Portent Alliance Is Recruiting!

Does this sound like you?

Is schadenfreude your middle name? When I say I have incontrovertible proof that Kil'jaeden has a fetish for draconic bukkake, do you want to know more?  Do you subscribe to the radical notion that your guildmates and raid teammates are people as opposed to little blinky boxes in Grid?  Then Portent Alliance (Sentinels-H) may have a straitjacket with your name on it.

PA is a level 23 guild, currently looking for dedicated players to fill out an "upper-mediumcore" raiding team.  We raid from 8:30 - 11:30 Eastern on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday with old-world mount/achievement/legendary/RP gear farming on Saturdays.  Loot is distributed by EP/GP.  We're 12/12 in normal-mode Tier 11, and the third ranked progression guild on our server.  Currently running one 10-man raid, but we're looking to fill out the ranks enough to run two 10-mans, then move up into 25s.

Our schedule is relaxed, but our attitude is not.  We need people who can commit to raiding, show up on time, be prepared, know the fights, know their class, and be ready to rock a boss's face off.

We're in particular need of raid healers, especially druids, but any class and role is welcome -- we're just in general need of raiders.  Any other questions or requests for information can be directed at our guild leader, Ktok, on Twitter or on his blog, The Glaivecow.

Crowd Control

There were three of them in the open, a priest and two fighters. Two sharpshooters lurked behind them, camouflaged. Badly. Jezriyah shot Ailinea a knowing look; she chuckled and shook her head. Humans might have gotten the hang of tracking and shooting, but they made pretty terrible hunters on the whole. A part of her really wanted to give them a hug, point out that even the mage could see them, and offer to take them home to their mamas.

But they did have guns, and the five of them had already slaughtered their way this far into the Deadmines. Udiyvli gave a great roar, rushing forward and slinging her mace at the priest.

Five.

Pomaikai rushed in behind her. The young Sunwalker spun around as she ran through, throwing one hand out and shouting a sharp word in Taurahe. Light flashed from her fingers, and a beam of sunlight materialized from thin air, striking one of the fighters blind. He clutched his head and howled, crumbling to his knees.

Four.

As the other fighter lunged for Udiyvli, Ailinea raised her hands, fingers twisting delicately in midair. The soldier's muscles stiffened, weapons falling to the ground. He gasped for breath as his body spasmed, collapsing in on itself. A tortured scream leapt in pitch as he folded inwards, flesh consuming flesh until his whole form tucked into that of a panicked swine, squealing in terror.

Three.

Udiyvli laughed, stomping a mighty hoof against the craggy ground. The walls of the cave shook, and the two erstwhile snipers lost their footing. Grunjin barely missed a beat, his eyes narrowing in concentration. The soft green healing mist swirling around Udi's body extended, tendrils coiling about one of the men's ankles. It coalesced into squirming vines, which dug into the ground and clenched tightly around the target's legs. He yelped sharply, trying to jerk away from the thorns digging into his flesh.

Two.

Jezi smiled darkly. She ran her fingers through her quiver, quickly discerning the fletching by touch. The arrow she drew had a small, blown-glass tip, filled with venom drawn from a wyvern's maw. She notched the arrow, pressed the end against her bow to crack it open, and fired. It caught the last dazed rifleman squarely in the throat. He gasped deeply, inhaling the vapors, and was quickly overcome, slouching against the stone wall in a daze.

One.

It was only a few seconds later that the priest finally staggered back from Udiyvli's blows, looking frantically around for her compatriots. Horror dawned upon her face as she found herself alone, and her last screams never escaped the oncoming wall of light and fire.

Back of the Class

My name is Jezriyah, and I am a raider.

Not a terrifically hardcore one, but a raider by anyone's standards.  I have 3 scheduled raid nights a week (it used to be 4, but my raid leader is temporarily leading another group as well right now) with a random VoA/ToC run thrown in once every week or two.  I crunch numbers like a motherfucker, or at least bribe Rilgon with one-liners and gnome porn to do it for me.  I know my role, I practice, I work my ass off.  There's nothing casual about how seriously I take raiding in this game.

I raid with nine other people.  Warrior and paladin tanks.  A resto shaman, disc priest, and holy pally healing team.  One arcane mage, one unholy death knight, one balance druid, one frost death knight (occasionally swapped out for a ret paladin) and me, the hunter -- survival when I have to be for replenishment, marksmanship at heart and when I get my choice.

I raid as a solid 20% of the raid's DPS if I'm doing it right, probably closer to 15% when you account for tank damage and the fact that our boomkin is god-tier.  I raid with my reflexes on full twitch and every door between myself and the rest of the house shut.  I raid my ass off.

Mine is one of two ten-man raid groups in my guild.  There are, in fact, 25 people in my guild who can put together a decent raid.  We cleared the Lower Spire on Saturday (and I scooped THE TRINKET off Saurfang) and could have gone a good bit further if we'd had the time.  But that's where it falls apart.  Our two raid teams have ten people each, and we've got three or four other raid-capable people, but putting together the 25-man involved taking one or two people who just aren't ready for prime time.  We can run a 25, but we just haven't got the manpower to run a 25-man progression raid.  And the scheduling differences throw another ugly kink in it.

I raid without the 5% Rampage/Leader of the Pack buff.  I raid without Mangle or Blood Frenzy, Trauma or Savage Combat.  I raid with a single ilevel 277 item -- the exalted Ashen Verdict ring -- and some 264s from the Frost vendor (and THE TRINKET, which was a fluke of that one 25 we rounded up).  I raid with Quel'Delar and non-heroic Njorndar.

I raid with the weight of the encounter on my shoulders.  I raid with the knowledge that if I hang out in a void zone one tick too long, there's only one person watching my ass, not three, and if I keel over we're most likely going to wipe due to lack of damage.  I raid with a back-of-my-hand knowledge of everyone's abilities -- whose damage will spike immediately, whose will build up, who's not good at moving and may need his name called out when he gets a debuff, whose connection is shaky on certain fights (and which) so if they don't respond for a moment they probably need extra heals and protection.  And of course, the immediate recognition of every voice in the raid.  (If you can manage this level of knowledge in a 25-man, good on you -- but I sure can't.)

I raid.  I raid my ass off.  And when I get the Kingslayer title (hopefully sometime this week or next -- we've just downed Sindragosa this week), I will wear it with pride.  And anyone who tries to assert that doing it with 9 other people and a 15% damage buff makes me any less the savior of Azeroth is gonna get my boot up their ass.

I Don't Know What Your Guild Does On Friday Night...

...but mine raids Honor Hold.

Okay, technically it was our weekly Friday Night Old School Raid. We'd knocked out Gruul and Magtheridon already, and neither Kazzak or Doomwalker was up, and we capped all the PvP bases, and this was just how bored we were.

"Where we port up to? Antechamber?" "No no, the Unclechamber." "... 50 DKP plus. That one HURT, Jez."

(Alternate title: "Hey look! It's a lock pocket!" I was a punning machine Tuesday night.)

So I guess some talk about actual gameplay is warranted here, no? I'm running out of lore musings, fits of RP and pointless memes to toss up here -- I might as well discuss what I'm actually doing in game most of the time these days.

Which, right now, is Ulduar. After some stops and starts early on due to bugged fights and personnel shake-ups, my guild has finally started getting into the place regularly. It's been loads of fun so far -- difficult as crap, but once we got out of the Naxxramas steamroller mindset and back into the familiar "wipe, study, fix, try again" rhythm of true progression raiding, the majority of it has been completely doable.

So here be my impressions of Tier 8 raiding so far...

Emalon was surprisingly simple, mostly due to the utter face-pwning of our DK offtank. She's a newish member who's turning out to be one of the best /ginvites we ever spent. With a few exceptions (mostly guildies) I've had very sketchy experiences with DK tanks, probably due to a lot of them being DPSers who got a level 55 tank for Christmas. Anyway, with a good offtank , there's pretty much nothing to this little punk. It requires just enough coordination and communication that your average post-Wintergrasp PUG will probably fall apart on it, but a friends-of-friends "people that you know don't suck" pickup should be able to handle it just fine. If your guild is good at keeping track of changing situations, he's cake.

Of course, being the only one of your class in the raid and having your T8 PvE pants drop doesn't hurt either. Those were a MASSIVE upgrade from my T7 -- I'm much more impressed with this tier than the last. Ready to wear, too; with just the leatherworking leg enchant and no gems, they were still an improvement. Plus, the socket bonus is just +hit, which I'm drowning in, so I just put two straight +agi gems in them. In MM spec (which I'm admittedly not in for raiding often, wtb retadin/spriest PST) I'm now over 4700 AP and 35% crit, self-buffed. Very, very sexy. I do still need to regem a lot of my stuff from AP/Crit to straight +agi, between my "main spec" getting better benefits from agility post-3.1 and the fact that I'm in my "off spec" most of the time for raid utility reasons.

Anyway. Trollsie gives new VoA boss an 8/10. A fun, simple fight with tier drops... hard to beat that.

Flame Leviathan is simultaneously an incredible drudge and fun as crap. I wish there was less trash leading up to it, because it really does wear thin after a while. By the time we're to the boss, I'm half asleep... but getting to blow away dozens upon dozens of mobs is pretty much always fun. Most of my experience has been on a chopper; this week I got to pilot a demolisher, but aside from being a lot slower the trash wasn't much different. I didn't actually get to do the fight in the demolisher, because we were in the middle of pulling the boss when the sky fell open over my house, we were suddenly getting frequent lightning and quarter-sized hail, and the tornado sirens started going off. By the time that was done with and I logged back on, they'd pulled someone else in to get the kill. Anyway, it's somehow simple and confusing all at once, but it goes by quickly. Trollsie says: 6/10.

Razorscale, I'm proud to say we got down before she was recently nerfed. Back in my day the mole machines popped on opposite ends of the terrace from each other! *shakes cane* But seriously, it's a fun little fight. I generally enjoy alternating adds-boss-adds mechanics (dear, sweet, darling Curator, how I miss you...) and trying to ground the drake in as few passes as possible is fun too. An intial problem we had was being dot-heavy -- we'd get her to around 52% in the second pass, she'd fly off, we'd get adds, then the dots would tick down and she'd hit 50 and come down. Chaos ensued. We've streamlined things since then; barring any hiccups in the transition, we can take her pretty easily. Trollsie says: 8/10.

Ignis the Furnace Master. Please divert the ears and eyes of any children under 16.

...

OH MY GOD I HATE THIS BASTARD WITH SUCH A PASSION. The main reason he's so frustrating is that we've, so far, just had tremendously bad luck on him. We have the technique just about down. We aren't making any huge mistakes. He just tends to eat our healers. Badly. As in, "One healer is in the slag pot already and he hits Flame Jets right as the OT needs a massive heal, so the OT goes down, the add goes after the MT, and while the lone remaining healer is trying to keep the MT up through all that, the healer in the pot gets thrown out directly into a scorch and dies." It is absolutely bananas. The RNG has it out for us on this bitch; apparently Ambrosine of I Like Bubbles and her guild are not faring much better.

The fight itself isn't that bad. It feels a bit gimmicky for me, and I am personally indignant at not being able to shatter the golems myself... although it's nice to have a fight where I'm not on add duty for once. Trollsie says: 7/10 on paper, FUCK YOU/10 in practice. The above-mentioned pun was the only good thing about this stupid fight.

X-002 Deconstructor is fun as hell. He was a massive bitch until we figured out that if you tank him near enough to a scrap pile, he won't spawn bots from those piles. Tank him in between two piles on one side and you only get two streams of scrapbots to deal with. We went from calling a wipe mid-fight because he'd healed back up to 80% halfway through the enrage timer, to getting [Nerf Engineering] on both of our first two kills. We do have a tendency towards bad luck with light bombs hitting right before tantrums (often on the healers... noticing a trend here?) but once we got the new tanking position down, we've been able to drop him fairly reliably. And the mecha-Majin-Buu voiceovers don't hurt, either. Even when your priest gets squashed, it's hard not to giggle when he gets all "I DUN THINK IT BENDS DAT WAY :(" about it. This is hands down my favorite fight so far. Trollsie says: 9/10.

Oh, and before Tuesday's kill, we accidentally pulled both of his add groups at once. Downed them handily. "Damn. Is there an achievement for that?" "If there was an achievement for surviving your own stupidity, we'd all have it already." My guild leader wanted me to note that these two groups pulling together was the "too hard to deal with" bug that led them to pull the Decon trash from the instance altogether early on. Therefore, the fact that we downed the two pulls simultaneously makes us uber.


Kologarn. Urgh. We've downed him twice, but both times by the skin of our teeth. I hate it when progression kills are that close. The first time, we ended up at like 4% with no tanks alive, flailing helplessly at all our cooldowns. The second was a little better, but it was still on the verge of going completely out of hand when he dropped. The fight mechanic is neat (and thank God that damage done to the arms actually damages the boss, otherwise this would have been insane) but we're just plain having trouble dealing with all the focusing and refocusing and moving around that we're having to deal with. Trollsie says: 7/10 when properly executed, 4/10 so far with guild.

And we managed to knock down Auraiya a single time. It's just like everyone's said -- it's all about the pull. The fight is frantic as hell, but in a fun way. I had no damn clue whether we were doing good, bad or otherwise until my Kill Shot started proccing. That Pounce move is an absolute mess. It is a little bit overwhelming, to be perfectly honest, but at least below the overwhelming is a fairly easy kill (we basically one-shotted her, not counting a false start where the offtank didn't break line of sight in time and got eaten). Crazy cat lady falls to berserker wolf lady. And I got [Ironaya's Discarded Mantle] -- which I'd link, were I not at work right now. Suffice it to say they were a solid upgrade from my T7 shoulders, and they have a nice bluish-black version of the T8 shoulder graphics. Still a bit disproportionally ginormous on a troll chick (as most epic shoulders are), but dead sexy nonetheless.

That's Ulduar so far. We got as much down Tuesday as we ever had at all, not counting Auriaya. She's on notice for tonight, along with the Iron Council, Hodir and Freya. The Portents are raiding again -- at top-level, cutting-edge content, for the first time in WoW -- and damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

On Staying My Blue Arse Put

So as of yesterday morning, I'm yellow-barred on WoW Heroes through Heroic Eye of Eternity. Not only that, but for the first time, all of my enchants are listed as top level (as soon as I get another socket slapped on my new belt, anyway). I have my full ten-man Tier 7 set -- granted, a couple of pieces were sidegrades or slight downgrades to what I had before, but I'm a sucker for matchy shit, and the last two pieces of it got defaulted to me anyway. Be.Imba actually has my "should perform well" line past the end of the 25-man Malygos fight. By all means, gear- and talent-wise, I have every right and ability in the world to just stroll up to any given raid boss currently in the game and shoot the living crap out of it.

The only 25-man content I've seen is Obsidian Sanctum. It happens once a week. I'm not likely to see any of the other heroic content until Ulduar comes out at the very soonest.

My guild be tiny. It's hysterical for me to say that, because we've recently pretty much exploded in numbers. We first started raiding in BC around last... August or September, I wanna say, if not later. And by "started raiding" I mean someone looked at the guild list and said, "Dude, we have ten 70s on." And someone else yelled "OMG, let's go to Kara!", and we did.

As of now, working around alts and schedules and the like, on the average night we can put together a ten-man raid with one to three people left over. Every so often we have a short night and have to grab someone off the guild's collective friends list. We host a Sunday night 25-man Sarth run -- no drakes -- with some of the better people we collectively know from members' old guilds and the like. I'll fully admit to being frustrated -- the random number gods have been good to me, and ADD and farming content don't really mix. I'd pretty much give any non-game-necessary appendage for the chance to see Kel'Thuzad or Malygos on heroic mode, to have a new challenge to work towards and new loot to aim for.

So I guess it's a shame that I'm not gonna do anything about it.

I've heard the tone people use when they say "family guild" -- the same tone you'd use when referring to the "girlfriend" of a guy that you know is gay. I joined my guild the day that I converted my trial account to paid, about six days after Jez was first rolled in early December of 2007. The friend who convinced me to try WoW was already a member, and told me the people were friendly, welcoming and understanding of noobishness. Plus the guild leader and second-in-command both played hunters, so they'd be able to help me along. This was before I knew what raiding was.

Fast forward to a year and some change later. I haven't so much as stepped into 25-man Naxx with these people.

What I have done is every heroic dungeon in the game, some of them multiple times over in pursuit of a single piece of gear for a single person. I've /cheered countless upgrades and /spit on bosses who dropped healing plate instead of the belt the shaman needed. I've sleepwalked through fights I didn't give half a damn for and watched the only upgrade I needed get handed to someone else. I've wiped six or seven times in a row on a boss because one person in the group wasn't getting it (including at least a couple where that person was me).

I've seen a resto druid down Kael'thas Sunstrider with moonfire spam, and a dead Death Knight resurrect herself as a ghoul and bite Sjonnir the Iron-Shaper to death (on heroic, no less). I've seen wipes at 1% on bosses we destroyed the week before. I've spent four weeks going after the Safety Dance achievement before finally barely pulling it off, only to go in later with five people who'd never seen the fight and got it immediately. Hell, I've gotten achievements I didn't know existed before I happenstanced into them.

I've wrapped up raids at 10 PM and still not gotten to bed until a quarter of two, flying my nether ray in circles while nattering on in Vent about life, love, school, politics, religion, and the sexual fetishes of nearly every canon character in the Warcraft universe. (Ask me why Kil'Jaeden is into dragon bukkake. You know you want to know.) I've theorycrafted over omelets at the IHOP across the street from Disneyland, argued lore over drinks at the Anaheim Hilton, and spent three hours hiding behind my favored meat-shield while DPSing down the Blizzard Store Line Boss. I'm currently frantically combing my work schedule for a point at which I can run away to a little lake north of Atlanta to get drunk and barbecue (and probably theorycraft and argue lore) with people I've never laid eyes on before.

A week or two ago, some slap-in-the-face drops and respeccing woes had combined with RL stress and emotional problems to turn me into a sobbing mess of inadequacy issues. I spent a good twenty minutes in tells with my guild leader reassuring me that I was useful to the guild, valuable to have on raids and damn good at playing my class. Comfort I didn't deserve for being so overreactive, but there it was.

If my car breaks down or my flight gets cancelled anywhere between Dallas and Washington D.C. (or in Chicago, or a few choice parts of the west coast), I have a ride and a sofa to crash on.

I've had the time of my life over the last year and change, and I have more and better friends than I thought someone with my lack of social skills ever would.

There are a lot of great raiding guilds on my server. I could get subbed into a raid with any one of them and have a good chance of getting in. I could probably, with a few upgrades, pull top DPS in any given heroic PUG on our realm. I could go take on the biggest and baddest raids in the game, and leave my tiny ten-man "family guild" in the dust.

Fuck it. I'll come back for Malygos at 90.