about Argent Dawn rep in the expansion

there has been plenty of speculation concerning what will be in the expansion – some evidence has arisen to support some of those speculations, and others remain unfounded. a recent discussion with a reliable source of wow wisdom gives me reason to question whether Argent Dawn reputation will be prominent in the expansion – contrary to some recent reports.

his main point was that BC implemented CE rather than CC (Cenarion Circle) as the Cenarion faction rep to be earned. this leveled the playing field between old timers and newcomers rather than give the advantage to the old timers that would have already ground out the rep with CC – thus avoiding old timers from simply picking up their Earth Warden right away.

similarly, in the expansion we may find a derivative of AD instead of the AD faction rep proper.

if you are enjoying playing some of the old school content, by all means carry on! however, if you are only doing it to reap the rewards of AD faction in the expansion, i would suggest caution!

strat for rep and omg levels of fun

fun in strat

strat is part of an old story. to most of the wow players today, it is arcane – it is beyond the borders of their knowledge and lost in the past. to some, it is new content and a new area to explore. invigorated even more given the upcoming expansion featuring Naxx and where possibly, Argent Dawn rep may carry some value.

it is also a great diversion from the normal grind and surprisingly fun – especially when you see your healer get knocked back so far he flies through the air and into another room with another boss. great times.

Blinded, Rawdogg, Yellow, Delbaethia, Pivond and Cyanide 5-man’d the instance (Del and Pivond switching out Living and Undead sides) and man did we have a blast in there. Not the least of which was all the drops that Rawdogg DE’d for us… hmm… Raw, where did all those dusts and shards go?!

guild website banner competition!

hear ye! hear ye!

over the next several days and ending on Sept 13th, we will be running a competition to replace the guild website banner!

how do you win? glad you asked!

1. design or screenshot or gnomishly engineer a replacement banner that is the same size as the one currently in use.
2. contact Iron, Ironhelm, Ironbow or Cyanide in game for an email to send it to and send it to me.
3. I will post the banners and the guildies will vote on them on the 14th.
4. If your banner wins, it will replace our current banner and be the official banner on the website.

caveat: guild leader reserves veto right in case the guild becomes momentarily delusional on what is appropriate!

we plan to run this competition more often based on participation – so start drafting!

changes to raiding for the next few weeks until LK comes out

there are always big swinging changes come the start of school in the Fall. we have a few of our own.

first Kara: until now, we have had a select few individuals heavily supporting the Kara raid split across two days (Wed & Fri) and using it to help others get gear. those same individuals for the most part have been playing the role for many months now. add to the mix recent recruiting successes over the past couple of months and we find ourselves with a enough geared toons to run Kara and clear in a night.

effective immediately, we will have a Kara geared/badge run weekly and a Kara gearing run/wipe club. huh? Geared toons are not restricted to the badge run. they can run the wipe club Kara raid as they choose – but out of courtesy, clear it with raid leader or guild leader first in case too many folks shift one week and end up canceling the badge run by absenteeism! the wipe club is where the toons not geared to clear Kara will raid until they are geared to clear.

as an example, Ironhelm will run with the badge run of Kara (but can choose to run with the wipe club to help if needed) and Ironbow will run with the wipe club — given room on either raid. because ironhelm is geared to clear Kara and Ironbow (in this example) is not.

there are a lot of reasons behind this decision – not the least of which are that the geared toons have already paid their dues in the wipe club and it is time for them to reap the badge run rewards and spend their time in the Gruul’s and Mags wipe clubs. allow me to be very clear about that: just because you are in the badge raid for Kara does not mean you are no longer in the wipe club in another raid dungeon. Ironhelm is definitely in the wipe club for Gruul’s and Mags seeing as we seem to always pick the pugs that wipe!

second, for Gruul’s and Mags we will continue to loosely staff half a raid and pug in the rest; however, we intend to find some non-guildies that are good raiders and group up with them on a regular basis rather than constantly pug in totally new faces each time. this might take a few weeks and there will always be a few seats filled by fresh faces; however, that is the gist of it.

lastly, ZA: the badge raid for Kara = the wipe club for ZA.

there has been a lot of pressure lately – a lot of which was self-induced by the raid group – to progress. we seem to have learned a valuable lesson that progression grinding quickly burns raiders out. especially if you try to progress too quickly. gear does not mean you can tackle the strats and knowing the strats does not mean you can do them without the gear. there are plenty of progression guilds out there where they flog themselves on progression until they quit the game. we are not one of them.

we are getting back to the basics: like having fun. yes we will raid, however we are not raiding against a progression clock. and once LK expansion comes out, and we all get to 80, we will raid through the content to the end content (w00t for all content being 10-man content). sure we will do some of it 25-man, perhaps even all of it. however, remove the pressure to push through at a pace that the raiders as a whole cannot sustain or meet.

with 10-man raids in LK covering all of the content, we will be easily able to run a friendly reward competition to “first downs” across two raid groups (at least) in our guild. however, friendly pressure is the only type we will plan for.

= )

peace out.

quals for raiding updated

the quals for getting into raids has been updated, mostly bringing down some of the mana/health pool sizes.

Undercity raid on Sat 30th 10pm server

That’s right. Undercity. Saturday 30th. 10pm server time.

Have the Chillwind camp flight point and the Southshore flight point. You will need an epic ground mount for this raid and pref a 70 to withstand the defenses.

/grin

Blinded & Jacofox take a breather

Blinded & Jacofox are taking a breather to prevent burning out – peace.

They’ve communicated with me that they hope to just do some fun stuff for a bit like old school instances and city raids. We wish them well and look forward to their future return.

It is however a good opportunity to reinforce two points:

1. be careful of who you invite into the guild as you would into your house; inviting too many drama llamas puts a huge burden on the officers and most especially on the GL and Snr O’s and it can burn them out fast when all they face when they log on is several hours of drama whispers;
2. we do not prescribe ‘your spec you have to play’ – much less your class; just because someone has a tank does not mean they do not want a chance to play their hunter or shammy – telling them to always come on their tank to a raid is counter to what our culture and what they may want to do and it can very well lead to burn out; same for healers; it’s one thing for someone to support the raid group in a role for a while, however once they have completely passed it in gearing and have been doing that role for many months, it is more than time for someone else to have already moved up to take that role if need be;

One thing that is ‘for sure’ about our guild is a solid culture that attracts both newcomers and oldtimers [back]. We look forward to seeing Jacofox and Blinded back once they get a decent vacation/breather.

In the meantime, it behooves us to level/recruit some tanks and healers. Pugging them in to our raids is a great way to see how they handle raiding and whether we want to recruit them.

Upgrade to GroupCalendar version 4.1

We have officially upgraded to version 4.1 of Group Calendar – upgrade now!

While you are at it, run wowaceupdater or macaceupdater and update your add ons!

Comcast DNS servers issues all up the East Coast

Apparently, Comcast is having all kinds of issues on the East Coast with either storms or [apparently] people driving trucks into Comcast DNS servers. Either way, it has caused massive disruptions to people being online.

Hope everyone is doing well and lets hope this next week fares better!

enjoy the calm, the storm is about to hit – oh goody!

Behind the scenes, there has been a lot of things going on. Online, it has been relatively quiet the past couple of weeks. change is coming. There are a lot of things that change at the end of August and the beginning of September – not the least of which is the number of guild members that come online. Each year, there has been a marked increase in new members joining in September as people return to online and decide to join a new guild. We should be expecting an even larger growth rate given our progression over the summer now squarely into raiding and pushing past Kara.

Our guild has a reputation on the guild as one of the best to level in. Hopefully it is now also earning similar rep about gearing and raiding T4/ZA as we continue to push raiding past Kara.

There will be some hurdles ahead. Not enough people have tanks or healers that are geared to take on main roles. Warhammer Online is coming out in September and we can expect that to be a minor distraction for a month or two. It may even permanently pull some members out of WoW; however, it is a minor blip on the radar for the guild. With many well-geared T6-content raiders ceasing to raid until LK comes out, their guilds are poaching T5 healers/tanks and gearing them to continue raiding – which in turn makes T5 guilds poach T4 geared toons. There are the hurdles of getting people into a habit of being online to raid or to sign up in advance and show up.

Regardless of the list of hurdles or strengths, change is coming.

All of the officers are charged with the responsibility of keeping the train on the tracks and moving forward. The guild objectives for December 31, 2008 include 50% of the guild accounts (players) having at least a level 70 in the guild.

With the upcoming expansion, there is a lot of debate on whether it makes any sense to gear and raid or just wait until the expansion. The officers support whichever side of that argument you want to take. However, we expect you to constantly and consistently work towards having at least one 70 in the guild by Dec 31 and preferably pushing hard to end game level – whichever level that is on Dec 31.

Blinded and Jacofox are tasked with evaluating different reward/looting systems and to make a recommendation based on what they have researched including what they think will work best for our guild based on feedback from the guild. I have already done my research and am awaiting their recommendation. This is both an exercise for them to truly step into their roles as decisive leaders in our guild as well as an opportunity for all members in our guild to build the habit of working with your officers to make changes and improvements to our guild. Take advantage of this time and give them your support.

Currently, our guild website is a domain forwarding to a wordpress blog. We have had other solutions in the past that were under utilized by the larger membership and did not have the convenience of a blog. However, we are currently evaluating some newer options with consideration of features such as forums and tie-ins to looting systems as well as raid management. If you have suggestions to this effect, post a comment to this blogpost and be sure to leave your in game toon’s name so that we can find you in game if we have more questions.

Finally, somewhere in the upcoming two months, based on use, we will upgrade the vent server to enable more connections (it is set to 25 concurrent connections right now) in order to facilitate other groups and raids while we concurrently raid 25-man content.

As you can see, overall we stay ahead of the upcoming changes and needs of the guild based on size and demands. As always, the officers openly welcome comments and suggestions and one of the best ways to get promoted to officer is to take an active role over time in working on the plumbing and wiring that is ever present in the background and keeps the guild on the tracks and moving forward.

Hope you have all had a good summer, welcome back!