Nothing new to report, but we are still at it

Well. We got Rotface down to 24% so we are making a little progress there, and team 2 is going back into Ulduar on Monday to see if we can make a push towards finishing it. So we have had some good raiding going on. We basically spent most of last night wiping on Rotface which can be kind of frustrating. I am tanking the oozes and I am starting to get better at it. I really need to find a better way to build the next big ooze after one explodes. I seem to do okay the first time but after the second ooze explodes we seem to get little oozes everywhere and I can't corral them. I watched a couple videos and might try something different next time. If anyone else out there knows a good strategy please feel free to elaborate. I'm all ears.

Team 2 rocks Ulduar!!

We started a second raid team this week working some undergeared toons and alts in Ulduar. It was a ton of fun. Seeing some of the fights in there from the dps side is way different. I think everybody had a good time and we pushed through the first 2 sections and the crazy cat lady in one night. I think our team 2 may do something our team one never got to do finish Ulduar. Which would be awesome because I would really like a chance to see the Yogg fight. I've heard that it is an insane fight and I am actually looking forward to seeing if we can do it. Tomorrow ICC and another chance to kill Rotface!!

My WOW year in review

Wow a lot has happened in the last year in WOW. I only wrote 39 posts in 08 but this year I've already done 116 posts. It almost seems like a different game at this point being in a new guild and raiding and thinking I've got a real shot at killing Arthas. I'm gonna break it up into sections and see where the last year took me.

January: I had only been 80 a short time and I was still running the regular instances to help gear up for heroics (right, who does that anymore, lol). I had my one 80 and was running with some of my friends who were still leveling up their toons to 80. Mostly January was me running regular Halls of Lightning and not getting the defense trinket.

February: I finally got that stupid trinket on my 16th try of Halls of Lightning that was probably the highlight of my month. I started running heroics with some guildies and worked on leveling a bunch of my alts (who now mostly sit on my old server abandoned). I was also deciding what my dual-specs were going to be for my toons.

March: This month was a really weird one for me as my account got hacked and that was an awesome experience, I also joined up with some friends to do the Arena Tournament which was actually alot of fun. Other than that I just leveled alts as my guild wasn't really doing much

April: The Corsairs finally stepped into a raid as a guild even if it was to 9man Voa and Sarth but at least it was something. We also started working on Naxx a little bit and got through Spider Wing and I thought we were on our way to start raiding, finally.

May: We mostly spent May wiping on Heigan. He was our nemesis and not being able to consistently down him was the beginning of the end of our raiding team. We did finally bring in a ringer to get us through Heigan but it was the beginning of the end. I also got layed off at the end of the month.

June, July, August: I'm lumping these together as I didn't really do much during this time but level my alts. We tried Gluth a couple of times as a guild but couldn't get him and a few people just decided they didn't want to raid anymore, or at least that's what it seemed like. I was layed off all summer so I basically just searched for jobs and played WOW when I could. A group of my guildies at the time had started leveling up horde toons on a different server and so our guild never seemed to have anybody on.

September: This was my triumphant return to blogging and working. The Brewfest event was going on so we killed ol' Coren Direbrew til I couldn't stand it anymore. I debated dual-speccing my priest Holy/Disc which I did and worked out well. This is also when I found out you can't skin low level rabbits anymore. I am still very perturbed by this.

October: My new beginning, as I joined my new guild. I was raiding, for real, I finally saw the inside of Ulduar and ToC. I learned alot and started having fun in game again and have been making a ton of new friends. We downed Sarth +1 a couple of times. We cleared through Naxx in record time a couple of times. Our most frustrating fight was Ignis because we trying to find a strategy that worked for us.

Novemeber: This was a month of learning new encounters as we failed on Malygos a couple of nights but had a victory over Onyxia on a different night so at least we keep working together and having fun while doing it. I also got my 6th 80 (mostly thanks to a summer of being layed off much easier to level alts in short amounts of time).

December: Its been a blur mostly with the holidays and seeing old friends and the new LFD giving me so many emblems they burn a hole in my pocket. We had a interesting first go against a overpowered Marrowgar and made even more progress through Ulduar. We did have on failboat night on Ony but you can't win them all. I even missed last nights run because a friend of mine from California was in town this week and it was the only night we were going to be able to hang out at all. I should be sporting my 4piece t9 for tanking tonight so maybe we'll see what we can do and kill some more raid bosses. I have also been running with a friend of mine on a different server and we have been running horde as of now we have 2 72 toons working on Northrend and being really tired of UK it seems to come up alot in LFD at level 71.


So there you have it another glorious wall of text from yours truly. I am so looking forward to the new year and having a lot more fun in game and meeting even more friends and writing more blog posts to entertain and amuse.

K Out!

I brought my dps gear out of the bag for the first time in weeks last night.

When you are a tank its nice to have a dual-spec but if your like me you really don't use it very often. because rarely if ever do you get asked to go anywhere as dps and running dailies is usually faster in tank spec because you can just grab more bad guys and take down large groups of mobs to speed up the process. Well last night we went into Ulduar to work on some of the bosses we hadn't done yet and we took out Hodir and Thorim which was pretty cool. Our raid leader had brought in another tank to help show us the ropes and since Hodir is a 1 tank fight I got to go ret and even rocking the 4 piece t7.0 set and an assortment of 200-219 level epics I had gotten randomly I pushed out 3500 on our Hodir kill which surprised me since I don't usually do well on movement fights and that fight is all over the place. I actually upgraded 4 pieces of gear last night for my dps set and got them gemmed and enchanted so I am kind of curious what I might be able to do now. I might just cue up some random dungeons as dps to give it a try and be one of the random faceless pew-pewers in the crowd.

Question: If the patch is next week what do we do?

Now I am not in charge of our guild (thankfully, Swan is way better at it than I would be) so its not my decision to make, but I am curious as to what you think our guild should do if ICC comes out next week. We are not a hardcore guild but we do have a regular raiding schedule and we do a pretty good job for where we are in my opinion. We haven't killed Yogg yet (in fact we are still working on the keepers) and we got, I think the word is roflstomped, by Faction Champs the one time we went to the big room of raiding. Now I am a big fan of Ulduar actually (except Ignis that fight is dumb in my opinion), and I would like to finish it out, but it would be cool to be raiding the actual current raid tier with everyone else, as I have never had a chance to really do that before in game. We do have some well geared quality members in our guild and raid team and I think I do pretty good job as a tank so I think we could actually put in some legitimate attempts on the new raid almost right away, especially since everything will be dropping triumph badges and everyone in your raid can be in tier9 gear in a week or two with a little heroic grinding, and the crazy new gear out of the new 5mans. For me, honestly I am good either way because I just want to kill bosses and have fun with my guild. There aare a couple ways of going about it that seem to make the most sense to me. The new gear will help us push through what we are working on now even faster, and would give us all good feelings of moving through content or we could try bashing our head against the new raid for a couple hours a week and fall back to other stuff if that doesn't work out. So faithful viewers what do you think we should do? Either way I will defer to our fearless leader I was just curious of your opinion

Weekend Update: Not much WOW actually

I actually spent the greater part of my weekend reading and catching up some TV (by the way TV on DVD and streamed on the Internet is the only way to watch TV. The only thing I actually watch on TV when its on is football and even that's very rare lately). I did play my horde toon on Friday night that my friend and I are leveling together. We are both 70 now and pushing hard through Howling Fjord. I did play a little Saturday morning but just a few dailies. I think I actually played Gears of War 2 more on Sunday then I did WOW this weekend. I felt like getting on the XBOX a bit after my friend brought his copy of Assassins Creed 2 over. I wish I wasn't broke because that game looks like a lot of fun. Maybe I'll ask my folks to get it for me for Christmas hahaha. Actually I'd rather they get me a microwave since the buttons on mine are going out(Do you know how annoying it is when you can't press the 1 on your microwave.) I didn't mention yet though that we made some really good progress on Ulduar last week. We finally killed that jerk Ignis and also got Auriya down to. We did kind of a peek at the Hodir fight which didn't go too bad actually I think with a little practice we should be able to take him out with a few more tries. So thats going well. I probably should have gone into Naxx this weekend with them I just was not really into WOW and needed to recharge the batteries. I have been pushing hard at WOW since the big server move and while its definitely been awesome I am now for the first time feeling the stress of being a raider. Its just something to get used to. I do think though that this move has given me the best chance I could ever get at killing Arthas and that's really going to be awesome. I may be the only guy on the Internet who is not pissed about the gating thing they are doing in Icecrown but this actually gives our guild a shot at going into Icecrown Citadel and keeping up with everyone else. I think we are basically geared enough to go in when it comes out, and while we might take longer to get the fights down with it being slowly released we will actually have a good shot at keeping up on our limited raid schedule. So hooray for false barriers I guess. I do understand what the other people are complaining about though and I don't think they are wrong in their opinions either. I am just trying to enjoy the game for what it is rather than what it used to be.
Wow I really need to watch it or all my posts will be giant walls of text.
/endwalloftext
K Out!

Iron Council down! Ignis still kicks my butt?

We did our now weekly run into Ulduar this week. Got through the first 4 bosses we know in 1 shot. We did have some deaths and we are still learning a little bit but mostly we have them down pretty good. We gave Ignis a few tries but it is a frustrating fight for us and we gave up on him and moved on to Iron Council or Assembly of Iron or whatever lol. This fight took us a few rounds to get the hang of but unlike Ignis we made steady progress each try (except for the next to last attempt where I mistargeted and wiped us in fifteen second, grrr). We are really moving through and I think next week will be even better!

Well, now that was a fun weekend!!

So this is what everyone has been talking about for the last year lol. I have found the perfect guild for what I want to do. We are running stuff on a regular basis and moving through content like I've never seen. I finally got my tank all the way through Naxx and am now one Maly kill away from being a Champion Of The Frozen Wastes. Now I know, yes everybody else has done that already but I was trying so hard to get my friends interested in raiding and geared up that I never got a chance to, you know, actually raid. So, now I am in this awesome guild with people having fun learning new encounters and piling up boss kills, it has been a blast. In my first week with them we downed OS, full clear of Naxx, and downed 4 bosses in Uld. This is more progress then I made in almost the last year, especially since last year at this time my old guild was barely getting into Kara and made only one run into ZA. We never even got into the Military wing in Naxx and I stepped foot in Uld for the first time this week. We are gonna take down Sarth+1 on Tuesday which I've never completed and maybe we'll throw down Vault if we have time as well. I'll have to see if I can ask them to do a Maly run sometime too so I can learn that fight and get the title. I've never had a title like that and even though its old now I think it would still be cool to have. I also got asked if I was interested in running with the group that's working on Heroic dungeon achievements, which is great because that's one of the things I thought I would miss out on leaving my old guild because we did have a good group for that going and had made some good progress on it. So anyways I looked at some stuff on the Ignis fight and we've talked about it some more and we think we can get that down this week. I think we might be running Uld on Thursday to clear out the bosses we know so Saturday we can work on learning and downing the bosses we don't know. I am just having a blast right now and I can't wait to see how we do this week

Important weekend post, Ignis killed me lots

I normally don't post much on the weekends I am usually to busy having fun actually playing the game or busy doing other stuff. Well I sucked at tanking Ignis. He wiped the floor with us and I really struggled tanking him. I think I gained a false sense of confidence since we pretty much breezed through the other guys up to that point with I think 1 wipe on Razorscale and maybe 2 on Kologarn. We had a couple people who had been in before so that helped alot. I actually think I was doing pretty good up to the Ignis mess. At least I have now been in all the Wotlk dungeons minus Ony and Maly. I'm probably just being to hard on myself. Don't think I wasn't having fun either, learning some new fights in Ulduar was awesome and I was having a blast. I don't even mind wiping as long as I'm learning the fight and we are making some progress which is what happened on the other bosses. Too many people just hadn't seen it yet one wipe to learn it and then boom down. We one shotted FL and XT and some people got some loot. I even got a new sword. I will have to work to get some defense to cover it but its nice not having to use the Red Sword of Courage that I've had since the first time I ran H UP.