Monday Musings: Brain Dump Edition.

Last week I had the luxury of being a complete and total bum.  That is to say that I took vacation time with the sole purpose of pretty much doing, well, nothing.  Ok, that’s not entirely true.  I had wanted to get old update posts hosted on a different web host transferred over to the new host before the paid time expired on the old host.  However, my laziness won out and that task totally did not happen.

Sometimes you just need a week of lazy.  But lazy or not, the world (of warcraft) still turns.  And things must go on.  So in order to get back into the swing of things, I thought I should go ahead and let everything that has been gathering in my brain for the past week air out, so that I can perhaps get some fresh thoughts in the old belfry.

On Raiding

We have started work on our 6th hard mode: Conclave of Wind.  We spent about 3.5 hours with it last night, trying to work through the kinks and really with a few tweaks I think we should net a kill fairly soon.  We had the basic issues that everyone has with Rohash’s platform – but as people got more comfortable with it the mistakes slowed down.  We didn’t really have issues with surviving the ultimates – and generally had both Rohash and Anshal down to ~30% before entering the second ultimate.

Really, the only bad thing about the encounter, in my opinion, is that it is very reminiscent of Vaelstraz in the wipe/run back repeat approach.  When first learning the fight, you tend to wipe very early into it…repeatedly.  With there being no trash to clear, and the wipes coming very close together, this means that you have wipes in very quick succession while trying to work through all of the mechanics/kinks.  That in and of itself is one of the challenges in the encounter to my mind.  It’s hard to keep people fresh and on their toes for wipe after wipe, with little or no reprieve in-between.

It’s my hope that we can shore up this encounter and net a kill tonight so we can start a new hard mode next week – but it may take us another night or two to work through everything.

On Stumbling

Do you ever have thoses raid nights where you wonder if space aliens have captured your guild, and replaced them with players that you don’t recognize?  Yea, we had one of those nights this week on Heroic Atramedes.  I’m not even sure that I can begin to explain what the problem was outside of collectively, as a team, we just weren’t getting it.  Which is odd, considering that we knocked him out last week in 3 pulls.

We went into Thursday night with only 3 bosses left in BWD – and it was our hope to quickly knock them out and start our work on Concalve.  However, sometimes even the best laid plans can go awry.  And we spent the majority of the night stumbling over Atramedes.  Any number of our pulls could have and should have been a kill – but pull after pull something went wrong and prevented it.  At the end of the night we said “that’s it folks, we will let him rot this week”, so that we could get our alloted time in on Conclave, which was our target for the week.

However – we ultimately decided that we’d see what people wanted to do with regards to Atramedes, and placed a poll on the forums asking people if they wanted to go back for him.  The poll options were as such:

• Yes – I think we can get it done and it’s worth the time to go back for the upgrades, but understand that if we can’t do it in the time limit that’s it.
• No – We already used the time we had for it, and I would prefer to continue to push forward with progression and focus Conclave as planned.

As the weekend wore on, the poll fluctuated, eventually ending in a 50/50 tie between the two options.  Ultimately, after a few hours of Conclave wipe/run back, we decided to get a change of scenery and went back in and cleared BWD. 

However, someone said something too me that basically caught me from left field regarding the poll.  When commenting that I found it interesting to see the pull fluctuate over the weekend, someone commented that they thought it was sad that people voted “no” – and that they thought it was a lack of integrity and a belief that either the people who voted no didn’t trust their team mates enough to get the job done, or that they didn’t trust themselves enough to get the job done.  And the reason this caught me completely off guard was that I had voted “no”, we should not go back.  However, it wasn’t because I didn’t think that we could do it – I knew we could, as we have done so before and will no doubt do so repeatedly again.  But my vote was 100% wanting to move forward with progression.  I also know, from conversations others had with me privately, that others who had voted “no” did so for much for the same reasons that I had.

When push comes to shove, I guess I was somewhat bothered that the assumption that it was a lack of integrity that lead to those who voted “no” in doing so, and I do not feel that was the case.  I truly believe that people really wanted to continue our progression push, I know that I least I did.  Not only that – but people really loathe Throne of the Four Winds as a whole – so outside of wanting to continue with progression, I do not see them eagerly jumping to favor that zone.  Especially when the week before, when we were pushing for Magmaw, everyone was OK with not clearing the zone to focus on Magmaw if needed.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why this comment rubbed me so wrong.  Unless I’m just being defensive for my choice, the choices of others or my leadership style – I mean, I certainly don’t feel that I lack integrity.  I also don’t feel that in my 6 + years of WoW I shy away from challenges just because they are challenging.  Either way, I suppose it’s a moot point now, just something that caught me off guard and makes me wonder what people think about the decisions we make from a leadership perspective.  Food for thought, more than anything else, really.

On The Great Haste Experiment

I’ve started to write up my conclusions on this, and have been scouring through the logs for the post.  I haven’t forgotten about it, I’ve just not quite finished my post yet.  I’m also finding that it’s quite hard to get the data I’m trying to get from the logs – based on any varying numbers of changed factors that happen from raid to raid.  Unless I healed identically from night to night (highly unlikely – as I’m not a robot) the data varies, which makes it less useful for detailed “test” purposes.  But…I’m still working on it!  If you want the short answer without having to wait – I have decided that hitting the WG breakpoint was the way to go for me.

On Alts

Dannie – I’ve been doing a weekly 3 hours alt run with her for the past few weeks.  It’s been a lot of fun and we are somewhere in the vicinity of 8/12 normal modes.  Not too shabby for the time we put into it.  I’ve found paladin healing this expansion to flow very well.  Almost the exact opposite of how I’ve found druid healing this expansion.  I find the toolkit plentiful and interesting, and their adaptability really wonderful.  All in all, I’m enjoying the paladin quite a bit.

Kitai  – Kitai managed to hit 85 early in my vacation, and I spent the week enjoying tanking normals and then heroics with her.  I even got the opportunity to tank BWD (save Nef) with her.  I still quite enjoy warrior tanking, and aside for the random jerk in PuGs it’s been a fairly pleasant experience.  I find the play style very immersive and challenging – and have really enjoyed it.  As I get more comfortable with the changes to the class, I only get more confident with my ability as a tank. 

I also picked up RSA during the week, and set it to announce to my party, to let my healer know when I’ve gone through my cooldowns.  I couldn’t decide at first if it was annoying or helpful – but the more instances I ran, I came to the conclusion that it’s extremely helpful, and also lets my healer know that I’m a touch worried with my life and that I’m aware enough of it to do something about it.

Goldberrie – After living the entirety of WotLK in Dalaran as my inscription mule, I decided to throw some heirlooms at the old girl  and push her to 80.  I did this for two reasons 1)I’ve always enjoyed warlocking; and 2) I wanted a bit of a break from the Cataclysm content, and this seemed a good way to get it. 

I went and spec’d her Demonology for leveling, and I’ve got to tell you I’m pretty much having a blast.  I ran a few dungeons yesterday and have done well for not having played the toon for over 2 years!  I don’t know how long she will retain my interest, but right now it’s been a fair bit of fun and a nice change of pace.

On Real Life

Outside of being lazy – we went and saw Cirque du Soliel’s Quidam this past weekend.  This is my 6th (?) Cirque show, and I loved it every bit as much as all of the others that I’ve seen.  I’m actually debating a trip to Vegas to catch some of the shows playing out there.

We also celebrated Brade’s birthday.  We had a dinner with some friends, and I took him out the night of his Birthday.  Both were quite wonderful – and I think he enjoyed his birthday very much so I consider it a huge success!

Other than that – I don’t suppose that I have much else to report!  I hope everyone enjoys their coming week!