Icecrown Impressions

With all my ranting about 3.3 I was still interested to see how the new raid instance has turned out and was therefore actually happy to get selected for my guild's first foray into it. Well, technically our first two forays but Wednesday was, well, patch day. Advantages to patching a day later my ass.
Anyway, we actually got into the instance late Wednesday night and then without issues on Thursday. You'll find my first impressions from all four available bosses below the break.

Christmas Raiding

Blizzard poster Datth posted the following on the tech support forums a couple of days ago, hinting at the release date for World of Warcraft's newest patch:

"We only provide mirror links for full client patches. Background downloads do not count. You have around 1+ month to download this file so we're not really worried about your speed. :)"

-Datth (emphasis mine)

This doesn't really tell us a lot. MMO Champion's Boubouille doesn't believe it will take that long, and if it does, 1+ month is still very inaccurate. This could mean, however, that we get the patch right before Christmas. That got me thinking - who would want a content patch at that time?

Like Butter Scraped Over Too Much Bread

If you are anything like me, you have probably been playing the last few months in World of Warcraft bored and annoyed with Blizzard's decisions but didn't stop playing because there was a shimmer of hope in Icecrown Citadel at the horizon. The issue with horizons is that, the more you travel towards them, the faster they move away from you.
The lead encounter designer for World of Warcraft, Scott "Daelo" Mercer, posted yesterday on the topic of Icecrown Citadel access progression.
And, merlin's beard, it sucks.

Levels of Difficulty

The discussion about whether WoW has become too easy or not is hardly new, but Mimetir, a guest poster over at World of Matticus brought it up again. This prompted Larísa to write a strong post on how she's sick of hearing people claim that WoW is too easy these days if they haven't beaten all the content yet.
She is correct in many points and I'll address that below, but here's one thing I am sick of: People claiming that just because there is something left that I haven't managed to do yet, the difficulty is fine.

Summer Raiding And You

If you've been in a raiding guild at all you've probably seen this. Everything goes great, your guild is progressing, people are attending, everything is fine.

And then it gets warm outside.

All of a sudden your attendance rates drop, raids don't happen and raids that do happen get worse. People start coming late or leaving early while others go AWOL for two weeks. Congratulations, summer got you and you're thoroughly screwed.
Or are you? In the following I'll discuss why raiding is so difficult during summer and solutions to keep your guild together. If you have more, by all means leave a comment!