Haha?

Okay, I clearly need to look at the logs in depth, but, uh, this amused the living crap out of me.

Basically, those graphs show me doing over 8k effective HPS, over 12k raw HPS over the course of a 1m 23s attempt on Queen Lana’thel. The first graph shows me, then the resto druid and a resto shammy. The table shows me, the druid, the shammy, the RET pally (JoL), the other resto druid, the SHADOW priest (VE) and the other holy paladin.

Sure, it doesn’t matter because we all died real fast. But damn me, how hilarious is that? :D

Edit:

Bwahaha, look at these numbers! I got seriously lucky with my timing. Look at the utter lack of overheal in this 8 second snippet. I was healing the bear tank with my beacon on the warrior tank.

[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1414
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1333)
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +12698
[23:40:55.832] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11768
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1235
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +450 (O: 786)
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11768
[23:40:57.455] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11551
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1213)
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11551
[23:40:58.687] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +*6481*
[23:40:59.389] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +6481
[23:40:59.612] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +5236
[23:41:00.325] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +*20051*
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:01.542] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 2 +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +2106
[23:41:01.729] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +16267 (O: 3784)
[23:41:02.353] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:02.541] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:02.993] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +13362
[23:41:03.257] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +459
[23:41:03.585] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567

Kurn's Q&A #3

Time for another browse through my site stats and the keywords that brought people here!

1) “does shadow ward stack with acclimation”

I actually had to look this up. Shadow Ward is a warlock spell in the Demonology tree. Acclimation is a death knight spell in the Frost tree. They are self-buffing spells only, so Shadow Ward does not stack with Acclimation as a warlock cannot get Acclimation and a death knight cannot get Shadow Ward.

If you mean the buff you get from the Blood Prince Council fight, Shadow Resonance, I do believe that Shadow Ward would stack with that. (And since it’s a buff from being the ranged/caster tank on that fight, it doesn’t matter if Acclimation stacks with it.)

2) “flask mastery”

There is no “flask mastery”. It’s Elixir Mastery in alchemy that will proc flasks. It’s been this way since The Burning Crusade and has continued into Wrath.

3) 70’s regular dungeon dk defence

Hi there, Mr. or Ms. Death Knight Tank. Thank you for doing research into defense rating! I presume that you were looking for the number your defense rating should be to render you crit-immune as you level.

540 is the number you’re looking for at 80 when fighting level 83+ (raid) bosses. 535 is the number you’re looking for at 80 when fighting 82 level (heroic) bosses.

Of course, the ratings change as you level and so level 80 numbers don’t help terribly much. What you’re looking for is when you hover over your defense rating is:

Decreases chance to be hit/critically hit by 5.6%

That’ll let you tank a boss or mobs 3 levels higher than you. Any higher than that, and you get into crushing blows, so don’t go tanking a 76 when you’re 72. You’re going to die quickly.

Remember to check your defense rating whenever you ding, because it will change due to the way the rating system works. You need less defense the lower level you are and more of it the higher level you are. That’s why 490 was the magic number for raid bosses at 70 and 540 is the magic number today.

Or something like that. Have I mentioned that I don’t do math very well?

4) “are priest still good healers? 3.3”

In a word, yes. That’s the short answer. The longer answer has to do with what you want to do with your priest. If you want to repeatedly drop 20k crit heals on your party members, then no, priests aren’t good for that. You want a pally in that case. If you want to roll Renew on the raid and pretend you’re a resto druid, then no, priests aren’t great for that, either.

Priests can have two main strengths, using Discipline and Holy specs. If you’re a disc priest, you are suddenly AMAZING at mitigating damage and do very solid single-target healing. If you’re a holy priest, you are pretty fantastic at helping to maintain the health of the raid, via Circle of Healing, Renew, Prayer of Mending and such. Both holy and disc priests come with valuable cooldowns, Pain Suppression for the disc priest and Guardian Spirit for the holy. Both specs of priests are an integral part of any raid composition. In fact, my ideal group makeup is:

2 holy paladins, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest, 1 resto shammy, 1 resto druid

Granted, I’m biased because I’m a paladin. ;) But priests are necessary pieces of the healing composition puzzle. A disc priest is invaluable on Saurfang and Putricide for damage reduction, a holy priest is almost mandatory on heroic Anub’arak for Body and Soul and both types of priests are always able to be used in any healing situation.

So yes. They are still good healers. In fact, my guild is currently looking for a disc priest with a holy offspec, so drop a line in the comments if you’re interested.

5) “can you get rhok’delar now that they changed onyxia?”

Well, according to WoWHead, the Mature Black Dragon Sinew will be a 100% drop off the black dragonkin mobs in the Burning Steppes IF you have the quest from the Ancient Petrified Leaf. So go to MC, get the leaf from Domo’s chest (50% drop rate) and then start the quest. Once you get the quest A Proper String, you should then be able to kill dragonkin to get the sinew.

Some notes about fighting the demons, since I did this back in the day:

– you MAY be grouped when you do the demons, but no one — not even your pet, and that includes the snake trap — can do any action during the demon fights that would cause them to get on the demon’s aggro list

– you MAY be buffed prior to your engaging the demon, so long as the buff is something that just sticks on you (no renew/rejuv/etc — but kings, mark, fort, they’re all fine)

Hands-down, this was the most fun I’ve ever, ever had on my hunter. I wish I could do something like this again. And yes, that even includes the 13975 deaths I had to Franklin the Friendly/Klinfran the Crazed. That bastard.

6) “wow needle encrusted scorpion automatically passed”

That would be because you (or whoever automatically passed) already have it. It’s a unique item, not unique-equipped. So check your bank or your bags, because you can’t get a second Needle-Encrusted Scorpion. Sadly. :)

7) “how do i get to dalaran”

Well, Dalaran is the major city in Northrend, so I get why you want to go there. :) If you’re low-level, the best way is just to get a mage to port you there. If you want to be able to fly out of there, however, you’ll want to make sure you have the flight point at Wyrmrest Temple, too. That’s a good hub and definitely links up to Dalaran. What I like to do is link the following (Alliance-only, sorry!) routes as I’m levelling (from West to East):

Valiance Keep (Borean Tundra), Unu’pe (Borean Tundra), Star’s Rest (Dragonblight), Wyrmrest Temple (Dragonblight), Wintergarde Keep (Dragonblight), Amberpine Lodge (Grizzly Hills), Westguard Keep (Howling Fjord), Valgarde (Howling Fjord). That allows me to fly from one start zone to the other, and will give me a connection to Dalaran as well.

As a mage, at level 71, you get a quest to go to Dalaran and you learn the Teleport: Dalaran spell. Everyone, I believe, gets a quest to go to Dalaran at level 74 (which is when a mage gets the spell for Portal: Dalaran).

As to where it actually is, it’s in Crystalsong Forest, north of Dragonblight. :)

8) “tanks who taunt on pull”

They’re dumb. No, really. They are. They go in and taunt, which has no real effect, and then their taunts are on cooldown when the over-eager DPS opens up. Splat goes the DPS and the tank tries to get aggro back as best they can. Unless the taunt has a damage component to it (like a paladin’s Hand of Reckoning), this is a super dumb move. And even then, it’s not like a paladin doesn’t have better ranged pulling options. Seriously.

I refer you to Kurn’s Guide on How to Behave as a Tank in Dungeons, point #4.

9) wow gemmin t9 paladin

Well, T9 is pretty good gear. I mean, coming from the perspective that this used to be available solely through badges earned in TOC/TOGC and off Koralon, it’s pretty good. Now you can get all your emblems from heroics and buy ilvl 232 without ever setting foot in TOC.

That said, I don’t know what spec you are, random T9 paladin, looking for gemming advice.

However…

Holy: Probably want to gem all 20 intellect gems, called Brilliant King’s Amber, (unless you’re a FoL spammer stacking spellpower, in which case, I doubt you would google for gem advice) with 1 orange gem (Luminous Ametrine) and 1 green gem (Dazzling Eye of Zul) to satisfy your meta requirements. Or, get a Nightmare Tear for the meta requirement and gem intellect everywhere else.

Prot: Make sure you’re at 540 defense, that you have met your meta requirement and then gem 30 stamina with Solid Majestic Zircons.

Ret: Make sure you’re not ignoring your hit and expertise caps, meet your meta requirement, then go nuts with the 20 strength gems called Bold Cardinal Ruby.

10) wow icc 10m composition

Basically, you want 2 tanks, 5 DPS and 3 healers. You ideally want one of the healers to be a direct healer (pally/disc priest) and one of them to be a raid healer (holy priest, resto druid, resto shammy). You want the third healer, not the single direct or a single raid healer, to have a DPS offspec.

You do the first four bosses with 2 healers, then switch to 3 healers for Rotface, have 2 for Festergut and then 2-3 for Professor Putricide. For the Crimson Halls, you’ll DEFINITELY want 3 healers for the Blood Prince Council and probably 3 for Queen Lana’thel. (Haven’t done her yet.)

Apart from that, things you’ll want to include:

– Blessing of Kings (1 pally or Drums of Forgotten Kings)

– Gift of the Wild (1 druid or Drums of the Wild)

– Fortitude (1 priest or Runescroll of Fortitude)

– Replenishment. I don’t care if it’s even a frost mage, Replenishment is soooo good.

– At least 1 person to cleanse curses for Deathwhisper (moonkin/resto druid, resto shammy, mage)

– At least 1-2 ranged DPS for Saurfang kiting of the adds

– At least 1 ranged DPS who can tank on Princes

That’s the bare basics. What is also nice, but still basic:

– Heroism/Bloodlust

– Blessing of Might/Battle Shout

– Blessing of Wisdom/Mana Spring Totem

– Hand of Sacrifice/Pain Suppression/Guardian Spirit

– Strength of Earth Totem/Horn of Winter

– Flametongue Totem/Totem of Wrath/Demonic Pact

– Swift Retribution Aura/Improved Moonkin Aura

– Rampage/Leader of the Pack

That’s just my two cents, really. I don’t even go into Trueshot Aura/Abominable Might and Windfury and all that jazz. The possible combinations are really hard to be “bad” as long as most of the basics are taken care of.

On a related note, I’m getting a LOT of search terms regarding strats, so I’ll be posting basic strats for the Lower Spire and the Plagueworks in the coming days, which should be workable for both 10 and 25-man groups.

Whew.

All my 80s have done the weekly raid quest, which was for XT in Ulduar this week. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get a group, particularly on my mage, because I had no achievements for her in Ulduar. She didn’t even have the flight point. ><

But I got the pally and hunter done early this week (on Tuesday?) and then got the mage and shaman tonight.

I was on the mage and in a siege engine as the passenger (my preferred vehicle spot in the awful fail that is Flame Leviathan) and my driver took a detour to Hodir’s tower and basically wailed on it until it died.

The raid leader was saying stuff like “who started the event? Do we need to down towers?”

No response from anyone. But I had a bad feeling about it. Brann had kept pointing out each tower and its abilities as we passed them by. Was this normal or was this hard mode?

Well, we engage FL and, wouldn’t you know it, Orbital Countermeasures are online.

Some jackass, most likely the idiot huntard I was in the siege engine with, had started the event on hard mode by talking to the mage instead of Brann.

“lol you guys didnt destroy the towers?” my huntard asks.

“If some idiot hadn’t started hard mode, we wouldn’t have needed to,” the raid leader responded. Or something along those lines.

So we wipe, obviously, then go back and destroy the three remaining towers, then kill FL and then XT. I was just glad to have gotten in on my mage. And I didn’t suck, either!

The grind for Emblems of Frost continues! I’ve missed one random daily on the mage, 3 dailies on the paladin and one week of 10-man ICC on the paladin. Eh. That’s a lot of Emblems lost when I think about it like that. But I honestly don’t know how much longer I can keep doing 4 randoms a day and ICC both 25 and 10 every week on my paladin. Blah. At least I have my 2-piece set bonus on the pally and she’s wearing her new boots that I was able to craft for her on Kurn, without spending any of her own emblems.

Confession Time

I have a confession to make.

The guild my paladin is in requires BigWigs as a boss mod. I mean, they require Omen, oRA and BigWigs, and Grid/Clique if you’re a healer. That’s it. Not terribly stringent requirements, since I already had Omen, oRA and Grid/Clique.

I had never downloaded BigWigs, continuing to rely on my old favourite, Deadly Boss Mods. I resisted BW for a very long time because… well, they do the same damn thing. I still prefer DBM, to be honest, but I have to say that BigWigs definitely has useful tools to ensure you see that you’re standing in fire, poison, etc, that you’re standing too close to others on a fight where range matters…

But I downloaded BigWigs because, at some point last week, half the guild was like “crap, my BW is out of date”. And I thought, well, I should probably install it and run it simultaneously with DBM so I can get used to the BW sounds/warnings while not screwing up because I know how to react to my DBM warnings.

So, there we were, about to pull Saurfang on Wednesday, when I heard this noise and wondered what on EARTH this infernal pinging was. It had to be BigWigs, I reasoned, because it certainly wasn’t part of the fight. It sounded like I was on a submarine and we had sonar going and we were tracking other ships or torpedoes or something.

And then I saw it. A little square box had cropped up and had as its contents the list of people in my raid that I was 9 yards or less away from.

I stepped back two paces.

Silence. And a little smiley face in the range box.

Okay, I admitted to myself, an audio tool for range can really come in handy in a number of places.

Some of the warnings are a little too harsh — the screen shaking, the audio AND flashing colours, combined with raid warnings and such can make it a little confusing. But all of that is customizable.

I love my DBM. I really do. I think it’s a fine piece of craftsmanship. But I’m going to be running  both from now on, because BW just has that something extra. Plus, it was invaluable to me and my guild back in Hyjal because it would announce the types of mobs in the upcoming waves, and good ol’ Football (melee DPS officer) would call out assignments on the fly. “Shack 2, spell reflect casters, pally tank pick ’em up, warriors pull one each off him for kill targets.”

Apart from anything else, BW saved my ass twice on Thursday alone. Once, I was the person Rotface spewed his slime at — and it told me when I was targetted and not when he was done casting. And the second time was because I was TOTALLY healing my ass off and I almost got blown up by a slime. I would have been killed if I hadn’t run away, like a little girl, when my screen turned blue and shook violently, thanks to BW.

Having said that, I genuinely hope that the majority of the players in the raids DO NOT have BW installed. Why? Because they miss even the obvious things like range issues. If they actually did have BW installed, would they not NOTICE the big slime is going to explode? Would they not NOTICE that their computer is beeping at them because they’re in range of 8 other people? If they do have it installed and are still missing most of these warnings… I just don’t even have words.

By the way, you should definitely download DeadlyBossMods or BigWigs if you don’t run a boss mod addon.

Briefly, in other news, I’ve managed to outheal the other holy pally. Finally. He has this stupid tendency to judge light, CONSTANTLY. I mean, all the time. Even with ret pallies in the raid. But tonight, he didn’t judge light (no idea why) AND I got the following Rotface assignment:

– Beacon the MT, heal infected players

I even outhealed my RL friend, the resto druid/healing lead. The only person I didn’t outheal was the disc priest, and half of his effective “healing” was casting PW:Shield on people. I don’t normally get caught up in the numbers, but DAMN, did it feel good to finally not have all my heals totally sniped! I usually just focus on keeping my target up, which is usually the MT or OT, and keeping my beacon up on the other of them, but I’ve noticed that the other holy pally will tend to beacon his target and raid heal, unless he’s specifically told to place his beacon on someone else. (And then he’ll usually judge light.)

So now I know that I don’t totally suck and confirms my suspicions that the only reason I’m “so low” on the meters (which suck anyways) is because of assignment. My RL friend knows I won’t deviate from my assignment except for quick spot heals, so she gives me the job of primarily keeping the tanks up by virtue of direct heals and beacon.  And I do enjoy it, except that all the healers are also tossing heals on the tanks — the other holy pally (via beacon if not direct heals), my RL friend rolling hots, the priests dropping POM, Renew, using Penance and shields, the shammies with ES and Riptide and chaining off the tanks and melee… So, it’s very rare that I have high effective healing or show up huge on the numbers. Which is fine. It’s just nice to see for myself that a small change in assignments can bring out those numbers and I AM capable of doing them, when asked to do so.

Rotface and Cleansing Totem

I haven’t really spoken about strats for ICC25 as of yet, mostly because I’m not a raid leader or even a healing lead at this point in time, which suits me just fine.

But I found this in my search stats, and thought I should address this immediately:

“rotface cleansing totem”

No! Don’t do it! I know I am a HUGE proponent of Cleansing Totem. I have said, repeatedly, that shammies should drop it all the time because it’s the best totem ever.

But dropping it on Rotface is BAD. As soon as the person with mutated infection gets cleansed, they drop an ooze. Dropping an ooze in the group is similarly BAD.

What we do, and your mileage may vary, is have everyone stack up on Rotface and beat on him at close range, sidestepping Slime Spray and running out when the big oozes explode.

If someone gets the mutated injection, we have them run to the OT who is on the outer edges of the room, dodging slime pools and trying not to run headfirst into the slime that fills up quadrants of the room.

We do not currently cleanse any of the people with mutated infection. This is similar to most people’s strategies on Grobbulus in Naxxramas. Just let it fall off naturally. The reasoning is that it appears that cleansing someone will reset his timer on casting it and will eventually lead to more casts of mutated infection, leading to more slimes, leading to more explosions, leading to less DPS just by virtue of people running away, not even taking into consideration the number of people who may die due to more infections, slimes and explosions.

So, long story short: NO CLEANSING TOTEM ON ROTFACE. Your raid will thank you for not cleansing, I promise. And if they don’t, point them here. :P

RankWatching a PuG VOA 25 raid

Oh, the stupid. It hurts.

First up, a shadow priest. CLEARLY the shadow priest is usually holy or disc. Why do I say that?

At least, I HOPE he or she was usually holy or disc.

Then, a shammy:

And yet, they did great damage. There are three separate Lightning Bolts for them in my parse. I’m very confused.

Meanwhile, Huntard alert! Huntard alert!

REALLY? Arcane Shot at ALL and rank one at that? Y’know how much that hit for, according to my worldoflogs parse? 41. 41 damage. And he’s survival. Arcane Shot shares a cooldown with Explosive Shot. Why on EARTH would you EVER use Arcane?!

Ahem.

Back to the priest that I REALLY HOPE is holy or disc:

Rank 1s. $10 says they never trained up for their shadow spec. I actually know this person, having done a run at some point with one of their alts. I know that this is a long-time 80. That this is only being caught NOW terrifies me.

And back to the shammy.

… wha? For real? That’s worse than my shammy using Rank 4 for 2+ months. :P

No joke, my worldoflogs parse says this huntard used Ranks 1-4 of Aspect of the Hawk and then settled on Aspect of the Dragonhawk. Rank 2. Why on EARTH would anyone do that? The icon isn’t even the same!

Anyways, so I went on my mage and I kind of sucked, but I beat the other mage. The other mage, however, won T9 ilvl 245 pants from Koralon. :P And I DEFINITELY beat the “shadow” priest.

My mage: 674,133 damage, 5130.7 dps #12

Other mage: 632,687, 4923.1 dps #14

“Shadow” priest: 254,378, 2021.2 dps #18

I feel naked.

Since I have felt, how to put it… silly hauling out my Water Elemental (his name is Clyde) in raid situations (VOA), I decided to get dual spec on my mage. Primary spec is frost and is more of a heroic spec so that if I get a fail tank who can’t hold aggro, at least I have my Ice Barrier and Cold Snap.

My secondary spec is arcane and I’m trying to get the hang of it before I go embarass myself in a raid, so I just did a boss and a half (we wiped on Hadronox when the fail tank pulled everything at once) of Azjol-Nerub before the healer (and the rest of the group) bailed. I cannot express how naked I felt without my Ice Barrier and how lonely I was without Clyde. :(

Still in the LFG tool though, to get my two Emblems of Frost and to continue acclimating to arcane. I have NEVER been arcane before. I went fire for like, two and a half levels in my early-to-mid-60s and hated it. Long cast times, no real defense and no Ice Barrier!

I may have a love affair with Ice Barrier. But Mana Shield just isn’t the same. :(

Having said all that, Kurn and Madrana both did XT today for the weekly raid. Hilariously, Kurn had no issues getting in. At some point, I’d done an Ulduar 10 pug and we’d done Must Deconstruct Faster (the speed kill) so all I did was “Hunter, 5k+ DPS, 5k GS [Must Deconstruct Faster (10 player)]” and got an invite. Heh.

The shammy and the mage, especially the mage, will definitely be more challenging when it comes to getting spots in the weekly raid, that’s for sure.

More 10-man bitching.

madboat10

So why am I bitching when I got an achievement? Basically, because I don’t particularly care too much for achievements and mostly because I then got swapped out on Saurfang (for a DPS, no less) and lost out on 2 emblems and 275 rep, since I’m human. I think, anyways. Don’t you get 250 rep (regularly) for a boss kill?

Anyways, this has me out of sorts. I don’t *want* to do 10-mans with the guild as it stands. I could probably pug it or go with the group I did it with the first week it was released. And then, I’d get all 8 of my badges and all my rep, assuming a decent group.

Honestly, the rep doesn’t bug me as much as the badges do. Being forced to run 10s to get badges to get my tier faster really pisses me off. But until I have… oh, let’s see now… a minimum of 310 badges to get the cheapest combination of 4 pieces of T10… then I’m not going to quit bitching about losing out on badges.

Assuming I get in for all of ICC25 and do my random heroic daily each day and do the random weekly raid (8 + 12 = 20), my total at the end of the week will be 98.

At a rate of 35 badges for the next 2 weeks or so, I’ll have 70 (2 weeks) + 98 (estimated total by next Tuesday) = 168 badges. Which is enough for 2 pieces of T10 and leaves me with 48 left.

Assuming that the next wing opens up after that two-week period, it will have three bosses, Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide. That’s up to six more emblems on 25 and up to six more on 10, meaning up to 12 more emblems a week.

Presume it now takes 3 weeks to get into the next wing, not four.

35 + 12 = 47

47 x 3 = 141 more emblems over 3 weeks, assuming you get every badge available to you, even though there are limited attempts on Putricide.

141 + 168 = 309 by the time raids reset on February 2nd and my guess as to when we’ll be able to get into the third wing.

Are you freaking kidding me?

It’s possible that I’m going to have to keep up with this nose to the grindstone thing until FEBRUARY?! And even THEN, I won’t have enough for 4 pieces of tier?!

This is the third reset right now. I’ve missed two days of daily randoms on Madrana and have missed out on one boss fight (2 emblems). I’m six emblems down and two of them aren’t my fault. I cannot continue to lose out on emblems like this or it’s going to take another 2 weeks of dailies to catch up.

This is ridiculous. I need to talk to my RL friend about stuff and how if the guild isn’t going to assure its members that it takes into raid of full emblems, I’ll just pug — to better the guild. How dumb is that? I’m working MY ass off to be able to get “Your Holy Shock spell causes the next Holy Light you cast within 10 sec to have 0.3 sec reduced cast time.” as my 4pc set bonus. Who do you really think is going to benefit from that? That’s right. THE TANKS WHOSE ASSES I AM KEEPING ALIVE. And they can’t even assure me that I’ll get all my badges in a week?

I spend a lot of time thinking about guilds and communities and some of the failures I’ve seen. I can point to where and why each guild I’ve been in has done poorly or broken up. I know exactly where the problems were.

In this guild, the problems lie in communication. Plain and simple. They need a communications officer to express to the guild what the officers are thinking and planning. If I can be blamed for anything in the past, *lack* of communication was never one of my faults, so this drives me absolutely bonkers.

10-mans. I knew they were a bad idea from the start, when I had to split up my guild into two Kara groups based on availability, social cohesion, group makeup, the ability to summon Nightbane and, oh yeah, skill.

10-mans = Failure

I really do recognize that Blizzard wants to make WoW raids more accessible. That’s why we’ve seen raids go from 40-man to 25-man and 20-man to 10-man.

But I still think that 10-mans are the biggest headache to manage for guild leaders. When I was a GM, I was like, “You know what? Fuck 10-mans. Run them, don’t run them, I don’t care.”

They’re filled with drama. You organize them in-guild, officially, and people invariably end up getting saved to the wrong run because some people didn’t show. (See: Karazhan.) You let people run them freely and people invariably get hurt feelings because they don’t get to go “with the cool kids”. (See: Zul’Aman.) You encourage them to run on their own with pugs and people invariably don’t go because they don’t feel like pugging raid content and wiping.

I honestly believe that the introduction of 10-man raid content, starting with Karazhan, but becoming more pronounced with Zul’Aman and developing into the headache we now have with Wrath content, has thrown a wrench into the works of any decent raiding guild.

My personal stance on 10s is “fuck that shit”. I view 10s to be inferior in terms of time + energy = reward than 25-mans. Obviously, I’m right in the sense that right now, ilvl 251 stuff drops out of ICC10 and ilvl 264 stuff drops out of ICC25. Stuff that I have that isn’t tier is basically 258 at this point. Almost everything I have is 245 or 258. ICC10 is a marginal upgrade for me from TOC 25 and is probably a downgrade if the piece is from TOGC 25.

But the problem right now is that you have to do 10s for two reasons. One is rep and the other is Emblems of Frost.

Blizzard has come up with this insane scheme to force you to get 400+ Emblems of Frost in order to get your tier gear. You MUST buy the Emblem of Frost version of your gear (ilvl 251) in order to use the tokens that drop in ICC25, to upgrade your tier to ilvl 264.

Thus, because I do want to get the exalted Ashen Verdict ring and because I do want to wear my tier gear, I need to do the following every week:

– ICC10 (not organized formally by my guild)

– ICC25 (regular raid)

– Random Heroic Daily x7

– Random Weekly Raid x1

That gives me 35 Emblems of Frost a week. I currently have 72 and I should have 76 (I missed 2 days of dailies).

This week, my guild is attempting to set up 10s on the forums. So far as I can see, utter failure. I signed up before the other regular holy paladin did and I am, thus far, not on the invite list. Healer 1: resto druid, Healer 2: shadow priest, Healer 3: other holy pally.

WTF is that all about? If you’re going to post and ask for people for your run, you should take those who post first. If you want to set up a super-secret, ultra-uber group, then use the guild calendar or something else so that you can be assured of the people you need.

I don’t care about going with the cool kids or not and I really hate 10-man content with a fiery passion. So I’ll make my own arrangements or whatever and if I miss out on 8 badges and a chunk of rep this week, so be it. But this is indicative of a serious problem in WoW, I think. Any time you split up a raid group that is generally larger (25 in this case) and force them to do the same content on a slightly less difficult scale, you’re going to end up with people who either miss out due to scheduling issues, have hurt feelings because they’re not as good as those organizing the run or, like me, figure that it’s just not worth the headaches to get 8 emblems a week.

This is the first time I’ve aggressively pursued 10-man content because I recognize I need the badges and rep. And into the third reset of ICC, I’m already disillusioned and am counting down the days ’till I can reform my old guild. :P

Note: Should this nonsense continue into Cataclysm, where we need badges for tier, etc, I am definitely organizing groups for the guild as a whole.

Short form of above: Fuck 10-mans.