angryraidleader.com

So am the only one that a few weeks after the so called expansion came out, looked around and said, “So… is that it?”  I swear there were Outland content patches with more playable content that WotLK had.  Sure the zones were massive and packed with quests, but quests have zero replayability except for dailies, and most of the daily quests in LK are rather underwhelming.  The only one I really looked forward to each day was trying to fry the dragons in under two minutes which I consistently failed, because I am old and slow.  Even rep griding, which has always been a secret pleasure of mine, was boring.  Hell, I hit exalted with Cenarion Circle just by grinding in Silithus before they made it easy.  That was like having a full time job.

“How was work today?”

“Not bad, I killed the Twilight Prophet twice.”

“That’s nice dear, dinner’s ready.”

“Smoked Desert Dumplings again?  Can’t we have meatloaf just once?”

Um, where was I?  Oh yeah, the rep grinds… boring.  And the raid content was like diet raiding.  Naxx has
15 bosses!  Yeah, bosses which have been in the game for two years now.  Frankly Blizzard’s claim that they were retuning the instance because so few people got to see it didn’t impress me.  They fucked up and put it in the game too close to the Outland expansion, making it the bulk of the new raid content in an expansion they’re charging for is bullshit.  I found most of the new class abilities to be underwhelming as well.  The only thing that impressed me in LK was the new pvp zones and world areas.

Compare the raid content of the two expansions at launch:

Burning Crusade: Karazhan, Grull’s Lair, Magtheridon’s Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, and Mount Hyjal.

Lich King: Naxxramus, Vault of Archavon, The Obsidium Sanctum, The Eye of Eternity

So BC has 4 large instances and 2 small ones with 28 total bosses.  LK drops 1 large instance (that you could successfully pug almost as soon as you hit 80) and 3 small ones for a total of 18 bosses, 15 of which have been in the game for two years.  Wow Blizzard, way to pull out all the stops!

And before you respond with some pissy comment about how you can fight all the drakes at once for an achievement and better loot, or you can can kill Malygos in under 5 minutes for another achievement, and blah blah fucking blah.

Blizzard is using achievements to make you enjoy playing the same content over and over, so they can provide you with less while still charging the same price.  Hey, I fell for it myself.  I spent hours running around doing boring ass shit in the game just to check off little boxes on a list, but it got boring fast.

The only thing really big in the expansion was the addition of death knights, and they fucked up big time there.  I’ll explain why next time.

Actually I stopped posting for much more mundane reasons. New job was kicking my ass. The base of my big plush leather chair needed to be fixed and the only other chair I had at hand was a cheap folding one. Made my ass sore to sit on it for more than a few minutes. And my E button on my keyboard crapped out. Ever try to write a sentence without E? It sucks.

Used to the new job, chair fixed, and new keyboard. Post to come this week.

Or I might just wait a month and see how many more bitchy comments I can get.  Muhahaha!

Some people seem to think my blog is ending because my guild broke up. Nope. I have too much stuff to bitch about to stop now. If I keep all this bottled up, I’ll just snap one day and start beating the crap out of some innocent stranger. “Move out of the fucking fire! Stuns are goddamn CC and should have diminishing returns! I hate death knights worse than huntards!”

Nope, too dangerous. Must continue to vent and keep internal pressure at just this side of psychotic. Plus I still haven’t posted my six part essay about how Death Knights are the stupidest thing to happen to this game since it launched.

Note: I haven’t actually written a six part essay, and when I get around to it, it may be like 4 parts, or maybe even one, so don’t be posting whiny comments about how you were promised six parts. I live in Vegas for god sakes. I have shit to do, beer to drink, strippers to support.

Guild’s dead.  Oh well.

———-

I could just leave the post at that, but it would probably annoy some people.  To understand why the guild went kablooey we have to go back a few months to before LK……

Anyone who was in a raiding guild pre LK, that wasn’t the top guild on their server or close to it, will understand what my guild was going through at the time.  People were getting burned out, our raid roster had become a revolving door, as burn outs quit and frustrated raiders jumped to guilds ahead of us in progression so they could see Sunwell Plateau.  Meanwhile, the people that stuck with it, along with a half dozen or so friends from another guild that had imploded under the stress were busy trying to finish off Black Temple before it got nerfed.  We came very very close.  I really do believe that if the nerf patch had come one week later, we would have downed Illidan pre nerf.  Then there was some down time as people relaxed a little, the nerfed content was so easy we could full clear BT in a couple hours, so we cut our raiding schedule back.  Right around this time I was getting ready to move, so I started spending less time playing.

Then Lich King hits, while I am literally in mid move.  I think I was unpacking stuff when I took a break to go buy the expansion.  I wasn’t able to play much at first and I could see that our quild was quickly breaking up into three groups.  About a third of our raiders, including some of our most competent players speed leveled their way to 80 and started pugging raids with the server’s top raiding guild.  Another third, including me, took a more leisurely pace, but were still leveling every day or two, but we weren’t in a big rush to start raiding.  The remainder of our raiders took the exp launch as an extended break and looked like they would need a couple of months to hit 80.

Time for a little confession.  When I made the decision to move back to Vegas and focus on my career, I knew that WoW would be taking a back seat.  I was pretty sure that if I raided at all it would be a once or twice a week thing, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted the responsibility of leading raids or even a guild, because I wasn’t going to let anything slide in my real life as a result of playing too much.  I was sure, however, that if I told people this before the exp hit, that the guild would quickly fall apart.  I hoped that if  I just quietly stepped back, people would step forward to lead raids, and they would find a way to keep the guild together.  It seemed a shame to have come so far in BC with the late start we got, and then just give up on the guild.

But one thing I have learned over the years I’ve been playing this game, is that when you face the stress of raiding, only two types of guilds work.

1. You can either collect a group of very good like minded players, who work together because they are all focused on fast progression.
2. Or you can have a guild of varying levels of skill and commitment, with personalities that occasionally clash, and the guild only works with strong leadership.

We were the second type, and the less I played, the more I fell behind in leveling, the faster the guild began to unravel.  It started slowly.  One of our top raiders wanted to switch from healing on his priest to tanking on his warrior, and we were pretty full of tanks, plus he had issues with some of our guildies so he left when LK hit and started a small guild with a couple of friends.  They were all good players, and some of our best raiders started running heroics and 10 mans with them when they hit 80.  Pretty soon messages started popping up on our forums.

“It’s been fun, I’ll miss you all, but I’m not really happy here anymore, blah, blah, blah.  Bye”

Some people freak out when members leave a guild, turning from best friends to sworn enemies instantly, but my policy has always been, go where you’re happy.  The guild doesn’t pay your monthly fee, and any kind of loyalty that people think is owed to a guild in a video game, is laughable.  So good, luck.  Stay in touch.  And once it started, the end was inevitable.  Pretty soon we had lost about half of our really good raiders.  The ones that show up knowing the fights in advance, put up great numbers, and always do their jobs.  By the time we started raiding 25 man Naxx, our roster was so full of amateurs, we couldn’t clear the place.

So now the hardcore raiders who had stuck around, started getting pissed off.  People started leaving without posting such nice messages.  More along the lines of:

“You fucking suck at raiding.  I hope you all die in a fire.  I’m out”

Then the people that were left started finding real life stuff that was suddenly more important than WoW.  I had been doing the same for a month already, so I could understand the appeal.  Pretty soon the guild was a ghost town.  No one logging on, raids not happening, no one posting on the forums, except to say goodbye or bitch about no one being on.  And then this week, a couple of the officers called it quits, guys who had been there since the first Kara kill.  And Sin, a horde raiding guild on US-Icecrown, quietly became a casual friends and family guild.

R.I.P.

No, I haven’t been kidnapped by a white slavery ring, soon to be sold into the arms of some hairy oil sheik.  I just had some stuff come up in the real world that kept me pretty occupied for a few weeks.  I went back to work in the nightclub business just after New Year’s and the new job’s been kicking my ass, so I basically go to work, come home, pass out, wake up, and go back to work.  Then on my two days off, I’ve been working on launching a photography business and doing body guarding work.  Plus my E key mysteriously stopped working.  Ever try to write a sentence without the e key?

Anyways, I’m back.  Posts may be a little infrequent while I’m getting used to working nights again, but be patient dear readers, I have much to bitch about.

First off, sorry about the long break.  I just moved back to Vegas and I’ve been busy looking for work and partying with friends I haven’t seen in a few years.  As a result I haven’t been playing much and just started doing 25 man raids this week, so I haven’t had much to write about.

So apparently someone at blizzard got fed up with people that suck at moving and he put this fight in to punish them.  Now, there are lots of fights where movement is important and as a raid leader you come to dread those fights, because there is always going to be someone who hasn’t mastered the WASD keys despite years of gaming.  And forget complex movement like strafing, jumping, or kiting.  But Heigan adds a little twist that I find hilarious, which I’ll get to in a second.

So on my first night back doing 25 mans, we cleared the spider and plague wings and I got to do Heigan for the second time.  I downed him on 10 man a couple of weeks ago.  Being capable of walking and breathing at the same time, it took me one attempt to get the dance down and it was cake from that point on.  Other people… not so much.

And that’s when I discovered what makes this fight awesome.  There’s no enrage timer and damage is so light that you can stay in the fight with 3 or 4 healers as long as you have some way to keep the disease under control.  So it’s like survival of the fittest.  All of the movement impaired die in the first phase 2, or the second if they manage to stumble their way through the first one.  Then they all have to sit there dead and watch their betters finish the fight.

You’d think this fight would piss me off with all the failure, but it makes me laugh instead.

I blame Vegas.

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!