Ding!!
My main, a troll mage, finally dinged to level 60 on Saturday after having started at the beginning of the year. Around 22 days play time if I remember correctly. It is sad that when I am at home I am too busy playing WoW to post this. It had to wait until I was at work
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Operation CWAL (my guild on Mannoroth) used to be in an coalition of three guilds. Op. CWAL, Forbidden Donut, and Brotherhood of Nine.
Op. CWAL was fine with Forbidden Donut (perhaps you've heard of them? "Illegal Danish" ring a bell? :P) - good bunch of people there. It's Bo9 we didn't get along with.
As a coalition, we were a Nefarian-clearing alliance, but we eventually split off from the rest for a number of reasons. And in the process, we lost our uber-geared, awesome main tank (Olgra).
So it was back to ZG for us. It was kind of spotty at first, depending on who went (lots of MC/BWL epic geared players = win, but the epic geared players weren't the ones who needed loot from ZG, aside from maybe reputation gains or the rewards from Hakkar. ZHC = win for casters.)
But we recruited some new healing, filled in some low-population classes and most importantly, geared up a new main tank (it helped that we had a lot of mats for high end epic crafted fire resist gear left over from when we split. For fire resist fights, anyway.)
So we got our main tank protection specced, decked out in gear and beefed up the roster. Things went a bit more smoothly after that.
Hint: Get your main tank geared and trained. Pick a new MT if the one you have can't hold aggro. Your main tank sets the pace at which the entire rest of the raid can do their jobs, and better damage reduction = less heals from healers = less healing threat. Plus, it reduces the likelihood a chain of crits will own his face.
People have to know the encounters. If the entire raid goes in without knowing the adds need to be controlled and killed ASAP, without knowing to counter/kick her big self-heal, and without knowing about the firebomb bats, that's a wipe.
Ony isn't bad. She's mostly a technical fight.
Getting 40 and getting into molten core ASAP is a good idea. When we split off, at first there was no way we could manage the core. But we were able to melt faces on Lucifron and Magmadar, which got us some good loot. But that's kind of an aside.
You probably want to get out to Azshara and get the Hydraxian quests ('cause they end up with a nice fire resist ring, and you need the aqual quintessence they give you to get to Rag). And you want to get into the core and start clearing trash, at the very least. See, the trash in molten core drop bind on equip epic set items, among other things. It's uncommon NOT to see at least one drop on any MC run, frequently more. They also drop lava cores, fiery cores, elemental fire, essence of fire, and with skinning, core leather. And there's dark iron down there.
All that stuff can be used to make epic-quality crafted fire resist gear which is really pretty good in general. Tank with dark iron helm + libram of resilience has something like 50 FR on one item right there.
Uhh. YEAH. So basically, it'll probably get more smooth and more reliable as people get better gear. Or something!
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I suspect when I log on in a few hours there will be no guild left.
It seems not a week goes by without one of the end game guilds disintegrating.
Oh well, at least I got a few ZG runs in, so I can claim at least some end game experience. :)
My current short term goals (besides looking for a guild) are to do the level 60 water quest, and work on the Ony key quest chain.
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On one hand, it's really useful to have.
On the other hand, when 300 people in ironforge start begging you for water, you can't say "I don't have my level 60 water" anymore. Well, you can, but you'd be a big fat liar.
It's actually even easier than it looks. If you have your dire maul key, you can solo-run through the first area in DM North into the library without aggroing anything, so you can pick up the quest (and turn it in) without a group. Then you just need a DM East group and you're done.
Endgame guilds splitting up isn't terribly UNCOMMON, although there tend to be those that are around for a while. CWAL's been around since beta (Actually, we've been around since pre-starcraft, but that's another story). The Squirrel Mafia has been around on Mannoroth since release, albeit they had some kind of an internal squabble and renamed themselves to "The Dark Squirrels". But guilds definitely do explode and reform. I know, because CWAL has absorbed refugees from like, five or six guild explosions.
And raiding alliances of more than one guild can work, but they're usually a bit unstable. Wouldn't count on them to be around forever (although the fewer guilds involved, the better. Two guilds raiding together that get along very well will probably last quite a long time).
You PROBABLY won't have too much trouble finding guilds, as a mage (depending on the class spread on your server), but I don't know what class swiftrat is. On Manno, rogues and hunters (I suspect this is true elsewhere) are a little overpopulated, so demand is pretty low.
And for what it's worth, without epic geared people, I actually think ZG is probably harder than MC. In the core, you have 40 people. There's more room for well geared and skilled players to pick up slack left by undergeared or lazy/bad players. In ZG, you have 20 people. So one bad/lazy player makes more of a difference.
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I actually haven't had many people asking me for free water (besides in instances, but I always offer then anyway). I actually get more people asking for ports and paying 1g for a port to the next city.
I have the DM key. Joined a group to do West a few days ago. But no one brought their keys! So we ran East to get them for everyone else in the group. And I was most frustrated at not having the quest at the time when we killed Hydro. I managed to get to the library solo and get the quest. Now all I need is the group for East.
Hunters seem to be the most over populated class, followed by rogues. The demand for mages isn't too bad, there are fewer warlocks about, I usually have a good chance of getting into a pug. Tanks and healers are most in demand from the LFM posts that I see. Curiously enough, a good proportion of the pugs I have joined have neither hunters or rogues. I guess they must be out there ganking the alliance than doing instances.
Swiftrat is playing a rogue. And for variety her highest level alt is a rogue too! She is playing a druid on another server.
I have a warlock 20, a druid 14, and a handful of characters below 10.
The guild has gone from 52 members on Sunday to 24 last night. I have already applied for a new guild, and wasn't immediately rejected like some of the other applicants were, so it looks promising.
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