Progression Raiding and the Holidays

Apparently, my guild hasn't been following my amazing advice on how to get Mythic kills, because we've been stuck on M Tectus for a week and a half. With the holidays forcing less than ideal comps and a lot of off days, our ranking has fallen precipitously from how well we were faring at first. It's come to a point where we're becoming disheartened, faced with the harsh reality that after all the work we've put into beta testing every boss and splitting main/alt raids for the first time, our place is still firmly situated in the semi-hardcore bracket.

While there is yet an adequate amount of time to turn this around, we're still left with the post-Brackenspore depression from our pace of progression not meeting the high expectations we held at the start of the tier. By the time everyone is back from celebrating New Year's, we need to have learned to cope with this potentially crippling disappointment like many guilds experienced at the end of Firelands or on H Siegecrafter. Surely, a night of transformative revelry full of new hope and resolutions for a better year will be enough to inspire our raiders to come into Highmaul once again with a strong determination to perform like world-class players. Or it could just end up the same kind of situation in which we don't quite meet the level of success we anticipate and fall into despondence again.

Thus is the inherent danger of New Year's and all its hype of fresh beginnings only for people to succumb to the human failings of lack of discipline and perpetually procrastinating change, but I don't give a crap, because I LOVE NEW YEAR'S!!!

<3Avia.

It might not be annual.

It's time for the 1st Annual RP Your Life! Awards, when I call attention to some of the most notable aspects of this soon-to-be-ending expansion! Now before you report me to the committee for rigging the elections, please note that these are all personal choices, not reflections of popular opinion or objective fact. Feel free to propose your own nominees in the comments; I'd love to hear them.

Most Interesting Boss Fight: Siegecrafter Blackfuse

There are plenty of fights in Siege with interesting mechanics, but while I got sick of looking at a resource bar by Sha of Pride, I never grew tired of the belt. With the choice of which weapon to kill left up to the players, the fight can change drastically depending on which mechanics a particular team finds hard to manage, the raid size, or the difficulty setting. If you're a lucky boomkin or hunter, you could be on the belt full-time, and as much as people bitch about having to be on belt duty, it is truly the easiest job in raiding history besides maybe being a lock on Garr or anything on Gunship. I would have given my left kidney to stay on the belt instead of hang out in the fiery deathtrap that is the main platform. Even though the fight on normal becomes pretty trivial with improved DPS, it's still fun and engaging every time.

Boss Who Puts Up the Best Fight: The Spirit Kings

 

In WoW's encounter history, it often feels like bosses just hand us the tools to eventually kill them. How realistic can a fight feel when there are such conveniently placed mechanics like Feng's Nullification, Will of the Emperor's Opportunistic Strike, or Tortos' shells? In fact, the one boss that seemed to actually want to kill us rather than help us was the Spirit Kings. They offer no protective bubbles, damage-buffing pools, or one-shot disintegrating lasers that were totally negated by clearly defined paths of safety. While other bosses were giving us magic tiles or standing around while we disabled their bombs, the Spirit Kings tried to take our armor, pin us down, and turn us on each other. Even when Meng was cowering away, he still put up a damage-reflecting shield that could easily cause a player to kill him/herself. There are many fights that are more technically difficult, but in an actual battle, these guys would be tactical officers.

Best Normal-to-Heroic Conversion: Imperial Vizier Zor'lok

There are many easy methods for changing a normal fight to "heroic," and I've seen Blizz employ them over and over again: increase boss health enough to turn it into a DPS check, add adds, include an insta-death mechanic, tack on an additional phase and change nothing in the previous ones, etc. What makes a successful conversion is changing the fight in a way that makes the raid rethink its strategy while still maintaining an organic relationship with the normal-mode mechanics. Therefore, I give this award to Imperial Vizier Zor'lok. Not only was the fight varied in normal mode and culminated in a last phase combining all of his abilities, the insect-like shedding of an echo forced the raid to strategically split up and handle the mechanics they had already seen in new ways. Unlike Morchok, one didn't merely split the raid in half and continue like normal, and the last phase was so appropriately chaotic that it gave a sense of relieved triumph to defeat him.

Worst Mechanic: Horridon's Pink Dinosaur

Since I consider well-thought conversion from normal to heroic mechanics to be extremely important, the worst mechanic of Mists raiding has to be that pink dinosaur. I'm not going to bitch that it was hard, because it wasn't, especially for a ranged DPS like me. It was a terrible mechanic because it was just freaking annoying and turned an otherwise engaging encounter into a nightmare of micromanagement, and anyone unlucky enough to be picked early had to deal with repeatedly knocking back an add for up to ten minutes. In general, I love add fights and council fights because there is so much to juggle, and there is a pleasure in keeping a mental priority for what adds and their mechanics need to be taken care of and which can be ignored. The dinosaur? Well it adds nothing to any of that.

Best Pet Name For a Guy's Penis: Wheatley

Uh... How did this one get in here?

-Avia.

Making friends in the military starts with your sub-unit.

What it felt like:

 

There were plenty of people in our battalion but only a few of us in our platoon. Three warlocks against the forces of Orgrimmar defending their corrupt warchief. If that's all the lieutenant thought we needed to succeed in our mission, then so be it.

A little away from us, the healers huddled around a pile of complicated charts and graphs, their officer briefing the new priest recruit on his assignments. The tanks seemed to have their strategy set and were sitting quietly, keeping an eye on the enemy that marched in the distance. Meanwhile, one of the death knights had fallen asleep, and the other melee were taking turns teabagging him. How ironic.

"You alright?" asked a fellow warlock, sitting next to me.

"Yea," I replied, a little too quickly. My fortified rations sat unmoving in my stomach.

He patted me on the back with a heavy hand. I felt some of the anxiety dissipate under the pressure. "Just do your job," he said, staring off in the same direction as the tanks. "It's important to get the mines down before they reach the ranged troops. Just kill the mines, and if you're still alive at the end... Well, that'll really impress the officers."

"Ok," I said. "Got it." Just stay alive. Stay alive.

"Ready check!" yelled the lieutenant.

We all leapt to our feet, the death knight swatting away someone's crotch as he did so. I adjusted my staff and my shoulders with shaking hands.

"Get into positions! We engage in twelve seconds!"

Falling in line next to the other warlock, I looked over at him. He caught my gaze and smiled before turning towards the boss, a potion at the ready in his hand. I clutched mine too and faced forward.

It was time to prove myself.

What really happened:

 

[warlockchannel] Fellow warlock: Just stay alive.
[warlockchannel] Me: Kk.

-Avia.

HAPPY NEW YEAR AHHHHH!!!!

For our raid team, the new year brought new management. Yup, there has been a bit of shuffling around in the ranks, and our disc priest turned raid lead started off last night's Siegecrafter attempts with a speech so full of confident assurance of our future survival and stern beratement of our past mistakes that there was much moisture from the members of our team; and I don't mean tears. I guess there is truth in the old advice about men being attracted to inner-strength and confidence though I never had the fortune of experiencing it in action until I saw our hunter getting riled up Braveheart-style last night. There's nothing like an impassioned, uplifting speech to inspire the troops and turn them on... to raiding. ^_~

-Avia.

A Plea on Behalf of My Raid Team

Lately, my guild has been under a lot of strain. It definitely started around our 150th wipe on H Thok and is compounding with our near 200 on Siegecrafter right now along with a general complacency from a few key members of the team. Long story short, our progression has come to a halt and everyone has retreated to other, less stressful activities to cope.

We might still be hanging out together in Mumble, but the in-game guild roster is empty since almost all of us have suddenly renewed interest in D3. Our priest has been playing random games on Steam while our raid leader is out on a quest for tail. And where am I? Making friends with 12-year-olds and soccer moms on the Sims 3 website.

At this point, when we have lost any chance of ending the tier with a competitive rank and are  struggling just to hold ourselves together, there's no other alternative but to abandon any vestiges of credibility and beg for the one thing that most respectable raiders cry against.

-Avia.