Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I spent the weekend offline (again!) in another city celebrating my raid leader’s birthday. Some things are more important than blogging. I know, I know…

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Still Alive

First up, this is not a complaint that getting The Undying is too difficult. It IS very challenging, but I don’t mind a good challenge and it’s nice to have something to sink our teeth into while waiting for Ulduar. Given enough time, we’ll get this achievement. Instead I’m more complaining about the concept in general.

The problem with Undying/Immortal as it stands right now is that the majority of the time someone is going to be the goose. I’ve been on two attempts and was fortunate enough to not be the person who died either time, but in both cases they were strong players with a history of being awesome and not standing in crap. They just made one split second wrong decision, and that was that.

Most of our usual 10-man team is pretty good about someone dying. There is some sighing, some awkward silence, but c’est la vie. A few people get a little grumbly and tense, but no one has yet devolved into finger pointing and namecalling. However, we’re a fairly mature, close knit guild. I can only imagine in some guilds where there isn’t as much emphasis on social niceties it doesn’t go as smoothly for the poor goose.

And what of the healers? These “no death” runs are simply terrifying from a healing perspective. I act like I imagine a new mother does around her child: “Don’t let them touch that!” “Stay away from there, you could fall and hurt yourself!” “You can play.. but don’t go out of my sight!” It feels like just a matter of time until I screw up. The Undying was actually a big part of the reason that I’m raiding as DPS until Ulduar… at this point in the game, I just don’t feel like putting myself through the wringer.

The very clear and easy alternative to the current system is to unlink everyone’s success. You have to clear Naxx during one lockout timer without dying on a boss. The dude beside you dies? No problem, he’s out, you’re still in. It’s slightly easier on the healers, and it’s not as much of a drama-generating pressure cooker. It does lessen the challenge of the achievement, but there is something to be said for maintaining an emphasis on an excellent personal performance without encouraging finger pointing and poor sportsmanship.

Between Undying and all the 8 and 20 man achievements, sometimes it seems like Blizzard has it out for those who play the WoW guild management meta-game.

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Achievements, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, Naxx, raiding

I intended to let the 3.1 news settle before posting anything this week, but the information keeps flowing in and it all has actually got me damned excited.

3.1 cannot come soon enough

The priest changes are right spiffy, including targeted PoH, a spellpower buff to CoH, and an entirely new Renew with a flat heal up front. All three changes directly address common priest concerns, and really compliment our current tool set. I admit I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly ‘healycraft’ the changes, but my initial impression is that they look great.

And the new Glyph of Hymn of Hope absolutely solves all our problems with the original spell: three times the mana in half the time. It would be even more useful if they hadn’t removed Hymn of Hope in the same patch notes. Right hand, meet left hand. Perhaps you’d like to talk this over.

I’ve been trying to play it real cool with my guild, since legendaries can make even the most sensible people get a little weird, so let me share this here: omg omg omg omg omg omg omg HEALER LEGENDARY omg. I’m not sure who will claim the first one for the Cats (the decision will be made by non-healer officers), but it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that healers in general have been pretty cranky lately, and this was a nice little sign from Blizz that they do love us after all. Now enough with the model shots, I wanna see some stats for this sucker.

Along with all the class changes comes what looks like a new long, multi-patch event, the Argent Tournament. I think events are great, as both a player and a guild leader. They get people logging on every night, running around the world, trying new things, and they’re always fun. The initial information is that this event has new mounts and pets, and features mounted combat, and thus far looks like an appealing way to spend non-raid time.

Additionally 3.1 has the greatest patch note ever: “Summons and dismisses a rideable mechanical gnome head“.

Oh, and there’s also this Ulduar thing.

Yes, this is the most puffy fangirl post I’ve ever written, because the 3.1 notes make me feel distinctly like clapping my hands with glee. With class tweaks, new events, a new raid, dual specs, new mounts (aquatic? exactly what water will we be repeatedly going through?), achievements, and pets.. this is almost like the second half of the expansion. Squeee!

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The trick that got us from always being 10 seconds late on Heroic: Make Quick Werk of Him to easily beating the timer: engage Patchwerk right in front of the frogger slimes. We usually misdirected him over the slime river and fought him there, but this slight change made a huge difference. (Thanks, pally partner in crime.)

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Achievements, Raiding Ruminations, WotLK Achievements, Naxx, patch

Planning your raid’s progression was pretty easy in Classic WoW. You cleared one instance, farmed it a bit, and then started on the next one. It was a little more complicated in The Burning Crusade, but not too much. After clearing T4 raids, most guilds kind of picked at the first few bosses of The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern at the same time, but usually focused on Vashj first and then worried about Kael. Hyjal and BT worked the same way — it was pretty common wisdom that a guild would kill Archimonde first before moving on to Illidan and the last few bosses of BT.

Granted, there are a few progression generalities in WotLK. I think it’s pretty unlikely that any guild is going to start with Malygos-25, for example. However, you have at least two new avenues of possible “progression”: Sarth plus multiple tiers of drakes, and achievements. And my job as a guild leader is to find a way to meet everyone’s progression expectations in (for our guild) nine hours a week. As usual no two people want the same thing.

Most of our folks love new content, and get bored really quickly when they’re not facing an unkilled boss. Some are more concerned about item drops, and rate progression by the level of their gear. Many are super gung ho about achievements, but it seems an equal number of people just see them as having do to things ‘the hard way’. Is Sarth 2D more or less progression than Maly-25? Does it even count? Getting The Safety Dance on Heroic doesn’t take a ton of skill (although we haven’t gotten it yet..), so is it less progression than Heroic Arachnophobia (which we DO have)? With so many options, it’s hard to know exactly in which direction to lead the team to get the most satisfying bang for our buck.

We still have Heroic Malygos to defeat, which will hopefully happen on Monday. I’d like to do many of the Heroic Naxx achievements, although Naxx Ennui is already setting in pretty hard with the more active members of the team. Sarth 2D seems possible, but 3D makes me nervous. I don’t even want to THINK about a 6 minute Malygos yet, even on Regular. (And on a personal note I am jonesing to finish off my 5 and 10 man Achievements. “Liore the Undying” sounds awesoooooome.)

So we are both quickly running out of fresh content AND flooded with multiple event options at the same time. Ahhhhh!

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Guild Management, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion

We ended up with a bit of a “Dream Team” in Naxx-10 this week and took advantage of the opportunity to load up on achievements. I will give it to Blizz – achievements provide a great deal of fun for naturally overachieving players, and it gives a sense of satisfaction that some of the easier raid bosses are lacking.

The Safety Dance
You can dance if you want to! And apparently we could. This achievement is pretty straight forward, but I was thrilled to have my dancing skills proven for the official record.

Momma Said Knock You Out
I got this achievement, but it certainly wasn’t my doing. One tank just holds all four adds for the whole fight, and the other tanks Faerlina through all her enrages. This was made possible thanks to my partner in healing crime, a stellar paladin. Bacon between the two tanks, and it’s actually easier than doing the fight the normal way. Which is good because we also wanted…

Arachnophobia
From the death of Anub to the death of Maexxna in 20 minutes. We had a group with some pretty badass AoE (a mage, warlock, and boomkin) and a tank who is infamous for pulling like crazy. We worked out tanking assignments for Faerlina and Maexxna ahead of time, and just didn’t stop moving until it was all over (ignore the loot for later, too). At the end we still had six minutes on the clock – plenty of time!

The Hundred Club
This one is easy to get in theory – just don’t have any frost resist gear, totems, or auras. It does make it a lot more difficult to heal, though. Sapph is still the big barrier that I can see to us getting The Undying. I don’t think we’ve ever one-shot him, and he definitely will take one or two of us with him.

Just Can’t Get Enough
Kel’Thuzad has some extraneous abominations spawn in Phase One of his fight, and if you go out of your way to kill 18 of them in total you get this achievement. There was some debate amongst our casters whether they’d have the mana to try this one, but we nailed it on the second attempt. (The first one was marred by a lack of communication and both the DK and the insane pally pulling abom alcoves. Oopsie.) Melee focused on the aboms, which usually came in groups of three, and ranged stayed on top of the skellies and banshees. The one tricky part was when our two tanks were occupied with a group of three aboms and a solo one came ambling over from the other side to eat clothies, but a quick yelp on Vent helped solve that problem. Fun priest tip: If you didn’t already notice, Shadow Word: Death can one shot a skellie, and it’s fun to boot.

We were 17 seconds too long on the 3 minute Patchwerk achievement. Soon!

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Achievements, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, Naxx

My bad luck with Sartharion + drake attempts continued as a very good guild group got their butts handed to them by Tenebron. We wanted to try Tenebron because we figured his increased shadow damage debuff would be easier than Shadron’s fire damage aura, but we underestimated the effect that many whelps can have on a small raid. (Yes, I did yell at people on vent to “HANDLE IT!”) We gave it our all, but I just don’t think we had the right group for the whelp drake. I stomped my feet a bit and made some disappointed faces, but at the end of the day we killed Sarth the old fashioned way. I’ll be back, stupid drakes!

On the bright side, the guild had three Naxx-10 runs last week that resulted in three Sapphiron kills and two Kel’Thuzad kills, a first for us! I was really pleased to see so many people eager to get into Naxx, and that our teams were so evenly balanced. Organizing 10-mans in a 25-man guild is always a bit of a balancing act, and it can be pretty fractious. Two of the groups were organized through a public signup, one was put together privately, and all three kicked ass.

After killing Kel’Thuzad, our group swanned triumphantly over to Malygos (or, as he’s known in the Cats, Malligoose), who promptly ate our lunch. Many times. Finally, a really tough fight! This one will take a while to get…

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Raiding Ruminations Archavon, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion