11/3 - Firelands Clean-up

We only had 3 bosses left to down on Thursday.

Baleroc

Majordomo Staghelm

Ragnaros

The plan was to get in at 9:00 PM and work on Baleroc Heroic til 11:00 PM when we'd blast through Majordomo Heroic and Ragnaros Regular. 

Unfortunately the other tank, Lexxor , had some real life problems that had to be dealt with and we didn't actually get started until 10:00 PM. We still got in some solid attempts on Baleroc Heroic but there just wasn't enough time or energy to put towards him that night and we ended up steamrolling him on regular mode. 

I'm going to gripe for just a minute about the Tank Shield that Baleroc supposedly drops. Shard of Torment is the only shield available to me in The Firelands and out group hasn't seen it drop even 1 time in all of the months that we have had Baleroc on farm status (easily killable). I understand that Blizzard doesn't want a relatively narrowly useful item like this to drop all the time and I also understand that random loot if random but this is getting ridiculous!

Majordomo and Ragnaros went down without a struggle and we were done for the night.

Patch 4.3 is now on the background downloaders so that means we are less than 2 weeks out from the next raid and for me it can't get here quick enough. I am excited to be able to share our group's experience plowing through normal modes of The Dragon Soul with everyone who reads this blog and I'm hoping it will be infinitely more interesting than what I've had to say so far. 

Thanks for reading and, as always, you can find my on twitter @rexplode to share any thoughts, questions or comments. Please pass the site on to anyone you think may be interested in it!

11/1 - Firelands

We schedule raids from 9 PM to Midnight on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Usually Tuesday is when we work on new stuff and then we just blaze through everything on EZ MODE Thursday so we can all get some sleep.

Yesterday we piled in on time and cleared trash, something that has gotten a lot easier as we've all become more comfortable with the raid. The first few weeks clearing trash was extremely time consuming and didn't leave much room for error, thank goodness Blizzard removed some of the more aggravating groups of enemies!

A couple of folks were running late and so we didn't actually kill the first boss until around 45 minutes in but both Shannox and Lord Ryolith went down easily on heroic mode. I was pretty excited to finally get my Best in Slot Belt from Shannox, I won't have to replace it until well into the next raid!

The rest of the night we spent working on Baleroc Heroic, he's one that we haven't been able to clear just yet and I think we may be reaching a point where too many of us are too bored with this boss to put in the effort required. We had some pretty good attempts but a combination of different screw ups left us never getting him below 35% health.

We cleared Alysrazor and Beth'tilac quickly and then called it for the night. Beth'tilac was kind enough to drop a pair of fancy new boots for me to wear when I'm forced to DPS so that was another highlight.


I'm getting to the point where I am far past being interested in killing these bosses, no matter what items they may drop, and I am only showing up to the raid because of the fun I get to have with the friends I get to play with. While it's definitely a good thing that I like the members of the group it is a bad thing that I am having so little fun playing the game itself!

Thursday night we plan to down Baleroc on Heroic so hopefully I'll have some good news for you then!

My Name is Jonathan and I'm a Goblin Warrior

I've been playing World of Warcraft off and on now for going on 4 years. 

I don't have the actual start date right here in front of me but I know that's pretty close.

My first character was a Troll Shaman name Rexplode. I named him after one of my favorite comic book characters (Robert Kirkman's Rex-Splode, my misspelling) and I leveled furiously to try and get to the max level which was 60 at the time. 

I played Rex for what seems like years, through the end of The Burning Crusade which was the first expansion for WoW. I healed for the most part and dealt damage(dps'd) when I was allowed to but I was never really very good at the actual theory or math behind the game. I mashed buttons and things didn't die (healing) or they did die (dps). 

At the end of the expansion, just a little while before The Wrath of the Lich King, I started to learn to tank.

Tanking usually involves rounding up all of the enemies and convincing them to hit you instead of your friends and that's a play style that really appealed to me.

I dug right in to the mechanics, I read helpful websites like Elitist Jerks and Tankspot and I ran any instance got a chance to as the tank. I got really good, really quickly, and next thing you know I was the main tank of the guild I had been in since the beginning. 

I'm going to fast forward ahead to now because this is getting a big long but I'll be happy to run through my experiences in more detail in future posts. I want to get the point so you'll know what to expect from this blog in the future.

Currently I'm in a guild called Reign , I play a Goblin Warrior named Slugfest and we raid 2 nights a week on average. We've been pretty successful considering our time invested, we've got 3 bosses down on hard mode and the rest easily defeated on normal. I'm proud to say that we killed Ragnaros, the final boss in The Firelands, a week before he was weakened significantly (nerfed). 

I'm one of 2 Main Tanks for the 10 man group and I have a lot of fun killing digital monsters with these folks. I've gotten to know all of them well and my goal on this site is to share with you guys, whether you play WoW or not, some of the good and bad times I share with these friends. 

I hope you'll have fun reading along as we work on hard mode bosses in The Firelands but I'm really excited about the new raid, The Dragon Soul, that's set to come out in the next month or so. 

A New, Nerdier Direction!

I haven't been very good about posting  for quite a while now and I want that to change.

From here on out I'm going to be keeping two blogs, one for each of my nerdy hobbies.

This blog, Rexplosions , will be about my experience in World of Warcraft as the main tank for a 10 man raiding guild . I'll update it at least 2 times a week following each raid. I'm hoping it'll be as much fun to read about as it is to be a part of. I'm also hoping Blizzard will release a new raid soon because I am tired of killing Ragnaros and his wimpy buddies every week.

My other blog, Stangg's Twin ,is going to follow me as I attempt to play Magic: The Gathering competitively after being out of the CCG scene for several years. I'm hoping to update that a lot more often as I stick my toes in to Magic Online and eventually jump in to the deep end of actual, real life tournaments. I'm going to try and be honest about how much money I sink in to this hobby in the hopes that shame will prevent overspending.

As always you can follow me on twitter @rexplode for all the updates and yes, I do realize this may be one of the nerdiest single blog posts in the history of the internet.