Ding! And Retro Raids!

DING!

Today, I at long last reached level 80 on my main character, my resto druid Honani. Those of you who read my guides may be wondering why I was so presumptuous as to write guides before I was even at the level cap - my reasoning is this: though I may not have as much experience as others, I am very good at organizing and formatting information. I also did a LOT of calculations and research based on WoWhead information, and read lots of advice from the Elitist Jerks. In addition, I have spent almost every bit of that leveling time in instances, so I got a lot of healing experience. I hope that puts your fears to rest, and convinces you that my advice is indeed still good.

In other news: I am excitedly looking forward to a sessions of what I like to call "Retro Raiding" tomorrow. I am going to get a group of my guildies together and run through a bunch of old world dungeons for achievements, and to level and gear alts if folks need that. It should be a lot of fun. Why does this matter to you? Because I am writing a Retro Raiding Guide! This guide will help you complete those old world dungeon achievements as efficiently as possible. I will post here with updates - I plan to release the guide in chapters since there is a lot to cover.

I hope everyone is having a safe and fun holiday season, both in and out of WoW!

Updates!

Today I fixed several errors in my Leatherworking Guide, and also added two more addons to my Tree Healing Guide. Hope you folks enjoy the update!

Feast of Winter Veil

My time for the last few days (and probably for the next few days as well) has been spent working towards achievements for the Feast of Winter Veil. Blizzard has made this a somewhat onerus task this time around, particularly for newly leveled characters. You see, it is no longer necessary or even really advantageous to go through the group quests and become neutral with Ogri'La - yet Blizzard decided to require this for their Winter Veil achievements. In addition, one of the achievements requires 325 cooking, something I never bothered to get on my second character since my first had it. Consequently I've spent the last five hours or so of game time clicking a bobber, since fishing is the best way to level cooking. At least I can watch TV while doing it.

There are plenty of games with a fishing mechanic, and essentially all of them are better than Blizzard's. Most allow you to catch a more diverse range of fish from a single place, of differing sizes. Most involve at least some kind of interaction or mini game where you fight the fish as you reel it in, or need to jerk the line once the fish bites. Why can't WoW have something like this? Come on, Blizz.

Despite being annoyed at Blizz for forcing me to leveling a boring skill that I was planning on leveling eventually anyway, I am still excited for another holiday achievement. However, I learned yesterday, to my sadness, that the Brewfest achievement requires you to drink one of every beer from the beer of the month club - this means I am going to have to wait almost two years to get the meta achievement, which is really ridiculous. I hope Blizzard considers taking this achievement out of the meta, as they did with the Mask for All Occasions.

Anyway, as a result of all my fishing and cooking, I am planning to modify and port in one of the old guides I wrote for WoWWiki on leveling fishing and cooking. I'll post an update here when I release the guide.

New Guide - Creating ToCs

I have just released a new guide, inspired by Dark Fanboy's Creating Tables guide. I've already had one person ask me how to make the tables of contents I use in my guides, so I decided I ought to write a guide about how to do that. As usual, the guide can be found on WoW-Pro, on my guide links to the right, and here.

WoW-Pro Plans

As I mentioned in my previous post (before I started whining), Jame of WoW-Pro recently asked the other WoW-Pro editors what their plans were for their future contributions. So here is what I hope to accomplish in the somewhat near future:

1. Help Jame spiff-up WoW-Pro - This will depend mostly on Jame, when he has time between writing guides to work with me. It's something I plan to try to help with in the background while doing other things.
2. Update my Leatherworking, Tree, Guild, and Loot System Guides - These guides are still missing some info or need to be spruced up. I will be working on them slowly as time goes on, but I also plan to start some new projects.
3. Instance Guides - I plan to work on instance guides next. We have only one (!) for Northrend right now, and I have been running instances litterally non-stop since the expansion hit, since leveling as resto sucks. I'm working on a good format for the guides now, and will come out with my first one, for Azjol-Nerub, soon. It won't have heroic info yet, since I haven't got a chance to run heroics, but that will be added in the future.
4. Profession Guides - Once I tire of instance guides, I might make some more profession guides. However, I don't plan to start this for a while. I have done some work in an Excel spreadsheet to determine the absolute cheapest way to level Engineering, so this would probably be the first one I'd tackle. I also did some writing on WoWWiki for a fishin/cooking powerleveling guide, so I could work on that as well.

Gripe-Fest

I originally was going to make this a post about my WoW-Pro plans, as discussed by Jame in his blog. Instead I am going to talk about that in a different post: I felt the need to gripe a bit first about my guild situation.

Lately I have been feeling like I don't have a lot of input (dare I say controll) over what goes on in my guild. As a "guild leader", I feel like I put a ton of work in. Quite frankly, I feel like I work a lot harder than our GM (I only dare to say this since as far as I know there is no possible way she will ever read this). Don't get me wrong, she's my friend (which is why I've never said anything about it) - I just don't really feel like she does the things she should as a GM. While she was gone dealing with RL stuff, I felt a bit better - I was mostly running things (though there are also a few officers who are getting on my nerves). But I still didnt have the ability to do some of the things that the officers and I agreed on (in particular, some changes to our rank system). It was extremely frustrating. Yes, RL comes before WoW always! But we can't have an inactive or missing GM - by taking the responsibilty of being GM, you are comitting to be there. If RL stuff is going to be a continuing problem, then you need to give someone else the GM status.

At this point I have all the work and none of the satisfaction of being in charge. I update the website, people look to me to organize meetings, people constantly discuss things and talk about changing the way I have things set up (after we had all decided on them) then expect me to change them. I feel required to hurry to level 80 so I can lead raids, I feel like I need to spend my play time doing things for the guild - and yet all it seems I have is responsibility, without any benefit. Perhaps this is selfish of me, but I would at least like to see recognition of what I do. As it is the GM barely uses the website that I maintain, doesn't participate in policy discussions, then overrules decisions the officers had come to when she comes back after a month-long absense. I have one officer who also thinks he is a GM and tries to make the guild into his own vision of it, rather than what everyone wants. It's becoming extremely stressful.

My conclusion: quit being an officer. Take the stress off. People will probably see it as me having a pity party, but that's not really the case. It's just the best solution I see with the way I am feeling about the situation. I'm giving my self a week to make sure it's what I want, but after that I am going to request to be demoted. I'm just sick of running the guild while someone else has all the power and attention (so call me an egomaniac, whatever).

More WoW-Pro Speculation

I was just thinking as I updated my guide today: If Jame did implement an update notification system, I wouldn't want my readers to be bothered by every little typo fix/etc. The system would need to include a "minor edit" button similar to the one many wikis use. This would allow the author to only notify the readers of more important edits, such as additions to the guide or major changes to existing sections. The "Log Message" could be where the author notes the changes made, and which tells the reader what chagnes were made.

I think this would be an extremely useful addition to the site, and is the one I am most looking forward to once Jame has finished his Northrend guides :)

Raiding Team

I've been thinking today about how our guild's raiding will be done. At the moment we have only one real raid leader, and only enough 80s for one 10-man raid. However, that will change in the future. However we still don't have a lot of good raid leaders. I'm thinking I will probably end up being one, and that's good because it means I can pick and choose my raid team.

Here is my wish list of raiders (not including those I know for sure will be in Eranis's group):

• Tank: Darrgoe, Strategy, Gaigex
• Healer: Honani (me), Taurrence, Nalesa
• Melee DPS: Edgeins, Elementress
• Ranged DPS: Eaither, Supermodel, Magannan, Shapa, Bahahnkur

Tree Guide Released!

Today I released Jiyambi's Guide to Tree Healing early, on the urging of Jame. So far it has met with great comments, I just hope some folks from Elitist Jerks don't come over and complain about how much of a noob I am :P

The guide is off to a great start, though it's not done yet. It still needs sections on gear, PvP, and macros/addons. The last I will complete shortly, the first a little later, and the PvP section may take me a while. I also want to add to the PvE section a bit more as time goes on and I get more familiar with tree healing. Hmmm, maybe I'll also add a "Tips and Tricks" section for miscellaneous stuff.

Resto Druids on the Brain

Well, I've been working hard on learning the fine art of tree healing. I'm writing an in-depth guide on the subject at WoW-Pro. And I finally decided that I have learned enough to respec (hopefully for the last time in a while - I need to save gold for my epic flight form!).

Here is what I am planning: (WoWhead Talent Calculator)

I'll post on here if it goes well, and also when my tree guide is done. I expect it to be greated with crickets, as usual, but I feel good about it anyways :P

WoW-Pro Favorites

Until WoW-Pro has something like this, I'll maintain a list here for myself (and for anyone interested)

My Contribs:

• Jiyambi's Guide to Leatherworking
• Jiyambi's Guide to a Successful Guild
• Loot Distribution Systems
• Loot System Example: Complex Auction
• Jiyambi's Guide to Tree Healing (forthcoming)

WoW-Pro Wish List

As you may know, I am an active user and contributor on Jame's website, WoW-Pro. I have, for some time, been throwing around ideas in my head of things that I think would make the website better. I thought I ought to write those down somewhere, so I'm going to do it here.

• Contribs - On the user's page, show the guides they have authored or co-authored.
• Watchlist - In addition to the current "Recent Changes", let us choose guides we would like to watch for updates.
• Favorites - Could be combined with watchlist. Can add guides to favorites, shows when a favorite guide has been updated or commented on.
• Friends list - let me know when my favorite contributors are online!
• Improved Front Page - I'd prefer to see a little less clutter on the Home page. Maybe one or two less news posts, so we can more easily see the new guides. I think the old news post from Snowflake summarizing leveling guides is sort of old, maybe it could be linked to from Jame's LINKS news post.
• Guide Rating - I know Jame is working on this one, I just can't wait for it to come out. Some guides really need to go away, and some need more recognition! Can be tied into the Karma system
• Comment Rating - I think Jame mentioned this, possibly as another automatic way to do his Karma system. Not as vital as guide rating, though.
• Improved Categorization - Some of the organization of guides can be improved. There are some issues that Jame has mentioned - atm, guides can't be in two categories at once, so things like class-specific leveling guides make for confusion.
• Featured Guide - it would be cool to have a special "Featured Guide" that changes periodically, that could be based on the guide's ratings. This could appear on the main page or on a sidebar.
• More Newsletters! - I really liked the October one, keep it up! I'm sure you can think of even more fun/useful stuff to put in the newsletter too :)
• Live Karma Data - I know this is coming eventually, once the system gets automated. Just putting it on here for completeness.
• View Count - Check out how many unique users/IP views a guide has gotten. I always am curious if people actually ever read my guides.
• General Guides - A silly pet peeve of mine, these guides are not general, they are quite specific - general would be something like "WoW tips" or whatever. Maybe change title to "More Guides" or something.
• Comment Notification - a simple notification, similar to the message one already in place, for when someone comments on your guide or responds to a comment of yours. Optionally, it could also inform for comments on your favorite guides.
  

I'll add to this as I think of things.

The Leveling Interlude

As a raiding guild, AEAE has had to make some changes while our members level in Northrend. We want to keep folks active and interested in the guild while they level, but our normal activity - raiding - is obviously not available yet. I've been brainstorming some other fun stuff that we can do:

• Have a leveling contest, with cheers and recognition for the first to each level.
• Organize LOTS of instance runs, to keep group skills up.
• Continue our screenshot contest - there are lots of great scenes in Northrend.
• Level in groups - it's both fun and more efficient.

Despite the urge to rush to 80 and raid, there are a lot of folks (myself included) who want to enjoy the content while it's new - too soon we will be burnt out on it. AEAE has always been a guild that played to have fun, not just to be the best - enjoying leveling to 80 is part of that.

In other news, leveling my resto druid is very very slow. I tried going boomkin but was sadly bad at it (like really bad). I am debating whether to continue with my druid right now or bring up my rogue to 80, or even start my death knight.

The beginning...

Hi folks, and welcome to my blog! As the description says, I co-manage a Horde raiding guild on the Uther US server of World of Warcraft. My guild is the Angry Elf Ale Empire, hence the title of my blog. In this blog, I plan to record some of my thoughts on guild and raid management, and also WoW in general.

Some background on me: I am currently a student studying chemical engineering. I have loved gaming, the fantasy genre, and writing since a very young age. Writing about WoW combines all of these loves into one. Consequently, I write about WoW a lot. I used to be a very active editor for WoWWiki, but faded into the background once I took a leadership role in my guild. Now I write guides for WoW-Pro, the home of Jame's famous leveling guides.

I hope this blog is useful to other active or aspiring guild leaders out there, or at least amusing ;) Look forward to some useful posts this week, as the guild works through leveling in the new expansion, the Wrath of the Lich King!