Carried by Mango

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I dislike DK’s. Like Cubby I think they are awesome farming toons, but since they were one of the best tanks in WotLK I decided to finally take one to cap. He has been mining and BS for a while and I get him a level every time I log into him rested.

I am getting pretty decent at tanking on him, and I enjoy that they are pretty easy to play but you have a batman size toolbelt to play them. Most of the randoms I play with him are quick en enjoyable. I also go and PvP with him when I do log on him.

After a dungeon and a horrible WG I decided to mine and do one more random, and Mangofruit from Maelstrom ques up as a healer. I was first a little concerned that he was in Shadowform, but since he was 80 I figured he was just going to have some fun. Oh no… he pretty much wanted to power through every dungeon we did. 49% of the DPS and all the heals later I got 1.5 levels and almost to 80. Anubis (a hunter that also stuck with us) is trying to get me killed right now since I put myself on follow while I wrote this! lol

So, thank you MANGO! It has been a nice fun run away from Cata heroics! Thanks for the fun!

L2Play Heroics!

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Since my last rant about healing I went the Holy way and it is possible to heal heroics a lot better than with Disc, at least at the moment… Sad day for me, but I guess I will have to wait until the next patch to try Disc again. My tank is geared past heroics now; but even with him I dread tanking heroics.

The game has always been about the purples. Everyone wants to get their shinnies, be it to show off in the trade district or just to get the achievements related to them, everyone wants to be “Epic.” Most of us in the guild want to get geared so we can start raiding and that means we have to do heroics.

Heroics are taking a lot of time. Back in the Vanilla or BC days when I started playing, a lot of the time was travel time to get to a heroic, but even with instant que from a tank a heroic can go as long as 3 hours if you have to explain the fights. Its also not as cool to be a tank as you think, sure we get insta que’s but the moment we get in with 4 other people, that means there are plenty more in que waiting for one. I have heard of que’s for DPS of over an hour.

L2Play (Learn to Play) is often tossed around when people find something challenging that someone else can do easily in the game. It is really getting on my nerves at the moment that most people seem to want to fall into groups of “awesome” players and people that need to L2Play. Heroics are doing that though. Some encounters are pretty challenging and don’t only have a learning curve but unforgiving mechanics… (what good is a 150K health pool if some mechanics still one shot people?)

I don’t consider myself awesome at the game, I feel I am competent at tanking but certain mechanics still get me. My perfect nemesis is right now in Stonecore. The third boss, huge rock dude is just nasty. He basically can 1 shot everyone including tanks. He has a frontal attack that I can strafe out of with no problem, however that is when things get complicated. he also has a stomp ability that everyone need to run out of, including the tank… and well, timing the strafe, run out, don’t let it face the DPS and healers can sometimes get out of control. I am sure with more practice I will do fine on that fight, but it seems like a pretty unforgiving mechanic that with one misstep can take out everyone.

Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the game is amazing. Questing and dailies don’t seem to have an end to them. The fun I used to have in the Isle of Q grinding is back in several places where I don’t mind doing dailies. The JC daily minus the freaking Lila quest (jeweldigger she is) does not feel like a grind and is making me look forward to getting all patterns. I am having tons of fun farming rep and it has even made me want to go back and get all the alliance side preps to Exalted. Running dungeons on heroic is just not that much fun. Healing them is not either, its challenging but not fun at all.

I think that Blizzard did a heck of a job with this expansion, and I am sure many people are happy to be able to tell other L2Play. I personally don’t find it all that satisfying to do heroics when I know a lot of the people I want to play with cannot do them just yet. Regulars are still fun and now that my tank is geared I might be able to enjoy both healing and tanking on alts a lot more. Raiding is starting to pick up momentum and that will be a lot of fun. For now, heroics are still not a fun part of the game and the only true grind besides archeology.

Blizzard Screwed Healing

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I am a blizzard fan boy. I plan to go to Blizzcon again, I plan on playing Diablo III. I think Cataclysm made the best game ever made into a game that is just on a league of its own. I LOVE WoW… however, I think they messed up big time with the changes introduced to healing.

I was very excited about being able to pop into the DPS meters as a Discipline priest. In my head I had a new healing class almost Diablo III monk like in the way it could DPS and heal himself or hang back and just do it all. I almost dream of being able to play a Panderan monk this way, yeap I want to play a Kung Fu Panda in wow.

My discipline priest was going to be amazing at healing and skill was going to once again prevail over gear… and it looked that way intially… until my priest hit 83. Basically they made my utility belt so expensive that I have to pawn the gun to buy bullets. I know that as I gear things will get easier, but the reality is that gearing a toon takes time, and even geared I am not going to be as effective as a paladin or as a holy priest are now. You put me in a box instead of making my class more fun to play.

If gear is going to be used as the mana regain factor in the game, gearing is going to be a pointless grind where you don’t really play until you are geared. It will be a grind that will make every healer want to just not play. If instead gear affects how much you can heal, it means that the gear will be the entry to the next level, be it raid or heroics.

Blizzard talked a lot about balancing things out. They said that with Cata, you will bring the player to the encounter and not the class, but right now healing is in a pretty horrible state. They seriously think that it is working as they intended it. I know several of our healers are giving up and going DPS. Except for our Paladins, they are quite ok healing right now as are our Holy priests and some shammans, our druids are still stuck on no heroics.

Many of our tanks don’t want to deal with gearing their toons because of the current state on heroics. People don’t want to go back to things being hard, and I understand it… I liked healing with mana not being an issue, and if you are going to make it an issue make it something I can fix with my class and not just with overgearing the content… what is the point of making the content irrelevant as soon as you outgear it.

If my mana regen abilities allowed me to pop a cooldown in a smart way and get a significant amount of mana back I could continue playing disc and having fun. Right now, if I do everything just the right way, I can get some of my Mana back, but in most cases that is simply not enough to finish some “bad” pulls. I understand punishing bad DPS that stand on the fire, but I get blamed every single time even when it was not my fault at all. I have been experimenting with different builds and reforging in various ways… but when bubbling the whole party up takes such a big chunk of mana it really makes discipline not feel the same. I don’t want to play a Holy priest, I liked Discipline and not just single bubble… I did not want a rotation, I liked flexibility. I was not just a bubble spammer when I ran things, if the encounter called for it I did it, but I would have fun switching how I healed from dungeon to dungeon or raid to raid.

Even people from Paragon are saying that druids and shammans are so broken that they are not even viable for hardmode content. What hope do we as casual raiders have if the people that spend time looking at combat parses see two classes just out completely… (The dude did say that shammans are still cool for their time being because of mana tide… I want mana tide)

I don’t want this to sound like a total QQ post. I plan on figuring a way to play my priest, even if it means going holy. I just really don’t understand the mentality at blizzard that they needed to make healing “fun” and ended up making us the lightning rods for any pug group sucking. Tanking is challenging as well, but I still find it fun even with an undergeared group. The difference is that as a tank I can control the pace, as a healer I get dragged along a lot, sometimes even without full mana. The result is that I end up getting kicked from the group, not because of a wipe, but simply because I had to drink between non CCed pulls.

Take for example the first boss in BRC on heroic. Blizzard made a very interesting encounter, but I really wish they would have let us figure out how to deal with it instead of making the abilities of the boss steer you into a single path that healers cannot affect. Unless a tank is geared enough that he has his cooldowns ready for the AoE the boss does after chains, the tank also has to run away from the boss along with heals and DPS bringin along all adds that are not already dead. Our guild already has alternatives to dealing with this because we are getting geared, but I cannot affect the fight as a healer in a pug. A good healer should be able to affect that mechanic directly and telling a tank, I have you, just keep the adds with you, I will heal you through it and they will get killed by the smash. I am sure I will eventually be geared enough for it… but knowing that is a viable strategy and not being able to execute it because I am not OMG BBQ 359ed out is NOT FUN.

If blizzard wanted to make mana something we needed to watch, they did an excellent job. Where they failed is giving us a set of tools to get that mana back that is not directly connected to how much spirit you have for regen that work effectibly or might not overscale with gear. Sure that should be a variable but abilities need to be fixed to make the game more playable without gear being the only way to fix the issues. Raiders should not be the only people that are allowed to have fun playing their class.

IF Smart Spells = Mana Regain then
Challenging = FUN
Else
Challenging = Impossible*

*Unless you outgear the content.

I have only healed with my disc priest in Cata so I don’t know the pain of druids yet. All I am saying is that what if my Holy fire also gave me a % mana back, or even my smite. Reward me for smart play. What about if archangel did not only make spells less expensive but cound proc some escaled regen as well. What if my hymn actually did something. What if my shadowfiend actually had a cooldown where I could use it after I had to spam flash because someone took too much damage, or even during heavy damage portions of an encounter… most encounters have 3 or 4… but I only seem to get 2 shadow fiends out.

While I understand that CC is necessary for heroics, the days are gone where I can actually save people. They they really got the whole triage (emergency room) healing down path now. I liked being able to heal not because I liked to do timed heroics, but because I knew that a new group of people that pulled a couple of groups or an extra pat were not going to die because of how I played my class, not because I had “unlimited” mana. I love the sense of urgency that you get from healing in raids, but I don’t necessarily want that feeling in every dungeon I run.

So I BEG blizzard, buff our mana regain abilities! make it percentage based so that gear does not affect them. Don’t leave undergeared priest out in the wilderness without even a flashlight. Make our toons playable again or you will kill your beautiful product when only 1 million out of the 11 are the ones truly having fun. The shinny new coat of pain will eventually dull, and when the majority of people start trying to do dungeons (which they will even if they are not raiders) you will start losing people.

The answer to everything should not be to outgear it. I would have never become a raid healer if I did not get the chance to actually have fun playing a priest while I was leveling and starting out. I don’t see many people picking healing up when its so challenging to do so without gear in the starting stages of the new cap.

The Dark Side of WoW

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Cataclysm is an amazing expansion, I have not had this much fun with the game EVER! All around the questing is just very well built. The dungeons are beautiful, the new mechanics are challenging, plenty is broke with the classes, but time will fix all of that. We even managed to down the new boss in Tol Barad in our first visit. Things are going well… well so it seems. The best thing about WoW is that is an MMO and people make the game enjoyable. Having an awesome group of people to play with makes it a wonderful experience… but the moment you step out, the moment the game changes and it turns into a very, very frustrating experience.

Blizzard decided that healing was too easy and decided to go back to making it challenging again. They are sticking by their decision of making things more challenging and while I respect that, well it has also made for some horrible interactions with people. I hear stories every day from guildies having horrible times in heroics. Even though my healer is past the gear level for heroics I stay away. I run heroics with my tank only with guildies and gave up trying to have people CC in pugs.

Sometimes you get into a group and everyone does what they are supposed to, but the norm right now is that one person will not do what they are supposed to and ruin the experience for the rest. Most people got used to the pace of chain pulling heroics during the last part of Wrath and expect that same speed out of a heroic dungeon. I think people don’t realize that heroic is not a 15 minute burn through bosses run, but a couple of hour commitment to team work and execution.

As a guild we have completed most heroic dungeons. Some people have already done them all and are even working on the achievements. I personally have stepped back and been working on reps and professions. I think that we will run a lot more heroics in the coming weeks and probably stay away from pugs as much as possible.

The anonymity of being behind a keyboard miles away makes people say some nasty stuff. Try to not take it personal and stick to your friends when running things for the time being. Its a nasty world out there at the moment and until people start to slow down in heroics, I think more and more people will find them to be a source of frustration rather than the source of sun they should be.

Guild Perks

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There is way too much to talk about in Cataclysm and the more I play this expansion, the more I love it. Guild Leveling is by far the most rewarding because it is an amazing feeling when you are in the middle of playing and across your screen the entire guild gets an achievement. No matter where you are at or what you are doing you see across the screen that we as a group acomplished something that will benefit all of us. From leveling faster to having cheaper repair bills, the guild rewards are making us work as a team and made us all focus on the guild.

During the first week of gameplay I though we were going to make a push to start raiding right away, seeing that many top world guild were already done with the initial normal modes like we were conquering dungeons. Then I took a step back and saw that everyone was having fun, not just leveling but looking at those guild achievments and not being daunted by the task of killing 50K critters but just ready to kill another 500 today.

We have our crafters and miners going nuts to reach all those watermarks. We have our PvPers hunting down horde (actually we are done hunting and already got Horde Slayer). We are slowly but surely getting our raid team geared and together to start farming heroics and helping people get through the initial content, but overall we are having fun as a guild.

Initially some people had concerns about how the rewards would affect their alts. Some of the rewards really don’t kick in until you reach honored with the guild which can take some time. The thing is about commitment though, if you are commited to being a part of a guild you now have to work towards getting those rewards not just by simply showing up, but by actually doing things with and for the guild.

Everyone seems to have their favorite perk, and some are just beinging to notice. Cheaper repairs has been one that almost everyone is noticing, specially after getting into a bad heroic group. The one I am looking forward to Hasty Heart because its always nice to not have your HS on cooldown.

I really want to thank everyone that is working so hard to get the rewards we are all benefitting from and want to say AWESOME JOB guys. This game is all about the people :) and we have the best guildies ever!

A Week in Cataclysm

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After a week in the post Cataclysm Word of Warcraft I have to start by being a blizzard fanboy. I did not mind that ICC was the only new content for a year as much as other people did. It became the training grounds for many players that had never raided before, including my wife. All that time spent in there made them a lot more prepared to take on this new content that is a lot more challenging but far more rewarding. The finished product feels a lot more polished than Wrath felt when it came out. I cannot stop saying, WoW. I never cared much for a game being beautiful because always find gameplay more important… but I just cannot stop flying and swimming through some of these areas and saying, this is just amazing. One freaking paragraph in, and I am already going to start using all the positive adjectives in the English language.

Before I go into more of the love fest, lets talk about some of the bumps on the roads have been.

While the added complexity of the dungeons is truly fun and challenging, there are some mobs and some pulls that are too complex for non heroic content. I keep on thinking on the people that don’t raid but still like to go into dungeons, they almost have no chance against some of these mechanics. As casuals that raid, we are used to not only moved out of the fire, but read the buffs that the mobs have to paint the roadmap of how we are going to kill them. Hey, that thing has a mana bar and its casting healing spells or silencing our healer… kill it. A lot of people will not get why they keep on ending up dead and become frustrated easily.

Even though 90% of the quest content has been revamped to be really easy to complete, there are still some quests that are very frustrating. We play in a PvP server and the other faction does not play nice, and in some cases mob tagging becomes very, very annoying.

Tagging is the practice by some players of hitting an NPC right before you actually engage it so they get the kill. This can be done to an elite that you need to complete a quest, if the target’s health bar is gray it means you will not get credit for it.

I have personally have not been frustrated by world PvP. Even walking through a group of about 30 opposite faction members we were left alone. It seems that for the most part people are trying to level. I have heard from other guildies that some areas become simply infuriating with the ganking, but my response is simple… the moment the game is becoming frustrating, just log into another toon or switch areas. Most gankers are also cowards, so every time we show up to rescue a guildie they seem to leave, even if they were camping. I would say in most instances it has not been worth our trip, but it has been very satisfying to just drive people away from anyone wearing our tag.

Tanking has been pretty difficult specially in heroics. While there is really no more one shots due to gear, most of my deaths have come the way of oom healer (out of mana). This is a little frustrating when it happens because DPS are still thinking ICC or Wrath (burn the whole group) and ignore CC attempts or marked targets which depleats the healers mana. Most healers are also not used to letting DPS drop to conserve mana. Once these shifts (not sure it really will) I think that DPS will get the idea that they cannot tank, even if they do have enourmous health pools now.

And that is it, that is pretty much all I can complaint about… and I am starting to realize that this is becoming lenghty and rambly! So I might have to leave some of the rest for another post!

The End of Wrath

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I started playing WoW during The Burning Crusade. I had the chance to experience some of the raiding at that time, but it was still not as accessible as it is today. My warrior was power-leveled to become a tank and saw some of the end game content. Being there for WotLK release gave me the chance to see how much things start changing before the release. I was not freaked out by the whole revamping of talents or even the elemental invasion. In fact, I think that in the past the whole points reset happened tons more often when they were tweaking things. I am not just looking forward to Cataclysm, I am excited for it to come out. It’s cool because I am as happy for this as I was when the Harry Potter books were being released after I became a fan of the series. (I am not as excited about the movies even though I do watch them.)

Our guild has a lot of plans in motion for the Cataclysm expansion and we will be having a lot of fun leveling to 85, and probably even re-rolling to enjoy the worgen and goblin experience. The month of December will be full of discovery and Blizzard seems to be expecting a lot of people back to see what’s new. They are a company that seems to listen to the community and is going to put out the content people want. Flight in all zone, you got it! More complex fights for raids and dungeons, checked! Being loyal to a guild giving you cool rewards, granted!

As I look forward to this, I want to take a look back at what Wrath of the Lick King did for me as a player, raid leader and most importantly part of the best guild in the world (That might not be a fact, but it is a truth because, for me, there is no other group of people I would rather enjoy my gaming experience with).

Before I dive into the whole discussion I want to make something pretty clear. I am not one of the people that believes that the game begins at cap, if your resilience is bellow 1K you should L2PLAY or that only raiders are doing it right. Many guildies enjoy the game simply for the leveling aspect or even solely the social aspect. Some just like to log in and have people to chat with about their day, or the food that is cooking (or at times burning) on the stove. While this post will have a lot to do with raiding, our guild is casual first. Friends > Loot

Our guild was born out of two thoughts. 1) Let’s help people become better at the game so they can see the content, they paid for it, they should see it. 2) To achieve that goal we don’t have to be nasty to each other. Yep, it was that simple. We had seen a stream of “hardcore” raiders parade on and say “you guys are awesome people but you suck at killing bosses.” Nobody took the time to explain that add-ons to heal made things simpler, or that add-ons needed to be configured, or that macros were actually helpful. Nope, most people would just say “you suck, you noob,” and move on.

I still remember a conversation with my wife back when she did not even play the game. I asked her if she would be OK with my starting a guild; she had even mentioned the option to me in the past when I mentioned that I might be joining another guild that was trying to do more progression (back in the Naxx days). I said to her “it is going to require that I spend more time in the game than I do now, so I want to make sure you are OK with it before I take this step.” She said go for it. (I am not interested on digging up the corpse that it is how me creating a guild affected my last guild. The story is simple but it always becomes a point of debate. All I will say is that there was never any malicious intent to destroy anything, only intent to create something new.)

BoondockSaints was born; it was small guild but we quickly gained some strength and were able to start raiding casually. I started to not just learn the fights more but actually lead more raids. I had done it before at a smaller scale, but now I had the responsibility to learn strategies, know what classes to bring and see where we could do better. We did lots of Naxx and some of Ulduar. We did not have the success other guilds had, but we were able to let people at least enter into those places and get some experience on what raiding was all about.

ToC was painful. We worked on it, but it started to show us that we needed to get lots better if we wanted to finish it. We wiped there a lot, people started to hate going there but we worked through it. I also had been leveling a healer, but this time I had taken my time and enjoyed playing him very much. Having another toon and its being a healer opened my eyes to the game and raiding a lot more. I saw how important it is to move out of the fire (as a tank you don’t have to deal with fire as often as you do as a DPS or a healer.)

When ICC opened and frost badges became the thing to get the game changed dramatically. The gear you could get was a lot better and a lot easier to get. We had also been getting a lot better at raiding and our casuals were now becoming actual raiders. We had come so far from before that some of them were filling up the ranks of other guilds on their 25s. Yep, those people that had left us behind to become “Elite” now needed our help to progress. I continued to run 10 mans and was making progress in ICC, small but steady. Then a bubble spammer became more and more of a commodity and it allowed me to go into a lot more raids, and see more and more content.

Our goal as a guild was simple during WotLK. We wanted to kill Arthas and therefore get the end game title. While some people in the guild do want hard-modes and drakes and the whole enchilada, our goals as a group were simple. One of the guilds that we were filling spots for had a migration to a more progressed guild. This situation put us at a crossroads. I tried to get everyone’s input but at the end we had to make a quick decision before the opportunity was missed. We were going to end up with a merger and potentially some excellent players that knew more than I did about ICC and progression raiding. It was not going to be without the bumps, we could potentially lose some of our ways (helping others, raiding slow and explaining every fight.) It was a rough change for most people and we were able to keep the identity of our guild even though most of the raiders did move on eventually. The end result was that we added more quality players to our casual ranks and loads of knowledge. Before they moved to another server we were able to get a combined group the Kingslayer title. As a guild, the BoondockSaints had accomplished what casuals in a low pop server should not have been able to do.

It is months later now and we have done a lot more raiding and a lot more wiping, but I am happy to report that as this expansion closes we have our 4th new group of kingslayers. We are trying to get at least one new group through the content a week, but the fight takes time to get used to because defiles just suck the soul out of people. Sure, it is a lot easier now and its not as amazing for a raider that has already conquered 25HM. But for a small guild from one of the lowest populated realms, on the 1:3 outnumbered faction, is really cool.
Fourth Group of Kingslayers

TL:DR

WothLK allowed us to become raiders. We might never become hardcore, but we were able and will continue to see content in Cata. We will do it with a group of friends that help each other become better at the game every day and are looking forward to the challenges ahead!

Blizzcon 2010

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Before I even begin to talk about this great weekend I want to say that without the people that I got to meet, hang out and just share this wonderful experience this would have simply been a good time; instead this will be one of those memories that stays with you for the rest of your life. We were lucky enough to have 10+ members of our guild joining the festivities!

Crowd
Even though Blizzard does do an excellent job to get people what they need quickly, there are lines… tons of them. While there is a lot of stuff to do and see while there, you at one point or another will be stuck in line somewhere. The only way to avoid them is to know the schedule extremely well, but honestly I did not see any of the cool stuff (or where they gave free stuff) without a line after the opening cermonies were over. The problem with the lines behind the obvious waiting and waiting is that some or our fellow geeks have not found it important to break the stereotype and some of them still don’t know what deodorant is. It was not horrible but I am not a fan of smelling people. Who knows maybe there is a niche market there to make some quick soap/deodorant combo that can help some of this people out. Thankfully there were plenty of hand sanitizing locations all over the convention center that at least made me feel better about touching keyboards and just overall other surfaces.

Everyone that we did had to interact to in lines and just standing around was extremely friendly and it was very easy to strike up a conversation. We had a big group of people, but others would approach us and ask us questions about our guild or what classes we played. It was very cool to have people just be so friendly and willing to just have a good laugh with you.

The only other negative thing was that their announcements were not earthshattering. I was really looking forward to them announcing something big like what their next MMO is going to be about, but they kept everything very current and concentrated on the release of Cataclysm and SCII related announcements. While they did unveil that Diablo III is going to have a PvP component to it and it looked amazing, revealing what the last playable class “Demon Hunter” was going to be was about it.

Being able to play their upcoming games was probably the most organized and what you could do in less than an hour. Everthing else that was related to a line felt like a ride at an amusement park, minutes upon minutes of waiting for just a 45 second thrill.

Now lets talk about the awesome. 95% of the people that dressed up really put months worth of effort into it. It was amazing to see the dedication some people put into their costumes. I thought this was going to be just a handful of people that knew what they were doing and lots of bad rushed jobs, but no; there were some serious costume makers there doing actual leather work and complicated things that were just jaw dropping. I think 3 of them were actually provided by blizzard and they were simply amazing, but the fan made ones really showcased dedication and sometimes humor. I would say that surprisingly the costumes were my favorite part of the convention.
Diablo Witch Doctors
Jay Mohr has been the host of Blizzcon and appearently last year he was a little under the influence of alcohol which he made fun of saying that he was just simply nervous and not drunk. The first night was the costume/dance contest. You do get to see most of the costumes up close from just walking around and they love to have their picture taken, but if you want to really see them all you must attend this event where they all get to walk on stage. The problem is that some of the get ups are quite elaborate and get heavy and toward the end of the night you could see some of the people having a real hard time moving on them. Nobody from the costume contest actually tripped on stage which was amazing to me.

After that part of the show finished the dance contest started and it was a riot. Basically every in game race/sex combination has their own dance emote in World of Warcraft. You type /dance and they characters go to town. Well now the humans behind the strings get to show their ability to move themselves with some comical consequences. I could seriously not stop laughing during some of the dances and some of the performances were just genious. The whole night was without incident until a kid who was getting really into his dance (and getting some amazing hang time to his jumps) actually ruptured a ligament. I am happy to report that he is “all good” and was at the convention the next day.

The next thing on my favorite list was the PvP tournaments. To see some of those people battle it out in front of an audience is amazing. Their level of skill at the game is just unreal. I was glad to see one of the North American teams make it so high in the later, but Asia simply dominates when it comes to competitive gaming. I would say that it is one of the things you should not miss!

Beating a Dead Horse

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Or rather horseman. Yes kids, the new holiday is upon us and like a lot of the game right not it is “OMG BROKEN GAME.” It seems to be related to mousing over the pumpkin, so until you are sure you don’t have the bug just don’t touch it. I know it has flames coming out of it but don’t be a moth. The good side effect is that like the other holiday bosses, this one is pretty easy and if you beat him while everyone else is DC it seems nobody goes without the goody pumpkin… which btw will sometimes give you nothing; but don’t fear, your justice points are still there.

In the spirit of beating a dead horse lets talk about the current state of the game.

Software can be a complicated thing to write and release, and currently we have a mixture of what Cata will be and what WotLK was. It is unfair to judge the game in its current state and almost silly. The full patch is going to be 4.0.3 but nerd ragers willl complain and start fires all over Azeroth because 4.0.1 is so broken. If you exercise patience in a couple of months you will see what the game is really supposed to be. On some of the comparisons of Live vs Beta you can see that if you have a decent machine the Beta really is giving you better performance. So welcome the preview of your talents, relearn your character if it changed considerably and just log onto another toon if yours is being too buggy. Better yet, go read about the bug you are experiencing and see if there is a simple fix. (/reload is your friend)

ICC is on its last days as the new shinny months old toy now. The 25 and 10s we ran this week felt like a cakewalk (probably how it has felt to most serious raiders for a long time.) Damage is up for some classes, but tanking overall feels a little nerfed (unless you are a Paladin). So after adjusting a little bit for the changes most raids can clear 10/12 with easy and work on the last two fights. I seriously suggest any raid that has trouble with Sindragosa to go the single tank route and just burn her to the ground. LK, well, that is still a fight you have to learn and practice… really no shortcut to killing valks and stepping out of defile.

If you are having lots of issue with lag and low FPS make sure you turn down your graphic settings to the lowest setting as well as get rid of (or update) all of your addons. At the very minimun turn them off and try the game without them at first. They have done a lot to update the UI and there are now some raid frames that are actually workable.

Even with all the bugs I think this is a wonderful preview to Cataclysm. I look forward to see what they have in store for us there. Also! see you at Blizzcon!

Loyalty & Respect

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“The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.”
- Rensis Likert

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”
- Lao Tzu

While the patch is being downloaded and people are going on about the builds they are going to use for the remainder of Wrath I am in the mood to look back. As a guild we have accomplished quite a bit. We managed to raid 25 month content with various degree of success. We managed to kill Arthras before 4.0.1 in our small little server. We also managed to stay together and I blame lots of loyalty and a bit of respect.

One of the side effects of having a guild that is able to actually do current content is that other people think you are trying to compete with them. Furthermore you get people that want to come into your group and make it about competing with others. We managed to not buy into it, and I made my ignore list that much longer. I was amazed when people were interested in discussing with me the policies of our guild even though they were never in it (nor plan to be in it.)

Overall the drama has been very little over the last couple of months and besides the people that left to hardcore raid (and in reality most of them were never truly Saints to begin with) we have kept our membership pretty intact. Even some of the people that tried horde for a bit came back. Our only problem now is that we have too many people that want to raid and get stuff out of 25 while there is a difference between it and 10 mans. Ah, but today a big percentable of that goes away with the flexible raid lockout and the capability of farming for gear not by going to get frost emblems but simply doing heroics! Badge farmers rejoice!

The reality of the sucess of our guild is that as a group we sacrificed many personal aspirations for the good of the group. Sure some people might have felt left behind here and there, but overall anyone that put in the time and the effort got to raid current content and kill bosses. Now new content promises to give us a lot more to do and having everyone be on the same level to start getting new lootz will make for interesting adventures to come.

Our guild is positioned right where we want it. We are big enough to not be ganked and camped, and we still know each other by first name. We will be leveling professions and helping each other wonder the world of warcraft after the Cataclysm. It feels good to have such a great group of people together with a high sense of respect and loyalty for each other. While some might argue that its just a game, we have created a very strong community :) with even our own BoondockSaints baby on the way. (Gratz Evan and Daniel).

We have a couple of months of doing lots of finishing up titles and getting used to our new talents and rotation, but most of all becoming a even better team of players that are always willing to help each other achieve goals. From finishing a tough quest, to killing bosses, the Saints are here to enjoy this game to the fullest!