I bought the ultimate gold sink

Long ass post today about my experience in buying the biggest gold sink I could think of. An escort through all of ICC 25m.

TL;DR: The run was epic, the guild and their members are awesome. It was definitely a pleasure running with them and, if I wasn't quitting soon, I'd love to run with them again. Great people, great fun, great challenge. The only bad part of the night was my terribad frame rate the entire time.


I have officially purchased the ultimate gold sink. The other night I hired 23 members of the guild Extra Crispy from Ysera-US horde to escort myself and a guest through all of Icecrown Citadel 25m. For those of you wondering how much I paid, the total number was 800,000 gold for the night. The details of the deal were rather simple actually. 25m raid, every boss must die, 50k per boss kill in the first wing and 200k up front for each following wing. I had to take a portal/summon each time of course to get the money. Since I took my DK who isn't my lead banker, and thus 100k withdraw limit, I had Stokpile withdraw 200k at a time and mail it all ot her in seperate mails. That way I could just grab one huge stack of gold, hand it over and pick up the next quickly as to not slow us down.

The deal was for two players to be kept alive as best as possible (fire standing not included), and we were to both pass on all loot. Granted the entire guild needs nigh zero from any normal mode bosses so a few pieces (including shadow's edge) were offered to us. But since I only run as DW and my buddy is a caster (and hates melee) it would be better off as an alt's off-spec side-grade because I'd literally shard it as soon as I got it. And now the fury warrior jesus shall commence with the smiting of many small kittens.

Yes that's a ton. Yes it's possibly even a metric ton. But what would be more wasteful, me canceling my account with a million gold in the bank never to be seen again or use it for something and give it to people who obviously aren't complete morons?

Also here's another reason why it's not a waste (in my opinion) to buy a run through ICC. Anything fun has a price. To me being a part of a great group of people going through a successful raid are some good times. It's what I miss the most about TBC and not just collecting purples like we all are in this expansion. The guild I ran with allowed me to have that same fun one last time before I left the game. Great big thanks to everybody in Extra Crispy that helped an old school (ish) raider have some fun. With all the guild hoping and never knowing how much fail is in a guild until you raid with them it's just far more of a hassle than it's worth. But back in TBC if a guild called themselves a raiding guild they were the REAL THING. How many guilds on your server call themselves a raid guild and can't get past saurfang? 'Nuff said.

Also with a guild that's capable of 100% carrying a random person through ICC including the LK they probably have their whole raiding roster decked out in all the weapons that he drops. If you see the loot table, that's the only gear he gives. So if your guild gets up to that point where nobody needs a weapon from him, why not carry somebody through it and sell off the title and a weapon of their choice? I mean if you're not actively working on heroic version of the LK encounter, killing him gives you nothing but extra crystals and emblems. Both of which you can get if you boost somebody through there along with a few thousand guild for your raiders and/or guild bank.

The run was split up into two seperate nights due to time constraints, but the first raid night was only 2.5 hours long and all we had left was sindragosa and the LK to take down.

I paid 800k for this run and we're not 1 shoting it all. I wasn't expecting all the bosses to jsut roll over for us and I didn't even want it to be a 100% perfectly flawless run either. I like that. I don't want to falcon-punch our way to victory over everything and see free purples raining down like the rest of this entire expansion. Its great to see progress and after a wipe they identified what the issue was and fixed it on the spot then blam. boss falls over with a hole in their chest

We wiped on queen because apparently if you have a proc from dbw, you can't get bitten because you're shape shifted so of course the top dps goes to bite the next top dps and they're shifted, an unexpected rogue on the rampage is scary and tore up several people. After we recovered everyone that was getting a bit and had the trinket took it off for something else, I think a couple even went without a second trink.

A few random observations about the runs.

Before every boss there was a feast on the ground accompanied with a raid warning saying that it was down and when it was about to expire.

There was a 5 count before the MT (go go paladin) would pull every time.

Their raids start at 730pm server, and at 730 on the dot the first trash pack was busy dying. That made my night worth it right there. Almost every guild in the game takes at least an extra 30 minutes after raid "start time" to so much as even get to the instance. I loved it.

4 frames a second average all night, that sucked balls.

Fun fact, half the people on vent spoke french or had a heavy accent.

Valithria was damned cool. It was pure chaos. And I like chaos. tons of adds spawning all the hell over the place, man I'd love to tank that fight.

I think I managed to hold my own throughout the raid. I didn't die on a single boss fight aside from H loot ship from pulling threat on adds. I couldn't tab around fast enough and still DPS to find out which I hadn't built threat on yet. I also sustained 10.5k dps on saurfang (including the 20% buff) and any other tank 'n spank type of fight. Not bad considering I knew zero fights after the first wing and was rocking an awesome 4 fps.

So far my favorite fight has been blood council. Again because of the pure chaos that is going on. I almost got myself killed a few times from the "move and you die" debuff. Luckily I'm a DK and have a number of tools that I can use to help myself out. But it was a pain in the ass to get a big stack of it as you finally get back into melee range only to be knocked right back and have to sit there doing nothing. If you armory "Daecidia" you can see all the achieves that we did from a single clear.

When all was said and done, I had the bloodhalls down on heroic, H marrowgar, H gunship, and over a dozen ICC related achievements.

I got the feeling that a couple in the raid were not so happy that me and my buddy interrupted their raid week. Though more accurately it seemed that they were more concerned with getting purples that were more purple than their 'old useless' purples with green text to prove that they are SUPER purple. I hate people that think of loot as a reward and not the tool to get more boss kills, be able to do more fun stuff, or to simply better yourself.

And I'm sure that millions of people would consider it to be "lowly" or "pathetic" to have to buy a run through ICC. Fun fact, I paid 800,000 gold for the run and I still have over 400,000 in my bank. Meanwhile they all sit nice and pretty with their 2k gold. Wonder why it's such a sad thing that I bought a run through the last tier before I left the game...

But for the most part they were really cool. for all intents and purposes it was just like i was an honorary guild member. No special treatment no insults or anything. just what I was hoping for.

The guy that set up the deal was also the guild's main tank and he even went as far as to run fraps for the fights. I thought that was just too cool. Here's a couple of the vids where we did some achievements or otherwise interesting. All of it is from a prot pally perspective.

Flu shots
H Blood princes
LDW Full house
Valithria portal jocky

We downed Sindragosa rather easily even though I messed up on the frost blast positioning. I didn't chain the blocks, but didn't manage to get into the position they wanted perfectly right away. But after the second blast on me I got it. I went unholy for the fight so I wouldn't have to worry about the debuff stacking up from hitting her lightning fast, especially with all the haste I have as frost.

As for the Lich King himself, well, that made every gold coin worth it to see the fight first hand. I screwed up on defile of course, I knew that you had very little time to move but I didn't know that you had basically ZERO time. Since I was the lowest dps of the DK's in raid I stuck to spamming chains on all the valks when they came out so they could focus on killing them asap and it worked out well. In a word the fight was holy-shit-super-cool-epic-awesomeness! Yes, that's a word. Promise.

All in all the whole experience was well worth it. Even if I wasn't quitting soon (thus making all the gold worthless to me) I still would've done it. Hell I'd even have spent my full bank on it. Blizz may have totally botched this entire expansion but there are definitely a few fights that are truly memorable. Hard mode twins in ToC, LK, Blood princes, Valithria, Iron Council and countless ulduar hard modes of course.

And to top it all off, apparently one of the raiders that with us has some quality pen and paper drawing skills and offered to do a nice sketch of my DK as a personal thank you. That's awesome. It doesn't matter who you are, if somebody says to you that they want to draw a portrait of you as a way to say thanks you can't help but feel like you're king of the world for a few moments. Seriously, that's beyond awesome. It also makes it even more cool because I fancy myself an artist as well (since that's sorta my job after all), but can't draw anything without a mouse to save my life. So even though I think my toon looks wicked cool I'd never be able to make an artist's rendition of them and screen shots just don't have the same personal feel as something hand drawn does. Call me old fashioned.


Lastly if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll notice that my normal blue double-border style isn't here today. And you may also notice that the only time I remove it is when I have screen shots to show. So here you go,a collection of screens that I took through out the evening of great fun, death by bad stuff, recount padding, and 'splosions!















And here's the picture the fellow raider drew for me. I think it's hands down adorable!





Thanks for stopping by!