Weekend MMOs
Guild Wars progresses apace, though we were down to three active people. Another two or three encounters done, taking us to about 18/26 current ones. Much faster after the afflicted mess. At this rate, we will be caught up in three weeks or so, and may actually end up waiting for the next part of Winds of Change.
Raid night on WoW was sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, we had some overly dramatic griping and confrontation before we started, which I may get back to later. On the other hand, we downed 6/7 Firelands bosses, the two in Baradin Hold, and the first in Dragon Soul. We saw, I believe, three trash drops (though still no patterns), one from DS. Our paladin healer (who was writing off the earlier Firelands bosses for anything useful) even got the caster shield off Beth'Tilac. That's actually a pretty good run, all told, though it wasn't without difficulty. Without our main death knight, we had to change things up a bit. Someone else got to chase Alysrazor through the air, which took longer than usual but wasn't bad as she still died just before the third hatchlings, I believe. Baleroc wiped us once, but an adjustment to crystal rotation seemed to fix that. I ended up getting stuck "directing" Rhyolith, which is not something I was prepared for and takes some different thinking and awareness - we downed him on our third attempt.
The (new and improved) Darkmoon Faire started up yesterday. It's neat to see, but still only available one week a month and all the spiffy new rewards are cosmetic (mounts, pets, old tier look-a-like armor, etc.), so I don't feel a great drive to do everything I can with multiple characters. The daily games are all pretty quick anyway. The profession quests are nice, even if they appear to be doable once a month rather than daily, offering +5 to uncapped profession skills for those over 75, with relatively little effort or material involved.
I've finished hammering out the PVP plate pieces I can make with blacksmithing. Still not sure how much I want to get into that, but it's an option. Tomorrow I can pick two or three new honor point items, too, which will make me ready as ever gear-wise...
I'm a little displeased by the "discussion" that came up at raid time, though not as upset as some. Mind you, I think it was all perfectly predictable. I tried to head some of it off with a forum post so people could discuss desires beforehand, but only one person availed themself of the opportunity.
4.3 comes with a new raid. New raid means new bosses and new gear. Naturally, there are some people who want to start working on the newest and greatest right away. And then there are some who don't.
Our two druids seem to want to see at least one more firecat staff drop off Staghelm. Our guild leader wants to complete a Dragonwrath (though I don't think he's going to push for the guild to stay solely in Firelands until that's done 16-ish weeks from now). There's some people who want to at least kill Ragnaros before moving on.
Meanwhile, our sometimes-raid-lead/lieutenant has done Firelands probably three times as often as the rest of us, running once or twice a week with another guild in addition to being a field leader for us. Their death knight tops the DPS charts rather ridiculously and they know how to handle most of the tricky boss mechanics (like flying after Alysrazor or driving Rhyolith). And because of all that, they're burned out on Firelands and want to immediately jump into Dragon Soul. They also made some argument for wanting to get new gear for people so that Firelands would be easier, but it seems to me that personal burnout is more of an issue. They ended up bowing out of raiding this weekend (thankfully we had ten competent raiders otherwise). Our paladin healer also spoke up with a desire to move on, but was less adamant about it and tuck with us.
There's really no avoiding the issue. We have time that's limited to one evening a week (we wouldn't get more than 5-6 people any other night), and with that in mind there are mutually exclusive goals:
- Kill Ragnaros. The fight is simply too complex to get down after two hours of other stuff. The only realistic way we can do this is to save a lockout and work at him until we get it done.
- Build Dragonwrath. This requires many, many things that drop from Firelands bosses, so we need to keep killing them. Heroic modes drop more, so skipping some bosses to focus on Ragnaros might be worthwhile, but that presumes success against him and on the heroic other bosses. We're another two weeks or so from the next stage, but then still 14+ weeks from a completed legendary staff and I see no way our group is going to remain dedicated to it for that long on our main night.
- Dragon Soul. New and shiny with better drops, but even though some people go on about how "easy" it is, there are fights that will trip us up and we can't count on cleaning up in an evening for quite a while.
We can dabble a little at all three, but completing any of them requires focus. And that's hard when some people favor one over another so strongly. We got through this week okay, but we'll see about next... and so on.
Personally, I'm fairly split myself. I don't feel I have to get into the new stuff right this minute, but I do like the feeling of working on "current" content over "old" content and Firelands is feeling fairly repetitive. I want a Dragonwrath in-guild, but I don't want to work on that at the expense of better gear for everyone else. So... yeah. Conflicted. Of course, I'm still in it more for the guild than the gear or achievements, so wherever we go, I'm willing to be there.
Raid night on WoW was sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, we had some overly dramatic griping and confrontation before we started, which I may get back to later. On the other hand, we downed 6/7 Firelands bosses, the two in Baradin Hold, and the first in Dragon Soul. We saw, I believe, three trash drops (though still no patterns), one from DS. Our paladin healer (who was writing off the earlier Firelands bosses for anything useful) even got the caster shield off Beth'Tilac. That's actually a pretty good run, all told, though it wasn't without difficulty. Without our main death knight, we had to change things up a bit. Someone else got to chase Alysrazor through the air, which took longer than usual but wasn't bad as she still died just before the third hatchlings, I believe. Baleroc wiped us once, but an adjustment to crystal rotation seemed to fix that. I ended up getting stuck "directing" Rhyolith, which is not something I was prepared for and takes some different thinking and awareness - we downed him on our third attempt.
The (new and improved) Darkmoon Faire started up yesterday. It's neat to see, but still only available one week a month and all the spiffy new rewards are cosmetic (mounts, pets, old tier look-a-like armor, etc.), so I don't feel a great drive to do everything I can with multiple characters. The daily games are all pretty quick anyway. The profession quests are nice, even if they appear to be doable once a month rather than daily, offering +5 to uncapped profession skills for those over 75, with relatively little effort or material involved.
I've finished hammering out the PVP plate pieces I can make with blacksmithing. Still not sure how much I want to get into that, but it's an option. Tomorrow I can pick two or three new honor point items, too, which will make me ready as ever gear-wise...
I'm a little displeased by the "discussion" that came up at raid time, though not as upset as some. Mind you, I think it was all perfectly predictable. I tried to head some of it off with a forum post so people could discuss desires beforehand, but only one person availed themself of the opportunity.
4.3 comes with a new raid. New raid means new bosses and new gear. Naturally, there are some people who want to start working on the newest and greatest right away. And then there are some who don't.
Our two druids seem to want to see at least one more firecat staff drop off Staghelm. Our guild leader wants to complete a Dragonwrath (though I don't think he's going to push for the guild to stay solely in Firelands until that's done 16-ish weeks from now). There's some people who want to at least kill Ragnaros before moving on.
Meanwhile, our sometimes-raid-lead/lieutenant has done Firelands probably three times as often as the rest of us, running once or twice a week with another guild in addition to being a field leader for us. Their death knight tops the DPS charts rather ridiculously and they know how to handle most of the tricky boss mechanics (like flying after Alysrazor or driving Rhyolith). And because of all that, they're burned out on Firelands and want to immediately jump into Dragon Soul. They also made some argument for wanting to get new gear for people so that Firelands would be easier, but it seems to me that personal burnout is more of an issue. They ended up bowing out of raiding this weekend (thankfully we had ten competent raiders otherwise). Our paladin healer also spoke up with a desire to move on, but was less adamant about it and tuck with us.
There's really no avoiding the issue. We have time that's limited to one evening a week (we wouldn't get more than 5-6 people any other night), and with that in mind there are mutually exclusive goals:
- Kill Ragnaros. The fight is simply too complex to get down after two hours of other stuff. The only realistic way we can do this is to save a lockout and work at him until we get it done.
- Build Dragonwrath. This requires many, many things that drop from Firelands bosses, so we need to keep killing them. Heroic modes drop more, so skipping some bosses to focus on Ragnaros might be worthwhile, but that presumes success against him and on the heroic other bosses. We're another two weeks or so from the next stage, but then still 14+ weeks from a completed legendary staff and I see no way our group is going to remain dedicated to it for that long on our main night.
- Dragon Soul. New and shiny with better drops, but even though some people go on about how "easy" it is, there are fights that will trip us up and we can't count on cleaning up in an evening for quite a while.
We can dabble a little at all three, but completing any of them requires focus. And that's hard when some people favor one over another so strongly. We got through this week okay, but we'll see about next... and so on.
Personally, I'm fairly split myself. I don't feel I have to get into the new stuff right this minute, but I do like the feeling of working on "current" content over "old" content and Firelands is feeling fairly repetitive. I want a Dragonwrath in-guild, but I don't want to work on that at the expense of better gear for everyone else. So... yeah. Conflicted. Of course, I'm still in it more for the guild than the gear or achievements, so wherever we go, I'm willing to be there.
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