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Chefs Knife Sartharion 3D Video | 1:46 | 41MB
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As has been mentioned here before, Chefs Knife is our guild. It's a guild in a way most people would find tricky to instantly comprehend. Being on a roleplaying server, the creators of our raiding community deemed that the only level of communication necessary within the game was to use a number of custom channels. An average situation is that your guild is who you do your twenty-five man raids with and you have a custom channel for your closer friends. Flip that scenario around and that is how we are. It sounds a weird system, it sure did to me before I joined Redemption, but it's one that works. It's ideals are that you are free to continue perusing Goldshire in your wizards hat and robe pretending Arthas is your father. Obviously those are a set of ideals that don't belong to me; Chefs Knife is used as a fairly serious ten man guild. Or, as serious as one can get about ten man raids. Before WotLK was released, it had crossed my mind to quit doing twenty-five mans and focus on ten mans but then those that I had a strong disliking or lack of respect for in Redemption quit and I decided to continue building the Chefs Knife blocks onto the foundation we had firmly set. With hindsight, it was an astute choice as the whole ten man path philosophy Blizzard paraded so vigorously appears to have gone awry.

We are a group of players with a great many alts. I now personally have three alts; a Fury Warrior (with full Protection gear), a Death Knight tank and a Restoration Shaman. Lunitun has an equal amount of alts, as does BTB, and others are getting close. The point is, we all enjoy our alts and we strive to gear each others up every week in Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity and Obsidian Sanctum. This naturally caused the Glory of the Raider achievement to sit on the back burner while we explored other avenues to pass the time.

There were two major catalysts in us renewing our desire to get Glory of the Raider back on track.

Firstly, and inevitably, the announcement that once 3.1 hits, the Proto Drakes will no longer be attainable. Maybe we all just felt that we'd have all the time in the world and could do it with gear that completely trivialized the most difficult meta aspects of the achievement. Regardless, we knew time wasn't on our side and decided to pull our fingers out before it was too late.

Secondly, I think we've all come to the realization that finishing Heroic: Glory of the Raider is a pipe dream. It only takes one person from a shallow pool of shallow pools to fail every week before you realize it's just not meant to be. I mean, we only got Heroic: Shocking! last week and that was because someone, utterly sick of failing Immortal yet again, decided to keep wiping us whenever a mouthbreather failed it. Of course, there was one person in particular that was unhappy at not being able to breeze through content for week n but that same person also whined about having to use consumables for Sartharion 3D when it was still progress. It's these sorts of people that just bring every one else down to their level and fucks it up for everyone. These are the people who don't have an invitation to our Burberry clad tea party. If it wasn't for what we've built in Chefs Knife I'd have serious considerations over my future in Redemption. I don't mean to speak ill of them or anything, they're a fabulous group of personalities, but one or two of them leave a lot to be desired on the skill front. As we don't seem to have any kind of community mission statement, it's difficult to know how they'll be dealt with when this stuff happens. It only takes one and they aren't held accountable to the degree that necessitates the progression of everyone else. So, instead of whining about it any longer, it's easier to just focus our efforts elsewhere, get the Plagued Proto Drake and forget about the black one. I prefer the colour of the plagued one honestly, but I still can't help being bitter that the heroic achievements are beyond me through no fault of my own.

So, Sartharion. All we had left after a few weeks of hitting up the achievements was You Don't Have An Eternity and Twilight Zone. We decided to focus on the latter as we perceived that to be the more challenging and time consuming (six minute Malygos will be done next Monday). One of the other things that held us off doing it earlier was the lack of necessary personnel to do it. As a small guild of serious, hardcore players that are only really doing ten mans as a form of pastime, we're not going to recruit or bring people in for an achievement. Not only do we not want to, but it goes against the bring-the-player-not-the-class that Blizzard like to harp on about so fondly. It's a philosophy we embraced rather strongly, so how were we supposed to do it without a Death Knight tank? As we had two actively raiding Death Knights in our small ranks, we held off as long as we felt comfortable for them to accrue as much tanking gear as possible. We finally felt that this week should be the week to go for it so I set it for this past Sunday. Then of course, the Thursday before, the now infamous Russian video of Sartharion being zerged in 76 seconds was released.

Despite this, we had intended to do it "legitimately" even though we had floated the idea around of the DPS zerg. It wasn't until I logged into the middle of a conversation Sunday morning that we seriously considered that we could actually pull off the zerg. I have full gear for every spec on my Paladin and our other ten man healer is Silinde, a Shadow Priest main who just respecs for us. In some bizarre way, it was more natural for us to do the zerg method than any other way. So we got our math hats on and began brainstorming. It was already known that it required eight DPS to pull off a minimum of 4.6k DPS but we had to figure out how we could spread that around. For instance, we knew that Rahla would pull off an insane amount of DPS and that I would probably achieve the lowest even without taking into account the fact I wouldn't be doing any DPS at all for the final 25% of Sartharion's life. I busted out Rawr and spent a few hours maximizing my potential DPS then spent a few hundred gold getting certain pieces up to scratch. Calira respecced and put a load of Bold Scarlet Ruby's in his gear to not only add as much DPS as he could but to maximize his threat, something we were concerned with being an issue. I also turned on guild bank repairs. All in all, our bank took a hit of about 2-3k which our community leader has graciously offered to reimburse.

I never attempted Sartharion 3D in ten man the standard way so I can't really offer a proper comparison. I've done it in twenty-five man many times and I've done 2D in ten man so I've got a fair idea of how it plays out. I suppose all you're doing is shifting all the pressure onto the DPS and the person responsible for running Tenebron away at 25%. A lot of people will feel this method is a blatant exploit or cheesing a hard fight. While I won't totally disagree with those opinions, it's more complex in practice than it looks in theory. One fuck up, and you've failed. Void Zones are an absolute cluster fuck. The elementals aren't tanked at all. If you get a right side wave, it's hard to maximize DPS. Ultimately, the planets need to align with everyone playing like a champion to pull it off. It's not walk up to him, DPS for 86 seconds, collect loot. I'd actually implore people to try it because it's fantastic fun and, along with Voidwalker tanking, it's going to get nerfed real soon.

The first three people that came up in the raid roll for the mount was Ally, Silinde and myself, those with the Twilight Drake that had agreed it was a ridiculous idea to take the Black Drake. The forth was BTB, though I mistakenly called out Rahla which I felt bad about.