Thank you everyone who has contributed to the guild bank repair fund by either donating raid BOEs, gold, or items for me to sell on the auction house. More guild bank repair funds means more guild bank repair allocations for everyone, and I hope to increase the repairs again soon. All the guild bank money goes solely to fund guild bank repairs. It is not used for any other purpose.

Just a reminder, we do have a mythic Uldir BOE farming event tonight at 6pm EST. Please try to be available to attend. You do not have to be a mythic raider to participate. The purpose of this event is to collect Uldir mythic BOE drops for sale on the auction house to fund more guild repair allocations.

Sunday at 3pm PST / 6pm EST, we will be farming Mythic Uldir trash for BoEs.

This is not a “personal farm day”.

All BoEs that drop during this time are to be given to Urostek so that we can deposit all funds into the Guild Bank. As it’s been previously mentioned, we are tearing through guild repairs at an alarming rate. Selling some Mythic BoEs will help stave off the slow drain that happens in an expansion where gold is hard to come by.

We will be forming at least one, preferably two groups, and farming over the course of several clears. Kill all trash, walk out, reset, repeat, until we either lose our minds or enough BoEs drop that we feel good about our potential bank deposits.

Because we are only clearing trash, anyone who feels they can survive the trash is welcome to come. You don’t have to be Mythic or even Heroic geared to join in. We encourage everyone to join us, regardless of whether or not you intend to raid. Guild Repairs benefit everyone!

As you may have heard, the guild bank is slowly losing funds over time, and we’re trying hard to keep guild repairs for everybody while not spending too much of Urostek’s money keeping the bank topped off. An idea that got tossed around was of setting up a guild marketplace: somewhere to buy items, wherein the sales can go directly into the guild bank.

After a week or so of testing, we’re reading to launch the Ministry of Defense Discord Market!

The Premise

Every week, officers (currently Lineda) will list market items according to auction house trends. However, we will be under-pricing the auction house! The idea is to sell goods to MoD members at a discounted price, while depositing all profits into the guild bank. MoD members benefit from cheaper supplies, and we all benefit from increased funds into the bank!

Continue reading

I updated the Vanguard Donation document.

New this month:

  • 75 Crimson Ink
  • 30 Viridescent Ink
  • 200 Slimy Mackerel
  • 200 Akunda’s Bite
  • 5 Vantus Runes

I removed a few donations and slightly reorganized the page as well.

Note that Blue items are currently being sent to Urostek, and Yellow items will be sent to Quetzie. Green items remain Lineda donations.

Remember: You only need to sign up for 1 spot, but you can always send multiple stacks of items anyway.

If you’re ever unable to find the link to this document, remember that you can find it on the left-hand box on the Raiding Home page under the “Required to Raid” heading.

The votes are in!

Thank you to everyone who participated and everyone who voted. Some of these races were amazingly close – we have SEVERAL ties for placements and there are very few categories with one “stand out” winner!

As mentioned, the prizes per category are as follows:

BEST IN SHOW and THE UROSTEK will have in-store mount prizes.

RACIAL PRIDE and CROSS-DRESSED CLASS will have in-store pet prizes

MOUNT/PET and OFFICER will have Sting Ray (mount) and Corgi (minipet) prizes

However, there is a bonus: I (Quetzie) was personally so impressed with the entries that I am throwing in 5000g to any second-place winners and 1000g to any third-place winners. This includes tied entries!

Without further ado…

Continue reading

All the images are submitted and the voting pages are up!

You get 3 votes per category, but you can only vote one time – no take-backsies!

Navigate to the individual pages below, or head to the Hallow’s End Costume Contest main page and click the headings.

Best in Show
The Urostek
Racial Pride
Cross-Dressed Class
Mount / Pet Matching
Officer Best

Voting ends at 1pm PST / 4pm EST November 1!

This week, I have seen so many new people running battlegrounds and have had several new people message me looking for how to get in on the rateds action. This is so awesome! I love seeing this grow and flourish.

From Miatreeleafa:

“Ministry of Defense’s rated battleground’s team has had a strong week. We continue to see week over week improvement with some team members hitting major achievement milestones! Congratulations to them!

We are beginning to see an influx of new PvP players. This being said, we would like to remind everyone that they need to confirm that they have read the PvP rules here with a warbringer prior to asking for an invite to the group.

Along with running normal strategies this week, we also had fun putting together a six rogue DPS team, which turned out better that expected, winning a vast majority of the games we played.

The team is discussing putting together a second RBG night on Wednesdays. What are your thoughts? Send a message to one of the warbringers, or tell us your thoughts in the #pvp channel in Discord.

Recruiting: Does this sound like fun? Well, you’re in luck. We are still looking for players that meet all requirements and have a reliable attendance history. The Ministry of Defense warbringers would love to see a full 10 man guild group running RBGs each week. We are specifically recruiting 2 ranged DPS and a Havoc/Vengeance Demon Hunter for Flag Carrier. Have questions? Message Miatreeleafa, Bizatch, Lunzzul or Bighoss on discord so we can assist you.”

I would like to add is a quick shout out to the non-guildies that have been playing with us through the new Ministry of Defense community! This community was created so that we can run and have fun with a large variety of different players, inside and outside of the guild, as well as making communication between the PvPers easier. If you would like to join the community, you can get the link here.

Be on the look out for PvP related news on Discord!

Thursday: M.O.T.H.E.R. F-

Taloc took two attempts to down; we lost a priest early because the definition of “loosely stack” middle was…well, taken loosely. After we restarted the fight and settled that, it was relatively smooth sailing.

MOTHER

Much like G’huun last week, I’ll be doing a breakdown of some of the problems on MOTHER.

Some of these stats may be a little misleading (purposefully getting hit by mechanics to die on a wipe call) so it’s important to pay attention to the information as a whole; a person who lives the longest throughout a fight, but has high laser or sanitizing strike damage / hits, probably hit them to wipe easier.

Also, some people weren’t present for all pulls. Sheekey doesn’t need to worry about some stats, while Neko should pay closer attention to overall trends.

Interrupts / Stuns

Depending on comp, we’re going to come up with a stun order for this week. We routinely lost Plutonic and Wendal to melee damage from 15 adds. This means people were using stuns right off the bat without paying attention to other CD uses. We’ll work on this so it doesn’t happen!

Uldir Defensive Beams

A number of people are getting hit by wall beams (usually on the room 2-3 transition), but several more are getting hit because they don’t move quickly enough. The ceiling beams are also deceptive – people will stand in the correct spot, but then move out of safety before the ceiling beams reach the floor (usually because the wall beams have passed, they feel “safe”).

Not all hits resulted in deaths, but it’s an undue amount of damage that the healers have to take care of during an already tricky movement fight. There won’t be a lot of damage going out as long as people are properly following mechanics.

We’ve taken to calling out “STAY!” when the wall beams pass, but we don’t always remember.

Remember also that wall beams move sooner than ceiling beams. Move into a place of safety for wall beams, THEN move into the ceiling beam location if you aren’t at one yet. If you bee-line for the safe spot of both, you’re liable to get hit with a laser or two.

Behold, glorious Quetzie artwork.

If you’re standing at the bisect of green and red, run along green (to the bottom of the picture) and THEN run to the ceiling safety location. Running alone the red (diagonal) will kill you.

Sanitizing Strike

Sanitizing strike should be easy for most ranged people to dodge, unless a tank points it at them. Melee will often have trouble resulting from wind + SS being tough to get around.

SS is also a common way to die when there is a wipe call; if your name is high on the list, check to see if/when you’ve died from the spell. For example, I died to it 3 times – all at 92% or more into the fight. This likely means it was a wipe call, and my actual hits were 2 rather than 5.

Purifying Flame

There are two instances of purifying flame: one caused by swirlies on the ground after MOTHER casts Sanitizing Strike, and one caused by the fire when winds are active. I did NOT track the winds one.

Given our strat, some incidental damage is expected at the start. However, as long as we’re smart, we can avoid most of the incoming flame damage right away.

Behold, more glorious Quetzie artwork.

If we all stack tightly together (red in this image) and move left when flame goes out, we’ll be able to avoid all of the damage from PF. You can move left and move into the wall when called out to do so.

Even with our strat, some people are just getting hit more than expected. Try to dodge PF, even within spirit link. Sitting and taking the damage is just causing unnecessary stress on people.

Healthstone Usage VS Early Deaths

If your name is not on the left, you never used a healthstone. If your name is not on the left (or is very low) AND your name is high on the right, you really need to fix this.

There are a few takeaways I have at a glance.

Neko, Belle, and Telann are a bit SoL on account of being Cleansing Purged a few times. Wendal and Plutonic are dying early to excessive melee add damage through no fault of their own, but are still popping Healthstones to try to survive the onslaught. Hopefully a good stun rotation will prevent those early deaths.

Hoss is the second highest healthstone user, but is in the top 10 earliest deaths. This likely means he needs to position better for mechanics like lasers (see also my doodle above), but Hoss is working extremely hard to stay alive in the event that he does fail a mechanic (mostly, I blame being a fat tauren death knight for those failures). Melee with low movement tend to suffer on this fight, so it’s important to peel away from the boss early to find better positioning for lasers when we call out that they’re coming. On the other hand, Kamahl doesn’t show up on the left at all, and died around the same time as Hoss in fights. If he used healthstones, it’s possible – even probable – that he could have lived significantly longer each fight.

Conversely, Foxxie is the #1 healthstone user, but is one of the last folks to die in a fight. Partially this is because of healthstone usage. Jibbles, Tusker, and Quetzie are the top 3 survivalists, and also have high healthstone usage.

“But I’m saving healthstones for phase 3!”

Yeah well….fuckin’ don’t. We’re progressing. If more of us live to see room 3, then we can start to worry about saving healthstones for that room. In the meantime we never got a proper rotation in room 3, so it’s a bit of a bust to save the stones for it.

Overall

At the end of the night we were getting into room 3 with some success. We need to time our crossing better to not overlap with wind, and save stampeding roar for the occasion if there are lasers to get to. The entire group crosses at once, so every big cooldown should be used (except healthstones – pop those when you’re out of spirit link!)

Thursday Logs

Friday: Heroic Fetid+

This week we tried something new, and started on Heroic Fetid. Taloc and MOTHER are easy to PUG on heroic now, and we’re starting on them for alt night (since normal heroic and mother were skipped regardless).

We had smooth sailing on Fetid, Zek, and Vectis, as usual. We practiced the Mythic strat on Zek’vos for moving the boss to each marker. It’s going to take some getting used to, but it’s good for us to do it now.

Zul gave us some expected problems. We tried the zerg strat a few times, which failed (not unexpected). We also realized that part of the failure was resulting from Laser Matrix, which is uncontrollable when a person soaking a pool stands too close to a hexer. We abandoned zerg strat because Blizzard is apparently an italian company full of spaghetti code.

We also experimented with changing lust times; initially we’d been lusting after Locus, then remembered that our successful kills had us lusting beforehand. Lusting to kill a crusher before Locus was the smoothest we’ve gotten. At that point, it’s on the tanks to run out stacks, pallies not to BoP the tank in the middle, and healers not to dispell people in the middle of the room (because those fear adds are nasty). We still got him down – our second Zul kill.

Mythrax was sort of a mess. Too many people stacked too tightly at the start of the fight. Not enough interrupts went out. Our DPS was spread too far and too thin, resulting in adds unable to be cleaved down. A second attempt resulted in our second kill. Everyone was alive at the end of it and it was extremely clean. A very good feeling!

G’huun we looked at only very briefly; we have a few people we want to practice orb running in the meantime.

Friday Logs 1
Friday Logs 2

Monday: Alt Night

We went into Heroic Taloc and MOTHER, since we skipped them on friday. After that, we went back to normal and did Fetid+.

For the first time, we one-shot everything AND came in under the two hour mark.

Monday Logs

Guild Repair Money

There’s some concern lately that guild repairs are putting too much of a drain on the bank. Urostek has put some of his own money into the bank a few times, which is not fair to him when we all rely on it so heavily.

A few ideas have been tossed around. One is selling all Mythic BoEs and putting proceeds in the guild bank. Another is selling all heroic or normal BoEs, but letting those who get mythics keep them. Another is selling Mythic BoEs and putting a percentage of sales in the bank. Another is to schedule farm nights after we down MOTHER to try to get BoEs just for the purpose of filling the guild bank. Still other ideas are farming old raids or selling potions / flasks / etc to guildies as a discount and putting that in the bank.

If you have thoughts or opinions on the matter, post in the raiding discussion discord channel. We’re all ears!

Attendance

I’m behind on both the raiding attendance page and the audit sheets. Don’t worry, that’s a penalty on me, not on you!

There are a couple of new guild ranks. Warlord will remain for our Raid Leaders, but a new rank, Warbringer, will be for the PVP Leaders. The Guild Praetor position was condensed with the current officer rank, Legati. All the other guild ranks are unaffected.

If you raid, or want to raid, speak to a Warlord.

If you PVP, or want to PVP, consult a Warbringer.

Do not forget about the guild’s Hallow’s End Transmog Contest currently underway at: http://ministryofdefense.net/halloween