In this installment I talk about the success of the newly released Icecrown instances, show my annoyance at farming up Ashen Verdict rep, and take a closer look at the idea of transferring the guild to greener pastures.

The new LFG tool is a godsend and the 3 new Icecrown heroics are a smashing success!

Like everyone else, I absolutely love the new LFG system. Instant gratification at it's finest. Sure, if you're not a tank, you may be stuck in the queue for a very long time, but at least now you can quest and do other things while you wait for a group, instead of idling around in a major city. Why didn't Blizzard come out with this sooner?

I have done all of the 5mans across various toons; tanking, DPSing, and healing. Healing was the hardest to do, followed by tanking. All of the dungeons were finished with ease on release, but I can see a lot of players struggling with Halls of Reflection. That place can be a tanking nightmare, even with the use of LOS tricks (I prefer not to use them as it just makes it more annoying), and in turn a healing nightmare since mobs will generally get a few free casts off. The loot is great across the new heroics; it's just too bad that Blizzard didn't add in a few more pieces of really well itemized loot to make them worth running more than a couple of times for any raiding toon.

The new Icecrown raid is challenging... when you don't have the best gear from the previous tier.

Loving the encounters so far. Although they're extremely easy with a ToGC farming group, they can be challenging for everyone else. Every encounter so far is trivialized by high DPS. I ran multiple 25mans the first week of release, (I am always crazy for content when it comes out), one of which was done with a ToGC Insanity farming group. The main group resulted in one-shots all around. All the mechanics were more or less ignored, except for the Gunship Battle, and the bosses were just zerged down with very little thought given to strategy.

The second group was almost all guild alts, most of whom were scattered fresh 80s in blues and heroic epics. This run went pretty well since at least 5 people were really well geared, and the rest had decent experience, but we actually had to use some semblance of strategy for the fights we were doing. When it came to Saurfang, we even wiped a few times trying to just zerg it down. After adopting a strategy for our lack of DPS, we overcame it.

I did the third and last run on my priest who is my worst geared alt. I joined a last minute trade chat PuG, and let's just say that it didn't go too well. We wiped for a couple of hours on Lady Deathwhisper and the PuG fell apart soon after. The initial encounters in 25man still aren't to the point where they're easily PuGable.

All the 10mans were much easier than the 25mans outside of Lord Marrowgar's hits on the tanks, which Blizzard very recently nerfed. It was a necessary nerf since it was a bit out of control for an entry level easy mode boss and none of the other bosses really put the tank at risk of death to the extent that Lord Marrowgar's hits did.

Having to farm trash rep to get a good ring sucks. A lot.

The fault for having to farm Ashen Verdict rep for rings lies mostly with Blizzard. If the rings weren't so good, less people would feel pressured to farm rep. The biggest issue is that the rep is there so that the trash won't feel so tedious the 5th+ week you're doing it, but if you max out your rep within the first week, that's exactly what will happen. In the future, either offer more vanity style rewards for rep, or mediocre gear, and raiders won't feel so pressured to power farm rep.

Few things are worse than massive server lag and nightly queues. It's time to look towards greener pastures.

Ever think of transferring your entire guild off of a bad server? We have, and we recently put it to a guild vote. It was unanimous that everyone wanted off the server. I'm sure this thought has gone through almost everyone's mind at some point. Transferring for us now is a certainty; it's only a matter of when are where. Mal'Ganis is such an overpopulated server that prime time during the weekdays, we get 500+ queues. Just last sunday night, we had a queue of 500, and last Tuesday it was well over 800.

Paying the monthly subscription and not being able to play when we want to, while others on better servers are able to, is extremely frustrating. Having to push our raid schedule back an hour every night, especially when we try to adhere to a very casual schedule really hurts us in terms of progression. Adding an extra hour isn't realistic either since people have to wake up early for work or class the next day, and we cater our schedule to the average working individual.

If you're on an extremely high pop server, or a low pop server, I'd suggest bringing up the idea of transferring to your guild. Just be sure that in the case of moving off of a high pop server that you don't jump at the chance to take the free transfer off that Blizzard often makes available to the most populated servers. As appealing as it may sound to not have to pay for the move, most free transfers lead to low pop backwater servers. Just make sure to do your research so that you don't end up in a worse situation than you already are.

A mid pop server is the sweet spot, and that's really where you should aim to be. Just make sure that when choosing which server to move to, you account for the ping of your raiders, and that can involve some information gathering on your end. Figure out where the majority of your raiders reside and select the closest data center accordingly. If most of your guild plays in California, it wouldn't make much sense to play on a realm located on a Boston data center, where everyone's ping will be double what they could be if you picked a realm located on a Los Angeles data center instead.

Next: Road to Arthas: Chapter 2