This week was the first time our group legitimately dedicated time and effort to the Yogg fight. We spent a good 2.5 hours learning the fight. We did not get him down, but definitely did “progress” with the encounter.

By the end of the night we eventually had phase 1 down pretty well. This phase challenges the group to manage the Guardians of Yogg-Saron. These dudes have to be killed near Sara because they explode when they die and cause damage to her. The catch is that if any raid member touches a green cloud floating around the room, more of the Guardians spawn. This was interesting from a melee’s perspective. The fight would be going fine, someone would touch a cloud, then a couple more Guardians would spawn. Now, the area around Sara (where all the melee are) becomes very crowded and it becomes difficult to see the clouds in this area. What I would observe is a cascade of fail: Ranged touches a cloud, melee get’s crowded, melee touches a cloud, more adds, melee touches another cloud, too many adds, wipe. It was just interesting to see this. Basically, it means people need to stay out of the clouds, which we were eventually doing very well. Read the rest of this entry »

Caladin with his first Recruit, Starsceem, now a geared and skilled raider.

When Blizzard announced the Recruit a Friend program, I let out a whopping “meh.”  At that time, I think it was toward the end of last year, I was completely focused on Caladin, my main.  Caladin was my only tune beside my banker, the infamous Fargowells.  Of course, I leveled a hunter to level 32 like everyone else, but there he stays.  So I wasn’t a very diversified player.

This year I’ve been able to “recruit” two friends to this game we know and love, and the reward from the program has been awesome.  As a result of the two recruits I now have the four characters listed below. Read the rest of this entry »

This week our raiding charter ventured into TOC, Ony, and VOA.  We cleared all three zones in about 3 hours and I’m really stoked that we’re becoming that efficient.  With our crew, most of us only raid for this 3 hours every week, so getting the biggest “bang for the buck” is a very good thing.

Next week we’ll be back working on Yogg, and after we kill him the plan is to ditch Ulduar all together and clear TOC, Ony, and VOA weekly in preparation for the Ice-crown content patch of 3.3 (for more info, check out WOW.com’s patch guide ). The hope is to have everyone geared in ilvl 232’s (Teir 9) so that we can jump right into the new content.

And that brings me to an exciting thought…and since I don’t have anything really interesting to share about the raiding efforts this week…I’ll explore the thought a bit more (tangent after the break).

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Hello!  Yesterday I sprained my ankle while helping to move a friend from church (previously sprained ankle + 1970’s stairs = ouch), so I thought I’d finish out my series on Hunter Raiding.  Again, these tips are just as applicable to 5-man groups as to 25-man raids. Read the rest of this entry »

Sans Pants is back!  This Season Bearspirit and I decided to make another run at 2v2 Arena awesomeness.

It’s been a while, since about mid-season 6, since I’ve PVPed.  In that season, Bear and I put in a few weeks climbing the ranks (only got to 1350ish) but then real life took priority, and we weren’t able to finish the season.  Dang, no Gladiator title.

Welp, at the start of this season Bear and I got all excited again and it was time to fire it up and see how bad we can piss off our ladies by playing too much WoW.  Turns out, we can’t get the Gladiator title this season either due to game changes.  Good thing too, else…

So I start doing what every wanna-be-good WoW player does when they venture into something new…google research.  Seems that a lot of people were rockin some PVP with Protection Paladins…whaaaa?  So up until the recent 3.2.2 patch, we played with me as a Prot Pally healer.  How did this work?  Here was the deal.

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