For those of you who have read the blog for awhile, you will recognize the “blog azeroth” prepend too today’s topic.  For everyone else, Blog Azeroth is an amazing resource for the “WoW Blogosphere”, where various bloggers can meet and share ideas.  One of the constructs of the website is the “shared topic”.  The general idea is that multiple bloggers write on the same topic.  I’ve done a few in the past, but always horribly past the “due date”.

The topic chosen for today is from Spinks over at Spinksville.  Inspired by a post on massively, the basic idea is to take your favorite quest, questline or zone and deconstruct it telling everyone why you love it so much.  I can’t say I will be near as successful as she was, but I am going to try anyway.

Westfall needs Heroes

  I remember back in 2004, I got my first taste of the wow crack with the File Planet sponsored “Stress Test” weekend.  I had been playing City of Heroes at the time, and managed to get into the test with a good number of my cadre of friends.  Initially I had rolled a Tauren Warrior by myself, and while enjoyable, the Mulgore area was thoroughly uninspiring to me.  When I joined with my other gamer friends, we decided to roll humans, since most everyone could find a class they wanted to play there.

Elwynn Forest was a good deal more interesting and we quickly progressed through the starter quests.  Before long we were fighting a curious band of thugs known as the Defias.  The storyline surrounding them was pretty scant but I definitely thought they were a cool villain.  Everyone needs a brotherhood of evil to foil their plans, and as we moved through the newbie quests we started to see some glimmers of an emerging plotline.

A Kingdom in Need

As soon as you cross the bridge from Elwynn into Westfall you are presented with the start of the zones central conflict.  Ahead of you, curiously at the side of the road are Farmer Furlbrow, his wife, and his their horse Blanchy.  Some thugs have overrun their farm, and in the rush to escape with their lives they forgot their most prized heirloom.  Being the consummate hero that you are, you offer to help them out in their struggle.

Low and behold, the “thugs” ransacking their farm house are none other than the Defias brotherhood you had seen so many of in Elwynn.  After making short work of the thieves and recovering the valuables, the good farmer suggests that you look up the militia at Sentinel hill.  On your way across the land, you encounter more farmers that tell similar tales.  It seems that Westfall is not only blighted with a horrible drought but also besieged by the mysterious Defias.

The People’s Militia

When you reach sentinel hill you are told the tale of the people’s militia by their leader Gryan Stoutmantle.  It seems that Westfall is not receiving much help from Stormwind, and quickly enlists you to help him investigate the activities at several nearby mines.  It seems that not only are the Defias pushing back the farmers, but they are also tunneling deep into the earth with the help of the local tribes of kobolds.

You had encountered Hogger the leader of the river paw Gnolls back in Elwynn and as a result knew the fury brutes were nothing to be trifled with.  If the Defias and Gnolls were in fact working in coordination it meant great trouble for the struggling farmers.  After a few skirmishes, Gryan realizes that the Defias are not a band of cutthroats but instead a serious organization.  He determines that you must get to the bottom of this threat.

In Search of the Leader

Gryan sends through Elwynn to Redridge and the town of Lakeshire, where he knows a man called Wiley the Black can help you infiltrate the Defias.  Wiley lets slip that the Stonemasons guild might have something to do with the organization. Upon returning to Westfall, Gryan sends you off again to verify this information with Mathias Shaw, the head of SI:7.

While talking with Shaw you find out that the Stonemasons’ Guild was run by a man named Edwin VanCleef. VanCleef was responsible for rebuilding Stormwind after the orcs razed it in the First War. Apparently, VanCleef and his men were unhappy with their treatment by the King after the reconstruction was complete.  This information fills in a few pieces of the puzzle.

Kill The Messenger

Once you arrive at Sentinel Hill, it is quickly determined that you must find the location of the Defias hideout.  Gryan has scout reports that a Messenger has been seen on the roads between Moonbrook, the Gold Coast Quarry and the Jangolode mine; all of which were locations of heavy defias activity.  The militia asks you to obtain the message he is carrying at all costs.

The message is firm proof that VanCleef is in charge of the brotherhood, and this escalates the need to find their base of operation.  With a stroke of luck Militia operatives caught a Defias thief trying to steal Farmer Saldean’s wagon.  The brigand has offered to lead you to the Defias hideout, in exchange for sparing his life.

You protect the traitor as he leads you along the roadways of Westfall, heading to Moonbrook.  You are ambushed many times by his former allies trying to keep him from revealing the truth.  After fighting your way into the Defias enclave of Moonbrook, he shows you to the entrance to a series of interlinking caverns known only as The Deadmines.

Assassinate VanCleef

You gather with you some stalwart allies and make your way inside the Deadmines.  As you climb through an intricate series of mine shafts, you find the secret entrance to the hideout.  Inside you face greater resistance in form of defias, miners, goblins, and gnolls.  You fight your way through mine shafts, a goblin foundry, and into a great underground dock complete with a warship.

Throughout the battle you have to fight your way past a number of members of the Defias brotherhood.  Rhahk’Zor the Ogre and his two lieutenants guard the first passage.  Next you are confronted by Sneed and his Goblin Shredder, that tries to make mulch of you.  In the foundry, the master engineer Gilnid turns the fire of his forge against you.  After using gunpowder to blow your way into the docks, you are confronted by Mr. Smite, who attempts to overpower you with his mastery of weapons.

Once on board the ship, you must fight your way past tiers of pirates.  Even Cookie the ships cook, tries to flatten you with his rolling pin.  As you mount the top of the ship, you are confronted by Captain Greenskin and his retinue, who attempt to skewer you with the harpoons.  All of this leading to the top deck, where the mysterious Edwin VanCleef stands awaiting your challenge.

Edwin VanCleef is a very formidable fighter in his own right, as his attacks quickly put your party on the defensive.  Just as you regain your footing and begin to cut through his offensive, you are ambushed by more Defias rogues.  You can’t really expect the leader of a crime syndicate to fight fair after all.  Though the battle is tough, and it taxes your skills, you and your allies persevere and laying before you is the corpse of leader of the brotherhood.

The Beauty of Westfall

This was the questline, that plain and simple, hooked me on the game.  Prior to wow, you had never really seen this level of intricacy and storytelling.  The game pioneered making quest lines both easy to find, and engaging at the same time.  In Everquest, you had to dig with obsessive fervor to be able to find a series of quests and complete it.  But here for the first time, quests evolved themselves in a very organic way.

The Westfall storyline is basically every good pen and paper adventure, distilled to its purest essence, and recast in MMO form.  Your character is drawn into the conflict slowly, and through the series of the quests you are given foreshadowing of the events that are to come.  Each quest giving you a piece of the puzzle leading up to the final reward.  The first alliance dungeon, The Deadmines.

Deadmines in itself was groundbreaking as well.  This was the first time in an MMO I had seen such amazing scripted events.  Each boss unlocked a piece of the dungeon, with its own flavor, giving you access to something new.  My jaw literally hit the floor the first time I aggro’d the ogre boss, and he announced “VanCleef pay big for your head!”.

Later when you collect gunpowder and use it to blow open the door to the docks.  This was a level of interactivity that simply did not exist prior to wow.  Players who were new to the MMO genre really missed the sense of amazement that all of us felt, seeing this content for the first time.  This was truly ground breaking stuff, giving the player a level of immersion into the storyline that we had never really had before.

Improved by Never Replaced

Next to some of the newer content, the Westfall series seems dated.  But in my heart it will always have a special place.  It was the first time I was given a glimpse of what this game could truly deliver, and was the dealer giving me my first real hit of crack.  After playing that first stress test weekend, City of Heroes no longer felt as shiny as it once had.  The bar had been raised, and nothing short of World of Warcraft was going to scratch the itch I now had.

I’ve recently started a new warlock, and while Goldshire is a wretched hive of scum and villainy on a role-playing server, I am dealing with it in order to experience Westfall again for the first time in 3 years.  There is almost a certain amount of giddiness I have at the thought of playing my way progressively through the Westfall quest lines once more.  I might even go so far as to pug my way through the Deadmines, trying to experience all the content as it was intended.

Westfall was to my Warcraft career, as the Dungeons and Dragons boxed set was to my role-playing experience, or Pong was to my video gaming history.  As the game ages and matures, I hope they can keep recapturing the magic of the Defias brotherhood.  With Wrath of the Lich King they seem to have taken the art of MMO storytelling to a new level, and they gave us some equally epic quest lines like the Wrathgate storyline.  This gives me great hope for what the future will bring.  But for me…

…It All Started With Westfall

It’s been a pretty crazy week here, so many of my routines have gone by the wayside including regularly checking Google analytics.  I find that website completely fascinating, and I enjoy seeing exactly where my readers are coming from.  I think its amazing that I have multiple users reading my page in Thailand, Qatar, Malta, some hits from Iraq, and 3 users from the Isle of Guernsey, that until today I didn’t even know existed.  So in the daze of this ending week I completely missed the fact that at some point on Tuesday evening I passed the 10,000 unique visitors mark.

I am completely amazed that in just a few days over a month I have been able to bring that many people to read my content.  I am feeling validated on one hand, but on the other hand extremely expose considering I have had that many people digging around in my head.  For the most part, my blog entries are my stream of consciousness, and expound upon thoughts and ideas I have built over the last five years playing the World of Warcraft.  Regardless of the website showing some signs of success, I still feel very amateur and am still “finding my voice”.

I realize that a good deal of the readership came during the wowinsider bump, but each day I keep getting linked from more high quality blogs, and more regular readers.  I want to throw out a blanket thank you to every one of my readers for the support they have shown.  Also I want to thank the wow blogging community for quickly accepting me into their numbers.  Blog Azeroth has been a great community with tons of good ideas, helpful tips and constructive criticism.

Thanks for the Continued Support

Yesterday I honestly did not have it in me to make a post.  I won’t lie, the raid Tuesday night was pretty horrific.  Combined with the feeling of general uselessness that I had been feeling, the general “badness” of our attempts the night before pushed me in to a stupor.  This combined with not having a good deal of time to even formulate my ideas (still pushing up against a tough deadline at work), caused me to fail once more to make my daily post.

I spent a good deal of the day bickering back and forth with one of the other raid leaders, trying to figure out what went wrong and how to keep it from ever happening again.  The source of my frustration is that, we as a raid backslid.  The previous week we fought hard to down XT, and when we finally did I thought we had reached that magical click moment, or at the very least it felt like a click.  However this week, in our push to get some solid attempts in on Kologarn, we skipped Razorscale and Ignis and instead spent the night wiping over and over on the big dumb bot.

The failure of a few players to be able to react in a timely fashion to bombs caused us to wipe over and over.  There is nothing more disheartening than having a perfect attempt go south when a single player detonates the entire raid.  We fought valiantly, and our players kept trying to recover from the same few people failing to react.  I tried my best to keep calm, but officer chat quickly became a long string of obscenities abbreviated by the bit of sentence structure. 

We finally adjusted our strategy to be a bit more forgiving, and managed to pull out a win, but the whole process left me angry beyond reason.  The last thing I needed to post were back to back “emo rants” about how players need to “pull their heads out”.  So instead I refrained from posting anything at all.  Today I am feeling more confident and looking forward to playing cleanup on the bosses we left behind and then pushing on to get those illusive tries on Kologarn.

Springtime for Ignis

Last night I logged in not really sure what I would be doing.  Wednesday is usually the night I end up tagging along with some non-guild/raid friends on 10 and 25 man instances, getting a much needed break from tanking on one of my other raiding alts.  After the “failure to launch” of a 25 man Naxxramas, and the horrible fail that was a PUG 10 man Malygos, I settled down to dps as my retribution paladin in a 10 man Ulduar run by a friends guild.

I am one of those players that learn most by doing, and whenever given a chance I like to tag along with a different raid group and see how they approach fights differently.  Last nights run yielded an amazing gem.  Up until now we had been doing what I like to refer to as the “Box Method” for Ignis as illustrated by the Tankspot video.  The basics of the strategy are to move ignis in a 4 point path around the room as to minimize the scorch damage. 

The negatives of this method are that it causes the raid to spread out, and you have to have players capable of doing 5k single hits watching both pools.  This makes the healing assignments fairly spread thin, and AOE healing becomes fairly inefficient.  The other major issue you have is that during the fight Ignis will run to a random player and dunk them in the fire pot at his crotch.  Because of the travel time for players on the outskirts of the room guarding the pools, it can cause Ignis to lay patches of scorched earth in unpredictable locations.

I’ve drawn this diagram to help out my raid adjust to the new strategy.  Because of the way it looks on the diagram I have decided to start calling this method the “Clover Method”.  The melee becomes the stem of the clover and the scorch path I will make with the boss becomes the pedals.  The pull starts with me standing on the horizontal line that divides the room directly between the pulls.  One of our hunters will misdirect Ignis onto me, and as he moves into place, I will spin him so that my body is standing on the A in the diagram.

The first scorch always comes quickly so I will need to move to where I am standing on the B within a few minutes of the initial pull.  I will be standing just out of the range of the first patch of scorch.  The melee should not have to move to stay in range with the backside of Ignis.  The diagram places the Ignis dot for scorch B a little higher than it would actually be, but the diagram is easier to read this way. 

I will continue to move him to point C at the next scorch, still trying to make sure the melee can have constant contact with the boss.  When the third scorch lands I will circle strafe until I am back on point A, which should now be clear thanks to the timer of the first patch.  This process is repeated for tanking the boss until he dies.  The next issue in the fight is managing the adds.

Always in the past we have had 2 casters that are capable of shattering the constructs guarding each pool.  In this scenario the only pool where a construct will be shattered is the left side.  This allows us to have fewer casters tied up tending to the pool, and gives us a greater ease of recovery if one of them happens to go down.  We will continue to alternate our two deathknight offtanks, but the scorched earth will be in closer proximity and should allow for the adds to become molten faster.

This strategy worked beautifully on 10 man last night, and I am thinking it will translate extremely well to the 25 man version as well.  It takes care of many of the issues we seemed to have with the fight, and should make it more recoverable as a whole.  The biggest piece I believe is that the add maintenance should be far more reliable, since we are only really working in one smaller quadrant of the room.  Healing assignments should be much easier to maintain as well, and with everyone being clumped up we should be able to finally utilize our chain healers.

Raiding 101

Apparently players are starting to think I actually know what I am talking about.  How I managed to fool them is a complete mystery, but Nibuca of Mystical Chicanery has asked for my assistance on her newly adopted project:  Raider 101.  The goal of the site is to be a Wiki document to help players who want to improve their raid game by offering tips, tricks and tutorials.  I’ve only just learned about the site’s existence today, but in the small amount of time I have looked around it seems like a rather valiant effort.  I will be looking through some of the warrior related information specifically and helping to tweak it a bit, so I will try my best not to screw things up.

It definitely looks like a great resource to send your guild, raid and friends to who are looking for help answering various class related issues.  Unlike wowwiki or elitist jerks, the information is distilled down into easy to read basic howto guides.  If you are looking for some assitance, especially with alts, I would highly suggest you spend a bit of time browsing through the wiki.

A Pirate’s Life For Me

The last little bit today is a shameless commercial plug.  One of the founding members of House Stalwart,  Ed/Saggart/Sgian/Shadoes, has been working on a side project for the last several months.  At great personal expense to sanity he has become a member of the pirate band, The Musical Blades, and over the course of the summer has been touring the renfaire circuit with his unique brand of showmanship and musical prowess.  Many bands that frequent that scene are what I would call a Gimmick band, but in the case of the blades they are all truly amazing musicians capable of standing up against any act out there.

This past weekend they released their latest CD, “Live at Pubs and Pirate-Core”, which is a compilation of live recordings, piratecore and a few unreleased bonus tracks.  From what I have heard of the various tracks of the course of several lunch outings I would say its a good release.  I know over the past weekend at the St Louis renfaire they sold a good deal of copies.  While it still lacks my favorite track, “Run out the guns”, which is waiting in the wings for their next studio album, I was glad to see Derelict make its debut.

I would check out their myspace music page for some good examples of their repertoire, or if you are in the greater St. Louis area, they will be playing the next two weekends at the St. Louis Renaissance Festival.  I’ve gotten to hear a good deal of their unreleased material, and I have to say the next Studio album will be pretty amazing.  This is coming from me, who doesn’t normally go in for this style of music.  The festival atmosphere combined with perfect five part harmony is pretty near impossible to beat.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Forgive me readers for I have sinned…  it has been 4 days since my last confession.  Friday was an extremely busy day for me, and then we had our long memorial day weekend here in the united states.  During which time I had zero desire to sit down and think of something worth reading.  I have all these “rainy day” topics in my head, but have been unable to bring myself to sit down and actually formulate them.

To further my sinning, I have begun to play a deathknight.  This is only a sin for those who know me well, and have heard me lament the fact that so many players abandoned “useful” classes to level a deathknight.  I lost my tanking partner in crime, an amazing feral druid named Sanctifi, to the dark class.  In addition to that we lost our best healing shaman to a deathknight.  However both were very open and up front about this, and both have become the two deathknights I look up to the most.  I patterned my DK after Roisen, at least in that I am leveling blood spec for maximum survivability.

I have to say that right now, leveling as a deathknight is much like I typed IDDQD in my chat window and turned entered “Degreelessness Mode”.  I started the weekend at 56 and as of last night was halfway through 64.  Right now he has taken the spot that the boomkin had, of my favorite non-raid activity.  If I keep this obsession up I will end up with a fourth 80 before I know it.  Yesterday I was happily playing along and “accidentally dinged”.  You can tell I am enjoying myself, when I am not watching the xp bar at all.  I need to slow down a bit, I have blown past my “leveling buddy”.

Dealing with the Guilt

As the main tank of our guild and raid, I carry with me a large package of responsibility, and with that comes a large degree of guilt and pressure.  Last night we had planned a second night of 10 man ulduar, in an attempt to push on and get Assembly of Iron and maybe Auriaya.  However yesterday I woke up with immense back pain, which I attribute to the extremely uncomfortable chair I was forced to sit in at the lake on Sunday.  As the day drug on the pain got worse, and when we arrived home from the movies yesterday afternoon, I took one Flexeril that I had from a previous back injury.

It completely knocked me on my ass.  I tried laying down for a bit before raid time, which caused me to get online a few minutes late, but this really had zero effect.  As I stand there, in the rooms just prior to the Assembly of Iron trash, I was quite literally unable to keep my eyes open.  I knew that without a doubt I would wipe the raid multiple times that night.  A few players noted that they too were not really feeling up to raiding, so I thought that if I stepped up to the plate and announced that I just couldn’t handle it, the raid would eventually dissolve. 

I am finding out this morning that this was not the case.  So this morning I am dealing with a severe case of guilt as I abandoned the raid, and the other players who were also not feeling up to raiding, apparently swallowed it down and pushed onwards.  So for other players who bring to the table a key role in a raid…  how do you handle the guilt when you can’t make it?  I still feel like me stepping out was the best option both for me and the raid, but I can’t seem to get past the sense that I failed as a whole.  Had I known the drug was going to have such a serious effect I would have just dealt with the pain.

Dealing with the Obsolescence

The other thing I am struggling with this morning is the general feeling of being obsolete.  It is really hard not to feel like the fate of the raid rests on your shoulders.  When you are reminded of the fact that your presence really doesn’t matter that much, it is kind of hard to swallow.  Last night, not only did the raid move on without a hitch in my absence, but they apparently downed a brand new boss.  Which of course, dropped a new piece of tanking gear, giving our off tank one more piece of gear ahead of me.  So this morning I am also struggling with that feeling that maybe my raid doesn’t need me at all. 

There are times I feel pretty bulletproof, but there are also times that I feel like I am wearing paper armor.  I am one of those players that strives to make sure I have the best possible gear for every situation.  It feels like, especially in Ulduar, that our class is even more gear dependant than it has been in the past.  With the crappy luck that I have had recently in getting the upgrades that I really need to remain viable, I am feeling very outmoded and ready for the recycle bin.

I should be excited and happy, that I have somehow managed to build a raid that is self healing and can keep moving along happily in my absence.  On so many levels I am, because I am proud of the fact that we have so many leaders in Stalwart, that any one of them can pick up the slack when something goes wrong.  But at the same time, it is very much a blow to my ego.  How dare the world not grind to a halt when I can’t be there!  I say that in joking, but at the same time, it is a bit disheartening that things went so smoothly without me.

Leading by Example

I felt it was important to make a post like this.  I have posted a good deal of raid and guild advice in the last few weeks.  All of it has been nurtured and compiled over years of leading a guild and raid.  But by the same token, I think its important for you the public, to see that even though the final product comes together smoothly, I have the same fears and doubts that every player has.  I am by no means special in any way other than the fact that I have a good bunch of loyal friends who will seemingly follow me to the gates of hell itself.

I am very much the type of person who will admit when I don’t know an answer.  Often times I don’t know, or don’t even know where to look.  However I am always willing to work through things as they come along.  Right now I feel guilty for abandoning my raid for the good of my own health, but I know that it was the right decision as I hit the pillow at 8 pm and didn’t wake for a second until the alarm went off this morning at 5 am.  Right now I feel obsolete because of the shitty luck I have had with gear, and the success that the raid has had without me.  However I know that many players simply feel more comfortable on the nights they are there, and that while things go successfully, they don’t necessarily go smoothly.  Me making this post, is in a way working through the issues I don’t know the solutions to publically.