Updates

Not much to post about recently, unfortunately. I'm working on getting several scattered objectives done in-game in during raid downtime.

I'm finally levelling enchanting, and working on getting that up. It's difficult after selling off most of my BC materials for cash flow long ago, when I wrote off enchanting as ever becoming relevant to me. I'm regretting that decision slightly now. I'm also monitoring the Bookclub channel and hearthing back to Dalaran and snagging the books when people report them up. It's the lazy man's way to a new pet. I quickly found that camping the spawn points was tedious, and time consuming, and not my thing at all.

Finally, I'm running old raids (did part of Sunwell last night) and trying to see the content I didn't get an opportunity to see in Burning Crusade. We wiped on Felmyst three times and almost wiped on Brutallus despite far overgearing the encounter. I can definitely see why Blizzard is moving away from these types of raids. The amount of min-maxing that was necessary to down these bosses at 70 was simply unfortunate. I quit at Eredar Twins (Mary Kate and Ashley?) but it seemed like that encounter was even more demanding than Felmyst was. I'd still like to see Kael'thas and Illidan (Vashj already taken care of). I'd also like to get into a discussion of Blizzard's raid design strategies and how they are changing, but I'll save that digression for a later time.

Updates in the raiding arena include big pushes to get all of our Heroic: Glory of the Raider done. It probably would have been done earlier had our guild been pushed to do so, but getting some people to wrap their heads around the new raiding model seems to be difficult. Completing the current content as-is is no longer "enough" to be considered hard-core. Not that I care about that necessarily, but the fact remains that the content isn't much of a challenge that way. Fortunately, now it's been made clear that completing those achievements is a big deal and as much a part of progression as anything else. We'll see if these pushes will exacerbate the attendance problem that we're having at the moment because most people consider us "done" with 3.0 until 3.1.

3 Drake Sartharion is still an issue, despite the fact that we're insanely overgeared for it. We're now able to consistently kill Tenebron before Shadron lands, and yet still lose people to Flame Wall and Void Zones. Execution is a BIG problem, needless to say. The more we practice it, the more we can see that this encounter is really not as hard as it's being made out to be. Seeing that and continuing to fail at it is demoralizing, to say the least. Simply replacing those people that consistently fail at it is unfortunately not an option. If there was a method of penalizing people that fail at Void Zones and Flame Wall in a way that wouldn't contribute to the attendance problem, I can't think of it. Unfortunately, simply completing 3 Drake Sartharion is the least of our problems if we're going to actually finish Heroic: Glory of the Raider.

An even bigger problem we're going to have is with Heroic: You Don't Have an Eternity aka "6 minute Malygos." Our best kill, a one-shot last Wednesday, took approximately 8 minutes, 30 seconds. Although we haven't tried the alternate strategy specifically for a 6 minute attempt (all ranged in one spot on the outer ring, all melee killing the lords), I can only fear for the results when we do if execution in encounters continues to be a problem.

Also, last Wednesday we missed Heroic: Shocking and Heroic: The Safety Dance because of one person (though different people) on both attempts. On Heigan, the fail was so close to the end of the fight we didn't even have time to wipe it and start over. We were that close. The Thaddius fail was right at the beginning of the fight, but at that point our achievement run was pretty much over and I think it was a wise decision to not attempt a second try. Our track record with that encounter isn't the best. I think that says a lot right there. Fortunately, as long as we have the healers, Heroic: And They Would All Go Down Together isn't too bad. The strategy for that fight is much more like the original version of 4 Horseman, and I think it will be equal parts of fun and frustration.

If we manage to get all of those achievements done, I would guess a good plan could be to award the best achievers with Heroic: Subtraction, Heroic: A Poke In The Eye, and Heroic: The Dedicated Few runs. Then we would try for The Immortal.

Ouch. We need three weeks, if we really turn this around, to complete this achievement, and that's if we one-shot The Immortal. I can hope (yeah, right. I know). Otherwise we can practically kiss any chance of getting a Val'anyr any time this millenium goodbye.