News
Having created Last of the Hybrid a little under 2 months ago now, it is with great regret that we have decided that it is just going to be far too much work than we originally anticipated.
The idea behind the guild was solid enough, but we just hoped it would all fall into place a little easier, however, after several of us spamming the relevant in game channels, out of game forums and anywhere else we could, it has dawned on us that getting a 10 man casual mature guild on it’s feet and sustaining this feat, was going to take, well, a miracle!
We are really grateful to all those who tagged along to try and make the guild work, and I am really sorry if you feel we have taken you for a ride, it was never our intention. We had hoped that once the guild was up and running it would be a low maintenance job, but we, mainly Ste and Lou I may add, are having to spend more and more time in game, just to try and get enough people signed, recruited and interested to actual have a raid up and running.
So without further ado, we have gone grovelling back to Hybrid Species to act as their mascots and occasional raiders. So long all feel free to keep in touch!
The idea behind the guild was solid enough, but we just hoped it would all fall into place a little easier, however, after several of us spamming the relevant in game channels, out of game forums and anywhere else we could, it has dawned on us that getting a 10 man casual mature guild on it’s feet and sustaining this feat, was going to take, well, a miracle!
We are really grateful to all those who tagged along to try and make the guild work, and I am really sorry if you feel we have taken you for a ride, it was never our intention. We had hoped that once the guild was up and running it would be a low maintenance job, but we, mainly Ste and Lou I may add, are having to spend more and more time in game, just to try and get enough people signed, recruited and interested to actual have a raid up and running.
So without further ado, we have gone grovelling back to Hybrid Species to act as their mascots and occasional raiders. So long all feel free to keep in touch!
Blizzard has recently launched an online “Pet Store”, where players can now purchase non-combat vanity pets for $10 or £9 / 10 euro (Somehow that exchange rate does not figure!) each. The first in game pets to become available are a Pandaren Monk pet and a Kel Thuzad pet.
The question now has to be, how far will Blizzard take this, are we to see more in game vanity items being made available for real money? I have to say, it can’t be long before mounts, or non combat vanity attire makes its way into a Blizzard store. The designs of these pets do seem to be of a rather high standard, but I suppose they are getting paid for it, will this result in less effort being put into ‘free’ vanity items?
My personal opinion is dead against the selling of in game items, vanity or otherwise, but many people do seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, stating that it just gives geeks something to spend money on in their hobby.
The one redeeming factor seems to be that half of the purchase price goes to a charity (although this is only for the Pandaren pet for a limited duration), the Make-a-Wish foundation.
Taken from the Blizzard FAQ;
Does this mean you'll be introducing more services like this in the future? Will you be introducing the ability to buy epic weapons/etc. in the future, for example?
As with the pets, mounts, and other items players can obtain through Loot cards from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, Pet Store pets are purely cosmetic and just for fun. Like other paid services we offer, such as Paid Name Changes, Race Changes, and Character Re-Customizations, the Pet Store service is entirely optional and intended to provide players another means to enjoy World of Warcraft in a way that isn't detrimental to the game and that doesn't detract from the game play experience for players who choose not to use the service.
The question now has to be, how far will Blizzard take this, are we to see more in game vanity items being made available for real money? I have to say, it can’t be long before mounts, or non combat vanity attire makes its way into a Blizzard store. The designs of these pets do seem to be of a rather high standard, but I suppose they are getting paid for it, will this result in less effort being put into ‘free’ vanity items?
My personal opinion is dead against the selling of in game items, vanity or otherwise, but many people do seem to be jumping on the bandwagon, stating that it just gives geeks something to spend money on in their hobby.
The one redeeming factor seems to be that half of the purchase price goes to a charity (although this is only for the Pandaren pet for a limited duration), the Make-a-Wish foundation.
Taken from the Blizzard FAQ;
Does this mean you'll be introducing more services like this in the future? Will you be introducing the ability to buy epic weapons/etc. in the future, for example?
As with the pets, mounts, and other items players can obtain through Loot cards from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, Pet Store pets are purely cosmetic and just for fun. Like other paid services we offer, such as Paid Name Changes, Race Changes, and Character Re-Customizations, the Pet Store service is entirely optional and intended to provide players another means to enjoy World of Warcraft in a way that isn't detrimental to the game and that doesn't detract from the game play experience for players who choose not to use the service.
In between last weeks Ulduar 10 and this weeks, we decided to set ourselves a little challenge, taking on Naxx 8 man as a guild for the achievement (namely because 8 is about all we could muster!), which was done with little to no problems;
After managing to make it up to Hodir last week, and having a disastrous time with him, last night we set out for revenge with another Ulduar 10 run, this time with almost a full Last of the Hybrids raid, blooding a few new members, but also taking along some of the old Hybrid Species guard namely Misha – many thanks for running through the tactics on each boss (even though he seemed to be in a washing machine, that was situated in a well, next to an electric fence, across the street from his microphone!) plus Shomy and Dorf for taking on the tanking responsibilities as our tanks are, well, tank shy!
We did have a few people who had not been to Ulduar, added to the fact that many of us have a memory span shorter than that of your average goldfish with amnesia, Misha ran through the tactics before each boss for us, which was both advantageous to the run and to our hearing as he tends to sit in a neighbouring field to ensure he is at maximum range form his microphone!
The bosses in “The Siege of Ulduar”; Flame Leviathan, Ignis the Furnace Master, Razorscale and XT-002 Deconstructor seemed to go down rather easily this week considering it was only our second run, with Ignis being far less stressful than the debacle of last!
Next on the agenda was “The Antechamber of Ulduar”, taking on Kologarn I believe it was first, which is a reasonably simple fight, nuke the right arm whilst avoiding the lasers, once the adds are up aoe them down then back onto the right arm, simple! We then moved onto Auriaya, which is really all about the pull, after that it was a case of following the scouser to avoid his TS wrath “ A A A A A”, kill adds, avoid the black circles, when no adds are up, nuke the boss. I can’t really remember too much about the Assembly of Iron, but it did get killed, honest guv’, and one would assume Darkserenity aka Rob took all the loot… ;)
So on to the Keepers of Ulduar, taking on our nemesis of last week first, Hodir. We did manage to wipe on the trash leading to Hodir this week, with numerous people having a play in the snow, hoping for snowmen and getting nothing but worms, leading to a few aoe fests resulting in a dead raid and an upset scouser, again, but we still couldn’t rattle Misha into swearing! It took a little time to explain this boss as a number of people had not been before; again Misha took the job on, but only one real way to find out what to do pull it and see!
The first attempt was much better than last week, although we were having a few problems still with healing and dispelling; still, it was an improvement, after this Misha went to healing, with Ste going Boomkin I believe, and the new guy Rob taking on dispelling responsibilities. The second attempt was almost flawless, with trapped NPC’s being quickly released and everybody on the whole managing to avoid the flash freeze, however, the dps wasn’t quite up to scratch, and in typical fashion we killed Hodir with only seconds remaining on the enrage timer!
We then moved on into a jungle, and although Ste had fingers crossed for a field day of herb picking, we opened it up to a free for all, and Ste’s ageing reactions didn’t cope too well, as he was left with rather slim pickings! It was in this area that Ste proclaimed “oh dear” (or words to that effect) “I’ve pulled a big flower”, as a rather large tree came bounding towards the raid (!), the trash was cleared effectively, if a little slowly due to all the herb picking going on! The boss was Freya, and although the tactics sounded a little complicated, with multiple packs of differing ability mobs that spawn, resulting in an initial wipe due to poor dps co-ordination (brings back bad memories of core hound packs!), must have been Lou’s fault, we did manage to down the boss on the second attempt. The tactics are reasonably simple once you get the hang of them, as we found with many bosses.
We then faced up to Thorim, I can’t really say too much about this fight as I was led through a corridor with some shady characters killing a few trash mobs and bosses, whilst the rest of the raid got on with the job of killing the boss, seemed fairly simple though!
Our next task was to catch a train, simple task for most guilds, however, after attempting to leave me behind, with only my aspect saving me, Ste was duped into jumping to an early grave by Misha giving him some “tactics” on how to get off the train, much to Ste’s disgust and the rest of the raids amusement. Misha was not to be trusted again this raid! The train took us to Mimiron, whose tactics sounded painfully complicated yet again, and on initial attempt resulted in an instantly dead tank! However, the first attempt did give us a taster of the tactics as we bungled our way through to the last phase giving us an overview of the fight.
The second attempt was more fruitful, albeit with a dead adam only seconds into the fight again, basically the first phase consisted of nuking the boss, with some big damage to the tank, any melee dps not switched on, and whoever was the victim of the fire ball. In phase 2, it was a case of keeping out of the circles on the floor, but the main obstacle was the lasers, which rotated round with players having to move round in an anticlockwise direction until it had stopped, rinse and repeat till phase 3. In phase 3 adam’s corpse proved useful, as it was used as a placer for the ranged dps, whose job was to dps down the adds, with Lou keeping up dps on the boss. A rather fun boss, and managed to kill it on the second attempt!
This took us to the next stage of Ulduar, The Descent into Madness, and with it getting late; we had to swap out one of the healers with brboss coming in as a replacement. We were warned of at least 30 minutes of trash before we got to the boss, however, this was to prove more like 10, I think Misha was just trying to put us off, which wasn’t necessary with Ste’s negativity reaching boiling point!
I think Misha was getting rather fed up with explaining boss tactics by this point, and gave us a brief overview of the boss, General Vezax, if you have X run left, if you have skull, run right. Like the lambs we are, we took this literally, and to the slaughter we went! A couple of wipes later and we were getting the hang of it, basically, if you have an X, you have a life leach dot, and you need to get as far from other people as possible or you will heal the boss. If you have a skull, a big shdow nuke is going to drop on where you were stood, much like the once in the 5 man instance. To complicate matters a little, you cannot regenerate mana, there are green clouds for this purpose which need to be killed, which provide a bitter sweet buff, in that it provides mana regen but also damages. Another small complication in that a black spot on the floor allows for higher dps, and you have plenty of things to think about, although this is pretty much a one phase fight.
On our final attempt for the night, we manage to take the general down to 1% health, before he enraged wiping the raid with a measly 20k health to go! This resulted in a final, final attempt, albeit without Lou (a godsend? Who said that!?), this time everybody seemed to grasp the idea of the fight and slowly but surely down went the general.
All in all a successful night of raiding, Ste getting ribbed for every misspoken word (although running the raid well via TS) and getting duped into a suicide bid, the new man Rob whoreing half the epics that fell, although he may live to regret picking up all that tank gear…, myself being ousted for being a noob with no aspect on and bertier not surviving a single encounter, Shomy and Dorf providing great tanks, although Dorf exploded into a fit of rage after the raid as he was ganked rahhhh, Adam providing a nice marker as a corpse, the most useful he has been… Add to this that our casual raid lasted over 5 hours and it was an epic night, thanks again all for being part of the experience!
Pictures will be added shortly.
After managing to make it up to Hodir last week, and having a disastrous time with him, last night we set out for revenge with another Ulduar 10 run, this time with almost a full Last of the Hybrids raid, blooding a few new members, but also taking along some of the old Hybrid Species guard namely Misha – many thanks for running through the tactics on each boss (even though he seemed to be in a washing machine, that was situated in a well, next to an electric fence, across the street from his microphone!) plus Shomy and Dorf for taking on the tanking responsibilities as our tanks are, well, tank shy!
We did have a few people who had not been to Ulduar, added to the fact that many of us have a memory span shorter than that of your average goldfish with amnesia, Misha ran through the tactics before each boss for us, which was both advantageous to the run and to our hearing as he tends to sit in a neighbouring field to ensure he is at maximum range form his microphone!
The bosses in “The Siege of Ulduar”; Flame Leviathan, Ignis the Furnace Master, Razorscale and XT-002 Deconstructor seemed to go down rather easily this week considering it was only our second run, with Ignis being far less stressful than the debacle of last!
Next on the agenda was “The Antechamber of Ulduar”, taking on Kologarn I believe it was first, which is a reasonably simple fight, nuke the right arm whilst avoiding the lasers, once the adds are up aoe them down then back onto the right arm, simple! We then moved onto Auriaya, which is really all about the pull, after that it was a case of following the scouser to avoid his TS wrath “ A A A A A”, kill adds, avoid the black circles, when no adds are up, nuke the boss. I can’t really remember too much about the Assembly of Iron, but it did get killed, honest guv’, and one would assume Darkserenity aka Rob took all the loot… ;)
So on to the Keepers of Ulduar, taking on our nemesis of last week first, Hodir. We did manage to wipe on the trash leading to Hodir this week, with numerous people having a play in the snow, hoping for snowmen and getting nothing but worms, leading to a few aoe fests resulting in a dead raid and an upset scouser, again, but we still couldn’t rattle Misha into swearing! It took a little time to explain this boss as a number of people had not been before; again Misha took the job on, but only one real way to find out what to do pull it and see!
The first attempt was much better than last week, although we were having a few problems still with healing and dispelling; still, it was an improvement, after this Misha went to healing, with Ste going Boomkin I believe, and the new guy Rob taking on dispelling responsibilities. The second attempt was almost flawless, with trapped NPC’s being quickly released and everybody on the whole managing to avoid the flash freeze, however, the dps wasn’t quite up to scratch, and in typical fashion we killed Hodir with only seconds remaining on the enrage timer!
We then moved on into a jungle, and although Ste had fingers crossed for a field day of herb picking, we opened it up to a free for all, and Ste’s ageing reactions didn’t cope too well, as he was left with rather slim pickings! It was in this area that Ste proclaimed “oh dear” (or words to that effect) “I’ve pulled a big flower”, as a rather large tree came bounding towards the raid (!), the trash was cleared effectively, if a little slowly due to all the herb picking going on! The boss was Freya, and although the tactics sounded a little complicated, with multiple packs of differing ability mobs that spawn, resulting in an initial wipe due to poor dps co-ordination (brings back bad memories of core hound packs!), must have been Lou’s fault, we did manage to down the boss on the second attempt. The tactics are reasonably simple once you get the hang of them, as we found with many bosses.
We then faced up to Thorim, I can’t really say too much about this fight as I was led through a corridor with some shady characters killing a few trash mobs and bosses, whilst the rest of the raid got on with the job of killing the boss, seemed fairly simple though!
Our next task was to catch a train, simple task for most guilds, however, after attempting to leave me behind, with only my aspect saving me, Ste was duped into jumping to an early grave by Misha giving him some “tactics” on how to get off the train, much to Ste’s disgust and the rest of the raids amusement. Misha was not to be trusted again this raid! The train took us to Mimiron, whose tactics sounded painfully complicated yet again, and on initial attempt resulted in an instantly dead tank! However, the first attempt did give us a taster of the tactics as we bungled our way through to the last phase giving us an overview of the fight.
The second attempt was more fruitful, albeit with a dead adam only seconds into the fight again, basically the first phase consisted of nuking the boss, with some big damage to the tank, any melee dps not switched on, and whoever was the victim of the fire ball. In phase 2, it was a case of keeping out of the circles on the floor, but the main obstacle was the lasers, which rotated round with players having to move round in an anticlockwise direction until it had stopped, rinse and repeat till phase 3. In phase 3 adam’s corpse proved useful, as it was used as a placer for the ranged dps, whose job was to dps down the adds, with Lou keeping up dps on the boss. A rather fun boss, and managed to kill it on the second attempt!
This took us to the next stage of Ulduar, The Descent into Madness, and with it getting late; we had to swap out one of the healers with brboss coming in as a replacement. We were warned of at least 30 minutes of trash before we got to the boss, however, this was to prove more like 10, I think Misha was just trying to put us off, which wasn’t necessary with Ste’s negativity reaching boiling point!
I think Misha was getting rather fed up with explaining boss tactics by this point, and gave us a brief overview of the boss, General Vezax, if you have X run left, if you have skull, run right. Like the lambs we are, we took this literally, and to the slaughter we went! A couple of wipes later and we were getting the hang of it, basically, if you have an X, you have a life leach dot, and you need to get as far from other people as possible or you will heal the boss. If you have a skull, a big shdow nuke is going to drop on where you were stood, much like the once in the 5 man instance. To complicate matters a little, you cannot regenerate mana, there are green clouds for this purpose which need to be killed, which provide a bitter sweet buff, in that it provides mana regen but also damages. Another small complication in that a black spot on the floor allows for higher dps, and you have plenty of things to think about, although this is pretty much a one phase fight.
On our final attempt for the night, we manage to take the general down to 1% health, before he enraged wiping the raid with a measly 20k health to go! This resulted in a final, final attempt, albeit without Lou (a godsend? Who said that!?), this time everybody seemed to grasp the idea of the fight and slowly but surely down went the general.
All in all a successful night of raiding, Ste getting ribbed for every misspoken word (although running the raid well via TS) and getting duped into a suicide bid, the new man Rob whoreing half the epics that fell, although he may live to regret picking up all that tank gear…, myself being ousted for being a noob with no aspect on and bertier not surviving a single encounter, Shomy and Dorf providing great tanks, although Dorf exploded into a fit of rage after the raid as he was ganked rahhhh, Adam providing a nice marker as a corpse, the most useful he has been… Add to this that our casual raid lasted over 5 hours and it was an epic night, thanks again all for being part of the experience!
Pictures will be added shortly.
The guild has now been up and running for a couple of weeks, and although recruitment is rather slow (maybe we are being too picky!), we decided to begin raiding with the players currently at our disposal.
Due to having no tanks, we have forced the duties on Adam’s Paladin and Mark’s Warrior (despite protests from both!), so first up was to begin gearing these two. We’ve ran a few Naxxramas’ and OS’ alongside heroic badge runs with the addition of the odd crafted piece, getting our two tanks to a reasonable level of gear to begin on some of the higher end raid content.
The other night we decided to test how far their gear faired in Ulduar, none of us having really been there, just seen glimpses when helping out Hybrid Species if they were short. The night started as old, with only 6 of us online, as we played about in the various machines available with comedy wipes and extractions via motorbike!
After trying the first boss with 6, and failing miserably despite our best efforts, we brought in a couple of Hybrid Alts to fill up the raid and away we went (ending up with about 4 druids, all trees main spec(!) and 3 huntards. Once we had the full quota the first boss seemed extremely easy, basically attack it until it chases you, when it does chase you, kite it until it chases somebody else, even we grasped this one instantly!
I'm afraid Misha Looted the corpse before I had chance to take a decent screenshot!
My mind is a little hazy, but if I remember correctly we then moved over to Razorscale. Being a huntard I skipped most of the technicalities of the fight, being on my priest I just spammed heals about a little, however, for the rest it did look a little tricky at times with multiple phases of Razorscale being in the air and adds spawning, to picking him up when he landed. This seemed again a reasonably straight forward fight and we downed him with little incident.
I believe next on the agenda was XT-002 Deconstructor, basically requiring a tank and spank until mobs spawned, with the offtank picking up the biggest of the adds and the rest of the little bots being aoe’d down after being slowed with frost traps, if the useless hunters put them in the right place, ahem!
Next up was Ignis the Furnace Master, you could tell this fella was going to be trouble after we wiped 3 or 4 times on the trash getting to him! The boss himself wasn’t too easy either, with the MT having to swap him from side to side, and the OT having to pick up the adds that spawned and move them to the water once they went red, or something like that anyway, I still have no idea what was going on! People were also put in the bosses “pot”, which resulted in a little more healing required for that player, but also a nice easy achievement! After multiple wipes due to basically not having a clue what we were doing, one of the tanks sadly had to leave and we took on board another Hybrid.
For the next attempt, tactics were simplified, a lot, to allow for our lack of skill, gear and co-ordination. We decided to just tank the boss in the pool of water, not bother killing adds at all and just tank them in the middle. To quote a guide I read “For every Iron Construct (even Molten ones) Ignis activates, he gains one stack of a 20% damage bonus. No more than a couple of these should be kept up at any time.” By the end of our ad-hoc tactic we had roughly 9 Iron Constructs who were having to be kited around the room to reduce damage to the OT and major spam healing required on both the OT and MT! However, we did kill him with only a few minor casualties, job done!
After this escapade we decided to call it a night and carried on the following day with a slightly different raid setup.
TBC
Due to having no tanks, we have forced the duties on Adam’s Paladin and Mark’s Warrior (despite protests from both!), so first up was to begin gearing these two. We’ve ran a few Naxxramas’ and OS’ alongside heroic badge runs with the addition of the odd crafted piece, getting our two tanks to a reasonable level of gear to begin on some of the higher end raid content.
The other night we decided to test how far their gear faired in Ulduar, none of us having really been there, just seen glimpses when helping out Hybrid Species if they were short. The night started as old, with only 6 of us online, as we played about in the various machines available with comedy wipes and extractions via motorbike!After trying the first boss with 6, and failing miserably despite our best efforts, we brought in a couple of Hybrid Alts to fill up the raid and away we went (ending up with about 4 druids, all trees main spec(!) and 3 huntards. Once we had the full quota the first boss seemed extremely easy, basically attack it until it chases you, when it does chase you, kite it until it chases somebody else, even we grasped this one instantly!
I'm afraid Misha Looted the corpse before I had chance to take a decent screenshot!
My mind is a little hazy, but if I remember correctly we then moved over to Razorscale. Being a huntard I skipped most of the technicalities of the fight, being on my priest I just spammed heals about a little, however, for the rest it did look a little tricky at times with multiple phases of Razorscale being in the air and adds spawning, to picking him up when he landed. This seemed again a reasonably straight forward fight and we downed him with little incident.
I believe next on the agenda was XT-002 Deconstructor, basically requiring a tank and spank until mobs spawned, with the offtank picking up the biggest of the adds and the rest of the little bots being aoe’d down after being slowed with frost traps, if the useless hunters put them in the right place, ahem!
Next up was Ignis the Furnace Master, you could tell this fella was going to be trouble after we wiped 3 or 4 times on the trash getting to him! The boss himself wasn’t too easy either, with the MT having to swap him from side to side, and the OT having to pick up the adds that spawned and move them to the water once they went red, or something like that anyway, I still have no idea what was going on! People were also put in the bosses “pot”, which resulted in a little more healing required for that player, but also a nice easy achievement! After multiple wipes due to basically not having a clue what we were doing, one of the tanks sadly had to leave and we took on board another Hybrid.
For the next attempt, tactics were simplified, a lot, to allow for our lack of skill, gear and co-ordination. We decided to just tank the boss in the pool of water, not bother killing adds at all and just tank them in the middle. To quote a guide I read “For every Iron Construct (even Molten ones) Ignis activates, he gains one stack of a 20% damage bonus. No more than a couple of these should be kept up at any time.” By the end of our ad-hoc tactic we had roughly 9 Iron Constructs who were having to be kited around the room to reduce damage to the OT and major spam healing required on both the OT and MT! However, we did kill him with only a few minor casualties, job done!
After this escapade we decided to call it a night and carried on the following day with a slightly different raid setup.
TBC
For those that are interested in picking up the Halloween World Event title “The Hallowed” I’ve been flicking around to find the easiest / quickest ways to work your way through the tasks in hand.
Here's a great guide to help you along the way;
Hallowed be Thy Name
