The Rise and Fall

Its been a lot of fun these last few weeks in Ulduar. We have finally defeated Mimiron and I have got my Breastplate from Thorim and Ring from Leviathin so I am pretty happy right now. We're currently working on the General right now and he seems simple enough that once we get it down right we should do pretty well. We tried him for the first time last night and we only gave it a few attempts but once everyone gets into the groove of things the fight doesn't change much from beginning to end. The only concern I would have is the mana issue. Considering his Aura does not allow any regeneration you need to be more attentive of when to use the Saronite Crystals and for how long.

Over the last few years I have been in a few raiding guilds. My first raiding guild wasn't that serious and while we did have a lot of fun together we would just farm Scholomance and Black Rock Depths. While its nice when you are a fresh 60 you hear about bigger badder content. I was approached by a member of a raiding guild one day while doing some quests in Un'Goro about joining a guild to do Molten Core. I told them no at first but I added him to my friends list. After a few weeks I decided to give them a try after some conflicts in my current guild. I had joined up with Radiant Dawn and got my first taste of 40 man raiding. I thought it was an incredible place and I kept constantly signing up to be on any run that they were doing. We eventually graduated Molten Core and tried to start up Blackwing Lair. We kept banging our heads on the first boss but we eventually got him down. Each boss after that was a struggle as well. It took many nights of wiping before we got Vael down and then the Suppression room had kicked our ass but most of us kept coming back pushing forward. After about a month in our Main tank and officer decided that it he was to good for us and left for another guild. This hurt our guild a lot but we had a really well geared off tank so we pushed forward and kept trying but the damage was already done and Guild Morale was low. We tried to push it as much as we could but we couldn't kill more then 1 boss in BWL. Radiant Dawn had gone Boom.


A lot of members had decided it was time to move on as well and soon we were just a shell of our former self. It made me feel horrible but I knew that to rebuild we would have to run Molten Core a lot and I couldn't do that. I looked through the progression page on the website and followed the links to see if any guilds were recruiting on the server. Me and my best friend were in the guild together so I told him to app with me to the best guild on server. We both applied to Oath and he was accepted and I was rejected. I kept trying to talk to the officers from the guild but I was told there were no spots for paladins. My friend went on and I tried to find a different guild. I did find a pretty good guild and I worked my way up building my reputation with them. Being the new member meant that I had no dkp and probably wouldn't be getting any loot any time soon. Every time I kept talking to my friend the guild was just handing him non stop bloodfang pieces and weapons. He was getting fitted with 2 or 3 pieces every reset and I was jealous. How could anything possibly go wrong with a guild farming BWL and making constant progression AQ40 and Naxx? A few weeks after joining the officers had a falling out. One of the officers wanted to create a new elite guild where he would hand pick and choose the people allowed in and the others respected the people who had brought them this far. The guild fractured off but many of the people decided to stay and form a new guild called Resilience. Oath had gone Boom.


This was my chance in. The guild that I joined was nice but the schedule wasn't perfect and I wanted to raid with my friend. He talked to the guild leader and we were well on our way to killing bosses in Naxxramas. I was the best healer in the guild previous to this one but the healers they had in Resilience had put me to shame. I am usually very competitive and if I'm going to play a role I have to be the best at that role. I research and test out how to play my class but these people were on a higher level. Burning Crusade had come out and Resilience was the leader of the pack. We ended up getting server first on Prince in Karazhan, Grull, and Magtheridon. I had a great sense of pride being in the guild and we worked our way into SSC and Tempest Keep. We had made significant progress into the zone but when you are the best you end up attracting a lot of assholes. Being in a top Guild has a tendency to go to people's head and they think they are better then everyone else. If you are learning a new boss and its not going perfectly you have a tendency to start finding ways to blame people and eventually bail out and try to find something better. There were constant fights and eventually it got so bad that people had abandoned ships. Most of the members of Resilience had decided to form up a new guild and recruit again and they ended up being Paranoid. Resilience had gone Boom.


Right around the time that resilience had gone boom I had gotten a promotion at work but it required that I worked during prime time raiding. I decided that the money was worth more then raiding and I had already started to get burned out. This was a good time to step back and leave the raiding scene for a while. Paranoid continued to have success and ended up beating most of the encounters in Black Temple and Mt Hyjal. I cheered them from the sidelines wishing that I could be up there with them. I continued to play and luckily I could farm heroics for badges and level up alts so I still had a a ton of fun with the game. My best friend was still raiding so he told me about what was going on with the guild. Every so often there would 10 man raiding on weekends so I was allowed to join up for those.


At the end of the Burning Crusade lifespan I saw in trade chat about a guild recruiting for late night raiding. I talked with Damathor and he convinced me to join up. I eventually joined up although raiding wouldn't really start until Wrath was in full swing. Zealous hit the ground running. Within a few weeks we were up and running 10 mans and as we continued to recruits we started up the 25 mans. It took some time to iron out some of the issues with certain members but we had an amazing drive and are now one of the top guilds on the server. Now that Ulduar is out people are at the point of seeing difficult content again. Being on top has a tendency to lead to fostering pricks and there was plenty of pricks in Paranoid. There were a ton of pressure for them to keep on top but there was plenty of fighting and the leadership had splintered off. After being one of the best guilds on the server and almost defeating Yogg everyone abandoned ship as soon as things got tough. Paranoid had gone Boom.


There seems to be a cycle of The Rise and Fall of guilds. If you look at any guild today there is a high chance that it wont be here in 6 months. Even if you look at the people that are there now they probably won't be the same people who are there in 6 months. Raid guilds are constantly changing. People are by nature greedy. They want certain things and they try to find a guild that fits what they want. If they stop providing them with the epics they want or if they get burned out the guild can't really do anything about it. I think this is where a lot of guilds have problems. For most people its not about what you ca do for your guild but what your guild can do for you. To get further and get the gear you need to treat your raiders like clients. The ones that help you get further you have to pamper a bit and you have to advertise to get good people in to make you get further.

Just do it

It is an interesting feeling when you come into a fight for the first time but you have never done it before. Certain people have done it and have a strategy that works and they tell you "kill the big guy, stand out of the fire, win". You always know that there is something more to the fight then just that. What causes the fire to happen and how often does it happen? Does the big guy do anything special I need to watch for? Do I need to move to a designated safe spot when I run out of the fire? Are there any tricks to maximizing my dps/healing/survivability during the encounter?

Blizzard has done an incredible job with a lot of the encounters in Ulduaar. They have many components to them that need to be dealt with and there usually is a lot of different tricks that can be used to maximize dps while also not blowing the raid and surviving. Hodir is a wonderful example. To someone new my guild would probably tell them "Avoid the blue circles on the floor, keep moving, break the flash freezes and get on the mounds". If you have done a fight like Hodir before you know exactly what that means. Every part of that statement is understood and that is basically how the entire fight works. If you are doing this for the first time you might not understand what the hell is going on. The pull happens and you notice you have a debuff but as your reading what the debuff is doing the stacks start building up. You also need to dps to not get yelled at so you start doing your normal rotation. You see the rest of the raid attacking frozen blocks so you go ahead and do that as well. Over vent you hear the words flash freeze and people start scrambling. You see his cast bar but not sure what to do. You may think to get behind him, or spread out, or to stop attacking. Next thing you know you are in a block of ice and have no idea how you got there or how to prevent it from happening again. And all the while not knowing what all the buffs and debuffs going on throughout the encounter.

Then the other side of the argument is that if you are coming to a raid you should have read up on the strat or watched some movies. Fair enough you should be prepared to do a fight and have everything you need to make the fight easier for the raid as a whole. But when is the last time you read a strategy for how to beat a boss in God of War before actually engaging him? Isn't the concept of a video game to learn the fight and the abilities and use what the programmers gave you to figure out how to fight the encounter. Also I'm sure you have watched many movies form different guilds on how to fight an encounter. How many of those guilds have done it the same way compared to the last video you have seen. Also depending on the site you may have different positions or requirements to make that specific strategy work. Plus we all know that there is a big difference between reading up and watching strategies vs actually being in the battle doing your part. Otherwise every guild would watch 1 video and go in and 1 shot every boss.

Also it gets complicated when dealing with the strategy that you end up using. most of the time the strategy you decide to use is never the strategy that you end up using to kill the boss. You will often times find little tweaks that work better with the composition of the raid. The more involved the battle the more tweaks you need to use until you get it right. A lot of arguments usually arise at this point on which one is feasible while dealing with all other components as well. Sometimes the problem is not doing it enough to get the strat down right and if you change it to much it just means learning it all over again. But if you don't make the necessary changes you may never down the encounter.

"Just do it" is something I hear thrown around a descent amount in guild. "This is not that hard" "Get the bosses health to zero before he brings your to zero" is one of my favorites. Every player has a set of tools that he has to use to make the encounter work. The fights in Ulduaar were meant to be challenging and not tank and spank. There are many nuisances to figuring out how to handle each aspect of an encounter individually. Whether it be how to time heals in between flame jets or how to get the different buffs in the hodir encounter its all something we have to learn in the heat of battle. Learning is a big part of progression and I get upset sometimes when I hear "this is not that hard just do it". There is more to it then just do it but you have to trust the people who are fighting by your side. To understand how to push what they do to the max to be able to finally hear those screams on vent when he boss dies.

Time is Epic

Whenever a new patch or update comes out that has a lot of content you see yourself spend a lot more of your free time in game. I've been doing more dailies, fishing, PVP, riding around Dalaran in circles then before 3.1 and that doesn't even cover the time I spend actually raiding the new content. Like most people we have a wide variety of things we enjoy doing. I know personally in addition to being a Wow addict I enjoy watching my tv shows, anime, going to the gym, hanging out with friends, spending time with the family, and a slew of other things. That doesn't even include the daily responsibilities each of us have. So now that I'm spending more of my free time in the game I have felt I have let other things fall behind a bit.

I used to go to the gym at least 3 times a week and since Ulduar came out I've missed a full week. I've recently looked at my DVR and there is a ton of stuff that I usually watch wtihin 24 hours of it airing still sitting there a week later. While I do want to play more I keep trying to push myself away from the game when I don't need to be there. Now that the initial rush of 3.1 is over I'm able to make the choice once again to step outside the house for few hours vs gathering a bunch of gold to spend on repairs.

We had an exciting time in Ulduar again. Every week we spend a descent amount fo time on a new boss. Iron Council, Kologram, Auriaya, and Hodir have taken us well over a full night of learning to get before we can bring down. It's usually not until the next raid night or even 2 days later before we get our act together and get it right. Once we do get it right we usually walk in there and down all of them in our first night after the reset. We're now giving it a go on Thorim. He's pretty straight forward but again its about each person learning their individual responsibility. We got him down to 17% last night and we're gonna go in tonight again and bring him down.

That is if the people show up. We've been having some issues with healers not showing up and not running with a perfect make up. Even still the people who do show up do a good job and we're a resilient bunch and soon we'll be taking down Yogg