Good

• Phase 1 was a blast with dps finally not giving it all out and tanks being able to move up and down the spawns without getting too many adds in the way at the same time
• Phase 2 had people inside the portal being quick and focused on the right targets
• Phase 3 had some of the melee dps on the adds together with ranged in order to keep them under control
• No pauses during the whole raiding session kept everyone focused on his job

Wrong

• I needed the loo
• During phase 1 sometime we rushed the dps and managed to get wiped like noobs so we alternated getting to phase 3 and not even getting phase 1 completed
• During phase 3 we had to move some melee dps on the adds in order to keep them under control

It might be of interest to note that we are raiding ToC25 hard mode but actually left Yogg untouched since last June. But it was about time we actually gave a goodbye to that mass of flesh.

And we got a massive slap from the beasts of Northrend who kept wiping us trial after trial (otherwise it won’t be called “trial” of the crusader). Those bosses hit incredibly hard and there’s massive damage going over the raid with no pauses anywhere in between. We managed to survive till Dreadscale and Acidmaw come in, but we still had Gormok beating on our heads.

From a tank perspective, the first part of the encounter is timing perfectly the taunts in order not to have more than 2 impale on any of the tanks at any time and use your cooldowns right as the two worms come in. That worked quite well to let us stay alive during the first part.

The main problem seemed to be the snowbolds on the healers as they basically prevent any healer without instant cast spells from firing off anything until the snowbold gets killed. And during this fight Gormok hits very hard. And as a tank you’ve got to pick up the worms when they come in and you can be sure that you’ve still got an impale or two on you which is not exactly nice.

In the end we couldn’t beat them yet but it was a good trial and some good learning as we now know exactly how hard the encounter is. I bet it won’t take long to get them off the way. (Oh! And we had two 10 men groups going there yesterday and the other one managed to kill all of the beasts of Northrend! Grats!)

Basically the problem is that as dpsers they are way low when compared to mages or locks. It takes too long to build up all the DoTs and it’s totally mana inefficient. The end result is low dps and a spot that could as well be taken by a pure dps class that would do way more damage in comparison.

As healers, they lost their power, especially when Blizzard made downranking of spells no more a viable option. As MT healer, any paladin will do a much better job, with overhealing being channeled to their beacon. Even a disc priest can’t beat a paladin when it comes to single target healing. On top of that, priests have slower spells compared to paladins so it’s still a no-go.

As raid healers, they are being overwhelmed by druids and shamans. It’s simply a matter or rotation PoM, CoH and PoH but in the end by the time you casted, everyone has already been topped up by one of the other classes.

Thus the frustration being shown by our own priests. I talked to a friend of mine who’s playing a priest in one of the top European guilds and he confirmed that priest healing is no longer interesting. It used to require brain to do it properly but since the last changes it’s become just a mere, blow all your cooldowns to top the haling meters (for all it’s worth) and just brainless healing.

It looks like Blizzard is aware of the poor performance of shadow dps and I haven’t done a serious research but I’m pretty sure someone has already brought up the healing issues as well.

So what would you do as a priest to make your role in raids more active? What can the raid do about it?

Now.. I know that this has been discussed almost everywhere on the net, but I’ll throw my 2 cents in as well. ToC is the easiest and fastest way to gear up any toon. Just by running that and farming some badges I managed to get the best tanking gear for my feral druid that can be taken before hitting Ulduar. And I’m planning on doing the same for the resto gear. Anyone out there remembers how hard it was to gear up through heroics in TBC just to be barely able to snip into a raid to Karazhan?

With normal ToC you can get your first epics while still leveling. At 80 you farm ToC heroic and get the rest of the gear and with the badges you buy the two T8.25 pieces and you’re set. Geared and ready for Ulduar and up.

This opens a question though.. why are people applying to raiding guilds showing that they have very bad gear when you can have a decent set in less than two weeks? Is it a sign of lack of commitment? Laziness?  Lack of time? I’d say that laziness is the winner here. And if that’s the case, maybe that’s one of those nice indicators of how dedicated certain applicants can be. Of course gear isn’t everything, but since it’s so easy to gear up with a few runs, why wouldn’t people do it instead of complaining about it?!

On the menu there were:

• An officer leaving
• What to do with the current trialists
• Recruitment
• A possible new officer
• Other things I’m gonna skip

The meeting went through Ventrilo which is our VoIP software of choice. I guess pretty much every raiding guild uses either Ventrilo or TeamSpeak which are both good choices for those kind of conference calls.

I’m going to skip quickly over the officer who left us. It happened. It’s not the first time this happens, it won’t be the last. The reasons are debateable but a solid guild can live even when losing some officers, so it’s not really an issue. I’m going to skip over the new officer as well as it’s something still being discussed so there’s no point in bringing that up on the table yet. What I will discuss is our Recruitment and Trialing system which has proven to work good so far and that it’s worth talking about.

Malevolence, as a guild, has a set of strict rules of conduct that are one of the most important parts of being accepted as a member. You could think of it as some ethics that have been agreed over time by those who have been in the guild for a long time, especially the officers. Something that comes to mind is that the majority of the guild members are over 25 and as adults we all require the members not to act in a childish way. No swearing, no insulting anywhere and trying to be helpful are good starting points. But these are all about being a member of the guild and it’s not all that is required to be a raider.

As a raider, you have to be able to follow some more rules that are supposed to grant everyone involved an enjoyable raiding experience. You can read them on this post on the forum. The fundation is that you’re expected to be available for most raids and be prepared and on time. Respect for the other players is a must as no one likes when someone goes AFK without saying that in advance or when someone does not know the tactics for a fight.

The raiding team itself is pretty small, especially for a non-hardcore guild. What is nice is that there’s a core of raiders that are turning up for most of the raids and thus recruitment during normal times is usually limited to a few classes, most of the time hybrids like boomkins, shadow priests, enhancement shamans. Recruitment usually starts from within the guild as we have members that from time to time might want to apply for a raider spot (which is also our preferred way of getting new people), otherwise the usual channels are being used: Terenas Tavern, guild recruitment channel, general chat advertisement in Dalaran, word of mouth between friends.

Once someone applies, its applications is being reviewed by officers (gear check, a quick look around to see if that person is applying to other guilds too, a check of his reputation). A talk with the applicant might follow to ask more information or to solve some doubts and once there’s an agreement, the applicant is being taken on board as a Raider Trialist. The trial time usually takes a month during which notes are being taken about raids signup, if that person shows up in time, if he leaves early, if there’s a good communication, etc. At the end of the trial timespan, officers review what has been noted and take a final decision whether to make him a fulltime raider or ask him to leave due to being under the expectations of the rest of the guild.

This whole process is very democratic and well thought. There is no rush and all of the small details are taken into consideration. I’m pretty fond of the guild officers as they care a lot about the people and the ethics of the guild and they’d do anything to preserve a nice and friendly environment for everyone to enjoy.

This is a good model for a guild like this that isn’t hardcore and that has a very strong social aspect.

What was I expecting? Well.. first of all the new 5 men.. and what else? hmm.. actually nothing!

So I copied my DK to the PTR, logged in, spent some time setting up the interface and enabling some addons I can’t live without (Bartender and Omen namely), respecced as the talents were wiped clean and started looking for a group for the Forge of Souls. I managed to get a resto druid, retri pally, warlock and enhancement shammy with me and off we went to try this new 5 men! Bear in mind that mobs and bosses do not drop loot yet, but at least we had a chance to see the architecture of the place and try out the encounters which are definitely interesting.  The first boss is Bronjahm, a sort of mage that you have to hug and nuke basically Then you move on to The Devourer of Souls which is a sort of Reliquiary of Souls from BT but smaller It’s a quite fun encounter as you have to pay attention to a lot of things during the fight in order not to kill whoever is being watched.

After cleaning the first 5 men it came natural to just went forward into the 2nd part which is the Pit of Saron. It actually looks like a pit, being a circular area. You can choose which boss to go for between the first two. It’s fun that when you kill the trash you’re actually freeing some human miners who will thank you and that you will see again later on. We went for the Forgemaster Garfrost first, which is similar to Sapphiron (not that he looks like it, but the abilities are similar). We killed him and moved on to Krick and Ick. If you happened to watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome you will probably recall Master Blaster. The encounter is just a matter of kiting the boss around, avoid poison pools and run away from the poison nova. And if you’re not quick enough with your dps, you will also want to kite him when he targets you (it happened only once to us).
Then you move on and go through a gauntlet (and now this is definitely cool) with snow and boulders falling from the top, undeads coming at you in groups, spawning here and there. You run through the gauntlet and end up at Scourgelord Tyrannus who is riding his dragon Rimefang. After a short talk, the boss will jump down from the dragon and the encounter starts. While you are fighting, the force of the Alliance (yeah I’m playing on that side of the force!) will keep the undeads busy at the entrance. The fight is just tank & spank, remember not to dps when you’re targeted and kite him on the frost patches when he empowers. That’s all you can find for the time being on the PTR.

And of course, if you’re like me and park your character in front of the quest giver for the heroic dungeon, you’ll find out that now the heroic is Naxx10/25!

I’ve added some images of both instances for those that want to have a look at them, they’re available on my Flickr set

Who am I? I am a passionate gamer, who has been designing games and writing them for years, who has been working as a journalist for videogame magazines, who liked World of Warcraft since the first time I put my hand on it during the early alpha stage while attending the E3 in Los Angeles.

What have I been playing in WoW? It all started with my warlock called Sigmundo who was my first main. I started playing it as a noob (ok, I came from the early UO days as I was a beta tester back then and a co-writer of the first server emulator for that game, but still I consider myself a noob ). During plain Vanilla WoW I decided to start a raiding guild at some point. It was a social-raiding guild, not a hardcore one. It was called Anathema and it was run by me and Azuul. The funny thing is that we managed to become server’s third guild progression-wise on the Alliance side even though we were far from being hardcore.

When TBC came out I decided to disband the guild due to conflicting ideas, too many members and too few spots for the 25 men raids and some personal issues. I started again from scratch and made a new guild called Edge but the truth is that it was bad timing as I couldn’t put enough time into it and I had to head leadership over while I took a pause of some months from the game. A few months later the guild was disbanded.

At that point I made my come back quite slowly, leveling up a gnome warrior called Zyxxyz and just playing casually until I found enough time to get back to raids (you all know it’s like a drug.. sooner or later you’re going to want more!). I spent some time with a friendly guild called Rune where I met some very nice guys but they were not raiding so I started looking for the kind of guild who would fit my playstyle and availability. I live in Italy, we are famous for our good food and the fact that we eat late and that’s absolutely true! So I needed a guild who would raid after 9pm server time and that was not too strict on raiding day (aka not hardcore as I couldn’t commit to 6 or 7 days of raids per week). I started inquiring and I ended up writing a sort of guide to the raiding guilds on Terenas (you can find my original thread on Terenas Tavern).
After some research I ended up applying to Malevolence and I’ve been a member of theirs since then.

With the release of WotLK I switched main to a Death Knight known as Soultrap and I chose to take the role of the tank as main spec. At the time I’m writing this, we have just killed the last boss in Trial of the Crusader 25. But I’ll talk about that and much more in the future. For the time being, farewell!

On the other end, I’ve got back to raiding in World of Warcraft after a little pause sometimes after the release of TBC. So I ended up leveling a new main, gearing up through heroics, finding a new guild, and finally raiding again places like Karazhan, SSC, MH, BT, etc..

Time has passed and with the release of WotLK I kept raiding with my current guild, Malevolence (on Terenas EU) and I’ve recently been appointed Veteran which is a little step back into the life of those managing the guild. And this has been the spark that pushed me forward into starting writing this.

So, what is this all about? The main idea is to write a weekly (but hopefully I’ll post more often than once a week) blog about what happens in the guild, talking about raids, startegies, specs, roles, recruitment, dramas, almost anything that happens daily in any guild.

Think of this as a sort of diary of a journey that has started something like five years ago and that has not yet finished.