Monday (25 Jan) - Guild Notes

Monday (25 Jan) - Guild Notes

A new guild 25 man schedule was posted on Sunday, changing our wed/fri to tues/wed. Wild will be available for the Tuesday run but will still be running with the MM raid on Wed/Thurs. In the short term this should help Wild as the guild has been able to down the first three bosses in ICC so far on their first night. Wild has at least a passing familiarity with the first two (Marrowgar and Deathwhisper), so I won't be totally out of my element. That, of course, assumes that Wild gets an invite. Winning gear could get harder, though, as the guild intends to establish a DKP system again to control how gear is distributed.

Raid nights were changed partly because the second night on Friday was not well attended, with numerous folks saying they had conflicts. I also believe the new transfer guildies requested the change. The first night of a raid is generally the more popular. Wild can only sign up for the first night, but the guild is encouraging folks who can only make one night to still sign up. What will be interesting to watch is whether Wednesday, which as the first raid night had better and growing attendance than Friday, will stay that way after a few of nights of wiping on new bosses, which is typically what the second night is about.

There is also the spectre of the guild going more and more toward hardcore raiding, as there are really no high visibility "social guild" type players around anymore to balance things. Wild is something of a remnant of the days of "casual raiders" and some already disenfranchised friends have warned Wild privately that my days of raiding with the guild may be numbered. All I can say is that I've been through this cycle numberless times, and Wild is still here and still raiding. The way I see it is that the raid either still sees value in having Wild in the raid, or they can't figure out how to fill a raid without having Wild along. I know I'm not the best player and never have been. But I hope that Wild's reliable attendance, positive attitude, and willingness to pound my head against new bosses for as long as it takes carries some weight.

Oh, and what this new schedule also does is open up Friday night for some pvp play time. :-)

Speaking of pvp, EZ did intend to get in game Monday night for some EZ, Ando, and Lao action. However, Wild had messed around all week without getting the weekly raid badge run done. Monday night was his last chance, and when a former guildie friend started up a raid to Ulduar for the badge run, Wild had to get in on that. It had been quite a few weeks since Wild last entered Ulduar. For the badge run the kill quest was XT-002, but we had to go through Flame Leviathon first to get to the girly screaming robot. Wild and a pally were healing. Although Wild goes moonkin for the five man heroic runs, I still prefer to heal in raids, even with PUGs.

Flame Leviathon was an easy kill, even if the driver of the siege engine that Wild was the gunner for didn't know where to go and kept attacking things that didn't need to be attacked. We then killed the two sets of trash in front of XT. Those mobs can be tricky, but we simply overpowered them.

The fight with XT, which Wild had all kinds of problems with in the early days of Ulduar, was laughingly simple. If you recall XT has a combat phase and a phase where he exposes his heart where we do most of the damage to him. Usually there are long periods of combat and short periods with his heart exposed. Poor XT got hit so hard that no sooner would he enter combat that he'd "get tired" and expose his heart. And he did it over and over again. We put the robot out of it's misery quickly. Wild has never seen all of Ulduar. Maybe Wild can convince his ten man to run it some night so I can get that experience.

Ando and Lao were pvping while Wild did the Ulduar run, but by the time Wild finished it was 10pm and Lao had already had to leave. Before Wild retired for the evening I noticed that the guild was running ICC10. I took a look at the names and nine of the ten were transfer guildies. So this is the new, third ten man. The one original guildie in their raid was a druid healer. Their group did seem to be light on healing type players, so that part of our guild makeup hasn't changed much even with the new infusion of players.

Anyway, Wild retired for the night and EZ and Ando got in three WSG matches. The first two were grimly frustrating. On the first match, whether the horde group was that bad or the allie team that good, we really could do nothing against them. It got to the point where the allies were able to take over and occupy the horde base, something I'd never seen happen before. And we couldn't take it back. In the second battle we got into a situation where the best we could do was to defend our base. We were pretty good at that, but we were losing 1-0 at the time, and there is a time limit on the match. Unable to do anything else, time ran out and the allies won since they were ahead. We got a little redemption on the third match, finally getting a win.

Wild is looking forward to the Tuesday night 25 man raid, but is also a little anxious. I'm fairly confident that Wild will get an invite, but a little worried about Wild's rookie status in a raid full of ICC experienced and better geared players.