Video of Anub Heroic Kill

To add some flair to my otherwise colorless blog, I'm posting the video of our Mad Skill kill of Anub (10-man). It was made by our mage Fjrebqll, who incidentally was not drunk that fight (but I'm sure he was when he made his character's name up).





/salute Fj
I hope you enjoy yourself in your new guild.

Chilly Winds and Pilgrim's Flu

I've been a bit demoralized lately, for several reasons.

Five of the members of our "Saturday Evening Heroic ToC 10 Fun Raid" left the guild last week. Not only were they five of the guild's best players, but also five of my best friends in the game. I won't discuss their reasons for leaving in this blog, but both I and my wife, who enjoyed our 10-man raids immensely, were not surprised to see them leave.

The guild's 25-man raids are stagnant. The guild management and the raid leader decided to stop doing heroic Coliseum several weeks ago, and instead pursue hard modes in Ulduar. This decision has resulted in lots of QQ on our forums, fewer signups, and people leaving the guild. The morale of the remaining raiders are low.

The combination of no longer enjoying our 25-man raids, losing our fun 10-man raid group, and spending a week sick with the flu has made me spend my game time on things I might not have done otherwise.

I've been running Outland heroics with my wife to grind reputation with factions nobody really cares about anymore. I've been fishing. I've been doing cooking and fishing dailies I never bothered with before. I even bought Haris Pilton's fashionable bag for many gold coins (shopping is supposed to make you happy, right?).

So when a new in-game holiday shows up, I'm first in line to get those shiny achievements done. I have nothing better to do anyway, right?

But, to be honest, Pilgrim's Bounty is a pretty stupid holiday.

• The quests that kept sending you back and forth between Stormwind, Ironforge, and Darnassus wanted me to reroll a mage just to get the portals...
• Getting people to understand how to pass food around the tables is like teaching dogs to read and write.
• Killing 40 turkeys in a row in competition with 40 others? Everytime you reach over 30 turkeys you know there will be a gnome mage popping up, stealing your next turkey with an Ice Lance, and you will weep when you see your timer run out.
• Finding a rogue of each race to shoot with your Turkey Shooter? Good luck with that one...
• And how many times will you get ganked in Horde cities when you just want to sit down and enjoy their food and hospitality?

Well, at least it's Christmas soon...

Patch 3.3 Badge Tanking Gear

MMO Champion has listed the gear that we will be able to buy with the new badges, Emblems of Frost.

The tanking stuff looks really nice, and all plate pieces have bonus armor on them. I assume the extra armor is there to compensate for the reduced avoidance that we are facing in Icecrown due to the Icecrown version of Sunwell Radiance.

This is what we can look forward to:

Cataclysmic Chestguard - expertise and block value on the same piece of gear isn't very usual, but considering Blizzard showers tanking gear with hit rating again in 3.3, maybe that expertise will be needed. The armor, stamina, and strength on this chest piece makes my mouth water.

Gauntlets of the Kraken - straight-forward tanking gloves.

Verdigris Chain Belt - straight-forward tanking belt.

Sentinel's Winter Cloak - very nice cloak with bonus armor in addition to the usual tanking stats.

Corroded Skeleton Key - trinket with loads of stamina and a damage absorption use effect. But isn't absorbing 3200 damage quite low?

We don't know the prices of these items yet, but I will most likely pick up the cloak and the trinket first, since I have gear of item level 245 and 258 in the other slots.

There is a libram as well, but I won't waste badges on that one, since it's such a minor upgrade from the current badge libram.

Another Dead Bug

At least we are improving :)

I was away on a business trip all week, and felt a bit rusty when we started ToC10 this Saturday. But it ended well, and we could all add another achievement to the list...

Dead bug = sweet

Sweet kill.

Five minutes past raid end time, last attempt for the night called. We already knew there would be no follow-up raid this raid lock. And that's when we nail him.

We screwed up totally and wiped more than ten times on Faction Champions. Our mage was drunk, and our disc priest left because he didn't think the raid was "serious" enough.

The bug still died, and it was the guild's first heroic Anub kill.

It felt good.