Fish Feast, FTW

OS25+3......ding!

You saw my spoiler yesterday, or maybe you read about it here, so its no surprise.

And now I have to wrestle between being Chef, Elder, or Twilight Vanquisher. I suppose its not all that hard to pick for the time being.

All those moving parts I tried to enumerate yesterday clicked.

On the winning attempt:

A) People stayed alive through fire walls and fissures.

B) Adds of all kinds were handled properly.

C) I-Kill-You-Now effects mitigated through perfect coordination of cooldowns by three players.

D) A few players attribute a benevolent RNG that helped with the timing of one of the I-Kill-You-Nows, but I'd challenge that and say it was just our turn after a long string of malevolent RNG's. /cross-arms-and-glare-defiantly Next week's repeat performance will confirm my defiant glare was not for naught.

E) See (A) above

The Beauty of the Fight

Here's the beautiful thing about the encounter, that'll take me a minute to get to. Read on!

Each time you add another drake in the progression from +0 to +3, the fight is mechanically the same, only the complexity skyrockets.

As a team that's been practicing three drakes for a few nights, when we succumb to the clock and raid ID reset schedule and kill one drake to finish off the night with a +2 kill, its just a complete and total cakewalk, because your mind and senses are tuned for the hyper-complex +3 environment. Mechanically though, its the same.

So doing +3.....the first drake flies down. The complexity is evident, but nothing too bad yet.

Then the whelps and elementals (who then quickly enrage as flame wall comes). Complexity increasing.

Then the second drake comes down. For the period of time that these first two drakes are both alive, the chaos spikes, ridiculous like.

Then the first dies, and the third arrives, which brings with it the lovely Twilight Torment (when you do damage, you are inflicted with damage, like that guy in Heroic VH or Zul'jin of ZA fame during his tornado phase), and you're at an all-time-high level of insanity with melee players leaping into portals, immense numbers of adds all over the place, plus the usual Fire Wall/Fissure/Meteor/I-Kill-You-Now routine.

If you're waiting for me to get to the beauty, we're almost there.

There's a pivot point, it would seem, about 80% of the way through Shadron (the second drake).

If you make it this far, you have illustrated that your raid knows how to handle each and every mechanical component of the fight. You no longer need to question your strategy at all, and the only thing that's in your way is execution.

You could feel it in the air as Shadron dies, leaving essentially an OS25+1 fight left (with a massive quantity of adds left over from the early parts of the fight)

And now for the beauty...

You've gone through this spike in chaos, eliminated most of it, BUT the fight is still got a long time left.

Vesperon (last drake) and Sartharion himself have a lot of health.

And for that whole time, you can just feel it, coursing through you.

WE'RE GONNA DO IT!!!!!

Sure, there's still a million and one things that can go wrong, and everybody needs to stay on the ball.

WE'RE GONNA F'ING DO IT!!!!!

I'm not sure if Blizzard intended this feeling or not, but I'm a big fan.

Contrast it with a fight like Prince Malcheezar. Fights that kinda increase in complexity over time, resulting in the last few seconds being the most stressful. At the start, you've only got one Infernal to worry about, and over time, there's less and less safe spots, and then the axes, and then his crazy attack speed and power buff. Granted, Prince is a strange example, because there's so much randomness in there, but work with me, its an analogy.

In 3D you experience the apex of intensity in the early parts of the fight, and then get to bask in the glow as you finish off the job.

The Ugly

A few forms of ugliness reared their...well...ugly...heads during the the progression night:

1) Discipline - I wrote about this one yesterday. During an early attempt, an overzealous DPS'er pulled aggro on Sarth while we were waiting for the first Drake to land. Although the tank regained aggro and nobody died, the DPS Lead ordered an immediate wipe then and there to prove a point. Absolute correct move. There is simply no excuse for this. As described above, the ending phase of the fight is not an issue, so claiming the value of carving off an extra 2-3% of Sarth's health at the beginning does not compute. When the Officers ask for "no dps", they're doing it for a reason. Discipline!

2) Radio Chatter - As the fight moved through the ultra-intense early parts, into the less-ultra-but-still-very-intense middle parts, and then on into the intense-but-starting-to-feel-good end phase, the Vent radio chatter increased. Inane stuff like "if you need help with those adds, just call out for it and I'll help you" by non-Officers. Sorry bub, but this type of verbal communication is unnecessary and can derail the team. (A) Its useless because if the guy needs help, he's going to call out for it without your permission or reminder, (B) you're occupying the voice channel and may obstruct actual necessary comms, and (C) you're encouraging more of the same, snowballing the whole thing down hill. Sure, we're all feeling the rush of impending victory, but that's exactly the time to NOT lose composure, only to silly wipe.

3) My DPS - Yeah, I'll call it ugly. Somewhere around 2.9K DPS for the encounter (going off memory of recount, I can't hit our WWS parse from work my preferred blogging location). Knowing its a Hunter unfriendly encounter, I compare myself with Brass, who did phenomenal during the kill. So I can't blame the nerf. Areas that need attention (1) ensuring I'm at max range to take advantage of Sniper, (2) more effectively managing Lock and Load to ensure I'm neither overwriting DoT ticks, nor wasting any time after the last DoT tick before reapplying Explosive Shot, and (3) actually using Rapid Fire, which is simply negligent oversight. But, I survived through the fight, so I'll give myself that pat on the back :-)

The Truth Behind How We Won

All those wonderful things described above (aka, not dying in fire), are great.

But you wanna know the true secret to victory?

I got two words for ya.....

Fish. Feast.

I spent the hour before the raid flying between Grizzly Hills, Borean Tundra, and Sholazar Basin fishing up Glacial Salmon, Musselback Sculpin, and Nettlefish, so I could fry up some vittles while sitting inside OS waiting for the raid to start up.

A little extra stats spread across the raid, and a little extra stamina for everybody.

A new title to show for it.

Harder than the coordination of the I-Save-You-Now abilities was the feast-dropping rotation between the Hunters.

Fish Feast, FTW

Pluggin away at the Drakes

EDIT, and massive SPOILER: You know how there's a 12 hour delay between when I write these and post them? Yeah, well....we f'ing DID IT! More on that tomorrow. Please enjoy the following story about when we ALMOST did it.




OS25+3 is the goal.

We will make it happen.

Very soon.

We're so close to the turning point at which the battle moves from total chaos into a much more controllable situation.

There's so many moving parts that we're just needing to have all 25 players firing on all 8 cylinders during the same attempt, and this baby is down.

We've got it so down, that when we end up doing one last attempt with only 2 drakes before the servers reboot and start a new raid week, 2 Drakes is an f'ing joke. We bat OS25+2 aside like its nothing, as the complexity difference between +2 and +3 is exponential.

3 Drakes must die!

Cut to the Chase

If you don't want to read a littany of the obstacles in the way, clicky click for personal reflections or Survival performance.

23 Issues

Well, you've got your flame tsunami (1) with its random direction and random safe-spot location.

Then you've got your ground fissures/void zones (2) and their random location and complete and total ability to visually blend in with Death and Decay. Oh, and also a penchant for one-shotting you if you don't move.

And you've got your whole area surrounded by lava. Evil lava (3).

These three are the basics. No matter what else is going on, each and every raider must survive these on his own. Evil lava can be healed through for short stints, so sometimes the melee and healers make a deal on that one.

But the tsunami and fissure, no negotiating.

You've also got the big stinking dragon, Sartharion (4). He/she needs to be positioned away from the raid so only a tank is in front of him/her.

You've also got meteors (5) flying down from the sky, blasting whoever they land on. People say you can predict where they land and avoid them, but I've yet to figure that one out.

Then you've got your first dragon, Tenebron (6) and the melee hits he brings hopefully only to the tank on him. Watch out for his breath in a frontal cone (7).

And the eggs that Tenebron hatches into whelps periodically (I'll call this 8, but there's a bunch of whelps, but I suppose we won't itemize, will we?). To be successful, thou shalt kill Tenebron before the second wave of whelps hatch. Burn Heroism and all cooldowns immediately on this guy.

And make sure somebody is picking up those whelps and some AoE folks are killing them (9), because healers tanking whelps is a bad thing.

Oh, did I mention that there's also Fire Elementals (10) that come out? And they enrage when the flame tsunami hits them? Enrage must be dispelled (11), maybe a rogue with some poison or a hunter with a tranq shot.

Oops, and one more thing. From time to time, Sartharion (or is it one of the drakes?) has an I-Kill-You-Now move (12), that requires very special handling. Priests and Paladins seem to be two classes capable of that "special handling" but with all these moving parts, my understanding doesn't quite make it this deep into the other specialities. I do know that the cooldowns on these I-Save-You-Now abilities is long, requiring a finely coordinated rotation amongst the saviors.

If your DPS is on schedule, somewhere near the death of Tenebron, the second drake, Shadron, will appear. Must tank him (13), and watch his breath also (14).

What is with these drakes and their breath? What profession can craft a toothbrush? Engineer? Wouldn't that be something? Alchemist to craft toothpaste out of fluoride mined from special nodes around the perimeter of Obsidian Sanctum?

Tenebron must be killed before anything else (16). Ignore portals up to this point.

Now that tenebron is down, and Shadron is being tanked in a good position (bad breath pointing away from people), melee and a healer need to scoot into the portal and kill off the acolyte (16), while the ranged folks continue to AoE and dis-enrage the fire elementals AND pour the DPS on Shadron (17).

I've no idea what that Acolyte does if left unchecked, but I'll assume its evil.

While Shadron is being destroyed, Vesperon will arrive. Sensing a pattern here? Tank him (18) and watch the breath (19).

We're getting near the end here folks, can you feel it?

I'm unsure of what you do with the portals once Shadron is down? Is Vesperon's acolyte evil also? I'll vote yes, just for the sake of padding the numbers (20).

Shadron goes down, all DPS that's not portal hopping move to Vesperon and burn him down (21).

Vesperon's dead, so lets get to the meat and potatos, Sartharion himself (22).

Oh yeah, and I totally forgot the best one. Twilight Torment (23). Randomly members of the raid will get debuffed with TT, I think after Vesperon lands, wherein you take damage as you DPS. If a DPS player gets this, he's either got to stop doing anything, and simply avoid the tsunami and fissures until the debuff wears off, or you need healers with balls of steel who can heal through the massive damage TT will inflict.

Personal Reflections

0) To whoever hacked our main tank's account and put him out of service for the last week and a half as well as the forseeable future.....kiss my ass.

1) On a lighter note, this fight really is so cool. The margin for error is non-existant at this point in our gear progression and amount of experience working the fight. The challenge is great.

2) The level of intensity and concentration throughout the night is incredible.

3) The annoyance factor when there's a tiny delay before a fissure appears on your screen (lag? video settings? L2P?) and you're dead before you even see the fissure on your screen is extreme.

4) The team stayed very positive through the whole night, which makes the difference between three hours of agony and three hours of invigorating action.

5) Some people need to L2STFU and let the Officers do the talking, but I suppose that's not my call. As long as they're remaining calm-ish and positive, I won't complain (more than I just did right here).

6) When the Officers call for "no dps on sarth while waiting for tenebron to land", why is it that half the casters are nuking sarth and causing the DPS Leader to call out an aggro warning? Discipline! But again, I suppose I won't complain. A Warrior taking a few swings to build up rage to allow for easier interception of Tenebron? Pure Win. A caster elevating the blood pressure of the sarth tank, the DPS officer and any raid healers? Unnecessary risk, even if justified with the excuse of "trying to get a trinket to proc" or whatever. Discipline!

How's SV Doin?

One of the many beautiful things of raiding along with a Hunter with a brass pair, an insane ability to deliver damage, and a non-gloating attitude when he comes out on top is that I have an excellent litmus test for my own performance.

As we both L2SV (amava, stop with the L2 crap), it is enlightening to see attempts where we have very similar raw damage output. Gives you a sense that we're both extracting a high amount of the potential damage available to us given the similar spec, similar gear, similar raid circumstances, and similar raid job assignments.

The fight remains very Hunter unfriendly from a DPS perspective since your pet is continuously on the move to avoid flame wall. Spec the pet in both boars speed and dash.

The longer the fight goes, the better the Hunter performance seems to be, relative to the other classes, which is interesting to see.

This difference is likely due to two things:
1) Early wave(s) of whelps give AoE classes massive raw damage
2) SV lacks any trinket-like period of excess, like BW. Heroism gets triggered very early in the fight, and SV has no special ability that can be triggered at that time. You can only hope for the various crit-enhancing abilities to proc during that 40 seconds for maximum bang.

DPS output seems to be in the mid- to high-3000's, pushing into the higher 3k's for the longer fights, which is nice for such a high mobility fight focused on personal survival (not spec survival).

The long range of Hawk Eye also helps as you can keep drakes in range while maneuvering through the Flame Wall opening that randomly gets located in the middle of the battlefield.

Amava-crest....OUT!

Sorry if this one came out boring, because it doesn't do the night justice.

Lots of excitement, lots of adrenaline. You can feel the team slowly but surely clicking, each attempt getting a little bit more survivable and a bit more under control. With so many factors in the fight, its a matter of repetition, and small tweaks to get through each micro-phase of the fight.

Sarth+3 will die!

Dancing with the Drakes

Conquest decided its time for Sartharion plus all three of his drakes to die in one epic battle.

Sarth and company didn't quite agree, but they were willing to indulge us with a few hours of Waltzing Matilda.

All I can say is...this fight is simply awesome.

I know most of Conquest was way more progressed in TBC and Vanilla than I was, so maybe they saw more epic battles than I ever did. And maybe they'll think I'm a turd for saying I loved a night that could be interpreted as fail if you view life through a black/white win/fail lens.

But it was just so cool.

Lets explore...

Challenge

Few fights in WotLK have provided Conquest with much challenge.

Sarth+1 was a one-shot, but I'd venture to say it was no cake walk. Fun night, though.

Sarth+2 was an hour or two of wiping, adjusting, tweaking, slowly progressing, resulting in a kill our first night trying. So a bit harder, and subsequently, a bit more satisfying when we nailed it.

Malygos was cool. A night of endless wipes, but steady progress through the phases. Practice Aces High daily quest for a few days. Return to kill him on our next night of attempts. Again, seeing steady progress and relying upon your Officers to adjust strategy and your members to adjust execution, very cool. The only thing that soils this one in my mind is how Phase 3 is totally unrecognizable mechanics that have nothing to do with the 80 levels a million hours of raiding you did with your toon. And you're riding a stupid dragon vehicle mount. But I digress.

Sarth+3 is tough. Very tough. Through a two hour wipefest, we made progress, tweaking one small piece of strategy at a time. Overall, the progress was still just the tip of the iceberg, where we can semi-reliably take out the first drake. So many moving parts to master, this one is going to be so sweet when we kill it.

Moving Parts

Moving parts you say? Do tell!!!

Of course, all this is from the perspective of a team that is still very early in the encounter. I'm sure there'll be more to tell once we've seen the full encounter, but here goes. Also, its from the perspective of a ranged DPS class, but you know that.

1) Flame Wall - You start off with the basic Flame Wall, same as in zero drakes. Make sure you recall pet each time you hear "RUN AWAY, LITTLE GIRL!" regardless of how much it'll gimp your DPS or how much of a Bestial Wrath you'll need to waste.

2) Sartharion - Also, same as in zero drakes, you've got Sarth himself. Nasty cleave in front of him, so make sure you know which way he's pointed. Not sure if his tail is evil or not, but I'm not about to hang around his arse to find out.

3) Void Zones - We all hate dying in the fire. So stay out of the void zones.

4) Lava - You're surrounded by lava, so don't run off the edges of the platform, unless you're choosing lava as the lesser evil when faced with an inescapable flame wall.

5) Tenebron - First drake to land. Need to watch the aggro and positioning while a tank picks him up. Oh, and to make things fun, a Flame Wall shows up right as he lands, making the transition rough. He's got bad breath that'll fry you, so watch your positioning closely.

6) Whelps - Tenebron periodically hatches eggs or something. Those eggs become nasty whelps. You must (A) have a way to handle the whelps, and (B) burn Tenebron down before he hatches a second set of whelps.

7) Flame Elementals - I think this is same as zero drakes. Fire Elementals wreak havoc amongst the raiders, so you need a way of controlling them or killing them. When Flame Wall hits them they enrage, so need someone like a Rogue to remove the enrage.

8) Shadron - The second drake to land. If your DPS output is like ours, you'll have overlap. Tenebron is still alive while Shadron arrives. So a third tank is required to pick this fella up.

9) Shadron's Portal - There's a portal with some acolyte or something in it. He does something bad. Good idea to kill him, which requires some DPS, a healer and a semi-tank (DPS spec DK or the likes) to pop into the portal from time to time.

And that's about all I can share from personal experience.

We had some attempts that were insta-wipe. We had some attempts that showed incremental progress over previous attempts. We had one attempt that was clicking, and went much smoother than the others, thus leading to the need to figure out how to transition from one portion of the fight to the next.

Interface Changes

Two interface settings help this fight out substantially.

1) Spell Details - Via the normal Video Settings screen, crank Spell Details down as low as you can. This makes the void zones stand out visually very clearly, and removes confusion that can come from Death and Decay or Consecration.

2) Camera Zoom - Why a special command is required for this, and not just the default camera zoom slider in the camera settings thingie, is beyond me. Zooming your camera way way out makes it way way easier to see the flame wall and determine (A) which side its coming from and (B) whether the gap is on the sides or in the middle.

/console cameradistancemaxfactor 4

I also use this on Malygos, and it helps a ton for spatial orientation during Phase 3. It definitely takes some getting used to or else you lose your own toon in the crowd, but once acclimated to the wider view, you're in business.

More fun to come

After a while, the raid leader called it and we went over to Naxxramas to pwn some mobs before going to bed, which was a good move as it vented some steam after an exciting but tough start to the night.

I think the general conclusion is that we didn't have enough DPS to reliably take Tenebron down fast enough, and also haven't mastered how to control the whelps yet.

I sure hope we keep pushing, though. Finally we found a challenge in WotLK worthy of night after night of slowly mastering the encounter.

Its fun, its got a lot of variety, there's a huge number of tactics we can use to make it happen, and most importantly, there's no stupid dragon vehicle mounts.

It would be a shame to abandon the challenge and wait till we get a little bit more gear raid-wide.

We can do this if we focus and keep trying.

Raid Progress Report - Drakes Up, Ho's Down

Just a real quickie for anybody who cares.

First night of new Raid ID's. Three Hours.

1) Heroic Sartharion + 1 Drake (Tenebron) progression attempt. One Shot. Cool as hell, added a bunch of complexity. Pets are so squishy in this fight, Princess Vespa was dead or at my side for much of the fight. /cry Hopefully we'll try 2 Drakes next week.

2) Heroic Malygos second kill attempt. A few shots, but dead dragon in the end. Several players in the raid who weren't part of the progression kill, so should be pretty close to farmable now that they've seen it top to bottom.

3) Heroic Naxxramas - Spider Wing and Plague Wing Cleared. Most importantly: Heroic Safety Dance Achieved with zero deaths on Heigan the Unclean!!!!!!!

Collectively, the DPS was up quite a bit, and nearly all boss kills were Guild records for speed.

Speed through trash was also much improved. That's a good thing, but unfortunately, it may build bad habits over time. Its good because I dislike wasting time unnecessarily. Its bad because we can just sorta pull entire rooms now (through gear and familiarity). With only half the raid, and the other half still standing by a corpse figuring out what to do with the stuff in the corpse's pockets.

Actually, strangely enough, it might be building even stronger need for skill, because clearing 4 or 5 packs of spiders in a single swoop requires you to be a bit on your toes, rather than sitting down, setting up, and just mindlessly AoE'ing small groups at a time.


The goal for the week is to clear everything in two nights.

To do that, Thursday night would need to be Naxx Construct Wing, Military Wing, Sapphiron, Kel'Thuzad, and then fly on over to Wintergrasp to take down Archavon.

Given the pace we moved at on Tuesday, seems pretty reasonable, especially with the two iffy ones out of the way (Sarth+Drake and repeat Malygos kill).

That is all.

You Better Believe, Daddy's Back

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin......




Q: Is being on top of the meters important?

A: Absolutely not. It takes a team to kill a boss, and we succeed and wipe as a unit. Either we all loot the boss, or nobody loots the boss. And anyways, being on top is likely the result of the RNG smiling on me and giving Princess Vespa a little nudge in the crit department. Hey, maybe they should nerf us?

Q: When you actively develop an improvement plan and work at progressing the plan daily, is feedback important?

A: You bet your bippy. Its a long-standing joke in my corner of the blogosphere that winning at WWS is King. Not at all. But using a tool like WWS to get feedback on the effectiveness of your improvement plan is simply splendid.

Q: In an environment where the officers have flat out said "As we see gear quality level out, low DPS will be replaced", does your position on winning WWS change?

A: No, winning WWS doesn't become more important, however illustrating that you can (A) develop a plan and (B) show clear results that the plan works becomes the new King.

Q: While palin' (sp?) in comparison to the joy of the success as a team, how does it feel being on top?

A: So. Ego. Strokingly. Good.


I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin.