<Fidelity>

Bosses have been dying pretty quickly over the last couple of weeks, so while we catch up on our posts from Sha of Pride to Spoils of Pandaria, we’ll leave you with our first impression of Thok.

Once again, <Fidelity> presents a post written by Esta, our resident expert in the coolest set of magical damages (shadow and frost), and only slightly edited by Borgthor, who carefully left in any digs at post punctuality.

As 5.4 looms on the horizon, we should perhaps recap <Fidelity>’s doings within the Throne of Thunder (Patch 5.2 and 5.3).

5.2 was released on Tuesday, March 5th and will come to a close on Tuesday, September 10th 2013, 27 weeks later. During this time, <Fidelity> cleared all normal content and 5.98 Heroic modes (because Council was that close). <Fidelity> also picked up a number of achievements along the way, noteworthy amongst which were realm first Cretaceous Collector, You Said Crossing the Streams Was Bad  and realm second A Complete Circuit. Fidelity finishes this patch realm 7th on progress and realm 2nd on achievements.

<Fidelity> raids 3 nights per week, 8pm to 11pm server time. As life goes on, things will crop up and interfere with our players’ ability to attend the requisite ~85% of raids. When these things are a permanent change, then often raiders will step down and allow their slot to be filled with another more capable of making the raid times.  A short list of those who stopped raiding this expansion: Dambrath, Tinytee, Whipshamazin. For those keeping score, that’s 3 players, or 30% of our roster.

As such, not a great deal of raiding could have taken place without a reasonably deep pool of locums and guests from which to draw to fill our normal raiding requirements while people are away, sick, moving, having internet issues or just about any other conceivable cause of absence. Firstly, hats off to Helly (who was previously a core member on his rogue, and since stepping down to locum has transitioned to his priest). We ask him (sometimes even beg, or apply a good old fashioned puppy dog face) to brave content that outstrips his gear, and compete with mains that posses the latest in trinket fashion and legendary meta gems. He has saved many a night doomed to trolling trade chat, and nerves fraying as the latest hopeful navigates the intimidating maze of connecting to mumble.

On reflection, the rest of our regular locum crew are mostly alts of people attached to a friendly bunch of guilds on Dath’Remar. Praka recently brought his priest alt to the guild from <And His Educated Rodents>, we have Avi from <Twisted Haven> and Maanu (or Widget as we knew him from way back when) from <Crimson> has brought his monk to play. Many of our guests from outside the guild have come from this network of guilds, and from people we’ve raided with in the past (Hi! to Dries and Cierndanis to name just a couple). While you’d be tempted to think missing a raider is pain personified, we have managed to meet some great people as guests in our raids, most recently I’m thinking of Dathramis, a rogue that knew Bio from his druid days who was a fabulous addition to our last battles against Heroic Council.

Fortunately, <Fidelity>’s stability is an attractive characteristic, not to mention Noondez’s smashing dress sense and Kalus’ laugh. <Fidelity> had had a couple of key signings during the mid-season transfer window, not least of which is our stoic bearded mountain Hagrim. Signing on Hagrim was key as it seems that the way to raid in 5.2-5.3 was:

Step1) Acquire Prot Pally

Step 2) Acquire 9 other players (preferably fire mages/warlocks)

Step 3) Profit.

Additionally, <Fidelity> now enjoys the delightful company and rolling multi-dots of our resident Shadow priest Alrius. Word has it that there exists a good number of cleave fights in SoO, so I’m sure his DPS will be greatly appreciated.

Lastly, but not least(ly?), <Fidelity> is looking forward to the contributions of Realpesky, our one time guest. Realpesky joins us as the obligatory healthstone making, portal placing warlock that has been so missing from our heroic Iron Quon kills. Real was with <Fidelity> for the first Durumu and Primordius kills in April, and will be full-time pain bringing again from mid-September (Check your guides for local times and appearances)

Going into 5.4, Kalus has elected to bench his discipline/holy priest in favour for his restoration shaman.  This can only be a good thing, as our blog can attest to the unnatural abilities of resto shaman in heroic progress kills. This brings the total for people no longer playing their original class to 2, and can only serve to confuse guests going forward.

Despite repeated threats, Borg will continue to raid on his protection warrior and not on his brewmaster monk. The local tote is also paying a measly $1.02 that Borg will continue to be engineer-less at least until 6.0.

Wrathion’s legendary quest line continues to progress, with some amazing capes available for player’s dedicated efforts. This patch saw players collecting rocks and tokens, killing Lei Shen and that’s about it. The toughest phase is the current one: Wait for 5.4

5.2-5.4 was arguably the patch for mages and warlocks to reign supreme. With a new pass at balancing, hopefully things will be a bit more uniform over the dps classes as a whole moving into 5.4. Bioderm is already bemoaning the nerfs to his much-loved fire mage class.

Going forward into 5.4, it will be great to see hunters lifted off the floor of the DPS charts, DW frost DKs rocking the cleave charts again, and Jondy might even get a tick of some sort of heal in with the number of shields being flung around reducing slightly. Stay tuned to this space for more developments as they arise (well, within 4-6 weeks of them arising. Usually. With some additional prodding required.)

We have been spending a lot of time in the last couple of weeks on Ragnaros, which has been the most unforgiving normal mode encounter of the expansion so far. In the mean time, Bioderm has been progressing nicely on the quest line for the legendary staff.

The previous raid night was spent clearing the farm bosses, while Bioderm ran around collecting fragments and charging foci for the quest line. The process was quite seamless for the rest of the raid, although we do like our fire mage to be the star of the show (with tanks as second billing) on Alysrazor, so having him running around on the ground collecting fragments while we sent a variety of toons into the air was an interesting experiment. It was more than worth it however, if only for the first pull. Unable to contain his excitement, Bioderm marched right up to a hatchling egg, got immediately imprinted and consumed.

The Delegation quest event in Firelands was a blast, and made for a nice interlude between ripping Majordomo to bits and getting stuck into Ragnaros. Congratulations to Bioderm on the first weapon on the way to the legendary, [Branch of Nordrassil].

<Fidelity> is an Alliance guild on Dath’Remar formed just prior to the shattering, and is ready to take on Deathwing in Cataclysm. We are a small 10 man raiding guild, looking forward to hard modes in the new expansion.

The picture above is several founding members of the guild celebrating their ICC Drakes over Dalaran.

Much to my surprise, we have 8 of 10 core positions filled, and will be looking for one healer (most likely Shaman) and one melee DPS (most likely Enhancement Shaman or Retribution Paladin) to complete the team. For more information about the guild, keep an eye on this blog, head over to our website or browse our forum.