World of Warcraft 3.3.3

[Mack Kilimaro]

You can avoid this situation by delaying the first 2 bites as long as possible.

Following up on this, if you have the first two bites take place with 5 seconds left on the "MC" debuff, that pushes the final bite back past the second bloodbolt whirl. Aratan's comment about having someone hit Divine Sacrifice during the second air phase is a good idea. That's usually what I do and it seems like the 20% reduction to the raid plus damage being redirected to me is helpful. BQL is a neat encounter - although if your healers or tanks aren't geared enough it'll hurt.

Must be the time of year for some raid attendance drama - or at least the time in the life cycle of Wrath. I don't know. The last couple of raid weeks have pretty much been treading water because a couple of emo kids who happen to be the 2nd and 3rd best DPS in the guild are being, well, emo and don't want to raid. Without them, we basically don't have much chance on Putricide or Sindragosa, and considering the two of them are generally 100% of our ranged contingent, that puts Blood Princes in the difficult column too since it means the fill-ins - nice folks but not on the gear/skill level of those guys - don't know what to do quite as automatically. Last night, we did the lower wing, Festergut/Rotface and Dreamwalker, and I don't know if we'd kill anything on our next raid night if we spent three hours on it. Getting pissed at teenagers. Was I ever that emo? Christ.

[BlueRose]

We've also been having attendance problems, we have to keep calling out Thursday raid, and sometimes the Wednesday one too. Wednesday is legitimately hard because we have three people with night class on Wed, but Thursday I think pwople just dont want to wipe.

But, we did get BQ last night, and it was after our very grumpy pessimistic RL said that we were going to practice a few attempts and then call it because our DPS was too low. And then we nailed it, second try.

We ended the night in spectacularly funny fashion. We were learning Sindragosa, which most had seen on 10 man but no one had done on 25. We knew that the frost tombs were supposed to be about 10 yards apart, but then in 2 different guides, it didnt mention that they did damage to one another. So we decided to test it when half the raid was already dead. We had all 5 marked people run to the same spot and get tombed on top of each other. We all got one shotted, of course. It was an excellent way to end the night,

[Cuellar]

I can barely get motivated to log on these days. I think the problem is a lack of interesting content for me. I probably need to pug some more raids, but even that will keep me busy for maybe 2 weeks.

When does the expansion come out?

[PhelanArcetus]

I think part of my lack of interest in raiding is being a bit burned out on tanking. I want to dps (on my paladin). And while we've talked about swapping a person or two each week in the first wing, I don't see it happening with me dpsing very often. I'm more likely to come in as heals than dps if I'm swapping, sadly.

I've been doing randoms on my paladin but not my warrior, also. Mostly because I really don't see any substantial upgrades to my warrior's gear from getting more emblems, whereas the paladin still has a few goals to hit.

Really the biggest problem attendance-wise is that we're a small group with no reserves. So if someone who isn't dps can't make it, we have to scramble to fill the role. And very few people have any patience for such.

[Angeleyes]

We're being hit with attendance issues as well.

Tuesday night we downed everything in ICC 25 but Sindy and Mr. King. So we walk in on Wednesday expecting to really get our first night on LK, and hopefully make some good progress. We had to wait 15 minutes or so past raid start to get a full contingent, and then went and 3? shotted Sindy which was pretty good, given that we also got our Retadin's Shadow's Edge completely infused. We ran off to do VoA 25 and took a 15 minute break to make sure everyone had watched the video... And apparently no one had watched much of the vieo.

DPS was asking retarded questions. Our tank kept dying, we think to healer error. We only had 4 main spec healers on out of the 6 we needed, and given I was disc spamming, and our top Resto Shammy was just dispelling Necrotic plague the whole phase we had a tough time. Our old Holy Pally is taking a 3 week leave of absence, don't know why, but it was a couple weeks coming so we were able to get a replacement to about 5300 Gear Score for the mean time... But man I miss his pro tank healing. Ended up headed to ToGC 25 after having made little progress through phase 1 just because DPS was failing so hard and we kept letting our Warrior get gibbed.

I can't make it tonight because my dad is in a play? so without a disc priest I dunno if they are gonna just send 2 ten man teams through or maybe try to down Anub (also progression for us).

On the plus side in our 10 man group we are consistently seeing Phase 3 of the King, and on Blood Queen 25 i was able to hit 7100 hps... Still can't hold a candle to the 10,000 our Druid put out, but fun nonetheless.

[Poobah]

Lady D down on heroic! Hurray! Hurray! It's a wonderful day!

[Greywolf2375]

Lady D down on heroic! Hurray! Hurray! It's a wonderful day!

Congratulations! from what I'm hearing that's one of the toughest of the heroic modes

so yesterday got kinda borked...in laws showed up a day earlier than expected, so while I was able to sneak away for a couple minutes here and there to see how the raid was going, wasn't even able to get on vent til about 10:30

[Inigima]

Odd day yesterday:

• PvP - PvPed in battlegrounds as a healadin for the first time (and in fact the first time ever on that toon apparently). Holy shit I am invincible. It rules. Sometimes people don't notice I'm there and I can keep everyone from dying and the enemy just bashes their head against the wall of 10-20k heals every second or two. Sometimes they do notice me, and focus on me, and I keep myself up with the same heals and my teammates nuke the shit out of them. Physical DPS is especially funny since I'm a platewearer. I think I died twice in the entirety of my IoC, when the entire enemy team, or close to it, ganged up on me. We rocked them, it wasn't even close. I need to do that more often, it was a blast and got me upwards of 6600 honor. Got my [Damage Control] achievement doing it, too (heal or DPS 300,000 or more HP in a single battleground match).
  
  
• Raid As I think I mentioned I lead a regular ICC 10 pug. Our raid healer didn't show, we had everything else we needed. Just could not find a replacement. Eventually I got a whisper from a tree who wanted to go -- had never been, but more importantly, had no head or shoulder enchants at all. I asked him about it, and his reply was "just got head." (*snerk*) We declined, but after way more time of not finding anyone, we decided to give him a shot. It took him 20 minutes to get into vent. We were already scheduled for a late start, and it was even later by the time we got started. He healed for 10 seconds before disconnecting, and never came back. I solo healed the trash without significant issue -- my team was very vigilant about getting me out of web wraps, by the time I finished yelling for help I was usually already out -- and we decided to try Marrowgar for shits and giggles. Our regular enh shammy threw on her (way undergeared, and she knows it) resto set to pitch in. We only gave it one try, and we wiped, but we almost made it. She's gonna grind up badges for her resto set with her excellent tank boyfriend (yes! a couple who are actually both legitimately good and drama-free!) and we're gonna try again on Monday with all our critical spots filled. Also I didn't realize it but the shaman is the alt of a tree I've known for quite a while and liked so it's nice to be raiding with her again. Also, her boyfriend is our MT, and he has I guess ended up with so much gold he just doesn't give a fuck about what he spends it on, so he is a never-ending font of fish feasts. He has so much shit to store he made his own guild just to have a guild bank to put things in.
  
  I really like my group, so I hope they'll stay together. Been about four weeks of regular raiding so far, pretty good for a perma-pug.
  
  
• Cooking: Got my Chef title yesterday! Still need a little over 30 more cooking awards to buy the chef's hat, I am generally pretty bad about doing my dailies.
  
  
• Shaman hit 60 and is an unstoppable healing machine. DK hit 65. Tree is... 66 I think? Priest is stagnating a bit at 40, haven't felt like healing on him and I have limited patience for waiting in DPS queues, although they've been pretty good lately.
  
  
• DK tanked manatombs yesterday. Somehow we survived with an inept shaman healing as elemental and a priest DPSing as disc.

[PhelanArcetus]

We had a not fun night.

Ok, the tree got home later than I had figured (she tried to avoid going through Manhattan, which resulted in a stupid number of transfers), but she didn't want to raid anyway. The OT was away again, and both of those are fine.

Unfortunately, it seems that our resto shaman decided to lock his shaman to a run. Yes, he locked, to some other run, the character he raids with us on. This resulted in us having to bring his ret/holy paladin, who barely outdamages the tanks, and doesn't heal especially well, as well as a pug shaman healer. Oh, and "our" shaman's buddy, who sucks at death knight, but has been brought along a couple of weeks running now because the raid leader would rather carry a guildmate than find a pug.

The early stuff went fine, despite a lagtastic (and me not having jumped in months) Gunship wipe. Rotface gave us pure hell, though; basically we had 2 people who'd never done it, and "our" shaman had some issues healing on the move as a paladin. And to top it off, I had really wanted to bring my paladin, at least for the first wing, and we had three drops he wants. (All healing, but the emblems are a big deal, as is not tanking the place.)

Followed this up with a sucky PoS for the random, which resulted in unnecessary death to lag and an idiot mage who kept focus magic on my paladin, despite the fact that I was dpsing. (Two ret/holy paladins queued as dps/heal, we knew which of us was going to heal, and it wasn't me. The dungeon finder tool disagreed, despite me being in ret gear and him being better geared for healing.)

[Poobah]

We had a not fun night.

Unfortunately, it seems that our resto shaman decided to lock his shaman to a run. Yes, he locked, to some other run, the character he raids with us on.

Ohai Gkick.

Congratulations! from what I'm hearing that's one of the toughest of the heroic modes

Yeah she's a real bitch. We took a long time and a lot of messing with our strategy to get her down. Now we're going to start putting major time into getting Valithria down since she's supposed to be much easier or something. Not raiding again till Sunday now so a nice chance to chill out. Hopefully on Sunday we nock the Princes down and they give me my heroic offhand. Best case scenario we get both the princes and BQL down nice and fast and then have a few hours to spend trying to heal Valithria. Should be good.

It sucks that so many of you are having probems with attendence and stuff. I hope it picks up for ya'll soon.

[PhelanArcetus]

Yeah I don't know why we haven't gkicked him. He seems to have been drifting away anyway, so I think the guild leader wants to just wait for him to leave. He's her ex-boyfriend, and they still talk, at least some (seems his current girlfriend is rather not thrilled about that), and I think she doesn't want to deal with gkicking him. She's basically hoping that between being disliked and his girlfriend disliking him playing the game, he'll just leave. Quit the game or join another guild, but go away without there being any drama to cause.

[Kalbear]

Bring 8 healers to Val. She's a snap.

CS is up to 8/12 and working on Sin. Only Sin, PP, LDW and HLK left. Sin is giving major problems though.

[Character Zero]

Deathwhisper took us longer than Sindragosa, I believe.

Ghosts suck.

And yes, if you're able to kill Deathwhisper, Valithria shouldn't be much of a problem.

[Angeleyes]

"Jacquen the Kingslayer" of Terokkar-US

:D

Our resto shaman got the fist weapon, and a DK gnabbed the 2 handed mace. Both were greed roles. At least we didn't DE a pair of crossbows! Once we got to 25% it was magically easy. Everyone was flowing together. It helped that he chose the same mage to port into Frostmourne 3 times, so the guy knew exactly what was up. 2 minutes left on the enrage.

The superfluous bloodlust at 9.5% felt excellent, and i got to show off my smite DPS. 2300 woo. Forgot to pop my shadowfiend though. Feeling good!

[jurble]

my guild always has attendance issues. We have like 40 people trying to get into the raid on tuesday for their welfare gear, and then no one logs on weds or thurs or mond to try to down new bosses

[Poobah]

We just successfully carried ~15 random pugs through ulduar 25, and even managed to get them to kill yogg. Then we pulled Algalon for giggles so they could get to see the fight for real... and die horribly.

I dunno how it is on other servers but that's probably the first time in the history of our crummy server that such a successful pug has taken place. Was great fun and we got some shards for one of our healer's legendary. Gonna do it again next week and work our way up to doing more than one pull of Algalon and maybe some hardmodes as we collect shards. Also throwing around the idea of clearing up to yogg with the pug and then doing some Yogg+0 for mounts. So much fun to be back in Ulduar I gotta say ^_^

[Greywolf2375]

Well, somebody did something I haven't done, so there's no reason to play anymore. Paragon downed Heroic Lich King...103MM health. damn.

[Inigima]

Woo! Time for bed now, but my tree is Northrend-bound.

[Darkostar]

Well, somebody did something I haven't done, so there's no reason to play anymore. Paragon downed Heroic Lich King...103MM health. damn.

Yeah, but they did it with the 5% buff, so the elitists are crying for a "natural" kill.

[Greywolf2375]

Yeah, but they did it with the 5% buff, so the elitists are crying for a "natural" kill.

.....

really? at work so I can't look at MMO champion or anything game related...but, really? shouldn't Paragon, well, BE the elitists in this situation?