Summertime blues

Raid Update

The elusive Yogg kill still taunts me. Is it because we are scrubs and cannot figure out his mechanics? Is it because our DPS sucks? Are our tanks reatrded?

No my friends, it is the dreaded summertime. Filling raids has become difficult, as once 100% attendance college students head home or get summer jobs. Other people get busy with this thing call "Real Life". I hear it has good graphics. This basically means we always end up with about 20 people that are regular raiders ready to go, and then try and peice together the last 5 spots with friends that have no idea what they are doing. This is the unfortunate drawback of being in a non-hardcore style of raiding guild. We do not have strict attendance requirements, and we do not raid more than about 9 hours a week. This means we end up wasting a ton of time each week training people or making people play an offspec to fill a role. We wipe to stupid things like killing one of the 3 Freya adds, or not moving away from everyone when you have the General's life drain. We still clear everything up to Yogg, but we just run out of time for serious attempts. It is frustrating to take steps backwards when raiders disappear on you.

This last week was our first night with more than an hour of work on him. We ended up getting into Phase 2 several times, but we were still in the learning mode, so several people did not understand what they were supposed to be doing. It was still good practice, as I believe everyone now has a good understanding on how to deal with Phase 1. The fight does not seem overly tough, and I am sure we could have it cleared if we could just get all of our raiders to show on the same night.

3.2 opinions

I am sure by now everyone has been reading the 3.2 details that have been all over the place. I am not sure what to think. The shaman specific things are great. I love all totems on one global cooldown. It's about time! I also like the resto buffs, but am a little doubtful they went far enough with fixing Chain Heal. They needed to bump the bounce up to 15 yards or so IMO. I don't feel a few more yards will cut it. I have not seen any raw throughput numbers to know how good the 40% reduction per jump is compared to the current 50% Obviously it is an improvement either way, I am just unsure how much. Now if they could only make elemental provide the ToW buff and still let us use our DPS totems I would be happy.

As for the other big changes, I am torn. It just seems we keep sliding further and further into the "casual" side of the game. While our guild straddles the line between casual and hardcore, I personally dislike the constant dumbing down of everything. Having one token for your entire gear set? Letting everyone buy Tier 8.5 just from heroics? It is a bit much. When do we get a menu to choose whatever we want from the boss loot table? However, I applaud the move of splitting hard-modes into a seperate raid lockout with a pull-limit in place. Great idea to let everyone clear it the normal way for the week and then have a fresh instance just to work the hard modes.

DK project

In non-shaman related WoW news, my DK tank project has now hit the wall where I can only get anything by raiding after only 2 weeks at 80. I ended up tanking a Naxx 25 and got about 5 peices. While I am happy she is getting geared, I am not happy I have nothing to do once again but raid, or go level another alt. I guess with the badge changes coming, I can gear her up through heroics again and just hit the raids when I can on the weekends.