A new year. Bringing new opportunities with the next expansion upon us, Warlords of Draenor.
Welcome to a fresh series with me, Sonie. I play a Restoration Shaman in Method, though I prefer to just say that I play a healer since I’ve had a history consisting of a lot of re-rolls depending on what is needed, which I believe qualifies me to speak about healing in general. The name of the series refers to my hate of absorbs and all things absorb-related and that is precisely what these articles will be about, healing and hating on absorbs.
#showtooltip Chain Heal
/cancelaura Power Word: Shield
/cancelaura Divine Aegis
/cancelaura Spirit Shell
/cancelaura Illuminated Healing
/cast Chain Heal
But first… A little bird (Starym) came whispering in my ear that no one from the guild had spoken about our last progress race in Siege of Orgrimmar, like Pacteh did for Throne of Thunder. So why not start 2014 looking back?
Ah... finally a new patch. it’s hard to describe how you feel at this point to someone who isn’t participating in the race. Lucky for us a .gif is worth more than a thousand words.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. It had been 5 months since we claimed the World First kill on Ra-den and finished Throne of Thunder as the #1 guild. We had a long time to prepare and the pressure was definitely on us for this last tier of the expansion. We got told that apparently there was this curse going around in WoW which prevented the top guild from claiming the World First in all the tiers in an expansion. Would we also fall victim to the curse or would we prevail? There was definitely a lot of speculation, and with our old raid leader Kuznam leaving shortly before Siege of Orgrimmar, I can imagine it didn't look bright from the outside. While we are on the subject let's see what roster changes we had from ToT going into SoO.
| Left | Joined |
| Imsupersdw | Drquyn |
| Lorgok | Fragnance |
| Nagura | Nymzee |
| Kuznam | Kazz |
| Strydem | Artlu |
| Faerko | Gabzz |
| Artzie | |
| Hentrenson | |
| Varia |
As you can see we lost more people than we gained, which lead to us running a very small roster in SoO. We had 29 active members for this progress which had both up and downs. Now that I'm thinking about it I actually prefer running a smaller roster since it gives you a more tight and well-knit group which shares the same goals you do. It also results in a lot less drama since you don't have 10+ people on the bench that crave a spot in the raid. But obviously there is a bigger chance that you lack people if someone would disconnect etc. Overall though I think it's better to have a smaller roster for the health of the guild and its members and officers.
The raid leader banner got transferred from Kuznam to Noxe and Rogerbrown, with Noxe calling out stuff like raid-cooldowns and Rogerbrown focusing more on strategy, which he's done in the past as well if you remember all the Picasso's he drew during ToT that can be seen in Pacteh's previous articles.
Simultaneously, the PTR had been going on. Weeks of testing new encounters and developing strategies to save time on live and gain an advantage once the patch arrives. The feeling and motivation for the PTR definitely varies from person to person but we still had a surprising number of 5 people who kept a 100% attendance throughout the whole period. No, I was not one of them :(. The lowest attendance percentage out of the people who are still in the guild was at 12.96% and I'm gonna let you guess who it was.
Overall I'm satisfied with how the testing went. Obviously it's hard to prepare fully when you only got about 1-2 hours of a window to test stuff (if the boss even works that is). But I believe we stuck with the same strategy that we came up with during PTR for all the bosses up until Thok. We tried to do our planned strategy for Thok and it worked very well to begin with. However... you will have to wait for a later episode to hear about that! #cliffhanger
Siegecrafter. I'm gonna be honest with you, it was a mess for us on the PTR just like Dark Animus was. We didn't get very far at all and even though it made me a bit worried, it made me pretty happy as well since we had the exact same issue with Dark Animus and that boss turned out to be really well made and tuned.
Paragons felt pretty much the same, it was a lot of damage going around and so many options with different orders that you can kill them in. We just tried to get as much information about abilities as possible so that our addons master Infeh could start working on our private BigWigs.
As usual they don't let you test the final boss on heroic mode so there wasn't much we could do to prepare on Garrosh other than to also collect abilities and their timers.
Next time I am going to talk about the normal mode week with all the split raids. See you for the next episode!
