Right! I have a blog! ;)
Hi folks.
It’s a busy time to be a guild master, especially one that’s heading up what is essentially a new guild. Lots of new personalities lead to a new guild atmosphere. Not everyone adores each other, but I like to think everyone respects one another. Still, being on top of things to help diffuse misunderstandings is something I’m having to do now and again. Everyone responds to things differently and some jokes do not go over well.
Plus, there’s Blessing of Frost (new episode, #9, is out — iTunes stuff still pending due to the move, but you can download it right from the website) to deal with and, well, that whole “raiding” thing.
We took 13 whacks at the Twilight Ascendant Council on Monday night. Monday isn’t a normal raid night for us, but Sunday was the Superbowl, so we went on Monday. Wasn’t an optimal group comp, but it was okay. We had 25 people! ;)
Of course, the disconnection monster ruined us. Our tank officer kept getting knocked offline, then half the Canadians (myself and my brother Fog included) got thrown off… We had several people with super-high latency and so we called it an hour early, rather than reclear trash for 40 minutes of potentially sub-par attempts at Council.
Honestly, it was demoralizing and probably not just for me. You could just tell people’s hearts weren’t in it and that they were frustrated.
So we called it and I told people to be ready for this week, to be ready to focus, to take on these new encounters, because we were going to spend a lot of time on them. Meaning Council and Cho’gall.
Our plan was to go into Blackwing Descent on Tuesday and go 4 of 6 or thereabouts and hope for 5/6 and then start fresh in Bastion on Thursday. By 11pm, we were 5/6 in BWD.
>.>
I think my precise words in officer chat were:
“Uhhhhh. So… now what? haha!”
We’d talked about extending our Bastion lockout so that we could spend even more time on Council and hopefully Cho’gall, but we elected not to do so and went in to go splat Halfus.
By 11:55pm, we were done with Halfus and done with our first-ever six-boss raid night.
We one-shotted Magmaw, had a quirk with Omnotron, then three-shotted Chimaeron (disconnects are BAD!), then one-shotted Atramedes for the very first time. We’d killed him in two attempts a couple of times, but it felt good to get Atramedes down that quickly. Then a quick one-shot on Maloriak and we were off to Bastion.
We one-shotted Halfus, too, despite a bad wipe on his trash.
If we can always bounce back from a sub-par raid night with a superb effort like we saw tonight, I will never be concerned about a sub-par raid night again.
And it WAS sub-par. Frustrating, some mistakes, some misunderstanding of various mechanics on everyone’s part… Hell, I even had a tank die on me. Totally my fault, too.
But we pulled it together tonight and blew through BWD. I even had the opportunity to sit myself out of Magmaw and Omnotron. To date, I’ve sat out of one, maybe two Baradin Holds, so I’m glad I got to sit out some actual fights. No one is exempt from being sat.
Hilariously, this means I missed one of my SHADOW PRIESTS getting mangled by Magmaw. I sat there, staring at my raid frames in disbelief, clearly seeing the mangle debuff on him. Go, go Dispersion. I have NO idea what the hell happened there, but it was a fairly clean kill anyways.
Also tonight, much mocking of me by the raid. They’re all fired and I imagine the Twilight Realm (where I tend to order my healers to go if they displease me in some way) is getting pretty darn crowded right about now. >.> It was pretty hilarious at points, though. Have you ever tried to do healing assignments while being mocked or teased AND laughing? No? Try it, sometime. ;)
In other raiding news, holy cow, did I get gear.
Over the last week or so:
Wyrmbreaker’s Amulet
Burden of Mortality
Relic of Norgannon
Darkmoon Card: Tsunami
Vibrant Alchemist Stone
Maldo’s Sword Cane
Flash Freeze Gauntlets
Pretty nuts. I’ve updated my chardev profile and the only thing that’s not right is that my JC trinket (Dream Owl) is now replaced by the Vibrant Alchemist Stone.
By the way, it’s pretty awesome. I took a mana potion tonight on Maloriak: 14487 mana back. With 351 intellect (301 + 40 int gem + 10 int socket bonus) and mad amounts of haste AND the 40% extra from mana or health potions… Very pretty.
So Tuesday was an amazing start to our raid week. Valiona & Theralion on Thursday, followed by Council work and hopefully Cho’gall.
Oh, and our tank lead uploaded a bunch of videos of Apotheosis vs. various fights. Sadly, his voice doesn’t come through on fraps for these, so just imagine a dwarven pally tank calling out things. ;) You do get to hear a bit of raid chatter, though, which I always think is fun.
Apotheosis vs. Maloriak (25)
Apotheosis vs. Atramedes (25)
Apotheosis vs. Halfus (25)
Apotheosis vs. Valiona & Theralion (25)
And here’s our channel link: http://www.youtube.com/user/apotheosisonet
More fights to come, more recruitment videos, more fun stuff.
On that note, definitely bedtime for moi.
I do hope to be able to post paladin-related stuff soon. I didn’t feel particularly nerfed on Tuesday, though, if that even means anything, but it’s probably because of all the gear I’ve gotten in the last week.
I’m jealous! In the 1.5 months I raided full time, I didn’t see a single piece of healing plate drop! I got a ring on my first raid a couple of days after Cata came out and a neckpiece a few days later and that’s it for raid gear upgrades!
Even with crappy gear, I didn’t notice the nerfs at all when running my heroic PuG, despite my tank’s efforts to drain me. And all the boosts to health seemed to make things easier (I don’t recall seeing the health changes in the notes, but I cold have missed it. People definitely had more health.) And to my greatest joy, I discovered that Aura Mastery does indeed still work Crusader Aura, at least outside of BGs.
I really admire the dedication you put into your guild. And from the sound of it, all those efforts are paying off!
Man, once I have much of this thing we call “free time”, I am SO kicking my arse in gear to get Lis geared up. Even if I’m mostly a benchwarmer. *fistpump*
Grats, to everybody. <3 My favourite raid team is kicking arse and taking names (and making videos of it)!
I’m with Ophelie: hideously jealous. I have had no drops at all from raids yet, other than the tier gloves off of Pit Lord Lootbag, which aren’t going to be replacing my Earthen Ring gloves any time soon… at least not until I get a second piece of tier.
The same night you were having the disconnection issues I was having some weird and serious lag which caused us to have a lot of problems getting Magmaw chained down. So you’re not alone with that.
As for being able to sit out a raid encounter, it’s a nice luxury having enough quality people to confidently do that… and frankly an impressive achievement for such a young guild.
@Ophelie: SHHHHHHH! Stop mentioning the Crusader Aura thing or Blizz is going to HotNerf us!
Woo! Grats. Keep on trucking!
I hear ya on the lag and the disconnects. Myself and our druid healer, and our resto shaman all had major latency issues last night.
All was fine at the start one shot Magmaw and Omotron. Clear trash on the way to Chim…and then boom…lets start screwing with the healers.
I have to admit even with connection issues we were able to get him down to 49% before my internet and the druid’s internet decided to go boom. ><;
Ophelie – How to get plate to drop ’till you DE it… Have a holy paladin as the RL and seed the instance. ;D
I didn’t notice a health buff, personally… I also didn’t notice AM working with Crusader Aura! I am totally not a very observant person, obviously!
I like to think the efforts are paying off. We’ve had some people drop for RL reasons, for the most part, so that’s unfortunate, but I hope to retain some of the new people we’ve picked up and to pick up some more. Recruiting never stops! :/
Apple – The videos are great, no? I only regret we don’t see more of Megs dying. ;D
Fannon – We got TWO Burden of Mortality drop off Chimaeron that night and I was like “Walks, you want that?” and he’s all “We have two…” and I was like “crap, I guess I should pick that up…” Not sure why plate isn’t dropping like candy for others! Granted, out of five drops, seeing duplicates isn’t all that uncommon.
Glad to know it wasn’t just us and some Skywall people having issues with lag and disconnects!
With the “farm” bosses, like Magmaw and Omnotron, there’s really no need for me to be there. We could probably five-heal it and we had 8 healers signed up, so I sat for the first two bosses and let the other officers deal with it, for the most part. It was nice to stand outside and swap myself in after the tiresome bosses. :)
slice – Thanks, Lee!! :) Sorry to hear you also succumbed to lag and DCs. Isn’t that the worst? :/
Great to hear about Chimaeron progress! Yes, Divine Guardian does work in P2, or at least it seems to. We pop everything at very specific points in time.
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?p=1644
That details our strat pretty well. :)