Last week I had high hopes for things starting to settle down for me.  The last three days of the week were pretty hellacious, but I had managed to wrap up one project that was causing me a good deal of stress.  It seemed like I would be handling many of the issues that had stacked up while I was devoted to that project which all in all should have been a few low stress weeks.  However I was sorely mistaken.

Friday afternoon I got thrown under the bus, figuratively at least.  I work for a good sized municipality as a web developer.  The small team of web developers for the most part represents the tightest cluster of modern development skill-sets in the entire IT department, with the majority being what I would term as, “application babysitters”.  The result is that we often end up getting pulled in to things at the last minute, to serve as virtual ballast in an effort to keep the entire project from capsizing.

Friday I was steamrolled by one of these such projects.  Including a develop that seemed to be willing to do anything at all in his power to halt the progress of the project as a whole.  Due to other issues I had to leave midday, but when we last spoke I had a clear path outlined and agreed to work on a solution to act as a stop gap measure to keep the project on track.  Today I sat down to start working on the application only to find in a few short hours that everything had changed.

For this very moment, I appear to be out of the loop, so I am finally able to sit down and write a bit.  However everything is very much in a state of flux and could end up undoing itself at a moments notice.  Ultimately, I am tired of dealing with individuals who will do anything at all, to craft excuses as to why they can’t actually do their own work.  Without a doubt, I do fully understand why it is that postal workers…  go postal.  Dealing with governmental employees takes a whole kind of stomach that I have yet to full develop.

It’s Everywhere

Part of my morning ritual involves stopping each morning at “Kum and Go”, a gas station chain in my area.  This serves as my morning caffeine destination, and gives me something to drink on for the rest of the day. Over the course of the year and some change we have been stopping there every morning, I have gotten to know almost all of the morning staff.  Even to the point of bringing the morning manager a small Christmas gift this past year.

One of these individuals who has warmed up to us over time is Tim.  Great guy, good sense of humor, and while he started out a little bit standoffish, he has warmed up and become rather personable.  At some point last week I was trying out the new WoW Mountain Dew flavors, and in checking me out I found out that he too plays WoW.  I am just constantly amazed and how widespread the game has become.  Now I just have to work my magic and get him to somehow transfer characters over to Argent Dawn.

More Guide on it’s way

The continuation of the groupcraft guide will be following shortly, but I wanted to get a quick note up to attempt to explain why I hadn’t been posting.  Depending on how long this break in the work storm lasts will determine how quickly I can get the next segments done.  In truth I should have worked on them this weekend, but after the insanity that was Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week I frankly needed a break from thinking. 

What better way to stop thinking than to grind away playing a horribly overpowered and mindless class…  aka the Deathknight.  I am going to pretty much have to eat all the nasty things I have said about the class as a whole.  While yes I am annoyed that so many players have abandoned much needed classes in order to migrate over to the unholy warriors…  I cannot at all deny how fun they are to play.  Friday I was level 66, and by Sunday evening I was level 71.  The time between seems to have somewhat disappeared on me.

The Problem

One of the issues I have encountered over and over in this game is the issue of how to get groups.  I have sat around watching players get frustrated when groups do not just magically happen around them.  Honestly, I used to be one of these players.  Just like so many players I would pose the question, “Anyone want to do something?” or the dreaded “Anything going on?”.  Each time expecting someone to magically form a group for my own benefit around me, when in truth the only refrain would be that of dead silence.

At the release of Burning Crusade I came to a revelation.  It was not my guild, or my friends, or anything else that was the problem at hand.  It was the way in which I approached the problem of getting groups going.  I was in fact doing everything wrong.  I set myself to the task of learning how to assemble group, and after a few weeks of trial and error I was building them every single night and burning through dungeons with ease.

I’ve shared my knowledge with guild mates and friends in less complete versions, but here I am trying to distill all the basic theory I have collected into one easy to follow guide.

Preamble: You Need People – General Networking

If you are going to group up, you in the most basic sense need more people than just yourself.  Yes I am stating this to be overly obvious, but it leads it’s way to a key fundamental of group building.  You need a ready supply of players at your disposal, or you need a network.  Networking is a concept used often in business circles but in its most fundamental form you need a list of “known good” players if you ever hope to start assembly groups with a regular frequency.

Looking For Group – Pugging

Networking in WoW is a process occurs gradually, but is so fundamental to being able to succeed in this game that I feel it is best to cover the topic as a sort of, preamble.  The only real way to network is to get out and expose yourself to new group of players.  The most basic way to get access to groups of new players is through the use of the looking for group tool inside World of Warcraft itself. 

If you are in the process of building your network, I would highly suggest staying in the looking for group channel your entire time playing.  Often times there are random grouping opportunities there, but more importantly an astute reader of the channel can pick up patterns.  There might be a healer, tank and a couple of dps looking for heroics, and all that it really takes is someone paying enough attention to make the connective tissue and organize the ready to form group.

Friends List – Known Good Players

While you are spending time in pick up groups, take note of the good players you encounter.  I suggest you utilize your friends list as a way to track all of the players you encounter that seem to know their classes and can execute assignments well.  Before long in your friends list you will have a directory of potential grouping options, allow you to quickly assemble groups with a core of players you already have experience grouping with.

You will quickly start to notice patterns while grouping.  Certain guilds just seem to have higher quality players than others.  When you find one of these guilds that seems to be both active, and populated with really good players I have found it useful to create a macro that does a simple “/who guildname”.  This allows you to easily check and see which players from that guild are online, and zones they are sitting in.  If a player is standing in one of the hub cities, it is generally a good sign that they are not otherwise busy, and are potentially an option for grouping.  I have had good luck in the past at “cold” messaging players that are from guilds that I know to be solid.

Social Channels – Haven for Good Grouping

Most Servers have many active social channels.  Get to know these well, and join them.  An addon like Cirk’s Chatmanager makes sifting through channels for potential grouping prospects considerably easier but the default UI is more than adequate.  Social Channels are by default, populated by Social Players…  which in turn makes them much more open to the concept of grouping as a whole. 

Once you “hang out” in the channel for awhile, you will learn the various players personalities and who will be more or less likely to accept your group invites.  These channels open up a door to a whole body of players and make it easier to assemble a group rapidly.  Various raids and guilds have specific channels open to members and their friends, and these channels often lend themselves to potential raid invites later down the line. 

Next Topic:  Communication

It’s that time again, another Tuesday, or to WoW aficionados…  maintenance day.  The day where little boys and girls sit by the warm glow of their screens cautiously watching for the sign to enter Azeroth once more.  For the Duranubs, it is another day spent wondering whether or not the server will be stable enough to raid.  For me personally sitting here trying to prepare for the impending disappointment brought by Titanguard  once more being fickle.  I am convinced that this will be one more in the long line of things that refused to drop: Shoulderguards of the Bold, Barbed Choker of Discipline, and Destroyer Shoulderguards.  It is a pattern…  certain pieces of gear hate me with deep dark brooding passion.

Bowing to peer pressure

Well its not so much, peer pressure, but I still feel like I am somewhat jumping on the bandwagon.  It started with Larisa moving from pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com to pinkpigtailinn.com, and then continued with Ariedan moving from wordywarrior.wordpress.com to wordywarrior.com.  It seemed like most of my favorite blogs were abandoning their cheap/free subdomains for the sake of a real domain name.  In a blatant act of following the leaders, I did a quick search and sure enough, Aggronaut.com was in fact available.

I snatched it up as quickly as I could rifle through my wallet for my credit card.  I have in fact had the domain for a few weeks now, but was waiting to make sure that my google analytics was in fact wired correctly and various other house keeping details.  So from this point on, both the original Aggronaut.housestalwart.com and Aggronaut.com resolve to the same location.  Thanks to everyone who has been reading this blog and making it so surprisingly popular.  Had I not gotten the overwhelming support, I don’t think I would have ever “ponied up” for the “real” domain name.

Life and Limb

Ysinnia has been an active support of me and my dumb actions for going on six years.  She helped me to found House Stalwart, acted as a gateway drug into heavy raiding, taught me to love and respect the power of the dwarven priest, and has been a great friend all along the way.  Though she has shifted in and out of the mix due to real life responsibilities she’s always been a great player.  When Burning Crusade was released, she shifted from her dwarven priest to her druid, and with the release of Wrath became one of the best Trees I know.

A few days ago, I added her new endevour to my blogroll, but haven’t really had time to give her a proper plug.  She is currently working on the Limb From Limb druid blog, in which she covers the life and times of a more casual player in wow.  We miss her horribly in Duranub, but real life has forced her to take a step away from the rhythm of the raid life.  She’s hopelessly addicted to the “Get That Achievement” game on the Achievements forum.  While I think she is nuts sometimes for it, she apparently enjoys being made to grind achievements by strangers.

Mostly I added that part in to fluster her, but I think it is a cool source of inspiration.  Limb from Limb is shaping up to be a good blog, and I highly suggest adding it to your RSS feed.  Great player, great sense of humor…  you just can’t go wrong.

Pathfinder

Every so often I write something that might be a bit more than just one of my random brain dumps.  When this rare event happens, it becomes a sort of guide that can be referred back to.  Stealing a page from the book of RollingHots,  I have decided it might be prudent to create a guides page so that it is easier for new folks to find these rare nuggets of wisdom, or at least not horribleness.  If you notice at the top of the site, there is a new link entitled…  wait for it…   Guides.

It took me hours to think that name up.  I hope people find it even mildly useful.  The real reason behind this is that I am working on a new guide for the site.  At the start of burning crusade I found that the groups were not coming as frequently as I wanted them to, so I set out to learn the ancient art of how to pull together a group from out of thin air.  The resulting guide was posted for my guild, and I am in the process of updating it to be more sane.  Hopefully in the next few days I will get it posted on the site.

A Final Thought:  Normalize Repair Bills

In closing I want to through something out there.  I think the time has come for blizzard to seriously consider normalizing the cost of repair bills for plate, mail, leather and cloth.  Last Sunday, I ran Naxxramas with my boomkin.  At one point during the run, I looked down and noticed that all my gear was in the red, so I flew over to Wintergarde keep to repair.  I was expecting the worst, because I am used to the plate repair bills…  and was shocked at a full epic repair bill for the Naxx leather gear I was wearing was only 35 gold.

This figure may or may not seem normal to you, but I will tell you that on Belghast, that is less than two deaths worth of repair bills.  Even on a good night of raiding, I am dropping over 100g in repairs alone.  My worst night ever that figure climbed up to roughly 300g, and in truth it was a little bit over that.  I simply cannot make enough money each week to cover 4 nights of raiding on my warrior.  Honestly this is the point at which blizzard needs to either adjust quest rewards to compensate the difference in armor classes, or look at maybe finally normalizing the costs.

In the old world, the basic theory was this.  Plate classes had the least reagents to buy, so as a result they had the highest cost of repair to normalize things so that each class had to pay out roughly the same cost for a night of raiding.  However, as gear has increased, the costs of reagents have not increased to a level to keep up with the astronomical repair bills that most main tanks have each night.  I very literally watch my gold reserves draining every single night, and it is very hard not to do the math in your head.

You start to calculate, how many more weeks can you afford to continue to raid.  I’ve had friends help me out with money, but in truth this only serves to delay the inevitable point at which I literally run out of money.  The time has come for blizzard to finally address the disparity in the “cost of living” for the various classes.  So I ask you my readers, what are your thoughts?  Religiously grinding daily quests are not the answer, this simply adds more workload to an already overworked player.  We should not have to work a “second job” just to be able to afford to raid. 

Basically I feel like general motors, looking to blizzard to bail me out

I promise that the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.  Quite honestly, as you can probably tell if you are a longtime reader I have been going through a bit of a rough spot.  My posts have become less informative and more emotional over the last few weeks.  This week many things seemed to come to a head and I just flat out exploded on some unintended victims.  While sorting through the rubble I came to the decision point that I needed to take a much needed break.

Life in the Wasteland

So I spent most of the weekend determined not to log into WoW, and for the most part this was successful.  I tanked one minor runs with my closest friends, but otherwise only logged in to do the fishing daily a few times.  I have to say the break was pretty revitalizing.  I needed time away from the politics and emotions that being a guild and raid leader tend to bring to the surface.

Where did I spend my time you might ask yourself?  I aimlessly roamed the capitol wasteland.  I had honestly never really devoted enough time to the game Fallout 3, and used this weekend as a chance to get hopelessly addicted to it.  I was a huge fan of the two prequels by Black Isle, and can still easily replay them with the full amount of enjoyment I did the first time around.

I was more than a bit skeptical about the titles move into the world of three dimensions, but after a few hours the game “felt” like the original 2d click to move adventures.  Granted I am not playing the game like I am “supposed to” in a very quest centric style.  Honestly the quests DO feel different, and I think this is a lot of the issue many of the fallout diehards had with the game.  However if you are like me and just want to equip some gear, and roam the wastelands finding whatever you can along the way, the game plays EXACTLY like the original.

This is my Boomstick

I am not sure what it is about the shotgun, but for some reason this is the weapon I rely on in ALL games.  It doesn’t matter if I am playing Doom, Quake, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, or in this case Fallout 3…  I always end up gravitating towards the shotgun and the glory of one shot kills.  I have laser rifles, sub machine guns, and assault rifles in my inventory and more than enough ammo to choke a mule…  but at the end of the day the ONLY weapon I care about is the trusty combat shotgun, or currently the rare upgrade…  The Terrible Shotgun.

I get perverse pleasure as I draw a bead on a radroach scurrying its way across the floor, and with a single catastrophic shot cause it to explode in a juicy fountain of vitreous. I find that blowing up ants in the many infested buildings is an equally disturbing pleasure for me, as well as the ever present headshot.  I find it bizarre that blowing off a Protectron head exposes something that looks much the same as blood and guts.   I guess part of me just finds it so appealing to blow things to bits with such a relatively simple weapon.  Some previous co-workers can attest to the annoyance of my addiction to this weapon, in our lunch and after work SoF2 matches (which I might add is still probably my favorite LAN game).

Ground Control to Major Tom

Sunday evening my space capsule had a forced re-entry as I had planned to lead a 25 man Naxxramas for alts, under geared guildies, and friends of the guild.  This was without a doubt the most horrendous mindfuck I have dealt with in awhile.  I don’t want the people who participated to think that I was meaning the raid, because it went really well.  I am meaning being pulled back into raid leader role, on a character I had not really played for two weeks, while being barraged by 10-15 tells at a time with each and every person having a valid question or need of me.  To go from the pleasant cocoon of non-interaction that I had wrapped myself in all weekend long, to the stark reality that every single member of the raid needed some of my attention was more than a bit of a culture shock.

We managed to down 3 wings and 2 bosses in the time allotted.  I feel that overall this was a pretty smooth run giving the facts that we had several periods of afk-ness, and scraping around to find extras to fill holes as people needed to leave.  We had more than our share of issues with the Death knight wing.  Most of this really comes from the fact that the assembled group represented 4 different 25 man naxx raids, with 4 different sets of strategies.  In my reeling mind, I was doing a less than adequate job of explaining our intentions.  So many of the fights in that wing particularly took a few attempts for us to come to a compromise as to the method we would handle each boss.

The real win of the night however is the fact that we only walked away with 4 Abyss Crystals.  That means that many items found new homes in much needed main and offspec sets.  Any night you down a good number of bosses, see a lot of loot, and very few of the pieces go to DE is a massive win in my book.  It helps to justify the fact that we did in fact have a need for a Naxxramas 25 man run.  In the case of Duranub/Stalwart, we have been in need of some fresh blood, but the majority of our good prospects were not geared well enough to be able to perform adequately in Ulduar.  It was my hope that by running a few weeks of this, that we would manage to fill out the gear sets of these players.

Getting Council-ed

Since the events that lead me to take a break happened Thursday evening during our raid, and I never got up the “oomph” to make a post Friday, I missed my normal Thursday night raid synopsis post.  We started the evening doing a little bit of cleanup, and going after Razorscale.  In stark contrast to last week, we pulled off a near flawless victory, with the only mishaps happening during the very tail end of the fight.  It was just a combination of me with too many debuffs, and I believe healers transitioning to the second tank before he had aggro.  However this bobble happened at 10% and really had little effect on the overall outcome of the night.

We proceeded on to the Assembly of Iron, otherwise known by almost everyone as the Iron Council (blame black temple and the Illidari Council).  On our first attempt we made some solid progress getting Steelbreaker down to under 60%, which made me very hopeful for our shots at downing the encounter.  We made some adjustments, and over the course of 3 more attempts we managed to push our way through Steelbreaker, and down Molgeim and Brundir as well.  Other than Flame Leviathan this was without a doubt our fasted time to learn a new encounter.  I don’t want to jinx us, but after the pure horribleness that was weeks 4 and 5, week 6 redeemed the raid as a whole and I think maybe signals us finally being back on our game.

 

will add loot later – since our lootmaster neglected to upload the file and my memory is crap this morning

More Indestructible

Iron Council also managed to drop us our 6th Runed Orb, and in the hopes of increasing my general “not dying-ness”, and the fact that I put in the first request…  they went to craft the insane new tanking belt.  During one of my trips into wow to do the daily fishing quest I managed to catch one of the crafters on Argent Dawn that actually have the pattern (thanks Riotus).  Special thanks go to all the people I pinged in the guild to do titansteel transmutes, and Rylacus who is freakin amazing for helping me with half of the bars I needed to craft the final product.  I love you man, and I totally DON’T want your Bud Light.

Indestructible Plate Girdle with 3x Solid Sky Sapphire for max stamina

Hopefully the week ahead will go smoothly, and I will be able to maintain the “better” mindset that a weekend of NOT playing Warcraft awarded me.  For anyone that I have had an unnaturally short fuse with these last few months, I want to post a very public apology.  I am hoping that the fact that I realize how much of an asshole I have been lately, and taking a bit of a break, will allow me to back down from the Raid Nazi mode I have been slipping into.

I couldn’t wish for a better group to raid with