Hellscream's Warsong, now makes people 15% more retarded!

Today the buff in ICC went up to 15% and people are excited because they think we will finally have a chance to down Lich King. The fact is we’re not going to down Lich King, not if people believe we need the buff in order to do so.

Do you know what we have died on every single time on the Arthas encounter? Defile, defile and more defile. People don’t walk out of defile because the use eyes are obviously considered an exploit. A 15% damage buff won’t make us move out of defile faster, it will make people pay 15% less attention to other things.

When the 5% buff hit our guild took a dive into the trash can. We wiped on Deathwhisper normal mode, people died on trash, we wiped on places we had never wiped before. If anything the ICC buff makes people more retarded, even if they’re not aware of it.

The buff itself is a horrible, horrible idea. Why is it even there in the first place? Aren’t we supposed to get better as our gear and knowledge improves? Thus making encounters easier to beat? Why on earth do we need a stupid, scaling buff that makes people more retarded? So that ICC can be pugged? To hell with that, every god damn instance in WotLK can be pugged already, let ICC be!

Blizzard made a nice gesture by allowing us to turn it off, but they could have at least added an achivement or a title for people choosing to do so that we could have som reason for doing it. The problem is, people always walk the path of least resistance. I was one of the few raiders who suggested the buff be turned off; the response I got was “Why?”

I don’t blame people for raiding with the buff, it’s only retarded to not use what’s been given to you, but the main problem is that it does not prevent lethal boss mechanics, and lethal boss mechanics wipe the raid regardless. What the buff does remove however is focus, and that makes lethal boss mechanics more lethal.

Explain to me why we spent an entire night wiping on Blood Prince Council hardmode with the 15% buff active when we almost one-shotted the encounter the first time with the 5% buff. Because people didn’t run after the flame orb, they didn’t need to; they had a 15% damage buff!

One instance per tier?

I proposed a suggestion to my guild yesterday that wasn’t actually endorsed by the masses. To put it simple, I wanted my guild to cut down from two days a week to one day a week when it comes to raiding. Why did I do this? Two days of raiding is already very little, but when there’s only once instance to raid even that gets too much.

Burnout is closing in as it always has been doing at the end of a raid. People are getting tired of farming the same instance over and over, especially when we got nowhere else to go. In TBC we could change between Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine, Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, and Sunwell was not within reach for most of us until the expanison hit.

Today we got one instance to go to and that’s Icecrown. We’re so overgeared that no place else offers a vague challenge. That’s why I think we should raid one day a week instead of two, because people will get tired, they will get sick of the game, they will be burned out and we will lose them before the new raid is released.

However, most people seem to think that the amount of time you spend playing is not proportional to the amount of time you use to get burned out. I can certainly understand why some people are reacting to this, they are not sick of the game and they already think two times a week is little, so of course they’re against this, but I only want to prevent the same disaster that’s been taking place every single time we come to this place in time. At the end of Naxxramas we nearly lost all our raiders from TBC, at the end of Ulduar we had trouble filling a raid with barely 20 people, at the end of ToTC people were so damn tired of WoW that some left to never return, all because we insisted on over-farming those instances.

I think we’ve reached a point in WotLK that makes me say I’m really looking forward to Cataclysm. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and not repeat this failure of an expanison.

Life Grip lol!

Information about priests in Cataclysm was revealed recently and it seems like us priests are getting a friendly version of the Death Knight’s death grip. It’s called Leap of Faith, but everyone will call it life grip, it’s inevitable.

For those who don’t know, this spell allows you to pull friendly party or raid member from their position towards you. The range and cooldown is unknown, but I’ll bet it will be somewhere between 30 to 40 yards. Either way it’s going to be a hilarious spell and I can’t stop hating Blizzard enough if they decide to remove it before Cataclysm goes live.

This spell will not only be a source of great humor, but we will now finally have the ability to pull those retards away from the fire they aren’t supposed to stand in. As a priest, I’ve always felt like a babysitter in a good way and I take enjoyment in knowing I save my friends asses from time to time, but now I can do it much more directly then previously.

Myself and one of my priest friends also discussed many ways of using this spell to piss of raid leaders and such. For example, I jump off a cliff and in the air I use life grip on another raid member, pulling him/her down with me while my priest friend stands on the edge of the cliff and life grips me up again to his position, we are so going to get demoted for this, but it will be worth it.

But enough about life grip. After the eastern vacation from raiding, my guild cleared some more ICC hardmodes and I must say that buff is starting to get ridiculous. 10% increase in health, damage and healing/absorption has a huge impact on the encounters, and I still don’t understand why this buff is present in hardmodes. If it were up to me I would raid without it, but without a proper argument this isn’t happening, seeing as there’s no rewards whatsoever to raid without it.

We downed Rotface, Festergut, Blood Princes, Lana’Thel and Valithria and got Sindragosa to 35% in one night and I think Lich King will go down soon enough. Again I am confused about the varying difficulty in the bosses. We struggled like hell on Blood Princes, but we almost one-shotted Lana’Thel. Festergut and Rotface went down easily as well, but I’ve heard Putricide is a living nightmare, so I’m looking forward to that fight.

There is one thing in particular that is a great source of concern for me and that is burnout. It’s starting to kick in, even for me and I’m afraid I’ll be tired of ICC soon. I guess it’s inevitable when Blizzard only decides to release one instance per tier. Don’t get me wrong, both Ulduar and ICC have been great instances, but they’re still only the only content we had to raid for months (I won’t even mention the grand failure that ToTC was) and that wears you out, even with different difficulties to choose between.

I’m looking forward to this new raid that’s supposed to come out soon, and I hope Blizzard decides to pull a Sunwell and make it bloody hard, TBC style. With all the easy content and seeing now as ICC is being pugged on a regular basis, not to mention the increasing amount of Kingslayers appearing every day, I hope that this instance will be different.