WotLK and The Ancients

Borgthor is now 80, having traveled far and wide through the wonderful landscape of Northrend. Combined with leveling, gearing and raiding - a massive increase in my out of WoW workload has resulted in tumbleweeds drifting sweetly across this blog.

I'm not a huge fan of playing catch up on blogs, but if I don't - the perfectionist in me will drive the last nail into the coffin of this story... so here goes.

I am the guild master of The Ancients, on Dath'Remar. I took over months ago from Liself, and am really surprised that I haven't blogged about it yet. Aside from Zenborg's flirtation with a 25 man raiding guild, The Ancients has been the only guild I've ever known. I believe thanks is owed to Lashana, who found this guild long ago... and who first instructed me to "type 'ding' into guild chat".

Another reason this blog has been left untouched, is that I've been much more active on our guild website. Recently I added a section to the site just for myself and our council members, which as been a fantastic way to communicate within the leadership of the guild. Jondy and I have had much restricted play time recently, and it's virtually impossible to get a hold of everyone online... and multi-typing is much to much to handle. We've managed to get some overdue promotions done, and talk about the way forward with raiding...

... RAIDING! The Ancients have completed (all 10 man) Vault of Archavon, Obsidian Sanctum and Spider Wing, Plague Wing and Patchwerk in Naxxramas. We had a ball learning the safety dance, found out that Loatheb hits like a wet noodle (we one shot him the first time with two of our hunters locked out). We're short a healer or two, and some more DPS with oomph for our second Naxx group, but we're close and 25 man Obsidian Sanctum should be just around the corner.

I'm impressed with the raiding team we've assembled and pleasantly surprised how much things have improved week to week. I was overjoyed when we defeated Patchwerk on our very first night in Naxx, and two weeks later (a week off for Christmas / New Year) I was at 1500 dps, every DPSer above 2k (with Oday just shy of 3k) and the healers hardly seemed to break a sweat before the abomination hit the ground.

TANKING. I have had a blast with tanking in WotLK, but have found it a little too easy. Leveling as protection was just plain FUN. Having much improved DPS, and some great AOE abilites made questing a breeze. Add to that, a delightful resto druid and we hacked and slashed our way through the fields of mobs, with Jondy protesting about avoiding mobs that weren't related to our current quest objective. Gearing into heroics was a joy, with many BC epics holding up well - there we're plenty of quest rewards, reputation rewards to easily meet the defense cap. While we managed to 'Tour the Fjord', our targeted questing (against a meticulously crafted gear plan) and level appropriate instancing had us to 80 much quicker than I expected.

After AOEing our way through normal instances, I was actually looking foward to using some CC come heroics... until I got some sage advice, "just pull the first pack in Heroic Utguarde Keep - if you don't die... it's AOE all the way". So that's just what we did. I also have to remember that all things are relative, and I have been able to get away with wearing a pretty much full block value set for most heroics because I have my wife Jondayla (a spirited, evergreen, resto druid) to heal me through thick and thin. Now we've just got Heroic The Oculus to finish them off.

Well, that's caught you up in extremely broad strokes to where I'm at. Zenborg has been temporarily abandoned at level 71, questless, surviving on DPSing through the lower level instances, dreaming of one day harnessing some true AOE prowess.

More soon... Thanks to everyone that's bugged me to update the blog (you know who you are).