angryraidleader.com

If you haven’t finished the quests in The Dragonblight there may be some spoilers in this post, so get questing!

I finished the aforementioned zone last night and got to enjoy one of the coolest events I’ve seen in the game, but what was even better was the battle in Undercity that followed.  I love that Blizzard has come up with a way for your actions to change the world permanantly.  Now the Wrath gate, instead of being a battlefield with a constant wave of undead pouring out into The Dragonblight, is a fiery wreck with some weird flowers growing everywhere, and a bunch of people running around screaming like little girls.  But if you haven’t finished the quests, it’s still a battlefield for you.

I’m hoping that Blizzard takes full advantage of this new feature.  In fact, they should use it everywhere!  Maybe by the 20th time you show up to spank that hell out of some raid boss he just starts crying and surrenders.

“What did I ever do to you?  Every week you come in here and kill all my minions.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good minions?  And those damn epics don’t just grow on a tree.  I’m trying to stay on a budget here.  I can’t even wear any of this stuff.  I’m a freakin giant, but the rules say I have to have three fucking epics on me at all times.  God I hate my life.  Just kill me and get it over with.”

Or imagine the possibilities for eliminate annoying spammers or retards who think everything they say on the trade channel is worth hearing.  Wouldn’t it be great if you reported a spammer and *POP*, they just disappeared.  They’d still be there, but you wouldn’t be able to see them!  Extend that to the ignore list and it would be like having the power to boot people out of the game!

Of course if I had that power bad things would happen.  I’d start disappearing raiders who pissed me off.

“Where’s the damn hunters?”

“They’re here.  Remember, last week, you banished them all because every time you looked at them you felt like punching someone and your roommate said if you keep hiting him for no reason he’d move out.”

“Oh yeah.  I know you’re there bitches!  Don’t screw up this pull!”

I’m a sucker for new content, so any time a content patch comes out I’m happy.  So when a full expansion hits, I’m like a fat kid at an all you can eat cake party.  There is a lot to love about Wrath of the Lich King and if you’ve read a review or two, or played it yourself you already know all the good things I could say about it.  So instead I’ll point out the few things that piss me off.

• The new level design is amazing, they especially went for more dramatic elevation changes.  In other words, they spent a lot of time designing places I would fall to my death from.  Everyone has parts of the game they suck at.  For all of you leet teenagers out there with inhuman reaction speeds and encyclopedic knowledge of the game, the part you suck at is interacting with your fellow human beings.  So don’t bother commenting about how wrong I am and how perfect you are.  It’s a social game and no one likes you.  Including your mom.  It’s true, go ask her.  Anyways, back to me.  One of the things I suck at, is I seem to suffer from some kind of in game vertigo.  I’ve never met a cliff, bridge, tower, or elevator that I haven’t fallen off of.  From level 70-74 I’ve pulled every elite in sight except for those cool looking storm giants in Howling Fjord.  I’ve solo’d every group quest I’ve gotten.  In all that time I’ve died about a dozen times and only one was to mobs (tried riding through a bad guy town).  The other deaths?  They are marked by a series of craters stretching across southern Northrend.
• No one sells recipes anymore?  I always got a kick out of talking to NPCs and discovering the butcher hidden over in the corner that sells all the coolest cooking recipes.  Now vendors are only good for selling crap to.
• Early alchemy choices suck.  Alchemy gets kicked in the face quite a bit with the expansion.  With the new potion sickness rules, the ability for an alchemist to profit off of his profession is pretty poor, but what I find to more frustrating is that most of the early potion recipes you can train suck and they all go green almost instantly.  Am I going to have to level using only flasks?
• People whining about mobs getting tagged before they can hit them.  Look, short of millions of immature little wow junkies waking up this morning as mature, polite members of society, there is always going to competition for mobs.  Especially named bad guys that finish quest lines.  Add in the rivalry between horde and alliance and the inability to communicate (except for the alliance’s love for emotes) and people are going to screw each over 24/7.  So stop complaining and learn to tag faster.  Plus, being on a very imbalanced server, there’s nothing I love better than riding up to a spawn point camped by half a dozen alliance and landing a frost shock on the next spawn.  Bring on the spit emote!
• Why do Taunka women have Tauren faces while the dudes have the ugly bison features?

Give me a few more days to play it, and I’m sure I’ll find something else to bitch about.

So I spent all weekend scrubbing my apartment and packing, then had to load the moving truck in freezing ass rain.  By the time I get here to Vegas I was beat and figured it would take me all day to unload and carry shit up to my condo.  So I hit Home Depot and hired some day laborers!

They worked their asses off for a couple bucks.  I’m getting them to do everything from now on.  Maybe I could teach them to farm gold and start competing with China!

Gone for a few days while moving.  Back on Wednesday when my Internet gets hooked up.

Next week, Lich King hits the shelves and a lot of you have an opportunity that you may not have realized.  You can finally fulfill your dream of being a raider in a real raiding guild, not that collections of rejects that you’ve spent the last year running Karazhan with.  I know, I know.  You’ve been planning to turn your little collection of short bus kids into a real raiding guild once LK drops.  You’ve convinced yourself that even though you spun your wheels in the Kindergarten of BC raid instances, you’re going to magically learn how to progress through content in the expansion and you’ll get to run things your way!

Well your way sucks.  How do I know?  It isn’t my way, so it sucks.  (Editor’s Note: The proceeding statement is intended solely to generate angry flamey comments so I get ranked higher on Google.) Give it up, you’re raid buddies are tards.  If you want to really raid, this is the best chance you’ll get for the next couple of years.  You see, with the exception of the top raiding guilds that have a roster full of psycho ninja raiders, and the ‘family’ guilds that all love each other so much they’d never split up, every other guild is going to recruiting as soon as LK hits if they aren’t already.

As the end of BC approaches, players decide that now is a good time to cut back on their raiding or give it up altogether.  Old feuds and long simmering guild drama breaks guilds up because they’ve taken a break from raiding and the incentive of weekly loot has been removed.  People split off to form new raid guilds, telling themselves that they can run a guild better than those morons they’ve been raiding with for the last two years.  And some people are just poor and can’t afford the expansion.  Those people are fun to pick on.

The result of all of these people jumping ship is that you can fill their spot.  And with the changes to raid buffs, classes, and specs in LK, you can even raid in your beloved boomkin spec that people used to point at and laugh.  Here’s a few simple steps to get you started on your raiding career:

1. Do some research.  Read up on the raiding guilds on your server.  Go to their website, check their raid times, ask around.  Find out in advance if they’re led by a soul crushing totalitarian bastard like me!
2. Level up and gear up as fast as possible.  As soon as those guilds hit 80, their going to be in 10 mans, and they’ll be looking for warm bodies to fill spots.
3. Try to pug instances or group for quests with members of the guild you want to join.  It’s one of the fastest ways to get recruited if you don’t completely suck.
4. Be patient.  You’re joining a group of people who have probably been raiding together for a couple years or more.  You’re low man on the totem pole, you’re going to have to work your way up.
5. Know your shit.  Study the boss fights, know how to make the most of your class abilities, and don’t do stupid shit when you get in a raid.  For tips, read my old articles.  I rock.

Now go out there and raise some raid leader’s blood pressure!

Didn’t realize how long that last post was until I went back to reread it.  So for you ADHD sufferers, here’s the fucking short version.

Stop telling me my raids would go better if I kicked people out and recruited replacements.  There’s never as many geared and skilled recruits as any guild would like.  Except huntards.  They’re everywhere.

When I complain about the performance of the raiders in my guild it’s inevitable that someone responds with a post like:

This is all your fault.  If you were a competent raid/guild leader you would kick out all of the people who are not perfect raiders and replace them.

When I see these posts, I don’t get offended, because I’m pretty sure that the people writing them haven’t ever led a guild or been responsible for recruiting for a guild.  I am on one of the most crowded servers in the US, so I think it’s fair for me to assume that it’s representative of most servers.  This big pool of eager wanna-be raiders that you imagine I’m ignoring in favor of the retards that I bitch about, don’t exist.

So for all of you back seat drivers out there that think recruiting raiders is simple, I’m going to run you through the process from the beginning.

The Early Days - This is when we were all first starting out back at the beginning of BC.  Some guilds carried over from pre BC and managed to survive the change to 25 man raiding, but it was surprising how many collapsed over stupid shit like Karazhan loot.  But dozens of new guilds sprung up, most with just enough people to run one Kara raid.  Once you got a ways into Kara you started looking ahead to 25 man raids and started recruiting anyone you could get your hands on.  If you were really lucky (like me) you absorbed a guild or two that wasn’t progressing in Kara and got a large number of people all at once.

But new people brought new problems.  How do you split into 2 or even 3, 10 man raids without someone getting pissed off at their assignment.  When two balanced raids stalled our progression, we went with a Progression raid that was focused on downing the bosses as quickly as possible, and a Learning raid that took things a little slower, so people could learn their raid roles better and get geared up.  Despite the fact that all of our officers took turns rotating through the Learning Raid, we still had people that threw hissy fits about being assigned to it.  Of course, they were also our worst raiders, but they didn’t see the connection between their ability and their assignment.  People actually cried when they weren’t allowed to go to the Progression Raid.  And I’m talking about full grown adults here.  Crying over a fucking game.

The first 25 man raid - Remember how excited you were?  The day had finally come, weeks (or maybe months if you were slow) of hard work, getting geared up in Kara and heroics, time spent farming for your crafted gear and consumables, time spent studying the High King and Gruul fights.  Then you can get 25 people to show up, so maybe you delay it a day or two.  Eventually you get enough people together, you pull that first brute in Gruul’s Lair and half the raid dies because their too stupid to listen to a couple of simple instructions.  After a few tries everyone gets it down, you move in to High King’s room and the wipes commence.  This is the really fun part where you find out that a dozen of your so called hard core raiders who thought they were bad asses because they can kill a few Kara bosses, can’t stand to wipe more than 2 or 3 times while learning a boss, and the excuses start flying.

• I’ve got homework!
• My mom wants me to get off the computer!
• I just found a weird rash on my junk and I need to get it checked out!

But if you’re really lucky, you can get enough people to stick around and you get your first 25 man kill, deal with the inevitable loot drama when the rogue who joined the guild this morning freaks out because you don’t give him the first Tier 4 shoulders to drop.  And you’re working on Gruul soon.

The Tier 5 grind - Once you start in on SSC and Tempest Keep things start to get really grindy.  Both instances feature some really crappy design flaws where the order you meet the bosses is not the ideal order to fight them in.  And the fights are wildly different in difficulty.  Thanks for the 30-40 minute trash clear to Al’ar that we got to do for like 3 months before we ever tried to kill the flaming bitch.  And who’s genius idea was it to have the first boss in SSC require you to gear up all of your tanks in nature/frost resist gear that they won’t wear at any other point in the game.  Pointless gear checks do not make for happy customers Blizz.  The end result of all of this is that people get sick of fighting Lurker and Void Reaver week after week, so your best raiders get bored.  Meanwhile fights like Solarian and Leo do a great job of highlighting your stupidest players and you start fazing them out.  This is where we started to hit our first real recruiting problems.  You always want to recruit people that are somewhat close in gear and experience to the rest of your raid.  Otherwise you either raid with people that put out really bad dps/healing numbers or you spend a lot of time doing farmed content gearing those people up.  When I announced that were were no longer doing Gruul’s lair as a scheduled raid so we could focus on Vashj and Kael, every warrior, rogue, and hunter who hadn’t gotten a Dragonspine Trophy yet threated to slash their wrists.

It seems to be in everyone’s nature to always apply to guilds that are ahead of them in progression.  So when other guilds that were a couple of bosses behind us in Tier 5 content would lose people, they wouldn’t app to our little guild.  They’d leap frog over us and app to guilds in Hyjal and Black Temple.  I’m sure those guilds loved having to kill Vashj and Kael over and over to get all their recruits attuned to Hyjal.  Our recruits were from guilds that stalled in Gruul’s.  Recruiting people that can’t kill a tank and spank boss like Gruul is like recruiting from the Special Olympics to fill spots on the regular Olympic team.  “I don’t do enough dps to kill Gruul!  Can I join your guild?!”  Great, you’ll be a huge help on Kael, we’ve got all day to kill the advisors in Phase 3.  So we struggled along and finally made it to Vashj/Kael.  Suddenly we were swamped with applicants!  And none of them were the least bit of help downing those bosses with the exception of a couple of hunters who were able to top the dps charts.  And of course since you’re fighting very difficult bosses you’re losing people who can’t handle wiping to new content, which means you have to bring in the new guys that aren’t geared for it.  NOTE - don’t bother replying to this with a comment about how easy those two fights are, no one finds them easy when they are first learning them.  So save it.

Hyjal and BT!!! - You’ve made it!  You’re into Tier 6 raiding!  Now you’ll be flooded with recruits and you’ll be surrounded by hot chicks and have all the steak you can eat.  Wrong.  You see the problem you start running into at this point, is that pretty much everyone who is ever going to raid already is.  Anyone reaching level 70 this far into BC is never going to get geared up enough to be seriously considered as a raider.  And while there aren’t any new raiders coming along, there are still people leaving.  We went through times where we wouldn’t have a single applicant for a month at a time.  Most guilds have worked out their drama, people are staying where they are, and the only time you get an app is when someone can’t get along with his current guild.  Most of those people are assholes.  That’s why their last guild didn’t like them, you won’t like them either.  But you’ll still recruit them, because at this point you’re desparate.  You’re so close to finishing the damn game (not counting Sunwell - that shit is like overtime) that you can taste it, and you’d raid with Osama Bin Laden if he could control his aggro and shut the fuck up about killing all of the infidels on Ventrilo.  I swear we had one girl that kept raiding with us and one of the guys in our guild was basically fucking stalking her.  And I didn’t kick him, because we were desparate for healers.  This is the point where you start to make decisions that find you curled up in the shower crying, trying to wash the shame off, but it just won’t go away.

Then came Archimonde….

and his hundred plus fucking wipes while we were learning him.  And our guild just melted away.  We went from having 30-35 people showing up to our raids to canceling half of the time because only 15-20 people would show up.  Once we downed him, some people came back, but we never really recovered from him.  We were forced to allow more casuals to raid, we had to recruit people who weren’t geared for Tier 5 raiding let alone Black Temple, and the only reason we were able to finish BT was that a guild just behind us in progression broke up and we got half a dozen of their former members to raid with us.

So before you respond with a comment about how if I’d just kick out all the people who aren’t 100% and recruit new people things would be perfect, go ask your guild master or raid leader if you can be recruiting officer for a month.  I’m sure you’ll love the job.

My two man Vegas raid went great this week.  Phat lootz!  I’ll post again after I sleep for a day or two.

Although I wasn’t able to get any good results at the Lumber Mill when I did some late night pvp last Wednesday, I did have a warm and fuzzy moment in EOTS.  Me and a holy pally rode up to the flag that was about to be picked up by four Alliance standing on it.

How about a little Thunder?!

All four went flying into the abyss.  Good times.

As anyone who has raided since patch 3.0.2 has hit can attest, raiding just got a whole lot easier. Bosses and trash mobs got a big nerf to their health and damage and several boss abilities were removed due to changes in player’s abilities. Now raiding is like putting a UFC champion up against someone who sits on their ass playing WoW all day.

My goal in Burning Crusade was to finish Black Temple. We got a late start on raiding and weren’t hard core enough to have a real chance at Sunwell. But I wish the patch had waited one more week, because we were up to phase 4 on Illidan and would have killed him this week even without the nerf. But the patch hit, and even with all the lag issues inherent in playing right after a major content patch, we cleared Black Temple in just over 3 hours, then went to Sunwell last night and downed Kalecgos. Brutallus is on tonight’s menu. And while I am a little disappointed that our Illidan kill came post patch and seems to be sort of tainted as a result, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

But if you’ve read any of the WoW forums over the last couple of days, I appear to be the exception to the rule. Just like every time Blizzard has nerfed something in the past, people are freaking the fuck out. Why do people get so pissed when Blizzard nerfs content? If you’re one of that small minority of players who are hardcore raiders and cleared all the content pre nerf you still have bragging rights. So why are you acting like Blizzard just gave you and your fellow hardcore raiders a big wedgie?

Why do you care if people are getting the same loot as you just weeks before Lich King hits. It doesn’t affect you does it? You can try to claim that it unbalances pvp, but the arena gear is far better in pvp than Tier 6 and easier to get.  What it comes down to is greed and jealousy. You want everyone to look at you and go, “Oooh! Ahhh! He’s the most awesome raider on the whole server! Look at all those purples.” So when some scrub raider walks up to you next week and goes, “Look! I have the Tier 6 helm just like you!” you’re going to run to the nearest forum and post some big rant about how unfair this nerf is. Stop acting like a little bitch. You don’t like the nerf, go play some other game until Lich King hits.

BC has been out for almost two years, but only about 5-6% of raid guilds have cleared Black Temple. Less than 1% have finished Sunwell. If you’re Blizzard you look at those numbers and realize that 95-99% of your customers aren’t getting to see all that fancy content you spent a bunch of time and money developing. And while there are some players that seem perfectly happy to do the same shit over and over, there are other players who don’t have the time to commit to hardcore raiding or maybe they just aren’t good enough to get in a raid guild, but they get pretty bored of doing dailys and running Karazhan every week. So how does Blizzard keep their monthly fees rolling in? Nerf content once it has been around long enough for the hardcore players to clear it, and let the casual players get a look at stuff.

Then Blizzard takes that money and develops new content for you hardcore players. No nerfs = less players = less money = less content.

P.S. If you reply to this post with some whiny ass comment about how nerfs are unfair and cheapen your achievements I’m going to go ahead and respond in advance since I’ll be out of town for a few days. - You’re a tool.