And here we go with some more inside-the-guild content, this time from Vodka, our overseas friends. Let's get right to it.
The old saying that “there are only two absolutes in life: friends and Vodka. And the best times usually involve both” could best describe what life is like in Vodka
Granted, Braindeadly and Athene died to some pretty funny things such as running into the Zon’ozz ball out of turn when its supposed to go for the boss, the three of them did a pretty good job overall in their first full Heroic Dragon Soul clear. Who said PvPers can’t hang with the big boys in PvE?
On Tuesday, the first raid started with our raid leader Grafarion calling an intended wipe on Morchok when he was at 2%. We definitely were able to just one-shot Morchok that attempt but due to poor play by more than a handful of raiders, Grafarion decided to call the wipe. We had players on the wrong side out of range of their healers. We had casters eating the double stomp because they were blind or tunneled dps. We even had people die during the black phase because they forgot to feint or some other equivalent cooldown. While we could have just muscled through it and gone on, we wiped because because we try to hold ourselves to a higher standard of play.
While we like to hold ourselves to a higher standard of play, it doesn’t necessarily mean that our raiding life will go smoothly as General Zon’ozz quick reminded us. Our normal strat for Zon’ozz is for the whole raid to stack up during the orb phase with one person bouncing the orb back to the stacked up raid, and to break up in four small kill groups that spread out into the four cardinal directions in order to kill the Eyes and Flails of Go’rath. This week we tried a new strategy dubbed the “clown EG strat” where the whole raid starts at one point, and then splits up into two groups. Of course when we try out something new people decide to turn off their brains and forget how to play and the WoW gods decide to mess with us as well. We had the orb bug out and not move at all. We had shaman dropping earth elemental so that the Claws of Go’rath would start one-shotting people. After 5 wipes though, we ended up with a kill that was only 5 seconds slower than our fastest kill. Remember, of course, we were carrying three PvP gladiators who don’t have optimal gear and haven’t seen the encounters before.
After the rocky start to the raid between Mor’chok and Dragon Soul’s-hardest-boss General Zon’ozz, we actually got to cruise through the rest of the raid with with one or two tries to each boss. We had a butt-clencher of an Ultraxion, but still killed it in one attempt.
With all of this action just from the first few bosses, you probably wonder if there’s a way to watch the action live. In fact, we have a lot of guildies who stream and have a pretty popular following; Landsoul, Adam, Killars, and Koilie are just a few of these streamers. Not only did we have all of them streaming, but Athene was streaming his first full hard mode DS raid as well.
We may sound like serious business all the time, but it’s honestly quite untrue. We’ll be full focused from the moment Grafarion pulls the boss up until the boss’ corpse is covered in sparkles. As you can hear in this sound clip of mumble after killing Ultraxion, Zalik had a question for our streamers, specifically Killars and Athene.
On Wednesday, we started our alt raid with some gusto because it was going to be the first time we got to sink our teeth into a bunch of the hard modes on our alts. Fortunately, we also had a bunch of mains and applicants who did not go on Tuesday’s run. We were actually able to make surprisingly good progress from Morchok through to Hagara, but then got stuck on Ultraxion for about an hour. There were issues all around with people forgetting to stay above and soak the hour of twilight. I felt as if members forgot how to play and applicants were playing scared. It finally got to the point where we had to put on our serious faces. It looked like our efforts were going to pay off with Ultraxion at 1% when we got the message that the aspects are now vulnerable! Someone forgot to soak the hour of twilight and it was a wipe! This sound clip will explain the what happened, specifically to applicant Bobloblaww:
Outside of WoW, a number of us have been playing SWTOR fairly hardcore. We crushed through all of the PvE content very quickly, putting us in the top 3 for pre-nerf content on hard mode (nightmare mode did not exist at the time since it was bugged, it was just hard mode). SWTOR has a lot going for it, but raiding in this game is just not fun. ALL of the content is just way too buggy. You have to adjust your strategy to stupid bugs like missing floors, randomly dying while you walk back after a wipe, and your tank getting mind trapped. At least the PvP is pretty fun; we have a large number of battlemasters already. Right now the only fun we get while waiting for ranked PvP is leveling Republic alts to stomp on the Imperial.
Anyways, thank you for reading this first of many shots of Vodka. I leave you with this gif (nice find in Rabz’ part) to remind you to kiss your grandmother and treat her well!
