Tagged: Azeroth
Exalted you say?
“To ask why we fight, is to ask why the leaves fall… it is in their nature” – Chen Stormstout.
So I spent the last ten or so minutes before I went to bed last night, re-watching all the WoW cinematics. I still love them all. The Monologue that runs behind the Wrath of the Lich King trailer, spoken by Terenas Menathil, always makes me shiver. Blizzard do have a flair for the dramatic when it comes to cinematics. And Deathwings little spiel in his cinematic was just fantabulous!
“Pain… Agony… My hatred burns through the cavernous deeps. The world heaves with my torment, it’s retched kingdoms quake beneath my rage. But at last, the whole of Azeroth will break, and all will burn beneath the shadow of my wings.”
However, I found that Chen Stormstouts words in the Mists of Pandaria cinematic release to be very inspiring. I still remember the first time I saw the camera pan up over the top of Chen, and sweep over the valley in the Jade Forrest, revealing the landscape. I got goosebumps!! (damn straight, and I aint afraid to admit it haha!) I love WoW lore, I love new areas, and I love exploring. The landscape in Mists still has me pausing to take screenshots when I see certain things, or find things that I haven’t found before. And that’s part of the reason I love this game so much. You can sink hours of time into the things you’re “supposed” to do, but slow down sometimes, take a ride on your flying mount, and just look around. It’s. Beautiful.
So anyway, enough of the fluff! Hehe fluff…
I finally finally hit exalted with the Shado-Pan this week. I got a bit lax with my dailies at one point and really steered away from doing them. In the back of my mind there’s a tiny little panda version of myself dancing around laughing and poking me with a polearm saying “If you’d just done them all, you’d be finished with them!” and I keep throwing beer scented bamboo at it to make it go away!
Regardless of my laziness, it felt good to hit exalted. Got myself some cool armored tigers that my alts can ride around on and look all important and such! Even though every man and his dog on my server has them already! I do like the feeling of accomplishment when I hit exalted with a faction. When I feel like dailies are sucking my soul out, I just remind myself of rep grinding in vanilla, and having to collect things for the argent dawn, and run Stratholme ALOT to raise that rep. I never did finish. Dailies are a nice way to rep grind, sort of. I just wish that there was some way that blizzard could tool it so that the mobs you kill for the dailies grant you rep. Although then people would pick them up and just keep their in quest log while they farmed rep I suppose, so that would be out of the question. I often speculate on these things, and then realize later on that someone, somewhere, would find some way to exploit it. I do not envy Blizzard their job, that’s for sure.
The other bonus of hitting exalted… my replica shado-pan hat! I’ve never been so excited for an item before in my life. I hearthed back to the Shrine, and went straight to the Transmogrifier and got all up in that hat! I feel like a ninja panda now. Although how a fat panda can be stealthy is BEYOND me!
Look at me in my ninja hat and riding my armored tiger!! WOO!!!
On a side note, my raid team did it’s last turn in Mogu’Shan Vaults, and we will now be spending our nights in Heart of Fear. Hopefully not beating our faces against Blade Lord Ta’yak for much longer! This is the current fight that I find I’m having issues with. I don’t know whether to stack a little bit more stamina. But once again, that would mean sacrificing some of my avoidance stats. And I don’t feel as though I’m being hit hard, like I was in Will of the Emperor. Last week I missed a cool down on an overlap of overwhelming strike and got insta-killed. Never a fun moment. In my defense… no… wait… I have nothing. It was purely my fault. I admitted that, and we moved on. We got him to 7%… stupid whirlwinds. The raid damage that’s pumped out during the run up and down that hall is ridiculous. The tornadoes are stupid too! On my screen, I’ll have missed one completely, be a good distance away when I start shifting for the next one, and get caught in the previous one that I thought I’d avoided! It’s very frustrating. Not that my tanking dps really has that much benefit on that last phase, but every little bit helps. It’s all learning though!
So hopefully this week, being fresh into HoF, without having spent any time in MSV, will have us focused and we’ll get things done! I love downing new bosses…
Fat Furry Tank… OUT!
Remember, feed your furry tanks… they like it. 😉
Here we go again!
Guild Drama. Most of us have seen it, most of us have been part of it, and a lot of us have had to fix it.
But what do you do when most of your guild is sectioned into smaller groups. It’s like high school all over again.
Currently our guild is suffering from “The officers do nothing and don’t help us, but I’m not going to talk to them about it, I’m going to talk to all my friends, who aren’t officers and then expect something to magically happen!”
As an officer, what do I do in this situation? People are assuming that we don’t care. And for some reason are not approaching us when they need help with, well, anything!
I’m currently trying to push the use of our guild website a little bit more, as I find it a more structured environment than FaceBook, for this kind of thing. However it’s always the same people frequenting the forums. There are literally 5 of us, out of a guild of about 250+ members, that are currently talking about the steps to take to fix this lack of communication within our guild.
What I seem to think is the major culprit of the hostility towards the officers is the raiding. It’s something I’m yet to bring up in as many words, because I don’t particularly see that stirring the pot has any benefit to any one. However what do we do? In cataclysm, I was the raid leader of the second raid team, one that cycled through members constantly, for many different reasons, weren’t progressing fast enough, people’s internet connections making it hell for the rest of us, personal issues flowing into the raid environment, and non-committal from a lot of my raiders.
The other raid team had a steady roster that cleared content every week. When there are two ten man raid teams, this seems to be something that happens quite often.
Currently we have 1 steady raid team, it just happens to be the one that I’m a part of (after making a decision at the end of cataclysm to give up raid leading and go back to main tanking). This team consists of people who work their asses off in the short time we have to raid (casual/social guild) and clear at a nice pace.
However the second raid team that started before us, pushed hard and fast, and fell apart. They had a big raid group blow out in december, and nothing has happened since. Then there was suddenly a third group of people around December as well, that wanted to start a third raid team. At this point you’re probably wondering why we’re not running 25mans, instead of three 10 mans.
The reason for this is that currently, we can’t even field two full 10 mans. And for some reason the majority of the guild seem to think this is the officers fault.
But my question is, how can the officers help you build your raid team back up, if even when asked, you don’t tell us what you need to fill your ranks?
How can the officers help with anything, if we’re never made aware that there are problems?
I’m at a loss. And the forum post is just the same five people going round and round in circles.
My question is to you fellow bloggers, if you’ve ever experience these issues, or any similar, let me know! I’d be interested in seeing how other people deal with the issues that surround guilds! Otherwise I might just have to climb up a tree and be in permanent /facepalm
Plate to leather…
So you’ve finished Cataclysm as a prot warrior. Patch 5.0 made your soul cry, because you forgot to read patch notes, and had no idea why suddenly shield block wasn’t working straight off the bat and you’re running into a boss fight with no instant mitigation. (I know, I know.. BAD prot warrior.) you’ve also spent a lot of time Offtanking as a Blood DK for your guilds other raiding team and have been enjoying that more than your warrior.
So what do you do?
Now the important question is upon you. Which team do you raid for in Mists of Pandaria, and which online persona are you intending on using? The weeks leading up to the release of “Panda Land” are filled with stress, to the point where you are pulling your Worgen hair out and becoming some strange… hairless, allergen friendly creature of peoples nightmares. You were always going to tank, that’s a given, but which class. Especially since you have the means to have them all.
But no, you don’t go the easy route. You don’t take your already level 85 character and do the new content. You bite the bullet, grab some heirlooms, and start at level 1 again.
And the next thing you know, you’re an overweight, stomach jiggling, black and white furred, mohawked panda with a moustache. By level 20 you realise “Oh my, this is the class for me… where have you been all my WoW life?!” and settle in to level.
I mean come on… who doesn’t enjoy throwing beer all over mobs and then setting them on fire. FIRE!!! Mmm burnies…
With every new ability your enjoyment of the class grows. Although you’re still a bit creeped out by the fact that your stomach jiggles whenever you move. You turn into some possessed levelling machine, knowing your deadline to be ready for raiding. You level so quickly, that one of your guildies makes a macro to gratz you because she can’t be bothered typing everytime you yell “Ding!!! *smashes face into keyboard*” in guild chat.
So you level your way to 88… and then bam. You get stuck in a rut. 88-89 feels crazy slow, you feel like your eyes are melting out of your skull with every quest you hand in, and your xp bar doesn’t move. Your guildies encourage you, and you push through and then BAM!! You hit that magic number 90!
And Ta Da!! Here I am. A level 90 Brewmaster Monk. It is to this date my favorite class.
The transition from a plate wearing prot warrior to a leather wearing monk has been an interesting experience. Even now, I’m changing things around in raid bosses to better up my mitigation for certain fights. This first post is mainly an introduction to the wacky mind that is me. The further into this blog I get, the more information regarding my gameplay and the rotations, cooldowns, talents and glyphs I use will be covered. The adventures of dungeon running with friends, including the wipes we have from being overconfident, to the first time we got our asses kicked in a challenge mode dungeon.
Until then fellow Azerothians, quest well, may the gold flow and don’t forget to pat your tanks!
~The Fat Furry Tank
The Fat Furry Tank. 
