World of Warcraft

[jurble]

Well that's the thing. I'm in a guild too (even though its all people from TBC who kept in touch). But where would the guildless and guildies meet? Guild people don't want to run with puggies, so they run with guildmates. And even if they do a random, they're not going to get people in realm. They're not going to look for 1-2 more people from their realm before queuing. They're just going to get their 3 and hit run random. And overwhelmingly chances are they won't get someone in their realm.

Mhm, back in the day, most recruitment was done by meeting people doing dungeons on your own realm. These days, the sense of intra-realm community is much weaker, since you can basically ignore the entire realm outside of your own guild if you so choose.

[Solmyr]

Terra, one of the chief reasons you're having problems is that you're killing 4 adds, hence having 4 waves of bloods. We used to do it like this and it was a nightmare (we run with 3 healers), we still got him down, but it took countless tries and basically came down to a lot of luck. Then we optimized positioning and stacking to give dps more time to nuke the boss during phase1, now we always get him to phase2 before he casts 4th fester blood. We get our fourth add around 30-35%, but you ignore it, push boss (if necessary even pop early heroism, but you should learn doing it without it) and bring it down to 25% before he casts fester blood. As soon as he enters phase2, start moving him to the throne. You will get one set of spawns outside the throne, kill them, then everyone should move inside the throne while trying to avoid puking on each other, then spawns can be killed and interrupted much more easily.

As for warlocks and cho gall. It took me a while to master my rotation as destro, but since I did I can say it even beats demo. Put circle halfway between your stack spot and the adds' dying spot. As soon as an add spawns put BoH on boss, nuke add down, go back on boss for a bit until bloods spawn, turn around and start rain of fire. Depending on the slow/knowckback abilities the other aoe'rs are using it can be easy ot hard, but I usually end up saving shadowfury if a few or all adds start moving fast towards the group. Start running towards them, stun them as you are upon them, shadowflame(glyphed) then fall back (via circle if possible) and do some rain of fire. Rain if fire is actually quite good if you have reliable slows like frost trap and earthbind totems. It even beats hellfire since you don't need to move. Furthermore, BoH ensures that some of the dmg you deal to the add and the bloods hurts ol' Cho as well. As soon as as bloods are dead recast BoD on boss, it will have time to tick twice before you need to put BoH again, hence it's worth the GCD. Save Inferno for last blood wave.

We run with two warlocks a fire mage and sometimes a moonkin. Usually no hunter and our only shammy is resto (sometimes puts earthbind, but not reliable since he has other priorities). Bloods are amazingly easy, last wave especially, since 2 infernos and 2 shadowfuries practically ensure that all the bloods will die in seconds in stunlock. Shadowfury is also a godsend during phase2 for interrupting the stacked adherents and in phase1 for getting people out of mind control. I think we've only wiped because of people not running out of shadow crashes fast enough and during some very unlucky second phases, where we drowned in puke.

[Kalbear]

Yes and no; while knowing everyone on your realm (or at least the real asshats) has reduced, the inter-guild knowledge is very strong. It's hard to get into a guild by just random chance, but it's easier than ever to know folks who are running content and where they're at.

[Weak With The Dawn]

Yes and no; while knowing everyone on your realm (or at least the real asshats) has reduced, the inter-guild knowledge is very strong. It's hard to get into a guild by just random chance, but it's easier than ever to know folks who are running content and where they're at.

This isn't necessarily true. The guild limit being what it is, if you're at max capacity or thereabouts you're not going to know everyone in your guild. This guild Ruinous on my server will literally invite anyone who wants in, and then spends most of their time doing large scale griefing. They're so big that they've started two sister guilds that are also pretty full. There's not much real community there.

[Inigima]

I understand the objections people are raising about the Dungeon Finder, but I really think you guys have rose-colored glasses on. Most of the people on your realm are stupid, annoying shitbags, just like most of the people you meet in the Dungeon Finder. Yes, occasionally you find a good one. I wish you could friend those people or something to increase the likelihood of getting grouped with them, but that may not be feasible. I also wish you could invite friends -- at least battle.net friends -- to groups across realms. I would love to be able to fill a spot in a raid roster with a buddy from another realm.

[TerraPrime]

I would love to be able to fill a spot in a raid roster with a buddy from another realm.

That would be money.

And to be honest, not something entirely impossible down the line, I think.

[Inigima]

They claim to be working on it. They've been saying that for a while, though.

[Inigima]

Canadians: It's not you. Rogers has been accidentally (probably) fucking up your connection to WoW for ages. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/oops-major-canadian-isp-admits-throttling-world-of-warcraft.ars

[Shryke]

Canadians: It's not you. Rogers has been accidentally (probably) fucking up your connection to WoW for ages. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/oops-major-canadian-isp-admits-throttling-world-of-warcraft.ars

It's Rogers, there's no probably about it.

[Inigima]

No no. I meant it's probably an accident.

[Arakasi]

I understand the objections people are raising about the Dungeon Finder, but I really think you guys have rose-colored glasses on. Most of the people on your realm are stupid, annoying shitbags, just like most of the people you meet in the Dungeon Finder. Yes, occasionally you find a good one. I wish you could friend those people or something to increase the likelihood of getting grouped with them, but that may not be feasible. I also wish you could invite friends -- at least battle.net friends -- to groups across realms. I would love to be able to fill a spot in a raid roster with a buddy from another realm.

Before: Would meet a guy I added to friends list about once a week or so. After 6 months or so I'd have a network of 15-25 people I could communicate with on a fairly regular basis. Whenever I did a heroic these would be the people I'd whisper. Many of them ended up joining guilds I was in or vice versa. From this group I ended up raiding with a number of them, meeting some long term friends in the process. And yes I met plenty of idiots and assholes.

Now: Since starting playing back in July of 2010 I've met a grand total of 0 people in my realm who I communicate with on a regular basis. There is no need to meet anyone. Rarely does anyone talk in heroics. Dailies are a joke as well. Usually started by the invite out of the blue and usually ended by the group disbanding immediately on the cessation of the objective. You can say the same thing for TB raids now. Not so many assholes though. It certainly has killed any personal connection I've had with the realm community.

Its been a problem for our guild though as we've been raiding. We run on just a 10 man crew and we lost one recently. So we're always pugging the 10th spot as of late. Still making progress in spite of that. But since we refuse to recruit like I said above and we can't meet realmmates through the LFD system it has been really hard making any new connections. And since our guild raids one time a week its hard to get the people who we randomly invite to stay with the group because they want to raid more. LFD has pushed the needs of the individual above those of the group. I love the convenience of it. But its turned an MMO into basically D2 loot runs.

[Kalbear]

It means that you need to ask first. If you refuse to recruit I'm not sure what to provide you.

But why aren't you doing the same thing that you used to with these puggers? You're meeting people every week that actually raid with you; why aren't you friending them?

[TerraPrime]

Re: Arakasi

But since we refuse to recruit like I said above

Why not?

To be honest, I've never been in a guild that does not recruit. I don't even know where you'd get your raiders if you don't recruit.

Re: Kalbear

But why aren't you doing the same thing that you used to with these puggers? You're meeting people every week that actually raid with you; why aren't you friending them?

I'm presuming that the good players he met through LFD are on a different server? I mean, you can still recruit them, but chances are they're not going to spend the money to server transfer just to raid. Some might.

ETA:

Saw the upcoming patch notes that they'll do the VP/JP caps on a weekly basis instead of daily. You still get the same amount as cap, but you can now run them all in one day if you want. So instead of logging on for 7 days to do 7 dailies, you can log on for say 4 days and run 7 of them and be done.

On one hand, I'm pretty excited about it. Some nights are just busier than others for me and I just don't get to do all the dailies every day. So this will be a great help.

On the other hand, it's going to suck pretty badly for the DPS classes towards the end of the week when most people have already finished their weekly cap. Queueing for tanks and healers could take even longer than it does now. So the smart thing to do is to run your dps dailies (now called weeklies?) early on and get them out of the way, I think.

[Arakasi]

It means that you need to ask first. If you refuse to recruit I'm not sure what to provide you.

But why aren't you doing the same thing that you used to with these puggers? You're meeting people every week that actually raid with you; why aren't you friending them?

We are and we've invited people to come back. And some have been with us a couple times. But it's like I said. We raid one day a week and don't have a lot of online presence most of the week. We're mostly professionals working a lot every week. Not exactly a huge draw as a raiding guild. We've been trying to find people who raid fulltime on another char and have an alt they want to play once a week. I think there are people out there who would be attracted to playing an alt once a week in a raid with a bunch of old time TBC players. We just haven't found them yet. But we have been rebuffed by several players who even though they enjoyed raiding with us aren't willing to raid just one night a week.

In the past I've been part of real raid guilds that were ranked on progression and raided 4 nights a week. Then it made sense to have a real guild webpage and actively recruit on the forums. But we're not that type of guild. We're a bunch of players who play very casually and get everyone online once per week to raid 10 mans for 4 hours. If the LFD didn't exist then through 5 mans since July I would have met a network of 20+ players who I could invite to these raids. Now I have like what, the very small number of people we've pugged to fill the last spot in our raid. And that network isn't large enough to get our consistent tenth spot.

[Kalbear]

If the LFD didn't exist then through 5 mans since July I would have met a network of 20+ players who I could invite to these raids.

See, I think this is the fallacy.

In TBC days you were raiding 4 days a week and your guild had a fairly heavy online presence. Now you don't. You've met very few people via LFD, but you probably wouldn't have met a whole lot of people via LFG raiding one day a week and not doing heroics every day regularly either.

Basically, if you're not online to socialize you're not going to have a lot of opportunity to meet people.

And you're not willing to entertain the notion that you should be online more - either in game or on forums or other places. So...you don't meet that many people - and that's not that surprising.

Why you'd think you'd meet more people that regularly wanted to raid with you 1 day a week only is a bit confusing too; why would meeting more people also equate to meeting the kind of people you like? Especially if you're doing something like spamming LFG for hours at a time - why do you think those people are only wanting to raid 1 day a week either?

I guess this doesn't sound like, to me, to be a blizzard problem. Back in TBC days you couldn't possibly find virtually anyone who would want to raid one day a week in a 10-man guild. What - do you run Karazhan halfway and then quit? You couldn't extend lockouts, you couldn't get gear enough to progress quickly, you'd have problems learning fights and Kara took fucking forever to do. Things like the LFD system enabled guilds to do fewer raid days. Now you're complaining that it doesn't do enough for you and looking back on TBC days - when you raided 4 days a week - as some mecca of socialization. Those people joined your guild not because you met them in 5-mans and liked them, but because they liked what you were selling.

Those same people aren't joining you now for the same reason.

You're not reaching the people you want. And here's a newsflash: the kind of people you want don't spend a lot of time in game but almost certainly spend a fair amount of time on realms forums and outside the game because they ahve time then. Refusing to recruit on the forums is hugely idiotic.

[Inigima]

1% WIPE FUCK YOU CHO'GALL ASDFHAWEUIOTHNGERIG49WEUHN

EDIT: GOT THE FUCKER. FUCK YOU CHO'GALL.

Also my tier token dropped and I rolled a 3 :(

[The Winged Shadow]

1% WIPE FUCK YOU CHO'GALL ASDFHAWEUIOTHNGERIG49WEUHN

EDIT: GOT THE FUCKER. FUCK YOU CHO'GALL.

Also my tier token dropped and I rolled a 3 :(

:cheers: Congratz. You guys fucked him, alright! Sucks on the roll, hopefully someone good got it. :ohwell:

[Inigima]

Yeah, one of our best casters won it, it's well-deserved.

[Minaku]

See, when your raid calendar event has "Cho'gall, you fuck" as its description, you know you're going to kill him.

I'm going to be a bit emo here. I benched myself because I thought my DPS was too low, and brought in someone who typically does 15-16k dps on a crappy day. Even so, it took another hour and change of wiping before we got him down, and thar's with kicking our hunter in the butt and making him get a wolf, since he didn't have one. I'm happy for the raid, and I am glad they got the achievement and the tier token, but at the same time I'm pretty emo about it since it meant I had to take one for the team. I'm not used to being the shittiest at anything in WoW, but it looks like this expansion I'll have to get used to being a bottom feeder in both PvE and PvP.

Sigh.

[Solmyr]

Ini, we've been killing Cho'gall for more than 2 months now (we skipped a few weeks tho). First kill he dropped warlock/paladin/priest token. Me, main tank (also guild master) and top healer (priest) rolled. I won. GM asked me to trade to healer since he needed it more and I obliged. A week later the healer quit the game. Last Wednesday on our kill it dropped again. I already had the Atremedes shoulders, but I rolled anyway to test my luck. Won against 3 others. Traded to the GM. The shoulders aren't so great - warlock's set bonus is the worst in the game. I only wear the chest set item and not for lack of valor points to buy pants and gloves. Let your friends take the tokens, content yourself with non-set substitutes, once 4.2 comes start bitching for that legendary ;). Thats how you achieve Winning -Charlie Sheen

P.S. After 3.5h of wipes on Nef yesterday we finally had people learning the fight. We got him to 16%, but we still need more practice in p3. Sucks that some folks are such rookies in their classes. Our offtank plays with glyphed shield wall >.<.