Guild Ox reverts to old ranking system, and I’m stoked!

In preparation for MoP, Guild Ox have announced this week that the ‘points system’ for rankings is being reverted as follows:

Mists of Pandaria is only seven weeks away so we have commenced our preparation.

One of the changes that you are about to see is a modification to the ranking system used by GuildOx. Our recent MoP survey, which had over 2000 responses, gave us much clearer insight into what type of ranking system people wanted. We had close to 80% of people say they wanted a simple ranking system or they did not mind what system was used. We also had many, many comments about people being confused or unhappy with the points system and suggesting some interesting (!) alternatives. Some folk found it too difficult to understand the points system, others did not agree with the encounter points weightings and many were just plain unhappy with guilds that killed bosses after them to be still listed higher in the rankings.

After running with a points system now for some time, we are experiencing the pitfalls that are associated with such a system – mainly the complexity in understanding where you will be ranked and the subjective nature of the points weightings.

Consequently, we are shifting back to the system where you are first ranked on the number of tier bosses that you have killed and then by the date/time of the kill. We will continue to normalize timestamps for heroic content. You will see this change happen early this week so we can test it for MoP.

The bottom line – your guild will be ranked based on the time/date of the last boss that you killed. Simple, easy.

Quite frankly, this is a long overdue and positive change to the ranking system. Our guild <Insidious> stalled in progression due to changes in the raid team, but played a pretty mean game of catch up once we had rebuilt.

We ‘thought’ we had finished 12th in 10 man rankings, only to be pipped at the post by a stinky Horde guild for a final rank of 13th on Nagrand US.

Without Guild Ox reverting the ranking system, we ran a high risk of being overtaken by other guilds with no kills for a number of weeks who had happened to have the right team to kill an earlier boss weeks (or even months) before, which would have given them the ‘points’ to overtake us even 2-3 weeks after our own 8/8H kill.

Kudos to Guild Ox for listening to the masses and making the system based on ‘we killed it 10 minutes before you’ rather than ‘we skipped bosses and killed the highest point value boss first on heroic’!

Ding, dong, Deathwing’s dead!

Well I must say I’m TOTALLY stoked – after a long and hard slog through Cataclysm, my amazing guild <Insidious> of US-Nagrand finally killed all the pieces of that evil fucking dragon, Deathwing! While we were a little behind the 8-ball thanks to the loss of a few of our core raiders mid-progression, we pulled things back together for a great finish to the expansion at the end of July. Granted, it was a rather messy kill, as evidenced by the screenshot below…

Yes, that IS one lonely token durid left alive – goooo Diggl! (mostly uh moonkin is 4 a spam moonfare. them haf sum good armors & fite storng)

With the 30% buff in effect, it was admittedly nowhere near as challenging as we had expected, and once we had the bloods under ‘some measure’ of control on the head phase, it was all kill from there. Well, Diggl killed – we just licked our screens and held our breath in the dying seconds, but that’s neither here nor there – a kill is a kill! While I’m on that, look at that silly rogue face-down in the crack! Dunno what he was trying to do – tunnel under the head or something?

Another great achievement was our Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider meta completion, where those of us who have raided throughout t13 got our lovely horn-headed dragons to ride around and poke people in the butt with…

well, some of us got our meta mounts… that other TOOL decided to get his Ashes out… Damn you Finia! One day it SHALL be mine!

We spent the following week completing metas for the rest of the raid team, with a few heroic boss kills still left for one or two that we’ll get to this week, but it really was a great effort by our raid team to complete current content before the end of the expansion – especially as we replaced half our raid team mid-progression and had all the trials and tribulations of gearing them up appropriately for end bosses.

We’re now spending most of our non-Dragon Soul raid nights working our way through some of the t11 and t12 end bosses and achievements we never got around to at the time, and we’re currently sitting at 4th overall on server for raid achievements, so that’ll keep us busy until MoP rolls around, and give us another mount (albeit a fugly one). Can anyone say Heroic Rag? We’ve only just started working on him (30-odd attempts so far), and I wanna see some leg soon!!

Last durid standing = win.

To give some background, we have a long-held tradition in our guild, that some of the most challenging fights are ‘last druid standing’ situations, as per our Sinestra kill a while back…

yup – that’s me still alive and kicking that dragon bitch in the clacker – CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!!!

I must say, some of the most skilled players we have in our guild are druids, and we regularly run with 3-4 of different specs (kitty, bear, healer and oomkin). Admittedly, most progression guilds wouldn’t run that many druids in a 10 man situation, but ours is a case of ‘taking the player, not the class’ as evidenced by the above screenies. As a druid myself, of course I am somewhat biased, but I love the fact we can save the day with some last minute magic to get a boss down in spectacular and nail-biting fashion!

Gotta love it when you hear the massive roar that goes up in vent when what ‘could’ have been a wipe becomes an epic kill 🙂