New Adventures

Fresh after the high of defeating the Lich King, I've reached a bit of a low spot in my time with WoW. Lal and I have decided to leave the only guild we've known for the last three years and search for something new. What that something new is has not been entirely decided yet. It wasn't easy to leave for anyone involved, and I'll miss everyone dearly that is still with Veritas. I still consider them friends, even if we don't share a guild tag. I sincerely hope Veritas goes on to bigger and greater things than they ever have. I plan to stay in touch with the guild leaders and other members without being a nuisance, and in the mean time branch out into new territory for myself.

This blog will continue to be a place for lore posts and raiding stories and other miscellany of the World of Warcraft. I have been lax in those duties for a few months now, but the coming Cataclysm has me excited to write more. Lal and I have returned to the Draenei we started years ago, Bogdan and Nadya, and are now leveling in Outland and having a rather fun time of it. I expect we'll be in Northrend in a week or two and hopefully level 80 before long. After that, we'll be anxiously awaiting the new expansion before leveling any new toons. I have some low level alts that I'll probably re-roll in Cata to experience the revamped zones that are coming.

It's about time.

We have finally killed The Lich King.

The Strength of Wrynn buff was at 30%. I'm pretty sure that's as good as it gets. After weeks and weeks of struggling just to get 10 people together on the same night that knew the entire fight from beginning to end, we finally got our act together and converged on the Frozen throne.

First attempt: Lost some people to an errant Frost Orb on the first transition phase. A careless mistake, but we recovered quickly to try again.

Second attempt: Bad defile placement on the second phase, so we called the wipe and started again.

Third attempt: Everything went smoothly into the second phase. We nearly lost Lal to a Val'kyr but managed to kill it at the very edge. We're running in and out of defiles, and the Val'kyr are dying a little quicker than we're used to thanks to that buff, and a focused intensity of our DPS. As we're heading into the next transition phase, I'm mostly hopeful that we just get some time in the last phase as we've barely spent any time there.

Transition happens, and spirits are dying fast. We head back into the Lich King and someone gets whisked away to Frostmourne, I'm not sure who. Raging spirits are dead, but the Vile spirits are just appearing, so I swap targets. They don't die nearly as fast as they need to and I realize then that it must have been our other ranged DPS in the Frostmourne room. The spirits come down and start exploding on people. I hear Lal yelling from across the room at the damage people are taking. But after the spirits are gone, we're still alive.

At this point we've got a weird rhythm. People are scattered due to defiles and spirits, but I'm still trying to call out when to close in and when to spread out. Somehow the healers are keeping us alive through explosions. Then I see Giraud go down. I call out for a battle rez and we're back to full strength again. More spirits, more running, more explosions. There goes a healer! Thank goodness he's a Shaman. He's back up and we're still fighting. At this point I realize we're not just practicing. We're nearly there.

My hands start to shake when I see Kill Shot come up because that only happens on mobs below 20%. We only have to get him to 10. His health is dropping fast and we still have 10 people alive. At this point I start thinking people are surely going to start dying, and planning what do do if that happens, because we could still potentially pull it off. But in the end I didn't have to worry about that because we all died at the same time. And that was the most amazing thing that could have happened that night.

The scene played out, and in the end, we stood triumphant. After months of working on just this fight and nothing else, it was such a relief to finally have beaten it.

I'm proud of everyone for making it through, and putting up with all the pain and heartache that got us there. We've essentially beaten the game now. For some of us that have been invested in Warcraft since the RTS games, this was the ultimate final boss. And now, we're the heroes of the story.

Icecrown Raid Updates

Earlier in this year we restructured our raid teams to get more people involved in Icecrown. We had been running one team because it was simple enough to fill that team each week, and it wasn't a strain on the weekly schedule. And also because we only had one raid leader, me. But that left us with a number of able raiders who didn't get to raid as often as they liked because we could only take 10 at a time. We discussed doing a scheduled rotation, but I was against that plan. I worried that it would just compound the problem we were having, namely that people weren't getting to raid as often as they wanted to. Rotations wouldn't fix that, they would just distribute the "not raiding" equally across the members.

We had enough members, and so we eventually ended up with two separate and individual teams. Our rules were simple. To avoid one team being cannibalized by the other in the event of no shows or scheduling, neither team could take a main raider for the other's use. Alts were up for grabs as long as people were willing. We did our best to allocate people to each team based on class, role, and approximate skill levels, and I think we did a pretty good job of it. We still didn't have a permanent raid leader for the other team, but we were going to use sub leaders until someone stepped up.

So that's the context for the rest of this post. I lead one of the teams weekly on Tuesday and Friday nights now. We've been very lucky in that we haven't had any major scheduling problems with people to the extent we couldn't raid one of the weeks. Granted, this has only been going on for a month, so our time will come. Hopefully with enough advance notice, we can reschedule or sub people in to make it still happen. The other team raids Thursday/Sunday, and they've struggled a bit on getting people together on one or two nights due to scheduling problems. Just the other night, Lal and I were able to help with our alts to fill some holes though, so the system seems to be operating as expected, and doing well.

The heart of this, though, is our progress. Last week, my team got our first kills on Blood Prince Council and shortly thereafter, Blood-Queen Lana'thel which had us very excited. We'd spent the previous 3-4 weeks wiping to Rotface and his oozes. A victory over the Crimson Halls really encouraged our abilities as raiders and as a team. We're going back into Icecrown tonight with the Lower Spire and Festergut down, so we'll start with the Blood Princes and attempt to finish them and their Queen off with fewer wipes than last week.

Rotface has me stumped. We originally had our paladin tank kiting oozes and our bear tank on Rotface. Even when we got better at avoiding slime sprays and kiting the small oozes to the big ooze, we were still dying at around the magical 4 minute mark when the oozes became too much to handle. Rotface never got much lower than 25%. The next time, we changed it up, and I kited oozes while maintaining some DPS on Rotface and the paladin tank went DPS. We had a lot better success with this strategy, but we still couldn't get him down. I think our best attempt had him with less than 5% health. The causes of these wipes were mostly getting a second big ooze in the middle due to people not dragging them out in time. Avoiding slime sprays also seemed to be a bit tricky. Our DPS was a lot better though, and with just a little more we thought we could get him. We spent a whole night on Rotface, and 24 wipes later, we were defeated.

I'm expecting to beat the Crimson Hall again tonight. After which we will return to Rotface to claim our victory. I think with a few more tries, the hunter kiting strategy will work, but it takes everyone being on the ball about moving out with their little slimes and side stepping out of those slime sprays. The other hang up usually happens when the big ooze explodes, and the transition out of the center of the room and back is usually very rough. We tried to two heal the encounter to help get the DPS up, but then people were dying to much to little oozes and puddles, so we went back to three healers. I don't really know which is better, but what's important is that we find a way that works.

After that it's Putricide time. We haven't fought him yet, but I'm hopeful, so very hopeful, that he's not going to be as hard as Rotface. Compared to all of the other encounters, Rotface is an exponential increase in difficulty for our raid. I don't know if it's the same way for most other people, but Rotface seems to play to our weaknesses much like Yogg-Saron did in Ulduar. But Rotface isn't the final boss, so the difficulty level was a bit unexpected. Putricide has some fun mechanics as well, but much like we were able to get the Blood Council and the Blood-Queen, think a few hours on Putricide will spell his doom. But don't quote me on that.

We briefly tried the Dreamwalker fight in Icecrown where the Healers take center stage in healing Valithria. We were overwhelmed with adds and wiped twice before calling it for the night. We got a taste of it though, and we'll soon be working on the nuances. For now, I'm deciphering the best plan of attack to make the most of our raid nights. It's a fairly simple task to clear the lower spire and Festergut in about two hours on Tuesday. But depending on how we do tonight in the Crimson Halls, I may start trying to clear the lower spire and then through Blood-Queen all on Tuesday night to make way for doing the harder wings on Friday.

All three of my 80s are Icecrown geared now. Elionene the most, obviously, but Khristin is doing very well on gear. I just need an off hand and a nice trinket for her. Salthier is borderline, and I've discovered that there are very slim pickings when it comes to bear tanking upgrades that you can obtain outside of raiding. All of Lal's 80s are Icecrown ready too, which makes us prime candidates for filling in spots on teams when needed, and we like it that way.

We're going back in with the second team on Sunday. I love healing it on Khristin, my Shaman, and I've been tinkering with her glyphs and spec to be a little more productive. I expect us to do very well, hopefully getting Blood Princes down, though I'm not sure if that's what they'll be working at. In that role, I'm not the leader, so it takes a bit of effort from me to hold back and just follow orders. Something I definitely need to work on.

Between the two teams in Icecrown, a group of people doing hard mode Ulduar fights, and some random raids here and there, Veritas has been cementing itself as one of the best 10 person-strict guilds on our server. I'm proud of that, and I'm looking forward to continuing our progression and maintaining that status.

Trial of the Crusader Completed!

Due to the weekend being a holiday weekend and wanting a shot at being one of the first guilds on the server to complete the Trial of the Crusader, we did our raid Tuesday night in the Coliseum. The Faction Champions gave us a bit of a headache as they most always do, but we had it after 4 tries. We one shotted the Twin Val'kyr, again, even though I still don't feel like I understand the fight. And then we tackled Anub'arak!

I only knew the basic strategy as no real information other than what was from the PTR was available. We tried to keep him on the permafrost so he wouldn't burrow, but we never seemed to be able to completely keep him from doing so. It may be that you can't keep him from burrowing and that the permafrost is more for avoiding the spikes in the second phase and slowing down adds.

Whatever the case, after 4 or 5 trial and error shots, we got him! We went on to attempt the heroic Northrend Beast fight and had a good laugh when the Jormungar entered the arena BEFORE we had killed Gormok.

We ended the night by taking down Koralon, the newest boss in the Vault of Archavon. Two shot, and a lot of fun for some Emblems and Tier 9 gear!

Time Flies When You're Downing Bosses.

It's already Friday? I haven't posted since Tuesday!? O.O

I wanted to have a nice juicy lore post for you today, but I haven't had time to research anything. I might make special weekend post for this. I know there's stuff I want to look into and share with all of you.

As far as guild stuff, this week has been busy! Tuesday night we joined with Brothers of the Fallen who needed some help filling out a raid. They had about 18 people, and asked us to supply some extras. We took on Gruul, and won! A couple of the people pining after the Champion of the Naaru title were able to grab that. Since it hadn't taken us that long to get Gruul down, we went and killed Magtheridon again for good measure. The guild we were with is a bunch of Tier 5, Tier 6 people, so they made it look easy. Unfortunately, this meant that Lal and Elionene were no longer available to get the title because we wouldn't be able to kill Magtheridon again before the patch hits on Tuesday, but I don't think either of us really cared that much.

It's of interest to note that none of the three bosses we killed, High King Maulgar, Gruul, or Magtheridon, dropped any T4 tokens for hunters. Each one of them dropped two "of the defender" and one "of the champion" tokens. It was actually kind of eerie. I think Lal snagged a T4 token for priest pants. She's totally decked out now.

After the raids we did a quick run of regular Botanica with a friend who just got to 70 on a pally tank alt. It was actually pretty fun. Easy and quick. After that we went to heroic Slave Pens to turn in the quest from killing Gruul and Nightbane. Sheesh! That was a full night.

Wednesday night's guild meeting was replaced with a meet and greet tavern role play event where instead of strictly going over guild business in character, we just talked and drank, and casually brought up events coming up in the future. Then Lal and Salthier got to go to Magisters' terrace with the same guy who had a pally tank alt. It was a bit stressful. Lal and I had never been there before, but overall I think I liked the instance layout, and the bosses were a lot of fun.

Last night we finally did our Heroic Shadow Labyrinth run. Ugh. What sadistic developer created this place? We did pretty well up until Blackhand's room. Every pull seemed to cause a wipe in there. I think I finally figured ou the pull order and we were able to do the 6 mob pulls without wiping. When we got to the third boss, Vorpil, who had given us a headache and stopped our progress the last time in Heroic Slab, we surprisingly killed him after only one teleport. I was happily surprised. And we all /cheered.

Murmur was a bit of pain. But we ended up going with the stay put strategy. We all ate the sonic booms and just kept up a lot of heals on everyone. On our third attempt, the tank went down at about 12% on Murmur, but we managed to get him the rest of the way down anyway. There was much rejoicing, and the tank got away with a pretty cool polearm and shield off of Murmur.

The officers in Veritas have been heavily discussing the future of raiding and role playing as we get to the expansion and make our way into Northrend. Some of it has been a little confrontational, but think we all feel like we want raiding to be more fun than taxing, and role play to remain a central part of our guild. It should be something that everything else revolves around. So we're working on role play and lore incentives for the guild to explore Northrend. We're sort of waiting for the in game world event to start it off, but each day gets me more and more excited. A lot of people are getting a little bored now, or tired, or both. Hopefully the expansion and even the patch next week will breath some new life into people.

Veritas Conquers Netherspite

Last night we went to kill Netherspite. And we did! It took us three tries, and on the third one everything just clicked and he was dead in a matter of moments.


It was our guild's first kill, and we had a lot of fun doing it. I was respsonsible for leading it, and I had a lot of fun. We nearly had it on our first try too, but he got healed part way through, and then we had some DPS die, and we ended up dying when he was at 5% and enraged. I got smoosed with a 100,000 point smack from a void zone. Oof!

Our second try was a little off. He kept aggroing random people after his banish phase, so we lost people early on. I decided to just call it after that, so we could quicly release and try again.

Third time's a charm. Everyone was in the right spot at the right time, and Netherspite's health dropped fast. I think he was dead after only two banish phases. As I told my guild, it's really a technical fight, and when you get everything done, it works really well, and he dies quickly. He dropped a nice caster off-hand and a mail healing chest piece. We were all excited. A much better ending than the Gruul run last night.

And as far as Gruul goes, we're trying again tonight. Hopefully he'll cooperate and die, but if he doesn't, we're taking another shot on Thursday. Whew, that's a lot of raiding for our little RP guild. It's not the norm. People just really want that Champion of the Naaru title. I think because of all of this, we're having a little more fun with our guild meeting tomorrow night. The meetings can be fun, but they tend to go long. It's all done in character as we talk about things that we did over the week, and events coming up. Tomorrow we're going to make the meeting really short, and then just hang out and role play in a tavern in Ironforge to let off some stress with all of the recent raiding.

And then soon we'll all be leveling. I keep mentioning that, and maybe it's because I'm excited to go exploring again, and doing quests and preparing for the level 80 scene.

Gruul is a Big Meanie, and Other Thoughts on Raiding

With the 3.0 patch on the very near horizon, a few people in the guild have been after the Champion of the Naaru title which culminates in killing Gruul, Nightbane, and Magtheridon. Veritas as killed Nightbane, and with a coalition of other guilds, Magtheridon. Last night we tackled Gruul's lair.

The first thing that happened was that 8-10 people we expected from a guild didn't show, so we spent some time talking with other guilds and finally getting our 25 people together. We go in, we clear the trash, and we sit down to talk about High King. Sheesh, this guy is complicated. 5 mobs, five different types of tanking. We had a good guy directing us though, and we killed the group on our third try. Loot is passed out, people are happy, let's keep going.

Kill some more Ogres, and suddenly we're standing in a big room with a large Gronn staring at us with his one little beady eye. We discuss the strategy and we all run in and position ourselves. I figured out where to stand so that I don't get thrown around too much when he does his ground slam, so the shatter doesn't hurt me too badly. But the tanks are having some aggro issues and then a group of people go down during a shatter and the chain reaction starts. Raid wipe.

So now people have seen the fight and we go back in and try it again. We do a lot better, get him down to 40% or so before the raid dies again. By this time, people are a little tired, cranky and I think we spent some time filling some spots. Which of course meant that the trash respawned and we had to clear it again. That's fine, we want our titles!

Gruul again, and this time we have some new tanks who seem to be better on the aggro. It's going really well until the ground slam throws everyone together and people die. We are still plugging away, but our DPS isn't high enough to plow through the growths. I succumb to a cave in that I don't move out of quickly enough. More people leave the raid, we try to fill spots, but then the trash comes back again. Yeah, we've been there awhile. It pretty much ends the night, and while everyone had pretty high spirits throughout the whole thing, we are really disappointed we couldn't get him down.

25 person raiding is not my thing I don't think. And as mentioned before, I don't even want to think about what 40 person raiding was like. It's really satisfying when you do get it right and the boss goes down, like we did with Magtheridon last week, but the frustration and difficulty of making it happen makes me wonder if the benefits don't outweigh the costs.

In Northrend, all of the raids will be have 10 person versions. I'm excited about this, but also a little daunted. I'm a raid leader now in the guild, so I'm planning to push to 80 and be one of the first to gear up for Naxraamas. As a guild, we really want to progress, and we really want to see all of the content that's out there. So the question for me then, is how do I make this happen?

We've been pretty casual about raiding. Tonight we're going to complete our first full Karazhan clear when we kill Netherspite. I want to try and maintain that easy going attitude where raiding is done for fun AND for progression, and we don't have to sacrifice one for the other. But if we want to be able to progress through these 10 person dungeons, we'll have to make some changes about how we raid. And that's where I'm a little scared. I don't want to turn us into a hard core raiding guild. That's not Veritas. But we do want to do these raids.

It starts with the leader, of which I am one, so I'm going to do my best to lead by example. Step 1 is that I'm going to do my research on gear minimums for these raids, and make sure that people are at those minimums before we go into the first raid. It just makes sense, and it will mean less frustration in the long run. If people know that they have to be geared, and we don't make any exceptions, then there will be less confrontation in the long run. No one can claim that gear is what prevented us from killing a boss, for example, and then point out the ungeared person. It's just a matter of learning the fight and practicing.

Step 2 is a consistent team. This is where most of the problem lies. I imagine we'll get to level 80 and eventually 10 people will be geared to go into Naxxramas, the first level 80 raid, and we'll start going. But as more people get to top level and geared, when do they get to go? If you have a lot of people switching in and out of the team each week, it just means that it's going to take you longer to complete that raid, by virtue of gear being distributed more widely, and having to teach more people about the fights. So one of two things has to happen:

a) Have a loot system that rewards the more consistent people first, so that overall progression is kept as high as possible. Cons) The less consistent people aren't going to get first chance at loot, and that can cause some drama.

b) People that get to 80 and geared after we have a full team have to wait until we start a second team before they can start raiding. Cons) People waiting can get impatient, and feel left out.

From what I've seen, Veritas is going to lean towards the second option before we start establishing loot DKP. And that's fine. Ideally, after we get one group, the people who want to form a second group will help each other get to that point. This is probably what I'll stress. It's sort of how we did Karazhan, but it will need to be more structured for it to work, and for us to not be doing Naxxramas for six months before we clear it.

Step 3. You can't make everyone happy. And trying to make everyone happy will eventually make some people unhappy. Most likely the raid leader trying to make everyone happy. But at the same time, there has to be a general feeling of well being amongst your members that we are raiding, we are progressing, and we're all in this together, whatever stage we're at. Otherwise they'll just get disgruntled and leave. And we've had a fair number of people leave recently for reasons I don't fully understand, but that are related to how we raid. That alone tells me something has to change.

Thankfully I'll have 10 levels to think about it and plan for it before we finally take our first steps into the home of Kel'thuzad.

Last Week in Kara

Sorry about missing the post yesterday. It was a long day at work, and then I couldn't find a good topic on game mechanics that I really wanted to talk about. Before I knew it, the day was over! I might try and make a double post later in this week. Today however, is character day.

Bogdan and Nadya are now level 10. We don't play them much, but I still enjoy it when we do. We're about ready to leave the initial starting area of Azuremyst Isle and head to Bloodmyst. Hopefully we'll play them just a little tonight and head that direction.

Lal and Elionene, along with the second of our guild's two Karazhan teams, went back into the tower Monday evening, after clearing up to Aran on Thursday, and one shotted Illhoof, played a quick game of chess, and then tried to take down the self proclaimed new Lord of Kara, Prince Malchezaar. Our first attempt saw a couple DPS die quickly to enfeeble plus shadow nova. We still tried though and managed to get him to 17% before the tank, and subsequently the raid, wiped. Our next attempt, everyone was on the ball, and we killed Prince with no deaths whatsoever. It was grand, and we were so pumped we decided to go try and kill a dragon.

Netherspite is a really interesting fight, and only a few, if any of us, had ever done it before. We tried three times before calling it a night, and the last time we really seemed to understand the nuances, but still weren't able to get him below 36%. I'm confident after our next Prince clear, we will give it another go and get the big dragon down. Hopefully at that point someone will have the item to summon Nightbane as well, and then we will have tried every boss in the place. It's one of those things I never thought I'd be taking place in. When I was just playing for an hour or less a day in the early mornings, I never had any hopes of doing a 10 person raid and seeing the great instances that Blizzard has made. Now I'm potentially looking at the opportunity to raid in Gruul and Magtheridan in the near future. How cool is that? Of course, I couldn't have done it without my wonderful wife supporting me and raiding with me. Lal is the best.

Salthier has been focusing on mote farming and Primal Might making and questing with Lal for gear upgrades. He's basically rep farming for enchants and alchemy recipes, and for his own gear. I don't plan to raid with him unless we're in desperate need of a tank, but I might take him to heroics to get a few badges or something.

Looking forward to this week, we're hoping to do quests for the Cenarion Expedition in Blades Edge Mountains, and then run Steamvault for gear and reputation with Lal and Salthier. Bogdan and Nadya need to get a few more levels and figure out where to put those first talent points. If I can find the time, I've got a gnome rogue alt I'm messing around with, and could level him, or I could spend some time leveling my dwarf warrior, Frelon, who currently is my bank alt. Other than Kara, Elionene's only real goals are to get her Honor Hold, Aldor, and Kurenai rep to exalted, the latter two of which I can do solo, so I just need to commit some time to it. Of course with all of these options, time is in short supply. Hopefully I'll be able to accomplish most of it before Wrath of the Lich King comes out!

Thanks for reading, and have a good morning.

Silencing the Shade

Last night, our guild Karazhan team sought to kill Aran for the first time, and we succeeded! Last time we attacked him, he kicked our butts four times before we gave up. This week we downed him on try three, and there was much rejoicing. Now the libraries of Karazhan are open to our exploration, and we couldn't be happier.

Elionene went for DPS, and Lal was the off tank healer. The whole team did very well, completing through Aran in just over four hours. Our quickest time yet. Lal got a ton of spell caster items to add to her Holy DPS set. The Bands of Nefarious Deeds from Maiden have an apt name. She also got the Wicked Witch's Hat since the mage in our group didn' t need it. Elionene got a lot of bages, and a funky head piece. I'm fine with that. We hope to maybe go back for Illhoof, Chess, and Prince this weekend. We'll see if that works out.

Since it's role play day, I wrote a journal entry for Elionene and her point of view on the assault on the Ivory Tower, and the fight with Aran specifically. You can read it at my other blog dedicated for journal entries, here, or by clicking on the link on the right.

I don't consider myself a great writer. I do it because I like to and no other reason. One thing I would like to work on though is more character interaction and development. You'll probably notice the whole story seems expository, and it really is. As I write more, I'll work on making it a little more personable.

Thanks for reading, and have a good morning!