Nalda

di⋅lem⋅ma  [di-lem-uh]
–noun
1. a situation requiring a choice between equally undesirable alternatives.

I have a real headscratcher here, and I am hoping the tankspot folks can offer some feedback to help out.

Blizz introduced the 10 & 25 raid format with WotLK, and it was good. Since Ulduar, however, some of the best loot in the game has been accessible through the 10 man format; first in hard modes, now in ToGC10. How can I prioritize both?...

Ah, Summertime.

Long days of sunshine and heat bring with them lighter school loads, fussy computers, and family outings that take even the most dedicated raiders AFK. The raiding attendance aspect of WoW is a cyclical force, strong enough to affect some gaming guilds for the worse. Is there anything a person can do to secure their continued gaming enjoyment in light of this? In my opinion, yes. I recently confronted this challenge with my own raiding guild, and I would like to pay...

[edit: this being the final entry in a series on PUG'ing Black Temple. We left off boggled by Phase II of Illidan Stormrage.]

Wow, what a crazy ending. Let me start at the beginning.

After posting my last entry earlier today, I sat with my coffee to unravel the mystery of our Phase II positioning problem, re-read all the guides I could find, and I hit a /facepalm moment. I noticed this line from the wowwiki guide:

“All raid members must stay within 25...

My week of PUG’ing Black Temple is coming to a close tonight. We have gone 2 hours nightly, Tuesday thru Friday, and yesterday we ended up raiding 9 hours, getting as far as Phase IV on Illidan.

To recap, I put this group of raiders together from players on my RP server, Steamwheedle Cartel, who have not been running with the large raiding guilds and have not had a chance to see the content at all, myself included. I screened applicants carefully, looking for the most dedicated and...

So far, so easy mode. In two hours of raiding tonight we one shotted Naj’entus and two shotted Supremus. Discovering which trash pulls were linked as we cleared a path to Shade of Akama gave us more trouble than anything. But now we know.

My biggest worry with this event was wasting precious raiding time at the start with efforts to fill the raid. I obsessed a little about this over the weekend, so I made efforts to overbook, figuring a certain percentage of invited players, as always,...