WoW! Progression!

Somehow, somewhere in the last ... oh ... week? Our guild got the must-get-to-top-of-progression bug. This made me squee with the happy. I think they sniffed victory that we, a 3 day raiding guild, were catching and passing other more "prestigious" 4 day a week guilds on our server.

And suddenly, our server is a hive of progression! Things like guildox and wowprogression as well as the realm forum progression thread are keeping people up to date with other guilds and their ups and downs. The other thing I am finding, is that guilds are becoming more willing to help each other with strat. I have been talking to at least 2 guilds about strats and progression and generally keeping in the loop with the excitement of their achievements. Personally, I find this to be a wonderful thing.

But, how did all this come about? Working on Yogg and getting him down within a week or so really cemented in a few key minds that we can do this. Especially when other guilds working on him 4 nights a week who got Vezax down weeks before us, still hadn't killed Yogg. Once those key minds got the progression bug, it SPREAD like wildfire through the guild. The reaction to FL hard mode was amazing, last night people were still pumped from the kill and were willing to go in and work on XT hard mode. A positive attitude and some chatting to a couple of people about strat and BAM XT down. Excitement all around.

Another thing that we were willing to do, and all credit to our raid leaders for this one, we changed strat in the middle of the night. Now, this is something our guild does a fair bit. If something isn't working or we think there is a better way, we will try it. Even if it fails, we will give it at least 1 go to see if there is any merit to it at all. Many guilds don't do this - they walk in with a predefined strat and will force that strat to work, even if it is a octagon trying to fit into a circular hole. I see that as one method that can work (and worked for one guild famously on our server for quite a number of years until the GLs recent retirement from the game), but it certainly doesn't work for us. I know that the ability to adapt is one of our guild strategists' strengths. We take a strat and smoosh it into what we know our raiders can do. We change adapt and rewrite everything. It is one of the reasons I started this blog - there were so many tips and tricks that we needed to learn on the fly that simply were glossed over on sites like wowwiki and tankspot and bosskillers. These tips were VITAL to killing the boss, more so than the overall strat. These tips were the things that so and so kept dying to that we couldn't figure out why.

Well, I have gone off on another tangent. I want to write up our XT hard mode strat today, and also a bit more about hacking and gold selling (as there have been updates in the situation and my opinion of the situation which I have been remiss in writing about, as I was reminded by a commenter, and kind of more goes into the generalities of boycotts and the history of gold selling .... STOP NER! NEW POST NOW!!!)