My guild

This pretty much sums up my raiding guild.

Big 80

Hit 80 last night, was a mad rush the last two days. Random thoughts.

1) Jeez leveling is time-consuming. I'm the last in the guild to level to 80 I think. I wonder what that says. Yet the guild is 'casual'.
2) I imagine most casuals wont hit 80 until January sometime, like end of January. We're looking at 8-10 hours per level at a casual basis. If you play 20 hours a week (which is alot), that's 5 weeks.
3) Most of the quests are great, but at the end I was really left searching for quests. One quest that unlocks a quest hub was bugged and that whole series of quests was denied to me.
4) If you play with rested XP all the way you will still burn through all but 3 zones, the start zone, and likely two middle zones.
5) The XP required per level doesn't change much at all, but the XP per mob and XP per quest does. So it does go quicker at higher levels.
6) Many of the later quests are single quest extremely long quest chains. At most you'll have two quests in the area with very short quest chains. So get used to flying to do the quest (or running) and coming back, and repeating this 4-5 times.
7) Thus an epic flying mount is almost required for the later zones. It will take much much longer without this. However if you sell your goods on AH, dont try to level professions, sell the greens you get, you should be close to 5000 at the end.
8) Professions: Enchanting becomes awesome, no longer do you have to do endless amounts of dungeons hoping for that rare drop, and every third quest gives a reward green or even a blue (there are much more quest blues now). I calculated last night, i saved almost all enchanting mats and have about 3000g worth, too bad I need 6000g worth of mats to get to 450.
9) This implies that they design it to get you halfway to profession cap while leveling, and the rest you do after cap.
10) quests are the absolute fastest way to level. Don't do an instance more than once, and that after you have several quests leading there (the dps boost from the blues means decreased leveling)
11) Shadowmeld (night elf racial) is a feign death type spell, if you run through an area and do no damage to the mob but attract it, hit shadowmeld and they'll run back to their area. This is insanely useful.

Done Raiding TBC (really)

Just announced today that the guild was taking a break from raiding. We didn't have enough to run 25 mans today or yesterday, and there is only a week left. With 5 raiding days to go, and all pre-SW content cleared, it just didn't make sense to raid when people wouldn't be able to use much of the loot (at this point most of us have gotten everything except the upper boss loot). People were very busy doing BGs and other stuff and we generally had a good time, i think everyone is really looking forward to wraith and I have no doubt people are going to come out of the cracks and the guild and server will be a thriving place again in a few weeks.

I managed to get a second piece of T6 set on sunday, now i just need to get into MH to get it. I'm now fully rocking SSO badge gear or T6 drops, so i'm happy I won't be needing to replace that gear, at least on one character.

I also ran the Scourge event and got 2 pieces of T6 equiv loot (seemingly) on my horde hunter.

So now I need to get my lock to 70 or 68, and finish leveling tailoring/enchanting.

Change is good

What an interesting two weeks it's been. I took a hiatus from raiding a few weeks before the patch came out. Now its out, and raidings been very easy. How easy? We struggled through all of BT, losing people on Gorefiend, Bloodboil, Council...We got up to Council and were thrilled.

Then came patch aka Nerf city, population us.

I've never seen stuff drop so quickly.

Last Sunday we dropped Illidan for the first time. (i say we, i mean the guild, i wasn't there)

Tuesday was bugged, the instances were down. I think we did Gruul, everything else was screwy.

Wed. we (me included) one-shotted everything in BT and did a 2 shot on Illidan due to random DCs.

Sun. we blitzed through MH and downed Archi pretty quickly. He really is freaking easy, you just can't die. Well, easy for us ranged, it sure seemed like healers/melee had their hands full. Then we decided to down Lady vashj. And we one shotted her. And then lurker just for kicks.

So 7 days, 3 end boss kills, i'm exalted with both MH and BT, I need Kael for the vials quest turn in, then i can get the sexy ring.

Raiding is so ridiculusly easy its not funny. We can get through Kael next week, then I bet off to sunwell. I really like the lack of mana pot consumption. I have only used 2 or 3, whereas normally i'd be downing 20 or 30 in a raid. This sort of thing makes it dramatically cheaper to raid.

Plus the leveling, plus the random kara group. yes, busy week WoW wise.

Moving

For the time being I am moving blogging to Doctors of Philosophy.

DF ending 25 mans

My raiding guild is giving up 25mans. There was a huge competition with another guild to get Illidan down, and they put in alot of effort and got him down, while we continued to dwindle. They eventually got him down, no surprise, while we can't muster 25 men for the first time in 4 months. So, we are taking a break for the time being.

Options being discussed: Old world raids, 40 man AVs, bear runs (which I don't have the skill for), other light stuff. For me, i'm still taking a break from serious raiding, and maybe am done forever. I'd like to see the Wraith content but i don't want it to become the 20 hour work week that it became.

It's talk like a pirate day!