Well, it's Friday again. About time, too!

Are we there yet?
Well, mmo-champion is predicting the shattering to take place either next week or the week after. And all I can think is about damn time. WotLK was a rather annoying expansion for me. Love my guild to death and have enjoyed poking around at this and that, but the raid and heroic instance design was just killing me :/

I'm sure there's someone out there who thinks WotLK was the best expansion ever and I regret to inform them that we can't be friends.

The elemental invasion has really been a let down. I wasn't a great fan of the zombie invasion for 3.0 because it was a great excuse for players to harass other players (especially low-levels and potential newbies - how fun it must be to have your first WoW experience, being corpse camped by your own faction!) and claim it wasn't their fault that 'Arthas' was ruining the game.

It seems like we're at the other end of the spectrum. I'm annoyed by the very idea that it happens at distinct times (roughly the top of the hour, every 2-3 hours). I like that people are given the chance to evacuate and not participate. I'm annoyed that I only have enough time to hit up one, perhaps two of the instances after the event (maybe I did it wrong). I'm annoyed that the guy I'm supposed to turn the kill quests in to is apparently in a different phase of Ironforge and in mine he's evacuated, so I can see his exclamation mark on the map but can't see him!

I'M ALSO REALLY ANNOYED THAT THE MAILBOXES DISAPPEAR. WHAT. WHY ARE THE ELEMENTALS STEALING MY MAILBOX.

So here's hoping that things are more interesting once Deathwing begins his reign of destruction! (An aside, threads on mmo-champ are claiming he's actively destroying random zones in the Beta as well as the PTR, which suggests he may be randomly destroying things until he's brought down in his raid :O)

This is a very cruel thing to do to someone
Blizzard has apparently changed the security protocols that monitor logins to Battle.net. How do I know? I got an email that my account had been locked yesterday :P Of course, the email being rather vague, once I'd verified it is authentic I went OH JESUS NO, MY PURPLES!, thinking I'd been hacked. But after checking the armory to see all my characters, even the enchanter, were still wearing their clothes, things turned confusing.

I called the support line, and got a girl with a simply adorable voice that unlocked it for me an helped piece together what was going on.

The new system appears to determine what is a normal pattern of behavior for you. If you suddenly log in from an IP address it hasn't learned to be associated with your account, it considers it suspicious and locks the account. What's annoying is there's no real way to 'teach' it aside from this trial and error game.

Making me spaz out and think I'd got hacked is very mean >:|

Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast
Well, work on the Insane plugs on, slowly. I did the math last night and guesstimated that I need to go through LBRS pickpocketing at least 33 more times. After that I'll probably move on to flying around Northrend on my pally and picking herbs for Darkmoon cards. I realized that it would actually be sort of cool to pass those cards on to characters leveling in Cataclysm (I'm probably getting a second account, because no more character slots). It'd be awesome if I could sell them though.

Sreenshots pewpew

Again and Again

This has been a pretty light week!... And I was so enamored with photoshop last night that I forgot to upload my screenshots again. Ohwell, something to do tonight :D

THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY
Ok so. I guess the big news is Insane in the Membrane is being 'fixed' so that it's completable in Cataclysm, and it just won't require Shen'dralar anymore. Which is a considerable nerf to the title.

This kind of surprised everyone. I certainly wasn't expecting it. It does feel a bit cheap to essentially skip 25% of the whole achievement. Those who did it the 'right' way will have at least an additional feat in the future, but I'm hoping that there will be an analogous feat in Cataclysm that can the the 'new' crazy bunch of rep to get. It's probably difficult to put in, as you essentially you have to create a faction that no one cares about, doesn't really benefit raiding, which is probably hard to justify in terms of development time. But here's hoping.

To celebrate, my grinding partner (THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID) and I hit up separate instances of LBRS and pickpocketed about 75 lockboxes between us. And now the guild bank is full 9.9

Durids!
As a personal reminder to myself, the Inconspicuous Bear put out an incomplete Gearing and Professions list for bear tanking at 85. While not finished, they're extremely helpful for putting together a plan!

Killin' Time
The guild as a whole has been somewhat counting down the minutes until Cataclysm hit, so over the last week raids of various sizes and seriousness have been put together to knock out achievements. I put together a group last friday that finished up 10 man T7, as well as Onyxia achievements for several people. In the name of arbitrary points!

More officially, the 25 man finally pushed several Glory to the Raider 25 ICC achievements to completion, so a large number of us got our Frosty Drakes. I have now broken and rebroken my mount macro several times trying to stuff him in, and somehow managed to put my sea turtle into the mix >:|

We also had a bit of a fiasco with our latest Shadowmourne box, where the quest bugged out and the GMs, for whatever reason, would only reward the wielder with one of the four items he was supposed to get. He chose the mount, which I had won the roll for. Which is freaking ossim, but it still really sucks that everyone else got screwed out of their items :/

Justicurr
Ugh. Well. I think a large part of my problem is I'm doing this either alone or with the boyfriend, and really, 1-2 people will find it very hard to change the course of battle. It's not impossible, it's just sometimes more than I care to try. I mean how many times can you stand watching your entire team dick off in the middle while the horde kills you with the flag without being a little angry.

Honor weekends turn out to be both better and worse, because you can physically see the rep bar move with each cap.... but there are so many premade teams you get paired against.

I did figure out, at some point, that I need 300 WSG and Arathi victories each, and then I'll be done, but that's some pretty depressing criteria.

I suppose really I need to make my own premade. Bah!

FACK YOU FISH
A little under 9,000 fish successfully caught later, my 9 alts are now all sitting pretty at 325 cooking skill. If nothing else, between this and the Candy Buckets of DOOM, I was able to run around the world one last time before it completly changed. Azshara in particular, while being so very useless, is very pretty, so you goblins had better take good care of it ;_;

I've been having a love affair with the new water.

Anyway, two weeks of screenshots.

The Non-Raid Leader

I haven't had a lot of time to myself, so no pretty drawings, but I'll remember to add in weekly screenshots (2-3 weeks worth? lol) today or tomorrow.

THIS IS MADNESS

The Insane feat of strength, based off a comment made by staff during Blizzcon, seems to be going away with Cataclysm. Speficially, Shen'dralar and Bloodsail reps will no longer be attainable, though if you had the reps previously, they appear to stay in tact. In terms of Bloodsail, this doesn't matter too much. As said previously, two people working for four hours in Booty Bay can get the appropriate rep.

Shen'dralar is significantly more frustrating by nature of their rep gains, which is from very rare objects that typically take a person several months to gather. What's even more fun is the NPC that originally accepted these items has been confirmed on beta to be in the exact same place, just with the quest disabled.

More or less, it appears an achievement with individual steps that take months to complete, seems to have gotten a 'one month sort of but not really warning because we still don't have a clear statement two weeks after someone mentioned it in passing'.

Most of the community is theorizing that other reps will still count toward the feat (similar to how you can still get Hand of A'dal or Champion of the Naruu after 2.4, so long as you'd met certain goals before that point). Nothing is certain because Blizzard has yet to clarify exactly what's happening, so really, if you need one last rep, now is the time to do it.

I'm a little miffed that this happened like, a week after I decided to try for it, but overall I've not wasted that much time if I quit cold turkey, turn around, and sell my rep items for 5000g a piece. :/

Hallow's End
Was another non-event. I was surprised to find that my primary alt, the paladin, already had it completed. Two others, the priest and dk, simply needed a hallowed helm (...which they actually had in their banks but FOR WHATEVER REASON I GUESS DOESN'T COUNT). The other six needed more or less everything.

Actually, the constant trick-or-treating every hour did not bother me. What did was going to all the candy buckets. The travel time involved sincerely felt like I was spending more time watching my character, rather than controlling it. Cataclysm will help with flying mounts in the old world, so similar achievements won't be as bad. But good freaking lord I never want to fly from Ratchet to Cenarian Hold again.

Overall it took a total of five days to get everything complete.

I am not a raid leader
Last year, at....almost exactly this time, actually, there was a series of events in our ten man groups that can really be best described as 'Some of you are assholes'.

My guild's policy only really cares about our official 25 mans, held three days a week in the most 'recent' content. So 10s and alts and anything else is free for all, and while the officers often take part, they don't enforce any rules. You can probably see why this is good, and why it's not, really it just is what it is.

So, I came to the conclusion that my solution to the Ulduar issue was to take my ball and go home - aka make the raid myself and tell the assholes to suck it.

When ICC came out, the primary target of my scorn built a raid group with a severe focus on progression that would meet early in the raid week. I made a group that would meet weekends and 'do whatever', with the solitary rule that he couldn't come (because I have the emotional maturity of a 4 year old).

In terms of actual raid leading, I'm actually pretty bad. Very bad. I'll send out 13 invites thinking only 9 people logged on. I'd say 'it made sense at the time' but I've done it more than once.

I have to delegate a lot. My boyfriend, who came as an alt, was handed assist and masterloot so he could handle marking and THE ACTUALLY NOT THAT CONFUSING loot window. I also had to main tank, meaning I had to focus more on what I did than the group.

The group of people I got were actually very good at taking care of themselves. Like, I cannot praise them enough. When it came time to try Professor Putricide, I gave them an order of who to try to drop disease on, told them to be vocal on vent about where they're moving, and then ignored them every attempt while I danced with Putricide. And they did it perfectly.

On the subject of loot, the group was generous to a fault with each other. I had no rules about main spec or off spec, and the few times I was asked said simply 'Roll however you think will best help the 25 man group's progression'. There were several conversations that went 'you take it' 'no you take it'. There was not one loot dispute, despite the fact that we ran /roll the entire way.

I know I lucked out with my group, and I think a lot of it is because the guild as a whole maintains a very outgoing atmosphere - Most of us refer to each other by first name rather than character name (though I'm still 'Amy' because I frankly prefer it). One officer in particular makes very sure that no form of hate speech is tolerated.

Now, this wasn't all rainbows and unicorns. My offtank was constantly abusive to random raid members. I can't even remember why, it was just arguments about petty shit. After five weeks of trying, through several channels, to get him to calm down, I was very frazzeled. Then, when his girlfriend slept through invite time and thus, did not get an invite, he threw a tantrum. And I had it. I put him on ignore and never invited him back. I replaced him within ten minutes, the end.

Several of my raid members were initially pleased with my choice. As time wore on and the offtank started leaving me messages in the one place that not only could I not ignore him beyond not responding, but everyone else could see it - the guild forums - many of those same people would approach me and say they 'felt bad' for how he was being treated.

I don't really understand why, mind you. This wasn't a case of 'oh he said something once and now I hate him', this was a pattern of abusive behavior that would. not. stop. I even talked an officer into asking him to calm down two weeks before I permanently threw him out, and that didn't stop him. He tried to stop the raid when he realized he wouldn't get his way.

Some other time I'll debate with myself over why people will willingly put up with this shit, and why I become the bad guy for not wanting to.

Aside from the offtank, the only other reprimands I passed out were for two separate people who were asked not to use 'gay' as a pejorative. I'm not sure either apologized, but neither did it again, and that's good enough for me.


Now this whole thing was going somewhere.

I'm not a very good raid leader. I have to ask my members to police themselves, and was blessed with a group of people who did. Very well. But they weren't always happy with me. I had several people who complained I was being too mean with the offtank. I had people who thought I wasn't being strict enough with gear/alt/flask/foods. I had people who complained that the group comp was bad. I was constantly questioned about doing X instead of Y.

But they kept logging on every week.

And now that we can't run a 10 man icc without locking ourselves out of 25, they're asking me to organize things. I still run a TK raid every week with a freeroll on Ashes of A'lar - our newest guild recruit asked if he could come 'just to see the fight', and was shocked when I said he was free to roll as well. Several people have asked to do a ten man to finish off T7 achievements, and when I made a post asking who could come when, I got several more requests to do T9 and Onyxia as well. Two weeks ago the gentleman running our Herald of the Titans group was running late, and I logged on to find a note saying I was now in charge.

WTF.

I don't think I have great leadership. At all. I think what I have that these people are following is that I'm ok with being held accountable for decisions. I don't mean that they were unable to admit mistakes, I mean accountable for everything, even shit out of my control.

When 9 people log on for a 10 man, it's not my fault the group comp sucks. Half the group would want an achievement, half would want the hard mode, and I got to be the tiebreaker. The offtank was the one abusing people, but once he was out of sight, I was the one who got the flak for removing him. I had to call several raids because people were burning out after an hour of attempts. All stuff that does not make me popular.

This is what makes raid leading not fun. This is why most people really don't want to do it. It baffles the hell out of me. I can't really come to a conclusion about it beyond that.