Space yourselves out

The following will make more sense when you get to the end....on a lighter note, it only took us about 10 seconds to make a near perfect shoulder-to-shoulder lineup around the corpse for the screenshot.

Back to the doom and gloom that is this blog post...

When fighting Void Reaver in Tempest Keep, for anybody outside melee range, keep space between you and your neighbor. When either you, or your neighbor, gets targeted with an Arcane Orb, just turn around, and run directly away from VR. Watch explosion behind you. Turn around, and run back.

Oh, and use every aggro-reset capability you have at every opportunity you have.

Backing up a step, before the boss fight, during our inaugural visit to The Eye, I noted how tricky the trash was.

Bah. Just first time jitters.

We flew through the trash this time. Everybody was listening to positional instructions, CC'ers remained focused on their jobs rather than trying to top the meters and let their assignments one shot all the healers, the tanks kept us moving quickly, the stars were clearly aligned during our trash clearing.

Night and day compared to our first visit.

Then came Void Reaver himself. And things took a strange turn.

During the raid, or actually in any situation where I'm leading a group of people, I prefer to give as few instructions as possible. Generally, its better to have people make their own decisions. That's easier for me, and also empowers people to figure out the best way to do stuff and have the freedom to act on it independently. Win-win so to speak.

So when I do give an instruction, its usually for a pretty specific reason.

Case in point.

"Spread yourselves around the perimeter of the room. To help reduce the impact of any Arcane Orbs, its important to have maximum space between you and your neighbors."

And then, while setting up, I have 4 other ranged players standing directly on top of me while, roughly 90 degrees to our right, there's a mile and a half of empty space. Ok, easy enough, I'll trot on over to the empty space myself. Only to have now 5 players standing directly on top of me.

And when I say "directly on top", I don't mean "vaguely near". WoW has no collision detection of players, so they're standing directly rendered inside my toon. Lengthy, lengthy setup time just getting folks into position, for what should be reasonably straight forward to find empty space in this massive circular room.

"Look to your left, look to your right. Memorize who's standing on either side of you. When you or one of your immediate neighbors is targeted with an Orb, turn around and run directly away from VR. Once the orb explodes, turn around and return to your original position."

And then, orbs incoming, I see 4 players running circles around VR. As orbs drop, they avoid the one targeting them, but then run directly into somebody else's orb. And they then stand there, in the wrong spot, which now trains additional orbs onto people who didn't realize they had a new neighbor. Major wipe fest.

"Once in position, until the tank has engaged the target, don't do anything. No consumables, magics, bandaids. All buffing should be done by the entrance."

And then, while standing there, actually having gotten the whole team into good position, somebody decides to bubble himself. Aggros the boss. We run out to reset. Ok, only a few minutes wasted, but now I gotta make sure everybody's back in their positions. Ok, on this one, the guy in question was really sorry, he knew what he did wrong immediately and came clean. Fine fine, he learned his lesson, we can recover pretty quickly.

"Other than dying during the boss fight, if you die, The Eye has the shortest corpse run in the game. Release and run back."

And then, after we reset VR, most of the players get back into position like good little soldiers. Nice, we can recover quickly from that bubble boo-boo. But, somebody decides to rez the dead bubbler. Aggros VR and we gotta reset once more. And this time, all chaos ensues getting back into position, wasting nearly 10 additional minutes.

I'm not sure what was going on. We usually dont have very much issue like this. Of any of the problems here, the one that really got to me was the positioning one during setup. I basically had to individually go around the room and call out individual names as I identified clumps of 4 or more people standing directly atop one another, with giant gaps of available space.

That wasted so much time, and so much of my concentration / energy. For something that really should need to be spelled out other than floating a single comment like "everybody space yourselves out around the edge of the room".

In the end, the team did an amazing job and our progression attempt went pretty smoothly (other than 4 people migrating towards me during the fight, so I was suddenly getting nailed by 4 arcane orbs and died at 17%, which kinda ticked me off, but ah well, we killed the boss).

I got pretty annoyed though, specifically at how hard it was to get a reasonable spacing between players during initial setup. I'm wondering how much of it I was able to hide, and how much came through vent. I hate to have the joy of a progression kill tainted by negative emotions, but it really just sucked the wind out of my sails to have to work that hard to get the spacing even vaguely close to right.

Anybody from the raid read this? Only guildie I know who reads this wasn't online last night till late. Wanna share what an annoying jerk Amava was last night :-) ? Or did it hide reasonably well?