Eventful Day

So I had a fabulous (yes Im manly enough to be comfortable using the word fabulous) few hours of PvP today.  Over 1100 kills before dinnertime... it was a varitable slaughterhouse. Good good times with my people.  I've been making a few new battleground buddies lately, but its always the old bg buds that come thru for you the best. In today's case, my two priest homies, one disc, one shadow, were in our base in WsG defending our flag. While they were farming returns, I went out to run the flag. Couple struggles along the way of course, but druids are so OP that it takes alot to really get in my way. But on my last run, as the horde got all frustrated with my two priests not letting them pick the flag up, they went all in to our base to try and get our flag. I met no opposition, nabbed both speed boosts, used my dash and cheetah form to full potential, my team facerolled the horde, and I cap. I got a surprise achieve too, and I did an actual half jump out of my chair fist pump woot.



Then this evening, back to Uld 25 HMs. Good times, got a couple of the oddball achieves, Set Us Up The Bomb on Mimiron, and Thorim (is this really a) Hard Mode. Couple wipes and an eventual call on We Choose You Steelbreaker, which is a pretty straightforward, yet healing intense fight. Most proud of Freya though, crazy lot goin on in her HM, all the keepers, crazy adds, serious raid-wiping abilities, all in all, its one of those fights that gives you a right good feeling when its finally over. Good times, and good job to the raid.

32753 Kills as of today. C'mon 50k.

The sacrifices we make for guildies.

Because our guild is not a "Raiding Guild", our memebership is not built around raiding. While this is not a bad thing in itself, it does put a small burden on those of us who want to raid.

We build a raid, and like alot of Raid Leaders, ours wants to have a full guild raid. Herein lies the problem : we are obligated (more by a sense of 'trying to be a good guildie' than actual rules) to admit guildies to the raid regardless of their skill level, play style, class, role, performance, or attendance, simply because they are 'interested' in going.  This causes some problems within a raid. Any raider worth his salt will tell you that a full compliment of buffs is the bizniss, it makes you perform at you peak, doing more and taking less damage, or doing better healing using less mana etc.. When you have to admit everyone who's interested, sometimes you end up with a great composition with all the buffs you need, sometimes you get shafted and miss out on crucial buffs/abilities which affects the raid in a big way. This can be categorized as a raid composition problem, but... our Raid Leader can hardly be held responsible due to his 'obligation' to the guildies, thus he lets them bring whoever they want, and if we are missing a shaman for heroism, "oh well". 

We have players of all skill levels in the guild, and it takes being a real raider to realize that there is a very big disparity in the skill levels required for raids. This being said... people who aren't real raiders have no clue, they think if they can get in the door, they have met the requirements for said raid. There is no way a serious 25man raid would ever admit anyone wearing green (uncommon) or blue (rare) gear, and all purples (epic gear) are not the same. Gear goes hand in hand with experience, we want to see people in gear they acquired in 10man ICC, so we know you've seen some of the fights.  In our raid we have people who have never seen the inside of ICC before, no Uld, no Naxx even. People in badge vendor gear that they acquired by running fail heroic dungeons all day every day, which is admirable (hey, gotta start somewhere), but it does not attribute to your skill level at all.  So the raid leading team is required to not only explain the fights, but actually micro-manage what people are doing throughout, and then monitor them through the whole fight (on top of playing their own class) to make sure they are adherent to the tasks they were set. 

Some people dont have what it takes to raid. Simple statement I know, but here's the rub. Most of the people who dont have what it takes are in the worst kind of denial, they think that just because they 'want to go' and they 'can get in' that they are ready. Any real raider will tell you it takes attention, temperament, patience, knowledge, awareness, reaction, anticipation, and a host of other 'actual' skills to be successful in a raid. Some people's playstyle does not include these things, they are laid back, they dont actively think of how best to use their toon's capabilities (ex:  a hunter using misdirect when the tanks have a 4million threat lead on any of the dps... waste of time).

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with a guild raid (as opposed to a raiding guild), in my eyes at least, is that it's hard to hold people accountable. When people screw up, we have to be nice about it, shuffle our feet and try to tactfully help them to come to understand where they went wrong and how they can do better, as opposed to telling them to get it right or gtfo.

Another accountability issue we have been having in particular is attendance. Here we are tripping over our own feet in a big BIG way : we tolerate poor attendance. We miss out on 45+ minutes of raid time filling up the raid, which is no more than the Raid Lead saying every 5 minutes "we are waiting on (fill in names of the 10 guildies who accepted and didnt show yet), let's give em another 5 minutes" then when one shows up it's "we are waiting on (fill in the names of the 9 still missing), I'm gonna start trying to fill their spots".  When we finally do fill, whether it's with the latecomers on the accepted list, or with pugs, does the RL give them a good lashing for starting 45mins late? No. "Thank you for coming".  Which brings me full circle to the root of most of the problems : our Raid Leader.

We talked about what it takes to raid, but what it takes to raid lead goes further on in the list of required skills, too numerous to count out here, and honestly I dont know them all. I do see a few large ones lacking here though. One of them, and I dont know if it is the inherent 'good guildie' implications or just 'I dont care', is the ability to deal with problems that affect the whole raid. You have 15 people there on time and staring at trash inside the instance for 45+ minutes and then you act like it's all good that we are finally starting, instead of being pissed that we are starting late. In fact, 20 mins before raid start this week, I said on vent "Ok, I'm gonna log over and line up for the raid". the raid leader said "Hey wanna try and sneak in a random heroic before the raid starts?"  (which caused him to be around 10 mins late to HIS OWN RAID, by which time myself and several others had been lined up and waiting for 30 mins or more). My advise to him, if he should happen to read this post, would be to start thinking about the raid an hour or more before the raid is slated to start. HE should be the one waiting around, not sticking 20 people inside and making them wait for 45 minutes. You owe it to the people who show up on time and come ready to do the damn thing, to make the raid happen, because you 'promised' them that it would. If the guildies are ever to get better/more serious about the raid, if the attendance/punctuality is to ever get better, if people's skill level is to get any better, it starts with the integrity of the Raid Leader. If you dont take it serious, who will? I, for one, will, and I can tell you that the people who do care get very upset when a Raid Leader doesnt care. I understand the scheduling and the monitoring of people's availibility and the sorting out of who's interested is alot, but it doesnt stop there. I also understand if you need help explaining fights due to your lack of experience yourself in 25man, these things are fine, even expected. But... the raid needs you to be strong and that works both ways, carry who you can, but be decisive enough to cut the fat, people who arent pulling their weight, arent showing up, arent getting better, for the better of the raid. End Rant.

BTW made my 30k kills, and I dropped my tank spec for a few days to try out some moonkin pvp, which is about the funnest thing since Disneyland. Starfalls-R-Us is now open, and we are giving out rain checks.

SotA

This weekend's Battleground *Call to Arms* is Strand of the Ancients.  OH boy, exciting times. For the alliance in my battlegroup, this seems a hard bg to grasp, conceptually. The whole game is about Demolishers (vehicles) vs. Gates (walls). Strategy here is, of course, stop the demos on defense, and stop them from stopping the demos on offense. Sadly, people are caught in what I'll call a 'PvP robot' loop. They manage to kill 1 demolisher, and the 3 players riding in that demo fall out, they proceed to fight the players while the other demolisher rides right past and up to the gate, or the other 2 demolishers, or the other 3 sometimes.  This is not only in SotA, across the board in bg's, people get caught up in racking up the honorable kills and fail to pay any mind to the objectives of that particular bg. Warsong Gulch for example, a competent group of 2 to 3 players can carry the whole team of unfocused nubs to victory, so if the other 7 are locked in the robot loop just killing in the middle of the field, it doesnt matter. This is not true for SotA, here you have to kill the demolishers which have a considerable amount of health, and I (a healer) am often the only one following a demolisher through a broken gate, while my teammates stay behind fighting players with pocket healers that arent gonna die anyway. All in all, this is my most frustrating bg experience, because I know what to do, but I cant accomplish it alone, and noone listens to a strategy. On the other hand, sometimes you get in a beautifully balanced group of people who know what's important and you can actually scrape a win in SotA. Even less often you get an opposing team that is horribad, and even with a scrub team you manage to do exceptionally well, but these are few and very far between. All things considered, I reckon I will be ignoring the *Call to Arms* and shooting for random battlegrounds instead, that way theres only a chance to be stuck in SotA.

28754 kills as the weekend starts, if I cant top 30k by Monday I'll call myself a failure, but I expect 30k tomorrow sometime. I have started spending my honor points and accumulated arena points on a feral pvp set. Though I will be using my PvE tanking spec with it, I think it will be useful in spots, if only as a stun-bot.

Algalon

Today I got in to an established *kinda* raid for Ulduar 25 HardModes. Not the most... attentive group I've seen, but hey, Uld raids are hard to come by, 25man harder still, and I'm not in the habit of looking a gift horse in the teeth... feel me? So it goes alright, and we WAY outgear the place (most of us), so it wasnt gonna be an impossible task but I was not ready. After getting the weekly raid quest out of the way *Razorscale*, we knocked out Heartbreaker *XT-002 Deconstructor* and then With Open Arms *Kologarn*. Just when i think we are moving on they holler that they want to do Algalon. I thinks to myself : "Self, you never did Algalon before, never watched a Tankspot vid even, and to top that off, you heard it was like the hardest fight EVER." So when I'm done crying and have changed my poopy diaper, I listen really hard to the Raid Leader's fight explaination (which, like most fight explanations when you never saw the fight, sounded like "wa wah wa, wa wa wa wah, wah wa wah wah, wah wa."), and away the fight goes. Oh and did i mention you get only 1 hour to attempt it, after that, it's better luck next week. So after about the 3rd raid wipe, I finally start to see whats goin on, and most of the others do too apparently because on the 4th attempt we get him to 7% (*the fight is over at 5%). "OK major progress." I says to myself. 2 more wipes later we didn't even get close. With disappointment in her voice the Raid Leader says "OK run back in, one more attempt left." and we fire it up with 7 minutes left on the hour alotted.

So we did it.  Next week's adventures : Iron Council, Freya, and Mimiron (which was rediculously hard on 10man, i can't even imagine what the 25 will be like)

PvE hunters in PvP

Had some interesting BG action today. A few epic wins, and a few miserable failures. In one notable Arathi Basin, up against 2 PvE geared hunters (who had almost 10k less HP than myself, and I'm a tree), I had more graveyard runs than honorable kills. Though I had 2 melee dps on vent, and called out the hunters' names in /bg chat, noone was killing them. Every time I rolled up to an engagement, all I heard was explosive shots going off in my arse. Gotta love when they consider you a big enough threat to target you first, but gotta hate when they *basically cheating* are wearing their PvE gear, and are basically able to two-shot you. It really gives me perspective for when I play my hunter. So I pose this question to myself : Will I, in the spirit of fairness / purity of PvP, wear my PvP gear on my hunter?, or will I harness today's anger and unleash it upon unsuspecting healers to ease my aching pride? (and my PvE gear is ALOT better than theirs was...)

27,295 honorable kills as of today. Working on that 50k achieve

Nym

First I will introduce Nymthiriel.  This druid was originally my wife's, until she quit playing WoW (which i cannot fathom why she would do such a thing) and i took it over when she was lvl 79. As my main raiding toon, Nym has seen a fair bit of the endgame content. Kingslayer with few hardmodes under her belt on 10man, 25man has healed and tanked 11/12. Nym is definitely my best geared toon, needing very very few upgrades *with the exception of 277 25HM drops, which she hasnt seen.

The second pic here is showing off my Heal UI. One of my favorite things to do is mod my UI, takes alot of time, and gives it that custom look and feel that you just know no other player can reproduce.

For Starters

I have been playing World of Warcraft now for a little over 2 years, and have come to realize that it literally consumes you if you let it. I let it. So here goes nothing, this blog will be the chronicles of a WoW addict, in his daily struggles with fail players, epic battles, repair bills, and gear upgrades.