Wednesday, August 11, 2010

More on Guild Alliances

When last I left you, dear reader, I believe the folks at Soulbound had entered a guild alliance to attempt to complete the 25 man version of the Ice Crown Citadel. Things had gone very well in the combined group’s foray into the despised home of Arthas, the Lich King. Many bosses were downed (all the way through Professor Putricide in fact), loot had been given out, and people generally seemed happy to be moving forward. There was a feeling by me at least, that maybe this would work.

Fast forward, if you will to the next night, Wednesday. I was actually looking forward to going raiding again, which is not something that I have been able to say in a long time. I wanted to beat more bosses in ICC, and maybe get through Sindragosa finally. If people were on their game as they were the previous night, I fully believed and expected that it was going to happen that day.

I logged on at about the same time as I had the prior night, and was immediately picked up for the raid. All was going as was expected. There were a few less people from Soulbound on, but that wasn’t unexpected since several people said that they could not make it to the night’s raid for multiple different reasons.

Coming up on raid start time, I expected that we would start getting members of the other guild coming into the raid, and one or two had trickled in; just not as many as I expected. At some point during the waiting, we heard that we were waiting on a 10 man to finish their attempt at Arthas. So we waited, and waited, and waited. There were spatterings of discussion about the fact that the 10 man was trying a couple of more times because they were getting so close. On our side, we talked about breaking raid and doing dailies, heroics, etc. At about 35 minutes after raid start I was good and thoroughly annoyed. I told myself if in 10 minutes they were not ready to start pulling I was out of there. The 10 minutes went, and I told the RL at the time that I had waited as long as I was willing to, and was going to call it a night. I then proceeded to drop raid.

About 10 minutes later, they began to get mobilized and offered my spot back, but I had already decided to do something else. Turns out it was a good thing. The raid went well I guess, but there was loot drama for one of our more respected thieves. I am glad I was not there also because I guess there was some…disagreement on handling of different things including communication and the like.

They are trying it again this week. I have decided to bow out and let others who are more annoyance accepting take my spot. Personally I am of the opinion, I would rather fail miserably with people in my guild that I happen to care about than succeed with people in another guild. I guess I now have 2 choices, I can pug (which is at least me being completely mercenary about my gear gathering), or give up on my dreams of taking out Arthas. Who knows which way I’ll go.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

A Guild Alliance to Complete ICC.

So, I’ve been a member of Soulbound on Malygos for a while now. And if you are a reader of my blog, you probably have noticed that it hasn’t always been the best of trips for me. It started out rocky, and on occasion I have had disagreements with the way things are done. In general though, nothing has ever happened that made me so frustrated that I decided it was time to go. Still hasn’t really, though things seem to be taking a bit of a rough turn. I actually have started playing on a different server most of my time because of this, though I really don’t feel it’s my home. I know I’ll go back to Paci and Michelinea, just not necessarily today.


Now, for a while SB like just about every other guild out there that I have heard of or read about has had some trouble filling their 25 man ICC runs. I have to say I completely understand it. There are many days lately where I know its raiding night but I just don’t want to do it. Dying over and over to Sindragosa just is not fun to me anymore. At this point I feel like I’ve been there, done that, and don’t want to do it anymore. Most weeks, I will raid once or twice out of the three scheduled nights as long as I’m not working. Usually it is a matter of I log on at the appropriate time, get invited to the raid, and wait until 15 minutes after the start time before it is called so we can go do something else. Clearly, this is not what many of our harder core members want.

As an attempt to get things moving again, early last week a post went up on our boards that started a bit of a stir. Another guild posted asking if we were still raiding 25s and did we have trouble filling them. Someone answered yes to both questions, which then caused a post to go up on the member forums asking whether the guild officers were thinking about a guild alliance to get through to the end of content. The answer was yes it was being discussed, but currently was in the very earliest stages.

Tuesday rolls around and I log into guild about a half hour before the first pull time for raid and got invited into raid. As has become the pattern, we were about five or six people short of filling the raid. Suddenly around the first pull time, someone mentioned that we were looking at adding the other alliance people to fill the raid. Being the somewhat patient person that I am not, I decided to hang around and see what happened. So after about forty-five minutes of negotiations, several members of the other guild joined our raid, and we went off into ICC, with a fresh run. It went very well! We did significantly more in less time than we had a history of doing in the past when we filled the raid. In general, just about everyone was on their game and things were going well. In fact when we called it, several people stayed around to do the weekly. Something I had not seen done in a long time.

This assuaged some of the fears that I had about this idea of a guild alliance. The other time I had seen it happen, it completely ripped the guild apart. If only the story remains so good.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

And I thought Leveling was hard

Someone once told me that WoW is 2 games (at least in 1). The first game is the leveling from 1 to 80. This we all know is a mixture of quests, instances, grinding, what have you. I have done this successfully twice now. I did it first by leveling a character to 55, then took Michelinea to 80. Then went on and did other things with her in "Game 2".

After a while I got bored with that and seriously began working on my Alt Toon 1. Paci the stupendous (she's the Night Elf in the banner above). Over time I have slowly but surely gotten her to 80 through a series of fits and starts. Now she is 80 too, which led me into my second foray into Game 2.

Now, when Mich made 80, I didn't know what I was doing, so I really botched up and kicked around working on getting myself going Game 2. Game 2 is really the gearing up of your fresh level 80 out of the mass of random junk gear that you have acquired as you leveled, and begin getting yourself the EPIC gear that comes next making you one of the cool kids in whatever you decide you want to do now that you are 80. Me, I like doing PVE type stuff, so that is where I have focused my efforts both time, any PVP gear that I've picked up along the way has been pure coincidental.

Back when I was doing it with Mich, I had no idea what I was doing to start with, that coupled with the fact that it was much harder to do it back then it took me a very long time to get "epic" gear. I spent months and months attempting to get gear and floundering all over the place.

With the advent of the LFG and LFR tools in their current iteration it is significantly easier to get gear, particularly now where everyone and their sister is so full of gear that they just are willing to let a new 80 need on just about anything that they want. Add to that the fact that you can just queue heroics over and over for triumph badges, and you have a recipe to near immediate Tier 9 gear.

It has taken me to date less than 2 weeks of fooling around to have 3 of my 4 piece bonus in Tier 9. Add to that several purple drops randomly in Heroics and poof, I'm up over 3300 Gear Score. I know that 3300 seems low, I mean Mich is up over 5700 as of last check, but I think it proves that it can be done. New players coming up through the ranks, take heart, your gear will come to you, older players will help you, and keep your chin up when you get that random tool who feels that he should berate you for being new. Put him on /ignore and go on with your life, you too will soon be trying to kill the Lich King and joining the ranks of the uber leet.