LK25 Down!

Well, that is a messy screenshot but we were all quite excited after the kill and standing still for a picture is hard when you are in that mood. I'm missing half the raid in that picture. I hope somebody got a better one made.

Last week we got to phase 3 for the first time. I guess the 10% buff finally pushed us into the last phase, which turned out to be the least challenging. With only the practise from the 10-man fight, we killed the Lich King only the second time we really got into the last phase.

I had the job of tanking the Lich King himself during the fight. That job mostly consists of positioning and surviving Soul Reaper. We had our warrior tank spec Safeguard to give an external damage reduction cooldown for me for every Soul Reaper.

As soon as we got the defile / val'kyr combination under control, the fight went a lot smoother.

After the kill we went to Vault of Archavon where we did the Earth, Wind & Fire achievement just for fun.

It was a great raid night.

Thank God it's Friday

I'm writing this sitting at an airport waiting for my flight home. Work keeps sending me out-of-town, which was all good when I was young and single, but is becoming dull now when I'm married and have a kid. But I gotta pay that mortgage, right?

(Oh noes, I have exposed the fact that I'm married! Now all the hordes of female blog-fans chasing after me will move on to the next sexy blogger hunk. What will I do without all those virtual panties that have been thrown at me allt his time?)

I just only had time to install the 3.3.3 patch before leaving home the other day. I didn't see any paladin changes, which is a very rare thing. No Pvp nerfs. No redesigned talents. No AoE threat nerf. It must have been a mistake, which I'm sure Blizzard will correct with an unannounced stealth hot fix. Or maybe the paladin team is so exhausted from all the previous changes that they needed a vacation this time around.

When I'm checking my earlier posts I realize that I stopped writing ICC guides when I got to Professor Putricide. Well, I guess that's proof enough that I hate him. When I start explaining tactics on Putricide in our casual 10-man, I throw up a little in my mouth, and quickly make a raid vote to go to Blood or Frost wing instead.

I'll try to pick up the guide writing, even though it feels a bit late to write them at this point. I might just go for heroic guides instead, but I'm just starting doing the heroic fights now, so it'll take some time for me to digest them.

In unrelated news, Arnax finally got a brand new hat. He's now wearing his first piece of T10 (iLvl264). The competition for Conqueror marks is fierce in our raids, since we run with six (!) paladins, threeish warlocks and fourish priests. It doesn't help that for some reason, the Conqueror marks drop less than the other two...

Boarding time. Time to squeeze into a metal tube with a hundred others traveling home.

Thank God it's Friday!

Arnax the Kingslayer

The Lich King is dead.

Alive and Kicking

Don't worry. I'm still here. I'm still playing the game. I've just had loads to do at work, which have made it almost impossible to do anything WoW-related (except raiding) lately.

I've joined another guild, and we are currently working on Lich King on 25-man. We have one 10-man team doing hardmodes, while the 10-man team I'm running with are pushing Lich King slightly below the 30%-mark of his health bar.

In addition to that, I'm also running a casual 10-man with some friends once a week. I usually go on my resto shammy on these runs, but I might use my death knight sometimes depending on the raid setup.

So there's a lot of Icecrown raiding going on.

Now when I have seen all the fights in ICC, I can finally have an opinion on the entire raid instance.

The Good
The Lich King fight is awesomesauce.
Most of the boss fights are well-designed.

The Bad
Professor Putricide is the most boring and annoying fight in the instance.

The "meh"
Gunship Battle is wearing thin, just like I expected from the first time we did it. It's a cool fight the first handful of times you do it. After that, it's just a time sink and free epics. It is truly the "Chess Event" of ICC.

After the horrible ToC, Blizzard promised us trash. Well, the trash in ICC is underwhelming. I might be an endangered species, but I enjoy trash. I liked the challenge of the trash in TBC raids. Trash pulls require a different set of skills than boss fights, and it was cool to get to use them on trash that actually could wipe the raid.

In ICC, we start with promising trash before Marrowgar, but then it kinda dwindles down to trash packs of a few mobs at a time which can easily be AoEd down. After the Lower Spire, it's mostly running up some stairs, kill five mobs, then run up some more stairs, kill five mobs, and then you are at a new boss. With the exception of two dogs and two val'kyrs, there are no patrols.

And the fact that there was no trash at all before the Frozen Throne was a big let-down.

But it's probably just me being old-fashioned. Trash and respawns are probably considered "annoying" by a majority of players.


Other things that have happened since my last post:

• Lots of Cataclysm info, which I will ignore on this blog until we are closer to release.
• Lots of patch 3.3.3 info, which so far includes nothing regarding paladins (but my frost death knight will be buffed!).
• Paladin AoE threat will be nerfed. Bummer. Ridach, over at Righteous Defense says exactly what I feel here.
  

But the most important blue post the last week:

Yeah it just takes one person to press Need after everyone's pressed Greed on the Frozen Orbs and you miss out. But the good news is that in patch 3.3.3 this won't be the case anymore -- the roll for Frozen Orbs will be an automatic Greed roll. Rejoice!

Or not.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Yesterday, I left the guild I have been in for three years. It was a hard decision to make, but I didn't really see any other options.

The guild introduced me to raiding back when Karazhan was new. I had played the game since its release, but never really gotten into the raiding scene until TBC.

The raiding days in TBC were a lot of fun. The guild was far from cutting edge, but we had fun while raiding, and slowly made progress. I know it's easy to forget the hard times, but I have a lot of fond memories from those days.

The main reason for leaving was that 25-man raiding had become a lot less fun. The raiding atmosphere was bad, raid morale was low, and I didn't agree with the leadership style of the raid leader. The state of raiding was so bad that we barely got enough signups to go raiding at all.

All guilds have their ups and downs, and during the three years I was a member in this guild, I stayed and helped the guild through bad times before. This time, however, I don't see any change for the better anytime soon, and I no longer have strong enough emotional ties to the guild to be prepared for a long haul.

Many of my in-game friends have left the guild, and other people I respect and enjoy playing with have either stopped raiding or play alot less than they used to.

It came to a point where I realized that logging on my paladin wasn't as much fun as it used to be. So I decided to leave and start afresh someplace else.

Will the grass be greener on the other side? I hope so. Only time will tell.

To my former guild mates I'd like to say: "So long and thanks for all the fish feasts!"

Hot-fixed Paladin Stamina Nerf

Several paladins noted the other night that their health suddenly dropped. I must admit I didn't notice it myself, but I can imagine the confusion it must have caused.

Blizzard did an unannounced hotfix where they, in short, nerfed paladin stamina with 4%, while buffing death knight stamina with 2%.

The official announcement came out later:

Paladin

• Sacred Duty now provides 2 / 4% Stamina, down from 4 / 8% Stamina. The cooldown advantages of the talent remain unchanged.

Death Knight

• Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.

It's a nice buff to death knight tanks, who have been a bit of an underdog for a while now.

For paladins it's of course never nice to get nerfed (especially not unannounced), but the comments from blue posters seem to indicate that the nerf to stamina makes it less likely that they will nerf Ardent Defender, the source of endless QQ from other tanks.

Since I prefer a fully functioning AD to 4% stamina, I'm all good.

Now we all have to wait and see about that AoE threat nerf that seems to be incoming...

First Time for Everything

Since the raid leader for the ICC10 raid I was in left the guild and did a faction change (he didn't like the state of raiding in the guild, and I don't really blame him), I decided to do some raid leading on my own.

I've never been a raid leader before. It has never really interested me to take the responsibility to get people together, finding replacements, explaining tactics, and police/guide the members of the raid. It just sounds too much like WORK to me, and it is stuff I do eight hours a day, five days a week already. Doing work on my spare time as well didn't sound all that compelling to me.

But since I want to do ICC10, and since my wife has been shut out from 25-man raiding, and since I knew there are a couple of great players who do not have the time to raid several days a week, but still want to do some casual raiding, I got ten people together and went into Icecrown yesterday.

Getting healers for the run turned out to be harder than getting tanks, and since I wanted to have a shaman in the group, I decided to go on my resto shaman instead of my paladin tank.

I have to admit, it was a challenge to raid lead for the first time while being a healer instead of a tank (which I have a lot more experience with). As a tank, I always have to be aware of the mobs and the surroundings, which means it's easier to guide the rest of the raid. As a healer, I was focusing on health bars and sometimes got tunnel vision staring at the colored squares in Grid. Well, at least I could be certain to what hurt or killed anyone in the raid...

Four of the people in the raid hadn't done ICC before, so I had to explain all the fights in detail, which slowed down the pace a bit. But even with almost half the raid being new to the content, we only had one death on boss fights up until Festergut. On Festergut we had our first wipe, but we downed him on the second attempt.

Rotface turned out to be too hard for us this time. With so many newcomers, healers not used to the fight, and a tank who hadn't done the kiting before, our tries quickly turned messy.

It was getting late, and we had four tries on Rotface before calling it and going to Naxxramas to do the weekly raid instead. With more practice, both for the kiting tank and for the rest handling the small oozes, and with stricter healing assignments, I have no doubt we will down Rotface as well next time.

It was a fun raid. I enjoyed leading it since the raid members were doing what they were supposed to, even though they've never done the fights before.

Next time, there will be a lot less explaining of tactics, and we will be able to steam roll the Lower Spire and get more time on the rest of the instance.

Thanks to the people who joined the fun and didn't make me look too bad :)