Another older blog post, but my reflections on Cata as an xpac
For me personally, this xpac was my most wild ride since I started
playing WoW. Back in vanilla is a close second, I had a guild that
split in half and then reformed and split again and I lost my DKP 3
times! Anyway, more so than any other xpac, I was the cliché, 110%
immersed in this xpac called Cataclysm, where Deathwing reigned terror
on the world….ooooo…scary. I was actually told he can’t really be dead
as he is a god per the lore. Lore shmore, I just want to clear raid
content. Oddly enough, I LOVED the actual Warcraft 1-3 lore immensely
and am even playing Warcraft 3 for the 4
th time and I watch
every cut scene. Somehow, the more doesn’t entice me in WoW whatsoever
as it feels uninteresting in the MMORPG setting. It doesn’t matter
though, Blizzard has me hook, line, and sinker – yeah, more clichés.
Woot! So, here are my memories/reflections of Cataclysm. I did my best
to recall it all, but between my many loose and moist bowel movements
and lots of drinking, it may get fuzzy and I may cross timelines.
Cata release and the grind to 85
From the outset and release of Cata I speed leveled a pally as prot
with a holy offspec, but holy would be my raid spec/main spec when I got
to 85. At 85, I tanked heroics as one of the guild tanks that was
geared enough to be able to tank and get people geared. I only really
healed in 5 man heroic PUGs, which I love to do and I have eluded to
this in the past as a way to fine tune your skills with unpredictable
puggers and bad tanks. It felt like an eternity to 85 with no guild
perks or rest bonus, but I got finally got there with great disgust. I
fing HATE leveling with these horrendously boring kill 10 of these and
come back then kill more until a piece of their nosehair falls out and
collect 10 of those nosehairs and then come back AGAIN, THEN you can
kill the boss of the noisehair clan and come back and I will give you a
green piece of gear that will replace that epic purple from your last
xpac that you spent weeks waiting for it to drop. Yah! I swore up and
down I wouldn’t level more than a few 85s in Cata due to the awful grind
to 85. Spoiler alert: I now have 10 85s and a 68 rogue that I just
can’t level anymore. /fme
At 85 and 329 ilevel (I think that was the ilevel needed), I most of
all enjoyed the difficulty of the heroic 5 mans. They truly
felt….heroic! I felt they were like vanilla and even TBC in
difficulty. CC was needed and using an entire healer arsenal was
needed. Then they nerfed them and I do understand why, I finally get
the Blizzard model after so many years. Anyway, 5 mans all became a
face roll. Luckily, the raids were there for the challenge, pre-nerf of
course. I hate that I have to use the word pre-nerf, but this is world
of warcraft 2012. Apparently everyone deserves to see end game….even
Rakrah.
Weeks after Cata launch, Broken had enough to start running BWD and
we formed 2×10 and started raiding. Now the real fun would begin!
ZA/ZG
Sometime during Cata, I think 4.1, Blizz re-introduced ZA and ZG as
heroic 5 mans for 353 gear. Both were pieces of shit as raids in
vanilla and TB (20 man and a 10 man at the time), so seeing them again
was like seeing my GI doctor. (check forums for the story of moist if
you are unfamiliar with my GI doctor stories, they are shittastic!)
Like a good and obsessed altoholic, I ran ZA/ZG MORE THAN 200 times to
completion (not counting partial runs) to get pre-raid BiS gear for all
my alts (I do not know why except there was nothing else to do). I went
through all my dungeon achievements of all my toons to verify the
number of completed ZA/ZG runs when someone in guild asked me how many
times I ran them and I was shocked and horrified at the total number of
ZA/ZG runs I had completed. On some level, it was a low point for me
and I can’t tell you how many people sucked at the last boss in ZG. It
was amazing at the fail, but I sort of chuckled at times. Healing bad
tanks and dpsers on that fight was truly challenging and oftentimes fun.
T11 Raiding and The great divide
So, Broken started raiding BWD with 2 groups. It was quickly really
apparent that some people couldn’t handle the demands of raiding after
the culmination of ICC which you could spam anything and have noi mana
issues or rage issues or whatever. Mostly the healers struggled as in
ICC mana was no issue and all of a sudden 25% through many boss fights
some of the Broken healers were now oom and qqing. /wtf Both groups hit
walls. A “super” grp was assembled to down Chogall, Al’Akir, and
Nefarion all pre-nerf for the guild. This was the beginning of the end
of 2×10 for Broken. It was abundantly clear some people were being
carried through content and hurting any type of real progression that
more than 50% of the guild desired. The great divide of skill was more
apparent than ever and more obvious than Rakrah being one of the worst
tanks on the entre Uldaman server. The call was heard by Officers and
the GL and the decision was made to form one group and bring the worthy
and the most committed to raid. We never got more than a few heroics
down in T11, Halfus and Chimareon. Chimy was a tough fight on heroic.
We spent 2-3 full nights on it before we got it down, but it was a
glorious victory when we did and sort of solidified this new focused
group idea. Of course, FL was coming and we all waited for that. I
think we could have done more T11 heroics with our new 1×10 progression
focused group, but we merely ran out of time.
Firelands
This tier was probably one of Broken’s best. Getting all 7 bosses
down pre-nerf. Rag down the week before nerf. That was a thrilling
kill. Vent exploded with cheers when we got it. It felt damn good as
it was not an easy fight and I slept really well. I even woke up my
wife to tell her. She grumbled and told me to f off. I tried to mount
her, but she bucked me off. In FL, I LOVED the Baleroc fight. My
favorite since healing Dreamwalker, the dragon in ICC, the mechanic of
building stacks and then swapping to keep the tank up from HUGE dmg was
different and awesome. After the huge flat FL nerf, Broken did a good
job at getting 6/7H rather quickly without really stumbling much.
Broken even beat Insomnia (one of Uldaman’s finest guilds now) to 6/7H
before DS release was announced. As a guild we decided to not even try H
Rag which was deemed a guild killer plus we were sort of close to DS.
It was a crowning glory for the guild that unfortunately was short
lived.
At the same time as being a member of Broken, I wanted to raid more
and joined a weekend alliance guild called Dark Carnival on Ysera as a
resto shaman (who was my least favorite healer, but have learned to
“love”). At the time DC was 6/7 Normal FL with only one rag kill. I
joined, as well as a few others to replace gquitters, and we got rag
down a few weeks later, then drama ensued and I left the guild to join a
startup guild called Evening of Score. That grp/guild consistently
downed reg Rag each week, but never got into heroics. There was drama
brewing and gkicks up the wazoo. Trouble was on the horizon for this
newly formed guild.
Dragon Soul
Broken hit the DS raid hard upon release as FL was as stale as poo. I
was away on travel, but wrote cliff notes for every DS normal fight
that could be read within a minute or 2. I want to say Broken got 6/8
in week 1, but cannot recall anymore (see paragraph 1 about too much
drinking and pooing to remember clearly). Then 7/8 and finally 8/8, all
pre-nerf. That was a milestone for the guild, all Cataclysm normal
bosses downed pre-nerf and it wasn’t 1 week prior to nerfs like with FL
and rag, so it felt like DS might be a bigger success than FL! It felt
good and Broken was paving the way to being something more than the
casual guild back that started back in TBC that entered Kara with pvp
gear!
At the same time, over in Evening of Score, that guild got to Spine and downed it FINALLY after having to carry a 3
rd
healer through it. Unfortunately, not long after that, the next week
actually, that guild broke up as startup guilds are a great idea in
theory, but take way more than saying “we want a drama free raid
environment” to be successful. Drama is unfortunately part of this
game. Officers need to keep it in check, that is their primary job,
they just don’t know it or deny it. J Anyway, the leadership could not
deal with the drama and the guild became unglued. I was sort of RLing
for them at the same time as RLing for Broken so it was a touch
exhausting too. RLing 5 nights a week.
So, after EoS went to shit, I transferred my shaman back to Uldaman
and joined Masochistic Tendencies on my resto shaman and joined Yakk’s
Sun/Mon group. That group got the first DS Madness kill for the guild
at 5% nerf. We almost had it the week before, but we fell a little
short and ran out of time. I wanted it bad too. I blame Giz, he wasn’t
there , but his spirit must have been.
At the same time Broken was immersed in heroic DS. H Morchok was a
joke then we got to H Yorsack. Broken got him after 40 tries at 0%.
2/8H at 0% wasn’t too bad and another milestone. Broken then proceeded
to go 6/8H all with a max of 10% DS nerf. Then the guild unraveled. It
wasn’t H Spine as Broken barely got into it (maybe 4 pulls?), but the
repetitive mistakes on H Hag and H Warm that led to finger pointing and
comments like, “this should be farm” plus having unstable groups week
after week hurt morale. Add that to losing some of our long standing
members due to burnout and the release of D3, and raids were too hard to
maintain, so we shut it down for a bit. It happens when you have a
guild going for as long as Broken has been going and you drop down to
one focused 10 man group with little to no real bench. Broken tried to
institute a 2
nd group and recruit for it, but the DS boredom was in full effect now. New recruits showed up once and disappeared.
After Broken stopped raiding and Yakk’s Sunday group disbanded, I
helped the Wed/Thurs heroic group as a fill-in when spots were open.
Eventually my priest got a core spot in the group and that group is now
8/8H DS. The kill was after 5.04 released, but a kill is a kill!
I also rejoined Dark Carnival on Ysera on my resto shammy where the
guild went through a rename and became The Night Shift. My
recommendation was “Moist” and it received 2 votes. 1 by me and 1 by
one other guy. Anyway, they had just lost 5 core members and mass
recruited. After a 1-2 week gelling period we finished H DS at 25% and
have been each week. This was a personal milestone for me. I had never
downed ANY end boss on heroic or prior to heroics, no end boss at all
in my wow career. I am hoping to work off of this success and make it a
goal of mine in each xpac and tier in wow from now on. These
challenges are what give me my endorphin rush and why I play this game
of ours.
In Cata I had
216 total Heroic DS Kills with 10 H Madness (as of Sept 11). This
isn’t meant to tug on my epeen, but merely a snapshot of the
involvement/commitment I had in this xpac at a personal level. Prior to
this release, my kill total was probably not even half of that in any
one raid. Add to that I raided with every one of my healers. 3
progressively and one as a filler or for group 2 raids. A time
consuming action packed xpac for me to say the least. More cliché!
MoP
Even with all the time spent in Cata, with only a few weeks left
until MoP, I am pumped for it. The talents, new raids, new 5 mans, all
look and sound great so far. Not looking forward to grinding to 90, but
hopefully it won’t be as painful this time around. I also can’t wait
to create Mavrosmoist, my Monk moistweaver.
So, that is it, my personal reflections, trials, and tribulations
from the Cataclysm. Hoping to build on the fun I had in Cata in MoP and
keep it rolling.
