AHHHHHHH! I know I am around 5 months removed since my last entry here on Manaflask, and I’m truly sorry for the long delay. I didn’t anticipate MoP and real life to be such huge time commitments. Besides taking classes again to pad that GPA to apply for med schools and getting more students to yell at in the lab, I’ve also been slowly trying to get back into the swing of things in League of Legends. Keep in mind, I’m trying to juggle all of this while hardcore raiding the first tier of a new expansion. Enough with the excuses and let’s dive right into it! In case you wanted to check out the earlier entries of the series, just click on the banner above.
The Merger
Unless you lived under a rock the last month, it saddens me to say that
Of course if you want anything good in your life, you need to work for it; and there are plenty of things our new Exodus guild has to work on. For starters we need to get over the culture clash from the merging of two guilds. One could almost characterize it as the old guys vs the young frat boys. The quicker we can bridge the divide, the sooner we’ll start playing like a cohesive unit. The Big Three of the Miami Heat only won a championship once they were able to play like a cohesive team, not like a bunch of egocentric children playing hero ball. The second thing we can work on, which builds off of the first one, is to keep the random noises and useless chatter in mumble during pulls to a minimum. Everyone is trying to be a hero and wants to be heard but frankly the only people who matter are officers and healers. Unless you have something imperative to say, just don’t chime in! Finally the 3rd thing we can work on which ties into the first piece as well is having our healiers work better as a unit. I hate to repeat myself but raid healing at the top levels requires cohesion and playtime together. How best to push that healing unit together? Force us to heal on alts where we’re uncomfortable and PTR play time. The more we heal together the faster we’ll get better and know each others’ habits.
Don’t think of this as me listing grievances or showing weakness. These are all things we’ve already if not addressed, already begun to. The Method bros need to watch out, there’s a new powerhouse in town!
If you want a good idea of what our guild environment is, this video is a perfect example of what goes on in a raid night:
That would be Chim or Peto in the helmet and then as soon as someone gets domed by an avoidable raid mechanic...BOOM. There’s Kay with the giraffe, Entio is off on the twitching with the laptop, and Shib is the one on the left humping the water cooler because he can’t eat food.
New Article Name
Now that we’re not in vodka but Exodus, I need to come up with a new name for a blog! I didn't have any idea what to name it so I asked my new guild.
One of the final options was Exodus to the Luu, but in the end the simplest one was best. Comment below if you have any better suggestions!
Throne of Thunder
PTR testing for the new raid instance has finally started. There was a lot of hype for this tier. “Supposed to be just like Ulduar.” “There will be no Dungeon Journal for important abilities.” From personal experience, this place has been pretty awesome so far. While it hasn’t reached the difficulty and epic feel Ulduar (only the best raid instance ever) had, the Throne of Thunder has HUGE upside potential. The raid tier will be decided on a boss that has no Dungeon Journal entry, kind of like Alagon. The fights so far have been pretty fun and difficult in their own respect. It’ll be exciting to see how difficult Blizzard will set this tier. There are a bunch of really fun healer fights, and when I say really fun I mean healing intensive. We’ll see how this difficulty in 10 man will translate to 25 man raiding. I also plan on going into more detail on each boss in future blogs.
The Future and Wrap up
So once things have settled down with the merger some more and Chim links less ladyboy pictures in mumble, I’ll try to give you guys a better peek at the inner workings of what Exodus really is like. The Mumble sound bites will return as well as will interviews with specific members. In the immediate future however, here’s what I have planned for the next couple of weeks:
1. The NEW NEW Healer Evaluations - I actually wanted to post these sooner but Blizzard made the new tier sets available so I’d like to get some more play time with all the healers. Remember my last evaluations? They were pretty spot on! In fact Blizzard made a bunch of changes. Resto Druids lost their amazing mushroom bloom heal. Disc Priest got HUGE buffs in shielding and eventually got to be T14’s all-star healing class. People eventually learned how broken Mistweaver throughput got to be and that got hit with the nerfbat.
2. The Blog’s Lost Months - This blog I’ll talk about what happened in T14. The crazy amount of turnaround we saw before and during progression. What happened in our final days as a guild in vodka.
3. Throne of Thunder Breakdown - PTR testing has already started! Blizzard has already publicly stated they want the downtime between tiers to kept to a minimum in order to combat loss of subscribers between tiers. I’ll likely make this a 3 part series about the bosses of the instance and funny moments of Exodus PTR testing.
Here are some final comments. Just wanted to tell all the vodka guys who left appropriately due to real life I wish you the best of luck and stay in touch. You know who you are. Oh and don’t play omgpop pool with Envy unless you force him to stream because he cheats. Envy didn’t lose a single game until Charles made him stream his screen and bet 20k gold. Lo and behold, Envy lost that match! You be the judge. And FINALLY here is some music to commemorate being back!
