WoW Burnout

I’m burning out.

No, really, I am. When I’m on Avierra, I’m tired of playing. My first impulse on a raid weekend is to log out, followed by a tiny voice reminding me that I’m missing out on two Emblems of Frost by not running the daily random, and it would be a real shame because all it would take is thirty minutes of my time.

Last weekend we had a little large bit of drama when our holy priest, irritated at someone who he didn’t care to name, hearthed out of the raid and ragelogged. Because he didn’t name names, I couldn’t act on anything. He hasn’t logged into any of his guilded toons since, although I suspect he may be on an unguilded 80 instead. He hasn’t guildquit either, which I’m grateful for.

For the past two months, we’ve run with three healers weekend after weekend – the same three healers. I’m one of them. We don’t have any others who log in on a regular basis.

So it’s a bit of an issue that we’re down to two regular healers, and I suspect that the other guy is as burned out as I am.

I’ve been playing on my rogue alt a lot more lately and my guildies have taken it to mean that I don’t want to be bothered with Guild leader stuff unless it’s urgent. They’re awesome like that. I have a few people who still bug me on Caret, but on the whole people back off when I’m on an alt.

So let’s talk about burnout.

The best solution for burnout is to do something else. I’ve done this before – I’ve taken a step back from WoW to do other things. My last WoW-break lasted all of four months and I really came back just to hang with my real life friends.

Which is pretty hard to do when you’re running a raiding Guild and filling a role that can’t easily be replaced.

I’m stepping back from WoW again – no raiding for the next couple of weeks (although I’ll be online this weekend) as I’ll be out of town.

I hope I still have a Guild to come back to.

Going Rogue

I have a confession to make: despite my no-alts policy, I’ve since levelled up my rogue.

After patch 3.3, levelling an alt is ridiculously easy. You can do a random daily instance for XP, some gold, and two Emblems of Triumph. Of course, the Emblems are fairly useless till you hit 80 (although you can convert them to Emblems of Heroism and buy Heirloom gear). I also noticed a bit of hanky-panky with rested XP: you used to only be able to earn rested XP for one and a half levels, but I levelled from 73 to 78 without once losing rested status. And two days of rested XP carried my character from 40% at level 79 to 80%, leading me to suspect that they also increased the rate at which we earn rested XP.

So Froufrou Caret transferred in from Bloodhoof to Nagrand and climbed up to 80 in around two weeks of irregular play. I played Caret on weeknights and Avierra on weekends. It hurt my gold farming but I really needed a break from my paladin.

Once I hit level 80, I started farming heroics. Despite what I’d been led to believe, the DPS queue for random heroics isn’t that bad – the longest I’ve had to wait for a random heroic is 20 minutes. Sometimes the heroic window pops right after I click on “Find a group.” And almost everyone has been nice, despite me being a fresh 80.

It might be me again, but I’ve noticed that in general, the asshats running randoms tend to be tanks. Or healers. I’ve yet to encounter a DPS I’ve wanted to votekick. I’ve even made quite a few friends on other servers.

Level 80 happened on Thursday night. I started unlocking the Argent Tournament dailies and the Sons of Hodir dailies immediately. I haven’t quite finished yet, but I should start work on the Knights of the Ebon Blade dailies soon as well.

And since then, I’ve:

• Acquired 2 pieces of T9 gear (chest and gloves),
• Gotten ilevel 200 epics in 4 slots besides,
• Gotten an ilevel 219 epic (thanks, Heroic Pit of Saron!),
• Run the weekly raid target with to a friendly PUG,
• Hit exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord, and
• Gotten level 80 weapons,

all in three days.

Playing Avierra is fun but I’m bored sick of doing the same things over and over again. I’m glad to have an alt I enjoy playing.

Our Progression’s A Joke, But We’re #8 On Our Server

I’ve received more than a few veiled threats for not updating this blog more often. While I enjoy making random comments about failpugs and soloing 5-man instances, I find myself embarrassed to write up what my little 10-man raiding Guild has been doing in the game. The WoW-blogs I follow are on my watchlist because they veer away from minutae like boss kills and Guild firsts. I’m afraid that if I focus on the same, this blog will become about as interesting as a dull red brick.

That said, I should mention that the parts of my old blog I enjoy the most are the bits where I talk about precisely that – about where my Guild and I are in our respective raiding careers, usually. I’m prone to fits of nostalgia, so when it’s mentioned that slightly over a year ago, I first set virtual foot upon Northrend’s shores, I positively swoon. Rereading old posts that skirt around long-lost drama in Guardians of Veeshan or ASTIG brings back memories. I suppose that makes me a sentimental fool. I dispute nothing in that statement.

So let me, in the spirit of fueling future sentiment, update you with what we’ve been up to.

Three weeks ago, the Plague Works opened up for adventurers large and small, and like good raiders, we tramped in full of piss and vinegar. We thought we’d down Festergut and Rotface easily before wiping incessantly on Putricide, but alas, it was not meant to be. After a few wipes on Precious and Stinky, we proceeded to die time after time on Festergut. It was only on the very last attempt of the day – our raid leader Az had to leave for someone’s 40th birthday party – that we downed the abomination. We returned the next day to wipe a few times on Rotface, then called it. Incidentally, that was the first week that we one-shot everything in Icecrown Citadel up to the new wing. Well, except for the Gunship Battle, but I’ve already alluded to that in a previous post.

So two weeks ago, we came back – and failed to down Festergut.

The details aren’t important. We are, in fact, still arguing about whether or not Festergut parry gibs – some of us are of the opinion that he does, and that the obvious response is for tanks to adjust their hit and expertise, while others are convinced that there is another reason why our tanks are taking 40k++ damage in less than two seconds. What matters is the fact that we weren’t able to down Festergut a second time.

Here’s what we did when we couldn’t down Festergut: we marched back into Naxxramas (the raid weekly was Anub’rekhan, so Naxx was in our rotation) and one-shot everything – and in the process, we earned the Undying title. It took us just over two hours.

Then we flew down to the Obsidian Sanctum and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, killed Sartharion with three drakes up, giving us the title ‘of the Nightfall’.

To top off this treat, we went into Ulduar and killed XT-002 Deconstructor on hard mode. No title for that, but we had been itching to do that for months. And we knew what was next: Iron Council hard mode, the first real step towards unlocking Algalon.

So this weekend just past, we cleared the first wing of Icecrown Citadel again, then stopped – we had some Guild drama involving a hacked account – before clearing out Sarth 3D again (for two or three guys who missed it, plus Sartharion was the weekly raid target). Then we went into Trials of the Grand Crusader for the first time and downed the Northrend Beasts.

I’ve never owned a piece of equipment with the word “Heroic” on it, but that’s changed now. I walked away with a Belt of the Frozen Reach.

Then we went back into Ulduar and took out the Iron Council in hard mode. I got to tank Steelbreaker – and of course, I died. But we killed him, and I got the Archivium Data Discs to start off the Algalon key questline.

And that’s where we are today – we haven’t gotten any closer to downing Festergut again, or any more bosses in the Plague Works and newly-opened Blood Elf Wing. I’m sure we’ll get there sooner or later. In the meantime, we’re taking care of old business. We’ll be knocking on Algalon’s door in a month or so, and Arthas’s not long after that. It’s just a matter of time.

And as for the post title – GuildOx says it’s true. Server Nagrand-US. 10-man strict progression.

I’m glad we finally beat Ghetto Smurfs. My pride was taking a beating.

This Is Why I Queue As Tank

Yesterday’s daily random run was a bit of a change for me, as I queued for the daily random as a healer. I normally prefer to queue as a tank – there’s virtually no wait and tanking suits me better, but I was sick yesterday and in no mood to take the lead in an instance run.

I quickly found myself in heroic Ahn-Kahet with three Death Knights and a Mage, all of whom shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say that the run did not go well. The tank had the bad habit of pulling multiple groups without generating enough threat – which, naturally, leads to healing aggro. On my third death (tank pulled all three Mindless Ones, leading to three Shadow Crashes on me) I considered leaving the group. I promised myself that I would leave if we wiped even once to the Herald. Fortunately, we didn’t, and I left the instance with two more Emblems of Frost and a repair bill just barely covered by the instance reward.

Let me make it plain: I am willing to tolerate noob behavior up until my first death. Even if the rest of the party does not wipe. I exempt from this statement all deaths caused by my stupidity – standing in fire, walking off the edge of a cliff, etc. etc. Up until my first death, I am perfectly happy to rez and buff any other partymate. Before that point in time, we are comrades, locked in a struggle against a cold and malevolent creature that sits at the other end of a dark and horrific gauntlet. I am your healer and I will keep you alive.

After that, you become just an ally of convenience, and the merest hint of idiocy from you will cause me to reconsider my participation in your run.

I guess I’m back to tanking random heroics.

Seventeen

Rage On has been in Icecrown Citadel since it first opened, which was something the officers agreed we wanted after our belated incursion into Trials of the Crusader. While I can’t say we’re kicking ass at the forefront of the push into Icecrown, it seems to me that we’re in the middle of the curve somewhere.

Just last weekend, we cleaned up the first wing of ICC with one-shots (well, save for the Gunship Battle, since Malaswa triggered it before we’d all had a chance to put on our jet packs.) Even Deathbringer Saurfang died in one attempt. Since we’d wiped to him continuously the week previous, this was a welcome development.

Then… seventeen attempts on Festergut.

We finally killed him on the seventeenth attempt. As it turned out, that was the very last attempt we could make that day anyway, as Az and Bren had a pressing engagement to rush off to. Seventeen attempts, incidentally, is roughly three hours of raiding. We cleared trash, wiped on attempting Festergut over and over again, then when trash respawned, we cleared again. I’m sick of healing through Stinky and Precious.

But we downed Festergut on the seventeenth attempt, and that was the very least of what we wanted last weekend.

We took a few swipes at Rotface – doable, but we didn’t have enough time left – then hied off back to Ulduar, where we finally did in XT-002 Deconstructor in hard mode. I can now officially say it: our hard mode hymen is broken. We’ve just beaten our first hard mode and we’re hungry for more. Next weekend we’ll be back in Ulduar for Iron Council hard… and after that… Sartharion with 3 drakes up?  Trials of the Grand Crusader?  Who knows?

Let me just share this: Festergut on normal mode is intense and painful. None of our DPS did less than 4k DPS. Our top DPS was Bladewisp, who cranked out an incredible 7k DPS – and the rest of the team weren’t far behind. Our tanks were taking hits in the 20ks.  Any time a tank got parry gibbed, we were in big, big trouble.

But we downed him in the end.  The first time’s always the hardest.

Rotface dies this weekend.

Soloing Heroic Magister’s Terrace

'One minute I held the key / Next the walls were closed on me / And I discovered that my castles stand / Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand' - Coldplay, Viva la Vida

My friend Jarvisius has been collecting mounts for a while now, and while I haven’t yet succumbed to the temptation to follow his example, I do have a rather sizable collection of non-combat pets. A few months ago, I reached 75 with the cross-faction purchase of a Mulgore Hatchling. Today I have 78 pets in my stable.

One pet that’s eluded me so far is the Phoenix Hatchling. I have it on my gnome rogue, but since I promised myself that I’d stop working on alts, so I went back into Heroic Magister’s Terrace on my protection paladin to try and farm another. (Heroic Magister’s Terrace also gives me a shot at a White Hawkstrider.)

Heroic Magister’s Terrace was by far the hardest 5-man instance of The Burning Crusade. I hated running it even more than I hated running Heroic Arcatraz or Heroic Shattered Halls. Between 5-mob pulls and ridiculous amounts of environmental damage, HMgT made my life as a healer a living hell.

At level 80, it’s considerably easier, but it’s still fairly challenging. And I was able to solo it as a protection paladin – I’m not sure if any other class and spec, save maybe death knight – can do that.

The good news is that you can actually avoid some of the trash packs now. You don’t have to clear everything. The bad news is that you’ll still have to clear around 80% of the trash you cleared at level 70. And with 5 or 6 mobs per pack (sometimes even 7), you will still get hurt. And clearing mobs takes a while. You will have no choice but to be patient.

The first boss, Selin Fireheart, was fairly easy. Fighting him solo meant that I wouldn’t be able to do enough damage to the crystals to destroy them before he drained them, so I didn’t bother. At level 80 and with a Sacred Shield up, I didn’t take a whole lot of damage from his Fel Explosion ability. To keep up mana regeneration through Blessing of Sanctuary, I actually kept the two mobs in the center alive for the fight. Each dodge, parry and block meant more mana for me, which helped me take down Fireheart faster.

Clearing to Vexallus after that was a relatively painless process. Because the mana wyrms in his room give a stacking damage buff, I briefly considered attacking Vexallus without drinking and eating. Fortunately, prudence won out, and I brought my health up to 100% before starting the fight.

Soloing Vexallus can be very challenging without killing the Pure Energy globes. Fortunately, they only have 40 hit points apiece.

Fighting Vexallus solo, in my opinion, was far more challenging than fighting Priestess Delrissa. Vexallus is a DPS race to see who dies first. Fortunately, thanks to Ardent Defender and Lay on Hands, protection paladins are able to outlast most such fights. The trick to killing Vexallus, it turns out, is to kill the Pure Energy globes as soon as possible. They only have 40 hit points, after all, but they do a lot of arcane damage.

With Vexallus dead, I cleared my way to Priestess Delrissa and her motley crew. I was quite worried about this fight. This was, after all, the much-hyped PVP-style fight that broke many a HMgT PUG.

It turns out that I need not have worried. At level 80, the fight is fairly trivial. Group everyone up together so they all get hit by Consecration. Focus on bringing down healers first. And if all else fails, use Lay on Hands.

The Priestess Delrissa fight. I didn't take a whole lot of damage thanks to the level difference and high avoidance.

Clearing to Kael’thas was a breeze after that.

The Kael’thas fight is broken down into two phases. In the first phase, Kael’thas casts fireball after fireball at the tank (4k Fire damage each, even with Fire Resistance Aura up). Every so often he summons a Phoenix add that needs to be burned down, after which it turns into an egg. The Phoenix Egg then needs to be killed, or else it will hatch into another Phoenix. Also, Kael’thas will occasionally cast Flamestrike (an area of effect ability) that does a large amount of fire damage if you are standing at the center of the effect. This spell is easy to spot – just watch out for the rotating spheres that indicate the spell target area. Lastly, Kael’thas casts Pyroblast – a four-second cast time spell that does approximately 35,000 fire damage to a single level 80 target.

Dealing with the Phoenix is simple – stand it next to Kael’thas and focus fire on the Phoenix (and the Phoenix Egg). Let Kael’thas take splash damage from Consecration and Hammer of Righteousness.

Dealing with Flamestrike is also simple – move away. Don’t eat the damage – it won’t kill you, but every little bit of health counts.

Dealing with Pyroblast is not simple at all. When Kael’thas begins casting Pyroblast, he puts up a Shock Barrier that needs to be taken down before he can be interrupted. The barrier absorbs 10,000 damage before vanishing. Then, and only then, can Pyroblast be interrupted.

With a 5-man party dishing out good DPS, it’s possible to interrupt Pyroblast. Unfortunately, I couldn’t guarantee an interrupt on my own.

After a few wipes, I discovered that I needed to survive two Pyroblasts before Kael’thas reached 50% health and triggered phase 2. This meant that I had to space my major cooldowns to survive both Pyroblasts. I planned to allow the first Pyroblast to take me below 30% health, triggering Ardent Defender, and to trigger Divine Shield for the second Pyroblast. This would leave me free to use Lay on Hands as I saw fit.

While it was a good plan, in the end I wound up relying on Lay on Hands to survive a second Pyroblast. A combination of Fireballs and pulsing fire damage from the Phoenix tended to trigger Ardent Defender early.

The good news is that reaching phase 2 means Kael’thas is almost guaranteed to die. I’ve since died only once on phase 2 thanks to falling damage taken when Gravity Lapse ended – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Phase 2 is much, much simpler than phase 1. In phase 2, Kael’thas returns to his starting position and casts Gravity Lapse. This causes you to float. You are repulsed from the floor every time you touch it, but otherwise you’re free to move around the room as you see fit.

Complicating matters further are three large purple balls of arcane energy that will follow you around the room. If they come into contact with you, you will take a bit of damage – around 1k Arcane damage per ball per second. When Gravity Lapse begins, you will be summoned to Kael’thas, and the arcane spheres will spawn near you. So all I did was take a few cheap shots at Kael’thas (to give him a couple of stacks of Seal of Vengeance), cast Consecration in the air near him, and swim away. After my first phase 2 death I learned to stay near the floor, but otherwise the tactic worked.

There's a joke to be made about avoiding huge purple balls here. Just not by me.

Every so often, Kael’thas will stop channeling Gravity Lapse and be stunned, taking extra damage. You absolutely must take advantage of this window! I usually popped in before Gravity Lapse ended to leave Seal of Vengeance and Consecration DOTs on him, maximizing the amount of damage he took while stunned.

The only other thing I did differently in phase 2 was to cast Blessing of Wisdom on myself. Because I was no longer dodging, parrying or blocking damage, I was reliant on Divine Plea for mana. I lost around 3000 health and 3% damage reduction, but it was all worth it as I would have been mana-starved otherwise.

So Kael’thas died.

With 9554 health left, I survived my encounter with Kael'thas Sunstrider. Sadly, no pet or mount for me today.

Heroic Magister’s Terrace solo is one of the most challenging 5-man instance runs I’ve ever done. Despite a 10 level gap and fairly straightforward encounter mechanics, HMgT is still hard. I wiped thrice on the Vexallus fight, trying to outpace the boss and pure energy adds burning me down. The Priestess Delrissa fight, while easy on paper, is actually quite tough, especially when multiple healers are in the group. I wiped once because I didn’t notice that the shaman had purged away my Blessing of Sanctuary, depriving me of a key mana regeneration buff. And of course, there is the Kael’thas Sunstrider fight. I still haven’t managed to one-shot him, but I’m getting better and better at taking him down solo.

Everything I Needed To Know About WoW I Learned From Badge Gear

One of the big changes that Blizzard made with respect to Wrath of the Lich King involves the accessibility of high-end raid content. Throughout classic WoW and Burning Crusade, mid-level raids (such as Blackwing Lair and Serpentshrine Cavern) and high-level raids (AQ40 and Black Temple) were the almost-exclusive province of raiding Guilds. The PUGs that entered these instances were few and far in between, and it was only when Blizzard made badge-bought epic gear easy to purchase in Burning Crusade that the 90% of us not in raiding Guilds had a shot at seeing endgame content.

This design philosophy changed dramatically with the introduction of Wrath of the Lich King. Once seen as “charity gear”, badge-bought epics are now the order of the day. If you run enough heroic instances and PUG enough raids, you can purchase the same badge gear as any core member of a raiding Guild. Whatever you may think of this leveling of the playing field, badge gear is here to stay.

To further complicate matters, the badges that purchase the gear have themselves been upgraded throughout the life cycle of Wrath of the Lich King, so that they now purchase higher level gear for the same amount of effort as when the expansion first started (even less effort now, actually, since most players are considerably better geared). Left at the wayside are the craftable epic gear we started out with – the Titansteel gear, for example, that I was so proud of and tanked with in early WotLK is now snubbed by the average starting tank simply because he can get better in a few heroic runs.

That’s created a massive body of potential mid- and end-level raiders. On any given day, I can probably find PUGs for Onyxia’s Lair and Trials of the Crusader, both mid-level raids. It’s actually harder to find groups for entry-level content like Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum now since even fresh 80s can easily leapfrog them. And I expect this trend to continue in Icecrown Citadel, with Ulduar completely disappearing from the PUG zeitgeist.

I firmly believe that there are deeper meanings in Blizzard’s new philosophy, “Bring the player, not the class.” Originally understood to mean that we would no longer need to stack particular classes (restoration shaman or warlock, for example,) others have since seen in it a declaration of parity among classes and specs playing a particular role. But I think there’s more to it than that.

Rage On is a social guild, so we’re always interested in personality over performance. We’ve been burned in the past by bad raiders who are into it for the loot and not much else. Naturally, we want guys who can perform reasonably well. More importantly, though, we want to know if they’re easy to get along with. In the past this has meant recruiting players who dish out sub-par DPS or who are inattentive at best while raiding. While we constantly strive to correct these flaws in their play styles, at no point do we shift our emphasis away from personality.

Easy badge gear, thankfully, means that we don’t need to worry about gearing new raiders up, so we can be very selective about recruitment.  We just need to make sure that we are recruiting the right people.

I’m constantly appalled at how terrible other WoW players can behave in PUGs. My win/loss ratio, PUG-wise, is around 50/50. Last night, I ran HVH with Malaswa, Bladewisp and Minicolossus and we had to PUG a fifth. It turns out that the mage we got through the LFG tool was the Guild leader of a relatively successful Australian raiding Guild, and in between pulls we had a great chat about the challenges of making the leap from 10s to 25-man raids. At the end of our run, we said our goodbyes and put each other on our Friends lists. That was a clear win.

Then there was the terrible TOC-10 PUG I ran this afternoon. The hunter who put it together was nice enough, but the better-geared DK tank and the main healer priest were so difficult to run with that the PUG disbanded after three attempts. Between blaming the other DK tank and finding other scapegoats to take the blame, it’s a miracle those guys ever got invited to raids at all. While we were looking for a replacement tank (the off-tank had gotten pissed off and ragelogged), the main tank kicked two DPS out of the PUG for having, as he said, “shit DPS.” I left the group after sending an apologetic tell to the raid leader. When I logged out twenty minutes later, they were still in LFG trying to replace the raiders who’d left.

I think badge gear has a social lesson to teach us. When everyone’s gear is at roughly the same level, you can be replaced. Probably very easily. So the burden is on you to be sociable.  Being abrasive, deceitful or just plain difficult to raid with makes you as much a liability to the raid as the guy who can’t hold up his end of the fight. We can fix your gear, we can fix your playstyle… but all the gear in the world can’t fix you when you’re an asshole.

How Now, Ulduar?

Having lost roughly six weeks of WoW-time thanks to bad ISP service, I was understandably anxious at the prospect of catching up to my Guildmates, who’ve made phenomenal progress in Trials of the Crusader and Ulduar. To be precise: they cleared ToC-10 and downed Yogg-Saron while I was away.

To speed up the process of catching up, I got myself into some PUGs. I didn’t want to tank fights I didn’t know, so I billed myself as a healer. Never mind that there are 23151616108008 holy paladins on my server all trying to get into PUG raids. A lot of them are bads anyway.

So I got into a few PUG raids… and realized that the world had caught up to me.

Six weeks ago, the average itemlevel of a random PUGgie’s gear was 213. A lot of these guys had PUGged Naxxramas-25 and gotten gear upgrades from it. As my average ilevel was 219 (Ulduar-10 level), I looked pretty good. On par with the average PUGgie, if not slightly higher.

But thanks to Trials of the Champion (average drop ilevel 219), Trials of the Crusader (226), and Badge of Triumph gear (232 or 245, depending on purchase), I now see fewer 213s and 200s.

I suppose that’s good, but it places the “floor” at ilevel 219.

The irony is that that’s the ilevel of drops from Ulduar-10, and no one is running Ulduar-10 any more, other than dedicated Guilds. Almost everyone is focused on clearing Trials of the Crusader, as it’s shorter, easier and gives higher ilevel loot. In the week and a half since I returned, I’ve seen around thirty PUGs for ToC. I’ve seen maybe six for Ulduar.

Even Rage On is now having trouble clearing Ulduar. We have spectacular attendance for ToC and Onyxia’s Lair. When it comes time to clear out Ulduar, raiders log off.

And I think that’s a damned shame.

Between Ulduar and Trials of the Crusader (which I’ve since finished), I consider Ulduar to be the superior instance. It’s better established in lore. It’s more challenging. And it’s more fun.

Trials of the Crusader plays and feels like filler content. It takes place in one small environment, with fights that can be geared through. Simple instructions suffice to explain the fight strategies.  Stay out of bad things (fire, poison clouds). Kill adds fast. Switch when DBM/Bigwigs/your raid leader tell you to.

Ulduar, on the other hand, is epic. From the gauntlet leading up to Flame Leviathan to Yogg-Saron’s cloud-infested room into which his freed Keepers look down… much of the instance is pure eye candy.

I remember walking into the Descent into Madness for the first time and seeing an immobile General Vezax standing in front of three squads of his elite troops. Everyone was quiet on Vent, savoring the moment. Quietly, one of our lore nerds explained the significance of the stained glass windows ringing the room – how each window depicted an Old God, and how the broken ones were for Old Gods who’d since been killed. We gathered in the shadow of a broken stairwell and prepared for the first pull, which consisted of no less than six mobs…

Contrast that with dropping through the coliseum floor to fight Anub’arak.

General Vezax's Room is deep in the heart of Ulduar and one room away from Old God Yogg-Saron. Note the stained glass windows depicting Old Gods; two of them (one in this screenshot) are smashed in.

1337 DPS won’t save your PUG when it comes time to down Freya, or Mimiron, or Yogg-Saron. Don’t get me wrong. 1337 DPS helps. But skill and the capability to carry out a complex strategy are bigger success factors in Ulduar than in Trials of the Crusader.

Ulduar fell by the wayside because it’s human nature to follow the path of least resistance. ToC is an easier raid and provides higher ilevel loot – but even if it provided the same ilevel loot as Ulduar, I strongly suspect PUGs would still prefer ToC. There’s less work to do.

Again, that’s a damned shame.

In Vent this past weekend, I posed a question to some of my officers: why are we still in Ulduar given better drops and easier fights in ToC and Onyxia’s Lair? I hear that our raiders still very much want to see Ulduar completely cleared regardless (we have yet to kill Algalon, who you can only get to by killing five Ulduar bosses on hard mode – something beyond us still).

The answer was near-unanimous: unfinished business. We know we’re not going to get many upgrades from Ulduar. ToC and Onyxia’s Lair have mostly finished Ulduar for us as a reliable source of upgrades. We just want to finish what we started. And yes, we probably won’t be satisfied till we kill Algalon.

And that is why Rage On, at least, is still in Ulduar.

Soloing the Headless Horseman

It’s All Hallows Eve again on Azeroth, and while I already did most of the quests last year, I still haven’t gotten the achievement and the title. Since I’m a title fiend, I packed up the sword and shield and hied over to Scarlet Monastery to pick up a Hallowed Helm  (I picked up the Squashling from a lucky group last year.)

As my friend Az has already shown it’s possible to three-man the Headless Horseman without a healer, I decided to take it one step further and solo the Horseman.

Avierra soloes the Headless Horseman. Note that my interface is much cleaner now thanks to the magic of Onyxia Whelp disconnects.

Fighting the Headless Horseman is just a matter of patience (essential for protection paladins).  Save your major DPS cooldowns (Avenging Wrath, etc. etc.) for the floating head phase. For extra mana, I picked up some of the level 30+ adds roaming the area along with the Horseman.

I still haven’t found a good way to do it without Lay On Hands, but I no longer completely buff up when soloing the Horseman (no more flask and stat food).

A nice reward for my troubles: a Hallowed Helm and 5g, all for me. I also kept the epic ring for my ret set since it has +hit on it.

I’m actually a little overgeared for this. I’d say you could solo him with around 32,000 hit points and maybe 40% avoidance (I’m currently at around 46%).  I’d still suggest bringing friends to pound him into the dirt, though – more chances at key drops like the Squashling and the Helm, plus it makes the fight go faster.

Sadly, I’m still two years away from the Violet Proto-drake. Thanks to my crappy ex-ISP, I was offline for most of Brewfest this year (and busy through most of Brewfest last year), so I wasn’t able to sign up for Brew of the Month.  I wonder if I’ll still be playing WoW in 2011.

Ah, who am I kidding.

Wish You Were Here

Some blogs teach you things, like how to plant a garden, or how to make more money, or how to maximize your DPS rotation. Other blogs entertain with clever turns of phrase. And still others are there to get you to agree with their authors.

This blog won’t do any of those things.

First off – this is a blog about World of Warcraft. I’ve played WoW for four years now. While I’ve quit the game for one reason or another a few times over the years, I’ve found myself returning to the game over and over again. Thanks to WoW, I’ve connected with friends, old and new, across vast distances and distant continents. I don’t think I’ll be giving it up again anytime soon.

I play a level 80 Paladin on the Nagrand server. This is important! Level 80 means that, for now at least, I am at the highest level possible. Nothing I do will make me level up. Until the next game expansion is released (next year, if the rumors are to be believed) I am stuck at level 80. So I have to find other things to do with my time than level up.

I play with a lot of friends in real life. By “a lot” I mean, of course, more than two. As a matter of fact, there are around eight to ten of us on the server, all playing together. We decided some time ago to form a Guild called Rage On. This allows us to share a bank, which is a place we store items we don’t need at the moment. It also lets us chat in the game in a dedicated Guild channel. And we run around the game world with the phrase over our heads so everyone knows what Guild we belong to.

We are what’s called casual raiders. At level 80 there are quite a few things that you can do to pass the time. Raiding is one of them. When we raid, ten or twenty-five of go into a dungeon together to fight bosses. Each boss has a particular mechanic, or trick, that lets us kill him if we execute the strategy properly. Like, maybe a boss is vulnerable to fire when he turns the color purple, and ice when he turns green. So our strategy would be to hit him with fire spells when he’s purple and ice spells when he’s green. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, and we spend literally hours learning how to defeat bosses. One boss, Yogg-Saron, took us more than two months to kill, raiding every weekend. Another, Mimiron, involved a strategy so complex that I had dreams about fighting and killing him (and I know I’m not the only one in my Guild who had them.) As raiders go, we’re fairly successful. We’ve killed almost all the bosses we can kill at our level. When we raid now, we farm these bosses for epic loot. Epic loot makes us better at killing bosses. So we are getting better all the time – or at least, we certainly hope so.

As fate would have it, I’m currently the leader of my little Guild. It’s not an easy position to occupy, and there are a great many days when I wonder about passing on this load to someone else. But that’s just not in the cards for me, at least not now.

I suppose that’s it for now. This has been quite lengthy for an introduction and I hope I haven’t lost anyone yet. Drop me a comment sometime and let me know how I’m doing. It would be nice to hear from you.