Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Five Bye Five

It's the eve of Patch 6.0 and as we bid farewell to MoP, it's been a slightly more disappointing than exciting couple of weeks for me.

Firstly, I had hoped that merging with the new guild would allow me to completely clear an expansion at the appropriate time for the first time in my WoW career, but unfortunately they were only taking 1-2 people through heroic Garrosh a week and didn't get around to taking me. Yes, I realise the expansion isn't quite over yet (and we are planning to continue raiding as a new 20man team), but it still feels wrong not to do it with the old MoP abilities.

Secondly, although I did manage to get to wave 18 of Endless DPS Proving Grounds as BM, I didn't manage to get further. I'm confident I could have made Wave 20, but making a single mistake means pretty much starting from scratch and unfortunately these days I have less time to play outside of raids. Plus, I'm not sure I would have had the patience to re-learn cooldown usage as Survival (pretty much every hunter guide I've come across has used Surv to get through Proving Grounds).

Thirdly, I didn't manage to get all the drops required for the Deck Your Collection Achievement of Brawler's Guild - random drops are annoying :(

On the upside, I did manage to finish the Gold Challenge Modes and I am excited about the new hunter changes (hooray for keybind space and new pets... although boo to losing Scatter), so maybe the shiny new UBRS will help to swing the mood. Or maybe not - I was rather disappointed to read that there wasn't an updated version of General Drakk to kite down the hallway!

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Teething Issues

Our first foray into heroic 25m raiding was... interesting.

Most of the fights seem a lot easier than the 10m version, although I missed the first 4 bosses.

Blackfuse was slightly tougher on the belt end - we started with 4 hunters and if one person made a mistake, it was over. For some reason, the 3 hunters left couldn't quite cover for the missing person (or perhaps we weren't on the ball about it like I would usually be if I know Ane is down), unlike 1 person covering for the other in 10m... possibly due to the unfamiliarity with each other more than a DPS issue.

Between connection issues, pressure from the rest of the team and the higher likelihood that 1 of the 5 of us would make a mistake (compared to 1 of 2 in 10m), we ended up using 5 hunters to get it done. Definitely not ideal, considering it's a rare occasion when you would have 5 hunter mains available at the same time.

Paragons was a wipefest. Since only 3 of us in Zero Yard Range had managed to get in on a Non Combat Pet guild kill, there was a bit of a learning curve for the rest of our old group... Although it wasn't always the uninitiated making mistakes either.

By the end of the night there was frustration all around - people complaining about the mistakes, people complaining about other people blaming them for the mistakes or bad DPS... not really the greatest environment for fun times.

All I can say is: hooray for custom chat channels - chatting with people you enjoy playing with makes all the difference to your mood when you're wiping constantly. Hopefully we can get to know our new guildmates fairly quickly so it doesn't feel like so much of a guild vs guild atmosphere (whether imagined or not - NCP outwardly have been quite welcoming to most of us!).