Cooperation

I honestly had a lot of skepticism about whether or not a sister guild would work with us... I am quite pleased with the results so far. There is good synergy between the two guilds and while their guild lacks skill, they make up for it in discipline.

The cykos GM leads with an iron fist (most of the time) and jae is lead by ocd/anal-ness. The two actually fit nicely together. Their GM is pretty hard on his guys by calling them out whenever they mess up. 3 strikes and they are out! I rather like it but it just wouldn't fly in my guild because we don't want to gkick anyone. And you can't make 3 strikes your out threats if you don't back it up with possible gkick threat.

So Sadin and I try to lead by being super thorough with set-up and instructions. And luckily almost all of our guild members come super prepared having read and watched the fights on our forums. They practically lead themselves mostly. They just want cues on when to DPS, who to heal, where to stand, etc...

We officially kicked off with our sister guild last week. We've now downed two new bosses together. Leo and Karathress. Last night was "farm" night. We downed 6 bosses in 3.5 hours (raid times of 6:30pm server - 10pm server). High King/Gruul/Mag/Hydross/Lurker/Leo.....Leo went down at exactly 10:00pm server time. LOL.

We trade off leading the raid with cykos every other week. Last week, we led. This week, they're leading. And since they have experience downing Void Reaver and a few of their guys have attempted Solarian...I'm very hopeful we'll be going to the Eye on Progression night this week. I've only been in their once to do Solarian with another guild. All I remember is that the trash pulls were messy.

All in all, it looks promising. I've told the cykos gm to always be honest about concerns etc...and let's not try to save face or be polite...because that leads to drama. We've talked about the game plan for progression and are very hopeful that if things continue as they are, we'll hit Black Temple by July sometime. hehehe. you know just in time to see all the 25 man content before the dang expansion comes out... :(

Are casual raiders F'd?

So the theory goes like this for MOST guilds. You come, you raid, you earn some way to get loot, you get loot, end of story.

And the theory about drama goes like this for MOST guilds. I can't always make raids, I earn little dkp, I can't get loot, I hate raiding.

But what people should really look at here is the bigger picture of the new opportunities in wow that Blizzard has created to allow casual players the best of both worlds.

Simply put, you don't need to raid 25 mans on a hardcore basis to get good gear. You can run BGs, farm Arenas, and run kara pugs and heroic instances for badge gear.

Badge of Justice gear is as good as a lot of BT gear. You don't need to run SSC or Tempest Keep or Hyjal to have good enough gear to be a good player.

Also, crafted items are amazing as well. Spellfire cloth, Shadoweave, Mooncloth, etc. You can put in the time to farm the mats or do dailies to buy the mats for these items. There are also several BOE patterns that drop from high level instances that you can pay someone to craft for you... such as the [Belt of Blasting] or [Mantle of Nimble Thought].

Daily quests are completely easy and you can earn your way to gear without having to commit to hardcore raiding.

By being able to put aside the need/greed attitude about loot, it's far easier to allow yourself to raid casually. Many of the guilds in our server only raid 3 nights a week and only 3 hours a night. There are more than a handful of Gruul, Mag, and SSC pug runs hosted by raiding guild on our server.

Of course there are limitations. Casuals will never see Black Temple or Sunwell 25 mans on farm status or may be limited to content. But I would say that there are far more opportunities now for us casuals than there ever were before last year.

25/25 Done

I did it! 25/25 Dailies! It was rough. hahaha. I'm resto spec on druid and disc spec on my priest (main two chars I do dailies on because they have epic flyers)

I did the 25/25 on my priest because she's the only one who can do the Netherwing quests in Shadowmoon Valley.

Felix would be proud. hehehe. He's the one who advocates earning a consistent income to all members. And I can't believe how easy a lot of them are ...even if you have to go solo. I at least try to do 10 per day...3 minimum that are easy and can be done while just waiting around etc.

I'm beginning to appreciate the ability to never have to worry about enchants or mats, gems etc. I think Blizzard did a nice job with providing a stable income for daily players. Especially with inflation, it's nice being able to afford primals. MY GOSH, primal life on my server is up to 28g some days and primal fire is 30g. It used to be 10g for a primal life.

After 2.4.2 patch or whatever, everything skyrocketed in price. But that comes with an influx of money into the economy I suppose so I guess it makes sense. It just feels harsh on the pocketbook.

Life after 70 is deadly

lol. Okay, so after the raid and after doing dailies there's just not much to do anymore. And if you're like me and have no life... you stay in shat figuring out ways to amuse yourself.

After a couple of awesome mind visions of a suicide mage, we also got a great free fall through the shat roof with an iceblock finale! I dunno why but mind visioning someone going splat on the floor of shat was just hilarious.



the reason the video jumps from the fall from the mages perspective to the 3rd person perspective of the iceblock falling to the ground...is iceblock removes mind vision.

Hula Girl on the Dash

Very cute. A guild mate pointed out to me the other day that the [Turbo-Charged Helicopter Mount] had a little hula girl on the dash board. At first I thought he was joking and was like "ha ha... yeah"... He was like "no, seriously, a hula girl"

hahaha. sooo cute. It almost makes me want to spend the gold to craft one on my engineer...but I think I'll hold off on that. :) She's not 5000g cute. lol.

Back to Cykos but Jae rules

It's actually pretty funny. I never thought I'd raid with cykos again but sure enough tonight I did. Now, before you shake your head and go "don't you ever learn?"...

it's not the same cykos. It's a totally new crew with a new gm etc. I was hooked up with the gm through a guild mate. Both our guilds are facing similar situations where we have about half the people needed to finish 25 mans.

Most of our old raiders have gone awol and/or off doing RL stuff. So we no longer have a consistent raiding schedule. Not enough people online = end of 25 man raiding.

So we're trying out a joint venture with this other guild.... Tonight was our first trial. It went decent I thought. The other guild seemed poised and the people were friendly. The raid leader pulled too slow for my taste but it was kind of nice not having to deal with raid leading as well.

This just allows some of us who want to continue to raid something to do to keep progressing.

I did feel really bad. I brought my druid to the raid and I was the only druid. I got at least like 5 pieces of gear. We haven't started implementing dkp yet since it was trial run. It was all druid specific stuff too or leather working stuff so I got msot of it by default. It's the total opposite with my usual jae runs on my paladin. I usually don't win anything ever. I was top healer though so I did do a little to earn it :)

But more importantly it once again reaffirmed for me and the other guildies on the run....what an amazing guild we have. Our players are 100% bad @sses. Hands down incredible in terms of focus and skill. It makes you wish cloning was available. lol.

Sometimes it takes seeing how the other half lives to really and truly appreciate what you have. That's why looking outside our world is sometimes a good thing.

Okay. that's enough cockadoodle doo stroking for now.

Nice deal for a game card

Circuit city is running a nice sale.

60 day pre-paid game card for WoW for 20 bucks. Only catch is you have to go pick it up from the store.

Circuit city <=== click here and check availability

Theramore Portal

Just in case you were wondering. The new alliance Theramore mage portal is in the big tower at the center of the town. Woot more Portals! You must be level 35 to obtain it.

1190-1707

We have this point farming team in our guild that people can use to farm arena points. They got as low as 1190 and then gave the team to us and then bought a new team. Today we took the team from 1190-1707. It was pretty fun.

At first it felt bad because we were really melting face and it sucks being that other team...believe me I've been on the other end. "WTF are these tier 3 shoulder Mother **#$*#* doing in the 1400s?!!!!!"

But as we got into the 1700s we started hitting up triple melee teams that blew our clothies out of the water. I mean....WHAM! DEAD! Enhancement Shaman, Warrior, Ret Pally... kabooom! hehe.

we went 27-3 tonight. Not bad. It was fun doing 5s again. Haven't gotten to do them in so long. The chaos is always the most fun for me.

Our line up was holy pally, warrior, rogue, disc priest, demo lock (warrior/rogue rocks against cloth)

World of Whorecraft

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Episode 33, Arenas Season 1-3

Basically a recap of Seasons One through Three. Since Season 4 is looming in the air I thought it'd be a good idea to do a quick history. Also, some discussion on pvp as a welfare system in WoW.



To keep an eye on the Arena scene:
http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/

Who is the opposite of Peter Jackson?

Uwe Boll!

I had the unfortunate opportunity to watch 'In the Name of the King, a Dungeon Siege Tale.' At one point, I had to check the dvd description to see if it wasn't made for tv or something.

And I even played Dungeon Siege when it launched. I was very pleased with the game. Had it been an MMO, it could have been WoW.

Okay, so the movie had Jason Statham (Transporter,Crank) and John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) so it actually had a chance. Had I known Ray Liotta was the villain I would have veto'd the movie right away.

The movie was every kind of bad that's possible. I definitely ranked it in the Blood Rayne category (my worst movie of all time pick).

The Krugs looked like bad halloween costumes. I'd say LARP youtube videos were better. NO exaggeration.

Then I found out it was the same director as Blood Rayne and man it just clicked. That dude should be banned from film making by law.

So I was very happy to come across this article. WoW Movie bans Uwe Boll!!! YES!

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167510

"I got in contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard," said Boll. "And he said, 'We will not sell the movie rights, not to you... especially not to you because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.'"

"You go for it to please the game fans, but on the other hand if you have the hardcore gamers, they live in their own world. And you cannot fulfill their ideas from a video game based movie, it's impossible," said Boll. "To be honest, the real gamers are the typical download guys, right? They don't pay anything for movies, because they illegally download the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the normal audience."

YOU BLOW BALLS BOLL! I should sue you for 4 hours of my life back!

Psychedelic Log In

One day my log in screen snapped and started going all psychedelic on me. It was radiating weird hippie vibes and techna color spasms. For a minute, I thought I had found a way to enter god-mode in the game. ;)

WSG No Deaths

I can add that to the list of things I should have screenshot or FRAPS.

SO anytime I get frustrated with PvE, I always turn to PvP. It's far less drama.
So this weekend, we ran a lot of Battlegrounds with about 5-6 JAE members on average. We didn't lose a single Battleground.

The best one of all though was when we went against another semi-preform in WSG and not a single alliance died the entire game.

/flex!

hahahaha. That's just fun sh*t.

Another great moment was joining a losing Arathi Basin and bringing it back up. Sad (warrior) and I (resto druid) guarded mine most of the time. It was awesome. We 2v3 and 2v4'd so many. PvP resto druid is so much fun.

Currently, my druid has zero pvp gear. I'm building up points starting last week for the honor sets and have about 2500 saved for next season's Arenas. Because it'll be fun to see how well she does when she actually has gear.

I smack my Draenei Orphan

Okay. I haven't smacked my Draenei Orphan yet. But I make her run along side my mount so a slap might be a step up. lol.

"that's right, snot nose, shine my shoes!"

So last year I got the one-eye willy. You gotta have a least one willy to /lick....sorry. it's just too obvious, I can't help myself.

This year I was thinking Peanut..the cutest little elekk ever. I wanted to get him last year but the willy was just too tempting..especially when it sleeps.

Well, off to show my kid the wonders of the world (of warcraft)

You can pick up the quest in Lower City from Orphan Matron Mercy (74,47)
There's also a level 60 and below version in Stormwind Cathedral district