Alts and Achievements
Slowly but surely, I keep pushing my alts up that leveling hill. My warlock hit the big 4-0 on Monday, which meant…PONY!! The druid actually hit 78 too, but all she got were some feral talent upgrades she’ll never use.
😉
Anexxia got her Love Fool title while my shaman got started on it, and I tried to make a small dent in the Elders achievement as well. I get a little restless doing an achievement as unwieldy and far flung as the Lunar Festival with its trekking across the globe to honor the Elders. So I have combined it with outstanding area exploration and herbing. I do need to give props to Blizzard for replacing the TB Elder with Ezra Wheathoof. It was a classy touch.
Raiding
Raid-wise, we had a good attempt on Putricide in 10 (40% when most of us in the team had not seen him), and in 25 we got Festergut to 9% which far exceeds our prior attempts. It took a while to get the spore management flowing properly, and we had to suspend attempts while a raid member had an extended work-related AFK. But our final attempt showed we can do it if we get folks to show up and focus next week. It was a positive end to a week that found folks expressing frustration in our forums RE: the lack of progress in ICC over the past month.
Personally, I would, of course, like for us to progress more quickly. And I also get frustrated when folks haven’t come to raids prepared (i.e. both knowing the strats and having their flasks/food.) And I understand how it can feel annoying when folks get caught up on fight mechanics that seem simple.
To be frank, given the turmoil we had earlier this month with all of our raid schedulers quitting that task, a healer and DPS giving themselves a multi-week time out from raiding and a tank and DPS leaving the guild entirely, I am happy we have tread water. And I am confident as things have stabilized that we can and WILL do better.
Furthermore, the guild’s charter is to be inclusive with the raiding, which is always going to mean a slower pace. But since we don’t even have a Cataclysm BETA in place, we are looking at not having another raid to conquer for what? 6 months? Thinking back to the end of BC, folks got to where they could get in BT (or not as the case may be) then defaulted to running their myriad alts through Kara. I personally ran and geared up 4 toons through there and made myself thoroughly sick of it.
We’ve got plenty of time to conquer the Lich King. And unlike Ulduar, which only 1 10-man in our guild completed, and only one time at that, we won’t be running up against an easy loot pinata raid with better ilvl gear.
We have time to work on this and to improve. Folks just need a little patience.
I remember it took us 3 to 4 weeks to down Festergut 25, mostly due to getting the healing down, if it wasn’t the tanks dying it was one DPS, which cannot happen.
A couple of tips:
• Healers need to be in melee range, even 1 healer at range puts a high strain on the difficulty of healing if he gets Vile Gas, it can be done, but I would strongly advice against it.
• I can’t stress enough that healing assignments are key to keeping everyone alive.
• For example a shaman healing the melee (chain heal FTW), and a raid healer for each of the 2 groups of range (holy priest, tree druid or shaman) and 2 tank healers for the active tank (holy paly and or disc priest). With beacon on the tank the holy palies assist the melee healer shaman.
• Cutting healers back from 6 to 5 greatly helps beat the enrage, but It’s way harder to heal, still doable, but hard.
Frustration for hitting a wall can be discouraging, just a heads up, Rotface is actually quite easy, the dps and healing required is way lower than fester. It’s more a coordination fight than a gear check the way fester is. The key to Rotface is to have less healers, 4 or 5.
Been inclusive is fine, as long as it doesn’t imply carrying people. Fester just won’t go down like that, 7k dps is the mark DPSers need to break.
No flask? No food? Un-enchanted, un-gemmed gear? Un-acceptable
I think ToC 25 gave WoW players in general unrealistic expectations about cruising through new content (i.e. taking down a new boss every week) as well as about their own abilities. None of those fights required flawless execution (or much strategy at that.)
ICC content is closer to old world raid content as far as requiring a solid strat that everyone executes on. Lower Spire = Loot Reaver. But after that, the strategies get complicated, and require focus. And I like that!
We had a huge setback with our raiders who left us and the ones who went on hiatus derailing our momentum. But we’re back on the right path now. And well positioned to kick ass.
If I could have chosen, I would have liked a casual raiding guild. As an ex Guild Master, even when I told members wannabe that I could not ensure a raid spot or that they would need to best another member to earn a spot.
Even so, I always got drama, because of me trying to have an inclusive guild, cause invariably those that didn’t get chosen for the raid called me and my coGM elitist, loot whores and the such.
That’s why little by little I’ve been moving guilds where raiding is a more serious business.