Spellbound

Summer is approaching, as well as the next expansion even if we don’t know the exact date yet. There’s also Diablo 3 and other game releases. All of this, and other things, are causing a lot of guilds to cut back on raiding or possibly stop entirely.

In most previous expansions my guild’s raiding was cut short because some vital member of our raid team decided to call it quits prematurely. Usually a main tank. It was frustrating, but not much we could do about it. Recruitment can be difficult at all points of an expansion, but towards the end it’s nearly impossible. This time around though, we’ve gotten further than we had planned. We’re a casual guild and our only goal has always been to clear normal content before nerfs each tier. As we’re winding down progression, we’re stopping at 5/8 Heroic kills, which is probably the best we’ve ever done in any expansion so far.

We’ve made the decision to keep raiding for a while longer, but just for fun and only once a week for a Dragon Soul clear. People will be allowed to bring alts and we’re removing the “serious” from raiding, and the intent is just to have fun and clear the content each week for those who still want some gear. We might add some raids to old content once a week for fun as well, but it all depends on how many people keep playing as new games are released and summer finally gets here.

I know, for me, while I intend to play Diablo 3 – I will also continue playing WoW. There are some alts I’d like to gear up a bit more before the expansion, and achievements I want on my Warlock. Things that will keep me busy through the months to come before MoP.

What are your plans between now and MoP? Is your guild taking a break/winding down or do you keep going strong until the end?

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We received a fair few number of submissions for our Worst Warlock Outfit contest, and they were all absolutely horrible. Just like we asked them to be! Choosing a winner has been incredibly difficult, and if we could we would probably have made everyone a winner. However, we had to choose one, and after a lot of discussions back and forth we finally came to a decision.

And the winner is…

Tome of the Ancient!

The Winning Outfit

There is something very disturbing about a Warlock that is not only wearing some low-key very non-Warlocky clothes, but is also picking flowers. No Warlock worth their fel would ever be seen gardening!

The runner-up…

The runner-up

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I’ve been running Looking For Raid on a few of my alts in the hopes of picking up some gear upgrades. (Interesting fact: since the start of LFR my Paladin has won exactly one item…) There are some things that this has taught me, and on this Friday I wanted to share them with you.

1. It’s apparently okay for people to stay in the Black Blood phase on Morchok even if they don’t have a cooldown to help them survive. Seems healers should just heal them through it. And if they die (I tend to refuse to heal people who do this), there’s always battle res!

2. It’s possible for 17 DPS to be unable to kill a single ooze on the Yor’sahj encounter. (Obviously the dps requirement is too high!) However, you can still kill the boss. As long as one ooze wasn’t purple and the healers, unaccustomed to dealing with this debuff, blow up the whole raid.

3. Using Mass Dispel to get rid of the debuff on Zon’ozz is a waste of mana if you’re a Priest. It’s better to let the other healers single target remove them.

4. On Hagara’s trash it’s nice and chilly tanking in the blizzard. Why move out when you can just have the healers spam heal the tanks and melee dps?

5. It’s by design that at least three people should die to Hagara’s Ice Wave every time.

6. The odds are that nine times out of ten one of the tanks on Ultraxion doesn’t know what to do about Fading Light and will repeatedly die. But no worries, just use the five combat resurrections on the failing tank!

7. There’s always at least one person who doesn’t move out of the Nuclear Blast on Spine of Deathwing. You don’t die (only close to it) and that’s what the healers are there for, right?

8. Being AFK for an entire fight is completely okay because surely no one will notice anyway.

9. It’s totally okay to roll need on items that you already have to then disenchant them instead of letting people who could actually use them have them. Your shards are definitely more important than other people’s gear upgrades.

10. Pressing the Will during Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion is a dps loss. Half the group should just dps through it and hope that the healers continue to heal! (Don’t mind if I let you die… you took that extra damage on purpose!)

Which important lessons / strategy changes has LFR taught you?

Edit: I felt I should just clarify, in case it wasn’t clear, that these strategies mentioned obviously are wrong. Sadly they do work in LFR due to the fact that it’s an easier content. I’m just not someone who believes that you should ignore a mechanic in a fight simply because you can. While it might make the fight easier for you, it often makes the fight more difficult for your healers because they have to make up for the extra damage everyone is taking by ignoring said mechanics. And yes, I play LFR mainly on healers, hence the strong healer bias in the post!

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Today Blizzard started wave four of the Beta Invites going out to the Annual Pass holders. A wave of 250 000 invites, of which I finally got one. I have to say that Blizzard are acting fairly fast after all, since they now have over half a million people with Beta access.

This of course means that the Beta servers are quite busy. I tried logging in today to have a look and you can’t really do anything since there’s too many people. The reason Blizzard are inviting so many people at once I suppose is because some won’t even care enough about the Beta to logon, some will play a Pandaren Monk for a few levels and never login again.. and the rest of us will wait until they’re all gone and have a pleasant Beta testing time.

Current Beta Status

I’ve made myself a Pandaren Monk named Rhauralie, but I won’t get to play her until the servers calm down a bit. Character copying doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, once it does I will transfer over the classes I play the most, though obviously Warlock is the one I want to test out the most.

Rhauralie

I will be writing more about the Beta and especially Pandaren and Warlocks later on. In the future all posts about the Beta will have a [Beta] tag in front of it. So if someone wants no spoilers at all, they can steer clear of them. (I generally don’t discuss lore or quests though, but I can understand if some people don’t want to know anything about what’s coming and so I will respect that and put the tag on my Beta posts.)

In the meantime, I wish everyone a Happy Easter/Noblegarden.

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