The First of Many

There was a time when I had a blog. It was a while ago now. I started it when I started my MySpace account. Over the years I lost interest in MySpace, deleted my account and transitioned to Facebook. When I deleted that account, my blog went with it. I have finally decided to start a new one, and I plan to update it fairly regularly, but i'll just start with post one and see where it goes from there.

Last night our WoW guild (xeno) ventured into the Obsidian Sanctum to face Sartharion with one drake up. We had destroyed him without any drakes up several times—with no drakes, it's so easy that it just feels like a waste of time. I was really looking forward to tackling the fight with Tenebron up in 25-man. Just two days prior, our 10-man raid group completed the exact same encounter; it was a challenging fight, but we were able to take it down after three serious attempts (Of course, this wasn't or first night trying the 10-man fight with Tenenbron up. We had worked on it the week before for several hours without a successful kill). the experience from our 10-man lead me to beleive that we wouldn't have too much trouble in the 25-man version, but I didn't expect it to be the joke that it was. Now, this was the very first time we put in a real effort at 25-man Sarth with a drake up. I expected we'd put in a couple of hours before we saw his demise. The true result was quite anticlimactic: We one-shot it. It didn't even get very hectic. When Tenenbron went down there was an overall feeling of disappointment and surprise. It seemed that the fight wasn't much more difficult on 25-man than it was on 10-man—but you have 15 more people to help.

It is a joke of a fight and it reinforces my opinion that Blizzard has made the game too accessible. I can't really blame them. They are looking out for number one; they want as many subscribers as they can get; they know that providing everyone with access to all content gives most people more to do. I get it, but it frustrates me. Back in the days of vanilla WoW, when 40-man raids were end-game, everything had a more epic feel. You didn't have to have a lot of great players to progress, as long as you had a solid core. You could pretty much carry 10 people through, even if they were AFK. When BC came out, Blizzard made changes that resulted in the necessity to bring people to raids that knew how to play. You could not longer carry several people through—in fact, in some fights, it was even a stretch to carry one bad player through. Now it seems that Blizzard has done a complete 180. WotLK 25-man raids require very little skill. Sure, there are exceptions, but overall the n00b is back in the game. Most of the WoW population is probably thrilled with this, but I am not. I enjoy the challenges. this week my guild will try Sartharion with 2 adds up—maybe even 3—and if we beat that, we'll have nothing to work on until the next content patch. Lame. WTB a challenge.