Yay ding 80! The last 50% of XP went so quickly in Storm Peaks as the stories were so good, I am seriously rolling a dwarf come Cata as the Bronzebeards are inspiring. So that’s my second level 80 and I still can’t raid so what to do next? I have been buying up mats to switch my Holy Pally jewelcrafting so that’s one aim other than that I guess it’s getting my DK to level 65 so that she can max out her professions.
Go on questing (some nice items from quests, some nice items from faction rep), chain normal randoms, later chain heroics.
Gratz and welcome to the perfectly-sized side 
One of the messages you can get from Brann is “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” Ehm… riiiiight, so, don’t jump headfirst into a volcano unless I’m wearing my engineering goggles, you mean?
Ty and thanks for the grats which is in fact my first as no other guildies were on last night when I finally hit 80.
My lock is a gnome so I made sure to zoom right in for the dialogue scenes so I was looking up to the brothers for the conversations. Ever noticed how sometimes the npcs are facing the wrong way during these scenes? Makes it feel very odd. Brann is my new hero.
Last night I gave up trying to get into Cairne and I only had about an hour to play so I logged into my human warlock on Lightbringer (I think). I don’t even remember why I created him or when, but he was level 3 and I leveled him up to 8 or 9 - it goes slower without heirlooms, and when you don’t know your way around Stormwind. Now I probably won’t touch him for another year or so until Cairne is unavailable again.
It’s interesting how easy the newbie quests have become, now that all the level 1-5 mobs are yellow.
Another night, and more content (new to me) downed. I now have 11/12 ICC10 HMs to go with my 25s. I’m actually more proud of these kills, because on both of the new ones (Sindri and PP) I was doing something new–tanking HM Sindri, and operating the abom suit for PP (which I’d only done once before, on regular, when we were going for the achievement and didn’t slow anything)–and because some of the other raiders were also new to the fights. (As evidenced by the fact that it took us about a half-dozen attempts to get Sindri down.)
The bonus is that I’m now only two achievements away from my 10-man ICC drake: All You Can Eat on Sindri and the LK one with stacking the disease (Been Waiting a Long Time for This or something like that). However, as this 10-man was formed with the intention of pushing for Bane (H-LK10 kill) to get more of us used to the fight for 25, it’ll probably be at least a couple weeks before I’m free to work on those.
It never ceases to amaze me, the difference in raiding experiences between groups with and without experience. I’ve had PUGs struggle on early bosses in regular mode; with a group of geared and skilled guildmates, we burned through most of the instance like butter.
Excellent username/post combo.
Congrats! Is that your tanking four-piece? The bubble is a lifesaver. Or is your DPS four-piece for extra attack proccing goodness? And <3 to you for CCing stray adds.
For any remotely serious guild, that’s pretty much to be expected. (Or at least that you’re in some way available to hop in if you’re needed–usually not literally sitting with your thumb up your ass at the entrance portal.)
Congrats!
I can see being ready to join a raid at a moment’s notice, but having to physically wait outside the instance sounds pretty unreasonable. Don’t most raids have a warlock to summon anyway? A bench player should be able to quest or BG or whatever while they wait for The Call That May Not Come.
Good stuff. Sounds a lot like my raid last night (ICC10 HMs). Sadly, we didn’t have some regulars so we couldn’t push the progression boss (Sindra HM), but we did clear the first 7 on heroic with two folks that hadn’t been there before. Hopefully Sindra on Monday, with drakes next week (or maybe the week after).
Still haven’t done the Abom in HM yet - making sure you have enough energy to slow both slimes at the transition seems a bit tricky. I’m pretty solid with it on normal though. Not nearly as good at DPS’ing in it as the guy that did it last night (who’s just basically good at everything… asshole… ;)) He was second on the DPS meters the entire fight (until jumping out of the suit to tank, of course). Gotta pick his brain a bit…
Oh, and Saurfang, you can burn in hell. How can a boss with three drops that are upgrades (legs, bracers, and weapon), each with something like a 20% drop rate, go a month without dropping any of them… Now I’m gonna just craft the damn tanking pants only to have his drop the next week…
Did get my final mark for 4p 264 tank gear. So at least I have that going for me. 
My experience is in line with SFG’s. When you only have a few hours (6 total for my 25-man) to get stuff done, every few minutes is important. We let folks do stuff on alts, but the raid toon better be right at the instance and you better drop whatever you’re doing the second the call goes out in vent that we need you. If not, well, you probably won’t even be backup for long.
Same goes with not being on time - fastest way to get removed from a raid group is being late or absent without notice. It seems really harsh to casual raiders, but it’s a requirement for anything more serious than that (especially larger raid groups).
You do get EP for waiting, so it’s not like you get nothing out of the deal.
Guess I’m not suited for one of those guilds, then. If I don’t get a raid slot, I’m doing something else. I may or may not be available later if a replacement is needed, and I may or may not be willing to burn a lockout to do it.
For that matter, pretty much any guild that expects me to fill out some form longer and more detailed than a job application is gonna get scratched from my list.
I like doing a few raids now and then, but it’s not the only thing I’m interested in doing. Kinda like being non-guilded at the moment. No obligations, no drama, etc.
Tanking 4 piece, all 264. Now if I could just get a neckpiece to drop so I can replace this badge one I’d be happy.
I’m so over the Lich King fight. Hoping they do down him next week while I’m on vacation so I won’t have to keep going through Phase 2 over and over and over…
You need to find a guild like mine–we have a dedicated raiding core, but tons and tons of “social members” who range in gear and skill level all the way from “just dinged 80 and have zero interest in raiding” to “used to be a main raider but dropped out due to RL commitments.” Socials in our guild don’t have any requirements or time commitments, but they’re welcome to join non-progression raids (of which we have several) whenever. We’ve even been taking some of the better-geared socials with us to get them Lich King 25 kills lately, since our raids have been a bit short due to summer/various RL stuff/etc.
Wouldn’t logging out of an alt (which may require a 20-second wait or at least a hearth), then logging back in on the raid toon, then making my way through the completed part of the instance, take longer than a lock tossing up a closet to summon me from wherever?
Yeah, there were some discussion of those difficulties last night… not sure what’s holding y’all back. I wish someone kept logs for your attempts to look over - maybe something obvious would jump out.
There’s really no reason to be struggling for so long on it - especially with the quality of player/gear you have in that raid group. Sounded like it was a different thing every time (with Defile being the main culprit of course… and maybe losing folks to Raging Spirits from time to time?).
Possibly, yes (assuming a lock was available - generally a safe assumption). Although often we’d be clearing trash (or running back from a wipe) while you come in, so summoning wouldn’t be possible.
Many times though, folks pull the “just let me turn in this quest” or “we’ve almost won this BG” line when on a main toon (more than if they were farming on an alt, for example).
And, to be honest, I haven’t really been keeping track of what the backups are up to - maybe they are questing, etc, and are just fast about dropping what they’re doing and getting in. Basically as long as you’re ready to go quickly when needed it’s normally not an issue.
6+ attempts on HM Sindragosa made me want to tear my hair out, TBH. I know there was about a third of the raid that wasn’t completely familiar with the fight, but I hate seeing those attempts burn on a farm boss. I’m sorry if my frustration showed through while raid leading, but there were quite a few more fails than I wanted to have last night. You will get your Frost Wyrm, but it won’t be until after Bane. Hope you’re fine with that.
Yeah, we definitely are focused on guild community and try to foster that amongst all the people we want to keep around. We, unfortunately, have a guildomatic web-site, but that was a choice made before I had any say about it. I think the web-site could be better, but it’s not terrible, as far as our needs go. I do think we could use a section for other games and encouraging more of the outside WoW experience.
Yeah, as the recruitment officer I definitely understand that we’re going to lose people and I keep recruitment open at all times. It’s just that I haven’t been in a position to handle it the way I’d like for very long, so right now I’m trying to play catch-up in the worst possible atmosphere with the end of the expansion and during summer. I know things will work out eventually, it’s just something I’m focused on right now, and it sucks to deal with.
Thanks, I’ll look into the WoWProgress and GuildOx adverts. We have cursory ones up on the other websites, but I know those are close to worthless.
Yeah, poaching a crew of players is kind of what I’m looking at right now. Having played since vanilla, where all the raiding recruitment was on server, I know how necessary it can be at times, and right now is one of those times. We need probably 5 more solid players and we can get our LK kill, but those 5 players need to be of certain classes and need to playing at a really high level, so it’s harder to find them. Also, it’s hard doing that across server, and on-server there is quite a lot of competition for PvE progression guilds. Hopefully we can find a crew like this sometime soon, because I really think we’re close to getting the fight down if we had those players join.
Yeah, we’re not interested in a merger at all right now. I was an unfortunate part of a merger in vanilla and I have a severe distaste for them now. If anything, the closest we’d come is some kind of poaching, just on a larger scale. There’s recently been some talks around this kind of deal, but it has fizzled out for now. So it goes.
Thank you for that. Those statistics are interesting; I may have to compile some for my own guild. You basically confirmed a lot of things I already knew, but hadn’t pursued completely yet, so thank you for that. If I have any questions, I’m glad I know I can pick your brain. Thanks again.
You can get frost wyrms from PvE now?
Yes, the meta-achievements for 10- and 25-man ICC (which require all Hard Mode kills but LK and a bunch of other achievements) reward Frost Wyrms.
Yeah, that would be sweet. Don’t guess y’all are on Elune?
Kind of lame they’d just give up such an exclusive PvP award like that.
I’m sure they will put in another PvP exclusive reward come Cataclysm.
Sorry, nope, I’m on Proudmoore.
If I had thought about it I could have asked J to log the attempts. I’ll talk to her about logging next weeks attempts even though I won’t be there, maybe that’ll help.
To be fair Wednesday was the first time we had worked on LK in about a week or so. The week before there was some huge argument between some raid memebers that ended up with the raid cancelled.
We had two good attempts on the night, our first was 51% and a few attempts later we got him to 49%. A few things that wiped us, as I remember were people running the wrong way with defile, effectively splitting the raid and making it nearly impossible for the healers to reach the tanks or people with infest. I can’t complain about that because I screwed up when I got defile and ran the wrong way. People standing too far away when infest hits, meaning I have to single heal 3 different people, we only lost a person once to that, but it’s really aggrivating when defiles come right after infest. I’m not a priest and we don’t have one. Also people standing too close to the edge when Valks come, or the ranged standing on the wrong side when the Valks come making the Valks fly in the opposite direction.
Our MT was also tanking the LK in a different spot this time, a bit farther away from the offtank which meant our two melee had further to run to drop off the plague. When we mentioned this to him he was like “Boo hoo so the the melee have to run a bit farther.”. After we explained that this was a bad idea because the melee had died because they weren’t close enough to be cleansed, he moved him slightly closer.
The transition was pretty sloppy too. Past transitions have left us with one Horror nearly dead, or no horrors at all. We were having two horrors going into transition along with a handful of ghouls. Twice the ghouls took out two of our DPS. DPS were also pulling the LK and Horrors off of the tanks.
Never made it to phase 3, but I had to remind our RL to go over phase 3 strat just in case we made it.
As for gear, my shaman is probably the least geared of the group, the rest are pretty geared so I don’t think that’s a problem. We just keep making the same mistakes week after week. It’s tiresome.