Unbearably HoT

Focusing on progression is admittedly tiresome. As long as you keep farming, keep pushing and make measurable headway on new content, you can let yourself get sucked into the whole process without feeling too strained. Unfortunately, everyone stumbles. It’s been a long time since I felt considerably frustrated on any particular raid-boss and had to resign myself to the fact that this could take…awhile. Not since C’thun.


Sunwell can be particularly unforgiving about making mistakes. Screwing up a portal rotation or standing too close to someone else when one spawns can spell disaster. Losing any particular player on Brutallus might mean you’re too short on damage or healing and won’t make the enrage. Failing to Mass Dispel or run away from an Encapsulate victim during the Felmyst encounter…you get the idea. But they’re still easy in comparison to the challenge the Eredar Twins has presented.


Does it help we’re running with too much melee and too few healers? No, not at all. I even had the remarkably unpleasant experience of respeccing Resto the other night for a gangbang wipefest on the Twins. I haven’t been resto since before 2.4 and found things working…a little differently than I remembered. That, coupled with gear that was suddenly sub-par, woefully unenchanted and ungemmed, made for a teeth grindingly good time. And by good time, I mean I went to bed in a dour mood with a massive headache. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for learning, but when we’re running with spur-of-the-moment healers and trying to make progress, it’s hard to expect much.


So we’re cockblocked, well and truly. While we at one point had eight million and twelve mages and warlocks, we now have too-few casters and flurry of assorted melee. The casters are being Shadow Furied into oblivion, piss-poor reaction times to the Conflagration debuff wipe us in seconds and no one seems to be watching their threat at all. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone’s paying attention. I’m sick of everyone discussing the fucking hockey playoffs when everyone is trying to focus, and thus I’m going to pretend that they’re not trying hard enough rather than assume everyone is mentally retarded.


The best I can do is fine-tune my own approach and attitude, and hope that sets some sort of example. HAHAHAHAHA. But right now, it seems like Conflagration is reliably targeting whoever is third on aggro, so we’re hotfixing our approach by using three tanks on Sacrolash as an attempt to control the burn (so to speak). I anticipate better attempts tonight. Since I’m not tanking as of yet on that encounter and (let’s be honest) a rogue or fury warrior better fills my DPS role, I’ll probably be sitting for awhile or going back to healing until we can muscle our way though the tough spots. The catch? I’ll probably be healing on my badge-pimped paladin, Dorkasaurus.


Thus, in the near future, I might be scooping up T6 epics that’d otherwise be sharded for the millionth time in BT and Hyjal and switching back and forth between the healer and tank perspective. In the meantime, I’m busily rearranging and resocketing my various sets of tank gear for maximum soak, dodge and threat generation (fashion show coming soon to a theater near you) and starting to rework my UI for a more efficient healing set up (because healing with Perfect Raid was a nightmare), and any and all suggestions are welcome—I’m even thinking of trying out the Grid/Clique combo.


That’s all I’ve got right now—I’m preoccupied by those Eredar ho’s and our current inability to coordinate well enough to kill them. And remember:

In the months precursory to The Burning Crusade expansion, the desire and drive to push progression crawled to a standstill for many guilds. Why keep raiding when our high level epics will be replaced with greens in the next three months? Why keep our noses to the grindstone when really, we could just coast until the expansion comes out? Are we seriously going to have to cut our 40 man raids in half? The list goes on. Disheartened by the prospect of starting over rather than amping themselves up for incoming new content, many raiders just quit the game entirely.


Many people probably heard the announcement that Wrath of the Lich King alpha testing was released to friends and family of Blizzard staff very recently—and if Blizzard’s track record is any indication (five months from alpha to release), that might mean we’ll see a hastily assembled expansion by September or October. The face of raiding changed dramatically from the original release to the expansion, and predictably, is set to change again. According to this blue post, one of WotLK’s major selling points is that all content, I repeat all raid dungeons, will be available in a handy ten-man sized serving. Shit, son!


Before everyone decries this as the total casual catering, regardless of how tightly tuned the encounters might be, think about it: you could take ten of your best raid buddies, the guys you trust, the chicks you know kick ass regularly, and destroy all content without any of the loldrama that tends to accompany the 25-man progression guilds we have now. If you have a small, tight knit group of raiders who even have similarly well-geared and well-played alts, then what’s stopping you from creating a ridiculously well-oiled class rotating raiding machine? This move by Blizzard represents the ULTIMATE in casual candy-coated raiding for the Everyone, but is also, in my opinion, one of the most alluring. Will the 25 mans still have better loot? I hope so. But would you be willing to settle for sloppy seconds if you didn’t have to bust your ass 17 hours a week with maybe 8 people you really like and 17 others you only tolerate? Maybe “sloppy seconds” was poor phraseology.


As the old cliché goes, history frequently repeats itself. To say that I haven’t seen this coming would be a bold-faced lie, but let’s just say I’ve been delaying writing about the inevitable—this is going to destroy the guilds who are already licking the knife’s edge of implosion. Death and Taxes, a veritable staple in World and US firsts since before Burning Crusade, officially disbanded on May 16th and cited this as one of the reasons:

“The ship went down faster than the Titanic, but the rats were bailing before the iceberg was ever in sight.”

Destruction imminent. While their mainpage goes on to cite a laundry-list of concerns and excuses et cetera, I hear the same amgcasualcraft mutterings that Risen expounded upon at length and the general consensus that, while Sunwell is finally the fine-tuned dungeon we’ve all been looking for, it’s too little too late. My raider radar didn’t really start beeping until I continued on toward the end:

“Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that they were bigger than the guild.”

Why is that? Some intrinsic human decency and vague sense of honor and obligation seems to have evaporated once forty-mans went the way of the buffalo. Were progression guilds still full of douchebags, elitists and general troublemakers back then? Oh, absolutely—but something kept us together. Drama existed but generally remained muted. Guild relations were often terse but not usually downright hostile. Any player who pulled some spectacular bullshit could find him or herself perma-blacklisted by top end guilds on their realm. Overall, I contend that there existed a greater loyalty toward the guild rather than toward the player, as we see now. I attribute this phenomenon to:

1. Slower gear up: fully gearing a 40 man raid took a ridiculous amount of time when bosses dropped fewer tokens than we see today in 25 mans. Acquiring T2 or T3 gear required a fairly substantial time commitment and a large amount of patience. As a newcomer to Awen, I had to compete with other druids (nevermind other casters or rogues or intrepid leather-wearing DPS warriors) who had hundreds upon hundreds more DKP than me—and still hadn’t gotten the items they wanted. The more time you spend with a group usually tends to imply that you get to know your fellow raiders more and, I’d argue, creates a sort of implicit, binding contract: you help me get my gear and I’ll help you get yours.
2. The “real” reputation grind: in my experiences, it was largely difficult to get into a decent guild on any particular realm unless you had some sort of in-guild sponsor or were realm-famous for…something else. Old World PVP, maybe. Raiders, or rather—prospective raiders, oftentimes found it necessary to cultivate realm-wide relationships without stepping on too many toes if they wanted to have a chance to break in to a specific raiding community. I was lucky enough to have a few sponsors in Awen that pushed my application forward—other top guilds, such as Lunaris, were notoriously “tight knit” and exceptionally difficult to break into.
3. Inaccessible server transfers: I lay a lot of the blame for guild breakdown on the ridiculously easy ability to server transfer these days. With six months in between allowed transfers, you had to be really fucking sure you wanted to leave, and super certain that you had a place to go to on your target realm. That, combined with the notion that you’d have to “rep grind” all over again, as listed in #2, was a huge deterrent to picking up and leaving. While I’ve server transferred a total of three times in two years, once was with my entire guild, for free, once was when my guild broke up and there wasn’t anything left on Baelgun, and the final time was to my permanent resting place on Doomhammer. It’s so easy to leave now that players aren’t required to commit to a guild for longer than three months—you can, essentially, with the ease of gear acquirement in TBC, loot phat purplez and leave for better grounds.
4. Name changes: similar to the easy server transfers, it’s more and more difficult to track someone’s progress across multiple realms now. Get all the gear you want out of people and then don’t want to stick around to work on a boss? Change your name and leave! Sell your toon! Become a new person all over again! Reinvent yourself into someone even more unoriginal and lame! While this feature has undoubtedly created some hilarious name changes (Dongwaffle comes to mind), I find that it caters to a player’s vanity more than anything else. Vanity—now we’re getting back to players feeling that they’re bigger than their guild.

As has been mentioned by a million people already, the 25 man raiding environment means (by numbers alone) that each person is almost twice as important, is counted on in a greater fashion, than each individual person was in a 40 man raiding environment. Egos have soared. The loss of 3 key individuals, depending on class, can cripple a guild until it finds replacements. There are folks who use that to their advantage and essentially blackmail the guild until they get what they want. They don’t care what they say or who they say it to, because they feel invulnerable. Me—I still standby my old guildmaster’s adage: “Everyone is expendable. You can and you will be replaced if I see fit.”


That’s how it should be. But even now, I’m feeling the heat. As the only feral druid with a ridiculous gear set who just happens to be coupled with the protection tank with the best gear, there’s a heavy reliance for both of us to always be on and always be available to spearhead raids. We have other warriors with only slightly inferior gear, and, even now, a protection paladin, but our combined experience and gear (along with my sass and ability to mediate when I feel like it) makes us a valued asset. It’s pressure. It’s hard not to feel like we should get some sort of special treatment. I am compelled by my old world loyalties and deep-rooted obligations to continue raiding in the best capacity I can despite the fact that I have, lately, felt unappreciated and generally disrespected. People have passed gear to me so that I can function as the best tank I can, and it’s important, in my mind, to set an example by not taking their “sacrifice” for granted. I don’t want to be “that person”.


So what have I been doing the past raid week, then? Sleeping. Watching movies. Playing Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and laying out a series of articles. Pointedly not playing WoW. After making sure that Kalecgos and Brutallus were appropriately handled, Lycentia and I found it in our best interests to take a four day break from raiding and reevaluate our roles in raiding. With people regularly ripping out each other’s throats, our minds growing progressively worn and patience thin, and with the siren’s call of 10-man raids nibbling at our ears, the question arose—do we keep doing this? Do we put up with the bullshit and keep pushing toward Kil’jaedan?


The quick answer is yes.


I implore all of you, however, to take a moment and subject yourself to the some serious thinking about your raid style, and bring these kinds of questions up in your guild as well:

Am I having fun?
Is this interfering with my day to day life and/or out of game ambitions?
Am I losing sleep over the game?
Is my generated effort being matched by the rest of the guild?
Am I being treated with respect and, similarly, treating others the same way?
Am I setting an example or contributing to a problem?

All instances reset today. Sunwell Plateau beckons us once more with the prospect of continuous wiping and brief moments of in-game glory. I am endeavoring to change mindsets this week, exact change and put my best paws forward—for now.

It’s recently come to my attention that someone was trying to claim my druid as their own—and in a piss-poorly written application post, no less.

Thus, if you ever see or hear of anyone using “Runyarusco” as a reference or claimed as an “alt”, they’re totally full of shit. Why? Because I’m the only Runyarusco in the Armory. I’m also the only “70 resto name Runyarusco in the guild <Singularity>”.

Link to the Application Itself.

Please let me know if you hear of anything else like this. Thanks!

    While eight million other WoW bloggers dutifully report the patch notes and lament the various nerfs and tweaks, I choose to spare any readers here from the same list they’ll eventually see in their own little Download window. There are, naturally, a few things I’d like to highlight and point out to my fellow dr00ds, but first, I’d like to explain my own goals. In an earlier article I sneered at the lack of challenge the game’s been presenting lately, the devaluing of epic items, the changes to the opening of the Sunwell event, the loss of raiding perks and the greedy me me mes! of the folks who beg Blizzard to hand out freebies so that they don’t have to put forth the effort to earn them. But before I fall prey to the siren’s call of NEW LOOTZERS and REP REWARDS, let’s take a look at what this means for raiders.

The dawning of the Sunwell is a welcome change for many raiders who’ve been farming Black Temple and Hyjal for upwards of eight months or longer. Fortunately, I’ve only been doing it since November and can’t complain too much there, but I admit that there are nights I go to sleep hearing, “THIS WORLD WILL BURN!”, cringing about having to go through four thousand pulls in Hyjal just because I somehow haven’t hit Exalted with Scale of the Sands yet. Sunwell affords us a chance to look at what could be exciting new content (although Kalecgos reminded me of, as Lycentia put it, C’thun on speed) and one day tackle a villain the likes of which we haven’t seen since…Ragnaros? Nef? The concept art featured on the linked wallpaper is ridiculously cool with exceptional detail, and while I don’t expect to see an exact rendering in game, coming somewhere close (especially if he’s massively huge) will make Kil’jaedan a fight to remember. Just don’t listen to all the Kil’jaedan soundfiles; the dialogue sounds pathetically similar to what every other boss yells when you’re kicking his ass (with the exception of Shahraz).

So new content. Learning new content as a progression guild means going balls out on consumables (food buffs, scrolls, flasks, potions, sharpening stones, runes of warding) and turning a blind eye to the repair costs you periodically incur. To put that in perspective, when I die wearing all my tanking gear (after, presumably, tanking), I’m looking at anywhere between a 7 to 8 gold repair bill. Wipe five times and I’m looking at a 35 gold repair bill. Spend an entire week of wiping on one encounter? Probably something like 50+ gold a night. It’s daunting, and it’s frustrating, but with the expansion of daily quests allowed and what will be a furious rep grind with the Shattered Sun Offensive, I look at it this way:

25 quests * appx. 11 gold each = 275 gold per day

275 gold per day * 3 level 70’s = 825 gold per day

Not too shabby. Even doing six or seven quests a day on each toon will likely sustain my raiding needs indefinitely, and making the extra effort to do each of them (with the convenience of pairing my 70’s with Lycentia’s) might net me a few more epic mounts as well. Granted, I also have the time, currently, to do all that farming without it coinciding with my regular raiding schedule; many folks, however, do not. To take the heat off their raiders in such a competitive environment, many guilds provide repair money and/or consumables for their regulars. <Drow>, the top progression guild on Doomhammer (to which we are number 2), was farming BT and Hyjal for so long that they were able to sell attunements and rot loot drops in Tier 5 content. The proceeds of all their mindless work will directly fund their grind to Kil’jaedan. <Singularity> hasn’t had the opportunity to do that.

    There’s been a little guild drama. In the past two weeks, three players have left for varying reasons (complications in real life explaining a few) and we’ve been scrambling to fill their raid positions in time for Sunwell. As we only raid two or three days a week now with BT/Hyjal clears down to two days, many of the hardcore raiders have been itching for something to fill their schedules. All in all, morale seemed a little bit low and folks appeared to be turning inward for their own class needs rather than looking to support the guild. When I’m in, I’m all or nothing, and I’m committed to helping <Singularity> succeed in whatever capacity I can. Sometimes this means troubleshooting personnel issues for the raid leaders so they’re less stressed out. Sometimes it’s just listening. Sometimes it just means being the best tank I can be and excelling at my class. But for Sunwell, I wanted to do something different to prove that one person, with the unwitting help of a few others, can effect considerable change in a guild setting, and that if one person can do it, the combined efforts of 25+ would seriously fine tune our working mechanisms.

Thus began Project Sunwell. Since the flasks purchasable with Marks of the Illidari will now apparently work in the Sunwell, this is what I sought to provide, relying mostly on my own diligent farming, for the guild’s first night in Sunwell:

• 19 Mana Potion Injectors—one for every caster and healer
• 10 Fel Mana Potions for every hunter
• 10 Elixirs of Major Agility for every melee DPS class
• 10 Ironshield Potions for every tank (except me, LOL!)
• 10 Brilliant Wizard Oils—one for every caster
• 9 Brilliant Mana Oils—one for every healer
• 1 stack of class appropriate food for every raider

As of right now, I only need another stack or two of healer type foods (easily done), the oils, and the Ironshields. Fortunately, I had a little bit of help from a few people (most notably Brand and Lycentia) and some later volunteers to make oils (Madara and Toinz) when I announced this today on the <Singularity> forums. I hope to spur more folks into taking initiative rather than thinking everything’s a freebie and put into perspective how long it took me, as a singular entity to farm all of those materials (and thus how quickly we could do it if EVERYONE pitched in). I want to win. I want us to be fully prepared and ready to rock, and hopefully with this incentive, we’ll have a lot more grins rather than grim determination.

So if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t updated recently, now you know. With that out of the way I can start fully planning out what I need from Badge vendors (I have pointedly put this off despite the fact that I know Runy needs DPS gear and my paladin could use some more fun things for Retribution) and gleefully anticipating all the new non-combat pets.

In the wake of a world-first powerhouse like <Risen> (Alleria US) dissolving, I think it’s pertinent to shelve my first discussion about druid tanking and reevaluate the point of raiding, period. The sentiments expressed on <Risen>’s front page very similarly mimic my own, and yet I’m still slogging through farm content, methodically revising my rotations and fervently hoping I’ll finally get the gear I want to drop.

Last August, when Runyarusco was still on Baelgun, <Awen> wasn’t the only guild that disbanded. Two of the other top tier guilds exploded, for many of the same reasons we did, and Glen’s statement about <Ordo Dog Genius>’s demise sums it up pretty accurately (I hesitate to link to the actual source since their website is absolutely NSFW):

“Let it be known that nothing killed this guild but the raiding game that is TBC. This expansion is a fucking virus that has slowly infected and consumed every middle of the road raiding guild this game has to offer. If you aren’t a guild of casual players or a guild of bleeding edge psychopaths, I pray for the well being of your guild, because if it isn’t dead yet, it probably will be very soon.”

True enough. Guilds who used to do moderately awesome pre BC have faltered tremendously since the unveiling of the expansion. Unwilling to invest the time and effort into re-gearing and re-training a group of brand-spanking-new raiders when they couldn’t skim experienced players off other guilds, there wasn’t much else to do but dissolve and hope for the best. But what’s changed?

• Old-school players, dismayed by the marginalization of their Azeroth raid achievements, dropped out of the game.
• Pools of players built around 40 man raid content had to be squeezed into haphazardly stacked groups for 10 manning Karazhan or 25 manning the rest of the Outland content. As a matter of consequence, players who were previously “carried” through 40 man content fell under considerable scrutiny in competitive guilds.
• Previously difficult PvP achievements have been watered down to the point of ridiculosity, making epics easily attainable by doing nothing but standing around waving a stick in a battleground.
• Players have dropped large guilds of unfamiliars in favor of close friends for the sole purpose of arena PvP.
• “Badges” have been made available in heroic instances and Karazhan (and in the upcoming patch, will also drop from 25 man raid bosses), allowing access to T5 quality loot. Soon, T6 quality loot will be available as well, in addition to non soul-bound Nether Vortexes and epic quality gems.

According to WowJutsu, there are over 131129 guilds registered in the world currently, and of the 39892 ranked guilds, only 4.36% of those guilds have downed Illidan Stormrage (as compared to the approximate 99% of those guilds who have killed a boss in Karazhan). While I don’t consider any of the dungeon content particularly difficult save, perhaps, Kael’thas pre-nerf, very few people have had the desire and the appropriate group of like-minded retards to consistently raid day in and day out to get to Illybeans and his Council of Special Friends.

There are plenty of “retards” out there, but what about desire? I’m not referencing the warm feeling when you check out that fine bear ass standing next to you in Shattrath; I’m referencing the will and drive to spend a fair amount of free time (you know, the time normally reserved for eating, makeouts, sleeping and going to work) exploring and conquering dungeon content with the vague promise of a reward afterward. Here, I’ll use <Singularity> as an example of “relaxed” end game raiding. Sing raids five days a week, from 10 PM EST to 1:30 AM EST–that’s my time; our server is MST. During those particular raid times, each guild raider is expected to be on their main, rocking and ready to go, repaired, and fully consumable buffed. We generally start with Mount Hyjal, blow through that content and then try for 2+ bosses down in Black Temple. The next day we finish up Black Temple, play the DST lottery with Mr. Gruul, and spend the rest of the week farming trinkets and offset gear in SSC and TK. Gruul is a perfect example of time spent > reward attained. To this day–and I’ve been farming Gruul since February/March 2007–I have never seen a Dragonspine Trophy drop and it’s still one of the best melee DPS trinkets in the game. We farm that bitch endlessly and still have melee (including me) crying.

Why spend countless hours farming dungeons, learning new encounters, and beating your head against the desk when the only promise is spending a large amount of gold (which also needs to be farmed) and facing continual disappointment and stress? I have no fucking clue. All right, I’m lying; part of the enjoyment is working together with others to reach a common goal, especially when you’re striving to be one of the first groups to destroy an encounter. I had a metaphorical boner goosebumps when we first laid the Council to rest and charged up the stairs to face Illidan. I wait in giddy anticipation for Bloodboil to one day drop his Priest-on-a-stick. But with the impending patch notes threatening more “welfare” epics that can be got with badges, the looming cloud of class balancing for PvP (the trees have dodged a bullet) and the recent removal of realm co-op to open the Sunwell, it gets harder and harder to justify spending 16 or so hours a week striving to be the best.

With all we complain about, Blizzard has created a game environment that hasn’t been equaled in playstyle to date. When I mangle someone or accidentally auto-attack with my staff, it feels as though I’m really beating the pants off a mob. My toon looks reasonably cool. I don’t get that whole person-in-front-of-a-blue screen effect that Age of Conan (disappointingly) seems to project or the stupidly disproportionate characters that Vanguard would have you nance around with. Blizzard created a PvE game that originally shuffled PvP into a corner, the veritable mini-game of a much bigger environment, and now, as they try to reverse that, they’re turning their backs on the original patrons of their games: the raiders and the role players. Raiders might be elitist jerks, but the massive influx of immature noobs running around in PvP epics reminds me of Counterstrike on the LAN at college.

And so it comes to heroics and PvP. I can run those all day with a relatively marginal repair cost and minimal consumable farming, but I’m generally ambivalent. Sure, I can gear up my menagerie of alts without coercing guildmates to attune me to BT or Hyjal, or round out my multitude of armor sets with random badge pieces. But I admittedly miss the Old World villains and hope Blizzard will at least create a rich and interesting cornucopia of foes in Sunwell and beyond. Kalecgos has piqued my curiosity, but unless each encounter proves to be different or dynamic, more and more of the “hardcore” raiders will die of boredom or drop off the map entirely.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure Blizzard cares. With raiders occupying an increasingly small minority, Blizz stands more to lose monetarily by making them happy; a loss of the aforementioned 4.36% of players, nevermind the folks still in SSC and TK, would hardly dent their bank.

If you’re a raider effected by the Blizzard PvP Steamroller, mount up, unite, remind Blizzard where it came from, and start clamoring for change.