Summer Slowdown, BlizzCon, and Podcast Question

Gotta love the summer slump - makes it a pain for me to line up work for the guys, which in turn makes for slow blogging. Most of what I've been able to find has all been one-shot jobs a friend of mine has found. Some of those go quite smoothly and everyone gets what they want out of the run. Others end like... well, like Medeleth's last run. I think he still holds a grudge over that one. Unfortunately from the looks of the guild roster most evenings and the way some of them talk about being bored or disillusioned with the whole war against the Scourge, I don't see an end to our PuG adventures in the near future.

The obvious solution to this would be to look for a new guild to contract one or more of the guys out to (or me even - I could use a break from doing paperwork for the rest of the guys). It would give us a new source of work for at least one member of the team and we'd have an inside line for any jobs that come up that require the services of someone else on the team. The downside though would be that whoever got transferred have to leave behind the guild members that still show up and we're friends with; there's nothing physically preventing them from staying in touch, but anyone who's ever changed guilds knows that it's never quite the same as having that green text going back and forth.

If push comes to shove and I end up having to find new homes for some of the team, I do have a couple of leads. In the meantime though, doing the occasional PuG should keep the team in fighting shape, barring any more spectacular failures like Med's last adventure. Well, that and it should keep them from complaining to me about being bored (can't be bored when something is trying to kill you).

In other news, we received our confirmations for BlizzCon today, so everything is ready for the trip now. I'll be bringing a camera and a camcorder with me, so hopefully between the two of those, there'll be something worth posting. I'll also try posting some on Twitter while the show's going on, but any pictures I put up there will be restricted to the iPhone's camera and that really only works on things within Charge range.

Lastly I've got an idea for something for the blog, but right now it's just an idea. I was reading Rilgon's blog today and he posted a proof of concept podcast where he covered hunters and the various things affecting them at the moment. Awesome show by the way, so I recommend any hunters or those interested in hunters take a listen (it's about a half-hour, so it'll give you something to listen to while doing your dailies). Regardless, while listening to his podcast, I started thinking about how it sounded like a lot of fun and maybe I should try my hand at it. Med could round up whatever program I need to record this, we've got a fairly decent microphone that I picked up to discuss raiding strategy (read: yell at people in void zones, make fun of people not in Ventrilo), so all that leaves is the actual content.

There lies the question: what to talk about? Certainly can't talk about hunters like Rilgon. For one he's got that covered, but more importantly our hunter can't even come up with decent pet names, let alone figure out what raiding hunters should be doing. That leaves talking about tanking or posting audio versions of the arguments/discussions we've used in the other posts. Tanking would probably be best, but I'm open to suggestions. While we figure out what to talk about, I'll work with Med to try and figure out how to actually record something. Once we've managed to make something presentable, I'll post it here... well, once I figure out how in the Nether I'm supposed to post audio here.

Medeleth vs. Naxx: Not All Guild PuGs Are Equal

Ragar: Not much to report from the last few weeks. Guild's still on a bit of a hiatus for the summer, so most of us have been enjoying the time off. We have had a few jobs here and there through a buddy of mine - mostly Naxxramas runs, but with the occasional Vault of Archavon or Obsidian Sanctum trip. Admittedly not the most exciting work in the world, but it's still practice for those guys and they got some upgrades.

Medeleth: Not all of us got upgrades...

Ragar: Look, I said I was sorry.

Medeleth: You sent me off to die!

Ragar: Hey now, I didn't line up that job. My shaman friend found that group and asked for a DPS. If I recall, you said something like "I suppose I could take a break from my research to support the masses. They shall stand in awe and wonder at the sight of fel magic and engineering prowess when wielded by a true genius." What happened to all that bravado, Mr. "Creation and destruction are my playthings"?

Medeleth: That "bravado" as you call it was trampled under the boot of Instructor Razuvious as the group proceeded to fail and call retreat three times before calling the raid.

Ragar: Wait, you couldn't kill Razuvious? How in the Nether is that even possible?

Medeleth: Combination of bad Mind Control timing, failure to swap threat between understudies so Bone Barrier was always up, and lack of healing on the understudies. Basically the one tanking Razuvious would either die or the Mind Control would break, then he would immediately run over to myself and one of the mages and express his dissatisfaction at our setting him ablaze.

Ragar: Well you didn't get locked into the run, so that's a plus. Besides, it couldn't have taken that long if you couldn't kill one boss.

Medeleth: We were in there for over an hour. It just took them that long to get ready between pulls. To properly illustrate just how slow these people were, your shaman friend had enough time after a wipe to fly over, use his Ebonweave and Spellweave cooldowns, fly back, then get a drink before they finally remembered they were in a damn dungeon.

Ragar: Well, I think you've beat most of my bad pickup group stories with that one.

Medeleth: Ah, but I'm not finished yet. This was not a true pickup group in the strictest sense of the word. This was a guild run with something like 60-70% of this 25-man group from that guild. These were people who had worked with each other on a regular basis and had apparently set foot into Ulduar. The raid leader even tried using that as encouragement. He said at one point, "C'mon guys, we've taken down Ignis with five people up before. We can do this!" Maybe it's just me, but instead of being motivated by that, all I hear is that either half of his 10-man group or 80% of his 25-man group got themselves killed.

Ragar: Realism does tend to cut into the motivational power of a battle speech. So I take it you don't want any more jobs from them?

Medeleth: If I end up in a group with those people again, I can and will find a way to make you suffer. It may be the next day, it may be a year down the road, but I will have my revenge.

Grunzford vs. Ulduar: The First Few Bosses

Ragar: Sorry for the delay between posts. Bit of a hectic schedule, compounded by an exploding hard drive on one of our Macs.

Medeleth: Which wouldn't have been as big of an issue if you'd been backing up like I'd told you to do.

Ragar: Yeah, yeah, I know. No big deal though - all of the important stuff is backed up, so all it really did was do the spring cleaning I never got around to doing. Anyway, let's get the quick summary out of the way. Solannis, Mordigg, and I are pretty much doing dailies for the moment. The mage and the hunter are both slowly making their way through Northrend. The priest shows up just long enough to disenchant things, then disappears again. Right now most of our field time has been going to Grunzford.

In the past few weeks, he got to tank a 25-man Naxxramas instead of pretending to be kitty DPS and he's had the opportunity to off-tank a couple of 10-man Ulduar runs for our guild. How was your first experience as a raid tank, Grunz?

Grunzford: Far preferable to being DPS. I've got nothing against being a cat, but for doing damage, it just never clicked as well with me as being a boomkin did. Funny thing was I got to off-tank one of those Ulduar-10 runs before Naxx though.

Ragar: Oh? How did that go?

Grunzford: Pretty smoothly, though I did have a bit of hassle from one of the random people the guild had in the run. They were pushing for me to convince you, Sol, or Mordigg to come in instead of me.

Ragar: Was he concerned about your gear or something? You were an off-tank. The stuff the off-tank fights doesn't hit that hard and anything that does would take us down just as fast.

Grunzford: If it were just a concern about my equipment, I might've understood. However, I begin to question their motivations when their gear concern comes moments after saying, "Aw man, we've got two druids. There's competition now." If you're trying to make sure you don't have to roll against people for loot, at least try to hide it. That's just insulting.

Regardless, all of the fights we did went just fine. Razorscale and Ignis went down quickly. They'd already done Deconstructor that run, but I did get to tank Iron Council before we called it. This was the only fight I went down on the whole night.

Ragar: Fusion Punch?

Grunzford: Yeah, the first attempt I ate two ticks of the DoT after one of them. The next attempt had faster dispels, so we got them down that time. I didn't feel too bad about falling to the DoT though, since I'm pretty sure that would have taken any of you three down as well.

After that run wrapped up, I also had that Naxx-25 run with a couple of tanking upgrades and we've also got a 10-man group planning on working on the harder versions of the Ulduar fights in the next week or two.

Ragar: Looks like other than your helm, the rest of your gear's up to the task of doing hard modes, so that should be fine. There is the question of your second spec though, since some of those fights only require one tank.

Grunzford: Yeah, there lies a problem. Right now my second spec is resto, but I don't think we want me healing.

Ragar: Ah, feel inexperienced at healing?

Grunzford: Well, that and the 1100 spellpower. Pretty sure the combination of those two is not a recipe for success.

Ragar: Yeah, that's not so much gonna work. Guess it's time to start grabbing offspec gear.

Grunzford: You mean like all of that DPS gear and healing gear you and Sol keep passing on?

Ragar: Bite me, smartass.