Casual Raid Leader

Last night was a good night to die!!!  Well for Saurfang it was.  We had spent Wednesday working on clearing the first three bosses, but as we thought we’d only have 5 attempts at Saurfang, we figured we’d hold off after a long night of raiding to do Saurfang on a fresh day.  Thursday I knew would be a very busy day for me.  My daughter had a music program at school, so I really didn’t anticipate having time to raid, but about 8:30 I jumped online and there the group was.. waiting for me to show up.

So we headed on in to Icecrown Citadel.  I suspect there was a bug as we were granted 8 attempts at Saurfang, but I’m not going to complain… we downed him.  Lets crank it up and see what we learned about Deathbringer Saurfang. (more…)

Its funny how we kind of find ourselves in a rut.  I think in an MMO, its kind of a natural thing.  You end up stuck… you’ve done most if not all of everything in the game and then.. things slow down… they crawl to a halt and you find yourself just filling in the spaces….

I’m sorry if you disagree, but Blizzard in my opinion has proved why they deserve the king of the hill for MMOs.  With the release of 3.3, they’ve redefined what it is to play WoW… again. (more…)

So I was sitting there this past weekend on Friday or Saturday figuring I’d play a little WoW.  Most people I think kind of skim past the launcher screen, but I thought I’d stop and read it.  My PC isn’t the fastest thing in the world, but hey… it is what it is.  Until my wife wins the lottery, I’m pretty well stuck with what I have. 

So I was sitting there reading and saw that Blizzard had $5 copies of the base game for the weekend…  Ruh Roh Raggy…. um… Well see I’m an altoholic.  And I was just bitching about how I didn’t have enough support structure right?  Well…. see… I kind of made the mistake of mentioning it in Guild chat that I was thinking of picking up a copy and testing out dual boxing as a nice easy way to level some alts quickly to level 60.

Lets face it… I’m bored.  Moving to a new guild came at a price.  The price was…well… everything is on farm.  So our raiding takes 1.5 hours.  Done.. out for the week.  Ulduar is off the table.  And we’re working on TOGC, but only one day a week.  So ok… fine… our raiding take 4 hours a week, but we haven’t been very consistent on TOGC.  Plus I have this desire to get at least ONE support character to a position where they can help my main. 

Little did I know the wave I’d start…. (more…)

Not that long ago as part of a large amount of frustation on my part, I vented on what I viewed as a huge issue with healing in Wrath.  Now… I was flipping through some incoming traffic and came across this very interesting article over at Procrastination Amplification by Scrusi.  They brought up a very interesting point. 

In my original article, I felt that a great deal of the reason that healing had burned so many healers out was the sheer difficulty.  Scrusi contends that difficult encounters would wake healers up and actually there’s a great deal of boredom involved with healing.  Ok… I’m 3 weeks into  my horde transformation.  Lets see what I’ve learned. (more…)

I admit it. I’ve felt a bit down on druids lately. Its not that I don’t want to play my druid. Far from it, but its a bit disheartening to look at your class and see that what you’ve built up as an expectation for how it should play… how it should work and how it should function is not in Blizzard’s vision.

I started thinking more on the subject and honestly… if I want to survive the new world order of Druids I think I need to readjust my take on them. I’m too old school… time to teach this dog some new tricks. 

Warning:  I am not a hard core theory crafter.  Don’t expect to see complex calculations… I fully expect the math geeks in you out there will start posting and correcting my “fuzzy math”.  I did this as more of general exercise. (more…)

Last night folks… was our first visit to Ulduar.  Yes… I know…. some of you are bored.  Some of you are done with Ulduar.  Well some of us rebuilt a new guild and got a little delayed ok??  But hey… what can I say?

For a glimpse of what my day was like.  I spent most of the morning getting my mundane chores done at work.  My breaks were dedicated to searching out strategies, making sure I read the details on the fights, and watching videos.  As a raid leader I need to come across as at least somewhat credible right?  So its a lot of time taking notes, going through things in my head and just basically figuring stuff out.

I prepped myself for pretty much what you expect to see any time you step foot into an instance the first time.  I was all set with my repair money.  I was all set with my flasks… I was all set to walk into Ulduar and get the living tar kicked out of me.  What I wasn’t expecting to find was the ROCK Factor. (more…)

Its been one of those interesting weeks for me.  I’m sure you can tell by my last post, but overall it wasn’t bad.  We had some raiding that we actually fit in around all my backbreaking labor.  It was really good work too.  Let me fill you in on that before I bore the rest of you with my story of construction gone wild. (more…)

Last night I was pretty happy.  For the first time since we reformed, we were able to head back into Naxx as a guild.  It wasn’t perfect.  It wasn’t always pretty, but damn it… we got some work done.

I’m  a realist.  What we did last night was damned good work considering what we started with.  It certainly won’t win any awards, but as far as I’m concerned… damn fine work. (more…)

Its been one of those weeks you know?  Well ok overall it hasn’t been that bad.  I used to just hate the achievements.  Ok I’m still not overly fond of them, but at the end of the day its a nice diversion to look at periodically.  Lately I’ve had this bug in me to go look at the lore of original Wow that I missed.  So I’ve been playing around with the Loremaster achievement in Eastern Kingdoms.  As you can see by the screenshot up above… all that glitters is not gold…… (more…)

So last week was a pretty good week all things considered.  The checklist was pretty complete…..

• All my mods nuked……. CHECK
• UI Screwed up? …….. CHECK
• New content to make me go OOOOOO?  ……. CHECK
• Patch here???? …….. You betcha!!!

Blizzard never ceases to amaze me.  Their ability to come up with new and different things or put a new shine and twist on old things is just a sight to see.

(more…)