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The Daily Grind: What content keeps holding you back?
Back when I was in the middle of Naxxramas in World of Warcraft, there was an iron wall that held my entire guild back, and that was Grobbulus. It was insane. We could clear every other wing of the raid without a single wipe, even managing the much more difficult Four Horsemen battle without any problems, but every time we wound up facing the slime daddy it was a night of wipes and frustration. When we finally took him down, the rest of the raid fell to us in a matter of an hour. For some reason, that one boss was just such a hurdle. It could be a mission that you can't solo and can't get help with in City of Heroes. Maybe it's a raid boss in Lord of the Rings Online. Or maybe it's a certain episode in Star Trek Online in which a bug breaks the game and prevents you from completing your objectives. Whatever the reason, we all have something in our games that just refuses to let us past, content that we'd happily never do again if we could get past it the first time. So what's your iron wall?
Will Ulduar break your guild?
Dueg is the first blogger I've seen to suggest this, but I feel like it's an undercurrent that's been going around since the 3.1 release last week (and we'll probably find out more when Guildwatch comes out later tonight). He suggests that Ulduar might be, of all things, a guildbreaker. Now certainly it won't be nearly as much of a roadblock as Karazhan -- not only was that a tough instance, but it was also the first one we came across in Burning Crusade, and guilds who couldn't make it in Kara had no place to turn back to (at least guilds that can't make it in Ulduar can fall back on Naxx farming). But there's no question that Ulduar requires some excellent gear and some serious tactics, and if your guild has people raiding who are missing either one of those, you're going to be hitting your head on the wall quite a bit in there.That's not to say that it's super hard -- it's not, especially if you know not to stand in the fire and you've got the kind of gear on that lets you conquer the Heroic achievements. A lot of guilds have 25 of those people, and they're doing very well in Ulduar so far. But as Dueg says, Naxx is a casual instance, and Ulduar is not. In Naxx, you can get away with losing a few people, or having a few folks in greens along. In Ulduar, you can't.It's not the apocalypse for guilds -- most guilds will go back to Naxx if they have trouble in Ulduar, grab a few more epics and tier pieces, and try again later. And some probably won't bother with Ulduar at all -- my casual guild is having fun just taking our time finishing Naxx wing by wing. But Ulduar seems to be where the rubber meets the road with casual raiding. If there's a guild out there who has a few lesser raiders carried along by a few high-level veterans, Ulduar's likely to cause some friction.
The perils of crossing water on a mount
This is something we've all dealt with: my Hunter is traipsing through Terrokar right now, and nothing makes me more frustrated than hitting those little rivers on my mount and having to dismount in water. When you think about it, the logical reasons for our mounts disappearing once we hit water are pretty sound -- you don't want that cat or wolf you worked so hard for to drown. But on the other hand, it's a huge annoyance -- not only does it slow you down while crossing the water, but you have to wait another second afterwards to resummon the mount.On larger bodies of water, this isn't so bad, but those little rivers are nothing but trouble (and Gnomes have it even worse). Even cowboys knew how to ford with their horses -- why can't we do the same with our mounts?Zarhym, the new CM, doesn't seem very empathetic, so odds are that this won't change anytime soon. We can only hope that in future designs, Blizzard stays away from putting the deeper water all over the landscape, where it acts as nothing but an annoying roadblock in front of our next quest. It's not like we don't have enough problems with the water as it is.
