Guest Posts

Guest posts written by friends of Matticus.

Hybrid it up on General Vezax

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This is a guest post by Paladin blogger Honorshammer of Honor’s Code.

General Vezax is the the last boss you must down before you cross swords with Yogg-Saron himself.

The General is one of most challenging fights in all of Ulduar due to his Aura of Despair. What is it that this lovely gift from the Developers does?

From WoWWiki (http://www.wowwiki.com/General_Vezax) we find:

Aura of Despair – Prevents mana regeneration throughout the fight by all means, except for Judgments of the Wise, Spiritual Attunement, Aspect of the Viper, Thrill of the Hunt, and Shamanistic Rage. Note that unlike the Play Test Realm version of this encounter Mana Potions and active abilities such as Evocation and Life Tap will not function.

My guild recently downed General Vezax. I was Retribution for the fight, but when one of our healers went down; I jumped in and started throwing some heals on the tank. That’s when I discovered the power of Judgments of the Wise for this fight. By Judging and stopcasting I was able to take over the 3rd healer role and concentrate on helping to keep our Main Tank alive, and do it on a Ret Paladin’s mana pool.

What exactly does Judgement of the Wise do?

Judgements of the Wise Rank 3 – Your Judgement spells have a 100% chance to grant the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.25% of their maximum mana per second for 15 sec, and to immediately grant you 25% of your base mana. (Source)

The replenishment aspect is useless. After reviewing the WoW Web Stats, I can see that I never gained Replenishment. However I did gain over 100,000 mana from Judgments of the wise! Because it works off base mana, it would restore the same amount regardless of the current mana pool of the Paladin.

We know that for a Level 80 Paladin, Holy Light cost 1,274 mana. So with a little napkin math, we can conclude that I regenerated enough mana from Judgments of the Wise to cast over 70 Holy Lights. That’s without the use of any Saronite Vapors at all.

How practical would it be it for a Holy Paladin to get Judgement of the Wise? Let’s look at a talents build that allows a Holy Paladin to get Judgement of the Wise, and the tradeoffs it makes to get there.

The most popular Holy Paladin build according to TalentChic is 51/5/15. Let’s look at what is needed to turn that into our hybrid build.

First off, the 5 points in Divinity have to go. Divinity is a really strong Tier 1 talent, but we simply won’t have room for it in our build. It doesn’t matter how hard the heal hits if you don’t have the mana to cast it.

Those 5 points move into Sanctity of Battle and Pursuit of Justice. Sanctity gives you even more crit for your Holy spells which should offset some of the loss of Divinity. There is a ton of movement on General Vezax so Pursuit of Justice is really nice as you move away from a Shadow Crash or into a Saronite Vapor.

Then we take the points out of Beacon of Light. This is one tank fight. Let the other healers handle the Raid; you can stay on the Tank so Beacon is a minor loss. You are going to lose the Haste from Judgments of the Pure and Infusion of Light. You will also have to heal from melee range because you won’t have the range increase from Enlightened Judgments. We had our Resto Druid healing from near melee range, so we could just have just as easily had a Holy Paladin there.

You won’t have the mana reduction from Divine Illumination. Based on General Vexax’s enrage timer, you would only be able to fire Divine Illumination more than 3 times during the fight. Are those 45 seconds of reduced cost worth the mana you can get back from Judgments of the Wise?

Assuming a little haste from gear, we’ll call Holy Light a 2 second cast. In those 45 seconds, we can get off 22.5 Holy Lights. To give every advantage to Divine Illumination, we’ll call it 23.

Holy Light costs 1271 so half it’s cost is 635. So we’ve saved 635 mana times 23 casts or about 15,000 mana. It’s about 10% of what Judgments of the Wise gives you. So Divine Illumination is gone as well. Bu-bye!

Our final move is to take 2 points out of Holy Guildance which will result in about a 4% loss of spell power from Intellect. The rest of the Holy Paladin build is pretty much intact.

With these points freed up, we continue to ascend the Ret Tree. The next point taken in Ret is Sanctified Retribution. This will increase all damage done by everyone near us, even if we are running Concentration Aura.

We want to pick up Improved Judgments so we can judge as often as possible, and trigger Judgments of the Wise as often as possible. Now we need two ‘filler’ points to move into the next Tier. There aren’t any great places to put them. I chose to put them in Crusade to increase the damage of Judgment by 3%. This build relies on judging often, so you might as well have them hit a little harder.

On the next tier, we grab Divine Purpose. The 4% spell miss will act as increased resistance to Shadow Crash and Searing Flames should one get through your interrupters.

Here again we find ourselves two points short of the next tier and not really any good place to spend them. I opted for Vengeance. Maybe you could get a stack going and hit those Judgments a little harder. It’s a filler choice so anywhere you want to throw two points will probably work.

Finally, we open Judgments of the Wise.

Here’s the final 38/0/33 build in the WoWhead tool.

General Vezax is a challenging fight. Specing for a specific fight is something that used to be fairly common in late Tier 6 and Sunwell. We didn’t need it for Tier 7 raids, but as we near the end of Tier 8, it may be something to consider again.

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Paladin Healing in 10 man Ulduar

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This is a guest post by Adgamorix, who’s launched his own blog: Divine Plea.

So last week I wrote a post talking about Paladin healing in Heroic Ulduar, and voicing my opinion that I thought Paladin healing was spot on. I was open about my lack of 10 man Ulduar experience, and was told to come back when I’d experienced that pain – with the expectation that my opinion would change.

Taking that to heart, the next day I rounded up nine of my fellow guild mates and began my assault. This week has been an absolute blood-bath of raiding, seeing me log six days of straight raiding (no less than three hours a day) when I normally log two or three. Why did I throw my schedule to the side and perform this atrocious attack on my sanity you ask? Simple. I thought maybe I was missing something.

So 9 hours of 10 man raiding later and we’re staring at General Vezax and laughing at how the trash was essentially mini-bosses. We’re now one boss away from Yarg himself, and of course a whole slew of bosses on hard mode to go. I believe that I’ve tasted the cool-aid, and I have a response for those who still say Paladin healing is broken.

What’s the fuss?

Yeah, it’s not a real adult reaction, but it fits in my opinion. Our raid makeup was fairly balanced, with a Resto shaman, and the Holy/Disc priest from my 25 man group. We used a Druid/DK tanking combo, two rogues (our hunter is suffering from severe wife agro), ret paladin, a shadow priest, and a balance druid. Yes, we could have had a better raid makeup for buff purposes, but this group is a solid core of players and we did our 10 man Naxx together.

We had our share of wipes and pain (Mimiron alone took 2 or 3 hours), but the overall experience was enjoyable. We learned new bosses, we got to hear the “I thought the button started the encounter!” cry from a curious rogue, and we learned some things to help with our 25 man raid. I learned that more than ever, I have to trust my fellow healers, and trust my raid mates to know when to use cool-downs and consumables. I felt the agony of no mana return with Illumination on Vezax, and I may have actually shed a tear the first time I tried casting a Holy Light while under the effects of Thorim’s Defaning Thunder (75% increased cast time). Overall though I felt like the raid was tuned beautifully, and it was a lot of fun actually being challenged.

So what’s different between me and those that think we’re broken?

I will concede that our group is the x factor in this equation. Are the healing problems coming from Paladins in unbalanced groups? Are they trying to two heal, or heal content beyond their gear/experience level? Maybe it’s the synergy between the healers, in that we know the role we play, and can accurately predict the actions of our fellow healers. For example, I know that on Mimiron while I’m healing the MT through the Plasma Blast, if someone gets Napalm Shelled I can toss them a quick Holy Shock to absorb the base damage while the tree HoTs them up and the Disc priest keeps the MT alive. We don’t have to talk about it, it just happens. Would it be awesome if I could still throw a Sacred Shield on them to help with the damage absorption? Of course it would, but we seem to be making it through ok as it is.

Canceling out the X factor

So after healing a lot of 10 man (and more 25 man), I decided to take the x factor out of the equation. I couldn’t down rank my gear (short of taking a piece off) to simulate healing in blues , but I could put myself in the LFG channel and heal any PUG that came along. I tossed aside any gear/instance standards I had, and went willy-nilly into the groups. After getting through Gun’Drak, VH, UK, and UP – I decided Paladin healing still isn’t broken. Yes it’s slightly tougher, the lack of multiple SS and Glyph crits huts some, but it’s still doable (and fun).

I’m going to stick by original statement that Holy Paladins are in great shape right now, and while we could use another tool in our kit, or maybe some kind of decent raid heal, we’re still really strong.

Paladin Healing in Heroic Ulduar

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This is a guest post by Adgamorix with some tips for Holy Paladins working their way through Ulduar.

3.1 and Ulduar are upon us, and the tears of Healadins fill the forums, feeding Yarg-Saron and keeping XT’s joints lubed. Bloggers and forum goers alike lament the death of Flash of Light as a useful heal, and wonder if the new Infusion is even worth it. 10% extra crit on a Holy Light? I want my haste back! I need to raid heal!

Can you taste the tears?

My question is what is the real issue? Granted, my guild hasn’t cleared Ulduar yet, but we did get six bosses down in the first week (no hard modes), and I haven’t seen the problem. As we’re a 25 man raid guild, we typically run with seven healers: two Paladins, Disc priest (dual spec’d for Holy which some Priests just aren’t good enough to do *wink*), Holy Priest, two trees, and a Resto Shaman. Our tanks are a mix of all the tank classes, and we run a fairly balanced mix of melee vs. ranged (though we do have a lot of hunters – fortunately no huntards).

Given a balanced raid makeup, I’m very happy with where paladin healing is right now. On any boss fight that we’ve done so far, I’m confident in putting my paladin partner and I on the tank and letting the other healers take care of the raid, off tanks, etc. Between Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield, we can run a steady rotation on the tanks, and it hasn’t failed us yet. Granted, I haven’t seen the fights in 10 man yet, but I’m confident that it’ll be ok.

Note that I’ve said ‘balanced raid makeup’ a couple of times here. Even though we’ve been told to “bring the player and not the class”, I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect to waltz through Ulduar with nothing but a pocket-full of rogues and no ranged DPS… at least not for a while anyway. Having a mix of buffs and abilities is part of what makes raiding so much fun. It’d be boring if any 25 people (regardless of class/spec) could walk in and down the content during the first week.

I think the problems being experienced by some paladins can be explained with the same explanation we had when our MT pulled XT with his face the first time, leaving all his healers 40 yards behind him.

“You’re doing it wrong!”

Ulduar isn’t Naxx, and I’m glad. The trash is harder than most Naxx bosses, and “gasp” we have to use crowd control again. XT’s trash brought back nightmares of old Kael’Thas trash (with a mix of Void Reaver), and it takes some getting used to. Healers can’t snipe any more, and target assignments are crucial. Trusting your raid mates to do their assigned task, and focusing on yours, keeps the raid alive. I generally can’t spare the GCD to hit someone else, and I count on the raid healers to cover me when I’m not beaconed. Sure, I’m lower on the meters than I used to be, but our strategy works and bosses die.

I won’t disagree that it would be nice to have another tool in my box, but I love the healing aspect of my paladin so much that my Resto Shaman has been collecting dust for two months. I like the challenge of healing without a designated ‘raid heal’, and learning new ways to cope with the incoming damage.

Here’s how we’ve pulled off each boss so far

Healing rotation: This healing rotation is similar to what we use for every boss we two heal. My partner will spam HL while I run FoL/HS rotations. I generally keep my SS up on the tank, and we beacon an OT if they are close, our we just beacon ourselves. After about one minute of this, we switch roles, and she hits DP to start her regen (I usually hit Illumination right at the start – I also pop my haste gloves). This continues for one minute, and then we switch again (this time I Plea). With this rotation the MT is getting around 30k in healing every 2 – 2.5 sec (lag depending), and there is always a heal landing.

Flame Leviathan: All I can say is, flying through the air with a boom-chicken by your side is worth it. I beacon the boom-chicken and unleash my holy DPS on the turrets. Instant FoLs on myself are enough to keep us both alive without any stress (hard mode may be different).

Ignis: Pallies beacon themselves and do nothing but roll heals on the MT. We have our Disc priest on the OTs, with the druids dropping HOTs on them as they race by with the constructs. Raid healing is covered with the shaman and holy priest, and the druids kicking in after a flame jet.

Razorscale: This fight is a lot less coordinated. Generally I sit on our DK who picks up the whirlwinders and also stays closest to Razor so he gets her fire patches. I beacon myself, and just roll FoL on him until the fight ends. I’ll also run in and hit the boss a few times while she’s harpooned, that way I have a full mana bar at the start of phase 3 (phase 2 if you don’t count the chained phase) so I can just bomb the tanks with HL.

XT-002 Deconstructor: We handle this fight just like Ignis. Prot pallies on the tank, Disc Priest on the add tank, and the rest of the healers on the raid. The only change up is during the earthquake/pound one of us will switch off the MT and drop HL bombs on the melee to help with the damage.

Kologarn: See previous strategies. I usually beacon the add tank on this one, since he’s close enough to always receive my heals. Only one of the tanks holding Kologarn should be taking a significant amount of damage, so we focus on them individually. A Resto shaman is also amazing for the folks caught in the grip.

Assembly of Iron: This one we switch up just a touch. We’ve only downed this once, and that was in the ‘easy’ mode. Here we flip the disc priest and a holy paladin, beaconing the off tanks and healing through the damage. A shaman is an ideal healer for the tank on Stormcaller, as they can interrupt the chain lightning and the lightning whirl.

Get Rich or Heal Trying: How to Make Money via Dailies

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This is a guest post by Sientina discussing earning gold in WoW as a healer.

I’m Sientina, and I heal things to death. You see that warrior over there? He’s been trying to kill me for the last 4 minutes and I’m healing away all his damage, waiting for help to arrive.  Sure, I could probably kill him… eventually, but I rolled a healing class for a reason. I don’t kill things. I don’t grind elementals for eternals. The thing is, raiding takes its toll. I have reagents to buy, armor to repair, and hair to cut when my old style isn’t working for me anymore. What’s a girl to do when she has money issues and no sugar daddy?

I could just heal the daily heroic for cash but if I don’t want to commit to a full heroic run, I can do a few dailies instead and still have the gold for the raid tonight. Besides, have you seen those dungeons? They need to fire their cleaning staff. I end up with more cobwebs in my hair then hair products, and I use a lot of hair products. For a style this good, there needs to be money rolling in. These dailies keep my hair free of cobwebs and my gear free of blood and gore.

Icecrown

Stop by your respective airships and pick these quests up.

Capture More Dispatches / Keeping the Alliance Blind – shoot down 6 scouts just west of Aldur’thar.
That’s Abominable! / That’s Abominable! – Kill an abom in the broken front for his guts and use your newly made Frankenstein creation to blow the undead to pieces.
The Solution Solution / Volatility – Loot some helms, armor, and bones and blow a Frostbrood Skytalon sky-high.
If you’ve unlocked enough quests to have the tabard of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, head to the Shadow Vault for 2 more dailies.
Vile Like Fire! – Grab a proto-drake and burn 8 buildings.  You can re-burn something already on fire, so it doesn’t matter how many others are around.
Shoot ‘Em Up – There are two buildings with harpoon launchers on the balcony. Pick a weapon and kill 15 drakes.  Make sure to grab group with anyone else at a harpoon, you’ll both be done sooner.
Both Alliance and Horde have their own assault point in Ymirhiem.  Join them to help their cause in a non-killing sort of fashion.  Horde, you’ll report to the northern edge while Alliance will be on the eastern side.
Assault by Air / Assault by Air – Grab the transport and hit the spear guns with the blinding shot to stay alive til all four of your infiltrators are dropped.
King of the Mountain / King of the Mountain – Jump up the mountain and plant the flag.  You can click for your next jump before you land so you can scale vertical walls with ease.

Sholazar Basin

For those Honored with Oracles:

Appeasing the Great Rain Stone – Hop around with your little green friend and look for sparklies on the ground.  After he digs them up, loot them.
Song of Fecundity – Go west to the Maker’s shelf and blow the horn around 8 piles of dirt.
Song of Reflection – Go to the top of each Pillar and use the digeridoo at each crystal.
For those Honored with Frenzyheart…
Chicken Party! – Click on 12 chickens or net big groups of them.  You don’t have to dismount to net or gather the chickens up, so catch them rodeo style.

Storm Peaks

You will have to unlock the Sons of Hodir quests to get these. Part of them are Sons of Hodir Dailies, and will give you rep towards your shoulder enchants.  Others are from Brunnhildar. Talk to Gretta the Arbiter to start them.

Thrusting Hodir’s Spear – Only available at Honored. Find a wyrm and slay him using the special cast bar.  Once you get the hang of killing the wyrm, it’ll take you about 5 minutes tops for 16 gold and 500 rep.
Everfrost – This isn’t a daily, but when you’re out and about and you see an everfrost chip, loot it.  Its a free 13 gold and then 7 gold for repeats.  You can do this as many times as you find chips and sometimes someone in general chat will be willing to pay you for the location of one.  If not… more rep for you.
Back to the Pit – Grab a warbear and beat 6 other bear-back riders in combat.
Maintaining Discipline – Beating slaves couldn’t be easier.  If they choose to fight back, you might have to kill one or two.

Grizzly Hills

The Alliance and Horde fight over the Blue Sky Logging Grounds.  Thankfully we can assist.

Pieces Parts / Making Repairs – Loot gears and springs off the ground.  The opposite factions npc’s won’t attack you, but enemy players might.
Life or Death / Overwhelmed! – Bandage 15 of your forces.
Shredder Repair / Shred the Alliance – Shredder time! Use the speed boost and get your machine out of there.  As a note, the keys you get from the quest reward will let you use shredders down in Venture Bay.

Dragonblight

Defending Wyrmrest Temple – Fly to the shrine, disable it and kill all opposing dragonflight in your way.  Simple? Yes… but you can up the ante by trying to complete Rapid Defense as well.

With dailies to keep this girl independent and her hair the best in Dalaran, I’m as carefree as bird. If you’re needing a break from that dreary old dungeon crawl, try a different way to get the gold you need.  Unless the main tank is cute and available. That’s a different situation.

On 1337n355

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The following is a guest post by Briolante, one of Conquest’s main tanks, also sometimes known as Mr. Sydera. Brio is normally a man (ahem, night elf) of few words, but here he waxes poetic on what it means to be leet. We’ve all wondered this, right, as we struggle to define what makes a good player both for ourselves and for our guilds. Enjoy!

Montaigne’s meditation on glory states: “there is the name and the thing.” The same could be said about leetness, which is what passes for glory in the World of Warcraft. We all know the name. We all sometimes sprinkle the word in our conversations and boasting. We may even think we know what the thing is that our words refer to. However, we’re usually wrong. After a ridiculous night of stupid trash mishaps in Naxx, I heard that word thrown about in a context that puzzled me, and I began to wonder what it really means to be an elite player.

Leet or sloppy?

Any raiding team has had off nights, nights where the focus, drive, and attention to detail just aren’t there. Sometimes we even intentionally (gasp) horse around to have a little fun when the content is as stale as the current raid content has become for many of us. The other night in Naxx, we had all manner of bedlam happening around us. Tanks weren’t paying attention to patrols and pulling extra mobs, DPS was opening up AOE before the tanks had even arrived at the scene, and on and on. And guess which green-haired night elf was up there helping cause the problems? Yeah, that was me. Who was left to sort out this mess? The healers, of course, who were usually able to keep enough of us up to get through the pull. It was after pulls like this that some of us bandied about the world leet. But, is this really leet? No, it’s sloppy, it’s lol-1337. But sometimes players fall into the trap of thinking they’re so good that being able to survive the biggest SNAFU confirms the group’s collective leetness.

Early in the Wrath leveling process, I pugged a Nexus run with a group made up of four other players from a guild whose name I have since forgotten. When the priest and druid couldn’t figure out who was going to heal, I started to worry. When two of them decided they were going to jump off the platforms and die below for shits and giggles, I knew it was going to be a long evening. Over the course of our 2.5 hours together (yes I stayed), each one of them committed suicide at least 4 separate times. When we were actually fighting mobs, they died constantly because they weren’t paying attention. Most of the boss kills were lol-kills with one or no players left alive at the end. Any of my guildies who were on that night will remember how pissed off I was in guild chat. I’m usually pretty Zen in my virtual life, but those two just made me lose it. But do you know what? The members of this other guild I was playing with were proud that they could always pull it out, no matter how sloppy. They even described this as their guild ethos. This style of play, in their mind, confirmed their leetness. I could not disagree more.

Leetness is a state of mind

What might the thing called leetness be then? In my mind, the best example of leetness would be the old ZA bear run. Depending on your gear level, earning a bear required near perfect execution and play. Each player had to know every pull and what his/her role in those pulls was. Of course, as we got better, people could make mistakes and we could adjust. But in the early days, it really required minimal mishaps. Is that leetness? I can say that for me, nothing was more pleasurable from a raid leading perspective than those bear runs. When everyone comes together, experiences the synergy, and executes an encounter well, it feels good and everyone knows it.

I might say then that leetness is a state of mind and a precision of execution. In raiding anyway, this is not something that just one person can have, because the whole team has to be there mentally. Conquest’s recent three-drake kill is proof that we have the potential for that state of mind and that precision of execution. But have we suddenly become “leet”?

The importance of execution

One of my biggest disappointments in my former guild from a raid management and leadership perspective was that we only managed to get Illidan down once before the pre-Wrath nerf. The intial kill wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but he was definitely defeated. In the few weeks after that kill, we were never able to get it down again. We got close, but never quite hit that same focus and precision again. It was as if we had accomplished something once and that was enough. People just didn’t care anymore. I asked myself, had we really proved our leetness once and for all by defeating Illidan?

The answer to both of those questions, I would argue, is no. Execution is important at every stage of the game, on progression and farm content alike. Leetness is not something that can be earned definitively. It’s not something that can be possessed, like the many titles that now commodify it for all to see. Leetness is something that we demonstrate, each time we raid. It’s a state of mind and play that we arrive at together, maybe not all the time, but most of the time. It’s our intention, our goal.

Leetness and teamwork

So Brio, you might ask, I top the dps/healing/threat charts. My dps is world ranked! Am I not leet? My answer would be no. From a raiding perspective, leetness is not something that just one person can earn. Raiding is about team play, period. While worrying about topping the meters or beating someone else in your class can sometimes force you to improve yourself, taken to extremes it becomes a hollow form of narcissism. Yes, you topped the meter, but did you get out of the fire? Or, on the contrary, did you overtax the healers who needed to be focusing on the tank? Yes, you topped the healing meter, but did you do your job and do it to the best of your ability? Did you try to “cover” for other people in order to eke out more effective heals? Yes, you did 3000 tps, but did you properly manage your buffs/debuffs in order to make yourself as easy to heal as possible?

As I see it, excellence in raiding difficult content cannot be about egos and winning personal performance meters. You have to do your job first and foremost. On three-drake Sarth, some players didn’t get the message until we obsessively repeated that a player’s first priority is to get out of the void zones. The second priority is to not get hit by the fire walls. The third priority is to dps/heal/etc. As one of the officers in my former guild liked to say, the dead don’t dps.

Raiding is about synergy and teamwork. Difficult content demands it. Difficult content cannot be completed without it. When the desire is there, when the focus is there, when the precise execution is there, when everyone does his/her job, the kill is, quite simply, beautiful. A well-executed kill is breathtaking to watch and experience. This is why sometimes the leet kill isn’t necessarily the first one, but rather the one where the kill looks effortless, like simplicity itself. We’ve all felt this, whether in 5-man dungeons or in 25-man hard mode raids. When Conquest finally downed Sarth 3D after many wipes, we found this state of mind and executed the fight almost flawlessly. Does that mean we’re now leet?

No. Leetness is not something you earn once and for all. It’s something that you work for, every raid, week in, and week out. It starts with desire and then requires the trust that the rest of your team is there to do the same thing.

Can we be leet in the current content?

Naxx is ridiculously easy. You don’t need to mark, you don’t need to CC, and yes, you can slop your way through there, survive, and still get it all done in under three hours. But that’s not leet, that’s lol-1337. Running in with an immediate seed, blade flurry, arcane explosion, hurricane, whirlwind, or whatever and pulling everything on yourself and the healers is not leet, it’s lol-1337. Pulling 18 mobs at once, allowing 10 players to die, and still managing to kill them all is not leet, it’s lol-1337 (and yes, that one was my fault–sorry).

Playing sloppy can be fun, loose, relaxed. Sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered after some really hard work on a difficult encounter. Even I can’t help myself from laughing when a hunter misdirects the next pull onto the resto shammy. But make no mistake, that’s not leet, that’s Leroy Jenkins.

Leetness is focus, precision, synergy, teamwork, execution, and above all else, control. It’s an individual and collective intention, something that we arrive at together with varying degrees of frequency. Due to the easiness of the current content, we’ve forgotten what some of those things are. Let me ask a scandalous question – do our dps players even have their crowd control abilities on the main bars anymore? This is symptomatic of the problem. But if all blue indications hold true, Ulduar will be a different story. Thank heavens, because I was getting frustrated with just how forgiving many of these encounters are, including the trash. I raid for the challenge and for the beauty that results when a team of players meets that challenge with precision. Does that turn the beautiful, effortless kill into a work of art? Maybe, but perhaps that should be the subject for another post.

To return to the matter at hand, dear readers, after this long rant, do you still think you’re so leet? Then show your guild mates how truly leet you are by executing every fight like you mean it.