Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

How is Your Guild Handling the Holidays?

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2009 has almost come to an end.

I’ve observed that a number of guilds have entered a brief hibernation mode and ours is no different. We’ve had to shuffle our roster and raid days around so that they wouldn’t coincide on Christmas Eve or New Years Eve either. High attendance days are usually reserved for progression content on the 25s and farm raids have been suspended until after New Year.

In the past, the guilds I’ve been in handled their winter breaks differently:

  • Completely call off raiding for two weeks
  • Disband (due to abandonment)
  • Combine with other guilds and organize pickup raids
  • Achievement running

My guild recently picked up a hunter.

What’s so special about this hunter that deserves a minor mention?

She has more achievement points than I do.

Time to fix that.

In any case, guilds aren’t the only ones taking a break. A number of bloggers are taking a much needed break over the holidays. I’ve taken a few days rest but I still have a number of posts to complete.

What is your guild doing over the winter break?

Happy Holidays!

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From all of us here at World of Matticus, we’d like to wish you a safe and joyous holiday season!

I just popped open my gift boxes from Greatfather Winter this morning. Hello Red Rider Air Rifle! Right now I’m in the process of tagging the various Horde faction leaders. Can’t think of a better way to spend part of my Christmas morning than that!

Anyone know what a hot pot is? It’s a thing that Asian families like to do for dinner once in a while. It’s exactly what it sounds like. There’s a big pot with a gas (or electric) heater underneath. The pot’s split in two with boiling hot water on one side and boiling hot water with spices on the other. And we’ll just throw in a variety of raw stuff and wait for it to get cooked before we devour it. Lamb, beef, chicken, oysters, mussels, fish balls, mushrooms, noodles, whatever. It all goes in and mmm, its so yummy. Just make sure the stuff is kicked.

Swag

I love my friends. They have a knack of knowing me. Here’s what I picked up this year:

  • George Foreman Grill (Steak and eggs anyone?)
  • Wanted on DvD
  • The Laws of Simplicity
  • 25$ gift card to Chapters (Some people don’t like gift cards. I’m not one of them. I like being able to choose what I want)

I Can Carry You

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Remember that scene from Return of the King? Frodo has just about given up hope. He’s at the bottom of Mount Doom. Sam can sense the frustration coming from Frodo and then says:

Sam: Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?

Frodo: No, Sam. I can’t recall the taste of food… nor the sound of water… nor the touch of grass. I’m… naked in the dark, with nothing, no veil… between me… and the wheel of fire! I can see him… with my waking eyes!

Sam: Then let us be rid of it… once and for all! Come on, Mr. Frodo. I can’t carry it for you… but I can carry you!

And so he did. Sam starts carrying Frodo and begins climbing up one step at a time until they enter inside.

We all know how that ends.

The random dungeon tool

You’ve run into “those” players, haven’t you? The ones that don’t seem to try very hard? They’re sporting a full set of T9s and are firing spells that don’t begin to approach the potential of the player. There’s all sorts of reasons for it. Maybe it’s an alt they’re unfamiliar with. Could be chatting on the phone and distracted. Perhaps they just dinged 80 and are wearing an awesome flavor of blues and greens and decided to start gearing up as quick as possible.

The simplest answer would be that such players downright suck.

You don’t have to be spiteful about it though.

It doesn’t matter to me if they just hit 80.
It doesn’t matter to me if they’re an alt that doesn’t know what they’re doing.
It doesn’t matter to me if they’ve never done that instance (or any instance) before.

I’m willing to carry you.

As a healer, we’re in a pretty unique position of being able to support the entire group if we have the skills.

Bruteforce healing

Ever tried brute force healing an instance before? It’s exactly what it sounds like. The ultimate 5 man healing experience is when every DPS pulls aggro or the tank is simply not able to keep the threat up on all the mobs. Or if the tank decides to chain pull 3-4 sets of trash.

To top it off, you’re at 30% mana because they didn’t notice your mana pool before the trash pulls went off.

Bruteforce healing means you won’t be relying on so much finesse. There isn’t much emphasis on healing rotation or using the “right” spell for the right job. Damage is coming from all over the place and every action needs to be prioritized.

This is where you take the shotgun approach and hit as many AoE and preventative spells as possible. It’s a lot of fun for a Disc Priest.

Whether intentional or otherwise, if a DPS player pulls aggro, I will have their back. I’m willing to be patient and to explain encounters. I’m willing to eat a few wipes.

Unless it’s Oculus.

That’s where I draw the line.

Relief

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Just downed the final exam boss. For those of you unaware, it’s a seasonal boss and it usually involves a massive 300 person raid to do. I don’t know who designs the encounters but sometimes I wonder what goes through their minds when they do it. In any case, things started off a bit slow during the multiple choice phase. All I can say is, all that time spent grinding the weekly lecture raid paid off. During the last week, he gave the “Exam material will only be based on lecture slides” buff which over two thirds of the raid didn’t get.

Skippers.

But yeah, a bit of a struggle during the multiple choice phase (and I hope I maximized my luck stat).

Definitely strongest during the short answer phase as I knocked over every question, definition, and example with confidence.

Now the final essay boss?

Utilizing everything you learned thus far in lecture, how would you go about exploring the issue of a relationship between heritability and musical appreciation?

Another heavy reliance on the luck stat.

It’s okay though. It’s over. Now it’s back to blogging business!

How Our Guild is Handling Primordial Saronite

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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!