LoDBlog

So as part of the Ladies of Destiny 5th Anniversery blog series, I’ll be writing a response to each of Matron’s posts, to let you know everything he got wrong or important details that he left out!  There actually wasn’t a whole lot going on in that first year before we started running Molten Core in earnest, compared to nowadays.  I think the main general theme of that era is that it was just a completely different game back then.  We still took ourselves every bit as seriously as we do now, but man were we noobs!

The Early Raiding Scene

It’s pretty hilarious to reminisce at just how backwater the early raiding scene was on Scarlet Crusade.  However, I think that in a way this actually helped Ladies of Destiny survive.  In the very beginning, LoD was a huge guild in terms of numbers (my “interview process” was literally just me whispering some random level 10 person who I needed to talk to in order to get invited, and then instantly having a guild invite pop up on my screen).  But over time I guess Matron must have developed some sort of standards, because we developed into a relatively small guild that had a handful of the server’s best players, but could never dream of fielding a full 40 man Molten Core raid.  As Matron alluded to in his post, the threat of losing our better players to the more advanced guilds was a constant theme for that first year of LoD’s existence.  Luckily for us, even the “more advanced guilds” on Scarlet Crusade would’ve made the current Ladies of Destiny look like Ensidia:

• Empire – The first attempted Alliance raiding guild was led by the Night Elf Rogue, on again off again Moonwink lovah, and overall uber-doosh, Vaan.  He ended up luring away several of our former guild members, including Angie, Hoa, Moonikki, Sirena, and most notably Wildelia.  Empire ended up flaming out extremely quickly when Vaan’s leadership turned out to rival that of Huntmaster’s in NC Gaming.  Matron’s heart remained broken for several years though, until Wildelia finally came back to LoD in TBC
• Emerald Lords – Another attempted raiding guild which flamed out rather quickly.  They actually took several LoD members on their MC runs (including myself), but never tried to recruit anyone away.  My first few MC raids were with them.  If I had to sum up their raids in one sentence, I’d have to go with “they once spent 15 minutes arguing over whether we should do random rolls on greens which were upgrades for people, or just DE them to save time”.  Yes, GREENS!  The guild blew up after a particularly brutal night of wiping repeatedly from trying to pull Lucifron without getting imps from the cave, or a pack of corehounds at the same time.  Good times!
• Archon – Archon started raiding around the same time as Emerald Lords, with infinitely better results.  Luckily for LoD, they had no interest in any of our members, as they were succeeding very well on their own.  We have several former Archon members in LoD today, and we generally always had a good relation with them (with the notable except of Tarja getting BANT from their TBC community raids for making Nightmusic cry)
• Haven – This was a new guild that started having some success in Onyxia, and was somewhat of a threat to poach LoD members, but never did to my knowledge.  All I really remember was one night when Emarori got really mad at me because I wanted to go to their Onyxia raid instead of run her thru quests, with the logic that “you can do level 60 stuff whenever you want, but how often will we have a full night to do Stranglethorn Vale quests?”.  I ended up telling them that I couldn’t go that night because I had promised my girlfriend that I would help her with quests – they never invited me back even though they continued inviting several other LoD members for a month or two afterwards.  Yes I’m still bitter :(
• Eternal - I was there for the very first raid of this new upstart guild led by a bald hooligan Priest named Baynoor.  The difference in attitudes between them and Emerald Lords was night and day.  Every time we wiped on a single core hound or lava surger, that was a great attempt guys, we almost had it!  When the the initial trash respawned before we even made it to the imp caves (much less to Lucifron), that was a great job guys, we learned alot tonight!  Even when the Hunter named Hakhu who had gone the entire raid DPSing while naked, went into great detail about how he would have more fun dry humping his grandmother, and then hearthed out and gquit mid-raid, people just laughed it off and no one yelled at anyone.
• Dark Heaven – Just when we were building our Zul’gurub group into a strong force of ~20 consistent raiders, a disgruntled faction of raiders from Archon split off to form DH, taking several of our non-LoD raiders, including Pung, Ningning, Veyl, Whitefox.  We always had a love/hate relationship with DH, and they played a huge role in the beginning days of LoD’s 40 man raiding.  I’m sure Matron will want to say more about that tomorrow though.

Finding Our Way in Zul’gurub

Maybe I digressed too much about other guilds on the server, but I suppose that’s ok since this is also the Scarlet Crusade 5th anniversary.  But anyways, like I said, in that first year Ladies of Destiny was mostly a small guild with some really good players, but not even enough to fill a 20 man Zul’gurub raid.  It’s fun to look back at just how noob we were back then though:

• DKP - So we read that the really good guilds don’t just do random rolls on loot.  We knew you were supposed to earn points for showing up, and spend them on loot… but I think that’s about as far as we knew how it worked.  I think our original system was that you earned 1 point for each boss killed, and blue gear cost 5 points, and epic gear cost 20 points.  But then we realized that the blue gear wasn’t all that great so we made it free.  Then eventually we realized that epics rarely dropped and that everyone had a shitload of points.  So then we increased the cost of epics, until we realized that everyone who ran ZG the most had negative points.  Also, some nights Tarja kept track of the DKP, other nights Matron did, other nights Anowyyn did – there was no master list anywhere, just the up to date current tally on the website.  Eventually we realized that whenever Matron said he would keep track of DKP, that night usually never got updated and ended up not counting.  So pretty quickly we moved to a system where I kept track of everything using a master spreadsheet, and Matron hasn’t been allowed to go near DKP since
• Bijous/Coins - Everyone needed to collect bijous and coins for their ZG setpieces.  Since there was no such thing as guildbanks (and even if there was, only half the people were from LoD), so we passed them out individually at the end of each raid rather than doing the logical thing and saving them all until people have the other mats needed for their setpieces.  I don’t remember our first system at all, the only thing I remember was that Muttonboy NEVER won the roll on anything, as if it was some huge cosmic joke.  We eventually changed it to a system where everyone rolled after the raid, and then we would pick which coins we wanted, in order of who rolled highest.  It was unnecessarily time consuming and silly, but people got the stuff they needed so I guess it got the job done
• Learning to play – Matron and Faranon thought they were coming up with some novel concept when they “invented” the tank switch for the Spider boss.  Tarja and Miyuki had no idea that Paladins were allowed to stand there and do nothing but heal, without meleeing stuff.  Silverluna was considered one of our better DPS even though she was so busy talking on vent that 75% of her DPS was autoshot.  Darreck actually got stuck in a cage by the Tiger boss. Muttonboy would die a dozen times a night, despite blowing thru a stack or two of Invulnerability Potions.  We cleared an entire wing of trash using the strategy of “Emarori gets naked and enslaves 1 mob, other mobs kill it, warlock dies and gets rezzed – repeat times 20″.  Moving out of the gas cloud on the Snake boss was something that we eventually realized was a good idea, after several weeks of killing the boss.  It was literally impossible to get the entire raid to run past the mobs near the first bridge without aggroing them.  Matron couldn’t even run across the bridge without falling off, even with no mobs nearby.  Matron continued taking rezzes on Bloodlord and taunting the boss even though he had died over 10 times and his gear was completely red.  Few people had Damage Meter mods, so the overall damage/healing done for the entire raid was always posted in raidchat for everyone who didn’t have them.  Threat meters?   Those didn’t even exist yet!  So yeah, I think we’ve come a looooong way since those days!