Yeah, that took long enough…

Sigh.

I keep guild drama off the front page most days, but sometimes it’s cathartic to just vent. I’m pretty sure no one from my guild actually reads these pages so the risk is pretty minimal.

The core players in my guild have been around a long time, some going back years into EQ raiding on Prexus. In that type of mix of old/new players and grudges YEARS in the making, it’s a wonder we don’t have more angsty bullshit than we do… *knock on wood*

A few months a back we gained a couple players who were with us in the beginning on Stormrage. They left to join the #1 and #2 power guilds on the server and did the whole hardcore thing for a couple years. Their departure caused a few ruffled feathers. These guys are pretty caustic individuals. I don’t mean that in a bad way – I find their demeanor to be absolutely hilarious. But I’m not a 6-year-old-girl, either. I can take a hit and give it right back when the need arises.

What gets them in trouble is that they have no issues telling people the plain truth no matter how ugly it might be. Again, I’m a big fan of honesty. If you don’t say what you mean how can anyone take you seriously? So combine old grudges with their no-holds-barred truth-telling and you have the pack of dogs with bees in their mouths that I’ve got now. Tank A told tank B that he was frustrated with the quality of tank B’s tanking. Tank B threw a hissy and bailed on the raid all the while going batshit crazy in private about how he won’t put up with that shit and why weren’t we supporting him. It was a fun night, lemee tells ya. Tank B still isn’t raiding after two weeks, but he’s apparently found time to pug 25s and run some sort of clandestine 10-man operation. What can you do, really? My initial solution of throwing them both in a burlap bag and chucking it off the side of a boat was a non-starter.

Getting pissed off at other people for inexplicable reasons just bugs the shit out of me. Seriously. What the fuck is the point? Anywho, here’s a helpful life lesson from me to you – don’t be that guy. Just don’t.

Man the fuck up already.

We’re happily clearing heroic Naxx every week now so we’ve started peppering in more difficult Sartharion and Malygos attempts. Malygos is a beast in heroic and frankly pretty soul-crushing when shit takes a turn. If you give the thumbnail a whack and load up the hi-rez you can see the skeletons left over from the 2 or 3 previous wipes.

My team’s normally on top of things but these days the attention span is rather thin. Not so thin as to preclude our first Sartharion+1 kill tonight though, so hoorah for our side!

I don’t recall what the loot was but I’m sure the winners were pleased. I’m camped out at #1 on our suicide kings list patiently waiting my spot at the trough.

You will be mine…oh yes, you will be mine.

First full clear of heroic Naxxramas is under our belts. Not nearly as hard as I expected, but still far easier than I’d have liked. Sapphiron was tough, especially since a great number of our players haven’t seen him in Naxx-10 yet either. No Calamity dropped; maybe next week

I’ll throw some pics up tomorrow after my early appointments. The new dropbox sync I’ve got rolling on the various folders has been working slick!

Not anymore?

Finally got a chance to kick the tires on the new raiding setup last night. We took 21 into the Arachnid Quarantine Zone and had a grand ol’ time with much achievementing and whatnot. We also managed to nab the achievement for dropping Sartharion with a mere 20 raiders. The loots were phat and plentiful. 15 suicide pieces, including 2 upgrades for moi. Lost the shot at the Fury of the Five Flights but I did grab Dawnwalkers and a Widow’s Fury for my troubles. A Webbed Death dropped as well.

I know I promised some pics so I’ll get to it later, promise. I’m thinking it might be useful to symlink my wowpics folder to DropBox or maybe the new LiveSpaces thing that I picked up the other month. Still gotta find a better way to push images. PWA is fine, but clunky for blogginatin.

No major news – hit 80 on the rogue on Friday morning. After Thanksgiving I just busted a marathon and 14 hours later my last 2 levels were toasty. Still haven’t run half the instances, so I’m picking up the heroics now for various achievements and gear. My T5/badges held up remarkably well. It’s only now that I’ve started to replace things, with about half my crap being new blues. I have about 9 weapons available right now, not happy with my choices. I won a 143dps MH dagger in a heroic the other night, but I dinged the factions for Ebon Blade and Wyrmrest to get the 130dps MH/OH sword combo. I’m in the process of building rage with Mutilate to just say “fuck it, DPS ain’t worth crying myself to sleep every night” so we’ll how it goes.

Dragonblight is by far my favorite zone so far with Icecrown coming in a close second. Zul’drak is ass. Sholazar, Grizzly and Borean are all tolerable with Storm Peaks and Howling Fjord yet to be touched.

The highlights of my run? Almost entirely solo’d, picked up the epic flying mount (and a purple nether ray from the Skyguard) and am still flush with cash… or as flush as I need to be to support raiding and my normal day-to-day funzies. Leatherworking is coming along with leather farming bein the only issue.

All-in-all a fun beginning to the expansion. I’m looking forward to getting back into real raiding this week with a great semi-PuG Archavon run last night. I’m torn on the timing issues present in Lich King. On one hand it’s lovely to be able to get a lot of varied stuff done in any given evening, but on the other I think it’s weakening the playerbase. I’ve seen it in my own play and it’s readily apparenty in the play of others. All 5-man content I’ve done so far has beeen AE trash for 5-10 minutes, 90 seconds to kill a boss, rinse and repeat. That’s great for the mindless instant-gratification twats running around cryfacing because they couldn’t manage to put in the teeeeeniest bit of effort to do T5+ content, but what about those of us who like a little skill with our peanut butter?

Roll with it, I guess. I’ll throw some pics up when I get home. I loathe the daggers, but I’ve got a pretty striking silouhette.

Sunday night means Sunday sunraid – our weekly roll-up of Gruul, Mag and whatever else we might be interested in as the week draws to a close.

Our first Gruul kill was on Dec 12th, 2007. Yesterday marks our hojillionth kill and 2nd Dragonspine Trophy. That’s 158 days to you and me. I lost the roll on the first one but last night karma came up big as I dropped a natural 100 and crossed another “won’t replace until post-Lich King” off the list. I’m exceedingly pleased. The DST is a big bump and the clock is ticking on nub raid content as we progress through T5.

Oh, and we dropped Karathress for the first time last week. I’ll add some screens when I get home.

As promised, more news re: Professor Plums.

I covered our antics on the Sunday following the patch, but neglected to mention TK on Thursday. For those of you playing our home game yes, Void Reaver with invisible orbs does, in fact, suck ass. We diverted to Solarian who I was promised was “easy”. Yeah, so they were right. Welcome to the 1st 1st kill of the streak.

Nothing overly amazing lewt-wise, we had some shards and some equippers, same old song and dance. So fast-forward past Sunday’s Magtheridon 1st and to the Tuesday Serpentshrine raid. What? What you say? Is that our 1st Morogrim Tidewalker kill? Yeap.

A nice surprise in the cracker-jack box for our 1st – grats me. Talon of Azshara

The WoW 2.4 patch hit, launching the Isle of Quel’Danas content and a slew of fixes/nerfs/bugs/etc. More on that stuff later, but for now, I’ll lead off with our first Magtheridon kill. Why yes, yes he is EZ-mode trivial now, we know. We could have killed him before, we just couldn’t get the bodies in front of him. At any rate, he’s dead now – suck it.

From what I’ve read and/or heard, Blizzard noticed the people just plain weren’t doing Mag anymore or (as in our case) never had done him and wanted to encourage more kills. I get that, I really do. As we enter the home stretch towards Lich King the mighty bliz wants to make sure there’s not a repeat of Burning Crusade with the vast majority of their players never seeing what had been described as some of their very best work. Works for us. I got me a Pit Lord’s Satchel with a natural 100.

More to follow…

Greetings and salutations, I am associate awesome.

1st Tempest Keep raid last night, 1st Void Reaver kill on our 2nd try. Not much more to say about it than that as it was a solid effort from start to finish. Grats to us.

Theostim – Mantle of Tirisfal
Triny (guest) – Mantle of the Avatar
Protexe – Wristguards of Determination