/readycheck

You dinged 70. Gratz. You did the four instances required (Shadow Labyrinth, Steamvaults, Arcatraz and Black Morass). You're ready for Karazhan, right?

Probably not.

I have a friend whose guild is knocking on the door of having enough folks at the appropriate level of heading into the world of raiding. He knows they are not ready as a guild, but doesn't feel he has a good argument for why. He was asking how he would know they were ready so they could evaluate themselves.

This started a rather longish debate which I soon realized was a blog topic.

While I'd like to break this down by each class and spec, it's not practical to spindle and mutilate each stat for a number of possibilities.

At the minimum a guild beginning to think about the Kara raid needs to have a group of 2 tanks (preferably one that can also fulfill another role), 3 healers, and 5 DPS. I know there are guilds who farm Karazhan without this makeup. But I'd almost guarantee they didn't start raiding it with whatever mutant makeup they use now. Make sure your tanks are specced to tank and your healers are specced to heal.

Each of your potential little raiders should have the majority of their equipment be blue (or above). Some greens in some slots are nearly unavoidable. I know my hunter wore the Duro Footgear quest reward for just about forever. What we're looking for here is that green items are the definite minority.

Now, run each of them through the BeImba site. It should be smart enough to look at specs and decide what they need. Pay special attention to enchants, gemming, and low gear. The site is awesome sauce enough to recommend different gems or enchants if it's done improperly. It will also recommend enchants or gems for pieces that aren't enchanted or have empty sockets.

As a team building exercise, you may want to suggest your group of potential raiders work together to kit one another out. Perhaps a grind for a static drop enchanting recipe is in order. Maybe someone needs the reputation to buy a glyph for their helmet. Also some classes might need help with a group quest to get a much needed gear upgrade. Also don't forget to suggest they do Heroics as training for Karazhan. The team that can take apart any Heroic Instance you throw at them is a group that goes far in Kara.

Finally have each of them check out the raiding checklist on this here site. It might not be a bad idea for them to also review which of their own cooldowns belong to the raid. There may be things on the checklist that can also be farmed while you're doing team building.

And when the dust settles, if your group has listened and done the things you asked, you won't have to answer whether they are ready. Because they will know they are ready, and you won't have to question that knowledge.

I finally have some success

No sidebar image cuz I've got some real images in the body of this post. These are screenshots from over the weekend. These are personal firsts for me. First up Nightbane from Karazhan. Unfortunately I didn't get the healing neck that dropped, having gotten the Ribbon of Sacrifice from the Opera event a few minutes earlier.

And here's Terrestrian Illhoof lying dead on the floor. Not a bit of loot for me here either.
And in breaking news, I realized I'm too dumb to take screenshots of both The Shade of Aran and The Prince laying in pools of their own blood. Maybe I should socket some Intellect Gems in my tee-shirt.

On a more serious note, I really do need to re-socket or something to get my stamina up. My hit points are very low and this led to lots of problems for us on Aran, Illhoof and Nightbane. If anyone has some advice, feel free to post. Here's my armory link so you can see what I've done.

Karazhan - Denied

So..For a guild first ever, I was not invited to Karazhan. Actually, I was invited, but I declined so that others could go. Instead I went to Shadow Labyrinth on my priest, getting within one (or maybe two) runs to revered. I'd attempt that in heroic, but yuck--Heroic Mana Tombs sucks.

We also got Akhilles' first key fragment. Which is awesome cuz we need more Karazhan tanks. I'm pretty sure I'll get called on for Sunday's Karazhan run because well..they need me!

In a side note, I'm in NaBloPoMo.

Karazhan - WowWebStats

Here's the raid report from WowWebStats for Sunday's Karazhan attempt(s). I'm not an expert, but I think my hunter did well with 0 misses. Does our tank need more +hit? I think most of the rest of us are okay, although I think maybe +spell hit on the mages? I'm a big noob when it comes to WWS. If only BRK would read the blog maybe he could tell me what I'm not seeing. :o)

You Eye

Since I got a comment from yesterdays posting about the UI, I thought I could post on that. Here's another posting with another UI picture, this on in combat.

That said, I'll refer everyone who is interested to WoW Interface where you can search for MazzleUI. This is what it looks like. I don't really know what to say about it. I've been using it since beta testing (over a year for me now) and in the dark days when UI's break, I'm so ineffective I generally don't do anything of any consequence. The pieces of the UI that I'm most happy with in Karazhan are the respawn timers (Incubator from ACE, on the left side of the screen midway), the HUD (an integral part of the compilation), and the buttons (Bongos1 in the UI, but the cool thing is they skills & spells are placed automagically). I'm also fond of the Context Menu (that 4x4 block of buttons hovering above the maintank windows). The 3D models are also pretty cool-they pictures are animated and do semi-random emotes.

Next - A significant milestone.

'Nuff Said?

Guild First for us. Yay!

10-man raids are not merely 2 5-man groups

(Extra bonus post since I promised to post this on yesterday's entry and then got distracted by the herbs)

My guild has had its share of drama over Karazhan. We started running it sometime in late April. Unfortunately, at the time, our raid leader wasn't really in tune with what we felt the guild was about. The vast majority of the guild was very much casual. We'd run together if we could, if not we'd find something that the rag-tag collection of folks on could do. He was a hard(ish)-core raider.

When we had 22 people (or so) sign up for raids, he was very much about making the very best, most cohesive, effective, blood-chilling group he could to take on Karazhan. But that left those not picked for this elite bad feeling chopped liverish. And the secondaries had approximately zero chance of doing anything worthwhile in there.

The guild leadership tried to moderate this by choosing groups such that both groups had decent make-up and moderate chance of success past the opera. This went, bluntly, not so well. About 15 /gquits later, we were a shell of ourselves and not able to attack Karazhan at all (even though we'd previously cleared through the Maiden).

The next thing the guild tried was an alliance with a more powerful guild who was routinely moving beyond the Curator. Unfortunately, our bad luck continued and this "alliance" wasn't interested in anything but them absorbing our guild. Strike two.

We made a few halfhearted attempts at Kara, eventually getting ourselves into position to routinely challenge the Curator. Then about a third of the raid group quit for reasons of their own. Still in guild but not logged in for about 6 days at a time. One of the tanks respecced arms.

Now we're at the present. Woefully short on tanks and healers, but having an adequate group to give it a shot. On our most recent excursions we've reliably cleared Attumen but Moroes has evaded us. Unfortunately, many of the attendees are recent eager 70s. But not the kind of gear you'd expect to be downing Attumen. They lack..badly. However, a string of Moroes at under 20% shows we've got the spunk and guts to try it, I'm afraid the gearcheck thing is going to beat us for a while.

This brings me to the most recent development in the guild. Several of the guys who are new to the raid are suggesting we put Karazhan on a back burner and instead do some 5-man heroics. They go on to say that getting folks together for Karazhan is hard, and the experience we gain as a constantly changing group of heroic instancers should more than make up for our lack of gear.

Having done heroics, I'm not so sure. In most heroics I've been in there's only a single healer (maybe a backup for tough fights) and clothies die pretty much arbitrarily. And maybe it's just me but I find Attumen and crew (up through the Opera) to be somewhat easier than most of the 5-man heroics. Granted I haven't been on all of them and made the mistake of doing Mana Tombs as my first heroic, but it just doesn't seem like its worth it to do heroics at the cost of not doing Karazhan. And the elite drops that I'm sure are enticing lots of folks drop from bosses that are WAY harder in heroic than anything I've seen (in my limited experience) in Karazhan.

I dunno.

Getting the Guildies Keyed

Well, I've not taken the warlock out of the barn for a good long time (other than fulfilling an adamantite bullet addicition for my hunter) and it was high time I did. Since a new 70 paladin tank (Owaru) needed his second Karazhan key fragment and what we really needed was DPS, I volunteered Bremette. (Bremagorn the hunter is already revered with Cenarion and Bremm's healing wasn't required as we had another awesome in-guild healer (Yorkshire) to pick up my slack) so the warlock seemed the obvious choice.

Due to time constraints we took a sneaky, meandering path with minimal pulls to get to the fragment jar and still down all 3 bosses. Alas, most of the drops were greeded for vendoring as we had no enchanter with us--and the second boss didn't drop my engineering recipe.

With that behind us, Owaru still needed his third key fragment. With some folks needing to log off, sleep, etc. we shuffled some characters around and ended up with a (mostly) in-guild run to the third fragment. Success. We even swapped out one of our (already keyed) DPSers for another Paladin tank (Noosh) when we were at the fragment. Two birds with one stone and two more tanks one step closer to offtanking Karazhan (or even main tanking for all I care)

Tonight we've got Onyxia. I know -- Onyxia, what sort of crazy talk is this. Isn't Onyxia like a 60 instance from back in the day when you had to walk to Molten Core, uphill (both ways) and in the snow with no shoes? Well, Yes. It is an "old world" raid. Lately what the guild has been trying to do (lately, ha. One other time) is set aside Wednesdays for the raid instances we are nostalgic about. Last week we did Molten Core (first three bosses) and this week Ony. In a couple weeks, we'll do Blackwing Lair. A good part of the loot was sharded (or crystalled as is more appropriate with epics) but we did take some pre-60's guys in there. All in all a warrior, hunter and mage all 57 or less got MC Epics last week. I'm not sure how the Onyxia hat drops compare to other outland gear, but for someone not at max-level it may be pretty significant.

But, Brem, I hear you decry, isn't this just a lot of time spent in old stuff when you could be doing Kara or something? Well, maybe is my definitive answer. I think even though the instances are easy-mode for 70's that it gives at least a glimpse of what a raid instance is like to the folks who've never seen it. And since we can safely take the 55-60 crowd with us, there's potentially some great loot for them. And besides. It's fun.