We’re going in for our first attempts on Madness of Deathwing on Sunday night, so let’s get prepared, all.

1) It turns out Thisby was correct, and that we may want to adjust the platform order slightly from the LFR strategy.  Instead of Ysera>Nozdormu>Alestraza, we’ll go Ysera>Alestraza>Nozdormu.  This means we’ll have to single target the Blistering Tentacles on the 3rd platform, but that we won’t have to let any Elementium Bolts land until the fourth.

2) I’ve been looking hard, and I can’t find any real differences in mechanics from the LFR version.  Everything does more damage, obviously, so executing correctly will become important, but there at least won’t be anything new for us to learn.

3) Icy Veins, as always, has a great written guide for the fight, with separate sections for Tanks, Healers and DPS if you want to see what matters most to you:  http://www.icy-veins.com/madness-of-deathwing-detailed-strategy

As Rych suggested might happen…I’ve an updated graph for you!  Let’s try and add another line to it on Sunday!

(Click to see full size.)

So, on Sunday night we hit what feels like our first real stumbling block in Dragon Soul:  Warmaster Blackhorn.  Sure, Hagara didn’t fall in week 1, but that was only because we ran out of time.  Ultraxion didn’t go down the second week, but it was clear we’d be able to come back with more DPS the following lockout and kill him.  Blackhorn, however, is the first boss we’ve come across where a kill doesn’t quite look imminent.

However, that’s not necessarily a horrible thing.  I wanted to present a little information on our progress in Dragon Soul, thus far, in order to bring a little perspective.

Consider the following graph (click to view full-size):

The y-axis shows the amount of weeks into each patch.  The x-axis shows the percentage of each raid we’ve completed (since the tiers all have different amounts of bosses).  Basically, the higher the line, the longer it’s taken to get to that point in the raid.

As you can see, this is the best we’ve done on any Cataclysm raiding tier.  In order to get this far in Tier 11, we needed 10 more weeks than we’ve had.  In Tier 12?  We needed almost 4 more months.

I guess my point is this:  I’m not sure we’ll down Blackhorn this week.  Who knows…it could be a couple weeks even.  Now, that sure as hell doesn’t mean we won’t keep trying our damndest — and I’m not saying there should be any negativity about our chances, by any means — but I just don’t want anyone to get discouraged if we spend a couple weeks hitting a wall.

We’re gonna finish this tier — and we’re going to do it far before the next patch/expansion releases.  We’re gonna break our “last minute” trend…this much is clear.  So, we should be proud of our progress so far, and we should be confident that we’ll continue to do well…

All I’m saying, though, is don’t feel bad if the cow doesn’t go down this week.  I really doubt we’re in for a block of Beth’tilacian proportions. 

Welcome to the second edition of State of the Guild, an overview I write each major patch to keep you, the people, informed. It tends to be the case that most issues in guilds arise due to a lack of information and communication.  In that spirit, this State of the Guild post will address where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Once again, for those of you want to know the basics, without reading the entirety of this post I’ve worked so hard on, I’ll make the important stuff pink so you can skim it.

Progression, pre-4.3:

Tier 12 was a bit of an enigma for us.  We ended up getting really stuck on early bosses, then pretty much tore through the later bosses. One potential cause is that Beth’tilac and Lord Rhyolith only received 15% nerfs, while Baleroc, Alysrazor and Majordomo Staghelm were at the end of some 25% hits with the nerfbat.  Another important difference, though, is the types of fights those are.  Our strengths tend to be communication, avoiding damage and properly handling some of the more difficult positioning mechanics. We’re even pretty decent at handling predictable adds, such as in the lava seed phase of Ragnaros.  Our weaknesses, however, continue to be fights that entail constant swarms of adds.  These tend to really lead to our DPS numbers suffering. If you want a perfect example of what I’m talking about, consider that we spent a couple months working on Beth’tilac before we could reliably down her on a regular basis…while we killed Ragnaros after only 3 solid nights of attempts.

But take that with a grain of salt and just keep it in the back of your mind for future improvement.  Overall, we should be very proud. We continued the guild trend (started in ICC) of killing final bosses immediately before a patch/expansion drops, when we finally finished Firelands last night! This puts us, for all intents and purposes, in a 13-way tie for 31st place.  If you remember, we were tied for 29th place at the end of tier 11, so we’ve certainly stayed consistent in Cataclysm. And we’re still up from the 64th place we ended Wrath of the Lich King with, so grats guild!

Progression, now and in the foreseeable future:

Dragon Soul is looking to be an even better time for us. I know I said something similar before Firelands dropped, but this time I think I’m right.  We had a huge shakeup with our raiding roster during the summer months, which hurt us.  But we seem to have a pretty reliable raid group these days.  Also, I’ve done some looking into the Tier 13 fights, and believe their mechanics will suit us well.

Morchok is all about stacking and spreading to reduce/avoid damage.  Yor’sahj is about knowing how to handle the abilities he receives from his adds.  Zon’ozz is a raid boss where we play ping pong — or perhaps is more like fighting Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time.  These bosses have a lot of variety and will hopefully be more interesting for raiders than Tier 12’s numerous “add fights” were.  I’ve already started compiling Linguist’s Guides on these bosses and will continue to add more in the days ahead.

We will continue to focus both of our scheduled raid nights on progression content, so we’ll be stepping into the Dragon Soul raid on December 1st!

Meanwhile, here’s a GuildOx inspired list of Tier 11/12 encounters/achievements that the guild has yet to pick up.  It is in order of most to least achieved on the server:

1. Full of Sound and Fury
2. H: Halfus Wyrmbreaker
3. H: Shannox
4. Silence is Golden
5. H: Majordomo Staghelm
6. H: Lord Rhyolith
7. H: Atramedes
8. H: Alysrazor
9. H: Chimaeron
10. H: Magmaw
11. Elementary
12. Achieve-a-tron
13. H: Baleroc
14. H: Maloriak
15. H: Beth’tilac
16. H: Valiona and Theralion
17. H: Omnotron Defense System
18. Death From Above
19. Double Dragon
20. Bucket List
21. H: Cho’gall
22. Do a Barrel Roll
23. H: Conclave of Wind
24. Keeping it in the Family
25. The Abyss Will Gaze Back Into You
26. H: Nefarian
27. Stay Chill
28. H: Al’Akir
29. H: Sinestra
30. H: Ascendant Council
31. H: Ragnaros
32. I Can’t Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am

While we won’t focus our progression nights on these types of things, you may see some T11/12 events planned by:

The Book Club

Miyoko has been doing a great job in the Book Club recently.  She put together a super fun Pilgrim’s Bounty event and has started filling up our calendar with Monday fun runs.  Check those out and be sure to sign up so we know there’s an interest in such events.

Recruitment

The beginning of a tier is always prime recruiting time since everyone’s on the same page.  We’ve also been running into the issue of “too many sign ups” recently. The biggest problem with current raid sizes is that 11-15 sign ups is kind of a dead-zone for being able to fit everyone into a guild group.  From 16 players and up, however, you pretty much always have a combination of raid sizes that will accommodate guild groups. For those interested in the math:

8-10: 1×10
11-15: DEAD-ZONE
16-20: 2×10
20-25: 1×25
24-30: 3×10
28-35: 1×25 & 1×10
36-45: 1×25 & 2×10
40-50: 2×25

As far as roles go, whenever we’ve had too many sign ups, it’s always been in the DPS department.  So, it’s tanks and healers we’ll be wanting to pick up in order to start filling out a second raid team.

As always, we’re more concerned with picking up quality people who are fun to be around than simply filling a raid slot, so don’t expect to see us recruiting any douchebags just because they happen to know how to use a shield.

I’d also like to thank everyone who has so graciously backed out on raid nights when we’ve had a raider surplus.  Specifically, Gal and Bam come to mind at the moment.  It really sucks having to turn people away on raid night, so you guys have definitely made things easier on those of us tasked with making those hard decisions.

The Legendary

4.3 is adding a new set of legendary weapons to the game:  The Fangs of the Father. In the Firelands, we took a while to settle on our Dragonwrath collector, which led to some wasted embers.  This time, the decision will be much easier, since we only have one rogue who raids with us.  Congratulations and thanks to Malkoran, who will hopefully be putting together these awesome daggers.

I also haven’t forgotten about Dragonwrath.  I’m not sure exactly how we’ll find the time to continue Miyoko’s quest to put this item together, but we should certainly figure it out at some point. It would be wonderful to see a giant version of one of our guildies, floating above Stormwind for all to see (and I wouldn’t mind having an extra pet on our guild vendors either).

Off-Spec Rolls

Finally, I would like to officially announce an important change in our looting procedure that recently made it into the R&P.

Our rolling priority used to be:  First Main Spec>First Off Spec>Second Chance Main>Second Chance Off.

After much consideration — and after discussing it with many of our regular raiders — I’ve decided to move our Second Chance Main roll above the First Off Spec roll.  This essentially means the priority has changed to:  First Main Spec>Second Chance Main>First Off Spec>Second Chance Off.

The previous system was chosen due to the high amount of pugging we were doing, and was designed to ensure that as many people as possible were able to get some gear, even if it was only an off-spec piece.

Since we are now regularly filling raids, however, it seemed prudent to make this change so that we can more quickly gear up the raid as a whole. If giving one person two main spec pieces in a night means that we can better approach the next boss, then it will hopefully be worth it to folks who might have otherwise had a chance to pick up an off-spec piece.

Concerns about the new procedure can be directed to Cutaia or any of the officers, but I did receive a pretty positive reception when I brought it up in Mumble, so I think we have a winning idea here.

As you know, patch 4.3 is very close on the horizon.  It could theoretically drop as soon as 11/22 or as late as 12/6.  Smart money’s on  11/29, though, when the current arena season ends.  So, if correct, that gives us a new patch full of content to explore in just about 2 weeks.

The Dragon Soul, an 8-boss raid culminating in the Deathwing fight, is the content we’ll be focusing on at that point.  So, you may be asking yourself, “Self…how can I best be prepared to kill the Aspect of Death, come patch 4.3.”  Well, first off, stop talking to yourself.  It’s weird and creepy.  Secondly, I’m here to tell you, so let’s take a trip down gear lane and figure out what all the hip and stylish raiders will be wearing for the holiday season.

Pre-patch gearing:

Before the patch, we have a couple options for gear preparation.

1) Tier 12 Raiding ~  Any piece of gear we’re able to replace during our runs through Firelands is nice.  However, the main draw from this place is going to be the iLevel 384 drops from Ragnaros.  There will be a lot of options for 378 gear once the patch drops, but items like Sulfuras are going to be BiS for some classes until we start downing bosses in Tier 13.

2) Valor gear becomes Justice gear ~ As mentioned earlier today, folks who might be able to pick up an extra piece of Valor gear now should definitely feel free since it can help us down Rag.  But past that, don’t worry too much about Valor points until the patch.  If anything, people with a couple Valor pieces left to purchase, should be more concerned with stockpiling up to 4,000 JP so that they can just snag those same items up on day 1 of the patch.

Patch 4.3, the easy gear:

So, you’re starting patch 4.3 with a nice smattering of gear, but you still have the odd 359 or 365 piece here and there.  What to do?

3) Dragon Soul 5-mans ~ When 4.3 hits, it will bring with it 3 new 5-man dungeons:  End Time, Well of Eternity and Hour of Twilight.  These three dungeons are fun, interesting romps.  The bosses of these dungeons also drop iLevel 378 gear for a ton of slots and include some quest chains that offer similar gear.

Here’s a complete list on Wowhead.

As you can see from the following, you will be able to fill out damn near every slot with 378s just through Justice Points and the new 5-mans — even those once-elusive head and shoulder pieces:

Head: 5-man
Neck: JP
Shoulder: 5-man
Back: 5-man
Chest: JP/5-man
Wrist: JP
Hands: JP/5-man
Waist: ???
Legs: JP/5-man
Feet: 5-man
Ring 1: JP
Ring 2: 5-man
Trinket 1: 5-man
Trinket 2: ???
Weapons: 5-man
Ranged: JP/5-man

Really, the only slots left untouched are the waist and one of the trinkets.  Theoretically, these can be filled through the Avengers of Hyjal rep vendors, as well, at Honored and Revered respectively.  (Also, trinkets being what they are, some of the drops and rep items may not be as good as lower level items anyway.  Keep that in mind.)

Now, the good stuff:

Since 378 gear is so easy to come by, you’re probably wondering how to get even better gear.  Man, it’s just never good enough for you, is it?  Oh well, I’ll oblige…

4) Raid Finder ~ The new game in town is the Raid Finder, which works a lot like the current Dungeon Finder.  You queue, and end up in a group with 25 assholes who want to ruin your day.  Pessimism aside, it’s going to be a nice tool for guilds like us.  We can get extra gear and experience during the week running this so we can be extra prepared when we zone into the actual raid together.

About that gear…it’s a lower level version of the gear found in the normal difficulty raid.  So, most gear will be iLevel 384 with Deathwing’s drops sitting at 390.  It’s only 5 levels above the easily farmed 5-man gear, so I wouldn’t kill yourself going after it, but it’s certainly nice if you can get your hands on any of it.

Here’s a complete list.

5) Valor gear ~ As always, there will be a nice selection of gear available for Valor Points.  This gear is iLevel 397 — matching normal mode Dragon Soul drops.  The best part about Valor gear this time around is that getting those precious VP won’t be so tedious anymore.  Valor Points will continue to drop from raid bosses we kill (115 per run), and will also be gained for completing each wing of the Raid Finder difficulty (250 each).

The real quality of life change, though, comes to those of us who like to cap our Valor through the dungeon finder.  No longer will we feel compelled to run 2 dungeons, over and over again.  Now, we will be able to do a random dungeon — which includes the Dragon Soul 5-mans, the Zulian heroics AND the 9 launch heroics — and be able to get 150 VP per completion.  We can finally enjoy grinding dungeons again!

Here’s a complete list of Valor gear.

The slots you can fill here are:  Back, Chest, Finger, Hands, Head, Neck, Ranged, Trinket, Waist, Wrist

6) If you can’t upgrade any items through any of the previous means, then you already know step 6:  Kill some raid bosses.  Enjoy!

Nominations are in and it looks like, once again, the winners have been decided without any voting.  Here are the nominees, as always, listed in alphabetical order.

Running for Author are:

1. Darthworgen
2. Galnadir
3. Rashmahal

Running for Book Club:

1. Darthworgen
2. Miyoko
3. Superior

There are 3 Author slots open and 2 Book Club positions available.  Since Darth will be automatically elected to Author, he will be removed from the Book Club race, leaving only 2 there.

So, there you go.  We have our new guild officers, starting October 1st, with the only senior member of the team being Galnadir.  God help us all. Be sure to congratulate them all when you see them!

It’s that time once again.  Every four months guild elections are held*.  Normally, the first 10 days of the month are designated as the nomination phase, but…uh…I’m late, so we will start that now.  The nomination phase will last until September 20th, at which point the campaigns will begin.  Members can nominate themselves or others (although those nominees will have to accept the nominations).  Seconds are not required.

We are currently looking to fill three Author positions and two Book Club positions.  Our current officials will need to nominate themselves if they seek re-election.

Job descriptions from the R&P:

Authors – These are the officers of the guild. They are voted in during guild elections. They are responsible for all the duties of Head Librarians when needed. In addition to this, they assist the Master Linguist in the daily management of the guild and are trusted to properly handle problems if they arise. They serve as a council to Master Linguist when it comes to important decisions, have the ability to promote or demote members and will have sole access to Tab 7 of the guild bank. Benefits are increased for these members. Authenticators are required for members of this rank.

Our current Authors are:  Circolaire, Galnadir and Mineta.

Book Club – This is a special rank which members may be voted into during guild elections. The Book Club is responsible for planning guild events outside of the standard raiding variety (i.e. events focused on pure fun factor). They are able to set events on the guild calendar, change the message of the day and have the ability to post entries on the guild blog. Benefits are slightly increased to compensate for time provided.

Our current Book Club members are:  Tarobi and Valyentena.

Nominations can be made in these comments, on the forum, or directly to Cutaia in guild chat.

*Yeah, yeah, or 8 months because I suck a lot, haha, fuck you.  >:(

Welcome to a little something I’ll be trying to do each major patch from here on out.  It tends to be the case that most issues in guilds arise due to a lack of information and communication.  In that spirit, this State of the Guild post will address where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Do you want to know the basics, without reading the entirety of this post I’ve worked so hard on? Well, you’re a jerk and I hate you, but I’ll make the important stuff pink so you can skim it.

Progression, pre-4.2:

Overall, we did a wonderful job of progressing in Tier 11. We ended up, realistically, tied for 29th place on the server. This is a dramatic step up from our final Tier 10 standing of — if I remember correctly — 64th.  Adding to this achievement is the fact that this tier was considered to be much more difficult than recent tiers like ICC.  Seriously, these encounters tore a lot of guilds apart, while we ended up getting even better.  So, kudos to us.

We didn’t down Al’Akir or Nefarian before the Great Raid Nerf, so that’s a little disappointing for a lot of us, but I think we can take solace in the knowledge that we very clearly could have done it if we had only had less bad luck in gathering people in those last weeks before the patch.  With more time, we would have gotten them down without a problem.

Update:  We killed a nerfed Nefarian and Al’Akir last night.  This basically makes us 19th on the server at this moment, which I don’t mind saying, is something to be quite proud of.

Progression, now and in the foreseeable future:

So, where do we head for now?

Based on early kill reports coming back from GuildOx, here is the order in which we’ll likely be attempting to clear Firelands:

1. Shannox
2. Beth’tilac
3. Lord Rhyolith
4. Alysrazor
5. Baleroc
6. Majordomo Staghelm
7. Ragnaros

Shannox being first honestly has a lot to do with the sheer amount of trash that is specifically tied to him.  I know that there is always rep and BoEs to be found in said trash, but assuming we have the ability to kill bosses, it honestly doesn’t make sense to prioritize those things over actually getting some face time with the big baddies.

With Firelands only having 7 bosses, we’ll more than likely have our second raid night be a Tier 11 night, working on achievements and heroic modes for drakes, challenge and experience.

The benefit of continuing to progress in these raids is two-fold:  Not only will it still contribute valor points and useful gear to us (H-T11 drops iLevel 372 gear, which is only slightly less than Firelands’ 378s), but it will keep us on our toes mechanics-wise.  Technically, heroic Blackwing Descent requires less gear than normal Firelands, but its fights are usually throwing more crap at you at any given moment.  We’ll end up getting better as players if we can challenge ourselves and succeed in there.

So, here’s a GuildOx inspired list of Tier 11 encounters/achievements, again from easiest to hardest:

1. Full of Sound and Fury
2. The Only Escape
3. H: Halfus Wyrmbreaker
4. H: Atramedes
5. H: Chimaeron
6. H: Magmaw
7. H: Maloriak
8. Achieve-a-tron
9. Four Play
10. Elementary
11. H: Valiona and Theralion
12. H: Omnotron Defense System
13. H: Conclave of Wind
14. Silence is Golden
15. H: Nefarian
16. H: Cho’gall
17. H: Al’Akir
18. Double Dragon
19. H: Sinestra
20. H: Ascendant Council
21. Keeping it in the Family
22. The Abyss Will Gaze Back Into You
23. Stay Chill
24. I Can’t Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am

The website

This website has fallen into a state of disrepair.  This place is like the Detroit of the Internet.  I fully plan to fix that.  I will get better at getting “screenshots” up in a more reasonable amount of time.  I will also be bringing back Monday Morning Minutia and The Weekly Quest as soon as possible. I do apologize for the amount of suckitude on my part in recent months, but not to worry, I’m gonna replace all these boards with windows, put all the copper wiring back in the walls and get this place presentable again.

Elections

You know how we were supposed to have elections every 4 months?  Yeah, uh…I just kinda didn’t hold them this last cycle. I really meant to, but just kind of got busy.  Seeing as we’ve gone so far behind on it, we’re just going to call the May election a wash and get back on track in September.

Recruitment

It’s a wonderful time for recruiting. There are plenty of folks out there who haven’t yet gotten into Cataclysm raiding, who would perhaps enjoy our raiding style and atmosphere.  It’s also a perfect time to quickly gear such folks and teach them how to avoid standing in fire.  So, I think we should do what everyone else is doing and maybe get an unofficial recruitment drive going to see if we can get some more cool people.

I’ve been very happy with the members we’ve gotten recently, by the way.  We’ve added some very friendly folks to our numbers.  Let’s try and get some more quality personalities around here!

The Legendary

4.2 included a new legendary weapon to the game…the first that is readily available to 10-man guilds.  Creating the staff is going to take 25 Eternal Embers, which differ from the Living Embers used to craft BoE gear — both drop from Firelands bosses.

In all guild runs, the Eternal Embers will go to the guild bank until we’ve collected 25. These are the only item I’m completely comfortable telling puggies they are not eligible for as well, by the way, as long as we inform them up front.  If we forget to mention this, I’m letting them roll out of principle, so please don’t let me forget.

Once we have 25 embers collected, we will determine who’s going to get the staff.  The guild bank will provide the funds for the required Sands of Time.

Only “mains” will be considered to receive the embers.  Out of the available casters, only those who have taken the initiative of completing the first step of the Dragonwrath quest will be in the running. From there, we will decide as a guild who has been the most dedicated raider and therefore will benefit our raids the most by having a legendary item.

To everyone not getting a sweet orange staff, you still have reason to rejoice:  We all get a cool pet once the guild completes a Dragonwrath.

Of alts and mains…

I would like to institute a common-sense philosophy when it comes to alts vs. mains in our raids.

When showing up to a raid, people should be doing their best to contribute to the ultimate success of the raid.  In a hardcore raiding guild, the level of effort expected to equate to “doing your best” is pretty high.  They often expect people to keep several fully geared characters so they can stack certain classes if it benefits a fight.  They also ask raiders to rearrange their talent points before each new fight to maximize every last bit of their DPS.

These aren’t the types of things we can or would expect from members of The Censored Linguists.  However, we can expect that people will take reasonable steps towards helping the guild succeed, as a whole.  Overall, folks should be doing their best to bring their “main” character to the guild’s raids. I don’t mean to discount the efforts of people who keep a well geared alt they can bring in if necessary (i.e. healers).  My main point is that, especially when choosing between multiple DPS alts, folks should be bringing their mainiest mains whenever humanly (or gnomely, or whatever) possible.

This also means that the start of a new tier is a wonderful time to “pick your main” so to speak.  If you’re just not feeling your old character or want to try something new, this would be a great time to do it! Free 359 epics from Justice Points and even better gear from trash runs and questlines means you can get your new main geared up relatively easily.

Trialing the new raid schedule…

Recently, I added 14 events to the calendar that people could sign up for in order to “vote” for their preferred raid days.  The impetus behind this was that we were having a few issues with raid attendance — especially on Mondays — so I wanted to see if there were some ways we could change the schedule to better suit everyone’s needs.

The results were as follows:  Monday, was apparently a universally horrible day to schedule a raid. Damn near nobody signed up for it on the schedule test.  This is compounded with the fact that Monday is a tough day to pug since it’s the last day before the lockout ends, and usually people have saved themselves to raids before the end of the weekend.  Monday, historically, has been our most often cancelled raid night.  Tuesday, however, appears to be pretty dang good for us. A ton of people signed up for it’s schedule test.  The only issue?  About half of them signed up for the 6:00 event and half signed up for the 7:00 event.  I split the difference at 6:30, so hopefully that will be a good compromise (it worked out wonderfully last night).

Our other raid night, Saturday, has usually had plenty of people show up.  However, when someone does have to bow out on that night, it’s usually due to the fact that our guildies tend to be of a young-ish mean age and Saturday is a good night for real life events. Damn near everyone who signed up for the Saturday schedule test, however, also signed up for the Sunday version.  So, we’ll give Sunday a shot as our second raid night so we can give them no good youngins their party-rave dubstep-time (or whatever the kids are calling it these days).

It’s on trial right now, so we’ll see how it works out and adjust as neccesary, but for now, there you have it. New raid schedule:

Tuesdays, 6:30pm server
Sundays, 6:00pm server

Events are now in your hands!

I thought I’d make note of an “undocumented change” to your guild permissions.  Members of the rank Well Read should now have the ability to create guild events. If you’d like to make events that don’t conflict with the official raids, you now have that power!  This would be great for making things like Heroic 5-man achievement runs, old school raids, etc.  Just don’t abuse it to fill our calendar with too much crap is all I ask.

Communication

Finally, I’d like to discuss one area where I feel I’ve failed a bit as a guild leader.  I think that I’ve had more of a hands off attitude to leadership than I perhaps should. When someone’s mentioned an issue, I‘ve usually just taken a wait-and-see approach.  So far, things have often blown over well enough, but it’s not a good way to handle things.  I would hate for a tiny little problem to ever snowball into something bigger due to my inaction.  I also realize I’ve been hesitant to just make some decisions, in some cases.  Things like how we’ll handle certain loot, etc., have been put off by me when I’ve been put on the spot.

This is basically my promise to the guild that I will be stronger in my leadership in the future. No, this doesn’t mean anything’s going to change that much.  I’m sure as fuck not moving over to some strict, Icefallian manner of doing things.  I’m just saying that I’m invested in making the guild an awesome place to be, and that I won’t puss out on being a good, decisive guild leader. You guys all deserve better.

Since we now have only the final bosses remaining in each tier 11 raid dungeon, I thought it was time to figure out how we can best balance progressing through these bosses and gearing people up through farm content.  As I’ve said in the past…the last thing we want to do is burn people out getting stuck on 1 boss when there is still gear and practice to be had elsewhere.

In the interest of this, I went ahead and looked through the gear of our usual raiders to figure out which raid had the best upgrades for our raiders, so we will know what non-Cho’gall bosses will be the best for us to murder on a regular basis.

Now, this list may not be perfect, but I’ll outline how I determined these numbers.  I used Ask Mr. Robot and looked up each of these characters.  A couple of them had logged out in some amount of PvP gear, so I did the best I could with those.  I found which bosses dropped best-in-slot gear for each character.  In any case where a player already had an iLevel 359 epic in a slot, I didn’t count the upgrade.  (Note that there are certainly 359 drops that are upgrades from some of the 359s many of us are wearing, but I was concerned with finding the “biggest” upgrades available to help the raid.)

Once again, this is by no means a perfect list…BUT it does do a decent job of illustrating which raid is going to end up gearing our raid the most.  Blackwing Descent simply has more desirable drops for our particular raid group (and as we’ve seen, can be easily and quickly cleared to Nefarian).

So, we’ll continue utilizing our Monday raid to get some good attempts in on Cho’gall — followed by Al’Akir and Nefarian, once he-with-too-many-eyes is down.  The Saturday raid, however, looks like it should be spent in BWD whenever possible.

The catch:

I’m not 100% sure if I can just keep extending our Cho’gall lockout week after week, or if there is a limit of how many consecutive times I can extend one raid ID.  If I can just keep extending it to our hearts’ content, than we’ll continue to kill easy bosses in BWD one day, then working on Cho’gall, the other day.  Easy peasy.

If, however, we can only extend it once, than every other week we’ll be forced to use our farm day to clear the first three bosses in Bastion.  You’ll notice the current calendar isn’t very specific about the Saturday raid because of this.  Once I get the lockout extensions figured out, I’ll adjust the descriptions to fit our new plan.

Anyway, we’re in a very exciting period for Linguist raiding.  We’re doing excellent on Cho’gall so far (we even had a couple of 15% wipes!),  and will have him down this week or the next, guaranteed.

If you’ve any thoughts on this subject, please leave them in the comments here or get in touch with me directly.

When patch 4.2 releases, raid groups like ours will get a unique opportunity.  Previously, all legendary items were relegated to either low drop rates or quests that could only be completed in 25-man groups.  For the first time, a legendary questchain will be completable by 10-man raids.

This will be a fun and exciting thing for us as long as we can handle the responsibility of choosing someone to wield this item.

I’ll be perfectly honest…the first person that comes to my mind is Jasprock.  The legendary will be a DPS caster staff this time around and I can think of no one who fits that role who has been as consistent in attending raids as Jasprock.

Now, I could be making some glaring oversight, of course, which is why I’m posting this so far in advance.  I’d like to see what the consensus is on this topic.  Do most of you feel that this would be the right choice, or is there someone else I’m completely overlooking?

My main hope is that this quest chain will be more like the Shadowmourne chain, as opposed to, say, Val’anyr.  Val’anyr was simply, “Collect 30 fragments, then kill Yogg Saron.”  Boooooring.  Shadowmourne had the collection segment, but went on to require specific criteria while fighting various ICC bosses.  These criteria required the raid to think of some different tactics in order to complete them.  I think it would be very fun for us to all band together for the common goal of completing this item.

Bonus for the rest of us non-Jasprock-types?  The developers announced in their most recent Q&A session that guilds who complete the staff will get a guild reward.  We have no idea what this reward could be, but don’t you want it?

I thought so…

So, feel free to comment here with thoughts on this whole Legendary business, so we can be prepared for Firelands (which I’m officially calling as having a June 7th release, by the way…you heard it here first).

The raid last night left some people feeling a little disappointed.  We ended up working on the Conclave of Wind, but Blackwing Descent had initially been on the schedule.  I take responsibility for the lack of communication on my part and for not thinking about some of the reasons this was a bad idea.

After the raid, we held a little open meeting in Mumble to discuss how we’ll handle raid schedules in the future.  I brought up a couple other things, too, while I had everyone there.

• From now on, we won’t deviate from raids that are scheduled on any given night.  This means that on Bastion of Twilight night, we won’t head over to kill Magmaw like we did this week.  This allows people who might need gear off a certain boss to know that they’ll get a chance at killing said boss if they sign up for its raid — no more zoning in to BWD to find your favorite loot piñata already dead.  It also allows people to be prepared for the content they’ll be tackling.  A great point was made by Cullendunn in that we likely would have done better on Conclave last night if people had known beforehand that we were going to be doing it.  Videos might have been watched, etc…
• We’re running into issues on some raid nights where more people are signing up for certain roles than we actually have slots for.  Going forward we’ll use earliest signups to determine who’s going to make it in when we have a surplus of attendants.  To avoid people simply signing up for everything that’s on the calendar, we’ll be unable to signup for guild events until a week before they are scheduled.  In other words, once this Saturday’s raid time arrives, the following Saturday’s event will be opened for signups.
• Finally…to be fair to people who are on the east coast or simply have limited time for raiding, we’ll start replacing guildies who haven’t shown up 10 minutes after the scheduled raid time.  We’ll replace first with backup guildies, followed by puggies.

On that last point, we initially started coming up with far more complex and in depth “rules” as far as punctuality, replacing, etc.  Fortunately, Rashmahal gave us a verbal kick in the ass to remind us of the more casual, social nature of our guild, so I thank him for that.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of the conversation.  I know it went on far too long and got way too businesslike, but I appreciate your help in bouncing all those thoughts around.  <4