Tuesday (16 Feb) - No Maintenance!?

Tuesday (16 Feb) - No Maintenance!?

There was no maintenance run on Tuesday. One has to wonder whether that will help or hurt in regard to the login and lag issues that has battered the game in the early evening for close to two weeks. Wild will find out in a few hours.

Another issue of the non-maintenance is that they are routinely used to open and close special events. The Lunar Festive kicked off Tuesday on schedule, but interestingly the Valentine's events that should have closed up shop are still in operation. Philly still has a chance to get a full closet of fancy dresses, in addition to other romantic goodies.

Philly wasn't completely absorbed in frills, though. The Valentine's quests provided over 100k in xp per day. Add in the 136k in quest xp for the dailies on the Isle, and Philly DINGED! to level 73.

Tuesday also brought the new weekly Frost raid, and it was perhaps the easiest encounter yet - Flame Leviathon in Ulduar. Since Levi is a vehicle fight, there was no need to find tanks, healers, DPS, etc. All that was required (or should be required) was to know the fight. Well . . .

Wild volunteered for what I thought was a ten man Levi run. Only after being invited into the raid did Wild hear that the raid leader was getting so many whispers he decided to move up to a 25 man raid. The raid filled fast, likely faster than the raid leader expected. Raiders started filing into Ulduar, only to be told to come back out as it was still set at ten man. Once that was sorted out a rather ragtag group poured into Ulduar and began racing to vehicles. The raid leader did no set up and offered no leadership, unfortunately, and raiders gunned their vehicles and engaged haphazardly. Even the uncoordinated assault managed to take out the trash. However, the race through the trash left many towers still standing and there was no pause to assemble as a team once we got to Leviathon. To make matters even worse, the raid was set to hardcore mode.

We wiped, although not as badly as we should have. The only good thing out of that first run was that Wild got a look at all the nasty things that have to be overcome in hardcore mode. It was kinda cool, and had we been 10% coordinated we could probably have beaten him. Oh well.

Three players defected, leaving us with 22 raiders. We went at it again in normal mode, took down the towers, and were beating up on Levi when a raider took his vehicle out of the combat zone. Levi reset and one shot the raid. Another wipe. The raider who caused the wipe apologized. His reason? He'd let his young son take over the vehicle, un-supervised.

There was a mass migration after that. Wild hung around as the number dwindled to ten and held. Those of us that remained at least had a clue. We reset for ten man and easily destroyed Flame Leviathon.

Sometimes, the easier it's supposed to be, the worse it is.

Even JB wants to give the weekly a try. She knows what to do, and her modest stats don't matter in this type of fight. The only disadvantage to lesser geared players against Levi has to do with the amount of health of the vehicles themselves. Vehicle health is determined by the ilevel of the raider's gear. So raiders are always advised to equip their highest ilevel gear, no matter what stats they have. This mostly matters for the vehicle drivers. Raiders with the lowest ilevels are usually assigned as siege engine gunners. Demolisher gunners also work, unless the raid leader wants to use the catapult feature, where demo gunners (always ranged DPS) are launched onto Levi to attack the turrets. It wasn't used in the raid Wild did and I doubt it will be used by others just wanting to get the quest done. Another good spot for lesser geared players is on the motorcycles, where the primary duty is spreading burning oil. They are fun to play around with, easy to learn, and if they get destroyed it probably won't hurt the raids chances that much.

The Lunar Festive kicked off on Tuesday, as mentioned above. This event is loosely based on a Chinese holiday, and features lots of fireworks and a huge quest line to "honor the elders" which on the practical side means travelling to every corner of both horde and alliance zones and cities to get Coins of Ancestry from specially marked npcs. What makes this interesting to the Wild family is that completing the quests rewards faction rep for all the major cities, which is a great help in trying to reach Exalted rep with all the horde cities. I expect that Wild, JB, and Philly will try to get as many done as possible over the next week.

Tuesday Night - Please excuse the more somber tone as Wild is not in the best of moods. For the second week in a row he was assigned as a standby, and did not get in the guild's 25 man ICC raid. Here is the way I see it. I saw that most of the raid healers who were in last week's raid also got invites to this week's raid as well. By my count four of the six healers were the same. As for the other two, I can only be sure that one priest from last week could not make it and was replaced with another priest who had been a standby last week. I'm pretty sure there were two druid healers last week, but one of them was not here and was replaced, I believe, with a shaman. The final makeup of the healers were one druid, two priests, two shaman, and a paladin. Yesterday, long before the raid, I posted some questions about the new EPGP system as well as asking for clarity about how raid invites will/are being handled. Guild leadership had opened a thread about that more than a week ago, asking for input, and got it, but so far have not provided any guidance. Seems Wild will have to push this a lot little harder.

As I write this JB is busy flying from town to town, collecting Coins of Ancestry from the elders. Not all of them are in easy reach of a town, so for non-80s getting all of the coins could be a real challenge. JB is still thinking about how she is going to get coins from the alliance town elders, as those are also needed for the achievement and provide faction rep.

While on this mission DER popped in and we almost teamed up for the random daily dungeon. JB chickened out, though, because the random dungeon was Occulus (OCC) and JB was given a healthy hate of the place through Wild. Wild has a mental block with the dragon riding/flying that is a crucial part of OCC. Despite a lot of practice, and many wipes, Wild just can't get the hang of it. So rather than exasperate and infuriate other group members with Wild's ineptitude, I just stay away. Wild's only successful OCC run was with the guild, who promised Wild that they would help him through it. Even so, we wiped on the first attempt. We finished it on our second try, despite Wild. That one win was enough. JB apologized to the group, and abandoned DER to his fate. DER has no problem with OCC, his group cleared the dungeon, and DER even won an extremely nice super fast flying mount. Gratz!

DER and JB later hooked up for a Wintergrasp pvp battle, which the horde won in a landslide. JB has maxed out her pvp honor again at 75k, and will have to spend some of it. There is new gear now available and she was overwhelmed with the number of choices. Time for JB to get back into regular WG runs to pick up more of that wonderful pvp loot. Oh, and JB now has 25 of the 75 coins she needs for the Lunar achievement.