Some WoW Love

Thanks to the WWK prerelease, I’ve been giving MtG a lot of love.  I’ve also been on a lot of work travel, so I’ve been fighting the Lag Beast; which has been keeping me from playing WoW as much as I normally do.


At any rate, the Frost Wing recently opened, which means Arthas himself is now killable.  Our raid is still working through some coordination and execution issues, so we’re still working through both Putricide and Blood Queen before focusing on (two dragons and then) Arthas.

What I find interesting is we can one-shot or two-shot Princes now, but we still have issues with Putricide (which should be an “easier” fight in that there is less going on and it’s more of a ping-pong fight than Princes.  However, our raid seems to be able to handle some harder progression blocks rather well while stumbling over fights that should be relatively easy.  It’s been this way since Tier 6.


I think part of this comes from the fact we have three 10-man groups that run regularly.  People who don’t normally run with those groups don’t have the familiarity with the fights and so have a learning curve.  As such, I find the people who are helping push the 25-man forward are those who run 10-man regularly (as it should be).  I’ve always wondered if there was a way to sandbox some of these fights so that individuals could get experience.  For example, if there was a way to set up a Boss Dummy to mimic a specific boss so that you could get used to their abilities; or a way to do something similar in a “training room” that allows the raid to work out their coordination issues.


I think if a mechanism like this were available (think Gorefiend Simulator, only in-game), it would help many of the casual raids that are now running through content.  They don’t have to sacrifice their limited attempts to learn the fight or to sort out the menial coordination items such as “when do tanks swap?” and “where do we stand to pewpew?”


Will it ever happen?  Not likely.  This is Blizzard’s way of throttling content and replicating the progression walls that used to be the norm for raiding (i.e. until they added the dreaded “Heroic Content” to raids).


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More raid specific, I’ve had to deal with crippling lag when I raid on the road.  I’ve been able to do so with moderate success, but it’s been touchy every time.  Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the beast when raiding from a hotel room.  I will admit, however, that I’d be willing to pay out of my own pocket for a premium high bandwidth connection for raid nights.


A perfect example of this is last night, when the raid worked on Putricide some more.  I would have a latency of 100 or less out in the world, but once we got to running the fight, my lag would be anywhere from 200 to 600.  In a fight like Putricide where a lot of movement is required to not die, it causes some strain on our healers (who continually prove they are amazing and the true backbone of the raid) as well as puts pressure on the raid as a whole; since once Putricide gets to P3, it becomes “Festergut with movement,” for all intents and purposes.  I therefore become a major liability to the raid due to my flaky connection.


Being a former class leader and co-raid organizer (before changing guilds), I put additional pressure on myself to not be that person.  When I feel like I’m holding the raid back, the first thing I want to do is drop and let them bring in someone who won’t die because the guy 2 doors down has a monkey-on-horse fetish and has to satisfy it RIGHT NOW.  Unfortunately, attendance has been such that there isn’t a proper replacement for me, and so we are forced to suffer through it.  To that end, I want to thank the raid for sticking with me.  Once this God forsaken mess of work travel resolves itself, I will pay people back in-kind.