General WoW

There are a lot of interesting things I think about when I look back to the start of this expansion.

There are people that were playing then that are no longer playing that I definitely miss, and many of us in my guild will reminisce for hours about funny conversations we had with various people back in the day.  Most of the people I’m referring to left the game to either concentrate on school, work, and/or have a family, and though all of us knew we would miss them when they left, we all knew it was the best thing for them and we wished them well.  Some of those people had been playing with the guild for literally years, so it’s hard to see them “hang it up”.  Even though they stay in contact it’s different then logging into the game and vent with them on a near-nightly basis and just talking about the game, or their day, or something funny that happened.

There are also stories of people that still play, that I dare say none of us miss.  These are people that were gone from the guild nearly as quickly as they came, and for the most part have hopped to probably a half dozen other guilds since ours.  Most of those people were interested in joining our guild to try and “get” things out of us rather then all try and have fun as a group and work together for common goals.  Usually these people can’t see the big picture stuff, like being generous with guild members will come back to you ten-fold, or that passing on a contested piece of loot this time will be remembered by everyone else you always roll against.  Luckily we have very smart people in the guild and they can generally pick out people that are there just for themselves.  There are still stories about recruits that would AFK in battlegrounds night after night for honor, or people raiding with us that we suspected of two-boxing and them claiming they were playing with their significant other.

I guess when I really look back at it I think our guild really came into it’s own with this expansion compared to the last one.  We just started really raiding toward the latter half of Burning Crusade, and even then we were just getting started with Kara, then a second Kara group.  Only at the very end of last expansion did we really get into raiding 25 man content, and even when we started raiding things like Serpent Shrine Cavern, Hyjal and Tempest Keep we still often were running short people and had to take what we could get from elsewhere.  Sometimes this worked out great and we’d not only do well but meet new people, other times it would be disastrous.  We were also obviously very late starting, so while other guilds were in Black Temple and Sunwell, we were still trying to kill bosses in SSC.

This expansion we started fresh with everyone else.  While we are by no means a hard-core guild, we have been and do raid current content, and while we won’t be the first to clear everything or even run 25 man hard modes, we make good progress and have always been working on current raids.  When a new raid would be released we would not only have learned from the previous raid fights, but we would be geared enough to walk into it on the day it released.

Last expansion I was also doing quite a bit of everything as a co-leader/guild leader.  I was recruiting, filling raids, running raids, handling squabbles, you name it.  I had help for sections of it but there were quite a few times I was on my own.  That was something that burned me out badly and was something that is now definitely fixed.  Our guild now has officers that all handle different specific tasks, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way.  If one of us has something else going on someone else can help pick up their job without missing a beat, and things run much more smoothly then they ever did (I think anyway).

Another thing that has changed since the beginning of this expansion is recruiting.  Last expansion I remember it was like pulling teeth trying to find people to fill roles in raids, be it a healer (most of the time), a tank (occasionally), or a DPS (rarely).  Now-a-days I couldn’t tell you the last time we had to recruit.  I think we’ve turned away 3-4 people in the last couple of weeks interested in joining, not because we are snobs or they are not good people, but simply because we don’t have room in raids for them.  We aren’t amazingly great, I think we get interest because at this point we’ve been raiding a while and people see the name and know we’re a pretty stable guild.

All things considered, this expansion has been a great one for our guild, and we’ve definitely learned a lot about working together and had a ton of fun along the way.  I hope the the rest of this expansion and the next one bring more positive changes like that.

Let’s have a little chat about the new dungeon finder tool, shall we?  I love it and I hate it, like a lot of people.  I wanted to share an experience I had with it last night.

I apologize in advance if I come off sounding like an elitist asshole here…

Two guildmates and I decided to hit the random daily heroic last night.  We had a tank, a healer, and myself as DPS and we decided to PUG the last two spots.  We IMMEDIATELY got into Halls of Stone, and once we ported in we saw that trash had been cleared already.  The two pugs told us that they wiped on the first boss and their other 3 party members had left.  I didn’t think anything of it, sometimes shit happens.

Little did I know that it was the three people that decided to leave that were in the right.

The two pugged folks were a hunter and a mage.  The mage was doing roughly 2000 DPS, and was in almost all epic PVP gear.  I don’t have any complaints about that other than I think the mage could probably do better with what he/she was wearing, but it’s nothing I’d bitch about openly.  However, the mage managed to pull aggro on anything and everything that was in a quarter mile radius, and I think just about drove our poor healer insane.  (I confess I also was pulling some aggro, but out of the three of us from my guild I was the only one in there on their main and I can go a little overboard.)

The mage was nothing though compared to the hunter.  This hunter was (and I checked after about 10 minutes into this debacle of a heroic) in almost all “blue” quality gear, plus 4 or so epics, including a trinket.  I think he might have had a couple pieces of green gear, but overall not poorly geared for heroics in the slightest (I didn’t look at WHAT that gear was until later, but I digress).

This Beast Mastery hunter managed a whopping 497 DPS over the course of the heroic.  FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY SEVEN.  On top of that he managed to pull/aggro stuff the tank wasn’t currently attacking and die.  How you even manage to aggro and die to anything whilst doing 497 DPS is a complete mystery to me.  For reference, that’s less DPS then people were doing at level 70 last expansion.  I don’t play a hunter much, but I’m willing to bet the hunters in my guild have PETS that do more than that.

I’m not really sure how many times the mage and hunter died in that heroic, but the three of us on vent all agreed after their first couple of deaths that it was just going to be easier to let them die, since we were essentially 3-manning the dungeon already.  Our priest was running low on mana on TRASH pulls trying to heal them, and though it’s her alt she’s plenty geared for it, and quite a good healer.

We ended up just sort of not saying much to them and just trying to plow through the heroic as quickly as possible, and after we finished I couldn’t help myself and I posted the DPS numbers into party chat.  I know it’s probably a futile effort to try and help someone on another server who will probably call me a jerk for even trying, so I just said something along the lines of “How is it even possible to do 497 DPS?” and then left the group/dungeon.

I mentioned the hunter’s name (who I won’t mention here) in vent and a guild member looked him/her up on the armory.  Two tanking rings, spell power boots, etc.  I guess that’s how you do 497 DPS.  I’d looked at the COLOR of his gear, but not what it was…

I’ve heard from a few people that the dungeon finder tool takes a look at your gear score, and then tries to match up over-geared people with “inexperienced” (read: under-geared) people.  I’ve also heard that people will often throw on their PVP gear to “fool” the dungeon finder into thinking they have better gear than they really use for PVE.  I’m contemplating making a set of all greens to wear to fool the damn thing the OTHER way, so it will toss me in with some geared folks.  (Ok so I’m kidding there…but only HALF kidding…)

In closing, to be perfectly fair, I’ve had some GREAT groups using the dungeon finder tool as well.  I actually had what I’d call an “ok” group for Oculus, which would probably be a good group anywhere else.  I’ve also run across some great players in a few of those random dungeons.  As much bitching as I’ve done in this post, the tool is a great way to knock out a few dungeons fast, and much better than the old LFG system…but…the next 497 DPS hunter is out there…waiting…

Patch day is the very definition of the term “mixed blessing”.

The week AFTER the patch?  Fantastic.  The day of the patch not so much.  It’s like waiting to open Christmas presents, FINALLY getting to Christmas, and then getting beaten with a stick whenever you get near the presents.  Perhaps I exaggerate.

Personally it was quite an odd patch day.  I was able to log in shortly after I got home (west coast time), and after checking my “load out of date add-ons” box I logged right into Dalaran.  The only thing that didn’t seem to work was Bartender, and that was only because the menu section was missing.  I assumed it was due to the Dungeon Finder change, and a new button there or some such.  That was something I could work around with keyboard bindings, so I decided to wait to update it (I’m sure every add-on provider was getting slammed last night).

I decided to try the new “Looking For Dungeon” dealy right away, so my buddy Deluxa and I teamed up and got in the queue as two DPS.  I was curious how long it would take for us to find a tank and a healer, I figured not long with all of the people on last night.  Sure enough, we got a full team rolling in short order.  Getting into the dungeon though…a different story.

Pre-patch when our server was having problems with “additional instances cannot be launched”, messages, at least you could bang your head into the instance portal and see your screen.  In this new level of hell that was the dungeon finder you would stay at the loading screen, with no progress bar filling mind you, for what seemed like an eternity before getting kicked back out.  Only then would you see that minutes ago one or more of your groupmates decided they were going to go jump off a building or hang themselves rather than wait to get in an instance.  The best part of all of this is, as soon as the first attempt was made to enter the instance, it would trigger your 15 minute cooldown, your lockout for joining another group such as this one.

Eventually Deluxa and I were able to get into an instance, and I was pleased to see the other members of my party (minus the healer) were pretty well geared.  We were tossed into Utguarde Keep, and with this group I knew we were going to demolish the place.  We rolled through the trash to the first boss and made short work of him.  Unfortunately at that point, the instance made short work of our party and not only kicked us all out, but disbanded our party for us as well.  All of a sudden I’m back in Dalaran, out of the group, trying to decide if Deluxa convinced the rest of the party to use the new “kick” option to punt me out (Deluxa is quite the character, but in this case it wasn’t him).

At that point, Deluxa and I decided to try our hand at the three new dungeons, so we loaded up a guild group and set off.  Aside from the inability to get into the dungeons right away we actually had very little problems.  I heard from other guildmates that said they were lagging out in the new instances unable to do anything, and then their characters would remain trapped online and in said instance for up to 30 minutes, during which time they would hop to alts and send themselves angry whispers expressing their displeasure.

We slowly worked our way through the three dungeons, only encountering problems heading from one to the next, until…

We finished the last fight of the last of the three dungeons.  Slight spoiler:

The loot chest for the last fight is on an airship, which is “parked” on the edge of a cliff, with stairs leading up to the main deck of the ship.  Any time any of us would set foot on the steps we would get disconnected.  We were struggling to find a way to reach the chest when someone else mentioned that levitate was working for other people trying to get up the stairs, so we tried it, and voila!  We didn’t alll make it, but eventually we got one person up there to pop the chest and then we were at least able to roll on loot.  HOORAY!  Some leather dropped for me that was at least interesting enough to look closer at later, and being the only leather wearer in the party I rolled on it and won it.

We then messed around a little bit trying to race up the steps on mounts with passengers, but to no avail.  A few of us died falling through the stairs when we lagged out, so we decided to claim victory just in getting to open the chest and roll and decided to call it there.  Only later did I notice:  Though I won the boots, I never received them.  I opened a GM ticket, which I expect to hear back from sometime around the release of the next expansion.

At the end of my night a full group of guild members decided to give the random dungeon finder one more try, so we hopped in a 5 man group and queued up.  We wouldn’t get anything for having a pug person in the party, but we didn’t care.  We got Stratholme, and we attempted to use the “Port to dungeon” option but to no avail.  One thing we did discover however:  By actually physically running to the instance opening and slamming heads into it a few times, we were able to get in almost immediately.

We started our adventure into Stratholme, only to discover the NPC you need to talk to to trigger the starting events was….not there.  No way to complete the instance.  We hopped back out, waited for our debuff to drop (again) and tried again, this time getting Gundrak.  This we were able to get into by again physically running someone over to the instance, and this time we got in and were able to plow through it in short order.  Two more Badges of Frost later and I was off to bed.

All in all patch day could have been worse.  Not perfect, but still fun.

How was your patch day?