WoW: Vanity Thy Name Is…

Post soundtrack: “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon

I decided to do something about my unguilded state, and the easiest route was a vanity guild for myself.  I purchased the guild bank slots while I was at it, so there’s a lot of space for me to fill with bits and pieces while I wait for Cata.

I’m not planning on making the guild a ‘real’ one (I’ve been a GL before, and it turns out I’m pretty dire at it), but it gives me somewhere to put my alts while I fail to get around to finding a raiding guild for Cata.

Now to go fishing for Mr Pinchy.

/wave

Rumours Of My Demise

…have been greatly mistaken.  Rumours of my laziness, however, have been right on target.

Post soundtrack: “Still Alive” from Portal

It was nice taking a break from writing and just levelling up my shiny new gnome rogue, but I guess enough is enough, time to get back to it.  So hello again, I’m back and…  well, still lazy.  But I’ve managed to level a character to 80 who isn’t a dwarf, which is something of an accomplishment.

Meet Pringle, mutilate rogue.  Although still under-geared (she’s only been 80 for a couple of days, after all), she’s well up to the task of taking names and kicking errant posteriors.  (Incidentally, I discovered this wonderful collection of rogue levelling tips after Pringle hit 80 – my timing is, as always, superb)

Today she managed to finagle her way into both VoA-10 and VoA-25, and performed to an admirable standard for someone who was (at the time) still wearing 7/8 pieces of crafted blue PvP gear.  In fact she managed 3.2k dps in 25-man, and 3.3k in 10-man.  Sure she was only in 16th place in the meters for the 25-man, but for such low-level gear I’d say she’s right on track to definitely not suck.  (On a side note, it’s the first time I’ve been in there since before Toravon joined the throng in there – that would have to be the most underwhelming boss fight I’ve seen)

I’ve also been doing a few battlegrounds (in between LFD heroics) and a couple of Wintergrasps, and Pringle’s now not only wearing two pieces of T9 (shoulders and gloves) but also has the relentless PvP boots (saving for a PvP cloak next).  It’s proving pleasantly fast to earn badges, and the honor from running random battleground is also not bad (apart from Strand of the Ancients, which I find to be even less fun than I remember WSG ever being – oddly enough, I’ve yet to have WSG come up so far).

I’m undecided about what to do next – continue gearing Pringle up as an intellectual exercise (with no idea of whether there any raids in her future), or move on to levelling my other priest or my shaman.  However, after the length of time I spent with Pringle, it’s a lot more tempting to put together the badges to buy heirloom gear before much levelling is likely to occur.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the lack of drama in the LFD dungeons I’ve run through – no loot drama, and players who are new to a dungeon have been open to explanations of fights and suggestions on how best to get to the end.  But then thanks to the way LFD assembles groups I suspect I’m the notional under-geared nub who’s supposed to get carried by the other, much better equipped and more experienced players.

I’m tempted to start looking for a guild to join, as I’ve been feeling nostalgic about raiding after remembering back to my old Tempest days after writing my previous post about the changes coming to Cataclysm raids, but the difficulty in finding a suitable guild along with the possible (probable?) cost of character transfers if it requires moving server are quite discouraging. 

But I guess at the root of it, I’m just afraid that Tempest was a case of the right group of people at the right time, and isn’t something that is likely to reoccur.  (Hopefully that’s just me being pessimistic)

On the off-chance that one of my readers know of a mature (I’m not looking for drama) yet easy-going guild (ideally professional in their approach to raiding) which is either looking for a disc priest (I’m only average as Shadow, and was pretty dire at holy for the brief period I was an involuntary holy priest in early ICC) or a rogue (currently Mutilate, but raided as combat-swords back in TBC from TK/SSC into early Sunwell) on Dath’Remar-US (where most of my older characters are) or Argent Dawn-US (where I’ve been lately), drop me an email.

For now, though, I’m just taking it easy.  Gearing up is (still) kind of fun, but I can’t help but wonder if somewhere out there is a group of people who need me but just don’t know it yet.

/wave

Toto, I've A Feeling We're Not In Kansas Any More.

Well, I’m trialing in another raiding guild and…  I miss my old guild.

It’s actually odd to discover how much of my enjoyment of raiding can be blamed placed on the people I was raiding with, and just how unsatisfying it can be to find myself playing with a new group of players who, while they’re more competent…  well…  the raiding just isn’t as much fun.

It’s an odd feeling, to be the new guy in a well-established social group, with their in-jokes and expectations, most of which I have no idea about.  Which isn’t to say the new guild isn’t most likely a good bunch of people who are fun to raid with – it’s just that I suspect my interest in raiding may not survive long enough to make the transition.

It’s a pity, as since joining I’ve experienced heroic 25-man Anub, finished 25-man Firefighter, 25-man Knock, Knock, Knock On Wood (although I died early on the successful attempt), and encountered Algalon for the first time (on 25-man, no less).

My experience of being thrown in the deep end as a holy priest has been more frustrating, however.  I’m very much aware of how poorly I’m performing (especially on trial), but so far I’ve had minimal feedback from anyone.  I suspect I’m also underperforming as disc, but it’s hard to tell with only the meters to guide me (and anyone who’s played disc knows how unhelpful they can be).

It doesn’t help my cause that I’m too anxious about the whole new-people thing to ask all that often – I’ve already had a couple of “Well, you should have done that already” moments during raid with boss videos, and another time when I didn’t realise I’d lost the healing channel until we were pulling the first boss of the night…  Way to impressive the healing officer, for sure.

I’m pretty sure I could follow my old guildies who’ve made the jump to Blackrock, but the higher performance bar on that server is something I’m wary of.  The fact it’s a PvP realm is also something I’m holding against it - PvP is something I only want to do when I opt in for it.  Mind you, I can’t afford to server-transfer any characters any time soon due to the fact I’m saving to upgrade my computer with a new cpu and motherboard, which renders such speculation pointless.  (Mmmm, quad-core…)

I really don’t know what I want to do, but suspect I’ll end up following the path of least resistance and continue raiding with newguild until I either, a) get used to them, or b) fail my application (although the latter is my best guess at this stage).  3.3 is slooooowly drawing closer, and after that we’ll be getting that cataclysmic game reset that probably renders the whole problem moot anyway, as the new Star Wars and Trek MMOs will probably be out by then if WoW has failed to hold my attention (which is increasingly likely).

Perhaps I’m just not cut out for modern raiding.  Or perhaps what I thought was satisfaction playing the game was actually due to the company I was keeping?  Time to consider my options.

/wave

Holy Moly!

It looks like I’m going to be expanding my horizons, as I’ve been accepted into one of the few hard-mode guilds, who are currently doing 25-man heroic ToC.

Needless to say, I’m a little nervous.

Or maybe, quite a bit nervous.

You see, I’ve been given a trial as disc/holy despite my having no holy experience.  I’ve done my research, re-gemmed and adjusted my gear to suit holy (and picked up a couple of upgrades to suit), along with changing my much-disliked shadow spec to holy, and setting up Vuhdo and Power Auras for my new holy spec and spells.

Now it’s a matter of getting some hands-on experience to go with my new-found theoretical knowledge.  Might be a little short of time, as first raid is scheduled for tomorrow night.

Yay, me?

LFG Raiding Guild?

Well, that settles that…  Another week where the guild couldn’t field a full 25-man raid, and we’ve finally thrown in the towel as a 25-man progression raiding guild (after the officers relented after their initial decision to retire, and tried for two more months to keep us going).

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do – as a healer, 25-man raiding is just more fun.  10-man, while a good time-filler, doesn’t measure up for challenge or rewards (other than trinkets, in some cases).  Some guild members have considered trying to do 10-man raids, maybe also 10-man hard-mode ToC (which I haven’t been able to do – disc priest healing isn’t good enough), but I don’t really want to do anything less than 25-mans (although that’s possibly my contrary nature shining through).

Unfortunately, after the wonderful experience of this guild I’m not looking forward to starting over with another guild if I want to get back into another 25-man guild.  It not only means leaving behind the collection of weird and wonderful people in this guild, but also hoping I get lucky and the guild I join is a fun group to raid with.

At heart, though, I just feel sad.  With our GM planning on server-transferring in search of 25-man progression (possibly along with other members), it feels to me like we’re also losing the heart of the guild.  Sadly I’m about to hit a financial crisis of my own, so server transferring myself isn’t really likely anytime soon (and would be problematic, with my support network of alts and lack of experience as a healer).

/sigh

Is WoW The Game It Used To Be?

Or it the players who’ve changed?

I never reached the level cap playing vanilla WoW so missed old-school raiding, but managed to raid everything in TBC up to Felmyst in Sunwell.  However, the changes to raiding that Wrath has brought us seem to have changed the raiding experience considerably for a large number of people, myself included, and not necessarily for the better.

Last night our guild was faced with the possibility that a large number of the raiders (including several officers) are so unsatisfied with the quality of our raiding (and the lack of recruitable players on the server) that they’re facing either stopping working on 25-man hard modes (which are pretty much the only remaining measure of progression raiding) or transferring to another server with a more mature raider population in order to continue progression raiding.

Several factors have lead up to this, ranging from experienced players getting burnt-out and leaving the game, to raiders server-transferring to more progressed guilds elsewhere, to unreliable raiding performance of current raiders (myself included) and general dissatisfaction with the progression-raiding model.  While some people are afraid that we may end up disbanding or at least retiring from 25-man raiding, the officers are working on one last recruiting push to try and get enough capable raiders and see if we can still push hard-modes.

Personally I’m beginning to think that if I’m not careful, this might be the feather that broke this particular camel’s back.  WoW (and the people I play it with) is a big part of my life, but the game doesn’t have the thrill that it used to.  Raiding especially has changed, with the challenge level going from “Challenging” in TBC for everything (well, with the exception of Sunwell), to either “Faceroll” for normal fights or “Impossible” for hardmodes in the current raiding tiers.

Apparently (hearsay FTW!) Blizzard’s goal with hard-modes is that only the top 1% of players are skilled enough to complete them.  I reckon this is raising serious issues with raiding guilds, who at a rough guess comprise 5%* of the total player base, but due to the binary nature of current raid difficulty the majority of them will end up either wiping in growing frustration or possibly dropping hardmodes entirely due to their very small reward-to-effort ratio.

* – Numbers may have been completely fabricated in order to support my rant.  Take with a large grain of angry salt.

Gear no longer has any meaning more than being the (occasionally aesthetically pleasing) vessel for your various stat bonuses – some of my guildmates still keep their T6 sets in the bank, because of how much completing the set meant.  However, when they replace their T7 with T8, or T8 with T9, the set it’s replacing will get vendored without a second thought because of how little the old items mean in this age of disposable gear.

The leveling game isn’t all that bad (once you get past the archaic 1-60 grind), and Outland is still quite beautiful (well, apart from Hellfire Peninsula).  But once you hit 80, the remaining game (either self-goals like collecting pets/mounts/reputations/achievements or group goals like raiding) just isn’t that exciting anymore.  Even raiding has gone from feeling elation at having defeated boss X (so you can move onto the next boss), to feeling relief that boss Y is dead (until next week).

I suspect I’m just getting burnt out by the same-ness of the endgame (and the necessity of a month of jousting to open up the latest group of dailies is just salt in an open wound).  To be blunt, I’m running out of things to do.

So it’s time for a change.

I’m going to try something new on my priest; I’ve changed raiding spec from shadow to discipline, and that means trying something very new.  I’ve spend a metric bucket-load of gold picking up some new disc-friendly gear (including the Etched Signet of the Kirin Tor – thank you Inscription), and my talent build has passed the healing officer’s once-over, so now I just need a lot of experience (which I suspect I’ll be getting in short order).

Here’s hoping we’re able to pull the guild back together, and reclaim our place as A Guild That Doesn’t Suck.

/wave