The jumpstart for our WoW guild was from a group of real-life friends that have hopped from game to game for a decade or two. Our roots are in LAN games and the odd hobby some of us have in collecting arcade coin-ops (Joust tournaments from my living room).

Even though our interests have migrated to MMORPGs, we do get together and LAN game now and then. This upcoming Saturday the 28th, it will be a combo LAN night and housewarming for Nelg's (You may know him as Uwen) new place.

WoW is definitely the main game on our agenda for the day, night and possibly next day. Playing within the same room is a much different experience than online, even if you're accustomed to voice ops. There's nothing like running around, shouting at each other and then sharing some pizza or BBQ immediately afterwards. This camaraderie has kept us a tight-nit group for a long time.

Congrats are in order for Ilterendi, the first guild on our server to kill Vashj. Landroval and I discussed the fight at length and it sounded very entertaining. His post regarding the kill made some interesting notes however:

"My biggest regret for the populace in general is that (So far, going by that amazingly nifty wowjutsu armory magic) so few will ever see something quite like it."
. . .
"Wowjutsu has 806921 characters in 14310 guilds listed in it's database. Those numbers represent (mostly) every player that has killed something in Karazhan on up. 56% of that 800,000 have killed High King, 42% gruul, and a spare 20% Magtheridon. SSC kills dwindle even more, with 13% of the playerbase having seen at least one thing in there. Players that have beaten Vashj drop to 2.77%, or 22,351."

If you calculate by the total subscribers in North America (2 million is the Blizzard ballpark), the percentage that have killed Vashj is just 1%. Worldwide, it would go much lower because mainland China still doesn't officially have TBC.

This is no surprise. Raiding content is designed to trickle down from the few guilds that master it quickly, giving other raiding guilds a goal to progress towards. For the rest of the population it provides mystery and perhaps jealousy. It makes the world feel bigger for all but a few, which is exactly the point. If everyone could see all of the content sooner, the feeling of having completed the game might set in for the general population.

I don't know if I agree with that, it's not bad design, but it also leaves a good deal of players feeling unsatisfied. It ~IS~ part of "The Vision", which Everquest started and Blizzard follows now in all but name.

Players who stand around in Ironforge all day begging for gold really baffle me. Wouldn't it be so much more fun to just go play the game rather than take abuse from strangers as you beg? Maybe they're trying to make some sort of mini-game out of it, seeing how much copper they can get just from yelling for it. These must be the kids that fell for it when Mom told them that cleaning their room was a fun game.

I often repeat something I'd overheard early in the game: "There are these magical creatures called humanoids. Legend has it, if you poke them a few times, they will drop coins!"

Why did the level 3 Night Elf Rogue travel across two continents just to stand in front of the auction house and beg for gold "to pay for repairs"? They could easily kill any mobs their level without gear at all, it doesn't make sense in so many ways.

I just don't get it.

Resistance gear entered my mind again for TBC after a humbling encounter with Steam Surgers in Heroic Steamvault. Some frost resist for those mobs would certainly come in handy.

I thought of Void Spheres: the +4 resist all socket gems. But would those cut it? Realistically, if I duplicated my gear, I could fill 15 to 19 sockets in total. That's only 60 to 76 resistance overall, which is still "poor" in the character pane, but it's sure nice to have one set for all schools of magic rather than multiples overflowing my bags. Plus, it'd be pretty awesome DPS for resistance gear. I could augment with rings, necklaces and offhands for a possible total of 169 resistance.

169 is a far cry from the max of ~370 resistance (see WoWWiki), but the max is based on level 73 mobs ala "??" raid bosses. For Heroics, where bosses are level 72, it may be more realistic.

Theorycraft can only go so far and real-world (or at least game-world, lol) results are more fun to obtain. =)

Without investing in expensive Void Spheres yet (35g each on my server's AH), I collected a set "of Shadow Protection" greens at cheap prices. I kept the resistance modest from my goal and tested with 151 Shadow Resist total. The mobs for my test were Wrath Corruptors @ Forge Camp Wrath in Blade's Edge (near Ogri'la). They spawn randomly between levels 70 to 72 and spam Shadow Bolts.

My results? After being hit with 200 Shadow Bolts, I resisted 36% (38% if full resists are accounted for) of the overall damage via partial resists. Much better damage mitigation than I thought it would be.

I'm going to start collecting a duplicate set of socket gear and fill them with Void Spheres. Once I've obtained my dream resistance set, I'll post results from actual Heroic runs.