Leading the Charge

Song of the Post:  Dream Theater – Panic Attack

Raid Leader.

I had never pictured myself in this role.  Ever since I started raiding when my mage hit 60, I assumed that for as long as I play this game, I would just show up, play my role and have some fun. 

Currently in Team Attractive, we don’t have a guild leader.  We basically have about 5-6 of us that share leadership and run the guild.  One of these officers usually got the raids together, led our raids and distributed loot.  He has been on hiatus as of late due to real life issues and like I had posted previously, we had a hard time getting raids together due to him not being around and the fact that he was one of our main healers.  A few people were very frustrated with the lack of raiding and not being able to clear everything in a week and morale was pretty low.

I guess around this time is when I took charge.  We didn’t know when our former raid leader would be back and we needed to raid.  So I sat my hunter out and brought in Loupe to heal while we waited for either the raid leader to come back or another guildie that wanted to heal got to 80.  So far I have actually enjoyed myself trying to lead our raid to victory in Naxx, Malygos and Sarth. 

We will see how it goes from here on out.

In other news, Lorkey has dropped skinning and picked up Enchanting.  I already have enchanting on Loupe, but with only having one person with enchanting that runs raids, we need at least two mains with enchanting so we can DE anything that no one wants.  Plus the extra 64 AP will be very nice! .  With this change, I will eventually drop enchanting on Loupe and pick up something else.  I am thinking about picking up herbalism so I can give Lorkey another crafting profession, not sure what though.

\m/

10>25

Song of the Post:  Gwar – Sexicutioner

What?!  How is that formula correct?!  Did you go to school or something?  What a D-Bag!

Heh.

So currently our guild is running 25 man raids either once or twice a week with another guild we have an alliance with to be able to run 25 mans.  We decided to start doing this due to some interest in trying it out 25 mans and the fact that since half of the people in our guild have not experienced anything above 10 man dungeons.

I used to raid back in Vanilla WoW with the Green Crusade and as much fun as it was with all of those guys and gals, I definitely do not miss the issues with dealing with 40 man raids.  Just WAY too many people in one place.  Too much loot drama.  Too much coordination.

Just too much in general.  The lesser, the better!

Fast forward a bit to when BC came out.  I was pretty excited that they lowered the raids to 25.  This however made raiding difficult with the amount of people in the guild.  With everyone trying to gear up through Karazhan, I never had the chance to raid with competitions for spots.  I was also in a period of my WoW playing that I was fearful of getting back into raiding since it took up so much time.  I was in the middle of getting ready to propose to my then girlfriend and I did not want anything to get in the way of planning for the wedding.

That’s when I found out a bunch of RL friends started playing WoW on a different server.  It was a smaller group and they just wanted to do 5 and 10 mans.  I did the progression thing, I did not need to do it again.  It was the perfect fit at that point.  When we got to 70, we started raiding Kara and I fell in love with the smaller group setting.  More intimate.  Rarely any loot drama.  Easier and quicker to make a tight group for raids.  It was great at the time when I needed more time for RL.

Before Wrath came out, most of my current guild went on a hiatus due to boredom and lack of 10 man content.  So because the wedding was over and I had more time to kill, I went back to the Green Crusade while they were raiding Sunwell.  This was the first time I got to experience 25 mans and it was definitely more refreshing from the 40 man raids, however I missed the smaller 10 man group.  Easier to talk to and get to know other people.  So when WOTLK came out, I decided that because of the 10 man content was going to be able to progress like 25 mans, I wanted to play with Team Attractive for the expansion.

So fast forward to today.  We have the current 10 man content on farm and we need something to do till 3.1 comes out.  And now that we have a couple of 25 man Naxxs under our belt, it reassures my thoughts on 10 mans versus 25 mans.  And I cannot wait until Ulduar comes out so we can show that place who is boss!

Hammer Smash Faced Sartharion Heroic!

Song of the Post:  Jeff Loomis – Miles of Machines

I dont know if it is sad or BA that we took out Sartharion Heroic with just 10 people.

On Saturday night after I got back from my Valentine’s Day dinner with my lovely wife, we did not have any plans so she caught up on some shows on the DVR and I logged in to see if there was anything going on.  The way our guild does raids is if there are enough people online and the right group make up, we will raid at that point.  Pretty unorganized, I know, but we never know when we will have the people on to do anything.  We had 10 people, 2 healers, 2-3 tanks and the rest DPS.  We were set for a night of killing, crushing and destorying everything!

Lately I have been playing my druid on raids due to the lack of healers we have had online.  One of the tanks on was gracious to let one of his alts come heal so I had a chance to get the gun for my hunter.  I told him I would make sure to switch out back to my druid so he had a chance to get the shield from Malygos if we fought him tonight.  Such a cool dude, thanks Lange!!

Anyways we had a very productive raiding night.  We finished 10 man Naxx with killing Sapphiron and Kel (no gun oh well).  I switched out to Loupe for Malygos and on our 3rd try we killed him.  We kept wiping on the drake phase, which I need to rant about drake fights at some point.  But we eventually got him down.  No loot upgrades for me, but thats ok because I was glad that we were finally able to get him down again since we had not taken him out since our last attempt.

It was about 11/12 or so and we had cleared all of the 10 man raid content.  We were all pumped that we finally cleared everything since it has been a while.  We were throwing around the idea of trying Heroic Sartharion because there is no enrage timer.  So we said screw it, lets do this!!

We did not need the extra tanks, so Lange and I switched again and I went back to my hunter.  It is pretty much just like 10 man Sarth.  Just more health and harder hits from all the mobs.  I was a little nervous at first when we started the first pull thinking how far are we going to get through this?  Is it going to be Wipefest 2009 or were we going to show this place what skilled players we have in this guild?!  Turns out, the latter was correct, sort of.  It was actually kind of a joke at some points.  It just took a bit more time than it would if you had 25 people in the raid.

Most of trash was the normal tank and spank.  We had a bit of trouble with the two giant mobs at first because of the curse they put on people since it has a chance to heal the mob whenever the player attacks the mob.  Once we got that down, the first drake was super cake.  I mean the kind of cake that melts in your mouth instantly like it just came out of the oven.  Mmmmmm.

We all got our first Emblem of Valor badge and couldnt believe it!  We cleared something that was in a 25 man instance!  We pressed on to the second drake.  This provided a bit of a problem.  Because of the lack of players and meaning the lack of DPS, we were not able to get any eggs down during the portal phase.  All the whelps were out and the tank had the drake and all the whelps.  We yell, “Screw it!  Just AoE the bastards!!”  The strategy actually worked.  We didnt even bother going into the portals.  We just let all the eggs hatch, the tank would grab them all and we would just AoE them down.  It worked very effectively and we got our second Emblem of Valor badge.

Third drake, same story as the first drake.  The cake once again melted in my mouth!  We finished clearing the rest of the trash and we were staring at the 15 million or so HP Sartharion in the face.  We decided to try the same strategy as we do in 10 man Sarth and see how that would hold up. 

We buffed up, everyone was full health/mana, Ready Check was good to go, I had Warriors of the World playing in the background.  IT WAS GO TIME!!

The whole fight took us about 13 minutes to complete.  It was long, but we were able to get through it with only a slight problem.  We were faced with the problem we had with the second drake.  The fire elementals had too much health for us to single target one by one.  For 10 out of the 13 minutes, I did nothing but Volley.  We had one tank on Sarth and one tank holding all of the adds right next to the boss.  Everyone was then being hit by AoEs including Sarth.  We moved whenever the firewall was up and continued to do this until he died!  WE DID IT!!

The funniest part about the instance was I went through an entire bag of ammo from the first drake to the middle of Sarth.  I was unpacking an ammo box in the middle of the Sarth fight and everyone was laughing about it.

Since I have not done any 25 man content in Wrath, it was to my surprise that we got two Tier tokens!  And guess who won one of them?

Thats right!  I was able to get the Tier 7.5 gloves!  Something I did not think I would ever get.  There was some other gear that dropped, but I dont really remember too much of it because of the excitement of killing a 25 man boss with just 10 people.  I know there probably has been plenty of people that have done this before, but I think it is an accomplishment in itself regardless!

The only problem with the whole night is that we did no SS it .  So yeah I can hear people saying “No SS, then it didnt happen!”  But they can think what they want.  Just check out the achievements on Lorkey and the other guild members in my guild and there are only 10 people that have it right now.  But it doesnt matter.  It was still a kick ass time and we are planning to do this every week.

Hail Team Attactive and congrats on a job well done!

Ba Ba Booie

Song of the Post:  Iron Maiden – The Clairvoyant

Well we downed Saph and Kel, no helm or gun .  Oh well.

I had been thinking about something that I would wanna try with 4 other people just to see how far we can get.  One of my guildmates and I had talked about it before and it is kinda similar to what Bell had said on her blog, but a step further.

Get a group of 5 together and start at Deadmines or Ragefire (depending on faction).  Start completely naked and work your way up through each dungeon in level order.  Equip any gear that you get during the run whether its greens or blues.  The goal is to see how far you can get without it being a wipefest.  If you wanted to be hardcore about it, you could always say first wipe and you are done.  I think this would be something fun to do and could present itself to be a challenge once you start getting into the higher level dungeons.

Nothing is really going on in game right now.  We are going to attempt to try to take out Sartharion with 3 drakes up over the weekend since it is really the only thing we have not done with 10 man content.  So we shall see how that goes.  But other than that we just have Malygos left to clear.

This weekend I think I may work on my Death Knight Bludburn.  He is currently 63 right now and he is sporting Jewelcrafting/Mining professions that I would like to level up.  Because of how much content is left to do till Tuesday, there will probably not be much raiding, which is fine.  I love working on alts! 

On a side note, my wife and I are going to a japanesse steakhouse tonight.  Hopefully I won’t make my stomach explode after eating so much .  Have a great weekend!

BT Gitters

Song of the Post:  Metallica – My Apocalypse

So its been about 2 weeks since I started playing with The Green Crusade again.  And it has been awesome!

I have been running heroics, doing PvP and a little bit of Kara.  My goal was to try to gear myself up to at least be able to do ZA.  I didn’t think I would be able to go to any of the content that they were doing, which now they are starting to dab into Sunwell.  Since I knew that I probably would not see Sunwell at all, at least I could still play with them on their alts through ZA.

Over the course of this past weekend, guildies were telling me to sign up for the first half of Black Temple.  I told them I didn’t think I was ready with the gear that I had.  I still was not hit capped and my spell damage was under 1k if I was specced full frost.  They said we will just gear you up since most of the raiders just need stuff off of Illidan.  Plus, they needed mages.  So, after more and more pressure to sign up, I signed up for the Tuesday raid.

On Monday the guild leader whispered me asking if I was going to be around Tuesday night.  I say yup I sure am.  He said well get ready to go to BT with us!  I was stoked.  I finally get to raid with my old buddies and get to see what BT was all about. 

But I was very nervous.  The last time I had done a 25 man raid was about a year and a half ago with them when they were just starting out on Gruul and Magtheridon.  All I had been doing the past year and a half were 5-10 man dungeons.  On top of that, I didn’t want to be a liability to the raid if I was too undergeared.  But they really want me to go, which is an awesome feeling, so I went to studying the bosses and getting elixirs/food/oils for the raid.

So yesterday I stepped foot into BT, and I think it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.  Namely because they pretty much have BT on farm status, but thats beside the point .  It felt pretty natural getting back into the mage role in a raid.  Sheeping, spamming frostbolt, sheeping spamming frostbolt, spamming frostbolt, etc.  In all seriousness, it was a blast.  Seeing all of these bosses I kept hearing about and actually doing the fights was a rush for sure.  The only fight I was nervous about was Gorefiend.  If he gives you a debuff, you have to run to the other side of the room and you turn into a ghost.  Your role at this point is to slow down these spirits that head towards the raid so they do not kill them.  Since I had never done this fight before, I was hoping that I would not get the debuff.  Fortunately, I did not .

We cleared everything up until Mother due to several people in the raid (me included) need shadow resist gear for that fight.  So that will be something I need to work on.  I ended up getting some robes and a wand, both are really sweet.  I was really glad that the robes dropped so I could test out a fire spec since I have been told that is the raid spec to go now.  I am going to test this out and see how it goes.

All in all, it was great to raid with them again and I had fun doing it.  Those guys are not only one of the most talented groups of people I have played with, but also the most fun.