Tuesday (20 Apr) - The Laws of Progression and Farming

Tuesday - The Laws of Progression and Farming

Like the laws of Physics in the real world, WoW has it's own immutable laws, documented in theories as thoroughly defined as physic's theory of relativity.

Wild's guild raids on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as everyone knows. We start with a fresh run on Tuesday. While the guild does not like to call it a farming run, this is exactly what it is. We now have as many as eight bosses on farm, out of the 12 encounters in Icecrown Citadel. We almost always have a very strong turn out for the Tuesday run, and since guild raiding rules give priority to our Tier 1 raiders, the best geared and (subjectively) the best raiders will almost always fill the Tuesday raid.

On Wednesday raiders tackle bosses that Tuesdays raid didn't get to or couldn't kill. Again, the guild does not want to name this night as Progression night, but again that is exactly what it is. The bosses faced on Wednesday are tougher and in many cases have yet to be defeated. This raid wipes a lot, and kills few bosses. Many Tier 1 raiders do come on both Tuesday and Wednesday night, but many don't, and the guild has a hard time filling the Wednesday night raid.

The guild recognizes the disparity in the two nights, and proposed a plan to even things out. That plan went into effect this week. Last night (Tuesday) the guild did a "lockout" on ICC, so that it would not reset to a fresh a run. Instead of facing farm content, the raid would be facing Putricide as their first boss (which we wiped on like 9 times last week) and maybe even the Blood Queen, an even tougher encounter. Most Tuesday nights the guild gets 30+ sign ups for Tuesday. On this particular Tuesday night, 19 signed up.

Despite every effort of the guild short of PUGing the raid (asking strangers to fill in), we could field no more than 21 raiders. Note that last Wednesday we butted heads against Putricide with 23 raiders for most of the night, and you know how that worked out. It was useless to try with 21.

For the sake of completeness, I will add here that we are entering into the spring break and college finals period, and some raiders participation may be affected by that. One would think that it would affect both nights, though, so we'll see if that is a factor.

A suggestion was made to drop the lockout and start a fresh run. Even with only 21 we could probably beat at least the first four encounters. The down side of doing that was that it would mean more clearing on Wednesday night and less time practicing against the tougher bosses. The positive side was that at least we'd get a few bosses down, and the Wednesday group, even though they wouldn't see a fresh raid, might get shots at bosses we haven't seen lately. Over several objections, the raid leaders opted to drop the lockout and do a fresh run with 21 raiders.

The night turned into a learning experience, however, when the locked out raid was unlocked. Due to the timing of when raiders entered the instance, we ended up with part of the raid in one instance, and part of the raid in another. Without getting technical, it meant we would not be able to raid ICC this night. We think that we were able to re-lock ICC so that on Wednesday we will now be facing Putricide instead of seeing a fresh instance.

Now comes the test of the theoretical laws of progression and farming. Remember that this Tuesday we had only 19 raiders sign up. For Wednesday night, the night we have trouble filling, there are 24 signed up as of this morning, which is a good number for a usual Wednesday. But this is not a usual Wednesday, since when most folks signed up this was to be a farming run instead of the usual progression run. Now, however, because of the dearth of raiders on Tuesday and the lockout problem, Wednesday is again a progression night with Putricide first on the agenda. So, at raid start on Wednesday how many will actually show up to raid? Those theoretical WoW scientists will surely get some good data to prove or disprove the theory of progression and farming.

We didn't ditch the raid completely. The weekly frost raid was Sartherion in Obsidium Sanctum. We took our 21 raiders to OS and slaughtered poor Sartherion. We did it in an interesting way, too. There are three mini-bosses (drakes), that when left alive to fight alongside Sartherion make the fight harder, but increases the loot. We decided to "zerg" the encounter, which means we intended to go all out on DPS against Sartherion, and ignore everything else - the three drakes, the elemental adds, everything. The strategy was simply to kill Sartherion before the whole raid died. That was a riot! And it worked.

Philly has been building up her pvp gear, getting into several WG battles and even winning a random pvp dungeon daily in Eye of the Storm. Philly is starting to replace her Frostsavage gear (mostly ilevel 187 stuff) with i232 and i245 stuff. She also now has over 200 WG shards and will be able to buy her first heirloom item by next week. Until then, only Wild and JB could get heirloom gear, and getting that gear from their account to the account Philly is on was a pain and a cost in real life dollars. Now Philly will be able to rectify that over time.