Was wondering how everyones guilds are doing, haven't heard from this thread in a while! I'll brag a bit since I'm really proud, my guild did A Tribute to Mad Skill (25 man) world 86th and we are currently ranked just at 99 http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/eu/laughing-skull/Randoms

After clearing most of everything (we still need to dedicate a night to Yogg 0 watchers) we've gone down to barely 1 and a half raiding days/ reset until 3.3 is out, so its pretty good, clearing 2x voa/ony/toc25, 1x togc25 and 3x togc10 (all three groups doing insanity). Basically we're just hoping to get a good week on Anub for our Insanity, but its not so much a priority as it is something we know will happen sooner or later. Anyone else done anub on 25man hard mode?

 

My guild is currently working on 25H Anub. This week was our first serious attempt at learning the fight and getting through it, and we're at the point where we consistently get him to phase three. Nine attempts left that we'll use on Monday.

We'll probably get him down next week. I hope.

Boomkin DPS staying around 5500, sadly. Hard to compete with the pure DPS classes. Though, I suppose if you counted all the damage my buffs bring to the raid I'd be far above all of the bastards.

Found a new add-on, though, that looks like it'll help every Boomkin: WiseEclipse. Acts kind of like the stop-casting macro, but it cancels the Lunar Eclipse right before your last crit so you can immediately proc Solar Eclipse.

 

Associated my WoW with my Bnet account today, might give the 7 free days and the pet they're offering me a whirl to see what's changed, if it's worth a piss I think I'll play a server again since I'll have the stuff installed, but not going to go back to pay I don't think.

Did find a list of my characters I built up in 2 months of brand new release, drugged out on Percocet playing:

Caspian 30 Undead Rogue Dragonmaw I still have my first pvp kill screenshot
Cellan 14 Tauren Druid Dragonmaw
Callen 6 Troll Priest Dragonmaw

Midknight 37 Dwarf Warrior Lothar Good fucking god Warriors sucked
Bloodbow 16 dwarf hunter Lothar
Shaded 16 Night Elf Rogue Lothar
Witness 10 Human Paladin Lothar

I remember having to make this ginourmous UI with buttons clustered in groups that would pop up under certain circumstances. Can't remember just what the hell they all were for now, lol.



I also remember the addons, good god I had a ton. It was fun for the first two months or so, left before the battlegrounds and most of the funner stuff got added.

Edit: And now after reading the boards and seeing how shitcrazy the game got, and addon reliance is even worse to maximise your crap apparently, combined with no time to sink into raiding, I may not even bother. Back to DA for me I guess.

 

Started playing again, deleted all my old toons and started fresh. So hard to find a group these days while leveling, and I am on a highly populated server. When I use to play there could be an easy 3-4 groups going any instance at any time, now your lucky to find one if you wait a couple hours.

The game has gotten too big and now that everyone is on the end game (fair enough) content there is hardly anyone on classic WoW. Thankfully the new expansion coming out is a re-vamp of the classic WoW, so hopefully people get interested in that side again.

These days everyone is so focused and serious with end game content etc. What happened to the old days of barrens chat and barrens/ashenvale raids? No one does anything like that anymore because there are no rewards for it.

 

That's why they're doing the crossrealm LFG channel, it'll be way better when it goes live.

 

How did battlegrounds ever turn out, worth it? I remember we used to have fun in a marsh zone, pvp raids all the time, going to wind up having to reread the guide I got at launch to reacquaint myself with the game before I bother

 

The Death of Raiding
As told by Fardeki
​

For me personally, who loves PvPing, WoW wouldn't be half as fun without battlegrounds. Level up and get half-decent gear if you wish, and join a battleground. Instant PvP enjoyment. You have your classic capture the flag (Warsong Gulch) and king of the hill (Arathi Basin) game styles, which were very easy to learn to play and made PvPing even more fun.

Then for the higher levels there was Alterac Valley (pretty much a king of the hill style with an added objective, kill the other teams boss first) which was awesome. 40 players per a side, you all had your role to fill, big groups meeting big groups etc, it was the place to be.

Adding the battlegrounds to WoW easily kept gamers and introduced new gamers to Blizzard, without it they would lose a decent amount of customers.

There are other battlegrounds out now for higher levels with the expansions and patches that came out, but I'm not up to date with them, and those three were the classic ones and still the most popular.

In concerns to raids, the first battlegrounds didn't do anything to raids at all. If anything they encouraged it with one battleground entrance being in the Barrens (Horde), and the other in Ashenvale (Alliance). With everyone going there to join the battlegrounds, it was very common for people to just group up and attack the enemy faction because of the close vicinity to each other.

Eventually though the Burning Crusade came out, and with/before/after (not sure) a new feature was released where you could join a battleground from anywhere in-game. People stopped going to the Barrens and Ashenvale to join battlegrounds, so in-turn the death of raiding begun. With the release of the burning crusade higher levels were spread all over the place, and as such raiding also started to decrease even more.

Today a raid only starts when people need to get an achievement (reward for performing a certain action in-game) by killing an enemy's boss at a capital city (i.e. Horde killing the King in Stormwind.) However it has become such a common occurrence because of the achievements that most people ignore the raid when it happens, so it's like another mini-instance with the odd enemy player trying to get in some action.

Another reason the expansions decreased raiding was because of the new land size introduced to WoW, and easier/quicker forms of travel being released. Since the world is larger, the world is not as populated in areas besides major citys. In classic WoW there were places you would go where there were guaranteed to be a group of people to kill (or large groups in the case of Barrens/Ashenvale) now you are lucky if you find one of two in any town besides a major city.

Technically raids still happen with enemies attacking enemy factions cities, however they are nothing like the old PvP based kill-each-other-non-stop-for-fun raids.

Bet you didn't expect to read that in response? I didn't expect to write it either haha.

​

 

Raiding means going into actual raids such as Naxx/Ulduar/ToC/Sunwell etc, not raiding an enemy factions city.

On another note, 3.3 (icecrown Citadel) was released today. Looks like a decent patch hopefully I'll get my comp back from being repaired today so I can try some of the new content.

 

More like raiding also means that...

That's why you used the verb 'raiding' (bolded above) when discussing RAIDING an enemy faction's city.

 

BRM in classic was quite possibly the funnest thing ever. Frankly, pvp died after the release of cross server BGs way back before TBC was released. That's when I started hating it. I did hit glad in S2, but it just really isn't as fun.

Edit: My WoW account is cancelled ATM. I don't think I'll be buying cataclysm either. I'm pretty much done with the game. Might try ICC later on though.

 

I've stopped playing but I'm more than likely going to start up again to try out the patch and then the expansion. Cataclysm actually looks very tight, the Worgen opening looks extremely Van Hellsing so Ill give it a shot if for nothing more than that.

 

I lived for raiding once they killed pvp. Now they killed raiding. :/

I may play cata as a casual to check it out, but that'd be it.

 

I play casually with my wife and kids on Emerald Dream, but I have almost no time with school and work as they are at the moment. I loved the Northrend zones, and I'm psyched about the Azeroth revamp. My biggest peeve at the moment is the supreme ease of getting epics. It's even easier than getting blues was in Vanilla WoW. I've seen people hit 80 and are in full epic gear in a couple of days, so how exactly is epic gear... epic?

It makes me miss the days of 40-man PvE raids, honestly. With 10 and 25 man versions of everything there are a bajillion guilds everywhere and I miss the sense of uniqueness. In case you can't tell I raided hard core in original WoW.

 

The Tournament five man is retarded, even on normal every single drop is an epic, rule of thumb is that if you can't get epiced out now your too dumb to live.

 

It's silly, but I would prefer it if they made them Rare items with the occasional epic and kept the majority of epics in raids and high end pvp. Back in Vanilla being decked out in purples meant more. It's like Elodin said, before it was a strong brandy, now they're well watered wine.

I'm really glad they're resimplifying the gear next expansion. Too much rating crap involved anymore, and I don't have time to read EJ.

 

Very true, I remember in Vanilla I got a few World drop Epics, that actually fucking meant something then, now its just kind of normal I guess..

 

Working on trash in the Icecrown Citadel at the moment. It's some interesting stuff.

 

Bah, wish I had time to raid

 

How is it? I haven't gotten a chance to play the new patch yet.

 

Trash is pretty simple. Couple mobs with 5 million health, a few large AoE groups. Oh, and some mobs that explode for AoE damage when they die.

The first fight we one-shotted. He's easy enough, just shoots out fire that's really easy to avoid and Spikes people (10% damage every few seconds). You get 1 minute of DPSing him, and then he'll go into a massive Bladestorm for 30 seconds where everyone has to run around the room avoiding him. During this he also continues to shoot fire at people (at a much faster pace).

We've wiped twice (er, three now) on the second boss so far. It's amazing, because all the ranged DPS just get to sit and DPS. For the first time ever I, as a Boomkin, am getting top DPS (8kish). All melee takes care of the adds that continually spawn, while the ranged just sit and knock down the boss's mana shield.

The place is looking really nice, and while the first boss was incredibly easy, it was the first, so that's fine with me.