths started to be about Amalg and blood placement. Well, mostly. Every so often there would still be an insta-death wipe and we'd all laugh. Honestly, I'm still giggling a bit just thinking about the entire raid dropping dead instantly.

Anyway after we swapped back to normal mode we handily slaughtered both Spine and Madness. As a raid we're definitely ready to start killing them on heroic. Not least because the loot they drop on normal was entirely useless to anyone in the raid. More crystals for the gbank, I guess. The one drop that wasn't DE'd were the Reins of the Blazing Drake.

We use EPGP for most of our loot, but mounts go by free rolls. Mornara apparently had the hot dice. Or, more accurately, everyone else had crap rolls. I won the drake with a 77, and the next closest person was Kuanchichi with a 73. I did see a number of rolls in the single digits, so I totally lucked out.

I'm super pleased with the drake, even if it's horns do seem to be ridiculously oversized. We all headed back to Org to see what it looked like and I immediately added it to my random flying mount macro.

I"m pretty pleased with our progress as a guild. We're actually getting pretty close to the Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider achievement. Only two heroics left for Mornara and Kuanchichi. There are a few missing achieves for other people, but we're working on those as we go. This week, in fact, we started on Kalec's platform again because someone is missing that and Noz's platform for Chromatic champion. I"m going to be so super proud of the guild when we get everyone the meta achieve.

Gaming Update

DraNgNon and I are splitting our game time between Diablo 3 and WoW.

Diablo 3 is a fun game but I'm a bit nervous about Inferno. We've got two pairs of characters that we play together. A monk and demon hunter who are at the end of Act I. And a wizard and barbarian who are in Act II. Both pairs are on Hell difficulty. It can be quite frustrating how totally random the difficulty level is for the random trash. Especially if you've got a narrow hallway to work with and the blue pack has molten, plagued, or arcane.

I am really enjoying playing both the monk and the wizard. I think I like monk best. But both are quite excellent. I'm also very very glad that DraNgNon and I decided to mix up our pairs so that we have a melee and a ranged in each pair. We'd tried it with two melee and that was just not good.

The WoW is going pretty well. Last night Darkfall one shot the first 5 bosses of heroic Dragon Soul. I was pretty proud of that even with the 30% buff. I did speak sternly to the raid before Morchok, to remind them that 30% doesn't mean they can goof off. However, I suspect that when we get to Madness later this week we'll still have at least one messup where we trigger blistering while we either still have bloods or big tentacle or elementium bolt. Hopefully that won't be a wipe, but it'll certainly be annoying and may cause the healers to burst a blood vessel.

The reason that we didn't get to Madness (or Spine) last night was that we spent some quality time wiping on heroic Blackhorn. The deckfire and other increased damage to the boat make that a pretty tough fight. We had a few wipes where not everyone got to the Onslaught. There were also several deaths due to one partner for the little purple swirlys not keeping up. Most of our deaths were due to the boat exploding out from under us. There was steady progress overall though, so I'm confident that we'll get him on Thursday.

I'm working Mornara through the Kalimdor quests. She is messing about in Winterspring right now. The current quests are merrily killing furbolgs and pretty much anything else that moves...

I've also got my jewelcrafting & alchemy & enchanting production line going. I'm making a modest amount, but, more importantly, I'm easily able to supply Mornara and Kuan and all our other toons with the gems and enchants that they need. It's also a good thing to do while I do the guild leader thing and chat/discuss/soothe all the things that need it.

Cataclysm Retrospective

The Cataclysm expansion seems to be winding down. The Mists 5.0 PTR is up for testing. The Mists beta is doing raid testing. Deathwing has been made dead many times over.

Guild and Raiding

It's been a pretty fun expansion for me and, I think (hope), for Darkfall too. This is actually the first expansion since Vanilla that I've been in one guild the whole time. Of course it helped a lot that I became a guild officer pretty early on. I could make sure the raid schedule was as comfortable as possible for DraNgNon and myself. Fortunately this wasn't actually any sort of change from what Darkfall had originally had as a schedule.

It was fun, over the past 18 months, to learn how to be a better raid leader. And, over the past eight months, I've learned a lot from being guild leader as well. Though I don't think I'm nearly as good a guild leader as I am a raid leader. Darkfall is currently 5/8 in Heroic Dragon Soul 10man so I don't think I've done a terrible job as raid leader thus far.

I am also really happy that I instituted the Monday night fun runs. I initially started them as a way to get guild achieves. We'd grab whoever was on and and interested to run old dungeons and raids. It actually turned into a really fun experience as we also would get whatever achievements individual people needed from the raid or dungeon we were slaughtering. In addition to being fun it was also a great way for the guild to bond. Most of the time I'd alternate easy and hard stuff on a week by week basis. So one week we'd be romping through Outland 5mans or Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj while laughing and talking on Vent. The next week we'd be concentrating on avoiding the defile from Heroic Lich King or twilght cutters of Heroic Halion. There was still laughter, but often it was laughter as someone fell to their death from an unnoticed shadow trap. Regardless of what happened it was a good way to have fun and helped the guild bond.

Story

The general Cataclysm story was pretty good. It suffered a bit from not being separate from the rest of Kalimdor and EK. With BC and Wrath I expected it when the new zones were their own new and separate stories. But with the new Cata zones being part of the original Azeroth it was both nice and odd that the rest of Kalimdor and EK were updated to fit with them. I think that it's going to be increasingly jarring to level as more expansions come out. I'm not sure there is any way to solve this, but I do wonder how the new trainers in the starting zones are going to fit in with everything.

The major problem I had with the Cata story, both in the new Cata zones and in old revamped zones, is how very linear most of it seems to be. I've complained about this before. And I still think that Blizz learned just the wrong lesson from the DK starting area. The very linearity seems to have taken away a lot of the mystery and the sense of a big unexplored world just waiting for you. Except for the sections where the dangling plot hooks are just completely unexplained. Azshara, Neptulon, and the Naga spring to mind as a story that had a lot of promise but was just dropped to the floor. I have fun theorizing about that, but, of the new zones, that is the only place where there is any sort of major speculation possible.

There was also a lot of recycled content in Cata. Some of it tried to bridge the gap from Vanillla to current times, and some of it was just entirely recycled. I think that Blackwing Lair to Blackwing Descent would have been more successful if we hadn't had to kill Onyxia for the *third* time as part of the end boss encounter. Perhaps I'm more forgiving of Nefarian in that encounter because I didn't ever raid BWL more than the first few bosses. However I did raid Molten Core on a semi-regular basis so I had no leniency whatsoever for the entirely recycled nature of Firelands, and Ragnaros in particular. OH LOOK! The Sons of Ragnaros!! /wrists

I also would have been more impressed if the revamped troll dungeons were handled a bit better. Well, in fairness, Zul'gurub did have updated story around it, so the new bosses there made sense. However, Zul'Aman didn't have any explanation for why Daakara replaced Zul'jin but the animal loa bosses and Hexlord were still there. It would have been a good chance to update the Blood Elf starting area, which is sorely in need of an update, or at least the ability for people to use flying mounts there.

Uldum Sucks

However, my least favorite part about Cata was the Harrison Jones quest in Uldum. I really, really hate that quest line. I did it on one character, and I will NEVER complete any of it again. It was such a bad story, but what I truly hated was how often you lost control of your character.

Understand, I did the Uldum quests with Mornara. Mornara is a TANK. This means (I'm talking to you Blizzard) that she regularly gets hit by very large and angry beings and it does not kill her. Ok, yes, there is a full raid group, with healers, behind her. But consider this situation: Mornara and Kuan and various raids have fought their way through ICC. They defeated Arthas. Anub'arak's carapace lies cracked at their feet. They ride Rust-bound Protodrakes because they freed the Keepers of Ulduar and killed Yogg-Saron without their help. Now they are headed off to Uldum, and a band of pygmies with spears and rocks capture them?!?! And then later Harrison Jones needs to rescue them from a single goblin with a rocket propelled grenade. Mornara jumps on grenades for fun! It's called being a tank!

I'm also not a big fan of the pygmies in Uldum. It's rather racist portrayal, but Saif said that better than I can.

Oh and lets not forget that the entire set of Harrison Jones quests is thinly veiled WW2/Nazi references. Yes, yes, I like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a fun movie, but the quests in Uldum had too many references to actual Hitler and his cronies. That's history, it's not something that should be made into a joke.

Archaeology

The new secondary profession for Cata, Archaeology, was also a modest success. I found it most useful as a filler while I was waiting for a battleground or arena queue to pop. I suspect it is also useful if you are waiting for a dungeon queue, but as a tank the longest part of my LFD queue is waiting for that one dps who is asleep to time out.

I've gotten some cool rewards with archaeology. There are bunch of rather cute companion pets you can get. I'm also always happy to be riding my skeletal raptor around. And even better, to my mind, there are a bunch of small bits of lore you can get out of Archaeology. Every item you assemble has a sentence or two at least of explanation or history on it.

Raid Achievements!

This past Sunday and Tuesday were good nights for a few raid achievements.

Sunday we raided into Firelands. Our most progressed staff person was out on vacation, so instead of trying to kill everything asap for quest items we went for some of the more time consuming achievements. Bucket List and Death From Above.

Bucket List took a lot of clearing. Fortunately our group was pretty solid so it was just a matter of getting everything out of the way. It was a pretty fun achieve to do. I always take Riplimb so I can spam Chains of Ice if there isn't a trap handy. Kuanchichi ended up with the skull marker and, since DraNgNon knew where to go, ended up being the person that the Shannox tank followed around. It worked like a charm.

Death From Above took us a bit to work the strategy out for. I had to call for several wipes because we'd have a drone or two die in the second phase. But once we figured out the plan for how much and when to kill drones it was a very smooth kill.



Tuesday, we did Dragon Soul. I can't tell if it's general end of expansion burnout or everyone logging on to the beta, but we were just barely able to field a 10man raid. We tried for heroic Morchok and were very very close, but we were ultimately stymied by a number of disconnects. If you don't have 5 people to soak the stomp it's practically impossible to get everyone healed up to survive the crystal and next stomp.

However, all that practice on heroic Morchok made it very easy to get Don't Stand So Close to Me


That also happened to be our 50th raid boss kill since the guild achieves for raiding were added in. So double achieve!


I really love guild achievements, and Darkfall is now up to 1690 points.

Fangs of the Father

Tuesday night the 15% debuff to Dragon Soul went into effect. It's a very massive buff. So massive that even though we had to pug to fill out our 25man we killed all eight bosses that night. There was one wipe on Spine because we had a few people not get locked down and a few other people die to not getting out of the blast radius of the first Amalgamation. But we went on to one-shot Madness. And seven different people got achieves for killing Deathwing.

Admittedly the raid ended at 12:30 instead of midnight, but that was due to me running late and the time it took to pull in the pugs. I did make Saruke, our ranged officer, give out loot so that Earthen and I could keep pulling what little trash there was. And that helped make up a bit of the lost time.

I was pretty excited the whole night. Dragon Soul is a relatively fun instance and I was very proud of everyone that we killed all of it in one night. However, my excitement was entirely due to our rogue getting his last Elementium Gem Cluster. He has had some very nice luck with very often getting 2 gems when we run 25man.

After he got is last gem the only item that Swifty was missing for the legendary was a Fragment of Deathwing's Jaw. This of course drops from Madness, which was why the raid went 30 minutes over the usual time. We all wanted him to get the legendaries.

And get them he did! The Fangs of the Father, Tiriosh, Nightmare of Ages and Golad, Twilight of Aspects, are now one more guild achieve that we've completed. I'm so pleased and proud of everyone in Darkfall for helping make this happen.