New Toys? For Me?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say our attendance problems are over, but the Red Devils have managed to successfully acquire several of the more hardcore casual (casual hardcore?) raid members from another guild, Upper Echelon! Like most guilds, UE was having difficulty putting together a full raid group. One of our officers (Hilfer) approached them with the idea of a merger/acquisition and instead of being rebuffed, the idea was received warmly. We put together a test run of Ulduar on Sunday, followed by a successful Ony/ToC/Vault clear on Tuesday. Everyone was impressed with the performance of the UE members and the guild invites were issued!

This made a busy night for me, putting together the raid report, issuing invites and updating the guild records for the new members. Some of the new members from UE have a LOT of alts (all alts are welcome!) and the Red Devils keeps the name of the main in the guild note for each member. Everyone joins as an “Alt” rank, and mains are promoted to “Friend”. Promotions are done roughly every two weeks and are based on raid attendance over the past 60 days. Given the scarcity of raids in our recent history, our new members should quickly climb in rank as we raid more frequently now!

I use the addon “Chatter” which displays the name of the main character for alts in the chat window. This really helps me keep track of who’s who! With all the new members, that’s even more important now than ever.

Musings on Modern WoW Life...

Ok, I know, I know… this blog has been comatose for weeks. It’s not that the Red Devils haven’t done anything; it’s just that we haven’t done anything new. Well, ok – we did clear the newly updated Onyxia, but I can’t say it was much of a challenge for us.


At this point we are able to clear Vault, Onyxia and ToC all in one night, which kinda’ leaves us with little else to shoot for on our other raiding nights. As a result, we are once again plagued with a lack of raiders logging in! A few of our more “hard core” members would like to fully clear Ulduar through Algalon, but now that the instance is considered outdated by many, we can’t get enough players together to make a serious attempt.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the shift that Blizzard has made in the game away from a raid focus to one of PvP (i.e. arena). The top end gear is no longer the coveted boss drops from endgame content; instead it is limited in availability to only the highest ranked arena teams.

So, what’s a WoW addict to do? PvP, my friend - battlegrounds galore! I have put together about the best PvP gear set that I can, outside of the current seasons arena gear (and arena matches are very painful for me). I just can’t seem to get together with a consistent team, so battlegrounds with a few friends is a lot more fun… usually. Some nights the Horde just romps all over us, but occasionally we can turn the tables and do it to them. Close battles are fun (win or lose), and steamrolling the Horde is always fun, but getting romped… not so much.

Is there anyone more despised by all other classes than a ret pally? This coveted position, once the domain of rogues, has been held for far too long by those bubble popping maniacs. Find one of these suckers guarding a base with a tree druid by his side and you better bring an army with you, buddy. You’re gonna’ need it to take that flag.

In other news, I have recently joined the ever swelling ranks of the unemployed. Given that situation, you might think I have a lot more time for WoW (and this blog). Sadly, that’s not the case. As official househusband of the Seabrat home, my duties are overwhelming! I buy the groceries, cook, clean, wash dishes and even (gasp) scrub toilets, all of which leaves me with precious little time for play. Speaking of which, I think I just heard the dryer beeping - signaling it’s time to get back to my new “job”.

Anub'arak Down… Colliseum Cleared!

Dateline: September 20, 2009 - 10:53 pm

The Red Devils finally managed to scrape together a raid group and down the last boss for their first full clear of the Colliseum! And let me tell you, it was brutal! We had to pug the last few spots to get started. Even then we didn't enter the instance until 8:00 and our normal raid time is 7:00! As expected, the pugees didn't stick around very long. Fortunately they did stay long enough for more Red Devils to log in and we were able to replace them with guildies when they began to mysteriously DC after wipes. That was when we started making some real progress. Bottom line - I'm glad we filled with pugs rather than call off the raid. It worked out this time!


Snyped and I were placed on orb duty, which meant we spent a lot of time targeting and dropping them to the floor to create frost patches for the raid. While we both recognized the importance of this task, it seemed a waste of our higher dps, especially since the raid was having problems getting Anub'arak down quickly enough (that pesky enrage timer). Targeting the damn things was a problem, even with a macro which frequently targeted one behind us. Click targeting was a bigger pain, since you often would target something else even when clicking directly on an orb. And forget tab targeting - way too many other mobs! We stuck it out and tried to find a balance between "enough" frost patches and dpsing the boss.


So, we've cleared the Colliseum and are now eligible to commence with heroic mode. Given our random difficulties with all these bosses, we might be better served to committing to a few more regular clears. I suspect we will dive right in, though. That's just how we roll!


For me… it's moot. Mrs. Seabrat and I are headed to the Florida Keys on Saturday for two weeks of fun and sun. I'll post all the pics and info on my Team SeaBrat blog (http://seabrat.blogspot.com/) when we return. The latest patch (3.2.2) has presented me with difficulties logging in, which I know is probably due to one or more add-ons. That leaves me with only two potential raid nights before we leave for the Keys. I wish my guildies good luck in my absence and hope I have both a guild and a job when I return!

Twin Valkyrs and Faction Champs Downed!

Last week, the Red Devils managed to defeat the Faction Champions (UHRAHH)! Unfortunately, their cowardly Horde corpses disappear after defeat, so no screen shot of that one. Anyway, the fight is more of a PvP battle than a typical PvE encounter. The Red Devils is a pretty good raiding guild, but not so experienced in PvP. Fortunately raid leader Xoroth is a PvP enthusiast and was finally able to come up with a strategy and lead us to victory. The solution, for us, was to focus CC on the healers and burn them down one at a time. Once the healers were down, and providing that few raiders had bit the dust, it was a drawn out affair of selecting another target for focus fire. The Horde champions cheat, of course, and their pets do not despawn when the master dies. Not only that, but they have a buff that reduces AoE damage by 75%, so you can forget those spells. Their warlock's Rain of Fire works just fine on us though. Cheaters!

We downed them again this week, but the fight remains very tough for us. It is complete chaos until the first couple of healers go down. That seems to be key for us. If we can get two down without many losses of our own, we seem to be able to finish. Diminishing returns on CC requires us to swap methods or players between targets. Freeze traps seem to do little more than proc Lock & Load while the trap is either dispelled or breaks very quickly.


This week we were able to bring down the Twin Valkyrs, the new boss in ToC... after we defeated the Faction Champions, of course. As the name implies, there are two; a light and a dark. A series of portals spawn around the arena, also light and dark, which you click to set your own "aura". You want to have the opposite aura of the one you attack, so get the light aura to attack the dark one. Floating orbs will occasionally spawn and scatter throughout the arena. Again, there are light and dark orbs. You want to run through the ones that match your current aura setting (buff) while avoiding the opposite (damage). To make things a little more chaotic, one of the twins will occasionally cast a shield (again, light or dark depending on which twin is casting) and this is where the confusion set in. Oh, and Michael Jackson made an appearance to perform "Black or White" on Vent. Thanks, Rentfn, but I can't hear the raid leader now!

Do we match our aura to the shield? Do we attack the caster or the opposite? What aura should each tank have? Is that different than the raid? What about the healers? Wait, what's my aura now? What should it be? Who do I attack? Where's the opposite portal? Augghh - I am SO confused! I wasn't the only one, either. Conflicting commands flew over vent, leading to multiple raid wipes. Eventually enough of us managed to figure it all out and we were able to adapt, improvise and overcome. My method? Assist Snyped, he seems to know what he's doing! Now if I only knew what his aura was...

Relax Vezax!

The Red Devils have put ol’ crabby wormhead face down on the floor!


After several humiliating attempts at downing Thorim on previous nights, we marched back in last night and finally succeeded in releasing him from Yogg-Saron’s mind control. He thanked us for our efforts, and we didn’t mention how rude he and his cronies had been. We also seemed to have confirmed the bug mentioned on elitist jerks… charging into the arena at the start of the encounter seems to randomly disconnect some of the raid group! When everyone calmly walked onto the arena floor, we had no disconnects. Honestly, having a tank toy with the last mercenary standing while the rest of the raid waited for the DCers to log back in was getting a little tiring!

We now had unlocked the Keepers of Ulduar (again) and circled back around behind where Freya now stood. This was the tunnel down to General Vezax’s lair and we were going to pay him a little visit. We made short work of the guards at the entrance and clambered down the dilapidated hallway to the Descent into Madness. We successfully cleared the three groups of trash mobs and the two patrolling faceless horrors. Now we were ready to take on Vezax.


We had several in the raid that had never participated in this fight and raid leader Xoroth explained our strategy. Finally, it was announced that we would try this and our feral tank Arayia charged into battle. It wasn’t long before several players succumbed to shadow crash (gotta’ watch those, guys) and mark of the faceless (get the hell away from me with that)! Our numbers had been reduced enough that Xoroth announced we would continue “just for practice” instead of just wiping. Apparently the rest of our surviving members thought “to hell with that” and decided we would just go ahead and kill the son of a crab! As a result, we one-shot him!


At last, the Red Devils had managed to clear Ulduar down to Yogg-Saron. We gathered our troops into the small foyer in front of Sara. Xoroth explained the fight as we prepared ourselves for battle. We soon found ourselves overwhelmed by guardians! Stay away from clouds, ok? Clouds are bad! That particular bit of advice seemed to be ignored by far too many and guardians were spawning all over the place. The druid assigned to healing the center tank and DPS charged directly into those clouds! Repeatedly!


Eventually we fired him and assigned another druid to that duty, but we had lost our momentum. At 10:00 pm, it was decided to call it a night and extend the raid lockout time. We will be back this week to finish what we started… after we throw down on the new boss in Trial of the Crusader!

Palin a WoW Blog Reader?

I was reviewing my visitors report and suddenly found several hits from Wasilla, Alaska. Is Sarah Palin a secret WoW blog reader? Inquiring minds want to know!

We can see that Guth (our resident Argentinian guildie) is NOT a reader!

Lord Jaraxxus Dethroned by Red Devils!!

Ok, just to prove that last week was no fluke, the Red Devils ventured back to the Trial of the Crusader to face down the Northrend Beasts and the new boss, Lord Jaraxxus. Once again, we proved our mettle and emerged victorious from battle!


I wish I could say I know the Lord Juraxxas fight, and how we won it, but truthfully - I haven't a clue! I followed the directions shouted out on vent as best I could, but it was a little like the hokey pokey. Some buffs you run in, some you run out and others you just shake it all about. Anyway... we succeeded despite my woeful state of ignorance and besides... who am I to argue with success! So congratulations Red Devils and Battle On, Heroes!