Titles and Finishing Up Wrath

So, with 2 1/2 weeks left in Wrath, my guild has been doing a little bit less "serious" raiding and more finishing up our "bucket lists" before things go away... A few people are attempting to get "Undying" from Naxx (nobody dies to a boss within a single lockout), and others, myself included (unknowingly) are still trying for "Champion of Ulduar", which includes defeating every boss with no one dying... and unlike Undying in Naxx, you can't reset that by wiping the boss. It has to be a one-shot clean kill.

As I mentioned in my last post, i've done a lot of things in this expansion that I never even expected to have the opportunity to do. I am two fights away from having my Ulduar 10m drake (Vezax HM and Yogg+1)... a couple more of my guildies got theirs last night, or will tonight I believe. I've seen literally *every* boss in this expansion fall before me (and now that I think about it, almost all of them were in heroic mode. A total of 6 bosses' hard modes escape me, now that I think on it... huh)

So, I don't exactly know what got me pondering it this morning, but I started thinking about titles... I started thinking about the titles that my main (Vaerron) has, and the little dilemma I had with myself over using either Kingslayer or Starcaller... So I posed the question to my twitter-base as to which title they felt was cooler. I actually had quite a response - with both titles getting about an equal nod. I personally went with Starcaller, because I've been Kingslayer on my druid since July, and it felt like time for a change. Besides, my hunter is still Kingslayer at the moment. Also, as several people have pointed out, Starcaller is a much more exclusive title. It seems like a majority of the people rampaging around Dalaran have Kingslayer titles, but not as many have Starcaller, so that kinda makes me feel pretty awesome... not that I am better than your average Dalaran wander-jockey. ;D

So, after the huge response I got to my "Kingslayer or Starcaller" question, I decided to pose another question to my followers... "Which title does (any of) your toons possess that you're the most proud of?"... Man... my twitter-feed was *not* prepared. I am still getting some replies even as I write this on my break during class!

I've recieved quite a large variety of replies. Some people saying Kingslayer or Starcaller predictably. Some of them saying much more exclusive ones like "Hand of A'dal" or "Champion of the Naaru", both of which are no longer obtainable. Several people mentioned the PvP titles that were given from back in the day, whereas others mentioned some VERY grind-accomplished titles like Salty, Loremaster, Bloodsail Admiral and Seeker. I think Cynwise won the "Holy fucking shit" achievement when he proclaimed his proudest title (with proof on his blog) that he had a level 19 Ambassador... holy shit.. I've got a metric TON of 80s, and only one of them has Ambassador. You can see how he did it here... Absolute insanity, if you ask me, but I digress.

So, if you're not on my twitter feed, feel free to follow me @Achloryn and see what all the insanity is about.. There is a *wonderful* WoW community on twitter, and a very large part of them are bloggers/podcasters as well. I'm really quite glad I stumbled my way across them. They've found me a guild, helped me improve my WoW game, allowed me to help others, helped me find new friends, and just been all-around fucking awesome... Now, before this post gets too sappy, i'm gonna close it out by saying just one thing.

I'm on a Chocobo!

Chronicles of an expansion

Welp... It's official..I've officially killed every boss Wrath of the Lich King has to offer... Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not 12/12 25m Heroic ICC or anything like that... but every boss fight i've thrown myself at has, eventually, fallen before my sword/spell/face/claws. Maybe a little backstory is necessary.

At the beginning of Wrath, I was a mage... The big draenei guy you see as my avatar for blogspot? Yeah that's him... still in his ABSOLUTELY HIDEOUS T8 tunic... Hey Blizz? Clothies are for robes, not tunics. Fuck off with that leg-showing cloth shit, mmkay? Anyway...

I raided in BC as a mage, and that was how I started Wrath... Clusterfucking my way through Naxx with pugs and the occasional guild run (we weren't a raiding guild, btw)... I succumbed to the bug and left my casual/social guild shortly after Ulduar was released, and joined a burgeoning raiding guild. These guys were... struggling to say the least. (I won't name any guild names, or even server names, lest they somehow manage to stumble upon this blog and think i'm speaking ill of them.)... The guild was moderately well managed by the officers. The GM wasn't a raider, which I thought was odd, but whatever right? But in Ulduar we just... couldn't manage to get it together really. We made............. a little progress. Only killing (oh god lemme count... ) 8 bosses out of 13 or 14 if you count Algalon. We only ever downed 1 keeper as a guild, Hodir. We threw ourselves at Freya and Thorim a few times with nothing even resembling success, and we weren't even dumb enough to look towards Mimiron's room... and of course not having been able to kill all of the keepers, we couldn't even attempt Vezax or Yogg, even if we wanted to.

The frustration of going 8 bosses in (in a 4 hour raid duration, mind you) and then going brain dead and barely even giving half-hearted attempts at anything else REALLY got to me, and shortly after ToC was released I retired myself from raiding and rolled a brand new toon on Wyrmrest Accord... an RP server. Why an RP server? Cause I knew someone IRL who was on that server, and WoW lore had *always* fascinated me, especially since I used to play the ORIGINAL Warcraft game wayyyyyyyyyyy back in the day... but I digress.

I spent about a year on Wyrmrest Accord... made friends, RP'ed, dungeoned a bit, leveled a SHIT TON of new alts, and just had a general relaxing time... ToC came and went with little more than a notice from me, and then Icecrown Citadel was patched in... and there was a little tickle in the back of my head. Along with this little tickle came with a toon I had had more fun on than i'd had in who-knows how long...

My hunter... God looking at my UI back then makes me *cringe*. Anyway... I've kinda taken to a lot of toons in my WoW career, but I absolutely fell in LOVE with the hunter.. From levelling him to dungeoning with him. So much so that I ground heroics like I had never done before, and soon had him a full t9 set of gear, and found myself going back to wowhead and find out how to properly spec... learn my rotation, etc etc.

I loved my hunter so much that I did something I hadn't done in over a year.

Trade Chat:"Starting a brand new ICC10 group. Looking for DPS. PST class/spec/experience"

Me: "Marksman hunter... No ICC experience, but i've read up on several of the fights, and I know my rotation well... no idiot, I know how to raid."

Yep... I pugged into an ICC 10... and holy fuck was it fun. After about 3 hours of raiding, I found myself with a 6-boss kill experience, and that little tickle in the back of my head had suddenly turned into a full fledged roaring desire to return back to raiding. I also had a standing invite from the raid leader to join their guild and raid with them... something I was very hesitant to do because I really liked my tiny little RP guild... but the thirst just would not be denied. I talked to my GM and asked around, listened to a few podcasts, and finally transferred my hunter over to Shadowsong-US... a very large guild called "The Illuminati Order", associated with the "Warcraft Outsiders" podcast. I really dived in headfirst into raiding with this guild. In fact, my first week in the guild I got to see 10 "Fall of the Lich King (10 player)" achievements spammed. This guild had gotten their first LK kill, and I joined them just in time to see it... and no I wasn't involved LOL.

Along with my hunter, I transferred one other toon to Shadowsong. A baby little fuzzball of a druid named Vaerron.

Man, that's still one of my all time favorite screenshots... ANYWAY. I levelled Vaerron up to be a tank. I became quickly enthralled with it from the first time I successfully tanked a dungeon (Gundrak) at level 78 with the full Eviscerator's leatherworking crafted set... but I ran into one problem. "Illuminati Order" was an *immense* guild compared to what I was used to (6-700 toons), and they really had no need for raiding tanks. Well, by this point in time I had already started blogging and started networking over twitter, so I put out a call for a relatively casual/progression-ish guild who was willing to recruit an untested tank.

Thus, in July of 2010, I met Amber and Orithea of Brotherhood of Oblivion, on Azgalor... Well, I have already been exceedingly verbose in this post, so I'll try to cut it short here, but I found my new home on Azgalor... Brotherhood of Oblivion splintered a week after my joining, and Stands In Bad was formed. The rest, as they say, is history. I've transferred my original mage to Azgalor, as well as my hunter, and started a few other toons as well. I've earned myself a couple kingslayer titles, helped several others earn theirs, became an officer, became a raid leader, and managed to not kill anyone in the process... go figure eh?

Sorry if I have glazed over the last few months of history, but a lot of what has happened since my leaving Illuminati Order has been chronicled on this blog, so I don't feel like repeating myself too much. A lot of people have had bad things to say about this expansion, but I think they're absolutely out of their mind. Were there bad parts? Sure... I couldn't imagine going into ToC as top-end content every week, although I do secretly enjoy the raid to a point. I've gone back and finished the bosses i'd never killed in Ulduar, and even done all of their hard modes, all the way up to 7/12 in ICC10 HM. That's pretty impressive, in my opinion, for someone who had "retired from raiding" at one point in time.

Thus Wrath of the Lich King comes to an end. I'm ready for it to end, but I can look back over the last 24 months rather fondly. Friendships made and ended. Raids killed me, and fell before me. Frustrations were had, money was spent on server transfers, disillusionment was emerged from, and all-in-all... I don't think I would change one bit of it.

Lucky day!

Aww yeah, that's right... I got my Anzu

mount... It's about damn time!

So, I still don't really have a lot to say. There's a lot of changes happening to people's stats over the next month or so, but i'm really not that phased by most of it. Druid tanks are getting nerfed? Well sure.. we're overpowered as shit right now. Our self healing is absurd, our mastery is outrageous, and our health pools are obscene. All 3 of them are getting nerfed...

meh, such is life.

My guild has also been teetering on the edge of taking the break from official raids until Cataclysm... Not entirely unexpected really, but it's happening in a bizarre way. People are cancelling at the last minute, people are getting frustrated for one reason or another, and it just seems like we're losing focus easily... I understand that things happen, but being a raid leader it's really frustrating trying to hold the raid together in spite of all of this. I do what I can but man sometimes I just wanna smack people... hahaha.. BUT.. In spite of that, we got several people something really cool with a project raid on fridays...

Yep.. That was the last achievement a couple people needed to get their Ruste

d Proto-Drakes... the mount given from the "Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10-man)" achievement

Awesome looking mount isn't it? I wants one for my own (photo courtesy of Wowhead).

With our project raid FINALLY downing Yogg+1 (which was a nightmare of a fight, by the way), we moved on to the only boss none of us have never killed in this expansion...

Algalon, the goddamn, observer.. Widely heralded as the most difficult boss encounter in this expansion short of Lich King hard mode... and rightly so. The man hits fast, hard, and has a LOT of goddamn aoe damage. When I ended up having to leave for work tonight, we had about 20 minutes left on his timer and had already wiped on him around 5-6 times... Not a fight to take lightly, even as much as you might outgear it. To give you a hint? My crew which is comprised of 10 man, kingslayers and ALL of us with average item levels over 251... and we could barely get past the first Big Bang (that's only 90 seconds into the fight) on our best attempt.

Algalon is no... fucking... joke... yarrrgghh. /flail