Right! I have a blog! ;)<\/p>\n
Hi folks.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> go over well.<\/p>\n Plus, there’s Blessing of Frost<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n 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! ;)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n >.><\/p>\n I think my precise words in officer chat were:<\/p>\n “Uhhhhh. So… now what? haha!”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By 11:55pm, we were done with Halfus and done with our first-ever six-boss raid night.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n We one-shotted Halfus, too, despite a bad wipe on his trash.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. ;)<\/p>\n In other raiding news, holy cow, did I get gear.<\/p>\n Over the last week or so:<\/p>\n Wyrmbreaker’s Amulet Pretty nuts. I’ve updated my chardev profile<\/a> and the only thing that’s not right is that my JC trinket (Dream Owl) is now replaced by the Vibrant Alchemist Stone.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So Tuesday was an amazing start to our raid week. Valiona & Theralion on Thursday, followed by Council work and hopefully Cho’gall.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Apotheosis vs. Maloriak (25)<\/a>
\nBurden of Mortality
\nRelic of Norgannon
\nDarkmoon Card: Tsunami
\nVibrant Alchemist Stone
\nMaldo’s Sword Cane
\nFlash Freeze Gauntlets<\/p>\n
\nApotheosis vs. Atramedes (25)<\/a>
\nApotheosis vs. Halfus (25)<\/a>
\nApotheosis vs. Valiona & Theralion (25)<\/a><\/p>\n