Week-in Raiding
**Week-in Raiding is planned to be a weekly post about raiding. I may chronicle new bosses my guild has cleared and diagnose a certain fight, go over any tank loot that dropped and talk about it a bit or just complain about the state of raiding**
This week in raiding FBI downed the usual suspects: Ony 10 /25, 5/5 in 10 man TOC, 4/5 10 man ToGC, 5/5 25 man TOC.
Loot drops: Gleaming Quel’Serrar I passed it, just doesn’t seem like it worth it…Last Laugh is what I’m using ATM. Frostforged Greathelm dropped for the 3rd week in a row…grr I’m really looking forward to seeing Helm of Wrath
drop in my lifetime. Loop of the Twin Val’kyr Pride of the Eredar and Bulwark of the Royal Guard were dropped from the various TOC/TOGC runs….I got them all. This has got to be the best week for upgrades that I’ve had since I first stepped foot in Naxx.
All in all I was pretty happy about our week of raids up to this point. Then we moved to Ulduar 10 to attempt to finish out our achievements for the rusted drake. This is when the fun started…**be prepared for a huge rant**
First off I need to chronicle FBI’s core hard mode team. We have around 12 members in this group, I feel we are a very solid group. The first week we decided to work on Ulduar 10 hard modes, we 1 shotted the entire dungeon minus Mimiron and Freya. We got Hodir down with fractions of a second left, actually dbm said that the fight lasted 3 minutes 2 seconds but we got the achievement and the extra loot. The next week we downed Hodir with over a minute left. Freya took us a couple tries but we got her down the first night and have 1 or 2 shotted it every week since.
Then comes Mimiron, Firefighter…the hardest fight in the entire dungeon, my favorite fight in all of the wow content that I have cleared so far. Maybe it’s the comradery or the clear progression we made each attempt but this fight, beating this boss justified every dollar I’ve every spent to play this game. It took us 3 weeks of hard work but each pull we progressed, each time we went in we got a little further. Late into our second week of work, we hit the enrage timer and that was a victory. Third week, it happened….with 4-5 people dead and believing we were going to wipe….Mim gave up, achievements flashed and nerd rawrs ensued. Vent exploded, we were all on a high at that point.
After the celebration finally ended we moved on and spent our last hour getting familiar with the freight train Blizzard has named Algalon. Freight train isn’t really a fair comparison though…if a train hit my truck, the truck would be totalled but I’d expect to find pieces lying around, maybe even something that resembled a truck at one time. When Algalon hit me…or my avatar…for the first time, I physically felt it. I swear my screen went black…his punches don’t just hurt, they end all that was once known. I think you get the point, he hit freakn’ harder than any boss I’ve encountered. That being said, we got him to 30% the first week (maybe the second, whiskey and old age fog has set in and I don’t really remember).
I bet you’re thinking, wait I thought you were going to rant…well, not to disappoint, here’s where it all fell apart. First Blizzard releases TOC and quite a few members decided with all the new shinies and sexies dropping there, Ulduar is a waste of time. We end up missing a few weeks work on Ulduar hard modes but when we get back with blow through to General in a few hours and 1 shot his hard mode. We ended up at this point going back to pick up the Razorscale achievement for the rusted proto-drake meta. Then a few attempts at Yogg and Algalon. A couple in the group had never seen Yogg and after our wonderful raid leader talked to the wrong keeper for 1 light, we decided on a straight up Yogg kill and reset the next week.
Next week never happened though, our main healer, a resto druid, has the hard mode fever now. 10 man hard modes aren’t enough. He/gquits and joins a guild working on 25 man hard modes. While we look to replace him, we lose our raid leader/warlock to real life, he decided to quit wow for a while and work on school. Now, we’ve lost a second healer. He’s a military man and got promoted/deployed. While I’m quite angry at the druid for taking the easy way out, instead of building upon our success and recruiting and building up our 25 man roster to be able to do hard modes….he quit, freakn’ quit…whatever, we’ll move on.
Fast forward to this weekend, our 10 man is now 4/5 in ToGC and still looking for 1 light and Algalon. Our 25 man is stale and stagnant after clearing all regular mode content except for Yogg. Nobody wants to go back to Ulduar to finish our business there and Ony and TOC are getting boring with the 1 shots to every boss. We’ve tried 25 ToGC but I don’t think we have the healing talent (or maybe experience) for it.
Anyway, this weekend we get the remnants of our core group back together and start looking to fill in the holes in the roster. We end up with a fairly solid team, even though our priest belly ached the whole time about not wanting to be there but whatever, she was there and did her usual awesome job. We run through, 1 shot XT and Thorim hard modes. We missed Hodir by 4 seconds, somehow…Freya went down in 2 attempts. FL 4 towers in 2 attempts. We got the new members the razorscale, Kologarn and Cat Lady achievements. Now it’s time to move to Mimiron and this is where shit hits the fan so to speak….we have, by estimates, 6 to 8 weeks to get this rusted proto-drake before ICC drops and the mounts are gone forever. The issue is clear, 3 people in the raid need firefighter and all 10 need 1 light. Of course the 7 that only need 1 light, want to work on 1 light. I’m one of those 7….but I don’t think it’s fair to these 3 new guys we’ve asked to help us out, to make them sit here and watch us celebrate our new mounts and achievements while they have unfinished business. Most of the raid wants to work on 1 light and go back for firefighter when we’re done. I say no, we knock out firefighter and then the entire 10 man gets 1 light and celebrates together. It’s only fair, am I right?
IDK, this is the problem with WOW I guess. If we want to see the entire game, we have to group up. Grouping up does nothing for us other than helping us achieve our own personal goals. There is no reward for being in a group, none. If my group downs 1 light in the darkness, I get a new mount. I get an achievement, me. I get it, not my guild. The only way to find out how good a guild is, is to look outside of WOW. You have to look at sites like wow-progess to find that information. In fact if you think about it, being in a guild is detrimental to you because there are others that need loot too. Maybe things will change when Cataclysm hits and the new guild systems are rolled out. We can all hope.
Vigilance 
October 22, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Just found this blog—I love the idea!
I understand your frustration. With the departure of Jirou and Watlikin, I feel like we’ve lost the “team” aspect of the 10-man. It feels more like 10 well-geared people going into Ulduar instead of a team handling the challenges.
In my mind, a “team” is a group of 10 (or 25) people who can get together and knock out the challenges put before them. Not just a “group” for one raid, to make the distinction more clear.
I do want to push for One Light in the Darkness, because I’m beginning to have visions of us losing out on it, after we did all that work. Even if we don’t get the drake, I’ll be proud of what we did accomplish—especially Firefighter—but I’ll be disappointed that we didn’t get the bragging rights (drake and title) that everyone else who bested the hard modes earned.
(As a sidenote, I’m a little concerned about doing Firefighter again. With all of the ToC gear we have, it may become much easier, and it will seem trivial to the new people we have.)
But since we don’t seem to have a “team,” we aren’t getting to Yogg-Saron with enough time or the right people. Last week, I had to explain the basic mechanics of Yogg-Saron to the group…that should never happen. That wasn’t what our team was: a group of people who knew the fights, re-challenging ourselves with the hard modes.
I hope we can get a solid team back together for Icecrown Citadel. Blizzard had a Developer’s Q&A today, and in one of the answers they mentioned that the hard modes will only be available to those who defeat Arthas on normal first.
I want our team in there, on patch day. Knocking out those bosses and learning the instance on the way. I want to be part of the team that goes in there and experiences the pinnacle of Wrath of the Lich King content. I just hope we have our team by then.
October 22, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I have no doubt that firefighter will be much easier with the gear we have now. That’s why I think we should go ahead and knock it out, that way we all get the mounts/title/achievement together. I think it’ll mean much more to them and maybe they’ll actually hang around.
Yes, they lack the exposure to some of the fights in Ulduar but I think they are talented enough to hang with us.
As far as, lessing our experience with firefighter….it won’t for me. I mean, I was there when it took us 50 attempts to get him down in regular mode. Now I feel great every time we walk in and 1 shot him without even taking time to setup. It won’t change the fact that we were able to down firefighter when most people couldn’t even get there. I’m proud of that…wish I got a title for it, I still say it’s the hardest fight in the game right now, even with TOGC out.