Despite rumors to the contrary, I have not been sitting in a bar sulking over drinks.  Our guild has need of a healer. I serve the guild as a healer. It’s that simple.

So, for the past few nights, we have been working on Marrowgar-10. To “real” raiders, we fail, right there. To “casual” types, maybe there’s a small reason for respect. And of course there is a whole spectrum in between. Hello.

It seems like forever that we have been fighting this boss. And this week seemed like any other. Two or three bone storms, and we’re all dead on the floor. Same as always.

Last night, our esteemed MT¹ spoke up about the need for DPS to hold off until the tanks had achieved aggroage. This is pretty basic, and a good sign as to what sort of challenges our tanks face every day. That being said, once the obvious was pointed out and emphasized, we started to make real progress. Last night, we left the place with Marrowgar 39K away from downage. It was heartbreak, for sure, but also the best we had ever done, and we were as a group energized to try again the next night.

That being tonight.

OCV's first ever Marrowgar downage

There were two key pieces to success:

1. Let the tank tank.
2. During bone storm, you’re on your own. Don’t stand in stuff, and don’t worry so much about the flurry².

That’s it.

With that simple approach, we were able to gel on the strategy around the 3rd or 4th try tonight, and kill that four-headed freak with no casualties on our side.

Well done, vorpal bunnies!

Naturally, what’s-her-face pwned us. But that’s par for the course on a brand new boss. As with all progression raids, the challenge is in the next boss, not the one you just downed.

Later.

1. Have I mentioned how fortunate we were to find him when we did? Not only has he been a boon to our guild, but he brought another tank, a great DPS shammi, and a few other assorted players with him as well. [↩]
2. Consider this to be a grown-up version of Heigan, with actual damage during the dance. [↩]

Over the past 48 or so hours, there has been much trash-talking about the Ensidia world-first kill of Arthas (and subsequent fallout).  People are weighing in on both sides.

One prevailing viewpoint of the pro-Ensidia crowd is that Blizzard failed to test the software “properly” and thus, somehow and ergo, Ensidia is blameless in this situation.

What utter, profound crap.

Let me essplain.  No – it is too much. Let me summarize.

There is a rule of thumb in the software testing world, which boils down to this:  “to attack the software properly, you have to think like a criminal” – such as , for example, when dealing with things like credit card processing – the storage of account numbers and so forth, especially. The designer will tell you how it’s supposed to work under normal conditions. You get to figure out what he didn’t think of, the cracks in the shell that you can exploit.

So; this rule of thumb helps one find good testers, but it begs the question as to how to “catch a thief”! Until you’ve sat in the seat of an interviewer, you really don’t know how difficult it is to find a mediocre tester, much less a world-class game buster.  To “catch a thief” to work on your team, you kinda have to think like one, too.

So that’s one issue.

Another issue is what I like to summarize as “the view is really good from the cheap seats”. Really, until you’ve actually been put in the place of finding bugs as your bread and butter, you really have no idea what you’re talking about when you criticize the work done by the testers in this situation. You really, really, don’t. You have no idea what kind of guidelines they were given. You have no idea what level of knowledge they were given about how the encounter was supposed to progress, nor how complete the testing environment was. You have no idea, at all, how this was tested, or even if it was testable.

So sure, go ahead and talk trash all you want, but those of us that work in the industry know exactly how hollow and foolish your critiques are.

Walk a mile in my shoes, and we have common ground to talk.  You can make real critiques at that point, not a bunch of generalities that mean absolutely nothing.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Regarding Ensidia; Grimm said this elsewhere, but I will reiterate now.  You don’t play this game for five years, earn a seat in one of the premier raiding guilds in the world, and somehow not know that this was an exploit. Saronite bombs are to be thrown at the enemy, not collapsed portions of a platform, and the enemy was not standing on collapsed parts of the platform. No, this was deliberate. And anyone that’s been playing that long would know it.

To whine that they’re victims of faulty QA is disingenuous at best. That QA team didn’t make them toss bombs off where they would (theoretically) do no good.  That QA team didn’t force them to take the achievement. That QA team didn’t keep them from reporting the issue.The QA team didn’t make them crow at their achievement.

-=-=-=-=-=-

An analogy, and then I will shut up on this topic.

You are walking through a mall. Ahead of you, a woman’s purse has a broken strap, and the wallet has fallen out. When it hits the ground, a bunch of $50 bills spill out on the ground. She continues on, unaware of the incident.

If you take the money and toss her wallet, who’s in the wrong?  Sure, she should have fixed the purse, secured the wallet. But does that in any way excuse theft? I don’t think so.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Ensidia, I’m sorry that you didn’t get a nice set of steak knives, but maybe next time you will use your heads and not risk your reputation on something so obvious. Or if you do (and I suspect you will), I hope you can at least own up to your stupidity next time.

Oh, and gratz to Paragon, that did it without exploits.

Well, after many many tries and wipes, today we went in and three-shot Maly as the weekly raid boss, and many of us popped [Champion of the Frozen Wastes] in the process. We’re such noobs, half of us didn’t know where the loot was. Bring in the flying gimmick, and we’re not exactly at our best.

We followed this up with a not very successful attempt on Marrowgar-10; I think our Boomkin ditched us out of disgust.  Or maybe I’m reading too much into the sudden without warning drop.  /shrug – know what, I don’t care. He can go do that, and as soon as a replacement is available for me, he can go do that without bothering me about it.

Marrowgar is a confusing fight; even with him scaled back to 10-man strength, the whirlwind is devestating.  We need a lot more practice.  Disc healing isn’t exactly useful at that point, either.

The one good thing I saw was that my T9 2-piece bonus really makes the Frisbee stand tall.

The scary thing for me with regard to T9 and T10 is that Blizz is pushing Crit down so hard for the healing sets. Crit is a Big Deal™ for Disc healers. We get some from primary stats, which do get stacked, but the loss of Crit is going to hurt. The mace that dropped off of Maly was biased in the same way. This brings up some really interesting gear decisions.

Wretched.

That’s how I feel after our last few sessions in EoE.

For two or three nights running, we attacked that dragon. From the first pull, we did great in phases 1 and 2.  Typically we’re going in to phase 3 with five minutes left on the timer.

We rarely see that five minutes go in full.

Invariably I die within the first 30 seconds, but I doubt it has much effect since I can’t seem to heal worth a damn during that phase anyway.

It is very frustrating and made me want to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me.

It’s so difficult, to do everything in your power to ensure that you are geared appropriately, have the right consumables, have studied rotations and methodologies, and can go a full fight and still have plenty of mana left in most, then to find that it all boils down to a gimmick fight in which none of the hard won lessons apply.

“Bring the player, not the class”, they might parrot.  I contend that that is a cop-out.

You would never go into a raid with no healing classes, would you? Of course not.

If class isn’t important, then why do we have them? If levels and gear are not important, why are they in the game?  Why don’t we focus more on looking fabulous than getting that hideous mock turtleneck helm for its lovely stats?

Because class matters. Because gear matters. Because level and experience .. matter.  That malarkey about “bring duh player not duh class” was nothing but a catchphrase and it’s taken on a twisted life of its own.

This phase is unrewarding and discouraging. Right now that’s how I feel. I regret rolling on that damned key at this very moment because it put a quest in my quest log that I am at this moment considering … not doing.

We do Ulduar tonight, and I dearly hope we bring our ‘A’ game because I could really use the boost associated with doing, well, well for a change.

So, I’ve had a meltdown. And yet, all other things aside, we’re still headed back into Naxx to finish it up.

So, what to do?

When you get thrown from a horse, the sooner you get back on, the faster your recovery. Or so I’ve heard.

So. I logged in. Did my dailies.

Parked at the flightpoint … and waited to see if the GM (who I did apologize directly to) would risk asking me back into a raid.

She did, I went. We had Plague wing and KT left.

And we steamrolled them. We even got an achievement out of it.

There was one amusing moment, when we started Noth. Or I should say, THEY started Noth. I was in the doorway, apparently just a bit on the outside of the line, and when somebody pulled¹, the curtains came down and I found myself on the outside. Worst, they were tanking him in the far corner (as per normal) so I couldn’t even help.  Two adds DID come for me, but I guess I evadebugged on them and they left.

So, at least for some value of ’success’, I succeeded in raiding.  I won’t be on Oprah documenting that any time soon.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Let’s talk about our run. Every boss was a record for us. This raid is no longer a serious challenge to the experienced ones, so we need to look at how to change that up.  I have a couple of thoughts.

1. Move this to Saturday as a solid block, and then move Ulduar to two or three nights in the week.
2. Swap out some alts.
3. Go for the 8-man achievement with the mains.

I’d also like to see us go for EoE soon. I guess I need to practice that stupid quest in Coldarra.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Regarding TotC, I really want to walk away from it and never return. It’s not that it’s hard. It’s that we (a) have most of Ulduar still to do, (b) Ulduar is interesting, (c) TotC is not.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Due to personal matters in RL, much of the guild leadership will be unavailable for raiding this week. I don’t really want to be in the middle of such things, but I know one or three people interested in VoA and that sort of thing, so I probably will help organize them. I’d rather take the week off myself, but being selfish is not the hallmark of a good officer. Bleah.

1. I have no idea if it was on purpose or not – I wasn’t in Vent. That was one thing that helped keep me sane, not having the chattering in my ear. [↩]

Well, last night’s third ever Ulduar raid was an exemplar of how our guild can take something that’s working great, and make it go awry.

After one-shotting Loot Leviathan twice, the last thing you’d expect is for us to wipe two or three times, and the one where we won was a just-barely affair. But there you have it. Typical of how we do things sometimes. Similar to the Naxx before last where we stalled on Grobbulus – almost the same crowd put him down like a bad habit the next week. When we have off nights, we have off nights.

People were late. People were dropping offline. People had places to be with the kids, were distracted, or otherwise … meh. One guy had a shooting on his street AND his cousin die within the same hour, and the hunter’s cable modem had to be reset by his ISP. We spent longer looting Leviathan than we did on the whole gauntlet.

XT and Metalbird were oneshot. I got a nice bracer off of Razordrake, too.

Did we attempt Ignis? What,  are we stupid? I swear, if the boss had suggested that, I would have possibly run for the hills. Fortunately for my sanity, we had to call it early so that people could take the kids out trick or treating.

This was very frustrating from a healing perspective. Metaldrake was almost a wipe since everyone thought that that blue crap was a great place to stand, and “healing through it” was becoming less of an option by the second as my mana bar headed for the basement. Early on I had to make a choice between a retpalli that knew better and the MT. I finally had to blurt out on Vent, DON’T STAND IN BLUE STUFF, GUYS!  I probably should have added YOU KNOW BETTER but I didn’t.

I want to go stand at the far end of the circle, where the guides show, but I’m not convinced everyone’s playing by that same game plan, so I’m worried that I’ll cause a wipe if I do.

Maybe I’ll just say screw it and do it anyway, and then cajole people into the right places retroactively. Progression means sometimes you wipe.  And if this bunch can’t be arsed to watch a video, maybe some pain will convince them.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I finished the evening pleasantly enough, well, the whole crowd did, really, as we made our final attempts at the Big Burning Horsie. It did not show, but the Helm of Even More Awesome Laughter did drop, and our Gnome DK received it. It was the only thing she was looking for.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ever read the story of the Headless Horseman? It’s pretty sad. A knight of the Silver hand, he went mad when he accidentally slaughtered his own family.

He turned against the Scarlet Monastary and was beheaded. But he was reanimated by demonic magic (thus the fel fire), and once a year he is brought back to life to suffer for his attack on the Crusade. During that time, he sees us as walking dead, and believes himself alive.

I had a very bad feeling about this evening’s Naxx.  Just a vibe.   It turned out, it was completely unfounded. We rolled over three wings and had time for a heroic after.

Our MT and two main DPS were complete beasts. We set guild records for every kill. As an example, Anub went down before the second insect plague. Faerlina’s enrage timer barely went off (after we killed all her acolytes). We had time for two swaps on Four Horsemen, no more.  We HALVED our time on Razz, almost.

That was awesome.

I tried a new healing approach; Renew was only used in special circumstances. Otherwise, I kept to PW:S, Lesser Heal, and Penance when off cooldown. My mana was never in danger of draining.

I’m looking forward to trying this on Iron Council.

We returned to Ulduar this weekend and I’m happy to say that XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, and Loot Leviathan all dropped respectfully before us, one shots all.  I seem to be having a problem staying vertical, though.

It also seemed – at least to me – that we didn’t bring our ‘A’ game. There were more than enough people to fill it out, but I didn’t feel the energy. Maybe it was just me.

Ignis did not light my fire

The MT had a thing he wanted to try, so we gave it a shot. I’m not entirely sure if everyone grokked it or not, considering that nobody ever started out where he said to. And as usual our DPS (which was rip-roarin’) had a tenancy to start as soon as he made contact. I finally suggested that he call out when he was settled, and THEN they attack. We promptly had two DPS start early anyway.

One officer offered to drop out to make room for a better DPS. We were pretty sure, however, that DPS was not the issue. As with last week, getting the adds together and killing them is the big thing, and we’re failing on execution.

The Iron Council

Eventually the boss decided it was time for a change of pace, and we went to test the waters with the Iron Council. Initially we failed to manage too well because we were using a 25-man strategy; once we had the chance to realize that we started making headway; phase 1; phase 2 (revenge of the phase); eventually we were left with one guy to take down, the dwarf caster. We had a bit of a deadline which we intended to meet, but we had that ‘five percent go fever’ going, in which nobody wanted to leave it at 5 percent, or 4, or 3. So we made two more attempts…

Iron Council is Down!

Now about that mana thing …

This is a LONG fight. There is easily time for two shadow beast evocations in there, and that’s without a shadow priest talent tree. I had pots. A druid innervated me. I had elixirs. And still, mana – not so much.

I have been doing homework. I’m starting to see that I need to change my habits.  One of the first things, probably, is to get my HoT off of a hotbar.  My mechanic is skewed towards direct heals and bubbles. I need to learn now to drive that better.

Until then … :: sigh :: … MP5 is back on the table as a major player in my gearing decisions.

Our Naxx run tonight was unusual in that we had more applicants than slots. I did volunteer to sit it out, but there were … personality … issues that would have made that problematic.

The GM actually asked me to lead the raid for a moment … talk about blood running cold!

Don’t get me wrong. I think I could do it, or at least as well as we usually do. But, to quote a former demon hunter … I was not prepared.  I told the GM later that given a warning I will be more than happy to give it a try, and live with the results (likely: fail).

As it was, with three melee DPS, two ranged, three healers, and two tanks, we made it through Arachnid Okay but got hung up on Globbulus. Our melee DPS was taking massive damage, and it was just impossible to keep them up. In retrospect maybe I should have handed out healing assignments, but hindsight is 20/20, eh?

Ah well, a couple of peeps got upgrades, so I am “not prepared” to go emo over that.   Given the conversation that followed in vent I’m actually far from unhappy. Progress has odd little zigs and zags.

A story.

Bob was hitting his hand with a rock, over and over again, causing himself much pain.

Sandra asked him why he was doing that.

“I wanted to punish you for wearing that ugly hat,” he said, hitting his hand once more.

Thus is the logic of the /emoquit.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

We took down Sarth+1D last night. Truly, much tougher than one might suspect, or at least if you’re not prepared for it, it falls apart f-a-s-t.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

As you might have guessed, more /emodrama. I give up. Go sit in a hole and weep bitter emo tears. Come back when you can envision yourself typing “I disagree with your desision, GM, and here’s why” instead of “/gquit”.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Headless was kind to us last night, in which he dropped his mount for one lucky guildie (not one I am fond of but oh well) and at least three squashlings, one which I received. /petcheer

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

It saddens me that the esteemed Ratshag at Need More Rage is hanging up his blogging togs, and presumably the rest of the team as well.  Not counting WoW Insider, his was in the first three blogs I started reading, along with BRK (also now gone) and Hydragyrum (formerly “Liquid Silver” over on Vox, currently Almost Evil).   And, due to Meta’s early exposure to his musings, he’s largely to blame for much of the way that this blog came to be. True story!

There are many Ratshag favorites out there, let us share ours:

• What he likes about being a warrior
• The Helm of Evil Laughter. Also, it has groupies.
• That other – tupid – hebet. Redux.
• Emo Kinnavieve
• Quite possibly, we’re not saying, inspiration for this.
• Five words: Nipple chain.  Maybe. Maybe not.

Thanks for the memories, you big glubberthumper.  And you’re always welcome to drop in here if you want a taste of true obscurity.

While Jas was hogging the spotlight in Ulduar this week, I was continuing on in Naxx, with a desire to complete it.

Coming out of Military wing, we had Four Horsemen left and I was looking at relatively pleasing numbers with the Stompasaurus. I had some time to prepare, so I took advantage of it.

First up, the laser kitty was leveled to 80, and the peasants rejoiced. Once I had that, it was time to do some numbers, so off I went to Darnasus (because I needed a trainer close by) to do some comparisons. I was troubled to find that the laser kitty lagged behind by around 100 dps. No matter what I tried, it simply wasn’t going to exceed a Stompasaurus properly talented. Incidentally, I found a talent build that added 200 dps to the lizard’s contribution, so it wasn’t a wash.

Thus armed, I returned.

Our first attempt was a wipe when the shammi in the back corner kind of freaked out and died. This was his first time on 4H and he probably panicked. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell people that all they need to do is keep aggro and live, they freak until they experience one good run.

Tenatively, I volunteered to pull out the Bear and take one corner. After all, I had seen the fight through Jas’ eyes, and I know more on the theory of how it could go. Besides, if a tree druid can do it, so can I!

I’m happy to say that it worked like a charm. I just kept autofire on and kept heals on Bumbles, and it just ticked like clockwork.  BM, foshizzle! RAWR.

Construct went smooth as glass, leaving us with Sapphir -

What?

You want Jas to come in to heal Sapph and KT?

Nooooooooo!

/sulk

/sigh

I’ll be over there trying out the ales.

Saturday was our first ever attempt on Ulduar. It went far more successfully than I would have predicted. We had our ‘A’ team and ‘A’ game – other than the seeming inability to be on time, including myself.

We one-shotted Flame Leviathan and XT-002, and two-shot Razorscale and Kologarn. We were unable to down Ignis, probably because of add management – hard to tell in all the confusion.

Overall it was a fairly pleasant experience considering that drama occurred right before and even during. Boy, we sure can get it.  We don’t have that many people logging it at any time, how can we generate that much drama so constantly?

Well, I’m not sure where this puts us now for raiding. We’re running out of nights to raid everything. We still need to work out Sarth with drakes up, and EoE and VoA are taunting us, and some people have actual lives to attend to as well.  I feel if we keep pushing for naxx raids that we’ll lose the more ambitious toons that want to focus on Ulduar now that we have made our first steps.

I guess I can see that. Nobody raids Molten Core anymore, except for lolz.  Still, those getting geared up are going to have to resort to badge runs and scrounge what they can get, looks like.  The good news is that as small as this guild is, that won’t be many people.

Onoz teh dramaz

So, remember when I said to enjoy the good times when you have them? The underlying sentiment is that they are all too fleeting.

You know where this is going: I was proven right.

The very next night, one of our long-standing founding members and officers – who has been a constant pain in the codpiece – decided to erupt in /g chat with a pile of obscenities and swearing about how bad pugging on our server was, and our server in generally just sucked. A guildy – OK, it was Mrs. Grimm – snapped back, “well, roll on another server, then.”  He immediately /ragequit.

/sigh

I’m done with him. I’m so done with him that I’m considering leaving the guild and starting my own to house all those that want to have nothing to do with him. That might effectively end OCV, because at this point I don’t know if even the GM would stay behind.

For now I’ll consider my options and mull it over some more. I have to decide why I would even bother starting a guild if this game has gotten to the point where I’m willing to go that far. I mean, maybe it’s time to wrap it up, or at least take another break for a few months. Maybe all I need to do is put him on ignore and be done with him.

In more pleasant news

Much to my surprise, raid night at Naxx proceeded as planned. Even more to my surprise, I was invited. I had Jasra parked there since the priest that we had planned on healing in her place was not on (we found out later: wife aggro).

I was unhappy that I was not able to bring out SDI for the proceeds, but as he’s currently only 78, there would be level aggro all over the place.  So out came Reaganomics, the stompasaurus of economic dooom!

I had a bad moment after the Anub fight. I looked at the damage meter and commented that my DPS was sucking big-time at only 1200. The GM disagreed … then I realized I wasn’t merging pet numbers in, as I had been wanting to see how SDI’s broke out from mine earlier.  Once I merged the numbers, I was much happier with my performance.

I came in 3rd in a relatively weak DPS pack. Our top-flight mage and hunter (SV) were leading with around 3500 and 3000 apiece, then me at 2500, then various melee dps starting around 1900. Our tank¹ actually outdid most of the melee DPS, as far as that goes.

Which makes it more astounding how well we ran that raid. We had a couple of wipes, no doubt attributable to some relatively newb blood (including me!), but overall we ran through the place and got 2 1/2 wings done, one of which was Construct, so no ezmode for us.  We got plague wing and Four Horsemen, then we go after KT.

I got two pieces, a neck piece from Anub and a helm from Thadd, which is – by the way – the first helm I’ve had that I wasn’t ashamed to show in a long time. It’s a right proper helm for a Dwarf.

Or the Goddamn Batman.

1. ”All hail K! All hail K!“” [↩]

A lot of people get bent out of shape if they can’t get all the achievements for all the holidays and thus get what Flora calls “their big purple strap-on.”   (Don’t look at me!) It really does take the fun out of the holidays, but some of those are pretty gruesome, too, forcing one to do unseemly things, such as PvP.

Here at casa de Grimmtooth we prefer less stress (Meta has to watch his blood pressure) so we set our sights on more achievable goals to start with.  For example, the Green Proto-Drake is a rare “hatch” from the egg you buy from the Oracles for two gold and change.  Now, I’ve been buying that egg every time I could since January, for I would guess around 250 gold total. But it paid off. Oh, yes.

Isn’t she a beauty?¹

Jasra and Flora are still working on theirs, but at last I can finally finish off the Oracle line and start working on the Frenzyheart.

Jas’ Naxx raid finished off last night by clearing two and a half wings plus Sapph plus KT. She got her tier shoulders and a new mace. We’re still not sure if it’s in total an upgrade, but probably so.  Each of the fights took longer, though, than they used to. Partly because they had three healers rather than two. On the plus side, healing was easy peasy. On the minus side … slow. Close to enrage timer on a couple of them.

So I’m wondering if Jas or the Shammi healer should step out and let a DPS step in. :: polishes gun ::

Oh, and to any curious visitors from Tam’s .. hi! Don’t forget to set out a new keg if you empty the one that’s out. And don’t mind the snow tiger, he’s harmless as long as you don’t try to pinch the silverware.

1. Well, might be a he. You have to lift the tail to find out, and that’s one big tail! [↩]

Flora can bite me.

This past week we ventured into VoA for a little bit of fun, and Jas was asked to sit it out for another healer to get his gear on, so I gave it a go. We figured that the worse thing that happens is that I swap out for Flora or Shadow-Jas, right?

What happened though is that I and my stompasaurus came in 3rd on the meters.

I was actually quite surprised. I guess the little upgrades here and there do add up.

This weekend I sat out while Jas went into EoE with the guild. The did well for the very first time, though they didn’t bring down Maly. Phase 3 was achieved but they were getting there with 2 minutes or less each time. Have to get better at placing the sparks.

But that’s not what this is about.

As is usual for us, our new MT, a new recruit to the guild, got nicely geared up, then departed for a “raiding guild”. He left alts behind, including one to whom Slithmere had just given two stacks of gold ore to level his mining.  Number of gold bars returned: zero.¹

In times past we would have been highly annoyed. Now we just roll our eyes and assign his alts to “pond scum” level and move on. Maybe we’ll have a working tank for Tuesday, or maybe we’ll take a week off from raiding and see who else bails out of impatience.

I’ve said before that we’re not one of those guilds that eschews raiding, but we also don’t push it. We like to be able to raid on a weekly schedule, but if someone is sick or out of town for a week or two, we just lay back and chill out. Some people don’t get the ‘casual’ part of our guild charter. I guess they think that we mean that we wear blue jeans while we raid, instead of dockers.

It’s a shame; he was a good tank, and I was on the verge or recommending his promotion. I was concerned he’d do this, and that held me back, and I was fortunate to see how he behaved in an actual progression setting.  The short answer: if we don’t get it in one session, he leaves. Noted. He might have also had some issues with our usual collection of screwballs, but that never really came up.

Our guild bank funds were flat empty with all the toons repairing using guild funds².  I’ve been running the troops on a savings plan with the intention of buying the guild a 5th tab in the guild bank, but after seeing that I decided to replenish the progression repair funds instead. Between Flora, Illume, and myself we were able to pop 3000 gold into the fund. We’ve still got 1000 apiece over 10 toons, so this is not a big sacrifice. Feels good to contribute, too.

1. ETA: He returned the ore. I withdraw my trash-talking in that regard. [↩]
2. Including a certain warrior, I’m sure. [↩]