Menzoberranzan on Tichondrious-H decided recently that after a spat of drama, they were going to go on hiatus until Wrath, so their GL cooked up this video to show off some of the highlights of the guild. Most of it is just a slideshow of screenshots (so we're using it as the header shot this week), but jump up to 7:19, because there's some funny kids dancing.

Lots (and I mean lots) of drama in the GW this week (including the "corrupt loot council" that spawned that gem of a title), so make sure to click the link below to read it all. And don't forget to send your own tips in -- wowguildwatch@gmail.com is the email address. We want your downed, drama, and recruiting news, so send it all.

Guildwatch is back, and boy do we have a drama-stacked edition for you this week. How about this Vent recording we've got, complete with classical piano playing in the background. Or this hacked guild that didn't really get hacked at all? We've got Shaman ninjas, Auction House drama, and even a Warglaive fight. Our tipsters really, really came through this week (thanks everybody!), and you reap the benefits.

Additionally, there's also plenty of downed news behind the break as well, and just a bit of recruiting news also (seems like most guilds are filled up for the time being). If you've got a tip for GW, whether for your guild or a great piece of drama you've seen somewhere, drop us a line at wowguildwatch@gmail.com and see it here next week. In the meantime, click the link below to see this week's GW!

Alex recently talked about the lack of bag space for the hybrid class. This is quite true for them, as they have a hard time with the near infinite amount of bag space that is demanded of them. However looking at the non-hybrid classes, in particular a warrior, it can be seen that they too have their own issue of sorts. For an end game tank, it becomes less of an issue of actual bag space, and more of an issue of the limitless combinations of gear.

Most tanks swear by outfitter – a tool that allows you to quickly change around pre-saved outfits. For instance, say I'm going to be tanking the nature phase of Hydross. Before even setting foot in SSC, I would have spent an hour or so making sure I had all the necessary gear, stats, and configurations that Hydross requires. A good part of this time would be spent getting all those gearing changes into an easy to use outfitter profile – so I would just have to click one button to wear the gear.

Of course, that's resistant gear and it's expected that there'll have to be a bunch of switching of it. However, the gear switching doesn't end there.

Daniel discussed the removal of the Essence of Immortals from the PTR and the progressive content of Quel'Danas awhile ago, and it led me to think a little about progression.

Obviously, the removal of that bit of the Sunwell Plateau isn't particularly devastating or crippling. Its inclusion could actually be crippling for the more underpopulated, raiding-light servers, holding the one or two raiding guilds back from experiencing content simply because they chose the wrong server to roll on. I can understand the removal, but my mind being the strange creature it is used this as fuel to wander to similar topics, my braincells discussing it amongst themselves.

Warriors? Druids? Paladins? And the people who love them? This one's for you. Now, I've previously fielded complaints that my posts are too long, so far warning; if you're not in the mood for a pretty thorough look at the current state of hybrid tanking, you'll probably want to keep moving. If you play any tank at all, just want to know more about them and the people who choose to play tanks, or are considering rolling a tank class, I hope you find the following to be of interest.

Please note that the headers below are not, as in portions of Matthew Rossi's post, quotes from anybody involved; they're just a means of helping me organize my thoughts and translate our email conversations into the blogging format. I'm attempting to condense the content of multiple email conversations.

My perspective on Alex's post

For reference, my main is a tanking feral druid in a Tier 6 raiding guild. Our main tank is a protection paladin, and we're on Reliquary of Souls at the moment. This guy main-tanked Vashj, main-tanked Kael for a certain period until we found out his computer settings made it really tough for him to see Flamestrikes (so we substituted a warrior for that reason, not because of the pally/warrior divide), and has main-tanked most of Hyjal and a fairish amount of Black Temple.

More past the cut.

At first glance, I didn't really think there was much out of the ordinary about a post made by one of Nihilum's resto Shaman, Neg. A number of raiding guilds have complained strenuously about the presence of easy-to-obtain epics in the game, but any post entitled, "Does Blizzard Hate Raiders?" is typically going to get a scoff and little else.

I had read the article shortly before zoning into Black Temple for the third time ever, and for the first time with the ingame sound on. My guild had recently killed both High Warlord Naj'entus and Supremus, and while the Karabor Sewers portion of the instance is interesting to look at, it pales in comparison to what you'll see once you're offered a teleport to a different floor by a member of the Ashtongue Deathsworn. My guildies and I were really just there to farm Hearts of Darkness for resist gear and to explore a little bit, with nothing really important on our minds. Nevertheless, what we saw that night was beautiful. The floor you're ported to has a tiny, friendly area with the Ashtongue Quartermaster, but beyond that lie a number of sinister things. The ceiling is pillared by giant statues much like those that guard the portal into Outland, and rogues lurk in pairs seemingly all around you. Not infrequently you find yourself turning around to shouts on vent to see them rapidly killing off members of the raid; we finally hit upon the strategy of sending our own rogues off to sniff out the presence of danger while the raid itself was ringed and guarded on all sides by the tanks. Once another set of rogues was found, our hunters set up Flares to flush them out of hiding, marked them, and pulled carefully. You were only really safe if you were in the middle portion of the raid; wandering off to go explore on your own was unthinkable.

The music is lovely, the atmosphere is stellar, and for the first time ever in a raid I felt the real sense of a dangerous place with violent, unpredictable creatures that didn't want us there. It was one of the few times that we've actually had to use real strategy as a raid outside of a boss fight. Black Temple makes it abundantly obvious that you are a small, embattled group struggling to survive against overwhelming odds. Most raids are pretty straightforward - learn the tricks to the trash, pull the trash, clear the trash, ask "What's the respawn timer?", and then kill the boss. Tempest Keep is a pretty cold and sterile environment; Serpentshrine Cavern is more interesting visually but the trash is, in many cases, just pull after pull after pull of the exact same stuff (weirdly enough, Karazhan and Zul'Aman seem to come a little closer to the Black Temple raid mentality than their Tier 5 brothers). But there is so much obvious care and attention lavished on the endgame raids, I said to myself (while taking tons of screenshots and turning the sound up), that I just don't buy the argument that Blizzard doesn't give a hoot about raiders.

But Neg isn't really writing about the conflict between raiders and the rest of us, which has been a pretty thoroughly discussed in one form or another. It's his contention that the raiding world - what I saw on Thursday and what Nihilum practically does professionally - is becoming obsolete in this, the Age of Purple.

Here's a good question from Strykt on the forums: why does Karazhan still require attunement? Blizzard has already dropped attunements on SSC and TK, and patch 2.4 will bring the removal of attunements on BT and Hyjal. So why are we still being forced to get those key fragments and attune people to Karazhan?

Bornakk shows up in the thread and says simply that it's a good way to find people to run Karazhan with, implying that Blizzard wants guilds to help each other get attuned, and that in essence, it's not so much a gear check as a group check-- you can't get into Karazhan as a guild unless you've helped each other to get in there first. And I actually like that idea-- if your guild wants your help in Karazhan, they've got to lend a hand first to get you into the instances to get the key fragments. "No guildie left behind," if you will.

I don't have a problem with having an attunement quest to enter the endgame (and you'll probably remember that Onyxia, BWL, and Molten Core attunements are all still in the game). And it seems that Blizzard doesn't either-- they're willing to open up the later endgame as time goes along, but you've still got to get some help to enter it in the first place.

Last week our own Marcie Knox pointed out in her Ready Check column the daunting task that's given to raiders when they face Lady Vashj and Kael'Thas Sunstrider. These two bosses have earned their reputation as a guild killer, and are some of the hardest encounters in the game. While there is a plethora of information out there on how to defeat the technical aspects of the fights, very little is written on the social aspects these fights give us. Examining what can be done to keep a group of raiders together during this difficult time is critical to success.

Lets take a brief look at why these two encounters are so difficult. When it comes down to it, Blizzard is testing our ability to deal with two different skill sets. The first being immediate and unknown change, and that comes with Vashj during phase two and three: which side will the Naga spawn, where will the Tainted Element appear, how many times is your main tank going to get rooted and bat poison dropped on him, which way will the tanks need to drag the Naga around to avoid getting the melee cleaved, etc...

On the flip side to Vashj's unknown factors exists Kael'Thas. Kael is definitely a scripted encounter. We know what order the advisers are going to come up in, we know (sans gaze) where they'll go, we know what Kael will do when he reaches 50%, and we know what order we need to get the weapons down. This fight is all about repetition of a scripted encounter.

I don't know what Vashj did to you guys, but there must have been something, because she is getting dropped more and more often lately. Nobody likes the Naga, I guess. And Kael is pretty much shaking in his boots-- nearly every guild that has downed Vashj is throwing him angry looks for being next.

This week's GW starts right after the jump-- click the link below to check the week's drama, downed and recruiting news, all tipped to us by you, dear readers. If you have news for Guildwatch (especially drama, because who doesn't like that?), send it along to wowguildwatch@gmail.com. Enjoy!

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Kara or BT, everyone can get in on the action and down them some bosses. Sadly this week, Hong his stuck clearing trash in SSC. It's bad news when the little fishes come back, trust me.

There are a number of things that drive people to raid. Character improvement is one aspect, but for most raiders that I've run across, it's all about seeing content. These are the explorer/achievers who see bosses not as just a challenge, but as a stepping stone to where even more reclusive mobs and areas exist.

In the past, raids experienced pretty linear difficulty levels as they plowed through instances. You could skip ahead some if you stumbled across a particularly nasty boss (/wave C'thun), but you pretty much just worked down the list of baddies since each one got slightly harder. Even in Naxx where you had four different hallways of death to pick from, and the attunement wasn't dependent whatsoever on previous content you've completed, the progressive levels of boss difficulty kept you on the straight and narrow. You didn't have a chance killing the Instructor if you weren't skilled and geared well enough, no matter how much the Argent Dawn loved you.