Tank like a girl

-This weekend, my guild had its first ever Icecrown Citadel raid. We’ve never been at the cutting edge of progression and this is like the closest we’ve ever been timeline-wise to starting progression fights. It’s pretty cool. It’s one of the things that I love about WotLK. It truly has made raiding accessible to everyone. We have been able to visit all raid content in the game so far, this would have been inconceivable in previous incarnations of WoW. Kudos!

Now, this first ICC-10 raid was a really different raid for me. It was the first raid I wasn’t going in as progression raid leader and main tank. I recently stepped down as guild officer, after 3.5 years. There were many contributing factors. First, I have no tact. I don’t know if this is a German trait or just me, so I fail at anything that in any form requires tact. When I think someone sucks, I will not sugarcoat it. I won’t be insulting, but I won’t pat on the head either. I will offer advice, but I won’t coddle. As I have posted many times, my guild is all girls. We have little to no drama, but we have a repeating pattern. Girls who have been in the guild for months will leave with absolutely no warning to officers. I don’t know if this is common in other guilds, but it really just happened time and again. Bam, leaving, and mentioning in their apps to other guilds that they did not like something or another about us. The lack of constructive criticism towards the most approachable group of people I have ever met anywhere is baffling. I drew my own conclusion from this: people fear the bad cop, people dislike talking to the blunt, most vocal officer. One of my (many) character flaws is that when I feel pressured and pushed, I will push back and block. But you know what? I was one of 7-8 active officers we had at the time. Even with personal beef against me, there were other nicer, kinder, more gentle people available to talk to, even if it was to complain about me. Never happened. So I bowed out, because I love my guild, and I don’t want to be that officer.

Not being an officer felt like a weight is off my shoulders. I still schedule raids and lead them in off-weeks, but more for my personal pleasure and not with a look at the big picture anymore. On my personal raid to-do list I want to do a Sartharion zerg, because Kadomi of the Nightfall sounds sexy, and possibly Ulduar hardmodes, which should likely be ezmode, but I still want to do them. For fun. After all, WoW is for fun! I am also raid assist for our current raid leader, trying to help her out in any form. We’re a good team, so I think we’ll do fantastically well.

I also did not go in as MT, as I mentioned. In fact, our first night in, I was healing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know most of you come here to read about tanking. But in all honesty I currently do not feel good about the state of the protection warrior in WotLK. I have tried to avoid making whine posts, but I think most protection warrior bloggers like Tarsus, Linedan and even Veneretio will probably agree with me that currently, we get the shaft. Icecrown Citadel, or maybe progression content in its current form is not made for warrior tanking. Our utility and toolkit is supposed to be the buffer for our traditionally low DPS output compared to all other tanks, but that’s not enough for me anymore. Speaking of the toolkit, how awesome will Warbringer be for us when it no longer breaks snares? Thanks, PvP, I love that nerf. Same with Shield Slam damage. Now, there is a sustained damage buff in the air, and it’s likely going to be Devastate getting another buff. This means we go back to Devastate spamming. Big toolkit. Yay.

Yesterday, I was offtank on our second day in Icecrown Citadel. Never have I felt more useless as a tank than in the Plagueworks. Our current MT is a Death Knight. She’s excellent, I adore her, and she does a great job. She could have solo-tanked most of the trash, I suppose. All those AoE pulls where I hopeless spammed Thunderclap and Cleave til I was out of rage and basically only my current target was on me, everything else on the DK. Or on Precious, with all her zombies, where the same situation occurred that she was doing all the AoE tanking and all I could do was taunt Precious off at the right time. And let’s not speak of Festergut. Dead, dead, dead. Here I was, feeling helpless in battle stance, keeping sunders up, keeping Rend up, keeping debuffs up, pretending I was able to make any DPS contribution. I am not able to say that warriors do not have issues. We do. Please fix us, Blizzard. I’ll be on my ‘main alt’ in the meantime, my shaman.

Enough with the whining. Let’s hear some good stuff!

First off, our raid group is awesome. I can’t say that often enough. They bring it. On Saturday, our first ever visit, we went in and one-shot Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and Gunship Battle. I had a blast healing, and got rewarded for my efforts, with the very sweet Midnight Sun.

Deathbringer Saurfang turned out to be our stumbling block for the night, after an 8% wipe. As we 2-healed this, I felt this was our first real healing challenge, holy crap. Healing a clothie with a Mark is really intense. Our two Blood Beast kiters got some good practice in, and we went back yesterday afternoon. That time I was tanking, not healing, and it was a very amazing one-shot. It was a beauty to behold. Our kiters did a fabulous job, Blood Beasts went down smoothly, our tank transitions were very well timed, and we got our first Mark at about 30%, much later than the day before. I love learning encounters and then kicking their ass.

We moved on to Plagueworks and banged our heads against Festergut for the rest of the day. All in all, I think our raid DPS just isn’t there yet. We need every DPSer to break 4k or it just won’t happen, not in such a tightly tuned encounter. But we did not have everyone break 4k, and those who did weren’t so far above that they compensated for the rest. We cannot carry. I hope that will be in every raider’s head for next time. We cannot carry any DPS. It’s A-game or we will only bring home a huge repair bill. I keep hearing the argument that tank DPS doesn’t decide an encounter, but 100, 200, 500 DPS, it still might mean you beat that enrage timer. I think next time we might have more success with a more execution based encounter as Rotface while we try to solve our DPS problems.

I really did enjoy what I have seen so far, despite my personal disappointment with my own tanking capabilities there. Trash mobs! Traps on the ground to watch for! Rep for killing mobs! You have no idea how excited people were when they got to buy their rings, just like in the good ol’ days of Karazhan raids. Unfortunately I am sitting at 50% rep towards friendly on both my characters now. Next time! The encounters in Lower Spire were all good fun, and especially Gunship Battle made people happy. The Plagueworks immediately set the bar with a lot higher difficulty, starting with the Vrykul trash pulls. It will feel amazing to clear it.

As an aside, I should note that my 24″ monitor I got for Christmas still makes me so freaking happy, and I am in love with my raid UI. Witness my screenshot of the Saurfang kill. Now only try to ignore the stupid quest tracker on the right. Really need to find a way to disable it in raids. I need to write another addon spotlight, to sing the praises for DXE. Deus Vox Encounters is fantastic, I love it, I fully endorse it. Must post about it soon.

As I mentioned a while back, I was interviewed via e-mail for an article in the Swedish magazine Level, about my guild. Daughters of the Horde and its Alliance counterpart Daughters OfThe Alliance on US-Bronzebeard are as far as I know the two largest girls-only guilds in the world. I have been an officer in DotH since 2006, and was interviewed as representative of DotH.

• How did the idea of an all female guild emerge? Why just girls? Tell me about the background.
  
  Daughters of the Horde was born in the Livejournal community wow_ladies. This is currently the biggest WoW community in LJ, with 7k+ members. Back in the day, when WoW was still young and fresh, wow_ladies was the refuge where girls were able to talk about WoW with other girls, as the game was absolutely male-dominated at the time. The percentage of female players is a lot higher now than it was then. It all started with this post. Basically a guild of community members, all female, a haven. They ran a poll, horde won as faction, and Daughters of the Horde was created on Bronzebeard-US. A short time later, Daughters of the Alliance was created on the same server, because some people preferred the ‘prettier’ races at the time. Many DotA players are also members of DotH and vice versa, and I am close friends with a bunch of them. I think we have maybe one original member left from back then, our former GM Tryna, who led DotH through the first couple years until recently.

  Originally, most people rolled alts to play in DotH, with their mains on other servers, and when dealing with boys got too much, they came to chill in DotH. This, to some degree is still happening today. Many members raid more seriously on other servers and hang out with us when they just want to relax and have some light fun. But there’s also a core of people who have made Bronzebeard their main home. I have tried playing on other servers, for example a realm with RL friends, but I always
  miss my home on Bronzebeard.

• What (if anything), apart from the all-girl-thing, do you think differs Daughters of the Horde from other guilds?
  
  I think we offer more diversity than the typical WoW guild. If you look at guild structures, there’s usually leveling guilds, social guilds, and guilds that raid. While we’re not exactly a leveling guild, we are extremely alt-friendly. All of us love to play alts, and it’s not uncommon that our members have all character slots full on Bronzebeard. Our guild is also very social, there’s always some chatter going on in gchat. We also do some light, yet successful raiding, so you can really do anything in our guild aside from dedicated 25-man raiding.
• What kind of mood or atmosphere is there in the guild?

  I think it’s usually very light-hearted and fun. Some of our members are crazy funny, like the world’s sexiest orc DK, Fangril. I am probably one of the more serious people in DotH, because I tend to take PvE progress very seriously.

• I’ve heard a lot of preconceived notions about girls in WoW-guilds. That having a girl in a guild can cause more drama and so forth. What are your thoughts on that? Is there a lot of drama in Daughters of the Horde.

Ah, the drama question. I think that drama can happen with girls in a guild, but it can happen with guys in a guild as well. Loot-drama is not based on gender. I think it’s just a stereotype that girls in WoW mean drama. It’s not my experience in DotH at all. In my 3 years as officer, there were moments that had some drama, but they’re very rare and unusual. I have seen some people join who could probably be classified as ‘guild princesses’, always more interested in taking than giving to the guild, but people like that usually leave fairly quickly, because gender cannot really be used as an advantage when we’re all the same.

• How do you solve conflicts that arise in the guild?
  
  We don’t have a GM and officers, we’re more an officer council. We rotate different duties amongst officers, including the GM hat. We regularly run a Suggestion Box in our LJ community, which allows people to voice concerns which only the officers can read. We encourage people to approach the officers if there are any issues, but in all honesty, we’re not really asked that often about problem situations. I think girls might have the tendency to just swallow certain issues, in hopes they’ll go away. There really is very little conflict that we’re made aware of.
• What does the recruitment process look like? How can you check and know for sure that the one applying to join is a girl?
  
  We actively recruit maybe once a year, in wow_ladies, but of course we’re always taking in new members. Joining us is pretty easy. There is no application process. All that they have to do is to /join our recruitment channel and give us their LJ name. We then check their LJ. Sometimes it’s very easy to tell that it must be a girl, but sometimes it isn’t, and then we do Ventrilo checks. Just a quick chat, to verify it’s a girl via voice chat. That’s usually the point that weeds out the most guys trying to sneak in, because the amount of people who mysteriously do not have a microphone, or it’s broken, or they can’t install Vent nor use in-game chat, it’s ridiculous. As we were originally born in a Livejournal community, we require an LJ account for all our members. Basically our forum replacement. We post everything regarding guild business in wow_doth.livejournal.com
• What kind of char is most common within Daughters of the Horde? Are there a lot of males? Which class is most popular?
  
  We have quite a few male characters, but the overwhelming majority plays female characters. We have very very few tanks, to my own sorrow, not as many healers as one would like to think, and used to have mostly ranged DPS. Lately, this has seen a bit of a shift that mirrors the general WotLK tendency, with a lot more people playing melee DPS after DKs were introduced. Based on statistics, hunter is the most popular class, closely followed by deathknights. When TBC was released, our guild grew exponentially, in what I would like to call the ‘Belf Invasion of 2007′. They’re still by far the most popular race, outweighing everything else by a huge margin, which makes me sad. Only the few and the proud like me play orcs. It’s a running joke in DotH that Thrall will kill a kitten everytime someone re-rolls a bloodelf.

  I play the least-played race and class combo, orc warrior, what does this say about me?

• Another preconceived notion is that girls usually prefer to play healers or support classes — do you agree? How is the balance between the classes in your guild?
  
  As mentioned before, we are usually short on healers. I mean, we obviously have enough to raid with, and more healers than tanks, but DPS classes hugely outweigh anything else in DotH. We have some fantastic DPS in DotH, so that preconceived notion is really not true for us at all.
• The male writers in the magazine want to know if there is much giggle and joking around on your vent-channel.
  
  That is a really funny question. I know that it’s common in many guilds to hang out in Vent at all times, but we don’t do that. We mostly use Vent for raiding or when we have a social event, and even then, it’s few people talking. I try to talk as much as possible when I am in Vent, but some girls really aren’t comfortable with talking much, while they type novels in gchat. I think most of us love to be silly, but not the gigglish type.
• What kind of comments do Daughters of the Horde usually get? Do people like the idea of a guild consisting of all girls? Do they think that it’s wrong to exlude and include players based on their sex? And what is your reply to people who gets upset about it?
  
  We’re one of the oldest guilds on our server at this point and have seen many guilds rise and fall. A lot of newer players actually have no clue that we’re all girls. We don’t go out and flaunt it, we just assume that our guild tag is obvious enough. I think old-school Bronzebeard respect us, and everyone else just assumes we’re all male. Whenever I pug as a tank and talk strategy on bosses, people always refer to me as male. Because, you know, girls would never tank, haha. We used to have one guy
  who long transferred servers, who hated both DotH and DotA and loved to slander both guilds in the realm forum. But as he was the realm clown, no one took him serious at all. He actually tried to sneak into our guild under a different name, and then in protest formed his own ‘all-girls’ guild that failed dramatically.

  Other than that guy, no one’s ever had any problems with us for being exclusive to girls.

• World of Warcraft is a game that has a big female audience, at least compared to other MMO:s like Eve Online, Warhammer or Age of Conan. Why do you think that is? What does WoW have that the other games lack?
  
  WoW has the most intuitive interface and you only need to play a couple of hours to get into it. I think the learning curve is probably more steep in other MMOs. Also, I think girls prefer PvE more than PvP, though we have a couple die-hard PvPers and arena players in DotH as well. I think AoC probably has very low appeal for girls, because the core of it is so sexist. I mean, they only recently fixed that female characters hit just as hard as males. At least I hope that was fixed. I wouldn’t call WoW easy, but it’s fun, colorful, very easy to learn, and yet hard to master.
• I’ve received a couple of mails from girls who are considering WoW to be a sexist game and who thinks that Blizzard is objectifying the female characters, and that complains about being harassed ingame by “horny 15-yearolds”. What are your thoughts on this? Thoughts on being a girl and playing WoW.
  
  My general advice for any female player would be to not flaunt their gender. I mean, realistically, if you look at things, no one really needs to know if you’re a boy or a girl behind the computer. Just play at your best. That way you get to avoid the teenage hornballs that no doubt exist in WoW. Yes, WoW has objectifying moments, though there are a lot fewer models these days that make me shake my head. My alt mage is currently running around in thigh-highs, and my warrior used to wear
  plate-thigh highs and a plate bikini in her 40s, stuff that looks like a shirt and normal legguards on a male model. But you know, it’s harmless stuff. No one’s boobs are hanging out, and considering the amount of objectification happening in advertisement, TV, and movies, it’s really minimal. It doesn’t bother me.

  I think Blizzard understands that this is seen as an issue in parts, and I can’t recall any skank gear in Northrend. I mean, sure, paladin T8 shows off female bellies [edit: the interview was done before Blizzard changed the model], but for the most part, female characters are just as covered as male ones. And that’s a good improvement.

Yesterday was raid day. We were in the middle of our first real Trial of the Crusader since all bosses were released when our hunter says ‘Hey Kadomi, you’re on WoW Insider!’ I quickly had to check on that and indeed, there it was, discussing the post I made last week of when it’s okay to move to the next raiding tier. Hi wow.com visitors!

As you can tell, I made the decision to schedule a Trial of the Crusader raid just to see how we would do. We had been there before when only Beasts and Jaraxxus were available, and we had struggled with the Beasts quite a bit. But yesterday we just breezed through. Yes, compared to Ulduar bosses, ToC is pretty relaxed. None of the fights has the intensity that I connect to our firstkills of any of the Keepers in Ulduar. The only fights we struggled with were Faction Champions, which is an encounter that fills me with rage. I don’t PvP, so it was very difficult for me as raid leader to suggest any working strategy. We were facing the pretty unpleasant combo of resto shaman, resto druid, shadowpriest, arms warrior, retribution paladin and warlock. It took us forever trying to figure out how to get the healers down, but the first time we got both of them down, the fight was ours. I was busy keeping the arms warrior under control, which was not as easy as it sounds in theory. HATE BLADESTORM! Ugh.

The Twin Val’kyr fight was two-shot, I kinda liked it, but I also thought it was somewhat confusing. Anub’arak took us like four or five tries learning it, but we steadily progressed through it, and thus, 2.5 hours after the start of our first full ToC raid, we cleared. Go us!

As is par for the course, there was not a single tank drop in sight, but our casters got to ooooh and aaah about shiny drops. Most raid members got a drop, which is always nice. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean full-time ToC now for us, next week it’s back to Ulduar. That gives me time to figure out how I can permanently weave ToC into our raid schedule without crippling our Ulduar progress. That one boss has got to fall, you know?

In my current raid gear, I broke 34k health unbuffed yesterday. That was a real high for me. We’re doing great. I have cleared ToC-10, VoA-10 and Onyxia-10, all this week. Our raid is pretty damn successful. It’s a fabulous feeling. Go go DotH.

First-kills feel dang good, don’t they? We’ve had 8 bosses down in Ulduar so far, but we definitely want to get more keepers down and progress. Seeing new content is pretty exciting, even for casual scrubs like us!

On Saturday, we mowed through Flame Leviathan, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn and Auriaya, all clean one-shots with no difficulties whatsoever. The only stressful moment was when one of our druid’s rez macro went haywire and she kept announcing midfight that she was rezzing me, then herself, then the other tank healer. Heart attack time! I wasn’t dead, was I? Hee. I was pretty pleased that I finally listened to Veneretio and re-bound Heroic Strike to mousewheel. 2.1k DPS on Kologarn, 25% done by Heroic Strike. It is weird to see Devastate up there. I decided to help melee DPS with sunders on XT’s heart, which led to 36% of my damage coming from Devastate that fight. It’s time to re-write my old tank priority chart to include the new and improved Devastate.

We then did Hodir, and had a heart-breaking 12% wipe killing our streak of one-shots. However, as we’re still struggling on him, that was already an accomplishment. Lots of people (including me being bounced around by an icicle like an idiot) got flash frozen, every single time someone got frozen, and I guess my lecture that people needed to step it up helped, because we all got the Cheese the Freeze achievements for no Flash Freeze victims. That kinda felt good as raid leader!

We had enough time for a couple of tries on Thorim. I was gauntlet tank, my partner tanked the arena as bear. From the start, it was easier than our first visit to him, with a lot less arena mobs from what I hear. Gauntlet tanking was fast-paced, and fun. On the try where I did the pep talk that we would first get him into phase 3, we actually did, which also felt good, after the wipefest of the previous raid. Unfortunately, people, including me, were getting tired, and I could feel it wouldn’t happen, at least not on Saturday.

On the second day, we always start with Razorscale as way of warmup, and what a warmup it was. We got A Quick Shave, getting her grounded permanently the second time she landed. Admittedly, she had just tossed us back when she hit the magic 50%, so it was indeed close! Also, I had amazing 73% avoidance in that fight, which is such a sweet thing to see. All my recent gear is very parry-heavy, so I have just about the same distribution for dodge and parry right now. Sweet!

Off we went to Thorim, and started with a misunderstanding in the gauntlet. The second time, we pulled it off flawlessly in the gauntlet, got him into phase 3, our gauntlet boomkin arrived just in time to battle-rez a healer, and we took Thorim down. Not that difficult once you survive phase 2. I think this will be a farm encounter soon.

We then headed to Freya, and I was really unprepared for the trash pulls. There is a lot of trash there, oy. After a few mispulls, we figured it out and soon made it to Freya. I was tanking Freya, and uber-pally was on adds. We had big trouble with the elementals waves who kept coming back. I think at one point we had three waves of adds up at the same time, it was that bad. The Detonating Lasher and the tree waves were no problem, but the elementals need some more work. Nevertheless, the team pulled it off and just as I died a second time on Freya, they brought her into phase 2. She got picked up by our paladin, and they killed her. It felt eerily familiar to the Icehowl kill, with me kissing the floor and the rest of the raid doing the job. It made this firstkill a bit bittersweet for me. I will elaborate more on this tomorrow, I think, today I want to be all happy and uplifted as I should be.

We’re extending our raid ID to get some shots at deeper Ulduar. We have four bosses left standing: Ignis, Mimiron, General Vezax and Yogg-Saron himself. It’s a tough decision to make. Extend the raid ID and risking little to no loot for the raid, or starting fresh, doing farm encounters and having the risk of having to call it before you can do new bosses. We would have had time for one or two tries on Mimiron yesterday, but that would have been it. Tough call. I might change my mind and remove the extended lockout again. Needs some discussing. General consensus seemed to be to extend it.

I’ve been excited about Cataclysm and 3.3 news. I think we’ll actually have cleared Ulduar by the time Icecrown drops, so the timing is great. I don’t know yet if I want to invest much time into the filler raid TotC, because the idea of the Faction Champions encounter is such a turn-off.

Overall, I am just super-proud of my guild this week. We’ve been to Ulduar five times now. Less than 30 hours total, and we’re 10/13 in Ulduar. We’re pretty damn good.

After my QQ post last week one shouldn’t believe it, but I love my guild. I really do. We have tons of fun girls in the guild, everyone’s helpful, and we have some very skilled, great players.

On Saturday, I forgot to take killshots and I always take great pride in taking those. But I just forgot. So Normanitee, our really excellent resto druid volunteered to draw us a killshot in MS-Paint. And today she posted it, and it’s just so much win. Click on it, you know you want to.

And that’s why I love my guild. Thanks Norm, you rock!

I managed to get the Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement plus my first heroic under my belt since I posted I would start doing PUGs. Kudos to WoW Armory, a wonderful plugin for WordPress. *points to her sidebar*

Normal Utgarde Pinnacle was alright, but I felt that I wasn’t on top of my game in the gauntlet. I was incredibly rage-starved and the fight lasted forever. Normal Oculus was just as painful to tank as it was to heal, and I don’t think I’ll want to go back on heroic anytime soon. Both of these runs were full guild-runs.

Heroic Nexus was done with 3 other guildies, plus a tree druid we pugged. Instance went fine, though I still want to strangle the hunter who had less than optimal pet control and pulled Commander Stoutbeard early. Full of confidence, I went into Heroic Violet Hold right afterwards, this time we pugged a paladin healer. I came out again with shattered confidence and one emblem of heroism.

As first boss we had Ichoron, whose mechanics overwhelmed most group members completely. It just didn’t work. There were gazillions of adds, I took so much damage, and it was frustrating as heck. It took us four tries to get Ichoron down. On one of the tries, the instance bugged out on us and we had multiple portals open at the same time. Even before the first boss we already had 7 portals open. Eventually we got Ichoron down, fought down waves and what second boss do we get? Zuramat the Obliterator. Again, no one (including me) knew how to deal with him and we wiped spectacularly. When we went back in and it started at portal 1 again, I just folded, as it was past 2 am my time, and I had been in the instance for well over an hour.

Very frustrating, as my last visit there as healer saw us out of the instance in 25 minutes, with Ichoron and Lavanthor as bosses. I will say I believe DPS was a huge issue. 1k DPS just doesn’t cut it in a heroic, no way. Is it that common to come out on top as prot warrior or am I still running with DPS that’s not quite there? Okay, likely a rhetorical question.

Summary: Fail guild groups are more soul-crushing than fail pugs.

As I was busy with RL things, my usual Monday update went missing. Which isn’t so bad, as I don’t have that much stuff to post about.

My personal progress is very slim. I can say that without having set foot in any level 80 instance, I am pretty close to hitting the magic 540, so it’s really not as hard to reach as some said. I am only sitting at 537 defense, 21.3k health unbuffed, 20.5k armor, but I haven’t got a single enchantment, and most of my sockets so far have stamina gems in them. I’m still working on the Loremaster of Northrend achievement, and am really getting there. I completed Sholazar Basin on Saturday and Storm Peaks on Monday, so all that’s left are 140 quests in Icecrown and 130 quests in Borean Tundra. One thing this loremaster attempt surely causes is that it’s making me rich. I spent 7k gold last week to buy Artisan Riding, epic flyer and cold-weather flying for my shaman, and since then I have already gone up 5k gold again because gold is just so easy to come by while questing.

Warrior-tanking still feels a bit too powerful for me. I ran normal Gundrak in a group of mostly 80s, was #2 on DPS again, setting a new personal record of 1.1k DPS, and there were times that I had mindboggling values like 3.5k TPS displayed in Omen, on some trash pulls. I would be pissed if I was a druid. The other half is a feral druid and doesn’t do TPS on trash like that. If tanking classes are to be homogenized, we should all be equally strong on multi-mob tanking. Here’s to hoping for a druid Swipe buff.

I have been very inspired by a lot of postings I have seen at Tankspot, regarding Impale/Deep Wounds builds, and I think I might give that a shot as well. Raid results where Deep Wounds did the same damage as Revenge did sound pretty fabulous. It’s the new cookie cutter spec, so I might as well try it. Who wouldn’t want to do more damage?

I’m currently a bit frustrated and unhappy. Being a member of a casual guild isn’t as easy as it might seem.  I recently did a poll to find out how interested everyone is in raiding, and the overwhelming response was that people want to raid, but are in no hurry. That’s cool, I am in no hurry either. Our most ‘hardcore’ member just gquit to join our partner guild, and I felt her app over there was full of disses hinted at our guild, and so was her farewell posting, in a very unpleasant passive-aggressive manner. I don’t mind people leaving, we’re not for everyone, but at least try to be nice about it.

We have eight level 80s atm. Of those eight, two of them run heroics every day and have gone to Naxxramas with other guilds. The rest of them are mostly questing solo-style, skilling up in professions and seem to have no desire to set up instance runs. Me, I am halfway inbetween. I am setting up runs, have done all instances up to Halls of Stone now. But I am still running instances with the druid/shaman combo first, so I have yet to set a warrior foot into heroics or any level 80 instance. I really can’t form a new raiding team if people don’t have their own initiative and drive to gear up, but if we don’t start raiding soon, we will lose those who are getting bored with us. Don’t know how to fix really. I am probably overthinking it, and things might change a lot after Christmas. I think the ease of soloing in WotLK is biting us in the ass. If you can complete whole zones without requiring any groups, the leveling/questing phase has turned into a big single-player game. I did Storm Peaks all by myself, all 100 quests of the achievement, without any outside help.

Maybe it’s just that I am not used to being on top of my game, because in TBC, the other half and I were the ones who were running instances and heroics every day while the rest of the guild wasn’t. Then again, in TBC we were also the ones who actively helped getting other people there, so we could start raiding.

I was thinking of setting a start date of when we would like to start raiding, maybe that would change things a bit, but I don’t know if that would work for sure. I tell you, being casual raid leader has quite the emo-potential.

WTB patience of a saint to just relax and have fun and not feel like I am millions of lightyears behind everyone else. Taking longer to get there just means less boredom inbetween waiting for future patches.

Setbacks are frustrating, aren’t they? As I mentioned before, my guild has a very light raiding schedule, every other weekend. We are currently alternating between Karazhan and Zul’Aman. My own interest lies in exploring ZA some more. It’s still exciting and fresh content for me. However, our raid balance is very wonky. We have four ZA-geared healers, maybe six geared DPS and exactly two tanks. You see the problem, right?

So while our other prot warrior shall go camping next weekend, we’ll head to Karazhan again. *yawn*

Our dire tank situation is actually quite bizarre, as for our last Karazhan we had, what, 5 or 6 tanks sign up. However, a bunch of them are alts. Alts of our main healers. Who are needed as healers in ZA, of course. My new mission as one of the raid leaders will be to schedule people who actually want to move on to ZA tanking.

Heh, maybe it’ll give me another chance for gearing up my own alt in Karazhan, my rogue.

I am getting excited about my next project: Go go Champion-title! It basically is a concerted effort to get a Gruul and Magtheridon kill, two bosses that my guild couldn’t possibly raid on its own. But apparently they must like me that much after all that we are going full-force, filling the rest of the raid slots with friends from our guild alliance. I should note that even though we have a 25-man raid alliance, few of the girls regularly go. Excited! Now gimme all your advice for Gruul, okay? I have off-tanked in the Highking Maulgar fight once, which was not so exciting. Tanking Blindeye the Seer was not the highlight of my tanking career.

This weekend was a Karazhan weekend in my guild. As we have an abundance of tanks, and too many people for one group, but not enough for two, I sat out on Saturday for the most part. One of the healers lost connection at Curator, and so the off-tank switched to her healer main and I was flown in as emergency tank. We only did Curator and Aran that night. Curator was easy as usual. I was amused to see that I actually took less damage tanking Curator than the off-tank did soaking Hateful Bolts.

Aran was not so cool, it took us several tries to actually get him down, but we had new people in the raid so it was all still good. As is usual, we have no one calling out people, no yelling, we raid as friendly as it gets.

That’s why it really hit me very hard when someone new in the raid apologized, professing that she had not fucked up before I joined the raid, really. She defended herself as if I had a reason to be mad at her. I was flabbergasted. Today I hear people new to the raid or less experienced were actually saying they were glad I wasn’t there for the raid because they were scared enough already. (

This is a real dilemma for me. I lead most of our raids, and I think I am friendly, try to explain our strategies as best as I can. I never call anyone out personally. I actually make mistakes myself. I try to encourage everyone, say thanks to people who I think really rocked, try to keep the positive attitude up. Am I always super-nice and sweet to everyone? No. Do I voice my opinion when people do silly things (like replacing superior weapons with inferior weapons because of the look and sound effects of said weapon)? Heck yeah. Am I a perfectionist who tries to play on top of her game and tries to encourage others to do the same? Yes.

Apparently that turns me into the guild version of a nazi, which is a terribly politically incorrect term for a German like me. It really makes me unhappy, as I don’t want to be considered an asshole, don’t want to scare people. I just want to raid successfully, and have fun.

Has anyone here ever been in my shoes or has experienced similar? I could use some advice. :O

On a more positive note, I took my currently favorite alt, my rogue Ardraz, to Karazhan for the second day of the raid, for all later Kara bosses. It was her first Karazhan raid, she hasn’t got any Kara or badge gear, so I was worried if she was actually ready for later Kara content. I haven’t stopped grinning and giggling since I ran WWS:

Guess she was ready. So happy. Rogue DPS is my favorite playstyle aside from tanking, I swear. Awesome sauce. )

This is my first contribution to a Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth, as suggested by Breana. I really enjoyed the premise of the Shared Topic, so here goes my story.

The idea behind the topic: What’s the one thing you never thought you’d accomplish in WoW?

For me, it’s the achievement of successfully doing 10-man raids within my guild.

When I hit 70 on Kadomi, I changed specs to full protection, after leveling with fury/protection hybrid build. A particularly disastrous Mechanar experience was the cause. Today I just have to laugh at the idea of wiping 5 times on the robot boss. But when I hit 70, we had maybe 5-6 active 70s. Three were very interested in running tons of instances: me, my partner and a priest. We tried to run level 70 instances, and I remember the frustrations of SL runs where Vorpil seemed insurmountable an obstacle. The priest left shortly afterwards, for greener alliance pastures. Summer rolled around, another priest hit 70, and together with her, my partner and I pugged instances. Tons of instances. Some great experiences, some good, some really awful, but we geared up. Soon I was the best-geared tank, my partner the best geared DPS, our healer the best-geared healer. We started pugging heroics and earned our first badges. And yet, that was the limit. Anything beyond that seemed totally off-limits.

I actually researched transferring off to another server, into a European friendly guild for raiding, but then didn’t, because I didn’t want to lose my guild and my friends there. I re-rolled as paladin on a German server because my co-worker promised me I could raid with them. I wanted to get into that damn tower so badly. In the meantime I continued to try and motivate guild members to gear up, to get ready, to finish the Karazhan quest chain. My partner was doubtful that it would ever happen, while I posted a draft of gear requirements for Karazhan.

At about the same time my paladin finally hit 70 and had the necessary gear to hit Karazhan, my guild finally had enough people who were keyed and geared. We decided that we’d brave the tower, with my partner and me co-raid leading, every other weekend. Our first Karazhan weekend was in mid-November 2007, months behind any kind of progression curve. We made it to Curator that first weekend. Every other weekend we would go back, and on December 30 we had our very first Prince Malchezaar kill. We went from a ‘barely breaking 1800 DPS’ raid to one that’s been clearing Karazhan for seven months now and that’s 3/6 in ZA.

We still don’t have enough people for two groups, though we’re slowly getting there. People have come, people have left, and still, we always get our casual all-girls raid going, every other weekend. I never thought I’d see it happen, and I am very happy that I was able to get something like this off the ground.