We finished Viscidus last night:
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| Kind of hard to get a screenshot of a smudge on the ground, so we decided to lie down instead. A couple of us took turns teabagging that old slimeball. |
So our raiding group (95+% Valhalla Myzrael-US*) is 9/9 AQ40.
And somewhere along the line I managed to become Exalted with the Brood of Nozdormu and Revered with the Cenarion Circle. Without doing a single quest in Silithus.
I looked at that and thought, "Oh, that's cool."
Then I realized that I might want to do a few of those quests after all. I wasn't thinking of doing much in Silithus until, say, November or December because by then I figured I'd be geared enough to consider it. Of course, that thinking went out the window in September.
***
What I've got now are people occasionally asking when I'll switch guilds.
/sigh
I understand where they're coming from, but while I raid with them they're not the only people I hang with in Classic. (See: My 11th Anniversary post.) I also hang with people from 9-10 different guilds, and I've even gotten invited into a guild run of Strat UD with the top Alliance guild on the server. (Four of them, one of me. I actually held my own and didn't behave like a jerk, so yay me.)
It's understandable that people would think that I'd eventually join another guild, especially since so few people in my own guild ever sign on. When I joined, there were about 20 active members, but as time has gone on people have left the game, split for other guilds, or simply vanished. Right now, we have 2-3 people --including me-- who login with regularity. I suppose that those people who thought that the guild was my own personal guild can be forgiven for that misconception, since I'm the only one they see around Azeroth.
And to be perfectly honest, I have trust issues concerning guilds in MMOs. It's not like I've never talked about them here, so I'm not gonna rehash them too much. And to be perfectly fair, the guild I run with has been nothing but welcoming to me and the few others who aren't guildies, so it's nothing they've done to make me feel that way. Instead, it's all about me.
The TL;DR of my MMO guild history has been about series of guilds blowing up, guilds reforming, blowing up again, and guilds fading away as time has gone on. The situation I find myself in with Retail Orphans is a mirror of what I experienced in Mists, where the guild I'd joined in Cataclysm slowly faded away until I was the only person who regularly logged in.
And while I see active guilds around that would love to have me join, I keep having the doubts in the back of my head. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me 4 or 5 times, what kind of sucker am I?"
So right now, where I'm at is where I'm likely to stay for a while. My WoW activity is (relatively) stable, and stability is nice.
*The rest are a few people like me who are part of different guilds.
Congratulations on killing ooze boy! Due to circumstances, my guild hasn't actually been back to try him since several weeks ago, but I'm still hoping to see him dead some time.
ReplyDeleteWhat was key for you guys getting him down? I assume you're not all hardcore engineers?
As for the guild thing... I get feeling hurt by guilds falling apart or imploding, but that's neither your fault nor something that anyone is doing intentionally. It's just a sad reality of MMO space that most guilds go through this sooner or later, and the ones that persevere and stay healthy in the long term are actually somewhat rare. I don't think that should stop you from joining your raiding friends though. The "fool me once" expression doesn't really apply here because nobody is trying to trick you...
First of all, we farmed sacs. Lots and lots of sacs. Everybody was given 50 sacs to work with, and one of the guild members put together a weakaura to ping you when you a) need to eat a sac to drop the poison debuff, and b) need to down another nature protection potion.
DeleteIn addition, we tried the all in attack where melee DPS was attacking Visc with Frost Damage daggers (the ones from Razorfen Downs) and all weapons coated with Frost Oil. All ranged had to have a Frost Wand (Captain Rackmore's Tiller from Westfall is ideal, but people had the Baroness' wand from Strat Undead too) and Mages used Level 1 Frostbolt to help get the frost attacks down to the Freeze stage.
Once Visc split, I can tell you what we Mages did: hit a single blob until they got close together, then we spammed Blastwave and Arcane Explosion close in. Engineers used their sapper charges (they'd downed Fire Protection potions before the fight to take the pressure off the healers).
On Monday, the first attempt was a wash as too many people died by the time we got Visc to 30%. The second attempt we did better at removing the poison, not standing in the bad, and hitting AOEs close in, and we were able to finish getting the slimeball below 10% in time for the third freeze cycle. (I died right before then, as the healer closest to me died at the same time.)
There has been a vigorous discussion in the guild Discord channel for raid strategy about what we need to tweak to bring Visc down, and we're going to try a couple of new things this coming Monday. I'll let you know how they go with another post.
(Actually, on Ouro we had a near wipe as we had a DPS accidentally pull aggro and didn't move far enough toward the tank's angle before the quicksand (or whatever) mechanic went off, wiping half the raid. (Including me. I've never lived through Ouro yet.)
Now, about that guild thing....
DeleteI see where you're coming from, but I could also argue that trying to hide guild issues from potential recruits is a form of deception. People would not like to be recruited and then have things blow up.
To borrow something from my own work career, a previous employer of mine once laid off an employee on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. And yes, his daughter was at the company that day. This was back in 1994 or 1995 or so, and the company got a tremendous amount of negative press for this massive screw up --and rightly so, I might add. At the time I thought "I would never work for them!" Fast forward to early 1996 and I was looking for a new job, and I got an interview offer from that exact same company. I was determined not to accept any offer until I was satisfied by their response to that fiasco, and I actually turned the HR portion of the interview on its head because of this. I became the questioner, and they were in the hot seat for that disaster. However, they took the time to explain what went wrong, who was reprimanded/fired for that incident, how they changed their processes for employee termination issues, and a variety of other details. Once I was satisfied, I was happy to entertain their employment offer and I spent five productive years there.
Now that being said, I do get what you're saying and that it's the nature of guilds to come and go over time. The slow decaying of a guild will happen as people move on, and even in my current guild I'm sad, but not surprised. But the guilds that blow up or simply cease to be (GM cancels the guild)? That's an entirely different kettle of fish. There's obviously different issues going on there, and if you walk into a guild and then "boom" a couple of weeks or months later, you have every right to feel a bit betrayed.
I guess you could compare it to the breakup of real life friend groups: some last, some fade away, and some blow up when tensions get too great. Everybody wants to be in that first group, and everybody wants to avoid that last group. But when you see that last group happen, people can say "okay, cover me, I'm going back in!" or they can say "I think I'm going to take my time and really think about it before I dive back in." I'm really deep in that latter camp, because reasons that are very much out of the scope of this blog.
When you say you farmed sacs, do you mean the temporary ones from LBRS? Or regular ones to turn into elixirs of poison resistance? My guild has been doing the latter and when we last did try we didn't do too badly, but the problem with relying on a bazillion consumables is that if you mess up, you don't get to try again until you've acquired more...
ReplyDeleteThe LBRS variety.
DeleteI actually asked a friend from another guild who'd raided AQ40 back in Vanilla about the Immature Venom Sacs strategy and she confirmed that yes, that was the method to cleanse poison against Visc back in the day.
Just to clarify, the former one you find in LBRS.
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