Well, while the servers are down I finally have the spare time to write something resembling a post! It’s not really a post, though. Instead, it’s a … todo list!

Finish levelling professions on Lunedi
Thanks to this guide and some mat donations from a guildie, I got Lunedi’s mining and jewelcrafting up over 400 this weekend. She’s just starting to mine saronite from Sholazar Basin, and will soon be fighting it out with everyone else for titanium, which I can prospect for blue gems to level JC!

Organize daily profession stuff
Continuing my gold-making plans from last week, I’m trying to make better use of my professions. Liore has an epic gem transmute each day that I should take advantage of, plus unlimited meta gems. Lunedi should do the JC daily every day, and make icy prisms when I get to that point. I have a level 70 tailor/enchanter who should really get her shatters and specialty cloth cooldown timers sorted. And on that idea..

Switch Liore to Transmute Spec
Liore has been Potion Spec since the beginning of time. Back in the day, being able to make my own mana potions was extremely cost efficient. It’s still pretty handy for the first few months of any new expansion, but overall I’d be better suited by being able to proc extra transmutes.

One Light In The Darkness (10s)
Both me and another healer just need this achievement to get our Ulduar drakes. I have a timer up to the Keepers saved — ask for help with this from the guild!

Get Exalted with Keepers of Time
Find some poor suck– um, helper to run Heroic Black Morass a few times. How am I just short of exalted with KoT, anyway? It feels like I ran BM a million, billion times to help people get keyed for Karazhan.

Get the Perky Pug on Liore!
Oof. While the LFG system was top of my daily priorities when it debuted, I admit I have been slacking a bit as of late. It’s also really tempting to just run with guildies instead of puggies, but that does not get me any closer to an adorable doggy of my own! Just 19 more random people to go…

Send mats from Guild Vault for flasks
Find a nice elixir master.

Repost all auctions on Friday morning
I’m going away for the weekend, so I’m listing everything my banker owns on Friday morning on a 48-hour timer. Let’s see how much gold I’ve REALLY made with this AH mogul thing.

Evaluate new recruit
Check the logs tomorrow morning.

Read up on new ICC bosses, kill Putricide
Argh, Putricide! 16% last week.. assuming people are on the ball, I think we’d have it… except our Abom driver is away for work this week. Figure out if we should wait until Monday (traditionally a weak roster night), or power through with a better roster but novice abom driver on Thursday.

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Random ICC, LFG, quests/dailies, silly

Look, let’s just put this in big bold letters up front so everyone knows where I stand: DO NOT NERF PLAGUE WORKS FOR A LONG TIME. Thank you.

I should hasten to add that we haven’t killed any of the three new bosses yet, so I am hardly speaking from a position of uber superiority. In fact, we wiped to Festergut 11 times on Tuesday, getting him as low as 3% once. And when we kill him tonight, as I suspect we will if everyone is on the ball, it will feel really good.

Everyone who has ever raided knows how good a first boss kill can feel. That rush is proportionate to how much work you put in to killing him. I remember after five weeks of slogging away on Kael, I literally teared up when he finally died. That feeling when the boss you’ve been banging your head against falls down and Vent erupts in cheers — that’s the rush of raiding. I like to improve my character and hang with my friends, but that boss kill is the real kernel of raid satisfaction.

That satisfaction has been sorely missed by “average” raid guilds such as mine.

Oh sure, there are Heroic modes, and we do a fair number of them. Some are unique fights in their own right, like Sarth-3D, and very challenging. But most are just the same old boss you have already fought three different ways, only with everything scaled up. I killed Gormok in normal 10s, heroic 10s, normal 25s, and now I can kill him while he hits the tank for 40k? Awesome. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not very interesting.

Meanwhile, normal modes in ToC-25 were so easy that we were clearing the place in an hour by our third run. I remember when we would be all excited to get a screenie of us standing around the corpse of a new boss, but with ToC it was hard to feel like we’d actually done something until we just finished the place. Even the first wing of ICC was a little underwhelming, at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, the boss mechanics are interesting, the setting is neat, and I get to shackle things, but none of the kills gave that sense of accomplishment.

Then along came the Plague Works. It was incredibly fun: fresh new content, and a boss that at our level requires solid concentration, effort, and teamwork from everyone involved. Our team has been buzzing since Tuesday, too. People are analyzing the raid logs, posting on the strategy threads, and shoring up any holes in their gear. There are places to go and things to kill.

Back in TBC we were very happy to have a new boss down every two weeks. Fourteen days! And we liked it! I understand that Blizzard wants to get away from elaborate fights like our five week effort to kill Kael’Thas, and I’m not entirely opposed to that. But give us some challenge. Give us a reason to be good (and get better) at what we do. Give us the occasional morsel of fresh content that we can’t just brute force into the ground, and I suspect that you, my dear Blizz, will find many satisfied customers. For the moment, I am one of them.

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Raiding Ruminations ICC, raiding, rants

So yesterday I wrote a little mini-manifesto to the guild, although I don’t think it was very shocking. It was just basically reminding people that 3.3 is here, and it was time to buckle down and knock this last raid instance out of the park.

The raiding in 3.2 was so terrible that I felt bad marching people through achievements and hard modes. I stood in that room three nights a week at least (25s and 10s), and even my infamously unlimited resources of guild cheerleadering were being taxed. It was pretty easy to just wipe out ToC, Ony, and VoA in 90 minutes and then tell everyone to go do something fun. Plus, some people don’t really dig achievements, and get a little shirty when they wipe for an hour to get some flashing lights and a noise that they don’t care about anyway. (Side note, but to those people I say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” You don’t like it, go talk to Blizz and tell them their new raiding paradigm is stupid.  Bosses don’t matter any more, per se. It’s all about achievements and hard modes. Personally, I like it.)

Anyway, previously the time requirement was a huge block to our competitive progress as a guild. As it stands now though the time demands of raiding are greatly diminished. After the holidays we will be raiding 9 hours a week (three nights at three hours) which should handily cover farming, progressing, and achievements. And no, server ranking isn’t everything, but it’s somewhat satisfying to see your guild name in lights, and it DOES help a lot with recruiting.

Without that time limitation, competitive progression relies upon player skill, teamwork, gear, and proper motivation from the gal upstairs… oh crap! That’s me! Hence the manifesto. So we started off our new achivement-happy stance by picking off “On A Boat” and “I’ve Gone and Made a Mess” on our second clear of ICC. The latter took a little strategy and a few wipes, and the former was chaos and madness and chanting “shootit shootit shootit shootit” at the cannoneers. The result of our little adventures?

Which, you know, doesn’t actually MEAN that much, except that we are a guild of determined spazzes with a rocket pack fixation. As a pally said, “WTF are other guilds doing right now? Underwater basketweaving?” All it took was a little motivation and 45 minutes of patience from the team, and we saw results unlike those we’ve ever seen before.

So to all you other ‘casualcore’ guilds out there: You don’t need time to be recognized as badass! This is kind of the dawn of our era. Knock that 3.2 lethargy out of your head, go forth, and achieve. As Newton — or was it Ghostcrawler? — said, a guild in motion tends to stay in motion.

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Achievements, Guild Management, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, ICC, raiding