Week 2 of 3.1

Alright so we're about to hit the end of week 2 of all the new content that came out in 3.1 Overall I have to say I am happy with what Blizzard has done with its content. Going in I was probably most excited about Ulduar and Dual specs but there are a lot of other things that was added that I have really enjoyed. I love the new fishing changes. The addition of a fishing dailies, fishing in wintergrasp for fish feast mats, and the reduced fishing time make fishing worthwhile again. Also the Argent Tournament is pretty fun. With all the money being spent on flasks and repairs its nice to have some new dailies to complete that will recoup some of those losses. Wintergrasp is also a bit more fun. Even when on defense you can take the offensive and push south into the zone and take out the 3 towers for an instant win. Also adding the timer on the Wintergrasp map makes for a really welcome addition.

PVP

Going into the patch I was pretty much capped out when it came to honor. Compared to pre Wotlk there really wasn't that many choices when ti came to paladins and PVP. You had holy which didn't terribly suck but was extremely limited and then everything else which really wasn't viable. Come 3.0 and the entire face of PVP changed. Holy has new toys to play with in PVP, mostly revolving around sacred shield and holy shock being great ways to keep up people while being Mobile and giving you some wiggle room to nuke heals. Protection which really isn't considered a PVP spec but still a lot of fun. With descent Block Value we could have insane burst potential with Shield of the Righteous, Avenger's Shield, and Hammer of the Righteous we had some powerful tools to use. Couple that with the nice changed they added in 3.1 such as unlimited Divine Plea when attacking and a silence on Avenger's Shield it has become even more viable.

Thought when it comes to PVP my heart is defiantly in Retribution. I wouldn't touch retribution with a 10 foot pole back in BC. Crusader Strike was nice but it still didn't feel like it was where it should be to be really wanted in raids or have the ancillary abilities to make it useful in PVP. With 3.1 all that changed. We have a way to keep going without going OOM in judgement of the wise and we have more attacks to use when it came to actually dealing damage, and a few abilities to use to time to make the different between a win or a death.

During the first week of 3.1 they were calculating Arena points so there wasn't really anything to do during week 1. Also the new items weren't ready to purchase. During the second week they had given us back the our Arena teams but with the rating set back to zero. This is different from previous seasons where they start us off with 1500 and depending on win/loss you would go up and down accordingly. The main problem with that is that if you are an average player or even a bit above average you are going to loose about half your battles. Also depending on what teams you get paired up with it can get downright frustrating to just loose. During the first couple of seasons it didn't matter because as long as you played your 10 games you would get your gear but just a bit slower if you sucked. Last season it was horrible due to the fact that to get anything half descent would require a pretty descent rating and depending on the gear you have, your luck, and how good your partner was it was a tough goal to hit. After playing a lot of games that season I had 3700 arena points that went to waste due to not having anything I could spend on ti that would be better use then my naxx epics.

I love what they did this season. I decided to run a dual pally team for this season and we switch off from either ret/holy for survivability or ret/prot for extra burst potential. With them having everyone start off at 0 gives everyone something to work towards. getting at least 40 points per win makes you feel like you are constantly moving up and getting closer to the point of acquiring some descent loot. Our team did really well and we hit about 1540 after 150 games played before we ran into some bad luck and dropped a little bit. I did have more then enough rating to pick up some sweet 226 furious bracers which could even potentially beat out my pve bracers for raiding.

Raiding

We had cleared all the way up Iron Council last week and we were all excited to continue to get back in there and see how well we could do this week. Since Flame Leviathan was such as joke last week we decided to try and give hard move up with 1 tower. We had tried this with 10 man last week and we kept getting close but something always happened and we would get close but couldn't bring him down. The same thing happened again this week. We spent about 2 hours wiping on the boss with so many close calls. We got him as low as 2% but this being a fight where your health is constantly dropping with no way to recover but to avoid what you can.

We all really wanted to get to new bosses so we dropped the tower and collected our loot. After having a descent amount of trouble with Razerscale and Ignis last week we were all proud of ourselves when we basically one shotted both of them. They had put XT's trash back in and I have no idea what they were thinking with these packs. We wiped probably about 8-10 times trying to get it right and we just ended up brute force killing them with no idea of how we can get a clean kill. We had a few new people on XT so after a few tried he went down easy as well.

We decided to give another hard mode a try this time with the Iron Council. We kept Runemaster as our last target and again things didn't go to well. The beginning of the fight will always be the same spending about 6 minutes burning down the first 2 bosses easy but when it came to getting runemaster down he has a new ability that usually wipes about 70% of the raid. He puts a rune of summoning out randomly in the room and about 20 seconds a bunch of elements will spawn randomly going in different directions then blowing up for 16k each. Get 2 incoming at you at a time and you were basically dead. We had a couple of ideas about how to deal with these but having to wait almost 7 minutes to get to that point then wiping in seconds was pretty demoralizing. Again after a few hours of wiping we ended up killing Stormcaller last.

When it came to doing hard modes its defiantly possible to achieve with the group that we were going with. The problem is many peoples goals are different. We know we can do it but at this point we still haven't even learned the 4 watchers in 25 man yet. I think most people wanted to just move on and try to get as many bosses down normally before we try and go for any hard modes. We moved onto Kolgran which is where we had stopped last week. I don't understand where people get it into their heads that we're going to be 1 shotting these bosses. Sure the 10 man was a lot easier compared to the 25 mans but the heroic version is a different monster. The basic mechanics are the same but you have to deal with the increased damage going around and managing 24 other people as opposed to 10. There is just a shit ton of damage going around in that battle but we got into our groove and ended up defeating the boss after a few hours of learning.

We still have a major problem when it comes to the guild and that is attendance. We have quality raiders but on almost every night this week we were running 1-4 short to begin with. We were constantly bringing in people who had no right being in there. When dealing with a group of people that are working together morale is definitely a huge issue. A lot of people are excited to get in there but when people are constantly not showing up it affects the way we play. If we're constantly dieing to a boss with very little hope of beating the encounter it stops being fun. This is a game that we play and we choose to be here if we want to be here. The moment it starts becoming a game and a job people will stop showing up. There is definitely a delicate balance to pushing forward vs throwing yourself at a brick wall.

We hit the recruitment hard and we have gotten some promising people so I'm hoping in the following week we will get in there with a full group and have some bosses meet there end. We had also tried Auriya this week as well. Again a lot of people went in there expecting to just steamroll through her with little thought after it being so easy in 10 mans. While the basic concept is the same the mechanics are less forgiving. The pull alone takes a lot of coordination. We had to use line of sight just right with building threat and moving adds into the correct position. This definitely took a lot of attempts to get right. Once we did end up getting it right the next time we came in we changed the way it worked. After not getting it right we went back to the original strategy which worked pretty well. The bosses in Ulduar definitely require a lot more coordination and individual responsibilities. With Auriya you have to deal with 4 adds with stacking buffs, a raid wide aoe fear, a aoe damage component that needs to be interrupted during said fear, an add that spawns that pounces all over the place, void zones that spawn throughout the fight, a pack of 20 adds, and a sonic screech that has to have its damage split through the members of the raid. All this on top of the relatively hard physical damage she deals. While definitely doable it will take a lot of tries to get it right. While close to getting it this week we still haven't gotten it especially due to not having a full raid to split the damage component.

10 mans vs 25 mans

On one of the nights we didn't have enough people to raid we decided to do some 10 mans while waiting for people to show up. We split off into 2 even groups. Group A decided to try Flame Leviathan with 1 tower up while Group B had learned its lessen from last week and plow through the first couple of bosses. After doing the 25 man versions of these fights the 10 mans were very easy to deal with especially having higher level gear. Our 10 man group wanted to come back in on Friday considering that was our off night but we ran into the same problem we had hit the previous week where we have a few from Group A and a few from Group B but not the right make up to get a quality run going. Fortunately for us Group A never did get Flame Leviathan down so no one from that group had been saved. We asked and everyone agreed that it was BS that people hadn't been logging on to get 10 mans done and that we should just get 1 group together instead of hoping for enough people to show up for both teams. It usually ends up that our tanks always show up so we ended up pulling both tanks from Group A but one went holy while the other wen fury for our team. This eventually became an issue for Group A if they were going to run they would have to have one of their other toons respec.

Our newly formed Group had some issues in the beginning. We had a hard time with Iron Council so we skipped him and went to Kologran but he was also giving us problems. We had 2 paladins healing so we switched one of them out for a holy priest and the added aoe healing ended up being what we needed to get all the way to Freya. It was definatly more exciting for our group in 10 mans because we all knew that we were very running with a powerful group. Mimiron is next on our hit list and hopefully we can down him tonight.

When it comes to raiding guilds there is definitely a competition that goes on to see who can get the bosses down first. We have been up there on the progression forum being one of the few guilds who could do Sarth 3d. We take that same energy moving into Ulduar. That's is one of the reasons that we push so hard and try certain hard modes. But then the question becomes why are we here in Ulduar. Most of us enjoy being here but we're really here to gear up. You need that carrot dangling in front of you. The possibilities of getting a cool item that is going to help you beat the next guy keeps us going. Sometimes the desire to be number 1 and the desire for loot don't cross perfectly. There are a ton of upgrades in the 10 man that will help us clear the 25 man content. But do we take time out of our 25 mans to get the gear from 10 man and fall behind on the progression curve. Also do we do split off into 2 equal groups that may or may not raid and get 6-8 bosses down or push 1 super group to work on the 12th boss of the instance but gear up half the people.

We all have our goals and are enjoying the content for the most part even if we're not where we want to be. I get frustrated at the end of the night but when I wake up in the morning I go through the events in my head and try to figure out ways to improve for the following raid. I still rush home when my shift is over to jump on and meet up with my social network and take on another challenge together.

Ulduar Impressions Part 3

With so many bosses still up in Ulduar we try to dedicate most of our scheduled raid time to the 25 man bosses. We know they will award us with better loot and that typically we should have the people to take on that content. When we have a good balance of people on its amazing what our Guild can do. If we're short 1 or 2 dps or healers its the difference between beating the encounter vs not standing a chance.

On our off nights we try to pull together our 2 10 man teams. Problem is whoever is in your first 2 sets of groups are forced to stay there during the rest of the week. Come our first off night we had about 17 people online. We had about 6 from Group A and about 7 from Group B and some non raiders on. We waited almost an hour with frustrations running high. We have certain people who always log in and some people who are up in the air when it comes to off nights. Some of our characters have high level alts so Group A ended up running with about 3 alts from Group B team and the rest of the team ended up having to sit it out. The next night the exact opposite happened. Group B was able to go but they had to poach the alts of Group A team. Frustrations usually run pretty high when you have so many people ready to raid but you just don't have the people to pull from. Luckily for us on Monday night almost everyone showed up and we were able to get in there with both groups and get 9/14 bosses down.

As far as 10 man went our first 2 nights were pretty bad. We attempted 1 tower up Flame Leviathan which brings your hopes up but the fight is really hard considering you have no way to heal and if 1 vehicle or player goes down its very hard to recover. Trying Razorscale also brought our frustrations up due to failing on FL for so long and people were tired and making stupid mistakes. We tried the battle a few more times but it wasn't worth it so we called it for the night. Night 2 was a bit better for our 10 man. We knew how Ignis and Deconstructor worked form doing them on 25 man. It was beautiful seeing our strategies being executed flawlessly in 10 man. After those 2 bosses it was time to learn some ones we never tried before

Iron Council

After figuring out how the trash worked again we were up to Iron Council. I had seen video's of this fight from the PTR and people from Team A had already beat the encounter so they offered up some idea's on how to deal with the 3 bosses. Steelbreaker definatley hits hard and I learned the timing of his fusion punch and after wiping a few times I got cleanse timing down. This is probably a very good fight to have a paladin tank on due to the fact they can cleanse themselves and not have to have healer waste a global cool down to remove the debuff. We didn't have much time left in raid and after a few more attempts and people dying to standing in Death runes we decided to pack it in for the night and try again another time.

Our next raid was a 25 man raid and we proceeded to try the 1st level of hard mode on Iron Council. We wanted to kill the medium guy last due to him dropping the discs that start the Algalon quest line. The thing that is annoying about Iron Council its another battle where the first 70% of the fight is not hard at all. Getting stealbreaker and the stormcaller was easy as pie but once we got up to the Runemaster he just decimated the raid when he summoned the Rune of Summoning. When the elements spawned and randomly ran off into different directions almost 75% of the raid was decimated. We attempted the boss a few more times before we know there wasn't much time left before raid end time so we proceeded to 1 shot the boss on normal mode


Kologran

Monday night we came back and we had 2 full 10 man raids awake and ready to take down some bosses. We were having a race with Group A to a certain extent but we were a few bosses behind. We went in and 1 shot the Iron Council since we were all pro's at it form our 25 man raid and proceeded to Kologran. Some people hate the way this boss looks but I love this guy. He is huge and has a very unique look to him and your night fighting his foot like you are usually with other huge bosses. Since our group was on a hot streak with the other bosses from the night we quickly figured out a strat that worked well for us. We alternated tanks when we got 3 stacks of overhead smash and killed the Right arm whenever it spawned. People started getting good at kiting eye beam and healing people who got death gripped so after about 5 or so tried we downed the boss.

We also tried this on our 25 man raid and it didn't go as well. Aoe damage was a lot higher and saving people in the arm was a lot more difficult. I saw this trend in a lot of bosses. 25 man content is a lot harder then the 10 man version. After people saw how easy Kologran was in 10 man version they expected to 1 shot him in 25 man version. They were sorely mistaken and you could see their frustration. I wasn't flustered as much. I knew that when you are fighting a boss you have to learn the boss. You can tell people what to do and how individual abilities work but you have to try it and see what works and what doesn't work on an individual basis. Telling someone to run form the eye is easy to do but when you get targeted by the eye and you start running you may not realise where the best place to go is. If someone is standing next to you you try to go around them to avoid having them be instagibbed as well. After you do it a few times it becomes second nature and you can do it while maxing out your other abilities as well. The guild will get there, we always do. We just have to realise that every attempt we do we are getting better and when all the pieces fall in place so will Kologarn

Ulduar Impressions part 2

Alright so now the guild is getting into a groove in learning new encounters, getting new loot and seeing where our strengths and weaknesses are. We have a couple hours left in raid so we break off into our separate 10 man teams. We try to make them as equal as we can. Considering how easy flame leviathan was on 25 man we decide to give hard mode a try to see how it works. We start by keeping all 4 towers up to see what happens. Once we pull FL all chaos breaks loose. Lashers are coming from everywhere, there are orbital bombardments, fire all over the place and debuffs on us that we have no idea what they do. We proceed to get our ass handed to us so we decide to do him with only 1 tower up.

Since we had 2 teams going we could see on the other side of the fence the other team had already cleared him and were already getting achievements. Both teams had friendly competition going so we felt we had to pick up the pace. We kept up the frost tower and learned how the encounter works with that tower up. An important aspect of that fight is being able to overload FL's circuit so that he doesn't have a huge ammount of gathering speed debuffs. We kept switching strategies and putting diferent people p to destroy his circuits and we got pretty close with a 5% wipe. The thing about FL is that every battle is going to feel close because it all determined by how much health you have considering there is no way to heal yourself. You will live a certain ammount of time but its one of those fights where "Bring his health down to zero before you go down to zero". After 2 hours of wiping and having my durability at all red we decide to just kill him wiht no towers up. Even though we quickly killed him it felt like a loss considering we "gave up".

I was talking to a few of my guildmates and all of us are excited about the new content but we also realize that hard modes will give us better loot. There is a line that ussually gets drawn as to whether we should try the hard modes or just move on because there is loot on those other bosses that we need in just normal mode. Our guild leader is very ambitious and I think that is a great quality about him. Coming from a guild in pre-wotlk where we were number 1 on the server and were constantly getting server first I had less faith in the guild I came into in the beginning. Zealous really did suprise me. Even though Naxx was "easy mode" we were constantly outdoing ourselves. When thinking about encounters such as Sarth+Drakes and 6 minute maly I was very skeptical about us being able to handle the encoutner or even if we had enough quality raiders to meet the requirements. But time and time again we pull it together and get the encoutner down.

I don't think the hard modes are beyond us. My guild can definatley defeat these encounters but its like every other boss where we need to learn how the encoutner works and our own responsibilties and find the little spaces where we can pull out something amazing. With that being said we raid 4 hours a night for 4 nights in a week. That gives us about 16 hours a week of attempts which we ussually stretch to 20 because we wanna give it a couple more attempts or quickly bring down another boss. We are at the point now where we have 5/14 on 25 man and 9/14 on 10 man after our first reset of raiding. I would personally rather go back and spend our 20 hours of raid time getting the next normal boss down getting our upgrades for the raid and move on and learn 1 of the other 14 bosses we haven't downed yet. I like the idea of progression. I like getting a new boss down and working toward the next one. Once we finish off the final boss I would love to come back and try it with 1 tower up because thats the next logical step.

We ended up coming back to Ignis on night 3 of raiding. We had more people log in that night and had a well balanced group. BLizzard implemented a new set of hot fixes on that boss and we were ready to give him a go. We decided to make our strategy less complicated and have the entire raid stand in between. I then kite the scorches in a diamond pattern around the raid and have our Ot's pick up the adds make them molten pull them in the water and have a dedicated mage break them. This strategy coupled with the hotfixes allowed us to one shot this boss.

I have to say I havne't compared a ton of tanking items from Ulduar. What I have seen so far have been slight upgrades and I'm waiting to get a comprehensive list of what is available before I determine what I'm going after. With that being said it has been said that if you wanted to be a min/max main tank you need to have Jewelcrafting as a proffesion. I currently run Blacksmithing which gives me about 48 stam currently and Mining which gives me 50. JC will give me about 52 but it also gives the best trinket for a tank, the monarch crab which gives 63 stam plus 2 extra sockets. I really didn't want to unlearn a profession because the 2 I had already took me forever to skill up and cost a descent ammount of gold. The main reason I didn't
was becausae i knew Ulduar probably would have some descent trinkets for tanks that wasn't blue. I'm really glad I did because the only item I was salivating over was The Heart of Iron. 162 Stam base and a on use ability every 2 minutes for 452 dodge. When the trinket dropped my jaw dropped to the floor and I wept tears of joy. I was 1 dkp over the other tank in guild so I knew it was mine and I knew I wouldn't have to go and train JC up!.

Ulduar Impressions Part 1

It's Tuesday April 14Th and I'm sitting at work. Before I had head off I had downloaded and installed the patch and was ready to go. Patch days are always rough and as I checked the web there were frequent delays of getting the patch up and running. It didn't bother me because I knew it was always like this whenever a new patch hit. Plus my guild doesn't start raiding until midnight and that is when most people are giving up for the night. It's about 11 o'clock and I am heading home salivating at the new content that I am about to embark on.

I arrive home and I quickly log in. All my talents have been reset and I go ahead and run to my trainer to purchase dual spec. It's been a long time coming but I'm glad that I finally don't have to pick if I'm gonna grind as prot or go ret to have some fun in PVP. I jump on vent and the guild is all excited with the idea of stepping foot into Ulduar. 32 people online. A lot more then we usually have on a given night. All of them are anxious and ready to raid, even a few that haven't been online in a few weeks. We already know that they aren't gonna get invited unless we are desperate. We send out the invites, start the summoning, and zone in. Its times to take on Flame Leviathan.

Flame Leviathan

As a guild we like the idea of just jumping into things and figuring out how to do it on our own. Often times after seeing what the boss is about we settle on a strategy that works well for us. The first run of trash we just tell everyone to pick a vehicle, jump in and have at it. We ram through the Iron army and make our way to the boss. We engage him because we didn't know any better and are aimlessly riding around using whatever abilities we have. After the first wipe our guild leader lays down a game plan for us to use.

We assign different groups for different tasks. We get an interrupt order in place. We have a time to call for people to jump on him and destroy the turrets. Our second attempt goes a lot better and we ended up downing him that attempt. The fight was a lot easier then we had anticipated. We were surprised that we were able to bring him down quickly but we weren't gonna complain and we took our loot and moved onto the next boss.

Razorscale

We moved onto our next target which was Razorscale. Even though most of us are trying to go in blind and learn the encounter as we go, most of us have been looking at the information that was available online already. We set up tank locations to pick up the adds, designate someone to fire the harpoons and split up our dps. It didn't go pretty our first couple of pulls. We ended up wiping a lot as we learned what the abilities of the adds were. What to do when he landed and how to not stand in the fire. After a couple attempts and berserk timers, we ended up bringing him down to 50%. None of our tanks were ready so he just headed to whoever had aggro. Our druid ended up picking him up first but he went down quick enough. After that one of our pali tanks got him and he went down after a couple of seconds, then I stepped up and grabbed him and started up and realized he was throwing fire patches in front of him. By the time I realized I should be kiting him around I had went down. We had 1 last tank left and he was able to hold the boss until dps was able to kill him. It was a sloppy first kill but a kill is a kill so we were happy and took our loot.

Ignis

It was time for some trash. We knew that blizzard had wanted trash to matter more and you could defiantly see it here. As we made our way down to the boss the trash took many of our lives. We learned what each add did and what we had to do to survive even if people didn't learn from their mistakes. We finally made it down to the boss and I was designated to be the Main Tank. It was time to step up to the challenge. I usually sit around 42k health buffed in my Best in Slot tanking gear so I was pretty confident going in. We pull him and I go down instantly. Boy did he hit like a truck. I look at my combat log and I got hit for around 35k. We aren't discouraged but I'm shaken a little bit. We get the pull down right and I proceed to kite him around the room whenever he puts scorches down.

Then the chaos starts. Getting the adds molten was a big pain, people getting randomly meelee'd, people dieing in the slag pots, main tank deaths due to to many adds. There were a lot of issues with this boss. We keep trying different strategies, using different classes to do different things. In the end we ended up over complicated the process but the boss was bugged to begin with. It was past the end of raid time so we decided to pack it up and try again the next day

We come back the next day and its time for invites and we're sitting with 22 core raiders logged in. We have some non-raiders logged in so we ask them if they want to go with us. We knew we weren't gonna get much out of them but we all wanted to get into Ulduar and get some shots into the bosses. We go back to Ignis and continue using different strategies since there were a bunch of hot fixes on the boss. I notice that I'm not getting hit as hard. Normal physical attack are doing around 27k. I was worried that as a paladin I wasn't gonna be able to handle Ulduar but then they nerfed druids and Dk's a bit so I was hoping we would all be on equal footing. There were still some major bugs with Ignis as he continued to meelee our healers as he ran to put someone in the slag pot so we decided to move onto a different boss instead.

XT-002 Deconstructor

Due to a bug there was no trash on our way to XT so we get there and start buffing up. Like before we didn't look at any strategy so I rush in and ended up getting stomped. The healers weren't ready and the boss hits somewhat hard but an off tank ended up picking her up. All I have to say is OMG that voice is so unexpected and funny. I was taken back when this huge robot sounded like a 10 year old girl.

I ended up telling one of our other tanks to go ahead and tank the boss. I know my fellow tanks love what they do and I don't believe in the concept of Mt's so I told them to go ahead and give this a shot. Also I wanted to try out my dual spec Ret spec. We proceed to give her a few more shots and iron out any issues we have. We designate people to different areas and safe zones to run to if they get a bomb. We get our strategy down but people kept dcing or leaving without a word. We were already taking non-raiders to begin with and we ended up having only 23 people in raid and not enough dps. Every attempt people ended up dead and we kept hitting the enrage timer. We knew it was a wash so we decided to stop early and split off into 10 mans.

The second night was really saddening for the guild since we spent 4 hours wiping with nothing to show for it. I think I wrote enough for now so I'll save the problems of 10 mans and the remaining 25 man bosses for another post.

Calm Before The Storm

I think a lot of people have been feeling it. There is just not that much stuff left to do in WoW right now. Some achievements you get one shot at such as the Immortal and others are just plain annoying that you don't want to do it. As far as I have gone all I need for the Heroic: Glory of the Raider is Immortal and Gotta Go when the Volcano goes. I am so close to my mount but I know I'm not gonna get it because we never run a consistent 25. We have about 18 core members who always show up and the other 7 or so are either new recruits or people who haven't played in a while. Not a good combo to get Immortal

The guild has recently been trying to get 10 man Sarth 3d. We did it the conventional way of tanking the drakes, dpsing them down in order and we almost had it but it is punishing if anyone messes up. We also tried the dps zerg and we almost had that as well (5%) but there is always one issue or another. I am currently just fed up with it and I don't even know why I continue because there is no loot to go along with the victory minus a mount.

You can feel the people in the guild getting tired of running the same old stuff over and over again and then also trying to get silly achievements that they already have. We need Ulduar. I perosnally need Ulduar. I need a new challenge. I want to learn new strategies and I want to drool over new loot. I have a feeling that we might zoom through Ulduar a bit. From the impression I get from Blizzard they want the encoutners to be challenging but doable. I have no doubt that we'll probably have at least half the instance down before the first reset is done. Looking at the strategies so far it seems there is definatley a lot of coordination that has to happen and a dps race on top of it.

Back before we were head long into raiding I spent hours a day going to sites and analyzing tanking items and trying to figure out which instances I needed to run, how many badges I needed and which bosses had the loot I was going to cross my fingers on. Now that I have best in slot for tanking I have no reason to look at any current gear available in game. I really haven't looked through the Ulduar gear but once the dust settles I am actually looking forward to going back and figuring out which pieces of gear I'm going to go after. Also with Dual specs being available with the patch I am going to be doing the same thing with the Ret gear that drops from there as well

I am a little worried about Ret at the moment. They both buffed and nerfed a lot of the Ret tree. In raids right now with my current gear I feel confident to be able to compete with the best dps in the guild. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do that once the patch comes out. I could also say the same thing about tanking. Right now we rely on our Death knight to be there to be able to complete Sarth 3d. I'm really worried that even if I have best in slot gear for tanking there will be more bosses out there where a paladin tank won't be optimal and the guild will look for alternatives to beating the encounter.

Even though it might be scary what happens I'm really looking forward to it. New encoutners, new loot, new strategies, and a new adventure await me and my guild. I see a lot of nights where I probably won't be getting as much sleep as I should