Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Blog Changes

Faced with a different direction in my gaming & the way that Hunter has changed, I've decided to go a new direction with my WoW blogging.

I'm moving my efforts to a blog entitled OrdoSerp. The page itself is up and there are some posts already, but I'm still in a "building" phase with the look and feel.

The exciting part is the broader scope of OrdoSerp. Instead of just following Beroth's activities, it will be a blog about and written by members of my little alt-guild the Order of Serpentis. While I have no doubt that I will be the major contributor, at least one of my friends has already written a post.

OrdoSerp will still include tips for hunters, but will also include insights about all the classes we play. It will be a place for us to share our screenshots & group achievements. It'll be a place where we discuss balancing between our time & the various Raiding guilds we belong to.

So, please join us at OrdoSerp.

This blog will remain available for the time being. But remember, Wrath changes everything!

Saturday, November 1, 2008

What's Old Is New

The recent Echoes of Doom patch & events have created a lot of excitement for my little band of friends in our little alt-guild. Before the patch, most of us were off on our merry little dailies, on various "main raiders" in various raiding guilds or leveling alts. At first the patch seemed to drive us further apart with folks running to the far corners of the old world seeking achievements. Then we started to come back together to farm old-world instances and re-do heroics. The Headless Horseman boss, the plague & the invasion all helped to drive us back into instances and re-equip long-forgotten Argent Dawn trinkets.

This excitement (and some serious dps increases) made us hungry for more. So, 7 of us ran over to Kara on a rag-tag group of Alts & mains to see if we could down Attumen and get at the event boss for the quest.

I know what you're thinking. Why not grab 3 more? This, again, is our little group of friends who've known each other for years. Our group time is for getting away from PUGs and guild politics. It's "us" time.

Our group consisted of:

Kara-Level Geared Feral Tank
Crafted-epics DPS Warrior/OT <---New Raider. He's Cherry!
Mint green Ret Pally/OT
T4 Enhancement Shaman/backup healer
T5 Frost Mage
New Epics Hunter Alt
T5 Geared Resto Druid

Attumen went down easy-sauce. It was so easy for my feral druid, that I hardly noticed that I was tanking both of them. We moved up into the servants quarters and after a "learning pull" we regrouped and downed the event boss easily. Well, since we're right across the hall, let's go kill Moroes. We should be able to get him, right? Why, in fact, we pwned him. I tanked him and all the adds, while a fury warrior picked off a mob one at a time for the group to kill. I built a high enough threat on Moroes that I put my back to him and fought the adds, thus avoiding blinding until I had to hit him one last time. Only lost one player when he blinded me and we ripped him a new one. So, hi on this achievement (but so late for a Thursday night) we called it and scheduled to return 10AM Saturday morning to see what else we could kill. And what happened Saturday? Fear the BEAR!!! RAWR! We mowed our way through Maiden & the Oz fights. We took a short break to lounge on the terrace and swat this gnat named Nightbane. What a wuss! We took a 5 min bio to make the rest of the instance think it was harder, thus preserving Nightbane's last shred of dignity.

We found Curator lacking and pwnd him accordingly. Illhoof slew one of our numbers and we just kept coming. It was cake. We moved on.

Our first real challenge came at Shade. And even with the "mistake" we nearly won. Rinse-repeat...one dead badge dispenser. On to Chess...

Amazingly, the with only 7 players, Chess event proved difficult. We lost the first attempt. We had to move more pawns into position and make some adjustments. It's still "free" loot! Running out of time, we rushed up the stairs, ganked Prince Malchezaar and called it "lunch."

Wait, what about Netherspite? Pah! His loot table sucks. Let's go try some bosses in ZA instead.

And so, after a break for afternoon chores and meals, we regrouped and killed 3 ZA bosses.

It was truly an experience. As someone who loves raiding, but grew tired of the drama of raiding, this was fun. We're grearing up and getting to know our abilities under the new system. We're seeing stuff "alone" without getting friends and guildies to slum with us on our alts. It was just great.