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I’ve lately become very obsessed with trying to optimize my gear. The problem is, I was an English Major so math only works when I use my fingers and toes.  So I had to find some tools to help me determine if a drop is actually an upgrade and I had to change my way of thinking about gear.

First, the Best-In-Slot lists aren’t that useful while you’re still gearing up. It’s nice to know where you want to end up, but you don’t want to hurt yourself on your way there.  For example, a lot of classes need to use their T-9 sets until they obtain two or four pieces of T-10 because the set bonuses of the “lesser” gear are that good.  You want to be as strong in your raid role as possible now as well as in the future. Read more…

Whenever you have a universe as big as Warcraft, retcons and inconsistency are inevitable. There are so many things going on written by so many people in many places. To me, Icecrown as a zone and as a raid instance was the epitome of this unfinished, chaotic mess of storytelling.

Lets start out with my initial expectations of what I thought I was going to see when I first arrived in Icecrown. Back when Arthas was racing Illidan to the Frozen Throne (so that Arthas could “save” Ner’zhul and Illidan could kill him) during the last events of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, as well as the Arthas novel and other sources of lore, Illidan and his allies had arrived in Icecrown well before Arthas and were sieging the Citadel. They had built up considerable defenses, and Arthas arrived by exploring the underground tunnels of Azjol-Nerub.
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Quests are an integral part of MMO’s. Without quests most MMO’s or RPG’s for that matter, would be nothing more than a grind-fest. WoW is no exception. Containing thousands of quests, you would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t completed at least a few hundred.

Quests are what drive players though the content. They direct you to the next level appropriate zone, they reward you with gear upgrades and there one of the best ways to get a game’s story over to the audience. So why is it, with quests being such an important factor in MMO’s, they seem to be overlooked so much of the time?

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First off, I want to congratulate all of the members of Bound on a successful LK 25 Man kill! All of the hard work paid off!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming. After closing out ICC for the week, the guild decided to go back and try out some of the older WOTLK instances in order to pick up some trinkets and achievements. We made some nice progress in 25 man TOGC but ran into issues burning down the shield on the Twin Valkyries fight.

One thing became apparent as we tried again and again to burn down the shield; our raiders had begun to rely on the buff from ICC. DPS was not nearly as high as it should have been and execution wasn’t nearly tight as it usually is. We’d gotten lazy.

I’m not trying to say that the buff has been all bad.  The ICC buff has been the source of leaps and bounds in current progression. More players and guilds are seeing more end game content than at any previous time in WOW. In fact, if it weren’t for the ICC buff, I’d wager that my guild would have had a significantly more difficult time defeating the Lich King.

On the other hand, the larger the buff gets, the more players can phone it in while in ICC. I’d wager that raid wide damage taken has increased as the ICC Buff has increased since its no longer life and death to avoid many of the mechanics of fights in ICC. Take a look at your raid’s performance in Marrowgar the next time you’re in there and see how many raiders are actually moving out of the Bone Storm.

While the buff has opened the doors of end game content (and the completion of that content) for many raiders, its not without some consequences. Just a caution to raiders who are anxious to jump into the Ruby Sanctum when it comes out.

We are at just the beginning of what I like to call the Great Funk of 2010. Summer is upon us, which is always a big transition for raiding guilds as some people can raid more while others either stop raiding entirely or ease up, but summer is a minor worry for raid leaders compared to the glut of content and the daily news coming out of the Cataclysm Alpha then Beta. Keeping people interested in Wrath content will be a growing challenge over the next few months. Raid leaders know that if they are not prepared to survive the summer and early fall with a stable group of raiders, they will be behind when Cataclysm comes out.

So how do you recruit?

The short answer is.. well, it depends on your guild and focus.

Many guilds are lax on recruitment. Most famously, AIE on the Earthen Ring server recruits new members at the beginning of each month and there are no requirements other than filling out a basic form. They are able to recruit so many people this way, their needs are always taken care of. Ensidia and Premonition, although they do actively recruit, have such high regard that they will always have enough people willing to join them that they can be extremely selective and still survive the funk.

These guilds have very different recruitment models and both can be successful. But for the vast majority of raiding guilds, it is not so simple. Open recruiting waters your talent and personality base down and can cause your better players to defect, while super selective recruiting can result in a negative growth. In many ways, as the pressure to recruit builds, you can feel like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Remember that recruiting the right people is more important than just recruiting people. A guild comprised of many casual raiders, if you are not a casual raiding guild, will cause your committed raiders to leave and vice-versa.

It doesn’t have to be like that

Recruitment is time consuming, it requires the help of everyone in your guild, and it can be humbling. Everyone focuses on the easiest, but essential, recruiting method:  Guild recruitment threads on the Blizzard forums. That is a given, you should always do that,  but it is only the start and it is the least effective way to recruit.

Shotgun thread method

Instead of just posting on the blizzard forums, make sure you post on every available forum including: mmo-champion, tankspot, wow.com, curse forums, and any other WoW-related forums you can think of. Keep your wowprogress.com guild recruitment profile updated. Raiders who might be looking for new servers or even new guilds on their current servers tend to look at wow-progress  at each guild to see what they are recruiting, their raid schedule, and a link to their forums/website.

Using the WoW Guild Recruitment Forums to Actively Recruit

One of the absolute best ways to recruit is to use the Guild Recruitment forums on the official WoW forums. You would be amazed to see the number of people who post threads there looking for guilds. In fact, so many posts occur in that forum in a single day that it is worth digging several pages in. Need a Shadow Priest to fill a core raid spot? Chances are you will have 2 or 3 candidates in a single day.

Recruiting is work. It is one of the most important functions of guild leadership in a raiding guild. Do it well and your guild will prosper!

When I say ‘chewing glass’, I’m referring to the activity of trying something very difficult over and over and over until you get it right. The hope is that once you are successful, you will be better able to repeat the success the next time you try.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

– Albert Einstein

We have all been in the situation. You wipe on a boss, head back in, and start over again real quick.  The inclination is that you hop right back in and try again and hope it goes better. There may have been a chance occurrence that caused you to fail in the previous attempt and people say “just get better”. You may also feel that because you are limited by time you need to get as many “attempts” in as you possibly can so that you get more experience. For example, say it is already getting late and your raid is going to end in 30 minutes so you group up and buff as fast as you can and try again. Read more…

Confession time. Raiding on my Warlock has become tiresome. I’ve raided with him from the beginning of the Burning Crusade and throughout WOTLK. We’ve braved the depths of Black Temple, explored the haunted hallways of Karazan, tested our mettle against the worst that Northrend has to offer in TOC, and taken the fight to the door of the Lich King in ICC. I’m well versed in the many different Warlock talent builds, used to slightly altering my play style each time a new patch comes out and I’m an old hand at grousing when my group makeup isn’t just right. It may be time to trade up mains.

There is hope on the horizon though and that hope (as odd as it may read), will be Cataclysm. Players often use expansions to switch up their main character. TBC saw the emergence of many new Draeni Shamans and Blood Elf Paladins, and WOTLK saw the explosion of Death Knights on every server. Cataclysm will be a chance for many people to change up their class once again. I’ve got a few thoughts poking around in the back of my head as to what I’ll change to…it involves a ranged pet class. Maybe its just the grass is greener on the other side but it seems that Hunters experience less instability than other classes do (dps wise) in game. For Warlocks, we’ve gone from the top of the DPS pile to the bottom and back more times than I can count in the past few expansions. All I’m looking for is a little more stability in my overall output and new class mechanics to explore.

Anyone else thinking of changing up their class in the upcoming expansion? If you are going to change up, I’d be interested to see a short list of likes and dislikes about your current class and what about your new class seems interesting.

You may recall our frequent updated on The Raid movie project being produced by Kevin Michael Johnson, in cooperation with TankSpot.com. I wanted to follow-up to make sure everyone knows, there are only 29 days left on Kickstarter drive. If you haven’t made a pledge, please check out the details surrounding the production, and the beneifts of becoming a sponsor.

Additionally, we are looking forward to having Kevin on for a brief interview this weekend. If you have any questions you would like to ask about The Raid, contact the sack!

Lastly, a new video has been released this week featuring Lady Raiders. Collectively they discuss the stereotypes surrounding female gamers, the luster of MMO raiding, and how much joy they get in kicking masoganist asses!

@JointheRaid on Twitter | Facebook

Reading through the official WoW EU forums earlier today, I stumbled across a post regarding the current progression system that is in place within Wrath. The main issue that was brought up was to do with the ease of gearing up your freshly dinged 80. Obviously this topic isn’t anything new, but there was an interesting point brought up that I’d like to give my 2 cents on.

The issue was to do with the large volume of Wrath content that is skipped by the majority of fresh 80′s nowadays. Instead of a streamlined progression from Heroics -> Naxxaramas -> Ulduar -> ToC -> ICC, most players, if not all, opt for the alternative of badge farming. A week or two of heroics, and as long as you’re gearing correctly, there’s a good chance you’re ready to hit up ICC-10. The downside of this being, all you’re doing before you start raiding in ICC, is grinding the same heroics you’ve done, time and time again. However, when comparing this to the Naxx/Ulduar route… are Heroics not the lesser of two evils? Read more…

So last night I managed to catch up with the rest of my guild and down Professor Putricide in 25 man ICC. After the fight was finished, it occurred to me that our regular 25 man roster had passed a certain threshold. Our tanks were surviving much longer, our healers were cranking out huge numbers and the raid wide DPS was very high. It looks like we’ve been exposed to enough ICC and Frost Badges so that everyone has received several upgrades. We had hit the tipping point where it now appears likely that we’ll be doing the Lich King in the very near future. Read more…