Garrison Upgrade

On Friday, Saoire made her way to Spires of Arak, and since she’s a dwarf, she naturally chose the brewery as her building of choice. Not so coincidentally, this building gives you Hulda Shadowblade. They bonded over hunting down an Iron Horde assassin, and Hulda immediately set to work as Saoire’s primary covert ops dwarf. (Since it appears Sully is not available as a follower).

When Saoire moved on to Nagrand, she put in the Rangari Corral, even though the Seigeworks looks a little cooler. Neither grants access to a dwarf follower, so a stealth talbuk sounded much more fun.

Saoire reached level 100 shortly thereafter. Since she was carefully squirreling away not using up all her resources, she was immediately able to upgrade the garrison and place her last three buildings (Dwarven Bunker, Trading Post and Salvage Yard). Unfortunately, that didn’t leave any funds for actually upgrading anything else, but as soon as she can, the barracks will be upgraded to level 3 so that she can start having  properly outfitted guards.  After that, the mine and the engineering works, and then other buildings. She’s also unlocked her Menagerie, primarily for the weekly quest to speedily upgrade some pets (and the daily, when I can do it. But I’m a crappy pet battler, so we’ll see how that goes)

I think that’s 5 dwarves working out of the garrison now, and it led me to considering a conundrum I am soon going to face: Periodically (well, probably more than periodically) she’s not going to get a dwarf in her recruiting. While she could choose to not recruit anyone, that does leave all those followers in the queue of potential options. To make finding her Dwarves faster, it rather behooves her to recruit non-Dwarves. So now, my order of preference is going to be: Are you a Dwarf? If not, do you particularly like hanging out with Dwarves? If not, I’ll consider putting up with you.

Similarly, since I’m about to embark on the massive collecting of gearing stuff for followers, guess who gets the gear?  (Ok, if you can’t guess, you need to go read that last paragraph.)

2 for 2 from the Inn

Apparently the Innkeeper has learned about dwarves and our penchant for Ale.  This week, Saoire picked up Domnall Icecrag, a swarthy dwarf with an awful lot of very tidy beard.

Inn Level 2, Threepints for Saoire

Saoire got to level 96 today, and along with that came upgrades to all of her buildings that weren’t already there, which was everything but the garrison itself and the mine.   The level 2 Inn provides the ability to acquire followers – which we’ve been looking forward to for some time.

Truth be told, there are a ton of abilities her 11 other followers hadn’t covered, and even more not covered by a dwarf, so I didn’t really “pick” an ability to look for her first follower.  But, among the three options was Brogan here.   Mister Threepints will clearly need some new duds. Those patches don’t belong in Saoire’s garrison, but they ‘ve had a pint together to discuss his position and her expectations.

Talador Outpost

Saoire has made it to Talador at nearly level 95. The two options here are not as critical as they were in Gorgrond. The mages give you Serena (a Human) while the artillary tower gives you Miall (a Draenai). However, the artillary tower has the nice dwarven bunker style look, so she chose that one.

This coming weekend I’m going to get a nice chunk of time to play, so hopefully there will be another update with something more exciting to report.

Level 3 Barracks unlocked

In Saoire’s master plan to represent Ironforge in Draenor, the level 3 Barracks must be unlocked. To do so, one must complete the achievement Patrolling Draenor. That was completed this weekend, even though Saoire is still only level 94, and therefore unable to upgrade her garrison, much less the barracks, to level 3. Conveniently, the achievement is account wide, and so Gurdrid now has a level 3 barracks, and will soon have 25 followers active.

In other news, Aingrit has made her way to the new continent, and I plan to take her just far enough to build her two profession buildings – Jewelcrafting and Enchanting, so that I can reap those benefits for her.  Aingrit’s leveling will be limited to what she can get from missions, opening her outposts, and mining and herbing until Saoire is level 100. Aingrit does at least have Hellscream’s Decapitator, which will speed things up immensely. Sveala is waiting her turn as well, but I’m not quite ready to bring another toon I don’t play well through the portal.

I’ve kitted out the lower level toons with at least 1-60 heirlooms – since most of them aren’t level 60 yet, I figure they can help pay for their own gear upgrades. Muirri and Sruith still need to make the move from Ysera to Whisperwind as well, and will likely do so in the early summer.

Drama Time

Note: While no names are being used in this piece, some people may be able to guess who I am talking about. If you can guess, it’s because you were involved, or heard something from someone who was involved. Some of what is posted here is conjecture based on events I witnessed or conversations I have had with one or more individuals. If I get something wrong, it’s probably because I made an incorrect assumption. Consider it an exercise in the telephone game.

No matter how much I try to avoid it, drama happens. It’s a given that players have different goals in a game as vast as World of Warcraft. In this particular case, I believe the drama happened because of a couple of things that could have been easily solved.  But I was not directly privy to the problems until a breaking point, and things happened well outside of my control.

While I’m talking about a particular situation that many of my readers already potentially know more than I do about motivations, I am writing this in part to get it out of my system.

I have been raiding with an awesome group of individuals, many of whom I call friend. I will not say that we are Leet, though I would say that several of these players are or could be in the right environment. This was one of the problems that manifested.

Another problem is that the leader of our merry band was hearing from squeaky wheels. Whether rightly or not, I do not know, because this leader kept that information relatively close to the chest. Perhaps to spare the feelings of others – even me. So this leader was doing all the work of leading both a guild and a raiding team.

Which leads to a third problem. Leaders need to delegate, which was not happening, putting a lot of pressure all on one person. Who probably has some personal stuff going on as well, as noted by comments made casually.

We had a bad raid night. We struggled with bosses we were doing well on, we fell apart on bosses we were already struggling with. We didn’t even get to the boss we were actively working on. And to add to it, some of our raiders were getting further with another group of people.

This created a chasm, and filling that chasm were a number of difficult feelings. Resentment from those who chose to/could/wanted to raid into the wee hours of the morning and throughout the week. Irritation from those who chose not to/couldn’t pick up extra raid times throughout the week to get practice and gear.  All of it veiled under a layer of camaraderie. I do not think this layer was false, merely hiding the problems that were beginning to show under the surface.

This bad raid night turned out to be a snapping point. The following day’s raids were cancelled at the last minute. A few people were able to pick up into raids or do some LFR; but there were a lot of people who were quite confused by the whole thing.

The next week rolled around, and communication was sketchy about whether raids would happen. Something was put together with another guild, and we were able to get some raid time in. The next night, however, we logged in to no guild. No official communication was made. A few people talked to the former guild leader, and from conversations I’ve had with those people, I have made some additional conjectures which have already been presented.

When we raided that night, I realized a number of things, not the least of which was that I had felt a lot of pressure to perform, and while I had a great time, I always felt a little bit carried.  Perhaps those feelings went the other way as well, and people felt as though they were carrying me. I couldn’t say, because no one told me in so many words.

Many of us have now joined that guild that we raided with during that week, and raids are continuing. The new group is beginning to gel, though there is clearly history around raiding in that group as well, which I hope can be resolved without too much trouble to everyone.

On a more personal note, and to end this happily, my new computer is built, and it has a fancy new video card. These two things have significantly fixed many of my lag issues, giving me two things: better ability to react to mechanics, and also a significant DPS boost. I don’t feel so carried any more. And I’m still melee in a raiding world that gives advantage to ranged DPS.