A change is in the air

First, we had a small guild shakeup this weekend. After a lot of debate and thought, we let our Resto druid go (you could say cut) from our 10man team. He’d been with us a long time, but some things were starting to show that led us to fear being left holding the stick – so we decided to pull the trigger ourselves.

What this means is, I am going to be shifting back to healing – and our crazy DPS rogue will be shifting to his warrior to tank. We picked up a hunter from our (now defunct, more on that in a second) 25man raid group, and we’ll be taking an extra week or so before tackling the hard mode encounters. It shouldn’t take us long to get comfortable with each other though – so I have hopes that we’ll get a hard mode or two down in the near future.

I have no illusions that we’re going to have some growing pains this week – and I honestly doubt we’ll get a repeat Arthas kill, simply because we’re only going to have two raid days (damn your work Thraxx). Adding a hunter will be nice for the melee with TSA – though we’ll technically only have one melee (unless we’re running 2 healers). Having Commanding Shout will be helpful, as well as all the warrior stuns for the Arthas fight. I’ll miss the extra life from AD – but them’s the breaks. Having a MD will help replace the loss of the rogue Tricks, and we’ll be losing one BR.

For those tankadins who have been hanging out here though, fear not, because I’ll still be putting up the tanking info. I’ll probably be adding some regular healing info now though, and (this is a big one for me) I should be able to film my own kill videos now – without Mongrr calling them boring. I don’t have pewpewlazors though – just jazz hands.

Speaking of jazz hands – I must admit that I really prefer the male human cast animation for the Paladin. The female Belf just looks like she’s setting a volleyball, not like she’s dropping bombs on someone. Ah well – I still look delicious I suppose.

Choosing a spec

So once we made the call to change – I had to trick out my healing gear and respect myself. I’m not willing to give up both tank specs just yet, so I’m trying to see what I can get with just a single Holy setup. I finally settled on a fairly standard 51/20/0 build, since DS/DG are way too powerful to ignore – especially with a 2^nd Paladin in the raid. Imp Devo aura is also a really nice boost, since it will keep the healing bonus we had with our resto druid (6% bonus to anyone in range of the aura), and the 50% bonus to Devo Aura’s armor bonus is really nice.

I think I definitely have an advantage going in, as I’ve already seen it from the tank’s PoV. I know when the big spikes will be coming, and we’ve already worked out all the strategies. The only aspect I’m really worried about is keeping my SA running high. It’d be embarrassing to die to something environmental my first night out.

I really liked the comment that Thraxx made when we were talking specs/glyphs. “This is the big game, dress appropriately.” This is the kind of mentality that our group has, and reflects the level of ability and responsibility that we hold ourselves to. We’re extremely hard on each other, and ourselves – very rarely does someone have to be called out for a mistake (as they are the first to admit it).

Guild alliance no more

Now I don’t know all the details of this little fiasco, but what I do know is that our 25man raid alliance died a horrible death last week. What I “think” happened is that Vicarious’s GM got a little big for his britches and started lording over the ‘have nots’ in his 2^nd 10man team (and those that weren’t included in the 25man). Drama ensued, and they all dropped away from us. He still owes us for that I think. On the upside we got one of their better players, one who just happened to have the skillset needed to hop into our raids. We’ll see how she does when we throw her to the wolves tomorrow night.

I was sad to see the alliance end though. We’d come a long ways in a short amount of time, and they were finally starting to become halfway decent raiders. Fortunately we have a fairly decent reputation on the server, and we should be able to work another group together. If not, we’ll go to a GDKP setup (which we might do anyway). It hurts less when someone doing ½ your DPS throws down 25k gold for the item you’re after.

Wrapup

We’re still moving forward, and still getting forum posts deleted. It’s a shame that any post on our realm forums that even mentions progression turns into a Steel vs. Unity (the top 2 Alliance guilds on Bladefist) vs. Salus Novus – some guild that left before we got there. Eventually someone says something offensive, and the whole thread gets deleted.

Oh – and if anyone from Bladefist is reading this (or if you want to transfer over to buy it) we’re selling Sarth 3D mounts (3k), Starcaller titles (15k), and Rusted Proto-Drakes (10k to 21k, DoE).

Yeah – we’re mercenaries, or the World Bank – whichever one you can stomach.