Well, all in all, my little trip to SoCal went pretty well. Blizzard puts on a helluva show really – of course when your company makes like $3000 a minute you should be able to put on quite a show.
The big topic was, of course, “The Wrath of the Lich King” (aka the next expansion) and about half of the convention center was dedicated to this. Sean (a fellow player and guildie from work) and I spent most of our time in the various game mechanics panels such as “class balance”, “pvp”, “itemization”, and “raiding” – and learned a great deal about what Blizzard sees as issues with the game and what they are doing to try and fix it.
As far as the expansion goes it looks awesome. Blizzard already has half the zones workable to the point they had in-game footage for a lot of it and one of the zones was playable at the show. I figure it’ll be another six to nine months before the world goes to Northrend, but the wait will certainly be worth it.
I had planned to write up the big expose on the show, but it’s all been covered in much more depth by much bigger wow geeks than me. So if you’re itching for information, check out “WOW Insider” or something – they sat in the same panels as I did and probably got better pictures because they were in the press section.
As far as the “here and now”, the guild I’m in has stalled on Karazhan – we can clear it pretty much on command in a day, but we’re having a hard time finding fifteen more people with the same level of skill as our “A-Team” for the next set of challenges…
See, Karazhan is also known as “the guild killer” – it’s a 10-man raid instance that is both fun and challenging and has certain tests built into it for tanking ability, dps ability, a gear check, and group coordination. Our “A-Team” can waltz through these tests without really breaking much of a sweat, but the folks we are recruiting are the folks who can’t get into other guilds and they’re very, very green.
So we’re training a few of the hopefuls – which is tiring.
The guild has a bit of mystique to it as we’re the #2 guild on the server, we’re really picky, and we tend to show up, kick content ass, and leave without saying much which lends to that “aire of mystery”. But, yeah, we’re #2 – if you don’t count the #1 guild because they all transferred in from a much older server (so they had much better gear and more experience) solely for the purpose of being #1, then we’re the top guild. So for a lot of these folks we’ve recruited they’re still getting over their swelled egos.
So, the reason we’ve stalled on Karazhan is because the next set of dungeons are 25-man instances – meaning you need 25 people who are coordinated, talented, and geared from Karazhan to really have much of a prayer in beating it. This is what makes good ol’ Kara such a guild killer as you need to field 2 10-man groups which are independent of each other and which are both equally good… But in a guild of over 70 people, you can’t take everyone all the time so those who sit out get pretty bent out of shape.
So what we do is every week we mix things up and have members of the “A-Team” in two different groups and each group half full of new members so they can learn the fights – in theory – most don’t seem to care to learn anything and just want the loot.
This guarantees that we cannot finish Kara in the week before it resets because the new folks don’t have the dps to down a boss, or they stand in the wrong place, or they do too much dps and get 1-shot by the boss, or they just cant dedicate the two hours on the night they’re picked to ‘go in’ and wind up leaving the other 9 people standing around.
It’s tough running a big guild.
But we’ll get there. I think the biggest problem we are facing is that Tanaris (the server we play on) is a low-population server, so the pond we’re fishing out of for caliber players is pretty shallow to begin with.
But that’s my update. With my work schedule being like it is right now, WoW is my only real outlet and I tend to focus pretty hard on the things I’m doing. So right now, this is my life. 😉