The last few months

The day that Cataclysm launched I was set and ready with my paladin. I grabbed my best friend, took a couple of days off, and bought a whole bunch of junk food to be ready. It started at 3 AM and less then 48 hours later we were 85. We jumped straight into heroics by the third day, and had a full set of heroic level items by the end of the first week.

Then the idea was to raid. We had a little guild set for 10 man but people who we though were gonna play never logged on. We waited while other people hit 85 while trying to recruit. We tried guild alliances but the furthest we ever got was Algalon. Since we weren't really raiding and I had spare time on my hands I leveled my shaman. After she hit 85 I did the same thing. I was nervous about healing with her in heroics but I did surprisingly well.

The frustration was high with bladez. I joined a new guild hoping to raid but after logging in for a week straight and not really doing much of anything I was flying circles around Stormwind. I see a pug group looking for a ranged dps so I jump over to my shaman and ask them to join. I get picked up right away and I was amazed at my damage on Magmaw. We weren't able to get the boss down so they asked if I could switch to healing since they had an offspec healer. We proceeded to kill half the raid that night, and the next night we got most of Bastion of Twilight down. I asked if they were recruiting and was invited to join the guild.

In the weeks to follow I was on of their main healers and we ended up 10/12 of the current tier of content. I was happy to be raiding and I even got my best friend into the guild and we cleared a ton of content together. It was a lot of fun but the guild did have troubles. Even as a 10 man guild every night we had to pug 1 or 2 spots. We got lucky most of the time with good people joining up. Some nights only 5 guildies log on so we have to call the raid. We had the talent but we just didn't have the time to finish the content.

At the same time I was also getting married. Two weeks before the wedding I told the guild that I would probably be offline until after the honeymoon. At the same time the guild had decided to transfer off server. They just were having a hard time on Thunderhorn recruiting good players for raiding. I couldn't blame them but I didn't want to go with them. They had no garuntee that they would find what they were looking for over there and I didn't want to spend the money to move a character since I have 10 characters on the server.

Life goes on. I went and got married. During down time I will still play world of warcraft but I really don't have a guild anymore. I have developed some altitus and have been leveling some new characters. Since the Cataclysm changed the 1-60 game I had a lot of fun with a new worgen, goblin, and an undead hunter. Also when my friend and I get time together I play my neglected death knight.

The thing I wonder about is the future. I really did enjoy raiding but it is easy to get burned out on it. My first love is tanking and I even have 1 of every tanking class. The problem is that tanks/melee aren't as desired as ranged/healer. The reason my shaman has better gear is because the need for her is greater. I am sitting at full 359 gear and she is ready for firelands. Since I am married and my wife isn't into warcraft or gaming for that matter she wouldn't understand a schedule based video game. The idea that I have to be on a certain time of day 3 days a week every week would sound insane. Either way I don't have a raiding guild and I don't know which character to focus on so raiding for now is off the table.

Hunting for a guild

The cataclysm expansion has not been kind to me. This is not anything that blizzard has programmed in the game but more the luck I have been having with the people I have interacted with. When I was in last hope things went somewhat smooth. After not showing up back last April I found myself removed from the guild. I didn't mind at the time because I really didn't care for raiding. When my friend brought me to his guild Vanquished I wasn't sure what to expect but I went with it. When only about 5-7 people were on during peek times at the launch I was nervous. There wasn't enough to fuel a raid but we could run 5 mans while we waited.

Unlike most people I never had much issues doing pick up groups. There are a lot of horror stories but considering I was the tank and I was good at providing instructions we did really well while the content was still considered hard. Within the first couple of weeks I knew the guild was not a good fit for me. I tried to salvage it by hitting up the recruitment forums but people don't want to join a starting up guild. They want to be in a guild that has been established and have already downed some bosses. You can't down bosses without people so it became a cycle with no way out. I jumped ship and put myself on the market for a new guild.

This is when things just got depressing. While looking around for a new guild I had nothing better to do on Bladez the paladin so I leveled up Giaz the shaman. I think the leveling up process is great in cataclysm. The quest flow is smooth and not tedious, story keeps your interest, and quest rewards are the carrot on the stick that makes you keep going forward. It didn't take long for Giaz to hit 85 and start hitting up the heroic dungeon finder.

A big complaint about Cataclysm was how hard they had made the healing game. In Wotlk you could compensate for a bad group by just being a good healer. You never had to worry about mana and people could just stand in fires and you could heal straight through it. It was changed so that the success of the group is on everyone shoulders and if people messed up it was the healer who suffered for it. I decided to take up the challenge and while sometimes a bit overwhelming I did really well at it. This is really surprising considering I never really ran with a guild group. Every time I ran a heroic it was through a complete pug and most people refuse to put themselves in that nightmare scenario. I persevered and within 10 days of hitting 85 I was decked out in full item level 346 minimum gear in every slot.

I was researching different guilds on the server and I tried applying to the best guild on the server (bedlam) but they never responded to my post. I applied to my old guild last hope but Gluteas just hates my guts and refused to talk to me. I went for a middle of the pack guild in Malleus Malefricarum and they had accepted me. I wanted to play my paladin but as I looked for a new home most people already had their tanks in order. You didn't need more then 2 for a 10 man or even 3 for a 25 man and considering that tanks were the people who got geared up first because of their instant heroic ques I was late to the party. There was also a lot of competition between Plate Dps. The top two classes played in WoW was death knights and paladins, with warriors not to far behind. That meant all the gear I was going for was going to be in high demand.

I noticed that the highest in demand was ranged dps and healers. It was a role that my shaman could easily fill. Considering that spell mail was only useful for shamans I wouldn't have much competition outside of other shamans. So I applied to MM with my shaman because that was what they were recruiting and during the interview process they said that they want people to play what the loved so I told them that my paladin was my main love. Heck I named an entire blog after him. They told me to play that character so I was extremely happy to be able to play the character I love. This would not last long though. I would log on regularly during raid times and would be put on the backup list. Every so often they would bring me in for 1 easy boss such as omnitron and then sit me again when they moved on to the next boss. For 2 weeks straight I never missed a raid but I raided for a total of about 3 hours max.

The kept recruiting to try and fill out a 25 man raid but they never got close and in the end they just sat the people that they recruited. I log in one day sit for 30 minutes and they fill out the raid with their "core" group and start up without saying one word to me. I whisper the leader and he says that seniority matters when it comes to progression nights. At that moment I knew I was finished. I was sitting in stormwind like I always do watching trade chat go by and I see looking for 1 more for Blackwing Descent. I whisper the guy and tell him that I have a shaman and they invite me to the raid.

I join the raid and it was a guild group that was just looking for an extra person to fill out their 10 man. We start on Magmaw and I blow up the dps charts. They were impressed but we didn't down the boss because one of their normal dps was healing for the first time and wasn't doing well at it. They ask me if its possible to heal and I agree. I never healed a raid before so I was nervous but was ready for the challenge. While we did wipe again we did defeat the encounter afterwards. I got comfortable in the healing role and the rest of the run went smooth. We were jumping from boss to boss and I was learning new encounters I have never done and was competitive with the other healers in raid. By the end of that raid I had joined my new home Crimson Fate.

It was a good fit. They raided Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday starting at 8 pm. This allowed me to raid regularly while having my life on the weekends. They are far in progression but they don't act like a hardcore guild. There is no attendance requirements or dkp system. You show up, you raid, and they help out with guild repairs, enchants, and flasks. It was not an environment I was used to but I liked it. But no guild is without its faults. Since there are no requirements we often times find ourselves starting raids late and most nights we have to pug at least one person to fill out our 10 mans. It is annoying when you log in on time but no raid happens since there are only 6 people on.

I have enjoyed the cataclysm experience but it has taken me for a ride. It is depressing when you are on a big server but don't have a place to call your home. It was depressing jumping from guild to guild and even toon to toon but I am happier now then I was over the last few months. I still see problems happening since we are such a small guild that isn't able to fill in every slot and I dread attempting heroic content.

Frustrations

It has been about a month since the release of Cataclysm and I am frustrated. I had a blast leveling through the content, running heroics, gearing up to be ready for raiding. Here I am now fully equipped and ready to raid but unable to.

They had made raids difficult, but manageable. They ask that you understand the mechanics, be equipped just enough to handle the encounter and execute well. All the bosses I have encountered so far have been doable but I just haven't had 10 people with the capacity to defeat the encounters. I check Guildox's website (progression monitor) and I see other guilds working their way through the content and remember being in the top 3 guild raiding for my server. Now I am in a guild that is trying to start up and we just don't have the members to really start the content.

After I left my guild back in April I really didn't want to raid until Cataclysm came out. My best friend started running 10 man Lich King with the guild I am currently in now and they were competent people who knew their stuff. I suspect many of them were tired of raiding on their mains and switch to an alt for the last couple months of wrath. The guild thought that everyone would continue to raid through Cataclysm but most of them returned to their original guild and original characters. When my friend convinced me to join the guild there was only about 5 people who were working their way to 85. I helped start the recruiting process, trying to get people to join the guild but it just wasn't working well.

People want to join an established guild more then a start up guild. You have to show them that you are worth joining. You can't show them that you are worth joining because you don't have the people to make it happen. It's a cycle that is hard to break out of and now I'm logging in the last couple days ready to raid but we hardly have 6 people on who are raid worthy.

At this point I don't know what to do. I don't know if I should stick it out and try help recruit more people in frustration. We did get a few people to join who were good but once they saw we weren't accomplishing anything they stopped showing up. Also while sitting in trade there are tons of guilds recruiting but none of them are making any headway either. Looking at other guilds, I am finding it hard to find any guilds that match what I need. I want to join a guild that doesn't raid late into the night, nor do I want to raid on weekends. There aren't any good guilds that I find that have a need for me.

So here I am flying over the roofs of Stormwind on a Tuesday after reset just sighing because I can't be in a raid because there are just not enough people on in my guild who can raid and no pugs who need me. Guess I'll go level my alt.

The New Heroic

I guess you could call me hardcore. Cataclysm came out December 7th and I was 85 on December 8th. Before the first week was up I had already gotten some epics through reputations, gotten a ton of gear from heroics, and leveled up both my professions to 525. I ask myself though how hardcore do I want to be. I know my ability. I make a good tank because I can multi task. I make a good leader, explain things well, have good control in fights, can maintain threat, positioning, and adjust quickly as the fight changes. I do think about the game a lot when I am not playing , but right now I'm not thinking all good thoughts.

World of Warcraft is a social game. It can be amazing when you get together with other people and things turn out real well but at the same time the opposite is true. Lately, playing with certain people has lead to more frustrations then enjoyment. The LFD tool is great. It lets people get together and tackle heroics but it was introduced at a time when running dungeons was a joke. The entire group can be held together with 1 or 2 competent people and everyone else was along for the ride. Now that gear has reset and we are not as powerful as we once were, we have to rely on the entire group to be able to defeat encounters.

This is where my frustrations are. I have been increasing my friends list with people that I know are competent. I try to run with them whenever possible. We will all get together on vent and we mark targets, crowd control, and use our abilities to make the encounters easier. The thing is I don't always have people online when I want to run a heroic and that is where I have to rely on the pick up group. I would have to say the likelihood of getting into a group that has the capability of getting to and defeating the last boss is about 30%.

The first pull will tell you a lot about how the group is going to function. To many times I will get a group that has no CC. A warrior, death knight, and a druid will be my dps and I am limited to root which wont do much when I have caster mobs. Then you have the people who refuse to interrupt. They probably don't even have it on their bars. People will listen though. They will dps skull first usually, will crowd control when asked, try to use some of their non-dps abilities. The problem is they don't really react fast enough. If a cc breaks they won't even notice. A spell starts getting cast and they wont interrupt. They don't notice when whirlwind is happening or there is fire on the ground. People are stuck in tunnel mode once the fight starts unless they are looking for something. We were doing the third boss of Grim Batol last night and a boomkin druid and holy priest just refused to get behind the boss when he did his 180 degree arcane breath.

Communication is key when doing heroics and when I explain to the group what to expect it increases our chances but doesn't mean success. I have been lucky with drops and have gotten to the point where there are no tanking upgrades left in heroics. The only thing left for me is to get my 70 valor points a day. I click on the LFD tool but don't always que up knowing that I might waste over an hour of time and not come out successful.

Then their is raiding. For as hard as heroics are, raiding is on a different scale altogether. Outside of Baradin hold, the other raids are extremely punishing. There are just to many abilities that the boss does that punish you if you ever mess up. I know I am more then ready for the raids but the people I run with are not decked out as well as I am. I can't really blame them because we have only been in Cataclysm for less then 3 weeks. My server, Thunderhorn, just doesn't have a good hardcore raiding community. The one guild that was in front as far of progression split up due to drama. We have been pugging a couple of spots for our raids and while the people we recruit are good, we haven't been able to make headway into raiding.

Cataclysm Week 1

Three Weeks ago the Shattering happened changing the world as we knew it forever. I created a couple of new alts and got my hunter up to 52 and got to experience the Blizzard magic through all the new leveling zones. This week was the true test though. December 7Th the new expansion launched at 3am.

Just like the last 2 expansion me and my best friend took a couple of days off and were ready and waiting for the clock to tick down to the point where we could get experience again. The difference between this expansion is the digital download and the fact that you could buy the game at midnight but it didn't start until 3 am. So it felt like the entire server was there waiting for the switch to be fliped. We were there along with them at the gryphon trainer to get our Master Flight Licence and to grab our bread crumb quest to enter Mt Hyjal. We did have some hiccups getting what we needed but we were able to get going and start our grind to 85.

Last expansion took about 4-5 days to get to level cap so I figured this should take about the same time. Competition was fierce this time around though. Everywhere you turned there were tons of people trying to grab whatever quest mobs they could causing frustration all around. Story has taken the stage for the questing experience and I wanted to make sure I read everything and understood what was happening in the zone. Also with phasing and all the new cut scenes it does make you go a bit slower then the people who ignore everything else and jump straight to finishing the quest and getting experience. During Wrath Expansion were about the 20Th to 25Th people to hit 80. For this go around it took less time with less then 2 days to get to 85 but we were closer to being between the 50Th to 60Th person to get to 85.

Unfortunately my best friend and I both wanted to play Plate tanking classes. Him on his Death knight and me on Bladez the paladin. We do have synergy but that also means we are competing with each other for any drops out of dungeons. Speaking of dungeons I must applaud Blizzard on making the 5 mans a lot more engaging. Mechanics that were usually reserved to raiding has been found on every boss in Cataclysm. You may not notice it to much in the normal dungeons but the heroics require coordination and understanding of the encounter to pull off. There are a lot of punishing bosses in Cataclysm and I have sat at certain bosses for 15 attempts before the group can take them down. Some of my favorite include the 3rd boss in StoneCore where as a tank you have to constantly side step a Ground Stomp and run away from a shatter. If you fail to do either one it is a group wipe. The third boss in Blackrock Caverns is also very punishing. He has an armor buff that can only be removed by standing him in fire. Debuffing him only lasts 10 seconds but every time he gains his armor back 3 adds spawn. Killing the adds results in an explosion of fire that will allow hurt you but remove his armor. The longer he stay in the fire the bigger his stacks get which does fire damage to the entire group. You have to kill the adds at the same time otherwise when they die it will create another pool of fire that will give the boss more stacks. Both of these bosses have challenged me and my group to play at our absolute best to defeat.

Then we have the raids. So far I have done the Barradin Hold raid which isn't to difficult but the first boss in both Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight are nothing like Wrath Intro Bosses. They are defiantly Gear Checks as well as ability to execute checks. The bosses have 8 or more different mechanics that have to be dealt with during the encounter and needless to say it whooped our butts.

I don't mind though. I enjoy learning a new fight and trying different strategies before settling on one that will eventually succeed. In terms of succeeding gear is defiantly a big factor. Since I am a tank the Que is pretty short. I also enjoy the leading role so I will mark all CC targets and explain every encounter to any one I run with to maximize my chance for success. As a result I have decked out my character in almost all heroic level dungeon gear. There are a few pieces here and there that I want to pick up as well as reputations to level up to get me some epics. Though for only 1 week into the expansion I am in a good spot. Now its just time to wait for the rest of the people to catch up and to start downing some new bosses.

New Beginning

Finally, the face of Azeroth has been burned and reborn anew in the fires of Cataclysm. Patch 4.03A has been released to live servers and with it brought all the changes to the 1-60 content. I always enjoyed the questing process but after 6 years and 9 different characters I really didn't want to go through it again. The world isn't completely changed but the questing has been vastly improved and I am having a blast.

In the excitement of Cataclysm Beta I gobbled up as much info as I could, trying to get a taste for what is to come without spoiling to much. All the starting area's have been greatly improved but the new undead storyline had the most talk. I decided to roll a new undead hunter. Currently I am at level 17 and I am really impressed. Blizzard made a lot of attempts to make the starting quests easy to learn and fun to play. The story has also been vastly improved on. My favorite parts of the game are the in game cut scenes. Every so often your character will walk into an area or start a quest where the camera takes over and a conversation starts that is fully voice acted. As part of the forsaken you are an agent of the Banshee Queen and you enjoy doing her dirty work.

My best friend also jumped on so we decided to roll trolls on a new server. The Troll starting quests are just as amazing as the undead. You start of on training grounds where you see an army of trolls just honing their skills. The questing brings you to Vol'jin, leader of the Darkspear trolls, and he shows you what happened between him and Garosh and the tension that is rising in the horde. You continue your journey that leads to an epic showdown where vol'jin fights by your side against a naga boss.

I am only 17 on my undead and 8 on my troll so their is a ton of zones that I have not gotten to. Also when Cataclysm does ship I will be rolling a Worgen Druid and a Goblin Rogue. All that will take a back burner to my true love, Bladez the Paladin. When I stopped raiding I had some of the best gear available so I really couldn't do much with him in the last couple months. I would log on him to try out the new talents or play a special event. As of December 7th all will be pushed aside to get him to 85. Out of everything leveling my characters and gearing them out is probably my most favorite. I can't wait to start replacing my epic level 80 gear with new blues from dungeons, quests and heroics. Looking at gear again and deciding what is best to get, leveling my blacksmithing and finding new pieces to make. I will start optimizing myself to start running all the new raids.

As far as end game content goes I'm not sure how I am going to handle raiding. I defiantly want to raid but I don't want to go back to what I used to be. I don't want to be on a strict schedule of having to be on a certain times multiple times a week. I want flexibility and choice but that really doesn't exist to much if you want to take it seriously. Also I am currently engaged to be married and I want my life outside of WoW to always take priority over raiding. I am afraid of myself. I have an addictive personality and I might see myself falling into the same trap.

I am a huge fan fo the lore in warcraft. As such I have read the last couple of books. Arthas, Stormrage, and most recently The Shattering. The shattering was such an amazing book and did a reall nice job of setting the stage for Cataclysm. When the expansion was announced there was a lot of head scratching with some of the story elements that were chosen. Garosh becoming the new Warchief, the death of Carine Bloodhoof, the council of three hammers were all perplexing at the time. After reading the shattering I can say that they had explained all of them, were entertaining to watch them play out and will be interesting to see where they go with those characters in the future of the game.

4.01

I had stopped playing hardcore World of Warcraft back in April of this year because there was nothing new to do. Raiding is fun but since November of last year it has been the same bosses every week. We defeated the Lich King and had done hard mode on about half the bosses. Cataclysm was on the horizon and I wanted to do other things so I had just stopped raiding altogether. Now its almost November again a full year after they released the last patch and I have got the itch to play again.

Two weeks ago they had dropped 4.01 that changed the talent trees and play style of almost all the classes. As far as paladins go we got a whole new resource to manage that drastically changes the way we play. Also the Blizzard philosophy has changed to make encounters more challenging so ret is no longer cooldown based abilities and Prot has lost the ability to aoe tank well. With protection spec paladins we had a set 6969 rotation where you always knew what ability to use next. I grew to memorize this very easily throughout wrath and having a bit of a tough time adjusting to the new 4.01 model. The problem is it extended the cooldown on a lot of our abilities and it gave us 2 buttons to press and I can't find a good keybind I like for them.

With 4.01 they converted all our different types of currency down to either honor or justice points. I am severely over both caps and while I don't loose any right now I can't gain anything either. I was over 5600 justice points on bladez and once you go over 4000 you can't gain anymore. I went out and spent as much as I could to drop me below 4k but there isn't anything I really need or want. While I am excited to play there is no drive to do anything with bladez so I find it hard to even test my abilities since things die quickly. Outside of the Headless horseman event I find playing WoW pretty boring right now.

I am really excited for the release of Cataclysm and I find myself checking MMO-champion and WoW Insider any time I'm bored and on the Internet. Usually there aren't many updates but I can't stop looking at them. I am nervous about the changed to the paladin class because I just don't know how well they will play out on the way to 85. As prot the nerf to our AoE makes me nervous, and our threat generation doesn't seem to be holding up as well as it should. Retribution seems OK and it will be fine for leveling because things die quick enough that there really won't be much time where we are waiting to hit a button.

December 7th can't come soon enough. I was hoping for some world events to happen so I would feel like I would have some stuff to do but the last 2 weeks have been uneventful. The gnomergon event could be completed in one sitting and it wasn't repeatable. Luckily I have had other things to occupy my time. The new fall lineup of TV shows is out and they have been pretty good so far. Also the holiday releases of video games have also arrived so I have been on my Xbox 350 and Wii more often. Plus between going to the gym, keeping my girlfriend happy, and working overtime I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy. But while engaged in those things I always have warcraft on the back of my mind.

Geek Kingdom

In recent years the geek community has become more vocal and recognized. For a long period of time playing video games was considered a thing for children. With the dawn of the Internet a lot of things have changed. No matter what part of the geeking subculture you exist in you can find other people that are also like minded individuals. Most geeks usually delve into multiple areas of the culture. For example in myself I love console games, pc games, world of warcraft, comics, anime, technology, and some others as well. My friend on the other hand is really into zombies, cosplay, Scott Pilgrim, and setting stuff on fire. While we may be different in terms of the specific areas we geek out in we still consider ourselves geeks and love a ton of what is available out there.

As humans we crave that social atmosphere. The problems is geeks by nature are more reserved group. The stereotype is true for a descent amount of the geeking community. On the Internet we can see and be a part of what we consider cool but get a bunch of them in a room and only a select few will be leading the interaction while most will be passive observers. I noticed this in myself during the Halo Reach midnight launch. There were a ton of people there. We were all geeking out about xbox, new tv shows coming out for the fall, staying up all night playing games, and just having a good time. I loved being part of it but I didn't say much. I was a passive part of the audience just taking in the experience. I noticed this with a lot of other people there as well. We all loved being there, otherwise we wouldn't be at a game store at midnight, but we spend a lot of time behind a computer or on a couch doing what we love.

A little after I got my iPhone 2 years ago I started discovering the world of podcasts. It was small at first but now you can find a podcast for any topic you are interested in. I have about 8 different ones I listen to during the course of the week that touch on different topics. Most of them are about Warcraft, Starcraft, or geek culture in general. It's after listening to the geek ones for a few weeks that I started feeling left out and alone a little bit. I am by no means an anti-social person. I am engaged to be married, a big part of my family, and have groups of friends that I talk to and hang out with on a regular basis. The feeling comes from seeing this huge culture that I want to be a social part of but don't have the friends whoa re hardcore enough who will get into it with me. Listening to a podcast such as the weekly geek, there are a group of people who get together all the time and play video games, boardgames, talk about the latest geek news, watch geek movies, and discover new geek things together. While certain friends of mine are into xbox, and the others into warcraft, and others into anime I still feel like I'm the most hardcore of them and I yearn for more.

The last 3 years I have gone to an anime convention over the summer. I loved going because I got to see some great cosplay, listen to panels about the culture, go through and buy geek related items, and just sit around a table with other geeks. But that was for only 1 Saturday afternoon. I also get that feeling when it comes to warcraft. While the game mechanics might be what bring you into the game, its the social experience that keeps you going. If warcraft was a single player game I don't think people would continue to do the same boss encounters every week for months at a time. In most games you beat a boss once and that's the end of it. The reason a guild is successful is that feeling of being part of a team that is accomplishing something. Getting better and more powerful individually and as part of a team. Getting onto the vent server and talking strategy or just talking about nothing. That feeling of being a part of something bigger then you is what keeps you coming back for more. The reason we spend 15 bucks a month.

Hiatus

I absolutely love world of warcraft. Over the last five years there has been no game that I have spent more time with. I look forward to it when I am not playing it and when I have free time at work I will read as much info about the game as I can. I am an avid gamer and I also love playing my xbox and other games. I had quit raiding back in April because it was getting dull. There were so many other games I wanted to get my hands on. Also having a girlfriend means that my playtime was cut considerably.

So what has Bladez been doing over the last few months you ask? The game that I looked forward to the most was another Blizzard product. Starcraft 2 came out July 27Th but I had gotten into the beta 2 months before it had come out. I had liked RTS games in the past and used to play the age of empire series, company of heroes, warcraft 3, rise of nations, warhammer, and a few others. I was not really all that good at it but I had fun playing the single player mode. The starcraft 2 beta was only online multi player so I was forced into rated competition. Unlike WoW, RTS games have a steep learning curve. Having a basic understanding of mechanics isn't good enough. Each unit was different. They behaved differently, have different counters, and come in different parts of the game. I got my ass handed to me in the beginning. I built a few buildings and a few units and threw them at the enemy and sometimes it works and sometimes it didn't.

So I did what any good gamer did, go online and figure it out. I tried to find different sites that had tips and beginner guides. I had found a few commentary websites that offered a lot of insight into the mechanics of the world. I slowly started getting better and understanding all the units and the timing of when to produce different things. I started winning more and my losses taught me what to change for next time. It had been my new obsession. I could see the amazing polish blizzard had put in the game and it was hella fun. Once the beta had finished and the game came out I gobbled up the campaign and did every mission. Jumped online and found a new love for the protoss race. I had learned to play all 3 races but something about the protess had me shift toward them.

Starcraft wasn't the only game I was playing. I picked up a whole bunch of console games that I didn't have time to play when I was raiding. I had gotten Splinter Cell Conviction, Heavy Rain, God of War 3, Prince of Persia, Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake, Braid, and a few others. I also had time to watch some great TV series. I had brushed up on all the fall classics and watched the entire series of Dextar and Spartacus. I had more time for my family, friends and seeing my girlfriend 4-5 times a week.

Life was good but I know myself. I am going to go back to Warcraft by the time that cataclysm comes out. I also know that I have an addictive personality. I still look at MMO-champion every day, and now I look at all the Starcraft sites as well. My iPhone is filled with podcasts about warcraft, gaming, and starcraft that I listen to whenever I get a chance. If I move away from one obsession I will move onto the next. Back when I was obsessed with raiding I did stuff that most people would call counter productive. The guild I had joined raided between 10 pm and 1 am. After that they would do 10 man raiding until 3 am. That was extremely late for me considering most days I would have work at 8 am. When I raided I would wake up, go to work, come home and go to sleep so I could wake up at 9:30 pm to be able to raid.

Because of my obsession I had little time for anything else. Doesn't work to well when other parts of your life call on you. I loved raiding but I had to quit. This was not a good way to live my life. I was tired during work, I cut my hangout sessions with my girlfriends to be on time to raid. I knew I had to stop so I did. It was such a liberating experience to. After 6 months of raiding the same place over and over again it was nice not to be in there anymore. It wasn't the game that called my name as much as it was the social experience. The guild knew my name and relied on me and it was a good feeling. But its only a game. I came and replaced somebody who left and somebody came and replaced me when I was gone. While it is said not to be there anymore I know its for the better. I have my freedom again to do what I want when I want. Hang out when I want and play the games on my own schedule. Warcraft will always call my name but I am going to try my hardest to not get back to the place where I was pulled in so far it took over my life.

Cataclysmic Changes

I do some Insane things sometimes. World of Warcraft is a game that I love and have poured a lot of hours into the last 5 years. No game has captured me the way that WoW has. When the Burning Crusade expansion had come out I had a hook up at EBGames. They had given me the copy the Friday before its release this way I could have it installed and ready to go before midnight. I had taken a couple of days off along with my best friend and we had some fun leveling through the content. I remember logging off at 11:59 at the Dark Portal and logging back in at 12:01 able to walk through the Dark Portal. We quickly made our way through the quests and were treated to a whole zone to ourselves. With our head start we were able to stay ahead of the masses as we made our way through outland.

Fast forward 18 months and the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. I was even more engrossed into the game and had planned to have over a week off in vacation time to play the game. My connection at EBGames was still active so me and my best friend got the game around 6 pm that night. We had the game installed and flew around outland finishing up over 20 daily quests that we would have ready to hand in as soon as they turned on experience. As soon as it turned midnight we killed a mob to make sure we got exp and proceeded to run around handing in our quests. We flew out to Menethil Harbor and jumped on the boat heading to Howling Fjord. We were screaming on vent to each other as we entered Northrend and seeing the new land we would soon be exploring.That week we had played 18 hours a day every day. We would play til 5 am in the morning head to sleep and come back at 11 and go straight til 5 am again. The zone had belonged to us and we had first dibs on all mining and herb nodes. There was a race to 80 on the server. We were always within the top 10 people as far as level goes.

While we didn't finish first or second we dinged 80 within 4 days. We quickly jumped into heroics claiming our triumph badges and epic purples. We got together with the other 80's on the server and killed Sartharion to claim server first and the nifty Obsidian Slayer title to go with it. We had our entry into Naxx toppling over a lot of bosses and claiming their loot as our own.Yes I am a bit insane at times. I hadn't left my house in over a week. I just went to the bathroom every so often and I had food stashed in my room to munch on. And so the cycle is set to repeat itself. Cataclysm is coming out this year and I have my vacation days saved up. I have made my friend promise to come along for the ride and I've confirmed with my contacts at EBGames. I've talked to my girlfriend about what is happening and while she isn't happy she begrudgingly accepts that this is a part of me.

Over the last few weeks Blizzard has released a ton of information for Cataclysm. We got a preview of the new mastery system, new stat changes, tanking changes, and new class spells for almost every class. Of coarse the one class they haven't done yet is the one class that I play as my main. Overall I like the direction that Blizzard is going with the game. When BC and Wrath came out there was a massive buff to every class and a ton of new spells to go along. With Cataclysm its less about massive buffs and more about tuning things to work correctly.

You have to read between the lines sometimes to understand what Blizzard was trying to do. During Wrath Ghostcrawler said balance was like a bar stool. It doesn't matter how long or short the legs are, as long as the bar stool is even it works. With that there was super inflation on all stats. Doing 2,000 dps was great when you started naxx. Now if you can't beat 10,000 dps in Icecrown you are not pulling your weight. The difference in gear was astonishing. Also we all remember how easily we blew through everything once 3.0 hit. Sunwell became a joke to get through if you knew what you were doing. This applies to all classes. Avoidance was through the roof, healers never ran out of mana, and you could easily just aoe everything in the game.
Blizzard has noticed that and they want stuff to matter again.

First there is tanks. It was incredibly easy as a paladin to hit that magical 102.4% avoidance/mitigation threshold without even stepping into Naxx. As a result right now I'm sitting at almost 60% avoided damage. That is why Blizzard had to implement the chill of the throne debuff. With Cataclysm we are going to see a huge drop in our avoidance and a big jump in our Health Pool. We will probably be closer to 10-20% starting off avoidance. As tanks we will be taking hits but powerful enough to survive through it.

When it comes to healers mana will matter again. All healers will have 3 direct heals. Its based on speed vs efficiency. With the new health pools Blizzard had said it will take 2 or 3 big heals to get from almost dead to back to full. On our Lich King kill we only had 5 healers the entire raid. This is probably not going to be an option in Cataclysm since there will be more healing overall, less over healing, and more time to bring a wounded member back up to normal.

I"m not sure how exactly DPS will scale in Cataclysm. The big thing is to make it so that dps rotation isn't as strict so that the difference between a wrong button press wont be a huge dps loss. With that said they want our special attacks hitting for more and our auto attacks not contribute for so much of our dps.

Overall I am happy with the philosophy of how Cataclysm is shaping up. A lot of people are crying that there is a bunch of nerfs but its not really a nerf considering that everything is changing. They are making a lot of changes to talents to make choices more relevant instead of just straight up dps increases with little thought. With all the information that Blizzard has released it seems as if beta is right around the corner. We'll have a better idea at all the cool stuff Blizzard is about to release.

The King Beckons

This is it. We are finally up to the final boss in Wrath. I had played through Warcraft 3 and I loved Arthas as a character. When I controlled him as a human as he fell from grace, to killing his father, and destroying all of Azeroth as leader of the Scourge. It was an amazing experience. I own 2 copies of the Arthas novel. One that I read and other one is a collector's edition that my best friend had bought me. When Wrath had come out we both landed on howling fjord and one of the first quests given to you was to enter the spirit world. In the distance you see the Lich King and of coarse I had to walk up to him. He spots me and instantly kills me in 1 shot. It was one of the more epic moments in Wrath.

I leveled up to 80 and killed a bunch of his lieutenants, and gear out in epics to enter his citadel. I took out his guards and now I have entered his throne room and challenge him to the death. And death is exactly what he gave me and my 24 guild mates. I didn't think I would be doing what I am doing right now. I am the main tank for the lich king. As a paladin throughout vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade I would tank but no one would take me seriously for progression encounters. When Wrath came out I was good at my job. After quiting the game for a while I never thought I would be in a position where I would be standing toe to toe taking blows from the lich king but here I am. My best friend plays a druid tank and he is so jealous because he quit the game as well but wants to experience the Lich King.

So here we are, Last Hope vs the Lich King. We have been trying for a couple of raid nights to bring him down. Like other ICC bosses he is relatively complicated and has a lot of stages. Phase 1 is pretty easy. I tank the Lich King where he stands and he summons a whole bunch of minions. The stronger minions get tanked by the off tank and if you get a disease you run to the off tank and get cleansed. Once you hit 70% he forces you to the edge of the room while he casts remorseless winter. We have a small problem in this transition phase because he will spawn Spirits that have to be tanked. The problem is regardless of if I taunt or hit him with a hard attack he seems to one shot somebody around him. It is frustrating because it seems that they kill somebody as they are materializing and don't have a hit box that I can attack.

Phase 2 is currently where we are stuck. I have the best gear that I can possibly have minus a shield and he hits for about 30k a swing. He also will cast Soul Reaper on me which is 60k shadow damage after 5 seconds. While he hits hard the healers do a pretty good job of keeping me alive. What wipes the raid is the Valkyr's and the defile. The Lich King will summon 3 valkyr's that will pick up a random person and drop them off the edge of the platform if they aren't dpsed down. Our problem is to get them going in the same direction and stunning them enough before they get to the edge. The other problem is defile. It picks a random person and puts a black circle under them. If anyone is standing on the circle it grows. Often times it will kill the people standing on them and grow further so that other people are standing on it and thus wiping the raid. We're slowly but surely figuring out how to handle this encounter and we are showing progress. We still have one more transition phase and phase 3 to contend with before the boss goes down.

I really like the guild that I am in but one thing that I hate is the DKP system. There is never going to be a perfect dkp system but there are things that a dkp system should account for. The way it works currently is you get dkp for showing up and if there is an item that drops that you want then you can bid on the item. The problem is that it is a blind dkp bid. You have no idea what other people are going to bid and you can bid all your dkp, part of it, or the bare minimum. This is one of the most annoying systems ever invented. I believe that a dkp system should reward the people who deserve items. If you show up regularly you get dkp and you have priority on that item if you have enough. You spend the dkp you get the item. Because you spent the dkp you have less then before so you might not get the next item you want if someone else shows up about equally as you do. I have never ever missed a raid ever since I joined this guild. A lot of people show up whenever they want or hardly at all.

I have 100 dkp and items are usually between 5 -30 dkp. If an item I really want drops and every other tank wants it how much should I bid. I have no idea. If the next highest tank has 80 dkp do I bid 81 this way I am guaranteed to beat them. That seems kind of absurd to bid almost everything I earned since I joined the guild for one item. When I talked to the officers about it they acted like that is what you are supposed to do. I looked at them like they were insane. So to get 1 highly sought after item I have to basically use all my dkp to the point where I won't be anywhere close to getting another item for a while unless no one wants it. As a tank this isn't that big of a deal because I only have 2 other people to fight for. If I was a dps I would probably go crazy in this system and possibly gquit. Trinkets are an item that benefit a lot of classes and specs but there are so few of them that are very good. When they do drop there is a mad dash for them and the people who win them often times don't have any dkp to spend for a long time. If you are smart with your dkp certain slots just never get filled because its not worth lossing all your dkp over.

It is hard to find a balance between spending your dkp wisely and just wanting an item so badly that you pay a ridiculous amount. The thing I hate most about this system is that it rewards the most greedy and not necessarily the person who most deserves it. We had a tank who didn't show up regularly that one day just blew all his dkp on some tier tokens and just leave. It was a highly sought after items and the people who did show up regularly didn't want to blow over 40 dkp on it. He made out like a bandit and the guild is left there scratching their head. While the officers don't like this idea no one is willing to change the system to something that works a bit better. I believe gear should have priority on people who show up regularly and have a set price attached to it. Its hard to find a balance between giving gear to people who deserve it and have new people who show up get geared up as well. The thing I notice is that gear is plentiful. Most slots get filled up pretty quickly and new people get geared out relatively fast. We can still give those people gear but find a way to reward the people who show up with Priority on the highly sought after loot without giving themselves an aneurysm figuring out how much dkp to spend.

Frost Queen

There is a time in a tier cycle where things start becoming smooth. On our last raid reset we were able to clear out 2 wings on Tuesday and the rest of the farm content on Wednesday with an hour left in raiding. This gave us a lot of time to work on our latest challenge, Sindragosa. We spent the last hour on Wednesday, all of Thursday and Monday working on this boss.

Like any boss encounter the first couple of times are very sloppy. Sindriagosa is basically Sapphiron 2.0. Phase 1 consists of basic Dragon mechanics. Stay away from the front to avoid cleaves, and frost breaths. Stay away from the tail to avoid tail smash so basically everyone is dpsing her hind leg. In addition to this there is a raid wide frost damage aura and every 30 seconds she will pull everyone close to her and do Blistering Cold. The raid has about 5 second to move away before she does Blistering Cold which will kill anyone but a tank. During this phase she will randomly cast Unchained magic on the ranged/healers forcing them to stop casting for a few seconds so they don't take to much Backlash damage if their stacks get to high. The melee have their own version of this called Permeating Cold, where each attack will has a 40% chance to make them take damage over time also stacking They will have to stop attacking after 5 or so stacks or they will take to much damage This is also a very hard fight for me as a tank when it comes to threat. As melee Permeating Cold forces me to stop dpsing every so often. Also every Frost breath that I don't resist will put a 2 minute debuff on me reducing my Melee swing time by 50% a stack. This is all while wearing my frost resist gear which has no threat stats on it whatsoever. Every 90 seconds or so she will enter the air phase.

In her Air phase she will randomly select 5 people that will get frost tombed. Unlike the Sapphiron encounter the people who get tombed have to be broken out. The purpose of the tombs is to hide behind from from bombs but again unlike Sapphiron where it was one big bomb in the center you get 5 of them in random locations so you will have to adjust your line of site to the bomb. Originally we would have 5 people line up in a row and try to bring them down to 40% before breaking them out. The problem with that is people have an issue with throttling their dps so they would break out early before the last frost bomb went off and the other frost tombs were still close to 100% by the time she landed. We adjusted our strategy to have 3 people at the bottom of the stairs and 2 right behind them. This allowed us to go crazy and break out the first 2 and by the time the 3 in the front were close to dying she would have cast her last frost tomb and start landing.

Once she gets down to 35% she enters phase 3. After a few attempts we were consistently getting past the first 2 phases without and issues. The last 3 raid nights we spent just trying to get past this final phase and we still haven't been able to defeat her yet. She remains grounded on this phase but she starts doing Mystic Buffet. It's cast every 10 seconds and increases your magic damage taken by 15%. She will also casts frost tomb on 1 random person in the raid. We would assign that person to be close to her head but far enough away from cleave range. Everyone would run behind it to drop their debuff before it got to high and we would swap tanks back and forth while we also dropped our debuffs. During this phase we would have a ton off issues. The first frost tomb would be in a good position but during the second frost tomb we would have multiple people getting frost tombed or frost tombs going down to quick for people to loose their buffs. Slowly we would just loose people during this phase and we got to a point where there were to many people down to complete the encounter. We'll head back into it this week and get her down.

They have released the patch notes for 3.3.3 as well as confirming a whole bunch of other mini patches before the release of cataclysm. Looks like we will have the Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5 as well that promises some new loot and a bunch of trinkets to look forward to. We will also be taking back Gnomergon and thwarting off the Twilight Cult. With it as well tanking stats are changing a descent amount for Cataclysm. First defense is going to be completely removed and you will get uncrittable by going into "tank mode" such as putting up Righteous Fury. This will be good if you are ret/arms/dps dk and don't have a secondary spec but you have some gear for tanking. You can now enter an instance and do well enough to get you through a dungeon or heroic.

Also parry is getting a pretty interesting change. Instead of being a clone of dodge it will reduce the swings damage by 50% and the next one by 50% as well. Because there is no more defense we won't increase our miss, dodge, parry, or block by a small amount because of it. Usually once you get beyond 540 defense you would gain about 10% avoidance due to miss and dodge/parry. Blizzard wants to reduce avoidance across the board. Right now a good tank can have up to 60% avoidance. That is only 40% of the time where you actually take damage. To challenge us they have to make the boss hit extremely hard or add a magical component to the attack table. In cataclysm we'll probably be closer to 15-20% dodge and about 5% miss. We'll be parrying 50% of the damage and when we block we will mitigate 30% of the hit as well. So as a tank we will be constantly be getting hit but we'll be mitigating more damage instead of just avoiding it. This will allow healers breathing room and us as tanks to better gauge when to use cooldowns.

I'm liking a lot of what Blizzard has planned with Cataclysm. A stat that excites me is mastery. Every class/spec will gain something different with mastery. It will probably end up being 3 different thing s as well. With retribution it will probably be strength, crit, and possible reduced cooldown time. With protection it will probably be armor, dodge, and some form of damage reduction. So regardless of what you play it will always be good for you. Bosses wll also scale in different tiers. Probably the first tier of raiding you will need 5% hit to cap, and probably have a 3% crit suppression. When you get into the next tier it will probably be 8% hit cap and 5% crit suppression while the bosses get expertise so the tanks loose 2% dodge and parry. This makes gearing less about pure "power stats " and keeps you desiring more as you move on. While I am really enjoying IceCrown Citadel I want the next expansion. I want to see all the world changes and I love getting upgrades. I am sitting at mostly 264 gear right now so there won't be much upgrades coming in the next month. The idea of exploring new dungeons and gearing up for new raid content is exciting. How long do you think we will have to wait?

Raiding Bites

IceCrown has been out since mid December so it has been over 2 months of raiding t10 content. In the beginning it has been a bit of a struggle taking down new bosses. During this weeks reset we have become so efficient that we had cleared almost all farm content in one night. It feels like each boss is like riding a bike. It is a bit difficult at first but once you get it right it is something you are a master of every time you go at it. I noticed it in our 10 man Putricide when our dps was so good that we didn't even dps the first add before we got past phase 2.

I have in me what I like to call the tanking mentality. Tanks who love to be tanks want to control the flow of the raid. I've noticed in a lot of the guilds and alt runs I have been in it is usually the tank who is talking in vent calling out orders and explaining the fight. They control the pulls, pace, and positioning. I haven't been in the guild long at all but I have already been a very vocal part of the guild. I think it is appreciated but I can't tell if I am stepping on any toes. I usually run in head first on pulls, mark all the kill targets, and yell out whenever anything has to be announced. When the guild leader isn't there I will assign Tank assignments and people will listen for the most part. I have all but taken over our 10 man group. During my second week I was asked to be the off-tank for that week. I now do all the invites and control the run. I don't think the people in the group mind because its easy to just relax after 25 man raiding and do what you are used to without having to deal with managing the raid.

Probably the one thing I hate the most is the DKP system. There are flaws in almost every DKP system out there. You have to find a balance between rewarding people for showing up for raid while not making it impossible for newer people to get upgrades. Also you have to give incentive for people to keep coming back without having inflation being a huge issue. I'm not sure if the perfect system exists. In Last Hope we do silent bids. The good thing about the system is that as long as you have the dkp you can bid whatever you want and have a chance of getting the item. The problem is that you can end up blowing your entire dkp load because you are so nervous about not winning the item. Then you are at a loss for the next set of upgrades that you want. Also people who aren't there as much can come in can take items that a veteran who bids a reasonable dkp amount for the item he wants. I see a lot of people getting stressed out including myself.

This week we cleared all the farm content leaving us with plenty of time to work on new bosses. We spent almost the entire raid last night working on Queen Lan'athal. For this fight I am usually the off tank taking delerious slashes and the Blood Mirror. The first couple of times we did the fight it was complete chaos. People with Path of the Darkfallen were constantly dying. Whenever the boss went into the air we lost half the raid. The fight has a very tight dps requirement and the only way to beat the enrage timer is by getting bit by someone who has been bitten. She will bite one person within 30 seconds of starting the fight. That person will bite 1 person. Those 2 people will bite 2 other people. Those 4 people will end up biting 8 people. Before the enrage timer you will have 16 people with the damage buff. During our first few attempts we were just calling out for who was going to get bit next. We discovered that it wasn't going to work and we would have to have a very specific bite order. We forced 1 person to be third on aggro to get the first bite and everyone knew their assignments after that. We got her to 6% last night and we'll have her dead by tonight.

Our next target is Sindrigosa and the Lich King won't be far behind.

The Dream Raid

The new 3.32 patch just came out and with it the final wing of IceCrown Citadel has been released. With it comes the 3 final bosses of Dreamwalker, Sindrigosa, and the guy the expansion was named after Arthas the Lich King.

In our 25 man raiding group we are still a bit behind. We have been trying pretty hard to get Professor Putricide down. It's always impressive to go from it being almost impossible to get to Phase 3 when we first started fighting the guy to getting their consistently. We had to change up our strategy a bit and it seemed to help out a lot. We used to move the entire raid from one side of the room to the other side of the room and that had hurt our dps a lot. We discovered that if we keep everyone on the right side of the room where the green slime spawned we were able to group up on the slime better burn him down and get back on the boss and bring him into phase 2 before we started working on the second add. We also maximised our dps by keeping the boss close to the abomination while he was drinking the ooze to get him to phase 3 a lot quicker. We were able to bring him down to Phase 3 constantly but we were having a lot of issues there. We were having a lot of sub 10% boss wipes and it was frustrating. We got him all the down to 1% before we had to stop for the night so we weren't able to claim victory as early as we wanted.

The following raid night we didn't have our best composition for Putricide so we went over to the Frostwing halls to try out our hands on the new bosses. Dreamwalker was our first challenge and this is a fight I was very much looking forward to . During PTR testing I was checking out a lot of videos of the new bosses and Dreamwalker sounded very different. To defeat the Dreamwalker encounter you have to heal the boss from 50% health to 100%. Throughout the encounter adds will spawn from different doors throughout the room that have be tanked and burned down while your healers bring the dragon to full health. Since the boss has so much health and healers have a limited mana pool there is a portal that healers can take where they can get a stacking buff that makes mana a non-issue and increases their healing output.

This isn't a hard execution fight. We go through a few attempts to get a feel for the encounter. At around the 6 minute mark the encounter has a soft enrage in which adds come out at a pace that is almost impossible to manage. At this time we would have the boss's health around 90%. The logical solution would to be throw more healing at the problem which is what we did. We upped our healer count to almost 9 at one point. The more healers we had the worse our attempts. We didn't have the dps to burn through the adds and by the time the soft enrage happened we were around 80%. The final kill shot happened when we actually only had 3 healers dedicated to healing Dreamwalker. The problem we ran into was the more healers you put through the portals the more likely it is that their buff stacks would fall out. When we dedicate only 3 competent people to go through the portal they were able to get immense stacks of the buffs that far outweighed having extra healers.

Before raid had reset last week we had went back in and attempted Putricide again. We still didn't have the best group set up but we didn't have anything else to work on so we went with what we had. We had fought the boss so many times that almost everyone was a pro at knowing what to do. People weren't getting hit with mailable goo or standing in Proximity bombs. We got our Phase 3 tank rotation in order and we finally got the boss down. With 2 bosses down in the week reset we were pushed up to a solid 3rd on the server.

As far as progression goes we are doing pretty well but as a guild we have been having our issues. I've been in 4 hard-core raiding guilds since the beginning of WoW. Each of them have had the same set of problems that seem to constantly repeat themselves. In a Dream Raid we would have 30 consistent raiders logging on every night, ready at raid start time to pull the first mob. Each of those members would be fully prepared with max level gems, enchants, gear, and consumable that they can realistically achieve. Each of those members reads elitist jerks and has a deep understanding of their main-spec, off-spec and abilities of all other classes in raid. They have read over the strategies for all progression bosses and watch multiple videos from different view-points of the encounter that they are about to face. Everyone would have an amazing connection to the WoW server with almost no lag and have computers that constantly push over 30 frames during a 25 man encounter. During raid times there are no real life tasks that have to be taken care of that would have people waiting.

Oh what a sweet dream that would be. Unfortunately it is a dream and these are real people we are dealing with. I know a bunch of people who actually fit into that Dream Raider mold. They know how to maximize their role, theory craft all the time, and show up to every raid fully prepared. You never get 25 people who fit the mold though. The last couple of weeks in Last Hope we have been having issues. Just last night we were 24 manning a lot of the bosses. Each night we raid there is always something going on. Usually its not having the right mix of players. We have good competent people but we often times have to many healers and not enough DPS. We are constantly pulling in applicants who don't know the fight or who can't pull their weight in progression content. The common theme in most guilds is people showing up on farm night to get loot and badges but not showing up to wipe on new bosses. We raid 4 nights a week for 3 hours each. We should be spending the majority of that time working on a new boss but often times can't because we lack the people. On Tuesday we have over 27 people on . On a Thursday that number dips to around 23. We have to constantly ask people to switch to their off-spec and I feel bad asking our shaman who spent 6 months on acquiring Val'nyr to go enhancement and play a spec he doesn't want to.

We have a lot of good players log on every night. There are 20 constant people and a list of about 15 people who rotate in every night. It is frustrating for the 20 people who show up to have to deal with the missing few. Tempers get high and yelling happens from the Officers and they want to punish the people who don't show up. In the end it is usually the 20 constant people who get punished because they are actually there to receive the punishment. They log in ready to raid ICC but have to run older content in order to keep it "random" to force people to not only log in on Tuesday. Those people still don't log in the next night and we lost a night that we could have been using to learn and defeat another boss. It is usually the people who don't care that just want loot. The rest of us want to move forward and fight the Lich King. The loot happens naturally through that process. Life is sometimes a bitch. Things come up. We have family, friends, and obligations that we cannot get out of. We feel bad because the other 24 people are relying on us but the real world has to come first.

In the end we are still doing well. Our raiders do a good job at their task. IceCrown Citadel was not meant to be an easy raid. It does take time to learn and in time we will get there and defeat the Lich King. Once we do we will start working on hard modes and continue raiding unless something Cataclysmic happens.

Council

It's been a few weeks since I have joined my latest Raiding Guild. It's interesting how you go from being nervous about performance and how you act in guild, to being comfortable joking around with your fellow guild mates. I have proved myself to the guild and they know what I am capable of. They have come to rely on me and know I can do the take at hand.

It's interesting to see what is most important in the raider depending on your role. After playing tank, dps, and healer its interesting to see what makes you good at those specific roles. As a healer your most valuable asset is your ability to prioritize your job. A lot of damage goes out in most encounters and its your job to figure out what the best heal to use is, what time to use it, and who to use it on. Healing for me is the hardest role to play. I look at the health bars and I want them all to be at 100%. During the encounter you have to decide if its smarter to get the raid back to 100% or use that global cooldown on the the Tank. Good healers are amazing at how well they can manage their mana and keep everyone alive. Finding that balance is what makes the healers so good.

A DPS most valuable attribute is his ability to time his abilities and know his rotation. A healer is going to decide what button to push when the global cooldown is available. A DPS knows exactly what button to push and at what time 3 GCD's from now. He'll be so adapt at his timing that he will be able to react to the bosses abilities without missing a beat. Usually a skilled dps will know what alternate abilities to use if they have to move out of fires or get away from the boss so there dps doesn't dip to much. These people are the ones maximizing their gear, going through spreadsheets, and reading elitist jerks to be number 1 on the recount or WMO.

Then we have the Tank role. This is my favorite role. To be a good tank your best attribute is situational awareness. As a dps I have gone into encounters and not have any idea what to do on the boss and I still did really well. That's not gonna fly so well when you are a tank. While building threat is what you are measured on its how you play the battlefield that makes you a good tank. Being able to pull a boss and position him correctly to make the dps's job easy. Being able to very quickly pick up adds as soon as they spawn. To knowing when to use your cooldowns to make the life if your healers easier. Some fights are easy for a tank because there isn't a lot going on. Most fights require you to be smart and know whats happening and being able to adapt to that situation is why I play the tank. Also its the tanks who usually end up being the leader of the group. A healer looks at his green bars, and a dps looks at his rotation. A tank looks at everybody and everything and can call out and adjust as things happen.

Every role is important and when one side of the holy trinity is weak its going to affect the other 2. You can tell who is good at their role and who is a mindless button masher. What a person chooses to play as their main spec speaks a lot about who they are as a person. While it's never smart to assume anything about a person but when you talk to people and see their characteristics they usually fall in line with what they are playing.

It seems that I always get the unique roles in raid. I am the slime kiter in Rotface and the abomination in the putricide encounter. These are pivotal roles in both the encounters and it's important to do those jobs well. I was half surprised to be picked to do these jobs because I am a recruit into the guild. On the other hand it makes sense for me to be picked for the role considering a paladin is a much better ooze kiter then a warrior, and I was the offtank available the night we attempted putricide. Pro-tip for anyone doing the abomination. You can use both your eat ooze ability and mutated slash if the boss is close enough.

Last Tuesday the Crimson Halls had opened up. With it brought 2 new encounters. The Blood Prince Council is a very cool boss fight. Blizzard just loves throwing so many random things into an encounter as possible. It's my job to tank Prince Taldaram during the encounter. Their is an orb that moves around between the 3 princess that give them empowered abilities. On the first one he will force all melee to move out during his Empowered Shock Vortex. When fighting my target we have to follow an Empowered Ball of Flames so it doesn't 1 shot its target, and for Keleseth the tank needs to run around and collect Dark Nucleus so that his Empowered Shadow Lance doesn't 1 shot him. On top of that their are balls that if they hit the floor will do a ton of damage to the entire raid. It's a lot of things to consider for the raid but when it comes together its a beautiful thing.

We haven't gotten a chance to work on Blood Queen Lan'athel but I've been watching videos and it doesn't seem overly hard to execute. There isn't as much going on during the fight as Blood Prince Council but its all about dps. During the encounter she will bite people and increase their dps by 100% for a limited time. Once that time is up they have only one option and that is to bite someone else and give them the same buff. About 4 minutes into the fight you will run out of people to bite giving this boss a soft enrage timer. On top of that there will people linked together who have to move together and a debuff which forces you to run to the walls. Hopefully we can get putricide this week in 25 man and have some attempts left to give this boss a shot.

The Citadel Awaits

It's been a few weeks since 3.3 has hit. It has been an incredible patch. I am really liking the way Blizzard has decided to deal with loot. I think what keeps most people playing at the highest level is getting new loot. I know for me it gives me an incentive to get in there and become the best geared I can be. When I had last left Bladez he was geared in almost all 226 gear from Ulduar. I had stopped raiding and there was no real point in playing him because I had the best I could get without raiding full time. Now that the new patch came out I saw all this gear that I could get readily since Emblems of Triumph were dropping from heroics. Also I could get Emblems of Frost for even better gear but with a bit more restriction on how much I could get at a time. This is incredibly smart of Blizzard. I see myself logging on in the morning before I go to work just to get my heroic daily in before I set off to work.

That being said I absolutely love the new Dungeon Finder system. Being able to click one button and be instantly transported to a heroic dungeon with everyone knowing their assignments is great. No more days of searching through a list of no healers, 6 death knights 2 hunters a rogue tryping to put a group together is over. I've made it my personal challenge to finish every instance before my dungeon finder debuff wears off.

Ofcourse it wouldn't be a good patch without a full raid instance to defeat. Every time a new raid comes out I'm excited to see what new boss mechanics the raid team can come up with. My hard work paid off and I am in one of the top 5 guilds on the server as one of the tanks. I thought this would be almost impossible to do after being gone for so long. Most guilds have their tanks set since you only need about 3 of them out of 25 people. If you do get in you are probably gonna be benched if their regular guys show up. This usually means you keep falling behind on the gear curve and sitting out is never fun. I was prepared for it though but it hasn't really happened much.

I have just been very lucky when it comes to gear. In the first 25 man raid I ran the main tank already had the 264 plate tanking legs and the other tank didn't want it so I was able to upgrade my legs super fast. The second week I was in for ICC 25 man none of the guilds regular tanks were online. This is pretty surprising for a Tuesday since it is loot pinata day. The 3 tank initiates were the tanks for the night and it was raining tank gear. I lost the roll on the bracers but luckily the helm dropped off the second boss and I was able to snag that up. On top of that I got the shield, weapon, and cape out of the 10 mans. When 3.3 came out I was at 33k unbuffed health. By the time I got accepted to last hope I was at 40k health. Now with all these amazing upgrades I am at 44.5k health unbuffed at over 55k raid buffed.

The thing about gear though it sometimes feel likes overkill when you don't have anything that you need it for. 50k is not necessary for a heroic where he healer never even hits a button. Progression is what its all about. Icecrown is the final content of this expansion pack and as such the requirements are high. Bosses hit for over 30k, dps checks are high and healers have a lot to take care of. Luckily Last Hope succeeds in all these areas. We know how to coordinate well, how to move, and how to do our jobs while dealing with all the factors the boss throws at us.

The first 4 bosses are pretty unique but we make it look easy. Within an hour we clear them out as if we have been doing it for months. This last week the new plague wing opened up giving us 3 new bosses to try at. Festergut is supposed to be the new patchwerk. You have 5 minutes to burn the boss down while dealing with high healing and making sure everyone gets inoculated. DPS is where our guild shines at. I've heard this boss is incredibly difficult for most people but we killed him on our second attempt. Rotface is another story.

I've had the pleasure of playing the pivotal role of being the kiter of the big slimes. The fight isn't overly difficult in terms of execution. Everyone stand in the center of the room. If he turns and faces you then go through him so you don't get hit with slime spray. If you get a mutated injection run out to me and wait for it to combine with another ooze that I kite around the room. Its pretty simple especially at the beginning. The injection happens every 12 seconds and once 5 oozes combine they explode and the raid just has to make sure they don't get hit with it. The problem is that as the fight continues on the rate of mutated injection goes faster. At 30% it happens every 6 seconds so there are a ton of oozes and it gets chaotic and hard to control. We've had so many attempts where he is below 10% but ooze control is difficult and it ends up killing key people.

Next week we will be trying out the final boss which is Professor Putricide. This boss is supposed to be incredibly difficult and you only have 15 attempts on him per week. In 2 weeks we will have another wing open up and new bosses to take down. I am pretty excited to have a new home and new challenges that await. It'll be awesome to see what the citadel holds and what new loot awaits. My goal is to one day be at 60k health raid buffed.

Bladez is Back

So it has been a while since I have played World of Warcraft seriously. Last July I had switched my job at work from a primarily evening shift to a day shift. This didn't work to well for my raiding guild since it started raiding at midnight. I was also getting burned out from raiding constantly. Ulduar was on farm, people weren't showing up for raids, frustrations was high and it was a great time to pursue other interests.

During my break 3.2 came out and I found myself leveling up 2 alts. I got both my warrior and my shaman up to lvl 80 and pretty well geared out. Without being on a raiding schedule I was able to have fun, join pugs and get tons of gear but still go out when I wanted to. I had for the most part ignored Bladez considering I was still overly geared for anything I wanted to do and there weren't any big upgrades unless I wanted to raid full time. I also spent weeks at a time not logging into the game at all.

Then a few weeks ago patch 3.3 came out and it was calling my name. 3 new 5 man instances, a brand new raid and the new Dungeon Finder. On top of that everything was dropping emblems of triumph which rewarded gear that was better then what I had. Although I enjoy playing my alts and gearing them up, Bladez is who I love playing. I enjoy tanking and I love doing it on a Paladin. I started using the Dungeon Finder and was chain running heroics. There were so many upgrades to get and I was so overgeared for heroics that I wanted to push myself and the healer but taking 3-4 pulls at once. I survived almost everyone of them to. instances that used to take 45 minutes I had shaved down to 15-20 minutes. Often times the debuff for using the random heroic finder was still ticking down while we were fighting the last boss.

I had the itch to raid again. I was able to get into a few pugs doing ICC and it felt amazing tanking progression content again. I decided to find a new guild to call home. There is a sad feeling when you don't feel like you belong in the game. There is plenty to do but you don't have a team you rely on and they rely on you. I decided to app to Last Hope which has a raiding schedule that fits better with my lifestyle and is constantly pushing the latest content. I put in an app to the website but was told that I have to up my level of gear. At that point I had 33k unbuffed health and I hit the floor running.

I started chain running heroics, pugging raid content, and crafting epics. Since the patch came out I have gotten 75 emblems of frost and over 230 emblems of triumph to max out my tanking gear. Luckily during my crazy heroic runs a battered hilt had dropped and I was able to sell it for 25k. This helped fund my need to enchant and gem all my new gear. I also took this time to max out both Shieldz and Giaz alchemy so that I can transmute my own gems.

Now I am sitting at 40k health unbuffed with a Gear score over 5k and an average item level of 240. There is nothing I can do now outside of running a daily heroic for 2 emblems of frost and getting accepted into a raiding guild. Icecrown Citadel looks awesome and I can't wait to be kicking the asses of new bosses.

Aion Impressions

Summer is here, Yogg is dead and that means there is time to stop and smell the new MMO's. There are a bunch of new MMO's scheduled to be coming out over the holiday seasonand beyond. From Champions Online, DC Universe, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a whole bunch of other games that are trying to carve a niche in the empire that Blizzard currently owns. One of the games that has recently caught my eye is the new Aion game coming to computers this September. I hadn't even heard of Aion til recently. One of our forums post pointed out a trailer to the new game so I decided to check it out. The trailer just looked amazing. The environment's looked varied and beautiful. The combat fun and stylish and characters looked epic in design.

Warcraft while a fun game gets repetitive after 4 years of play. I want a game like WoW but from a different person's attempt to do it better. I check out the website and noticed that a beta is in effect and access is available with pre-order. I head down to my local Gamestop and put down some cash and walk away with a beta code. I proceed to follow the instructions and download the game. I try logging in but unfortunately it doesn't let me in. I do some research and beta's are only open a weekend at a time every other week. So I had to wait until this weekend to try it out. I jump on the servers and start creating my class.

You start out with the ability to join 1 of 2 races. At first glance it looks like a battle of light vs dark. The Elyos which are more angelic in design vs the Asmodians which are more demonic. Whether this is true or not I have no idea but its what I get at first glance. No matter what game I play from Elder Scrolls to Knights of the old republic I always find myself creating a good character. A saviour of the universe out to save the world and whoever needs help on the way. So I decided to create an Elyos male warrior. You get a choice of 4 different classes ranging from warrior, mage, scout, and priest. Each one has eventually splits off into 2 different classes with my warrior being able to be a Gladiator or Templar.

A gladiator is akin to an arms/fury warrior and templar a protection warrior. The one thing I have always liked from Warcraft is that you get character arche types that can do a variety of different roles and if you decided that you wanted to be prot instead of fury you had that option down the road. I'm not sure if Aion lets you change once you pick your sub-class. Considering this was a beta it didn't matter much but that will be a hard decision to make if it is permanent.

So my new warrior named Bladez steps into the world of Aion into Akarios Planes. I look around the world and while it is beautiful lacks some of the artistic brilliance that Warcraft has. This is the beginning zone so there is probably some beautiful zones awaiting for me in the future. I see a man with a blue arrow on top of his head so i figure this is Aion's version of the yellow exclamation mark. I run over to him and get my newbie quest. Go help the farmers with a problem of Kerub's taking over. I go over kill my 3 quest npc's and go back and collect my reward.

If you play warcraft a lot of things are familiar. Movement, inventory management, menus, leveling up, hp, mp, skills are all familiar. But as warcraft players we want to be able to customize everything the way we want. I am so used to being able to right click and swing my camera around to be able to see the environment. I was pissed to find out that I couldn't do it. I searched thought the options but I would just keep running to whatever spot I clicked on the terrain. I was able to change most other bindings but I didn't really need to considering there were very few abilities in the beginning. I continued on my quest of reporting from one person to the next and completing their objectives. What is nice is the fact that they have a built in quest helper. While looking at your quest locations and npc's would be marked with blue text. You could click the blue text and get a little blurb about it or click the locate button and it would put an x on your map.

As I leveled up I got a few abilities but nothing all to impressive. You basically get a strike ability but that strike was able to combo into a new ability that you get at level 3 that has to be used right after the original strike. It had a 10 second cooldown so you were basically left auto attacking until the mob died. I'm sure combat will get better as I level up but I just sat there hoping the mobs life dropped to zero before mine did. A few times I wasn't so lucky. I'm not sure if there is a penalty for death. You basically resurrect where your bind point is and since I didn't have a bind point yet I just arose where the game started. I wasn't sure if you get exp penalty or anything or if you take durability loss but I'm sure there is something there.

I had gotten up to level 5 before i stopped doing roughly around 20 quests. Most of the quests are the traditional kill X mobs, loot X items, or fedex quests. With the type of quests lich king had it felt kinda silly but this is the beginning of the game so I'm hoping things will get better as time goes on. Though like most mmo's there is a certain addicting quality about it. You create a character and you want to make him stronger. You want to get new abilities, more powers, make your swings hit harder and equip new gear. The game deffinatly delivers on that fact. Apparently at level 9 you get your quest to start getting your wings to be able to fly and choose your sub-class.

I enjoyed my time in the game and it was fun. Unfortunately beta's only last for the weekend so I won't be able to play past monday which sucks. I'm not sure If I am going to end up buying the game when it releases. While the game is good I'm not sure if I want to invest $50 into another MMO at this point. It has been said before but nothing is going to be better then Warcraft until blizzard makes something better. Most people who leave to try new things usually end up coming back. Plus by the time the game releases there will be more to do in Warcraft and the holiday season of console games will also start releasing. I might just wait until the price of the box goes down and they fix the majority of the release bugs before I step foot into the live game.