10-man raids in WotLK

I am outraged! How can people be this petty?

In the news that have been coming out about what WotLK will have in store for us, there was the fabulous piece of news that all raid instances will have both a 10-man version and a 25-man version. To the guild I'm in this is the most amazing news ever.

We are a small, social guild with an even smaller group of people that are interested in raiding. We few, we happy few, learnt the principles of raiding together. We farmed for mats and ground for gold to gear up to Karazhan. We ran instances over and over for drops and attunements until finally the day dawned when we took our very first step into Kara.

Nothing can beat the feeling of that evening. We one-shot Attumen, spent 4 frustrating attempts on Moroes until we found a strategy that worked for us and ended the evening triumphantly having achieved the goal we had set ourselves. This with a guild that had never even done normal instances regularly before.

For most of us the joy of raiding comes from doing it together with these the friends that we have met in game (and many of them IRL now). We would love to be able to progress beyond Kara (once we've finished it), but realistically we are highly unlikely to ever field a 25-man team. Some weeks we can barely get a Kara run going that's how few people we have in our raiding group. Yes, I know that there are options. We could move to another guild, recruit or look for an alliance. But why should we have to? Just because we are small, we don't deserve to be able to raid?

The 10 and 25-mans will be separate progressions, so no more going through a 10-man to get to the 25-mans. The 25-mans will have much better loot. The fights in 25-mans will (one has to assume) be much more complex, challenging and ultimately more satisfying to conquer. So how can anyone possibly claim that giving small guilds the possibility of raiding takes anything away from the big 25-man raiding guilds? The big guilds get the big rewards both in the sense of loot and being able to experience the absolute top level content.

Saying that the availability of 10-mans will mean that noone will be interested in doing the 25-mans is utterly ridiculous. I cannot for one second imagine that raiding guilds would be interested in anything but the top level content. Their whole reason for raiding is to systematically defeat all the raid bosses in the game. I really cannot see them romping through the 10-man versions and declare themselves done when harder versions are still there to be conquered.

I think it is high time that some people out there stopped being so selfish about raiding. Having small raids and big raids takes away nothing of the achievement for those that conquer the big ones, but merely allows a larger amount of people to grasp why that achievement is so awesome by having experienced the smaller version. ;-)

Blog Azeroth

Just came across Blog Azeroth's introduction page and there were so many interesting looking blogs, I just had to note down all the ones that I want to have a look at later. :-)

I've only managed some of the pages and look how many interesting looking ones there was!!
Warcraft and Other Hooha
http://chickgm.blogspot.com/
http://azerothisburning.com/blog/
http://respeccost.blogspot.com/
http://wowconfidential.com/
http://www.mikomi-wheresmyfrisbee.blogspot.com/
http://www.nochocolate.org/oo5sr/
http://www.mamadruid.com/
http://www.godruid.blogspot.com/
http://birkinsbrain.wordpress.com/
http://zemalf.blogspot.com/
http://girlmeetswow.blogspot.com/
http://rhoelyn.blogspot.com/
http://gnometastic.wordpress.com/
http://www.bansidhe.net/
http://flux.io/
http://gbhwarcraft.wordpress.com/
http://violaceousmana.wordpress.com/
http://lady-jess.com/
http://www.ktnb.net/holynova/
http://manaturkey.wordpress.com/

Balance druid blogs

Being in the middle of levelling a little boomkin, I wanted to read lots of nice blogs about how to be the very best little boomkin I can - the way I learnt so much about healing from reading Ego Priest and Matticus amongst other fab priest bloggers. But many of the ones I could find seemed to be either by now-retired bloggers or they haven't been updated for a month or more. Now that I know that knowledge is power I crave it - whereever shall I get my boomkin fix??

Of course there is also the fact that I thoroughly enjoy Ego and Matticus' writing style and that I early on decided that I trusted that they knew what they were talking about. I guess I shall have to trawl through the archives on what I have found and try to find some boomkin equivalents - unless Ego and Matticus could be persuaded to level up a boomkin each and write about it? Hmmm...

Blogs found so far:
Laser Chicken - current
Gray Matter - current
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Moonkin - last updated Feb 2, 2008
Balance of Power - moved to other blog

The search continues...

The epiphany

Tufva was started as I had gotten bored with my original main and I had the bright idea that it would be good for the guild to have another healer (at the time we had 1 or 2). At the time I was terrified of instances, so I'm still not sure how I thought that was a good idea. I must have over-dosed on chocolate or something.

I healed groups a couple of times while levelling, but it was hard work, so if anything it had made my instance phobia even worse. Just the thought of it made my palms sweat!

One day I was chatting with a guildie who was also levelling a healy priest alt. He'd instanced a lot as he was levelling his priest and he introduced me to my first piece of the puzzle of that is healing: healing tactics. The tactic he explained to me was that as a healer you sometimes have to let someone die in order to keep someone else alive. Usually in 5-mans this translates into keeping the tank up at the expense of a DPS (who really shouldn't be taking much damage anyway).

Wow - what an epiphany! This one piece of advice changed the way I healed completely - and the results were great. Not only was my healing much better for it but the feeling of actually having a (albeit small one) clue about what I was doing did wonders for my confidence and made me actually start enjoying the whole instance experience. That little nugget of wisdom was the start of the journey that has taken me from instance-phobic palm-sweating 'oh-shit-what-am-I-doing' to thoroughly enjoying healing my guild's romps through Kara. Knowledge is power - and makes instances great fun!