There’s not a whole lot to report about in-game this week.  We did Firelands last night and did Death from Above, which was hectic, but pretty fun.  We’re still 2/8 heroic in Dragon Soul, as well, but cleared that fairly handily on Thursday.  This is probably going to be the last week of Dragon Soul at 15% nerf, so we’ll see if we can down another boss, but if not, it should theoretically get even easier soon.

That’s enough about WoW…let’s get to the important information:

Miyoko and I have finally followed through with our plan to create a weekly podcast.  Saturday night we recorded it, and it is now approved on iTunes.  It can be found here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/untitled-podcast-project/id519524186

It’s a bit rough around the edges, of course, but overall I’m proud of it.  I think we did a decent enough job for our first go at it.  So, feel free to support your guildies, subscribe to our podcast and rate it 5 stars, or you’re kicked out of the guild and we would really appreciate it.

So, you guys want a chart, eh?  Well, here!  Here’s your chart!  I see that’s all I’m good for in your minds.  Next up I’ll make a chart of how you guys make me feel.  It’ll look like a broken heart, jerks.  (Click for full-size.)

Anyway, this chart also has a little dashed line showing what it will look like if when we kill a new boss this week.

Speaking of killing new bosses.  I’ve been thinking…since Yor’sahj is just not going very well for us (we generally wipe somewhere between 75-80%), perhaps we should consider attempting a new boss between Morchok and Ultraxion tomorrow.

Warlord Zon’ozz seems like it could be a decent fit for us, so I’ll throw some tips together and put them on the forum at some point today.  Technically, Yor’sahj is supposed to be the easier fight — more guild’s have killed him than have killed Ultraxion — and is supposed to require less gear, but the same could have been said about Beth’tilac back in the day and we still wiped on her week after week when Baleroc would have suited our strengths much better.

So, let’s get a good heroic group together tomorrow and see what we can do.

Edit:  Also, check out some ideas for finishing up the 2 Dragon Soul achievements we haven’t gotten yet.

In order to get us all up in a tizzy for the next 7 days, Blizzard released what is sure to be only the first of a series of Mists of Pandaria teasers.  The silhouette for the female pandaran model can now be seen over at MMO-Champion.

But what is a silhouette?  A miserable little pile of secrets!

So, let’s ruin the mystique and slap a little color on this bitch, eh?  I’ve provided my own version based on the coloring of a red panda:

Got your own version? Send it on over to cutaia@thecunninglinguists.net and we’ll get a little gallery put together.

We got some good attempts done on H-Yor’sahj last night, bringing him down to around 70% a few times. So, as a quick post-raid review, I thought I’d discuss what went wrong and what we’re going to need to do to see him die:

Fortunately, the answer is simple: Get more brute force.

Our inability to down him last night was almost never due to mechanics failures. Sure, Çull had a little learning curve when he switched over to healing, and there was that time when I totally screwed up the slime call-out, but overall, everyone knows what to do and when.

I downloaded a nice customizable Yor’sahj addon that will stop me from fucking that part up again, but otherwise, there’s not a whole lot to change here as far as I can tell.

It’s just pure numbers at this point. We might need a couple more weeks of gearing up in Deathwing weapons/trinkets and H-Morchok gear, but eventually we’re just going to hit a level of DPS and healing that’s going to allow us to easily overcome this boss.

Another thing to recognize is that the jump in gear required between H-Morchok and H-Yor’sahj is larger than most of the jumps in the tier. It’s similar to the difference between normal Ultraxion and Warmaster Blackhorn, which you may remember, provided a similar period of simply needing more gear. This chart is from GuildOx. Note that it’s not as awesome as one of mine:

So, have heart. Even if it takes 3 more weeks and another 5% nerf…this crazy talkin’ mother fucker will go down. And whenever he does, more bosses are very likely to follow.

Hey there guild.  It’s Monday morning, so time for another edition of the good ol’ Triple-M.

• I did a little research on Holding Hands, the Hagara achievement that keeps eluding us, and think we can get it with a different strategy.  I think what’s causing us problems is that we’re actually too close to each other when making a line down the middle.  It seems that if there is more than one person in range — 10 yards — of any given conductor, it has trouble and bugs out a bit.  I found this image that shows a method that may give us enough room to spread out more:

  

  I’ll tell you what, though…this achievement makes me very happy we’re not a 25-man raid at the moment.  Take a look at this crazy strategy someone made for the 25-man version of this achievement:  http://bossblueprint.com/world-of-warcraft/app/view.php?game=wow&img=58rvD5HPa

• I know you’ve been expecting an updated progression chart, so here it is!  (Click for full-size.)

  

  Remember not to get discouraged if new heroic bosses don’t go down right away.  It took 4 weeks after killing Ultraxion before Blackhorn went down.  It was another 4 weeks before Spine went down.  So, if we don’t kill anything new this week…or the following week…or even the following week, we’re still kicking ass.  Check out previous tiers, in which there were plenty of longer gaps for normal bosses.  So, let’s just get people decked out in more Deathwing and H-Morchok gear, keep trying and getting better, and soon enough, we’ll see even more progression.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I made things better.  As far as I can tell, the forum is loading much faster now.  Also, I believe I’ve made it so people can register forum accounts without us getting a massive influx of spambots.

So, do me a favor…while using the forum in the future, keep an eye out for anything that isn’t working or looking right, and let me know if I need to fix anything.  Hopefully all is well, though.

Madness of Deathwing ~ 2/12/12

H-Morchok ~ 3/1/12 (Click for full-size)

Seeing as there’s been a bit more interest in the forum recently, I figure it’s finally time to get the software updated so that we can finally allow new members to make accounts without e-mailing me.

If I know myself, I’ll fuck it all up and have to spend a few hours or nights fixing the damn code.  So, here’s just a heads up to be prepared for that possibility.

I’ll be trying to do it tonight, so that’s when it all might go down.

There’s not a whole lot to mention today, quite honestly:

• The Dragon Soul debuff is up to 10% as of today.  This should make H-Morchok a guaranteed kill this week.  We should definitely experiment with some other heroic bosses, as well, such as Yor’sahj.  Some pretty decent Heroic Raiding discussions have been cropping up in the forums.  You have checked out the forums, haven’t you???
• A very minor patch happened today.  You early adopters who picked up the test 64-bit client will have some fixes to make.  More info here:  http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4079625547

Since it’s a “slow news day” here on the guild site, I thought I’d do a little something different to pad the content for your entertainment.  There was a rather interesting new blue post today that rationally and calmly discussed how the Quest designers felt about Cataclysm’s questing and what they think succeeded or failed.  It gives us some nice insight into how the design will be affected in Mists of Pandaria.  As usual, the folks at MMO-Champion are providing some hilariously stupid commentary on the subject that seemed to deserve some recognition.

So, I’ve decided to present some awards here to the absolute dumbest comments of the day.  I’m going to name this fictional awards ceremony after the main MMO-C admin, so without further ado, here are today’s Boubie Awards!

• The Glass-Half-Empty award goes to the super pessimist who said merely: “and still no changes to silithus”
• The Can’t-Be-Appeased-Unless-Blizzard-Devs-Commit-Seppuku award goes to the cheerful soul who said:  “Completely avoided pretty much every single issue that people have raised. [...] Why can’t they just openly admit it was bad”
• The Why-Didn’t-This-Blog-Address-Issues-Aside-From-Its-Actual-Topic award goes to: “Oh what do you know, no questions about why their was no raid in 4.1″
• And finally…the award for Most-Inefficient-Armchair-Developer goes to: “[Legendary items need] both: super low drop rate AND extremely long/hard questline…”

Congratulations to our winners, and to those who weren’t mentioned, just keep reaching for the stars.