Guild trauma

We had a rough night... our server had constant lagspikes and we were supposed to get little ragnaros down. After 8 or 9 attempts ragnaros despawned (he will despawn 2 hours after the first battle with him has been initiated). It is a shame because we have had him 3 times before and I wish I could blame the lag but it wasn't entirely its fault.

With the guild progressing through MC, we've burned out 3 raid leaders. The guild is going through alot of inter-drama. I hope we sail it through. I've read on numerous other guildpages and blogs that once you nail Ragnaros and start peeking into BWL things are bound to change. Alot of guild can't handle the shift - suddenly you need enormous commitment. Lots of reagents to be farmed - fire pots, health pots, and gold for repairs, flasks and a gazillion other things. Constant wiping doesn't improve morale either. It becomes a rift between the truly hard-core raiders and the "causal raiders"... HC raiders being annoyed by the lack of dedication from the casual and the causal being annoyed by constant wiping.

Our guild started out casual, became semi-hardcore and now has both types of players. Various penalties are being handed out for leaving mid-raid (without notice) and the mood is getting darker.

Personally I am probably more of a casual raider. My schedule only allows me to raid once a week but with periodic gaming during the rest. It allows me to do some farming and more importantly PVP =) I love the guild and if it breaks down I gather it will be hard to find another that will accept a rogue that can only raid once a week =/

Oh .. our server is getting a hardware upgrade this maintenance. I wonder if we'll notice any difference. Hopefully it will quell some of the lagspike we have. I just wished more horde would play in our battlegroup since the waiting time is about 15minutes for AB and over an hour for AV... funny enough, the BG queues are much faster on lower levels.. so either there are plenty of hordes in training or just less alliance there. Dunno but I am getting most of my PVP fix at the lower brackets right now.

SF and UI hell!

So I picked the old classic Seal Fate for my new 1.12 build. I really wanted to go Hemo or heavy combat swords... but my weapons are not really up to par with hemo and I hesitated so much.. so I went with SF to see how the BGs would come out.

BGs in battlegroup 3 has been a pain. There is lag from hell when it comes to actually join the queues. You talk to the NPC... but nothing happens. 10 minutes later the instance list pops up for a second, just enough to remind you that if you were patient enough and waited by the NPC for an indefinate period of time you would be able to join the 40 minute queues.

But they'll fix it.. it will take a while but then it will start working. That is how it works.

I downloaded a new UI to celebrate the 1.12 patch... going with NurfedUI and nothing more. I've always believed in having as few mods as possible. But man! going from one UI package to another is time consuming. Spent a few minutes in AB in confusion of where my skills were and it seems everytime I tried to go for Cold Blood I would switch the menu page. SHIFT-2 is my usual Cold Blood key.. but without fixing up Nurfed UI correctly it swapped my main attack skills for bandages and shit...

1.12 rogue talents reviewed

So I've just downloaded and installed the 1.12 patch. Later tonight I'll have to respec and to be honest I don't really have a clue of what to spec. My previous spec was a classic Seal Fate (31/8/12)... I'll see if that will serve as a starter or else I am going with a Combat Sword build to make sure I don't gimp my PVE DPS too much.

Combat Sword is also quite handy in the BGs... although you need slightly better backup.

I just quickly browsed through the official wow forums and they are filled with many "OMG! the worst review ever" threads. Somehow I think the rogue community is a crowd impossible to please.

MC on farm status?

Yesterday the guild cleared the whole Molten Core in one go... little over four hours and without a wipe. I guess this qualifies for putting MC on farm status. Unfortunately I wasn't raiding yesterday. I had plans to join tonight.. with no raid going I'll try to get into an AQ20 spot later this week to get the quest Perfect Poison completed. I desperately need to upgrade my Heartseeker...

Anyways with MC cleared the guild will be hard pressed to start with BWL. While I want to get into BWL I still think we are miles away from doing anything but wiping as most of our members still only have very few T1 pieces. I gather we should stick around in MC for a few more weeks before seriously attempting BWL. Problem is that the most raid intensive members have little left to gain from MC and will probably do their uttermost to start BWL. We'll see what happens.

In other news.. this weekend I'll be taking care of our very-soon-to-be 4 month old son alone for the first time. It will be a great adventure! He is the curious, awake kind of little guy so I'll have my hands full.

Ragnaros down

I had a great time in MC... on our guild's third attempt we managed to kill Ragnaros. It was one of those really legendary fights that will live on in memory for a very long time. Our raid leader did a really good job shouting "More dots" and "Hit it like you mean it" during the fight. We had a few newbish players during the fight such as the paladin in my group that never tried to stick close to his melee group. I noticed how the Fire Resist Aura would come and go as I moved back and forth dodging Ragnaro's AOE blast.

Rogue tactics during the Ragnaros event is fairly simple. Start out behind Rag and move in to melee. Start building DPS slowly with lots of feints. As soon as the 5 sec raid warning appears move back to the edge to avoid getting thrown high into the air. Rinse and repeat. The last few percent was extremely exciting as we were just a few people left alive. Mostly caster loot appeared and no Perdy =(

Interestingly I didn't use any sharpening stones or other consumables than a +25 strength thingy from Blasted Lands. I ended up third on the meters.. a combat rogue in the 0.5 set did an excellent job of topping the charts. Guess I have to start focusing more ;)

Pinioned has now successfully cleared ZG and MC. My guess is that we'll soon start with the first bosses of BWL once we've killed Rag a few more times. So it is time to stock up on even more FR gear.

The new Burning Crusade PVP

I just read Joystick's exlusive intervju with Blizzard designer Jeff Kaplan.

There was a few very interesting tidbits...

The first is the arena combat system. You'll be able to join a team: 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5. There are two different modes you can play: One is called practice mode to hone your skills and the other is competitive mode, which is level 70 only.

Very interesting. This will allow champions to emerge from pre-made groups. Hopefully the end of a few premades vs pugs. I really look forward to the 2 vs 2...

You can get the best rewards in the game on par with the raid game. So, wherever the raid game loot is currently at, the PvP arena system will match those rewards. And, the arena system is a seasonal system that will last three months then reset with a new set of rewards each season.

Again interesting.. I'll be sure to look for the raiders to start whining about easy epics. I guess most of them have not fought a godly team. On our Ravencrest server it used to be a guild called Amazing Randy... they sure showed skill.

The last pvp improvement is:

The third thing is a revamp of the honor system. We're not going to do away with the honor system, but we're going to fix many of the flaws with it. The first thing players will really care about is that your honor points will no longer decay. Honor points will now become the like the PvP equivalent of a PvE experience.

Finally.. I wonder if they do use some sort of weekly comparisson to adjust the amount of honor each player recieves compared to the amount of PVP done.

All in all extremely interesting features that definately gets my interest to wait for the expansion.