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.

I was a bit surprised to the the senior staff log in tonight considering that raiding has been suspended for the week. I was quickly asked to come to the daily (HoS); I was quite happy to. Grimmy needs a new hat.  So off we went.

I found that the goal was also to get a couple of achievements; we failed at the final one because we failed to understand the difference between the two kinds of slimes.  But I got a few.

After that it was decided to storm Gundrak and go for more achievements.  Unfortunately, we were only able to get the one.

Finally, we went for CoS. We planned a timed run, but the tank had never run it before and started the Malgannis fight instead.  I franticaly changed out to the bear which got rofloneshotted.

Once everyone died, we still had time; however, our druid died on the wipe and didn’t take the rez in time to get credit for the kill or a chance to roll on the drake. She was quite cross, and actually left the group in a snit once we downed Mal. Him and Jas should get together and drink. A lot.

I didn’t get the drake, but I got credit of a sort.

I wasn’t aware of it but I had been stacking up Timear quests all along, and this put me over the top.

Overall, my DPS was around 2250. Not bad for an undergeared BM huntard.

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.

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.

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!“” [↩]

Now that our new raiding tank’s departure has had time to sink in, we’re being introspective in officer chat¹ and asking good questions, such as “how do we fix this?”

The answer was probably not what anyone wanted to hear, and that was “make the guild what is isn’t.”

Well, that’s change, for you.

The unspoken question was “how bad do you, as a guild, want this?”

Here’s the thing. We’re casual. Very casual. We have a hard time fielding 10-man raids because we have that few interested raiders. We don’t enforce start times, consumable  requirements, gear requirements, or anything of that nature. If we get 10 bodies willing and able, we go in and either die over and over or learn the fight, then move on to the next one.

Rather than being a “progression guild”, we’re a casual guild with progression on our minds. If we can, we can, but we don’t do it at the expense of our “family”.

This was one sore point with the departed tank. Three failraids (Ony, Emilon, EoE) in which nobody was kicked from raiding, no obvious adjustments made by the officer corp. He didn’t “get” us. We told him up front we were casual, he was cool with it, but he changed his mind. Moving on.

So rather than toss the “tossers” as it were, we do our best to work around them. The warlock that always dies in a fire? We make sure we have DPS to compensate. The squishy tank that doesn’t gear up right? Dedicated healer. The mage that keeps pulling aggro? Oh wait, that’s the GM. Whatevs. And don’t get me started on my own screwups or we’ll be here all night²! We’re all huntards at one point or another, so we try to have fun as we go along. We have a guild-institutionalized Huntard Hat Award. How obvious do we have to make this?

Heck, we’ve had officers leave the guild over that – founders, even. But the GM holds to the principle that we’re here to have fun, not have a second job.

Do I regret that I’ve never seen Black Temple or Hyjal or Sunwell with my guild? A little, I won’t deny it. And I probably won’t see much of Ulduar before Icecrown is out, either.  I’m at peace with that. Those that are not, really should move on.

As our officer corp realized, changes to the guild would gut us morally and physically. It would betray our founding principles. One by one, voices died out as everyone realized this. We’re going to have to find a better way to do this.

Our guild is Ordo Cuniculi Vorpalis, the Order of the Vorpal Bunny. Our values and humor are right there for all to see. When someone sees something neat in the game for the first time, and comments in guild chat about it, there’s always somebody that responds: “it’s only a model.”  We get every single Monty Python joke in the game. It’s in our DNA.

A sense of humor and being serious about raiding are not mutually exclusive, but the former at the expense of the latter is not on the table, not ever. Sure, that means that we don’t cull out slow learners and underperformers. It also doesn’t preclude us from informing people when they have room for improvement.

Games are for having fun. This is at the core of what we believe in, and I believe that it is right and proper. At the end of the day, the people that are there for each other are the true heart of the guild.

All else is transient.

1. I can’t get anyone on the same page for a forum to save my life. [↩]
2. Show of hands of people that have pulled the entire room @ Moroes using only his pet. /raiseshand [↩]

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. [↩]

After weeks of hiatus due to losing many key players, our guild made its first wobbly steps back into Naxxramas this week. Sure, go ahead, laugh. You’re taking down Yog-Sauraon or whatever using ten priests and paper forks at this point, our mere Naxx attempts are laughable.

Bah, go play in a fire somewhere, leettards.

Fact is, we’ve had a hard few weeks, but we’ve recruited from the ranks of the newly ascended, and we have some damned fine players in the batter’s box. While there is virtually nothing of value in Naxx 10 for me, I have nine guildmates that want to finish this instance in the worst way, and I’m there for them, no matter how annoying or thankless the job may be. And these people have picked up the gist of things remarkably well. It’s a lot of fun to see people that have never experienced this content do it for the first time.

We started at Heigan, who we one-shot, on-shot Loatheb, took three tries on Razevous, one-shot Noth and Four Horsemen, one-shot the entire construct wing, and two-shot Sapphiron with this crew. We took three attempts on KT, and our final attempt was 1.2%. I blame myself for letting one DPS die.

We’ll return on Monday and take this bastige out for our third ever clear of Naxx. We’re looking at Loot Leviathan…

Nice to be back raiding. Nice to see people excited over doing this thing.

I think all 3 of our readers use RSS so nobody probably noticed that the site went dark for a couple of weeks. Meta’s bad … he forgot to pay the Internet bill and it died right in the middle of Dragon*Con … anyone knowing about that knows that attendees … or spouses of attendees … do not have money of any sort during that period of time.  So, apologies all around.

It’s been pretty quiet around our neck of the woods anyway. We’ve got some new blood in the guild, and we’re trying to train them up and raid with them and hope they don’t bolt for another, more ambitious guild. A certain guild that has been poaching ours forever imploded, so now we’re considering “co-raiding” with them, or vice-versa. Fai’s taken her place amongst us and has been terrorizing Hellfire right proper, and collecting herbs and ores like nobody’s business.

And I got to run my first 80 instance. Since Jas is the belle of the ball, I rarely get to see much of any action. No worries, that’s the way it rolls. Plenty of books to study and reagents to grind. But it’s nice to lay down a table for a party of five and rain down some destruction every now and then. This particular instance run became one of what Meta calls Epic Tales of Battle. Well, only one part of it, really, which was a wipe. Spectacular in its nature.

Our GM is a mage named, well, we’ll call her Songbird. Normally it wouldn’t be important except that she invented, more or less, the “Songbird Maneuver”, so I must use a name. Anyway, that maneuver goes down when the mage notices the tank going down and the priest appearing next on the aggro chart, and nobody left to heal or tank in the group, and no chance of ending soon. She lays down a frost nova, turns around, BLINKs, and runs for the entrance, blowing cooldowns on frost nova, ice shield, and blink whenever they come available.

That night, it was my turn, and I executed perfectly. I’m around 1/2 way out when around the corner comes our recently deceased priest, now hale and hearty. Waving, I went past trailing my retinue, and she just had to drop a heal on me. Down she went. Then our tank came around and I stopped to heal him. Only one problem, which you probably saw already. I’m not Jasra. So off I go again, and just before hitting the door, I went down. Of course, to add the last laugh, our hunter came in the door just as I went down. I shall ever remember “Hey, what’s going — WHOA!!!!” just before he splatted.

Now, one might say that in one’s “pro” guild, that would never pass. Lie down and force the wipe, already, you might say. And I generally agree. But, you see, we’re not a “pro” guild. We’re a bunch of friends getting together to have fun. Silly things like this provide a chuckle to the gnarly veterans, and help us judge our new recruits. If you take this sort of thing too seriously, you probably need to find another guild, because we roll a little differently in the Order of the Vorpal Bunny.

This is not to say that we don’t get down to business come raid time. We do. And next time, I will most likely just lay down and take it like a mage. But sometimes you need the image of a lone mage, frost nova-ing and blinking down the hall, screaming at the top of her lungs GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFFA MEEEEE with a legion of angry frost giants hot on her trail.

Oh, and by the way. 2nd on the charts. Me, as a 79 mage, grouped with an 80 hunter and 80 DK.  So I’m quite content with Frost right now.

It’s wonderful¹  that a week after you write up a post about how wonderful your guild is and how proud you are at the accomplishment of your guildmates … a couple of divas screw it all up.

Coming off a successful run, we were plodding through Naxx a bit slower this week, nowhere where we wanted to be, and stalling in odd places. Spider wing went smartly, but Gothik gave us fits.

We picked up Saturday, and one-shot Gothik, 4 horsies, Noth, Heigan, Loatheb, and Patchwerk. I had noticed that our off-tank was getting a little happy with chain pulls but figured somebody in charge was dealing with it.

We started on Grobbulus and the OT got aggro on the boss. The MT … stepped aside. “Well if you want to MT, then MT.”  The OT basically says “I don’t need this shit” and DCs. Then the MT leaves the raid and logs.

Leaving two healers and six DPS locked up in a room with one very angry … thing.  With a hypo where his hand should be.²

So this one’s for you, my passive-agressive tanking pals: GROW THE FRAK UP.

Thank you.

1. In some alternate universe [↩]
2. Afterword: Sunday we downed everything up to K’T. Same MT, different OT. No further comment. [↩]

When Grimm started raiding on behalf of the clan back at Kara, and later Flora as well, each boss was a stepping stone to the next, but each was a long, difficult learning curve. I recall clearly the excitement over the guild-first kill of Attumen. They avoided Moroes like the plague, and repeatedly bashed up against the solid wall that is Maiden. Oz was surprisingly straightforward but Romulo and Julianne gave them fits. And Curator … :: shudder :: … Grimm took to the ale hard and Flora invented whole new obscenities to mutter.

Overall, it took several months from our first boss kill to a full clear, which was just before they nerfed everything.  I may have seen one or two forays into Kara before that all fell apart, but overall that was the place where our senior members shone.

Good times.

Things fell apart then, as some guildies felt that the rest of the guild was holding up their forward progress – i.e. not levelling like a fiend – and our numbers teetered on the verge of never raiding again. We perservered. After all, there were Heroics to do and gear to obtain. The GL worked like a coal miner to keep new blood coming in as others broke loose. Old faces returned – and sometimes wandered off again.

But, finally, we got critical mass. At least enough people to where we only had one or two holes to fill from allied guilds. And in we went, just a few weeks ago.We made our first attempt at our first Naxx boss, after wiping on trash en route. We wiped on the bosses, too, of course.

Shortly thereafter, we read up on strategies, and took him down. We one-shotted the next boss and wiped on Meaxxna.

A week or two later, we were fully clearing that wing with occasional wipes, and moving on to other other bosses. Military wing was our next one, and for a while Razz was our bane. One or two tries later, we got him. We stalled on Gothik until we got the balance right, then we ran full tilt into Four Horsemen and hit a brick wall. Ow.

Eventually we got that down. The last two attempts have been like silk. Meanwhile, Plague Wing awaited. One-shotted everything up to the end boss (yes, Heigan was one-shot, even if we only had three standing in the end). We sailed through Construct with a couple of stutters, but within three weeks’ time we went from stalled on Horsemen to staring at Thadd – and we one-shot him.

It took us a couple of weeks to get a handle on Sapph – and it’s still rocky – but two weeks ago we took our first shot at Kel’Thuzad.  Less than a month had passed from when we first stalled on the Horsemen.

This week we set foot into the necropolis, facing a fresh instance. We took out Anub’Rekan before the second plague swarm. We rolled over Feralina before the 3rd enrage. Maexxna went “wtf, dudes?!”  Razz saw us coming and tried to hide. Gothik teleported twice. The horsemen didn’t get the zerg treatment, but I had 20K mana left¹ .  Noth, Heigan, and Gluth all fell before our wrath. And that was the first night.

The second night, Patchwerk, Gluth, and Grobbulus were all one-shots, but Thadd delayed his fate a little due to some bad jumps. But he did go down.  Sapph gave us trouble due to bad luck on the ice blocks, but went down in two or three tries.

That left us with two days to work on the big guy – normally it takes us three days to get here, but this time we had some good vibes kicking in.

Kel’Thuzad has left the building. Feet first.

It took us several tries, but we got him. Phases 2 and 3 really strike me as serious healer fights – if the healers stumble, you lose people. One of our members suggested to me that I save Pennance for those ice blocks, rather than hope for a lucky proc on flash heal, and that really seemed to turn the tide.²

Full clear, three days, two to three months after we started trying in earnest. I am so happy for our guild and especially our GL who has had to endure drama, drama, and more drama along the way.  Seriously, I don’t know why she didn’t snap, disband the guild, and retire on a beach near Zul’Gurub – it’s not like anyone visits there.

Malygos, then Ulduar, are on the horizon. We be small, but we be vicious: beware the vorpal bunnies!

1. ”Nerf MP5!” [↩]
2. So: Disc priests, save Pennance and (if not on CD) PW: S (with glyph).  Personally, I go straight for Pennance as it is most likely to be available. [↩]

Meta was going through the archives changing categories and sorting old posts out a bit and came across this entry, when my life attained new purpose and meaning.

The irony is as thick as that fog in Northrend, for the K2 Tankadin I mentioned is now our main raiding tank – and he prefers me healing him in raids. He probably has no idea the part that he played in the resulting circumstances.

And actually – I don’t think he actually killed his priest after all, though I haven’t seen him around.

… almost. So close. But we just ran out of time.

Our final two Construct bosses went down last night, Gluth on what was our third try (our first for the night), then one-shot Thadd FTW.

I didn’t think we stood a chance with Sapphiron, but on our 2nd or 3rd try, the old fella went down.

Then that left the Big Bad himself. We got one good shot in, got to Phase 3, and our second try failed on phase 1. At that point the early workers had to go to bed, so we broke up the raid.

But – what a week! Going into this week, we had at best taken down 5 bosses in Naxx.

Now we work on perfecting it and getting that final clear done.

/fallover

We’ve certainly been a busy little guild. When last I spoke of such things, we had completed the Arachnid Quarter, and were one boss short of the Military Quarter.

Saturday, we crash against the wall of the Four Horsemen, again and again. Part of the problem is that I was calling the switches, and I think I was off. Eventually our two tanks took ownership of the process and we downed our first one, then the second, and moved to the back, and Oh MAI GAWD we’re gonna … WE DID IT!  Despite one of the warlocks in the back insisting that we move on because we’d never be able to do it. ¹

Sunday, we find ourselves outside the entrance to the Plague Quarter. First up is Noth, and with decent DPS we brought him down before it got crazy.

Then came Heigan.

You have heard of the dance. I’ve read up on the dance and watched the videos. The one person in the raid that had done this extensively took 10 minutes to explain the fight, did a good job.

Of course, we were doomed. The first dance saw five out of nine (yes we were nine-manning at this point) fall victim to the dance. Left standing: the MT, myself, a healing Shammi, and a Survival Hunter² . We set about proving that Heigan could be taken down by such a crew … and we did.  A good 10 to 15 minutes later, we stood victorious. To commemorate this, the GM insisted that the four of us stand before the corpse while everyone else lie on the ground before us.  Clever idea.

All righty then, Loatheb! Nine-manned! Two-shot!  /flex   OK, is this a “healer fight” or a “DPS” fight? The two biggest obstacles to overcome here were (1) getting the healing timing down to fit into that 3-second window, and (2) remembering to toss some dots and use my wand during the downtime in between.

The GM is on fire now, so we’re charging hard into Construct Quarter, still nine-manning it. We decide that Patchwerk isn’t going to work on a nine-man configuration, so we get a former guildy to step in to the vacant slot³ .  No training vids now – the raid has outpaced my expectations⁴. We’re taking this one cold, with some instruction from our druid. After one wipe, he shifts to HoT assist mode and we are able to keep the tanks up.

Hey, look, it’s frogger!  OK, I expected a lot more pain here, to be honest. People have problems with this?  I can see lag playing a factor, but that aside, dying on this should be hard to live down.

Grobbulus! We two-shot this one as well but I really think we need to learn more about this boss to make it go smoother, such as how to dump one’s poison bomb, and so on.  In the end we were all dead, but so was he, and we were able to loot, so we’ll take it.

We ended the evening getting omgpwned by Gluth, with the realization that we needed to read up a bit on this one and Thaddeus.

But what a night … five guild-first kills in our Naxx progression. It’s nights like this that make all the drama bearable.

Oh, and this final screenshot serves two purposes.

1) Hey lookies, I haz epic rug now!

2) Fuubar was commenting on his ugly UI. I offer this as evidence that it could be a lot worse. As Grimm told him:

It is the TRUE reason that bin Laden is still in hiding.

It is what actually made Romney drop out of the presidential race.

Someone at Chrysler tried using it, and see what happened there.

McG used it on his WoW account.

Christian Bale saw it.

Seriously, my UI has been weaponized. Classified. Probably going to fight the Taliban.

To which I’ll add: and we totally took down Heigan with it.

Tonight: can we finish Construct? Will Sapph be Our Little Dragon? Will K’T get revenge for Bigglesworth’s untimely demise?

1. This is what we get for looking the other way while he pegs 25s – he starts thinking everything should be easy. /sigh. Can’t have a run without drama, can we?  At least nobody quit the guild, though our MT left the raid until the GM called him out and made him come back (good on her). [↩]
2. Our MT conjectures that we were probably the only ones to watch the vids as instructed. A good guess, I think. [↩]
3. we later found out that the DPS warrior he replaced had gone offline because the police raided a house on his block, and they killed power to the whole block [↩]
4. I’m in charge of finding and posting training materials on the guild site [↩]

Today’s Meta’s birthday, and many are celebrating in the traditional manner. He, of course, is busy camping the laser kitty while everyone else is off at work.

This weekend we actually executed our plans to raid – having more level 80 healers is a boon – and downed our very first L80 raid boss – Archie – as a guild. Naturally, the druid chest piece dropped, and naturally, we had no druids.

We attempted the Arachnid wing of Naxx and didn’t make it past Anub’Rekhan, but we identified several things that needed fixed before the next time¹, so it wasn’t all a loss.

We then attempted Sarth +0D, got the drakes down, but again failed to down the boss². Again, we learned from the experience.

I was elected to stay outside with the MT during the one drake where everyone runs inside the portal. Around 3/4 through, I was asked how my mana was holding up, and I was pleased to report that I was at around 13K out of 20K still. As I continue to run this spec I am learning a lot about its ins and outs. Rapture makes it so that any time your shield absorbs damage, part of that gets translated into mana for you. So if I keep my shield up on the MT as much as possible, my mana consumption is reduced to a trickle. It is very sweet, let me tell you!

What is interesting to me as a priest is that our GM has gotten her priest to 80 as well, and has started running heroics. Her comment last night was to the effect that she had no idea how hectic healing had become in WotLK. I was stunned. I had thought that this was just a case of Meta – a born DPSer – shifting gears to be a healer, and mostly just brute-forcing through it. To hear from an experienced healer the same thoughts that have flitted through my head … well, it was a load off my mind.

It changes everything for me. Now instead of wondering what I am doing wrong, I focus on what I do right and improve it. It’s a subtle difference, but it means a lot mentally in how one approaches what one does.

1. Namely, people need to learn the strat and stop trying to bully everyone else into non-standard strats [↩]
2. Again, for much the same reasons. [↩]