Welcome to another edition of Mancy's Ensidia. In this week's article you can read all about the first week of Dragon Soul, our ban, how we dealt with it and Ekyu's high IQ.
Alright, first things first. Wednesday 30th of November. 4.3 is released and we have our raid set at 16:00. Why so late? Well, because there is not that much to do. We started off with Firelands to finish our staves and get the final loot upgrades. We did 3 raids again and thankfully managed to get a mace. When those raids were done, we chose to start with our LFR plan. Our LFR looting plan was to do many, many raids and give everyone a chance to loot by filling up the remaining spots with alts that wouldn't make any use of the loot. For example, our first 3 raids looked like this:
- Raid 1: Ekyu (prot+tank loot), Ascar (vanq + melee DPS loot), Rei pala (conq + healing loot rings etc), Pacteh (caster loot, trinkets etc), Calippo (leather+agi)
- Raid 2: Zerman (prot+healing), Danie (vanq+melee DPS + tank loot), Tanky (conq + caster loot)
- Raid 3: Kayrin (prot + healing stuff), Cheeroke(vanq + melee dps), Attero (conq + caster loot), Stekharn (leather+agi)
As stated before, the remaining spots would be filled with alts or mains that already did LFR and were thus unable to loot anymore. Remember, the LFR mechanic doesn't prohibit you to enter as many times as you want, but to loot as many times as you want. So, after doing some LFR raids, we decided to call it a night and continue on Thursday at 16:00.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Thursday and we continue with our LFR plan. Suddenly, we hear about a hole in the system. We heard that other guilds were using it and that by doing that, you were able to get 4set Tier13 on basically everyone. Since some of the bonuses are pretty big (the paladin one was rather huge, the mage one was pretty cool for Hagara and Yorsahj which we didn't know were a walkover etc.) and since Blizzard's previous stance towards unintended use of game mechanics wasn't strict, we decided to go ahead and use the bug. I can tell you that it was a really unpleasant experience to run 100 LFR groups but well, we did it. Okay, they probably weren't 100, but you get the point.
With that out of the way, let me get back to our raiding adventures. At some point, I don't even remember when we were done with LFR and were to start with Normal Modes the next day, Sunday I believe it was.
For Normal Modes, we had a different plan. We were to kill the first 6 bosses which are ridiculously easy with 5-6 groups, and then merge those into 3 for the last 2 bosses. And so we did and enjoyed a ton of loot! (Or well, the other people did, since my raid managed to drop 0 Vanquisher tokens)
Of course we didn't instantly kill the bosses, we tested strategies and ideas first until we felt comfortable with the practise we had on everyone and with our Heroic Mode strategy. We were done on Monday, distributed Gems and Essences of Destruction to most classes.
"Tuesday off-day, need to handle gems and craftable for DKs-Warriors-Rogues-Druids, Wednesday raid when the server comes up."
Little did we know that late Monday night (or early Tuesday morning) during this awesome HoN game me and Ekyu were playing we would get banned for 8 days.
That sucked a lot, it definitely did. All the hype and the excitement was gone, I can tell you that for sure. We were really uncertain what action we should take. In regards to raiding, we waited until Friday (aka 72 hours) to make sure that Blizzard wouldn't change their mind and remove the ban. Guess what, they didn't! So we proceeded to get a 10-man raid going with skanky alts on second accounts, unbanned characters and old friends (without legendary). The result? A pretty disappointing raid! Our main tank had 384 Item Level, our offtank had 378 and our healers even lower. We did manage to get 5/8 down in Heroic Mode which certainly helped in terms of gear, experience and revising strategies, but it wasn't as much as other guilds managed, for sure.
And that pretty much sums up the first two weeks of 4.3 for Ensidia. Stay tuned for the next entry! Shoutout to Svettmorfar (stop spamming me when im raiding)
