The title to this post sounds rather more ominous than it deserves, but I loved the song, and love the phrase.  Another week is passing and this is my first blog post.  I’ve found myself in a slump lately.  When I started this crazy experiment I had more topics to write about than I had time to write them.  Now as I sit here trying to drum up anything worthy of discussing, I realize that it’s become much harder.

I’m finding myself in a pretty “blah” place as far as the game goes right now.  I’m enjoying Ulduar still, and I am happy that we are making progress.  But the prospect of more content on the horizon looms over my head like the sword of Damocles.  I know without a doubt that we have more time needed before we reach the end of Ulduar than we have weeks left before the patch.  So as I look at what is coming down the pipe, I know eventually we will have to move forward.

This is the big frustration with living in the “medium-core” space (as one of our raid council members put it), you are constantly trying to temper both ends of the spectrum.  We have our more hardcore members, who actively want every single achievement, are pushing with full gusto to do hard modes, and burn through content as fast as we can.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have the players who either want to stop and smell the roses, have specific goals like obtaining X item, or only have enough playtime to show up just in time for the raid. 

Being a “casual but focused” raid means we are constantly trying to steer between the two very different pillars.  If you move too slowly, you risk losing your best players to bigger raids.  If you move too fast, you end up tearing yourselves apart at the seams while forcibly dragging players who don’t want to move.  So as raid leaders we walk this razor thin line, attempting to make everyone acceptably happy in the process…  but at the same time having to swallow many of your own hopes and aspirations in the process.

So I think a good chunk of my malaise towards posting lately is that I am myself going through a bit of a burnout from all the opposing forces surrounding me.  I think it mostly started when the first news of the new patch surfaced, my impending class nerfs, and a brand new dungeon that feels like another hamster wheel presented before us to keep the most hardcore of players from going to other games.  I am sure I will enjoy it when it arrives, but my present disdain of the argent tournament is not helping my excitement at all.

Goblin Engineering

One of the topics that has spurred more than a bit of interest in me is the supposed “leak” of new mask textures from the last few PTR releases.  I believe MMO Champion broke the news first with their provocative topic titled:  Goblins and Worgens are the new races of the Expansion.  Two new halloween mask textures made their way into the 07/17 PTR build, and they featured a good number of curious things.  Firstly the quality of the textures shown represented something we had never seen in the existing Worgen or Goblin models.  On the Worgen side, they represented a “female” Worgen model, something that doesn’t exist in the game today even when the female humans in Grizzly Hills transform.

This started the forum crowds murmuring about the likelihood of whether or not these were legitimate racials, or if this was yet another Blizzard red herring.  A few days later, in build 10123 other masks began appearing.  So added to the pile were Murlocs, Vrykul, Ogres, and Naga.  So of course, this began the chant of players claiming that the new races were simply a figment of our collective imagination.  I am not sure if I am ready to call this as over, or to call it as a conspiracy to cover up a mistake.  However one thing you can notice immediately, is that the second set of masks do not match the level of detail as shown within the first two.  The Murloc, Naga, and Female Ogre masks are all extremely low resolution as compared to the high level of detail shown within the Goblin and Worgen masks.  Part of me wants to believe that we really DID get a glimpse of the new racial models, and that the resulting additional masks were an attempt to diffuse a mistake.

I’ve said for awhile now within guild conversations that I felt this expansion would lead to new races being introduced.  In MMO gaming, after awhile companies tend to get into patterns for releases, and I feel that blizzard has probably already hit it’s stride.  For sake of balancing the game, it is far to destructive to introduce both new races and classes at the same time.  So I feel that from this point on, Blizzard will introduce an expansion that provides new races and starting zones to grow its player base, then follow it with an expansion that introduces new classes to play.  This pattern gives one expansion to bring up a new crop of players, and then the next to reward these new players and old ones alike with new kinds of game play at its most basic level.  So following this pattern, it means that this next expansion would introduce new races…  which in turn fits the leak.

The Beta List

There has been a list of “expansions” floating around the internet for years now.  The very first time it came to my attention was shortly before the announcements surrounding Burning Crusade.  Much like Nostradamas and his quatrains, it seemed to predict the progression of Azeroth.  For the sake of explaination I am reposting the list here.  I’ll make no guarantee as to its validity, but it has in fact been floating around the collective web since before the original Naxxramas patch, which is roughly when I first saw it.

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

As you can see, for the most part the list has been accurate to this point.  Some of the final names of the zones have been different, but the wide majority of both the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones have been dead on.  If the list continues to predict the future, then the next expansion would in fact be related to the Maelstrom as many have speculated, which strongly fits with the recent trademark of the name Cataclysm.  In the above list, the area slotted as the staring zone for the expansion is Gilneas.

Gilneas is rumored to have fallen to the influences of the Worgen.  So while the zone levels do not fit with the pattern of a starting zone, it would seem that the next expansion will in fact let us peer beyond the Greymane wall into the cloistered realm.  As far as the Goblins go, it has been long rumored that the “Sea” expansion, will let us visit the goblin continent of Undermine.  We know it has been designed based on whiteboard drawings from the Warcraft Behind the Scenes DVD.  So if the next expansion is in fact the Maelstrom, it would be the “sea” expansion and more than likely have a good deal of involvement with the Goblins as well.

So when you take the combined speculative powers of all of the above, combined with the supposed “leak” of the racial masks you can get to the point where you begin to believe that we will be playing wolves and gobbos in the next expansion.  Granted this is all a colossal feat of Imagineering, with only the most flimsy of evidence… it could happen.  After you have leapt to the conclusion, the next question you have to ask yourself is which faction will get which of the new races.

Without a doubt, in these are the new races then the Goblins will be a Horde race.  My reasoning here is pretty simple.  Goblins and Gnomes hate each other.  This has been a construct of the wow mythos since the days of beta.  The engineering might of the gnomes and the goblins will forever be pit against each other, and that in itself is reason along to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they would end up wearing red.  But if you need further reasons, I give you this.  The horde has no “small race”.  Burning Crusade gave alliance their first “big race” with the Draenei, so in the Great Blizzard Homogenization I figure the next expansion will give the Horde their first “stunty”.  Granted I would have rather it been Iron Dwarves…  but Goblins would have been a close second.

So by elimination this leaves Worgen as being the new Alliance race, which also makes a certain amount of sense if you stop to evaluate it.  There are many bits of non-canon lore suggesting that the individuals locked behind the Greymane wall too suffer from the same Worgen curse as the inhabitants of Pyrewood Village.  Pyrewood itself is our first step on the delusional road that leads us to believing the Worgen to be Alliance sympathizers.  This Village by day is a normal run of the mill alliance town, which registers as hostile to horde players.  Every race needs a foil, so you already have the ready enemies just a zone away in the Forsaken.  It would be an easy fit for the Forsaken and Worgen forces to be opposed to each other.  Lastly in the Great Homogenization, this would give the alliance our very first REAL “Montrous Humanoid”, to use the Dungeons and Dragons term.

Granted everything I just said, is for all intents and purposes, utter bullshit.  I am by no means a lore afficianado, I haven’t even read quest text since about level 40…  so in truth I have no leg to stand on.  However this all makes a kooky kind of sense to me based on the patterns we have already seen from Blizzard.  Worgen would present the alliance with a new Shaman race, but Goblins however I really don’t see solving the paladin racial issue.  I am anxiously awaiting BlizzCon just so we can finally get some real information to replace all of this hysteria that currently abounds.  Granted I just probably fed a good number of conspiracy theorists with my blog post, but hopefully some of you Loremasters out there can tell me just how wrong I am.

As you might guess from the logo, Tales of the Aggronaut has passed the 40,000 unique readers mark on Google analytics.  As a result, I decided to steal from the iconography Warhammer 40,000 logo, in honor of the milestone.  Over the last few weeks, real life has slowed my postings down to a crawl, but I thank all of you out there for sticking with me.  I continue to gain readership each day, and I am completely amazed that anyone is willing to read my half-baked rambles on a regular basis.

This week has been busier than most.  With a house guest from Mississippi I have missed more raids this week than I have ever missed during the lifespan of the Duranub Raiding Company.  As fate would have it, I managed to make both of our 10 man outings, but completely missed both of our 25 man raids.  So between last week and the cleaning/home improvement ramp-up to having a house guest, and this week the actual act of playing host…  I am completely worn out.  Looking forward to a long weekend of doing a whole lot of nothing.

In the past I have posted a few emotion wrapped rambles about how expendable I was feeling at the beginning of Ulduar.  Prior to that, I posted about the bittersweet feeling of when your raid group does just fine without you.  Because of the insanity of this week I have to say that I was thoroughly thrilled that my raid was able to pull together and perform extremely well without their main tank.  From what I hear we saw some pretty phenomenal performances from various players as they stepped up to fill the void left by the raid mascot…  me.  Awesome job to everyone.

You can’t go back… can you?

Expansions are an exciting time, with the advent of new content to conquer, but with each also comes a certain sadness for me.  I know in the back of my mind that I will never again experience the content in the same way as I once did.  Sure I can go back and run Molten Core, but it is rather sad and wrong that I can now solo what once took a group of 40 players working together to conquer.  We can never again experience the camaraderie of 40 players focused on one singular goal…  or can we?

The 3.2 expansion brings with it a new feature to the game, the ability to for a fee lock your character so that it will no longer receive experience in any fashion.  The goal of this addition is without a doubt to be able to create PVP twinks at the various brackets, and there will be much rejoicing amongst players as they know that they can safely run instances to acquire gear without ever pushing beyond that much vaunted bracket.  However this feature also allows for an unanticipated option.

Real Retro Raiding

With the new feature we will be able to lock characters at level 60, and experience the older content in a similar fashion to the nostalgic days of WoW.  On Argent Dawn, one of our regular community organizers Wargallow, has suggested just this.  His plan is to create a group of 25+ level 60 characters for the purpose of running old world content the way it was originally meant to be experienced.  For the time being, any level 60 character is welcome, and I am presently planning on playing my dwarf rogue Gloam.

Will this usher in the era of “Twink Raiding”?  I guess only time will tell, but I feel this is a brilliant way to experience content that either you are nostalgic about or managed to miss the first time around.  While it is enjoyable to push through the older content with a group of over-level and overpowered friends, for me at least it has always been bittersweet.  I remember the epic feeling of experiencing molten core for the first time, and the joy I felt when I completed my Giantstalker set.  Maybe we can recapture a small bit of this.

This weekend I will be spending it pushing my rogue to 60 off and on, and looking forward to the hopefully good times to come.  I look forward to meeting new players, and helping to nurture this fledgling group as it gets off the ground.  The only sadness I feel as I look forward is the fact that my gnome warrior Bobbinn is ineligible, as on a whim I dinged 61 all so many months ago.

Ragnaros, we come for you!

There is one lesson I should have learned years ago.  Never pick on someone for something, because sooner or later you are doomed to do the exact same thing.  A few weeks back I was picking on Ariedan from Wordy Warrior a bit for her lack of updates.  Then over the course of the last week I’ve had a pretty significant lapse in my postings.  I guess for lack of a better term, life happened.

Last week and this past weekend almost all of my time was devoted to minor home improvement projects, and cleaning.  Why on earth would I wear myself out doing this?  Well, we had a house guest coming this week, and among other things our house needed a good deal of TLC to get to a state fit for company.  As a result I am very much feeling my age.  Getting up and out of bed sounds like a bowl of rice crispies as my back straightens, followed by a chorus of groans.  However the house looks better than it has in years, and I am praying I will be able to maintain it.  My general state of “worn the hell out”, combined with limited time has thrown a severe case of “lack of giving a shit” when it comes to the frequency of my blogging.  So apologies for the lapse. 

One more oddball thing while I am on my traditional “real life” section of the blog post.  My local newspaper just launched this HORRIBLE google maps mash-up application where they attempt to show all the businesses in the Tulsa area as tiny indistinguishable dots on a map.  They made the mistake of showing the top searches on the right hand side of the page.  When my co-worker first hit the website, the first few phases were expectable… but number 5 in the list was “Can of Corn”.  So it has been our goal to try and keep this gem at number one.  So if you are bored, please hit this site and bump “Can of Corn” a few times for us.

Emo Aborted

Tuesday afternoon I was primed to make a rather self-indulgent and emo post about the rigors of raid leadership and the insanity it takes to try and lead at all.  Tuesday in 25 man Ulduar had a very “herding cats” feel to it, making me address all the things I dislike about the 25 man raid dynamic.  It hadn’t quite gotten to the point of my cyclical internal battle of “why don’t you just quit 25 mans and do nothing but 10s”, but we were probably teetering dangerously on the edge of that slope.  So you can probably only imagine the load of crap that would have been contained within the body of that post.  However I got tired, and busy and the post never made its way onto the digital page. 

Wednesday and Thursday happened, and both days restored my faith in humanity and the reason why I began leading in the first place.  First I have to start with my beloved 10 man group.  Even if the rest of the week had been complete and total crap, just getting through another Wednesday with my 10 man team is usually enough to push me through even the worst of Thursdays.  I’ve bragged on my folks so many times over the last few weeks it is probably getting annoying, but alas I have to do it again.

Wednesday night went by the books in every way.  We did our normal Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya clear to get to the bosses we would be working on this week.  While there we went ahead and pushed through and downed Hodir, making great time doing it.  From there we went to Freya and downed her in a single shot.

It was at this point that I made the judgment call, since we only had an hour of time left, I didn’t feel we really had enough time to adequately work on Thorim, so instead we began to backtrack.  We picked up Assembly of Iron, then moved to Razorscale, and still had time left for an Ignis the Furnace Master oneshot.  So for the second week in a row, in our 3 hour window we had cleared all of the bosses previously downed.  I am pretty damned proud of us downing 9 ulduar bosses in a single night.  This gave us plenty of time to come back in last night, and work out the kinks on Thorim.

Last night we managed to work through the issues we were having with Thorim very quickly in spite of some backseat driving going on in ventrilo.  I believe it was within 4 tries that we had to the second phase and managed to down him that attempt.  Among other things I got a shiny pair of ram shoulders (Valorous Siegebreaker Pauldrons), and we had plenty of time to start work on Mimiron.  In the few attempts before we called it, we managed to get him halfway into phase 3, so I fully feel that next week we will down him since we will be prioritizing his encounter.  Last week I posted about how wonderfully our team has meshed together, and I have to say things keep getting better as we learn to work as a cohesive force.

Hall of Winter Defrosted

Thursday we continued on in Ulduar 25 man.  Riding high on the weds night fun I was looking forward to the 25 man raid once more.  On Tuesday we had only managed to make it through Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya > Assembly of Iron, which on the day seemed like a letdown, but looking back now seems pretty good.  So as a warm-up we started the night with Razorscale, which went down the smoothest we have seen yet…  we have to find a way to get folks paying attention faster so we can finally knock Heroic: A Quick Shave out.

After this interlude we moved forward to the real focus of the night, Hodir.  It took us a total of 6 tries from start to finish to down him, but when we did it felt pretty stable.  In fact we managed to pick up Heroic: I Have the Coolest Friends in the process, and I personally picked up Heroic: Staying Buffed All Winter at some point throughout the attempts.  After Hodir, we moved on and cleaned up Ignis the Furnace Master which had always given us trouble in the past.

 

All in all it was a great week of raiding for Duranub and House Stalwart.

A few months back I made a post in the BA shared topic regarding the distribution of Fragment of Val’anyr without our raid.  In that post I laid out the basic decision path we were planning on taking, and after a vote of the healers Elnore, our healing lead was unanimously chosen.  Being a very good writer herself, I told her that I thought it would be cool if she did a guest post outlining how she felt about being chosen for the honor of our first legendary weapon.  This afternoon I received the results of this prompting.  I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did.

On Why I Raid, Leadership, and Val’anyr

As a raid, we very nearly have what I think of as the absolute perfect progression speed—just finishing up the Big Bad of the last expansion as the next thing comes out.  We have yet to farm any Big Bads.  I maybe wish we were a tiny bit faster, since we sometimes miss a boss or a hard mode here or there, but two nights a week is what our real lives can give up to raiding, so two nights it is.  I find that I’m content visiting the things we miss later, as an overlevelled tourist; for instance, since we formed quite late in BC, we never got to Black Temple or Sunwell, but we just spent a very entertaining, somewhat ad-libbed Sunday evening doing just that.  And who of the envelope-pushing raid groups of BC could say “I solo-healed most of BT?”

What I am saying, I suppose, is that what I raid for is not progression or best-in-slots.  I care about gear only to the point of staying above the threshold where I remain useful.  I just want a challenge, be it new content, needing to try a crazy strategy to account for a class mechanic we’re short on, or seeing just how far you can get with how few people in an old instance.  I just want teammates I trust to take on that challenge with me.  Bonus points if our defeat of that challenge is rewarded by an awesome cinematic.

When I was approached to help form Duranub, I agreed not because I was sure I could do a good job—I was frankly terrified that I wouldn’t, since my previous leadership experience was exactly two raid nights as healing officer during my previous raid’s death throes and an essentially responsibility-free officership in my guild—but because I knew that the other officers and I would make a good team.

And for the most part we do, and so do the elders (the next rank down) and so do the raid members.  But when I learned that Ulduar would have a legendary healing mace, the raid was having a tough time.  The summer was coming, most officers and several other pivotal members were either dealing with important real life things or having real life explode in their faces, and attendance and attention levels were slipping to the point that we tended to wipe to dumb mistakes and low DPS levels.  I questioned whether we would ever kill Yogg-Saron, let alone do it well enough to allow for throwing a bunch of shards in his mouth. I questioned whether I even wanted to play the game long enough to see it.

But because our first shard could fall at any time, we talked about it anyway, and decided all the shards would go to one person, and that the healers would vote on who that would be.  And perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised when it was me, unanimous except for my own vote.  I was burning out, I felt like I had been failing for a long time, and a large part of me wanted to see it go to anyone else.  There were definitely others who were drooling over it more.  But I have to admit that in the five years I’ve been playing, nothing has ever felt quite like the moment the officer who’d tallied the votes announced my name, and the raid channel, the healer channel, and my tell window all flooded with gratses.  I got all misty-eyed and wordless, and I feel a bit like that again each time another shard drops.  Which probably doesn’t sound much like the Elnore my fellow raiders know, but there you go.

That was several months ago now, and there are still off nights, and disagreements, and the occasional ugly thing said when it shouldn’t be.  There are nights I dread logging in because I’m worried we will be short healing and that I’ll spend the whole night feeling both responsible and unbearably helpless to fix it.  Leading can strain friendships, and I still fantasize about quitting sometimes, about being in some other raid where all I’d have to do is show up and spam my assignment.  I am looking forward to a vacation in August, where I will be unable to log in for a whole week.  That Tuesday will be the first raid I have missed since before Wrath was released and only my second in Duranub history, I am pretty sure.  I suppose it is overdue.

But there is no question of whether I’ll come back.  The thing is, for all that being a raid officer is much more stressful than being a raider was, it is also more rewarding. You get to see that for all the frustration, there are also people who offer to play even though they’re sick, who amaze me with what they can do with their character, who know just when to cheerlead or crack a joke, or who go out of their way to craft an epic or two for the new undergeared mage, There are nights when the Steelbreaker tank is learning and the Molgeim tank dies and the Brundir tank disconnects and we only have one battle rez, but we pull off the kill anyway.  Because my raid is awesome.  (See above, where I play for the challenge and the meeting of it as a team, heh.)

Tuesday night, a shard dropped off of XT, and we had the standard ceremonial just-for-me auction. (We use a version of WebDKP, and I pay per shard.)  It brought me up to six, six shards that aren’t really a weapon to me, or even necessarily a future weapon, though I am much more confident that we will get that far than I used to be.  Those six shards are my continued responsibility, a weight and a humbling and an honor, the hard work and trust of my raid.

And my raid is awesome.