Standard disclaimer: Leave your loathing of meta, World of Warcraft, or community diaries outside. If you think we should be playing your MMO instead, start a guild and write a recruitment diary. Don't leave a comment here and then get all hurtful when it isn't received with flowers and candy. Link to your recruitment diary is OK though.
Standard advertisement: Wreck List is the Daily Kos World of Warcraft guild. We are Horde-side on the Garrosh server. To join, roll up a character on Garrosh and when you log in type
/who wreck list
and any officer can get you in the guild. Yes, you have to be Horde. No, you don't have to be hardcore - casuals, PvPers, and people that just want to hang out on guild chat are all welcome.
No slow news week here. A very successful raid, an amusing political tale, but also some really yucky news too. Much more good than bad below the fold.
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BAD NEWS FIRST...
...another vault hacking. Security on the Internet really has gotten tougher over time. It no longer is about just not visiting sites you shouldn't -- now it's about getting your password stolen on open wi-fi connections, or all sorts of crazy stuff. Not sure how, don't really care, but another member got their account hacked. That, of course, meant the guild vault got robbed. Thankfully, both the guild and the member got their stuff returned by Blizzard.
They'll only do that so many times, though. So we had to come up with a response. To that end, the vault was sealed to all but guild members with an authenticator. To date there has only been one questionable report of hacking of an account with one of these babies, and no reports actually validated. So they are our new best friends.
Guildies without them can still get things from the Guild Vault, but they are now required to ask people with access to get it for them. If you want to avoid this, spend the $6.50 and buy an authenticator. Under no circumstances are people with access required to get you things beyond the initial two-week period (ends next Tuesday!) -- it is their personal generosity.
Dkosmama/Grassroots Mom really stepped up during this transition period, as every other officer had been lax in acquiring one, aside from the intrepid Moody. Yes, even I was a lazy bum about getting one. She has been the temporary guildleader of Wreck List for the past week, and has done a wonderful job getting the vault put back together in such a way that it's safer. And she's put way more hours into this game than she wanted to. For her willingness to make the game more like a job for this past bit, I give her my thanks. And she's going to permanently remain an officer, a well-deserved promotion, although that requires much less in the way of late nights...
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RAID UPDATE
We have moved up from 28th to 25th on 10-man Strict Progression, and made an larger jump in Strict Achievement from 26th to 21st. We don't just kill things, we kill 'em in weird ways. These are the numbers I really like to watch climb.
When we did Ulduar this past week, we scheduled the first night to be Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT, and Kologarn -- those being bosses we've seen before and are easy kills. So when we added Ignis and Auriaya to the list, I have to say, we were all a little shocked to have accomplished so much in a single evening. We'd never successfully killed either, and both went down quickly -- Ignis after I think three tries, Auriaya after two.
The awesome part was reconvening the next day -- and one-shotting the Iron Council. Yeah. One-shotted a boss I'd never successfully killed in any PUG, no matter how good they were as individuals. We really know our team well, and do listen well to instructions.
But then came Hodir, who cleaned our clocks. 15 times. Thank the divine for lots of coin in the guild bank! What was great about this fight as a DPSer is I got to blame the healers! (And they will not appreciate it! :p) But not in that sense of "healers can't do their jobs", more like they were trying so hard to do their jobs that they were not paying attention to their own health.
Meanwhile, the DPSers had really been learning the fight, and a look to FailBot showed that no one was really dying to the oddball stuff like Ice Shards anymore -- it was always "healer chases DPS, dies, group wipes". So the only thing I could come up with was to tell the healers that the DPSers really were fine, trust us, we can keep alive -- focus on your own HP bars. If we screw up, we screw up -- lesson learned. That was on wipes 14 and 15. 16th attempt, win. Healers really focused on themselves over everyone else's survival, and we pulled it out.
This isn't an anomaly, either -- I had been saved to a PUG on my other toon, who also got her first Hodir kill last night. I suggested to the healers in that group, after five or six wipes, that they let the DPS die if they foul up the fight, instead of chasing them around -- and they did. A couple tries later, everyone was standing near Toasty Fires during Frozen Blows, the healers could use their awesome AOE heals, and we pulled off the win. Once the healers start telling the DPS they need to be responsible individuals, they usually wake up and come through -- until then, they send you running in circles.
I also saw Mimiron the other night, who despite the hell I've heard about him, seems to actually be a fight Wreck List would thrive on -- step-by-step instructions work well for our team, and I honestly could see us pulling this one off. So I'm thinking of doing him next, actually, despite how illogical that apparently is for progression through the Keepers of Ulduar.
Whew, long piece.
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GMS GONE WILD!
So a few days ago -- Thursday, I believe -- the public trade channel was full of racist jokes. Really bad ones. So one of our guild members, true to our form, reported the racist chat as offensive.
So when he logged on the next day to find himself banned for racist comments, suffice it to say he was a little confused. And extremely angry. So he called up Blizzard and gave them an earful, after which he was unbanned. But not before he missed his shot at Flame Leviathan -- sorry. :(
The best part was the e-mail to him, in which it stated he was banned for making racist comments, and then a list of OTHER people making racist comments was provided for his perusal. You know, the stuff he reported? Yeah.
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ONYXIA IS BACK!
One of the most popular World of Warcraft raid bosses has been upgraded to level 80 for us to slay once again. If you need to learn how to kill this boss, please view this Not Suitable For Work video:
So! What's going on in your world... of Warcraft?