Horde With No Name

It looks like the site decided to click the “Accept” button and is currently waiting for buffs and eating a fish feast – if it can find it under the Tauren.

Despite the successful rez, this is now going to be pretty much a “read-only” site for historical purposes. The new guild site can be reached via the links below.

If you’ve just stumbled across this site, welcome to the posts covering the inception of the Horde With No Name in March 2007 through the technical Cataclysm of August 2010.

Please check out the current base of guild operations that is now live courtesy of EducatedOrcs.com for what’s new with the HWNN.

I’m in again this week, are you? Let us know in the comments section. You can also check the in-game calendar for an invite.

I saw a short but interesting post over at GuildOx today titled “Moving Beyond Saurfang” (which is essentially what we’re looking to do despite our 6/12 status). Based on their collected data regarding how many guilds have successfully progressed they’ve suggested a kill order for the next bosses.

After the first four, most groups then succeed next on Festergut followed by Rotface (sounds about right). At that point things differ a bit for 10 vs. 25:

From here it gets interesting – for 25m raiding, the Blood-Prince Council is next in line followed by Dreamwalker and Professor Putricide.

However, for 10m raid groups, Professor Putricide is somewhat easier than his 25m counterpart and is the next boss followed by Dreamwalker and Blood-Prince Council.

Both progressions then end with Sindragosa followed by the Lich King.

I know we “love” the Putricide fight, but maybe we should think about revisiting it this week before moving over to Dreamwalker. Just a thought. Let us know your thoughts below.

I’m in again for this week. Here’s hoping you are as well. Let us know in the comments section and check your in-game calendar for the invite (if you haven’t already done so).

How about a brainless weekly this week? Patchwork anyone? OS10 perhaps? Something I can get my crappy alts run through without dragging down the rest of the group maybe? We’ll see…

I felt like sharing a little of my good fortune this week and not just in gear, gold and emblems. I am talking about the people I pugged with.

I have noticed the last couple weeks that it is getting harder to find a raid as a pug. I am sure the reasons are summer time, and content has been out a while now. Friday night I was able to to join an ICC25 with my priest (as dps even) and collected 15 Frost Emblems (no weekly). We downed Rotface, Festergut, Blood Princes and Sister with out even trying Blood-Queen, Putricide, or Dreamwalker. Last night I was lucky enough to start an ICC10 pug with a Pali who took on the roll of loot master. It took a while but was worth it. We hammered our way through the same bosses with the exception of Blood Princes, but did the weekly and earned 18 Frost Emblems. On top of the emblems each of them got a significant item upgrade. Very lucrative endeavors for both toons.

I was also part of a ToC 25 this weekend that was a total fail. But what made these pugs worth mentioning is that there was none of the unpleasantness normally associated with pugs. There were wipes in each pug. The ToC wiped on the worms twice. Instead of the typical blame game and name calling immaturity the group just dissolved. In the ICC pugs there were wipes, but the group reformed and went again or moved to a different boss fight.

I think there must be a relationship between the scarcity of people for raids and the overall attitude of the raid. If this is true then now is definitely the time to raid for those of us that dislike pugging.

See you Wednesday for a whole bunch of new emblems.

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Well, I didn’t get a AAR post up for last week, so feel free to sound off about that here as well. I’m in for this week, by the way. How about you? I believe the in-game invite has been issued as well, so check your calendars.

I’m going to propose that we blast through the first wing of ICC 10 this week and then head to the one emblem boss and explore the area we ended in last week. If we become frustrated, we can head back to the plague wing and take it out on Festergut and the puppies.

Click to enlarge.

Craig and I talked a little bit about what we could try differently in the new fights we attempted last week and we have a couple ideas. I think both of those fights are going to be doable, though Putricide may still require us to gear up a bit more. I think we can get “heal-the-dragon” fight this week, though.

Damn this learning phase. It will be nice to quash the first wing again. Let us know your plans and thoughts and w’ll see you on Wednesday.

Don’t miss the Roll Call post (one post down) or the Gear Score post (two posts down) but I just had to ask:

Should I do a little creative writing?

If you think you and your guildmates have what it takes to make invaluable beta testers, take a stab at our Cataclysm Beta – Guild Contest. All you need to do is tell us in a short essay why you and nine of your guildmates should be in the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test. We’ll be picking 100 winning submissions each week for five weeks, for a total of 5,000 beta keys at stake!

Hmm… Me and nine of my guildmates sounds about right…

Well, Rotface is down and we’re ready for a night of learning new fights. I’m in, are you? Let us know in the comments section.

I have to admit to some mixed feelings about this Wednesday. I’m excited that we’ll be working on new content, but it’s going to severely gimp my Frost Emblem and Ashen Verdict Rep gains for the week. Unless we run the table and clear the rest of ICC which… seems unlikely. Hopefully there’ll be a new boss kill or two for us though.

That’s assuming that the server recovers from the FULL TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of scheduled maintenance. Ugh. You didn’t want to play on Tuesday this week anyway, did you?

I’m in the process of auction-housing the clutter from the Guild Bank. I don’t expect a lot of income from the items we’re selling, but we’ll see. When the dust settles, Shimmey (who’s on AH duty in Orgrimmar at the moment) will deposit any profits into the repair fund.

If anyone wants any of the patterns/recipes (for any profession) currently in the Guild Bank please take them now. If I ever manage to unload all of those glyphs, the patterns/recipes are next on the chopping block. They’re all for mediocre items and have sat unclaimed in the bank for ages. That has “Sell Me Next” written all over it.

I tidied up the bank tabs while I was clearing junk out. Hopefully everyone can still find things. If not, keep looking it’s probably still there. Also, a reminder: Other than high-value end game stuff or stuff that we use a lot, try to keep things to one stack per type of item. Obviously this isn’t an inflexible (or enforced) rule, but it helps keep the clutter down.

I think that’s about it. Let us know what’s up for you this week and check your in-game calendar for an invite if you haven’t already done so.

OK, it’s been a long time since our last gear-related posting. Being kinda pressed for time, this is gonna be a quick-n-dirty one.

I’ve decided to limit this gear check to only our ten main raiding toons in their raiding specs. This may play havoc with your “Change” number if the “Previous” number was from a different spec (Sorry Bael and possibly others!). I’ll try to do this from here on out. If bragging rights on these posts matter to you, try to log out in your raiding spec/gear whenever you quit the game to give me the best chance to pull accurate info. If not, do what you like. :)

I’ve added GearScore to the mix and tried to condense the table for clarity. You can sort the table as desired by clicking on the headers. Clicking a second time on the same header will reverse the order of the sort.

And here’s your charts:

WoW-Heroes Score

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Change from last WoW-Heroes Score

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GearScore Score

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I’m going to abandon the “Alt Progess” charting for a while in the interest of staying afloat. In the meantime, you keep gearing and we’ll keep checking.

So far this week it sounds like I’m in and Mike is out. Let us know your plans in the comments below.

There’s a couple relevant comments on the previous post as well.

I think that we are right on the verge of making Rotface a really routine and easy fight. We have the mechanic mostly mastered, mostly. I think we just need to tweak a couple of things. The final three attempts were all pretty good — particularly the one where we got him down to 5%. I think what differentiated this attempt from the other two which were a little less successful, but still good, was that the mechanic of the cleanse was just a little off. I like our three heals strategy and I think that our healers are doing a great job. But, I think if we can all work together on the cleanses, we’ll have this fight totally mastered. Here’s how I saw things play out…

As I watched the 5% attempt, (I was dead within 30 seconds of the fight starting — no fault of heals or tanks — stupid aggro rip on my part) I noticed that as toons with mutated plague came out of the dps/heals stack, each time they were able to quickly locate Kashee. This enabled them to get purged and to merge their slime quickly. There was some good fortune here or luck. During this fight no one seemed to spend anytime finding where Kashee was at. They just were able to run right to him. In the subsequent two attempts, however, we had several people leave the stack (I was one of these, but there were a number of others) who had trouble finding Kashee. In my case I was 180 degrees away from him. By the time we established visual contact the mutated plague debuff had run its course and killed me. Kashee couldn’t see me to cleanse it and because of my lack of situational awareness (not knowing where he was at all times) I couldn’t move to him quickly enough. If the debuff is not cleansed, it will almost certainly kill that toon and most likely wipe the raid. So, we need to fix that.

Now that being said, we can’t have everyone one cleansing too soon or we get little slimes making big slimes in the dps stack. This was our problem in the first three attempts of the night. So, as I see it we have a couple of options to solve this problem (I’m sure there are more).

1) We could just make situational awareness — i.e. know where Kashee is at all times!!! — a priority for all toons in the dps stack. So, slow dps/heals all activity to ensure he is in sight at all times. This would reduce the chance that we get unwanted extra big slimes. It will also make the fight go a bit more slowy — i.e. slow and steady wins the race. But, this type of situational awareness is really hard for most of us. It also puts a lot of pressure on Kashee to cleanse in timely way too. He has a lot on his plate — kiting the big slime, looking out for puddles, and cleansing. Not a lot of room for error with this plan.

2) We could designate a secondary cleanser. So, if someone runs out of the dps stack and can’t find Kashee for whatever reason right away, they call (in Vent) on a designated secondary cleanser to help them. The upside here is that it should really help us keep our dps/heals toons alive longer. The downside is that we could get cleanses that are too quick and lead to more than one big slime. Of course, this optional also requires some enhances level of situational awareness — the running toon has to know how long before the mutated plague debuff expires. So, we are not totally off the hook. I like this option better, however. It should also make for a faster fight and give Kashee more margin for error.

This was just my take on things. I know we are really close to getting this finished off. With a fresh and early start next week, I know we’ll get this done. Please let me know what you thing of my ideas or if you have other observations on how to master this one.