Six weeks into WotLK...

Oh hai all!

A combination of flu and the festive period have kept me away from this thing.

Well ok, that's not strictly true, flu, festivities and a growing sense of boredom with the game.

I had unreasonably high hopes for the 10-man game when the 10/25 man switch was announced. I hoped we'd get challenging, fun fights like later Karazhan was when you were still mainly in blues, or hell how Zul'Aman was to anyone not entirely geared in T6 epics.

Naxx10 is a joke. We've managed our second clear now and the only boss we didn't at least two-shot was Heigan the Unclean, and that's because it's a fight you can't bruteforce. That said, when you have 60% of your DPSers averaging under 2k DPS mark on a run, you can't really say your force was that brute.

In the new year, we're going to start on the Dragons. We're aiming to kill Magylos and possibly start with Satharion + 1 drake and see how it goes. After they're dead, then it's a long boring farm of the same old content until they release Uldar. Given the fact that Uldar isn't on the Public Test Realms and they normally like to have raid content sit on there for two months at least, I'm not expecting to see Uldar until mid-March at the earliest.

I'm torn. On the one hand, Blizz have made it easier than ever to take your first steps into raiding. Heroic drops are on a par with 10-man drops and Heroics can be completed by a group of lvl 80s who possess at least one functioning brain between them. Even if that's too much, you can get a bunch of nice level 80 drops from craftable items and a few quest chains alone.

On the other, for the proportion of people who have raided and know their way around a boss encounter, there's very little for them. Fifteen all-too-familiar bosses in Naxx, some unchallenging heroics and two stand-alone boss encounters. The big guilds can have the special privilege of clearing out the above content in both 10 and 25 man mode, so they can get sick of it in half the time.

I can appreciate why Blizz have made the choices they have, but I can't help but feel they've failed to learn the lesson from Warhammer Online and Age of Conan's launch this summer. They made the journey to 80 fun and rewarding, but they simply didn't leave enough content there to keep their rabid fanbase amused until they could release the next instance.

Q3 profits aside, I can't help but feel if they'd delayed release until January and brought Uldar out at launch it would feel more satisfying. As it is, it looks very much like we have at least 2-3 months of time-killing ahead of us before the first ray of new content.

In Naxxramas

Ok, well I've been off this thing for a week now because of a particularly nasty strain of flu. I finally started feeling vaguely functional yesterday in just enough time to pack my bags and get ready for the exodus to the Frozen North for the holiday period.

Still despite being near-incapacitated by said Flu, I managed to lead and main tank Smart Casual's first three Naxxramas raids. Priorities, I haz them!

Wednesday saw us crack open the Spider and Plague Wings. These were undoubtedly the two easiest wings, and I used them as a gauge of the guild's ability to handle content that was, to most of us, pretty new. We managed to one-shot all the bosses, even when two of our DPS were locked outside during the Maexxna encounter, when I disconnected during the Noth fight, or when 70% of the raid failed to do the Heigan Dance correctly.

On Friday we returned to do the Construct and Military wings. This is definately where things got harder. We only one-shotted two bosses in there (Thaddeus and Gothik) with the rest taking 2-3 attempts to get down. The final encounter of the night, The Four Horsemen, ended up taking about four or five attempts to get the tank transitions down. It's still fairly straightforward, but still much more interesting than the average Karazhan fight.

Turning our attention to the final wing on Sunday, we had our work cut out. Sapphiron was a pretty frantic fight. A lot of running about and a lot of aoe damage, plus his brutal cleave and tailswipe made positioning a bitch. Three wipes and we killed him though.

Kel'Thuzad took much longer. I can't remember how many attempts in the end, but either people got into bad positions (and chained iceblocks) or we lost folks to void zones. The two Nerubian Guardians he spawns at 40% are exceptionally brutal to boot, since they start stacking a +15% damage buff every 15 secs. Ulu played offtank on the fight and died to them at 13 stacks of the buff, so it feels like you've got about 3mins to get him down from 40%-0.

After I was done. Well I dunno, I didn't feel much of anything. There was no big "woo-hoo", more of an "oh, that was it?"

Ah well, now we've got two dragons to amuse us until Blizz rolls Uldar out.

The Northrend Vanguard

So last night Ulushnar got Exalted with the Knights of the Ebon Blade and earned the Northrend Vanguard achievement. This basically means he's finished with the Championable factions and can go back to wearing his old guild tabard. It's kind of a shame, since I really liked the championing mechanic, although I wasn't a massive fan of the look of any of the faction tabards (The Argent Crusade one was arguably the best).

Still, Naxxramas 10 on wednesday! Ulu's been ready for weeks now, but I waited until most of the guild was 80 before we went in.

In other news, I got Graysun, my Deathknight to level 65 last night. I'm currently working him through Nagrand, and once I'm done there I figure I'll finish him off in either Blade's Edge Mountains or Shadowmoon Valley before I take him off to Northrend. The transplant can't come fast enough, since the unique "joy" of Outland levelling is the schizophrenic armor designs. He's currently wearing a mix of green, black and purple armor pieces, with a aqua-blue helmet which I've thankfully hidden.

I can't wait until I hit Northrend and get a set of generic Viking Armor in various shades of black, blue, red and dogshit brown! It may be slightly dull that all the armor has the same model, but it helps that that model is badass looking!

On the other hand, I'm really enjoying Blood Spec for levelling. The constant influx of health means there's practically no downtime whilst levelling, and since I intend to use a Blood PVP spec at 80, I'm getting used to the rotations I'll use then.

A few words to Puggers.

If you're gonna whisper a prospective tank and ask how much Health they have, then you're only going to attract idiots who think all they have to do is stack stamina.

If you're going to say stuff like "In my experience a tank's HP is a good indication of his skill" then you're pretty much an idiot.

If you do both these things and then skirt around the 1.1k DPS mark on a heroic, don't expect that tank to want to tank stuff for you in the future.

I don't mind someone being a jerk if they've got the skills to back it up. But if you're both ignorant of how my class and role works, and barely able to play your own, then you're not worth my time.

I'd rather quest, hell, I'd rather a holy priest solely by mob grinding than tank for you.

Oh and one more thing, without a healer or tank, you're not "looking for two more", you're "three DPS looking for group".

Game over man, Game over!

So this weekend Ulu did a few more heroics...

This included a PuG run to Ahn'Kahet: The Old Kingdom. It started with the normal question about Health, which I passed with flying colors when I said "26k".

Anyway, it was a slightly wipey run. Partially down to a couple of dodgy pulls and partially down to the fact that none of the DPSers were able to create more than 1.1k DPS whilst Ulu was sailing ahead at the 1.6-1.8k mark without trying.

*sigh* Ah well, at least the Bracers of the Herald dropped. Also whilst doing heroics later with Guildies, Ulu got the last few badges for his Heroes' Redemption Handguards. That's ulu at 2 pieces of Tier 7 before he's even set foot inside Naxxramas.

Sunday continued in this vein, In between heroics, Ulu did daily quests and spent the gold on materials to level Wulfsblood's Leatherworking. This may be inefficent, but it beats levelling Wulf so I can get him into the zones that drop decent amounts of leather. In the end, I was able to make the Durable Nerubhide Cape for Ulu.

Finally on Sunday night, I did a Violet Hold heroic run and finally Lavanthor showed up! After we beat him up, he apologised for his tardiness by giving Ulushnar his Talisman. With it (and with swapping back to his Titansteel Shield wall Ulu stood within a couple of % of the point where normal hits cease to be an option.

The talisman was also the last tanking drop that Ulushnar wanted from Heroics. From this point, he's in them purely to help guildies get their stuff, and of the occaisional DPS drop along the way.

#403

Oh my, I appear to have gone over 400 posts without realising it. Ah well, not like much of it matters. I could reminise about early victories in Zul'Gurrub or Molten Core to my readers but chances are either:

a) You did these encounters to death yourself or
b) They were something you went to as a tourist after The Burning Crusade was released.

Instead, I'll keep talking about what's happening here and now.

Ulushnar is something of a victim of my success. When I started Smart Casual I envisioned keeping the numbers small to minimize rotation in raids and shorten the length of time it takes us to master difficult fights.

In practical terms however, when you're one of three tanks in a guild with eighteen members, you get asked to do a lot of heroics. And if you were directly responsible for keeping the number of tanks in your guild low, it seems churlish to refuse.

That said, I'd like to help the last few guildies who haven't hit 80 get those last few levels. Since a lot of the guild has raced past them, it's hard for them to get groups to instances and they're falling further behind the rest of the group.

I can't please both groups, but I also recognise this will be a temporary situation. In a couple of months when we're ass-deep in Naxx and people have spent a ton of badges and are currently looking at their alts, the situation will be less desperate.

Guess I'll just have to balance my time better before then.

Fun with double entendres!

So Ulu's been working on Sons of Hodir rep, but I'm unsure about thier intentions...

Once he got Friendly with them, they asked him to blow their horn and polish their helmet...

Now he's Honored and in addition to these duties he's now gotta thrust their spear...

If there's a quest at Revered that involves a sack and some jewels, I'm running for it!

New toys!

So Ulu got some new toys tonight...



The Red Sword of Courage



The Royal Crest of Lordaeron

And also the Chained Military Gorget, but that one doesn't have a cool graphic.

I cannot begin to describe how much more bad-ass Ulushnar looks with Lich King gear!

Post-Weekend update 01-Dec-08

So last night, Ulushnar got the loot 100 Emblems of Heroism achievement. Given he hadn't set foot in a Heroic before last Monday night, that should give you some idea of what he spent a lot of the last week doing...

...Yeah, Ah well, it's winter and being outside isn't good anyway.

Still on the plus side, ulushnar now has the T7 chest and is currently working on badges for the neck. At this rate though, he'll outgear Naxxramas 10 before the guild's ready to set foot in it.

This week I'm going to try and tone it down a bit. There's a couple of target heroics that I'm going to run, but I also wanna spend time helping the last few guildies not at 80 to get there so we can all join the Heroic frenzy.

I've also been logging in Wulfsblood a bit. I haven't really been levelling him so much as committing mass genocide on the Rhinos of the Borean Tundra. Our guild's only leatherworker has been having connection problems, and some members of the guild want the epic cloaks available at 440 LW, so I put my nose to the grindstone and got it done. Wulf's currently at 423 LW, and is working through my backlog of Eternals from Mining and Engineering to get to 440.