Random Instances with Strangers

Lately I have been working on my getting my Gnome priest geared and ready to raid which means one thing...a lot of random instances. Sometimes I run with guildees who make the run much funner then it normally would but more often than not they are either pvping, in their own instances, or they secretly hate my priest because he is such a sexy gnome and they can't stand to be reminded that they are ugly and not Gnomes. That is my theory and I am sticking to it. Well when no one wants to run with me I do what I have been doing since Vanilla WoW...I pug an instance run. Some of you reading this are probably cringing at the thought of the looking for dungeon tool and there are times I can't blame you.

During my healing adventures I have run quick and painless instances and I have run horrible, disgusting, tear inducing instances. Now I have never healed on a priest in all the time that I have had a priest except for when I was spriesting it up and the real healer died forcing me to pop out of shadow and toss heals like my life depended on it...which more often than not it did. But that was on my human priest who has been shadow since day 1 of his existence. My Gnome priest was created to be a healer specifically. Why did I make another priest instead of just dual speccing my current priest? Well...I think Gnomes are awesome and if I can't have a Gnome Paladin, I might as well have a Gnome priest. 

Fun with Raiding

Ah Raiding, the past time of champions. The creator and breaker of guilds everywhere. Like the One Ring, it will bring people together and bind them. Wait...scratch that. It's not quite as evil as the One Ring. In fact with the right guild, it's actually fun. Even wiping can be a less frustrating experience if you are surrounded by good people. Personally raiding for my guild is going pretty well as we are 5/12 which is not zomg uber world first but it's good enough for us at the moment.

How do we keep going as a raiding guild you may wonder? If you didn't wonder that well I am going to pretend that you did wonder it for the purposes of this post. Well we have been raiding as a guild since vanilla when epics were really epic and required a lot of time and effort to get just one epic. While some people have come and gone, we have kept the same officer core together which adds institutional memory to guild raids and activities. When explaining fights we'll reference past boss encounters which have similar mechanics and this helps people visualize the fight better.

The most important thing that we do as a guild that has kept us together is that we have fun. How do we have fun you are probably wondering. (And I am just going to say that you are wondering that so I can continue with my post.) Well...we have fun! Raiding is an activity that often leads to burnout if done in excess so you have to find things to ease the mood and make people relax and enjoy themselves.

We do get serious when we need to but we still manage to have a great time because we all remember that it's only a game. If we don't down the current internet dragon today, we'll get it the next raid. I don't think I have ever singled someone out and tore them a new one because we wiped on a boss due to something they did. I have raided with several other guilds over the years and while I have never had that happen to me, I have seen it happen to other people in the raid. To me that is just dumb and accomplishes nothing except making that one person feel like crap and reducing the raids morale. Happy raiders will stay in the raid until the boss dies, unhappy raiders want to leave after a wipe or two.

How do you keep your raiders happy? That is the million dollar question. Each raider is different, some will be happy only when bosses are downed, some are happy just being social in raids, some are happy just listening to everyone else talking. As a raid and even a guild leader, you have to figure out what makes your people tick. If all else fails...give away gold. Who doesn't like to receive free gold after all?


What do we do to keep the raid light and fun? We laugh throughout our raid, play /roll casino while buffing, tease whoever dies on trash, make jokes about having a designated person to die first in most encounters. The last one is a very serious thing we do as we have a person who just can't seem to stay alive on trash or on some bosses. Not because they are a complete fail but because they seem to be the person who gets targeted by mobs for bad debuffs, fire gets spawned under them, when tanks get cc'ed the adds turn as one and target that person. It's almost like Blizzard is trying to tell that person that he is not liked. We start our raids with guesses on how many deaths he will have by the end of the raid and the winner gets some gold. Why do we encourage sacrificing one person for the good of the raid? Because it's a joke and it helps lighten the mood. People go into boss fights in good spirits and ready to put forth their best.

Am I enjoying raiding? Yes. Do I enjoy the people I raid with? Yes. Is my guild recruiting? Yes. Was that a shameless plug? Yes. And so I end this ramble with the following piece of advice: Be excellent to each other.

Possible future Instances

This expansion has been out for 2 months now and most people have farmed heroics, downed raid bosses, ground out reputation with numerous factions, punched Nazi's goblins, used trunks to hide from explosions, ridden in submarines, worn octopus hats, ridden in tornadoes, stood in the fire, and many other activities. The question has to be asked...what's left to do? We know patch 4.1 will bring 2 new raids, one of which will be the Firelands. But what else should it bring? I think we need more 5 man instances. Burning Crusade brought 13 5 man instances at  launch and added one towards the tail end of it. Wrath launched with 12 5 mans and then patched in 4 along the way. This expansion launched with 7 NEW 5 man instances. Yes I know that most of the old vanilla instances were updated for newness and such but they are still OLD instances. We need more 5 man instances to keep us occupied.

Why do we need more 5 mans? Because half of this expansion is for characters under level 60. Yes you can go back to all the updated zones and redo the quests at 85 but to me theres a payoff missing for doing it. If you're leveling you get money, rep, xp for experiencing the newness. At 85 the money is usually not even enough to buy a stack of reagents, the xp gain does nothing at max level, and rep while nice if you're not exalted with a faction...may not be enough for some people. Blizzard has added so many things to help us level fast that we tend to skip complete zones while leveling and miss some of the new and interesting story lines.

With Heirlooms, dungeon quests and Guild XP gains, you barely get halfway through a zone before you are too high to really enjoy it. Yes you can always not wear heirlooms or run dungeons but that still doesn't address the fact that once you hit 60 you are no longer enjoying leveling because you're stuck in Outland with it's lame quests until you hit 68. And then you get to experience Northrend all over again except this time you can't abandon it at 78 for the new zones. You're stuck dinging 80 the old way. It's like the developers want to remind you that they have gotten much better at the game but they do this by making you go through old content.

Once you hit 85, most people are probably not going to go back through zones to quest and see the story lines. They will probably be too busy farming heroics for gear and rep which will lead them to over heroic themselves and burn out. There isnt a whole lot to do at 85 other then heroics and if you are really grinding them out to get geared you get bored of them real fast. We need new heroic instances to keep us entertained.



Update: So while I was busy with work and unable to post this yesterday, Blizzard decided to read my mind and release information about the new heroic 5 mans that they are adding. And by releasing information I mean it was all data mined by people who do things of that nature. So this can only lead me to believe that Blizzard is a fan of my work and has planted spy software on my computer to read what I write so they can make me happy. =D

Valentine's Day Fun

Today those of us with loved ones celebrate the day with chocolate, roses, gold, money, and many other odd and unusual things. For those of you with out a significant other, today is referred to as "single awareness day" and you may or may not hate today. For those of you who don't care to celebrate the day...today is the 14th.

I decided to give my lovely lady something unusual and a little more creative then just jewelry. I enlisted the aid of the very talented artist, the awesome Vidyala from Manalicious, to help me with this task. She created a postcard sized watercolor of my fiance's warlock and I gotta tell you...it turned out even more awesome then I thought. I gave it to my fiance early because I wanted to surprise her with it and I didn't want to wait for the 14th to come around. Here is what it looks like:

Happy Valentine's Day to those of you who are in the mood for it and for everyone else...Happy Monday!

The Sky Is Falling

Today, Ranting Jed is Ranting. It seems to me that whenever a patch is pushed into the game we see a resurgence of people whining about how suddenly their previously Over Powered will now no longer be able to one man a raid boss or take on a whole bg by themselves or some other dumb thing that they think should merit their class not being balanced with other classes. I think that I dread these whiners showing up more than I do watching my class be nerfed. These whiners will make grandiose statements such as "If this nerf goes through I will never play my class again!" or "This nerf will ensure that no one will roll this class and spec because it is no longer fun to play" or my favorite "This change has caused me to cancel my account because blizzard is being so unreasonable."

My response to statements like those above? Good bye, good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Honestly if these whiners can't understand that the game needs to be balanced so that no one class is more powerful than any other class, they should go play something else. What makes WoW so fun is that it is constantly being fixed and tweaked so that the world is always changing and moving forward. The WoW developers are always watching to make sure that balance is kept. If they didn't do that...warriors would still be running around wielding arcanite reapers oneshotting mobs or ret paladins would gather reckoning stacks and unleash reckoning bombs on raid bosses, effectively soloing them. Ah the good old days. /nostalgia

Anyway back on topic, nerfs happen, tweaks happen, deal with it. Change like Spice, is life. If you feel your class is being nerfed into the ground today than look forward to tomorrow when it will be buffed to the heavens. Paladins are a great example of a class that is constantly being changed and tweaked. Back in vanilla, most raiding paladins were healers, ret pallies were rare and protadins were even more rare. BC made paladin healing more fun, prot more viable, and ret...well it was not as uncommon to see raiding retadins. Wrath made all three classes fun and viable to play in pvp and pve, but tankadins were made OP. Cataclysm so far has to make all three fun, although ret was nerfed a little because its mastery was a bum deal but that will be addressed in 4.0.6 which drops today and will make it more fun to play. Ask any vanilla paladin about their class and they can tell you all about nerfs and buffs and nerfs. It's an ever changing world we play in.

If you want to complain to anyone...don't bother talking to me as I have been a frost mage for almost 6 years now and my class has gone from everyone being frost in vanilla, to everyone being fire in BC, to everyone being arcane in wrath. The only people who were frost were people like me who rocked it, people leveling, and pvpers. When I joined a pug raid on my mage I had to constantly prove that I could rock the dps meters, which I of course did. It was only in very late wrath that frost was buffed and even than most people didn't consider it a viable spec unless you were skilled. Cataclysm has finally made it accepted in raids and for that I am happy and even though I am getting a few slight nerfs with this patch, I won't be complaining that the sky is falling. I know its necessary to balance the game.

If you can't one shot level 85 elites anymore after the patch...well maybe you should rethink about whether your class should be the only one who could do that and if that was fair to everyone else. Or better yet...remember that it's just a game after all.

Blogaversary!

My blog is a year old now. Wow. I honestly didn't think that when I started writing this blog that I would stick with it for a year or that I would even have any non guild readers. My very first post was on January 25, 2010 and I meant to write a huge year in review post but work kept interrupting me every time I wrote more then two sentences. So for the moment I will just post this while I try to finish the other post. Woots for a year of ramblings!

Oh and here are a few screen shots from the Gnomish Death Race that I held on sunday to celebrate my blogaversary. We had nine racers participate and everyone had a great time.
 A shot of the racers lining up at the start of the race:

 The race has begun:

 The pack enters the tunnel to Searing Gorge:

 The first racers into Burning Steppes:

 The winners crossing the finish line:

 Here are the three winners and my mage:

Thanks to everyone who participated in helping me celebrate. /cheers

A Celebration

So on the 25th of this month I will celebrate my first blogaversary! Woots! I have decided to celebrate the best way I know how...an ingame gnomish death race and you are all invited!! Now you may be asking yourselves what exactly is a gnomish death race? Well first and foremost its a race to the death! It is a race of level 1 gnomes from the gates of Ironforge to the gates of Stormwind. The race takes the gnomes through Khaz Modan, Searing Gorge, Burning Steppes, Redridge, and Elwynn.

Since the occasion is my blogaversary I am inviting all my faithful blog readers to join in on the fun! The race will take place on Sunday January 23 at 2 PST at the gates of Ironforge. All you have to do is be there on a level 1 gnome ready to race! Why race you may ask? Well other than the fact that the race is fun, the winner will receive 500g, second place receives 300g, and third place gets 200g. If you are interested in participating and you're on a different server...well...I will have a banner announcing that you have placed in the top 3 of the race which you can display on your blog or make a forum signature out of it. Or you can just have bragging rights!

If you are interested in participating please leave a comment letting me know or contact me through email: jedimas729 (at) gmail (dot) com or ingame by whispering Jedem on the Alliance side of the US-Ursin server! It will be a great time and I hope to see a lot of people there!