Not that Leafie has been idle: her new title is Guardian of Cenarius, which every druid should have.
She finished off Cenarion Circle reputation by questing in Desolace & Silithus, incidentally earning the zone achievements along the way. Cataclysm certainly makes the rep grinds easier, doesn’t it?
Less than 100 points to go to 10,000 achievement points total. I only just now passed the total of my departed guild leader. And just think: she quit the game when Cata landed, so she has zero Cataclysm achievements. Oh my.
Fleetfoot, my nelf warrior alt, in her transmog set. This is full Overlord’s plate plus a Gothic Shield. I am thinking she needs the Shield of Impenetrable Darkness plus the Tabard of the Shattered Sun. No idea what to do about the weapon. Is there an out of game previewing tool that does something like what MogIt does in-game?
It took me this long to get into transmogging for real. I was too burned out when this patch landed to care about anything that wasn’t killing raid bosses.
Leafie is rather tediously transmogged into full heroic T12 gear. She’s very purple. I chose that set not because I like purple, but because I like leather sets that are not Yet Another Giant Robe.
Storm of Medivh-US is 3/8 in Dragon Soul heroics. We went 7/8 normal modes the first week but didn’t quite eek out that Madness of Deathwing kill. We got it immediately the second week. The week after that we brought a fourth healer like everybody else does and got our first heroic kill easily. We then stayed at 1/8 heroics for a while. Then we finally got the big idea of trying Ultraxion; killed him the second night we worked on him. We had to class-stack to get heroic Yor’sahj. Next: Hagara.
From this you may deduce what everybody has: that normal modes were far too easy and the difficulty ramp-up for the heroic modes was huge. Blizzard is, I fear, trading on that difficulty to stretch out the content until Panda-Mode lands on us. It’ll be as Bilbo said, though, butter scraped over too much bread. We are already bored of Dragon Soul and at the same time frustrated by the difficulties.
The ramping ICC-style buff will be nice in that it’ll eventually let us clear the whole place and then… well, switch to guild survival mode until December and the likely arrival of pandas. We’ll have to go back & get Sinestra.
Two years between expansions but Blizzard doesn’t seem to be able to pace its mid-expansion content properly. Ah well.
The guild is doing well otherwise. We can’t seem to keep ranged DPS to save ourselves, though. Either they flake out and vanish or they suddenly acquire lives and can’t raid any more. We’ve gone through a succession of perfectly nice warlocks this way. Our most recent victim was a hunter who moved & lost reliable Internet. Melee dps? Awesome. We have a ret pally who could probably slot himself into any top 100 guild he felt like joining, if he felt like going hardcore. Fortunately for us he doesn’t. We have a solid tanking crew and I adore my fellow full-time healer so that part of raiding is happy.
The only fly in the ointment is content. In this I suppose we’re completely typical of guilds at this point in the expansion.
[video]
[video]
This. -
On the video shown at the Blizzcon closing ceremonies. The final line of this essay is the keeper.
Firelands meta achievement mount: what we did the week after we finished off 6/7 heroic modes! We went back and did the wacky things required for Glory of the Firelands Raider and got ourselves some pretty purple birds. Not a lot of those on our server yet, I noticed. (The guilds that could have easily beaten us to it are busy with the race for heroic Rags.)
[video]
20% nerf to T12 normal & heroic incoming -
Well huh.
Seems a little early for this, doesn’t it? The obvious conclusion is that patch 4.3 is coming in faster than we think for a patch that hasn’t showed up on the PTR at all yet. Even with the buff to legendary staff quest item drop rates, I’m not sure we’ll manage to finish one before T13 lands. And we’ve been clearing Firelands steadily. Can’t imagine what a 10-person raid who’s behind us must be feeling about their staff chances.
Seems a little early to me as a raider as well. We’ve just started digging into hard mode encounters. A couple of weeks of normal mode clears to gear up (painfully slowly in the 10s) and then our first one down fairly easily. We start work on Majordomo tonight, because our raid leader read the strats for it and got interested. Seems doable. I guess we have one week to do it before the accomplishment feels so much less interesting. I am somewhat surprised, though, because T12 normal felt fairly easy for us. Even Ragnaros went down without the kind of work we had to put into something like Yogg-Saron or Lich King.
Overall Blizzard appears to have completely screwed the pooch on pacing content release in Cataclysm. Seven long agonizing tedious months of punishing T11 interrupt fests, no nerfing, only retuning of encounters that were literally impossible as released. Several long months of running two 5-person instances over and over and over and over for badges. A new raid for three months and then nerfs to all modes. 4.3 is supposed to be the last raid of Cataclysm, but the expansion isn’t yet a year old. Let’s assume it gets released in early December, at the one-year mark. When is the next as-yet-unannounced expansion? A year from then? Will we have a whole year of T13 in a repeat of the ICC thing?
On the plus side, we’re clearing T12 in a raid night and a half… so long as we spend the first night mostly working on a new heroic. New content soon is going to be good because otherwise I’m not going to have enough to keep my raiders busy.
[video]
Allison Robert dares ask the hard question about 25s raiding. -
Is the game outgrowing 25-man raids? Are two different raid sizes just not worth keeping around anymore?
A followup to her previous discussion of how post-Ulduar raiding hasn’t been as much fun for many people, with one possible cause being the normal/achievement/heroic triple kill need.
You know what that means. Yup. We need to recruit again. We had a couple of weeks of blissful overpopulation with players on the bench at raid time. Now we’re down 2 and we nearly could not raid this week.
To compound the roster problems, I have had a very nasty Internet service degradation this week that causes packet delays of up to 5 seconds. In a raid this translates to all action freezing for several seconds then zipping forward in time very quickly. We had only 10 people logged in on Tuesday, so we ran Ulduar 25 instead of Firelands-10, on the theory that my inability to play at full capacity wouldn’t doom us. On Wednesday, somebody made an effort to log in especially to cover for me. On Thursday, that person couldn’t do it again, so we had exactly 10. And I raided.