asdf!
Oh hi. Its been since August since I last posted, heh.
Well, how are things, you might ask? Interesting is probably the best answer I can think of.
From my last post, I ended up becoming the best geared Retribution Paladin on my server (as in, the damage dealing variety). I slipped as my guild became full of fail and stopped being able to stay current in content. Basically, I started playing again during patch 3.2. This patch came with a new raid (Trial of the Crusader, Trial of the Grand Crusader, aka ToC/ToGC). They "gated" the instance, which means that they released the bosses one at a time (for a total of 5). It had multiple modes, unlike Ulduar (which was patch 3.1). Ulduar had triggers for bosses to put them in to a hard mode, so basically if you fulfilled the criteria, you got hard mode, otherwise it was normal. There was a 10man and a 25man version of each. ToC had 10 and 25man versions as well, and once you completed the last boss in a version, you unlocked a heroic version (ToGC), which
was, and still is, fairly hard on 25man.
Now, I started playing again during 3.2. This meant that Ulduar was no longer the top of the line. The guild we were in had farmed out a lot of it, and as such, I got a lot of gear quickly. I also strategically bid on items so as to get a lot of good loot that people still wanted. We did the gate deal with ToC, and got stuck on the 3rd boss for a few weeks. This alone was embarrassing, but such is life. Eventually we did get through it, after getting rid of dead weight that we were carrying through. As such, we were getting gear from both Ulduar and ToC at the same time, and realistically should have been able to breeze through the content. This wasn't the case, however. We couldn't beat the last boss of Ulduar for a very long time, in fact it came about 2 months AFTER the new raid came out. We were over-geared for the content, and should have had it down a long time before we actually did.
That out of the way, we decided that we'd keep our nice little 25man ToC on farm, and work on old hard modes. This again was foolish, as we were kind of beating a dead horse. It took a few weeks of that to finally get frustrated with seeing the same crap all the time, and even more so that it was actually kicking our asses. Eventually we said that it would be best to just try and work on ToGC instead. This was a good idea, on paper, because we were more than sufficiently geared for it, and other servers had the HARD content on farm, why couldn't we?
Well, basically, we were in a situation where we had bad raid leaders, and more than our fair share of bad players. Good gear doesn't make a good player, and I still see it now. Ultimately, we got through to the second boss of the raid, and it ended badly, and the raid leader just spent his time yelling and putting people down. No one was really interested in doing it any more.
The final straw came when we partially blew up another guild and got a couple of incredibly good players in to ours. The biggest problem was that the GUILD LEADER of the old guild became one of our main tanks, and had spent a lot of time reading strats and actually learning the fights, while OUR tank officer had not, and was incredibly stubborn about it. Fortunately, through the new tanks pushes, we made our way through some stuff. With him, we took a successful group through Ulduar 10 hard modes and got the first Horde side Algalon 10man kill, 3rd on the server (Algalon is the real last boss of Ulduar, and is a hard-mode only boss). This was not without drama, and a couple of people complained, and ended up getting our jackass guild leader pissed, who then forced his way in to our group, which we ran on off nights that wasn't really a part of the guild. I fought back hard, saying that the guy had no real interest in actually doing the stuff until we were actually getting to be successful at it, and he just wanted in for the glory, without putting in the footwork. I wasn't the only one who thought this, but alas, we had to deal with that.
We had also been working on a 10man group through ToGC10, and that was going fairly well, including a few nights where we made our way to the last boss, and eventually managed to kill him. Using these strats, we tried to push through ToGC25.
Ultimately, this new tank got mad, and was threatening to leave. He didn't come to the guild to get yelled at and it was starting to cause him problems with his girlfriend. He wanted to go, and started shopping himself around. I was at my wits end, wanting to take a break from the game, to head back to FFXI for a while. Ultimately, I said at the end of our unsuccessful Friday night raid that I was going to be taking a break for a while. At the same time, our tank quietly said a few goodbyes, and logged for the night. The next day he posted on the forums thanking people for their time, and gquit and server transferred.
In between that time, however, I had logged off. Shannon ended up getting in a big fight with the other officers (she had been made a healing officer when we cleared dead weight from the guild). It basically ended up going between her and the stubborn tank officer. Shannon said something along the lines of this is a game, there is no reason to be mean to people just cause you can. He replied back about it being an employer-employee relationship, and that said tank needed to earn his respect first. Shannon again reiterated that it was just a game, not a job. Another officer, who had the title solely because she had been around for so long, decided to take personal shots at Shannon, saying something like "yeah, you know all about having a job". She then got called a bitch, told that she was the reason for the elitist attitude and was responsible for the problems of the guild, blah blah. Shannon said "well, let me take care of that problem" and left. I came on, told her off and left myself. The next morning, they lost their best tank (the aforementioned one) and by the end of the day, the guild was basically gone. As far as we're concerned, we destroyed it.
That left us in a strange place though. We started looking around for other servers to go to. We'd been longing for a better place for a long time, somewhere that we'd actually SEE these bosses die, and be in a place where we could be surrounded by good players. It wasn't happening though. I told Shannon to just find a place for herself, that I'd just as well quit. As a healer, she'd be fine going almost anywhere, but as a damage dealing paladin, I was a dime-a-dozen and probably only going to get bench warming spots (as in, backup raider). Not happy.
Word got around the server, as we both have a reputation for being good players. We were pretty much set on another server, in fact, the same server/guild as the tank that had quit, when we got an invite from a guild to join a ToGC10 run with them. This guild was formerly the top guild on our server, within the top 200 of all US guilds. Most of them had left and gone to another server, leaving this guild in shambles. They had been rebuilding. Also, they'd been struggling through some 10man stuff that we had done already, and really needed a healer. I was going to just drink beer and watch hockey, but they outright kicked someone from their guild who was in the raid and brought me along. It was sort of like a job interview I guess. At the end, they asked us straight forward to join. I thought about it for a while, and said to Shannon "look, lets give them a try, if it doesn't work out, we can just leave." Before the night was out, we'd joined.
And oddly enough, its been pretty decent. Despite rebuilding, they'd managed to pull together a pretty good group of players. We breezed through some regular junk with them, hell, we even managed to knock off all of the hard modes in Ulduar 10 (which is something we'd been working on for a while). We became a part of their really core group, and things were great. We started farming ToGC10, working on a wipeless raid (you get better loot for it), which we still haven't quite managed, but its getting there. Our biggest accomplishment, however, was being there to get through ToGC25. The last boss in there is still quite hard, and we haven't taken him down, but in 2-3 weeks of raiding these hard modes with them, we managed to catch up to EVERYONE else on the server. Many of them have been raiding this stuff since it came out, we did it in 3 weeks. Not too shabby.
Of course, now we're in new territory. Even grounds so to speak. The final raid of this expansion started last week. Its gated again, but we're obviously not going to let that stop us from working on it. As it stands now, we're in a 3-way tie for 1st place on the server. Its nice being able to have that kind of claim. We're not a proven guild any more, but we're on even playing grounds now, and we have a real shot at being the best again. Hell, I think we have a shot at being one of the best on US servers.
The best part is finally being part of a competent group instead of one that lucks its way through content. I'd rather be a leader than a follower. I look pretty good doing it too:
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Terenas&n=Aphmau
Well, off to bed now. I have to be up at like 5:30 to make pizza all morning :(
Well, how are things, you might ask? Interesting is probably the best answer I can think of.
From my last post, I ended up becoming the best geared Retribution Paladin on my server (as in, the damage dealing variety). I slipped as my guild became full of fail and stopped being able to stay current in content. Basically, I started playing again during patch 3.2. This patch came with a new raid (Trial of the Crusader, Trial of the Grand Crusader, aka ToC/ToGC). They "gated" the instance, which means that they released the bosses one at a time (for a total of 5). It had multiple modes, unlike Ulduar (which was patch 3.1). Ulduar had triggers for bosses to put them in to a hard mode, so basically if you fulfilled the criteria, you got hard mode, otherwise it was normal. There was a 10man and a 25man version of each. ToC had 10 and 25man versions as well, and once you completed the last boss in a version, you unlocked a heroic version (ToGC), which
was, and still is, fairly hard on 25man.
Now, I started playing again during 3.2. This meant that Ulduar was no longer the top of the line. The guild we were in had farmed out a lot of it, and as such, I got a lot of gear quickly. I also strategically bid on items so as to get a lot of good loot that people still wanted. We did the gate deal with ToC, and got stuck on the 3rd boss for a few weeks. This alone was embarrassing, but such is life. Eventually we did get through it, after getting rid of dead weight that we were carrying through. As such, we were getting gear from both Ulduar and ToC at the same time, and realistically should have been able to breeze through the content. This wasn't the case, however. We couldn't beat the last boss of Ulduar for a very long time, in fact it came about 2 months AFTER the new raid came out. We were over-geared for the content, and should have had it down a long time before we actually did.
That out of the way, we decided that we'd keep our nice little 25man ToC on farm, and work on old hard modes. This again was foolish, as we were kind of beating a dead horse. It took a few weeks of that to finally get frustrated with seeing the same crap all the time, and even more so that it was actually kicking our asses. Eventually we said that it would be best to just try and work on ToGC instead. This was a good idea, on paper, because we were more than sufficiently geared for it, and other servers had the HARD content on farm, why couldn't we?
Well, basically, we were in a situation where we had bad raid leaders, and more than our fair share of bad players. Good gear doesn't make a good player, and I still see it now. Ultimately, we got through to the second boss of the raid, and it ended badly, and the raid leader just spent his time yelling and putting people down. No one was really interested in doing it any more.
The final straw came when we partially blew up another guild and got a couple of incredibly good players in to ours. The biggest problem was that the GUILD LEADER of the old guild became one of our main tanks, and had spent a lot of time reading strats and actually learning the fights, while OUR tank officer had not, and was incredibly stubborn about it. Fortunately, through the new tanks pushes, we made our way through some stuff. With him, we took a successful group through Ulduar 10 hard modes and got the first Horde side Algalon 10man kill, 3rd on the server (Algalon is the real last boss of Ulduar, and is a hard-mode only boss). This was not without drama, and a couple of people complained, and ended up getting our jackass guild leader pissed, who then forced his way in to our group, which we ran on off nights that wasn't really a part of the guild. I fought back hard, saying that the guy had no real interest in actually doing the stuff until we were actually getting to be successful at it, and he just wanted in for the glory, without putting in the footwork. I wasn't the only one who thought this, but alas, we had to deal with that.
We had also been working on a 10man group through ToGC10, and that was going fairly well, including a few nights where we made our way to the last boss, and eventually managed to kill him. Using these strats, we tried to push through ToGC25.
Ultimately, this new tank got mad, and was threatening to leave. He didn't come to the guild to get yelled at and it was starting to cause him problems with his girlfriend. He wanted to go, and started shopping himself around. I was at my wits end, wanting to take a break from the game, to head back to FFXI for a while. Ultimately, I said at the end of our unsuccessful Friday night raid that I was going to be taking a break for a while. At the same time, our tank quietly said a few goodbyes, and logged for the night. The next day he posted on the forums thanking people for their time, and gquit and server transferred.
In between that time, however, I had logged off. Shannon ended up getting in a big fight with the other officers (she had been made a healing officer when we cleared dead weight from the guild). It basically ended up going between her and the stubborn tank officer. Shannon said something along the lines of this is a game, there is no reason to be mean to people just cause you can. He replied back about it being an employer-employee relationship, and that said tank needed to earn his respect first. Shannon again reiterated that it was just a game, not a job. Another officer, who had the title solely because she had been around for so long, decided to take personal shots at Shannon, saying something like "yeah, you know all about having a job". She then got called a bitch, told that she was the reason for the elitist attitude and was responsible for the problems of the guild, blah blah. Shannon said "well, let me take care of that problem" and left. I came on, told her off and left myself. The next morning, they lost their best tank (the aforementioned one) and by the end of the day, the guild was basically gone. As far as we're concerned, we destroyed it.
That left us in a strange place though. We started looking around for other servers to go to. We'd been longing for a better place for a long time, somewhere that we'd actually SEE these bosses die, and be in a place where we could be surrounded by good players. It wasn't happening though. I told Shannon to just find a place for herself, that I'd just as well quit. As a healer, she'd be fine going almost anywhere, but as a damage dealing paladin, I was a dime-a-dozen and probably only going to get bench warming spots (as in, backup raider). Not happy.
Word got around the server, as we both have a reputation for being good players. We were pretty much set on another server, in fact, the same server/guild as the tank that had quit, when we got an invite from a guild to join a ToGC10 run with them. This guild was formerly the top guild on our server, within the top 200 of all US guilds. Most of them had left and gone to another server, leaving this guild in shambles. They had been rebuilding. Also, they'd been struggling through some 10man stuff that we had done already, and really needed a healer. I was going to just drink beer and watch hockey, but they outright kicked someone from their guild who was in the raid and brought me along. It was sort of like a job interview I guess. At the end, they asked us straight forward to join. I thought about it for a while, and said to Shannon "look, lets give them a try, if it doesn't work out, we can just leave." Before the night was out, we'd joined.
And oddly enough, its been pretty decent. Despite rebuilding, they'd managed to pull together a pretty good group of players. We breezed through some regular junk with them, hell, we even managed to knock off all of the hard modes in Ulduar 10 (which is something we'd been working on for a while). We became a part of their really core group, and things were great. We started farming ToGC10, working on a wipeless raid (you get better loot for it), which we still haven't quite managed, but its getting there. Our biggest accomplishment, however, was being there to get through ToGC25. The last boss in there is still quite hard, and we haven't taken him down, but in 2-3 weeks of raiding these hard modes with them, we managed to catch up to EVERYONE else on the server. Many of them have been raiding this stuff since it came out, we did it in 3 weeks. Not too shabby.
Of course, now we're in new territory. Even grounds so to speak. The final raid of this expansion started last week. Its gated again, but we're obviously not going to let that stop us from working on it. As it stands now, we're in a 3-way tie for 1st place on the server. Its nice being able to have that kind of claim. We're not a proven guild any more, but we're on even playing grounds now, and we have a real shot at being the best again. Hell, I think we have a shot at being one of the best on US servers.
The best part is finally being part of a competent group instead of one that lucks its way through content. I'd rather be a leader than a follower. I look pretty good doing it too:
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Terenas&n=Aphmau
Well, off to bed now. I have to be up at like 5:30 to make pizza all morning :(