Happy Noblegarden

I was going to mention some useful tips for the noblegarden holiday, but I was way too slow, maybe next year. Sorry.

Hope you all achieved your Easter goals. I myself got my spring Strider on Monday and didn't look back. Along the way I got the last two random drop achievements so unless they add more next year I'm done with that holiday.

On to other news. Still no helm token for Ironshield, but if that thing ever drops on Normal my EPGP is so high now there is no question it's mine. But RNG gods seem to have it out for me so we'll just wait and see. I suspect I'll get heroic tier shoulders or something at about the same time just to rub it in. Bit of background, I'm using LFR tier shoulders right now instead of the Heroic off set to keep the 4pc bonus. Naturally the tank off piece shoulders are BiS.

Speaking of LFR, there has been a lot of venom around the blogosphere lately about LFR griefers. And some of those are sounding like absolute world class d-bags. People have been asking... what can we do? Well not much really.

BUT

There are a few things. First off remember that even if there are 5/6 absolute asshats in your group, 80% of the group is fine. It's important to remember that the bad people are memorable because they are bad. And usually because they are vocal or conspicuous in some way. But the good people quietly get on with things. Don't forget the decent people, it will improve your stress levels.

Now what can we do about the bad? Healers, you have a Lot of power here. Even on low damage fights everyone is getting something. Don't waste your mana on the idjits who can't click the heroic will button or move out of morchoks slime. Tanks, don't taunt off the guy which breaks CC on Hagara trash. But other than that, manage the bad as best you can. The off tank on spine should pick up the bonus hideous amalgamations and keep them out of blood pools. Preferably go stand them on top of the moron DPSing tentacles just to scare him a bit. And take note of griefers and call them out in /s (or /rw if you're assist). That way you can possibly get a votekick in before the next boss.

But the most important thing to do, is not stoop to their level. Don't be a BAD. If someone is doing the wrong thing, start with polite correction, don't go straight to insults - although this is sometimes a big ask. The best way to improve the community is by being a decent member of it.

Death of Deathwing

As the title implies, the 42nd downed Deathwing this Monday. On the second night that we had seen him, and with almost an hour left of raid time. Ironshield and 7 other team members got wasted with the last pulse of his blood AoE, but the DK tank, and a healer - (I think) managed to shield / survive it and he keeled over. Next week, HARD MODES. I managed to witness our raid's first kill of about half of the Dragon Soul bosses so I feel quite involved this tier.

This leads me to wonder, are these nerfs coming too fast? I know this topic has been done to death, but hey this is my blog, I can flog a dead zhevra if I want to. The 42nd is a pretty casual outfit. We started with the philosophy of not forcing people to join the guild in order to join the community, and as far as I know the recruiting has been done much more on a social and attitude related bias than performance (or God forbid, gear). We raid two nights a week for 3 hours. I personally only usually do one of those, but 2 usually happen every week. We fairly regularly pick up a stray from one of the teams other guilds to make up our ten, but there is usually a core of at least 8 who regularly raid. With this setup, is +-8 resets really too many to be killing the tier end boss? Especially when you consider Christmas and New Year were in that slot. I acknowledge that Blizzard sees more data than we could ever hope to, but I personally expected to spend more time than this on progressing this far.

Blizzard have told us that some guilds have hit a wall. And I can believe that, but only really because they progressed too far and far too quickly. As far as I know, all the hard mode raiders on my server went 7/8 on the very first reset, and most killed Deathwing the next week. This isn't a hard core progression type realm by any stretch of the imagination. So my conclusion is, are these nerfs coming early because ultimately the raids were under tuned? At least the first part? But even the last few, this DW kill didn't feel nearly as epic as the Ragnaros post 30% nerf kill. Yes Ragnaros was a massive amount of dance, and the seemingly unrelated phases felt disjointed, but killing him felt EPIC.

DISCLAIMER : the only "data" I base any of my conclusions on is my own experience so conclusions may vary :)