Sunday, August 31, 2014

Raiding on Eggshells

With Mythic raiding going to 20m in WoD, we have been in talks with another guild (withholding the name in case it all falls through) about merging our 10m teams.

I've always been amused by merger dynamics - everyone always tries to impress everyone else and tiptoe around each other; people are worried that they won't fit in and vice versa... it's pretty exciting and nerve wracking for everybody.

I would have to say that I'm more excited/wary than nervous, myself. The guild we are thinking of merging with is higher on progression than we are, but I'm fairly confident in my ability to at least be adequate, if not brilliant. Pretty far cry from half a year ago when I was about to join a heroic guild after a) being rusty on skills and b) leaving the guild I had been in for the past 8 years.

Since this is the 3rd new guild I would have encountered this year, I suppose you could say I'm even used to the process... never thought I'd be in a situation where I'm one of those heroic raiders that jump guilds to stay ahead - and I certainly don't feel like one - but from the outside it probably looks that way! :P

At least this time I won't be doing it alone; most, if not all, of Zero Yard Range are looking forward to Mythic raiding in WoD and barring any serious personality clashes I can't imagine why the merge wouldn't work. Interesting times! :)

Thursday, August 21, 2014

"Raid Break"


Well, it's counted as a break to *me*... when else does one have time to do old achieves but in raid breaks?! :P

(Incidentally, it's crazy how much my gear affects old raid soloing. Doing Firelands with my Heroic SoO gear vs my fresh 90 gear, which would have been the last time I did it, makes me feel absolutely invincible!)

Sunday, August 10, 2014

An Apology...

Yes, I'm still alive.

I've been incredibly busy this year and haven't prioritised time for blog posts... sorry about that! Anyway, I've finally decided to stop putting off a catch-up post, since my hunter exploits have certainly not been neglected in that time. Plus, we're on a raiding break so there's a few extra hours this week :P

Here's the recap:

1. Raiding. My last post made reference to downing heroic Iron Juggernaut. Well... we've gone a little further than that now - Dark Shaman, Nazgrim, Malkorok, Spoils and Thok have all fallen, making our guild 11/14 heroic in Siege. Exciting? Hell yes! Haven't ever been in a position to potentially clear any final heroic raid boss at level, let alone the final boss of an expansion.

2. Challenge Mode dungeons. I managed to get a regular group going for CMs. They're almost as bad as heroic raids in terms of difficulty (and sometimes even more so depending on the dungeon), so it was extremely satisfying to get those Golds done.



3. Proving Grounds. The DPS challenge naturally didn't give me too much trouble, although I haven't managed to get the Endless version done yet; mainly because the AoE phase annoys me (I might have to actually use a flask to get it done; it's terrible! Also, I refuse to switch to Surv to make the AoE easier...). Because I am who I am, I of course had to get You're Doing it Wrong (seriously, it's like Blizzard made that achievement for me... I'd wear it as a title if I could; it sums me up in a nutshell :)).


I tried both tank and healer, and just found tank a lot easier. The tank in the healer challenge tends to taunt a lot more than my pet can keep up with... but if I have time I'm definitely going to try and get at least Bronze healer on hunter. My achievement pane says Gold healer only because I did it on my druid (yeah, the rare occurrence where I actually did something on an alt and not my hunter! I can only think of a handful of things where that's the case and I think this is the only non-horde specific achievement where it would be).

4. Old Achievements and Random Stuff

a) I managed to solo Halion 25 on heroic, which was a bit of a pain to get through. Can't think of any particular tips apart from drop traps and wait to DPS until he gets pushed into your phase, then blow your cooldowns.

b) I also got my last achievement (Stay Chill) for Glory of the Cataclysm Raider, which means the only non-MoP dungeon/raid achievements I have left are Ragnar'Os, heroic Spine and heroic Madness - all of which I expect to knock off in this raiding break. I expect I'll have to bite the bullet at some point and start working on some of the other "farming" (hi2u, fishing and archaeology) and PvP achievements that I've been neglecting.

c) Last but not least, I have a shiny new heroic warforged bow - once again, first time I've ever had the absolute best bow you can get in an expansion. Rhok on! :)

Phew, epic wall-o-text. I'm going to try and post here regularly again so that I don't get so far behind in updates - there will be plenty of LOL-worthy moments in pipe-jumping for heroic Siegecrafter that I'll want to post about, I'm sure. Plus, I've probably missed posting about so many things, just because I can't remember what happened between now and February. Half a year is way too long!