Primordial Saronite is the item that’s required for the next level of crafting gear out of Icecrown. There’s all sorts of methods of picking up this stuff and our leadership’s been hard at work figuring out what our approach should be. There’s a few things that are high on the priority list.
Shadowmourne, for one, requires over 20 of these. While going for another Legendary isn’t required, it makes a statement about the guild (not one but TWO Legendaries after all).
Our tanks can get an early boost to their gear and not have to rely on random drops from the different bosses. The better those guys get, the easier time we’ll have moving forward.
As we’re packing a number of sharpshooters in the raid (4 hunters), they’re also going to need some heavy artillery. The recipes for bullets and arrows will cost one Primordial Saronite to learn.
There’s lots of different ways we can go about spending Primordial Saronite to maximize raider utility.
Our approach
In a recent thread on the WoW forums, Ghostcrawler was clarifying a question regarding Shadowmourne. At the same time, he wanted to know this:
We’re also interested to see how various groups handle the Primordial Saronite issue. We designed it so there isn’t necessarily a right way to handle the material and we don’t want to over-prescribe your social dynamics anyway.
I found out over the weekend that Blizzard devs do read this blog. Wyn and Lodur kept bugging me and insisting that they did, but I remained a disbeliever until one of their guys pinged me on Twitter about it. That was too cool!
So here’s our answer:
Prioritizing Saronite to the tanks – Our tanks will get first crack at the Primordial Saronite that they need. The better their gear gets earlier on, the easier time we’ll have heading into Icecrown. I think they’re shooting for the boots first, but I can’t be sure of that yet. I’ve created a queue list on the forums where the tanks put down what they need (not necessarily what they want). I’m not sure how the legs are. If they beat the tier legs, then I’ll devote more Saronite to it. Until then, the queue list is just for the tanks and once they have all that is requied, the list will be opened up to the rest of the guild.
Ammo recipes – This is another one for us but it won’t happen until later on. Not only do you need the Saronite, the engineers need the reputation to purchase the recipe. It’s Goblin and Gnomish right? One crafts bullets and the other does arrows? Once our engineers have the requisite reputation, we’ll send one their way as well.
Shadowmourne – The Shadowmourne quest line is fairly extensive. The last step involves taking down Sindragosa which isn’t going to be anytime soon. Not only that, you have to perform a variety of tasks at different bosses (like standing in fires while surviving for a prolonged period of time). This step can wait a little longer before we invest.
On the other hand, there is some speculation that you need to be on the opening quests before you get the Shadowfrost Shards from the bosses. We don’t know how often the drops are and there is no confirmation.
Getting saronite
To that end, we’ve decided to increase the chances we have of obtaining Saronite. Sundays have been opened up for a new alt raid. We’ve been doing this for a while now, but we’ve decided to lay down some ground rules for it.
Why an alt raid?
For one, there’s many players with nothing to do on Sunday nights. We could either jump on our alts and join a pug with a 50-50 shot of succeeding, or organize our own with a higher chance of it working out. We like having multiple geared characters!
Our alts are almost as geared as our mains and it gives us a nice “break” from our normal duties that we have to do on our main characters. It’s nice for me to randomly destroy stuff on my Ret Paladin or my Elemental Shaman.
As I said earlier, extra Primordial Saronite is a plus. We can channel the results of those into the main raid. Not only that, since they’re alts, the players that are comfortable with it can spend their Emblems of Frost that they have to purchase Saronite for their mains if they need to.
Our main raids are overstaffed. We do this in order to ensure that we have enough players to raid. This inevitably means that some players are going to sit out during the week. I don’t want them to fall too far behind us in gear. So any main raiders that don’t get to come in during the week are able to come in on Sunday in order to use up their lockout period. At the very least, they’ll get some Emblems.
We’re still working out loot systems for the time being. Last Sunday, when we walked into ToC 25, we had 23 alts in total. The other 2 were friends of the guild. The one thing that we’re lacking is another tank for our alt runs. If we can field a full crew for 25, then I can definitely apply loot council rules and prioritize main readers who need loot and balance it with the alts.
If you’re a tank out there with nothing to do on a Sunday night, come and check us out. Of course, anyone who feels that they are exceptional healers and DPS are welcome to apply regardless.
Let’s take down Arthas and move on to Deathwing already!
What about those individuals that want to craft some of the new BS/LW gear? Are they left to spend their badges on the Primordial Saronite, or is the guild willing to help out with that.
After all, the first tier pieces MUST be bought with Emblems of Frost, so ultimately it’s going to take forever to gear up the raid.
@Morynne: Again, that’s what the queue list is for. Once the tanks have all the stuff they need, the list opens up to the rest of the guild who needs it. It’s up to them to get the other mats required for it but if we have the Saronite, we’ll release it accordingly.
The boots, tank-wise at least, are fairly under-par. A much better item are the Avoidance boots from ToGC25 LJ or 10man ToGC Twins.
I respectfully disagree with you Matticus but Maintank gearing is something from vanilla WoW where you could essentially heal most bosses to death.
What I’ve seen over and over in WotLK is that tanking hasn’t really been a real roadblock anywhere along the line.
Healing hasn’t been also.
DPS on the other hand…….whether you have strong dps matters a lot. There have been many many roadblocks where the issue was dps.
So…..in my opinion dps priority would be logical.
@Orcstar: Absolutely, and there’s nothing wrong with your approach at all ^^! While it’s not super important similar to Vanilla where tanks had to be geared out the ying yang, it certainly doesn’t hurt. Anyway, I’ve always been more conservative than anything else and my time in the PTR with the assorted tanks I had showed them taking a bit of a beating. But that’s always the case with new content.
I would have to go with orcstar, I dont think their was a single stumbling block duinrg heroic totgc where our tanks where the issue. It has allways been about having sufficient DPS.
Shadowmourne the quest lines may be the stumbling block. I know one of our ret pallies has decided he has no chance of getting the Primordial Saronite through the guild and is planning to devote his stable of alts to farming emblems. WIth the healing legendary the stess of trying to complete the questline(3 weeks of attempts) led to her decideing to go Casual and eventually gquitting afer 3 years of close to 100% atttendance.
The biggest problem I have with MT gearing is that it often is used to rationalise the greed some people have. (btw I play a tank myself).
We had a tank applying to our guild with full t 9.5 from a less progressed guild.
Turned out he had first pick on everything in his old guild an when geared to the teeth decided it was time to move on.
@Orcstar: Our tanks have their head on pretty straight. I don’t have loot issues like that with them. We try to equalize the tank loot as well and spread them around.
“I found out over the weekend that Blizzard devs do read this blog. Wyn and Lodur kept bugging me and insisting that they did, but I remained a disbeliever until one of their guys pinged me on Twitter about it. That was too cool!”
I think blizzard reads a lot of blogs. Probably more then we do. In my mind it is impossible that they have read mine but don’t read other excellent blogs like yours. However, I know how awesome it feels to get that confirmation. Grats, next thing you know they will be naming an item after you.
.-= Graylo´s last blog ../facepalm: Patch Issues a Day Early =-.
We had the Tank > healer > dps prio once too but have found in the expansions that having the gear more evenly spread over the raid is more beneficial we droped that prio, making alot of non tanks happy in the process 🙂 But to be honest I had a hard time letting go of that way of thinking, (still have I think)
.-= Uskan´s last blog ..A story of death and deceit =-.