Monday night was the first All-Conquest 25-person raid. It was my first raid with the new guild, and in fact, its the first group activity with the new team, since all my focus since the server transfer was power leveling and power turkey-eating.
Short Version: 3 Hours. Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum Dead. Naxx Spider and Plague wing cleared. Mama got a new pair of boots.
Medium Version: Matticus tells the medium version better, so go read it there. This is my first raid with a brand new team. I had no idea what to expect: from the environment/culture of the raid, from my own personal performance, from the performance and expectations of the players around me, from the mass quantity of new bosses we'd be facing.
Lots of uncertainty. Lots of change. To summarize the end result of each of those uncertain expectations listed above: perfect blend of professional execution while still laughing at fart jokes, piss poor, absolutely stellar, not too bad given the concise explanations from the experienced raiders.
If you're the type who generally loves the ego stroking, I highly recommend raiding with a Hunter who has Balls of Steel for a nice serving of Humble Pie. And, contrary to most historical posts on this lovely blog, no, folks it wasn't yours truly. The other hunter, did well over double my damage output, is carrying the Legendary Thori'dal bow, 4x T6, and everything else level 80 epic already. Just....wow. Out of 14 DPS, I was generally 10th or 11th in DPS. Me thinks hardcore isn't a strong enough word to describe this crew. How's that for a rude awakening for a Night Elf dude/chick alone on a brand new server?
In other news, Mama got the first piece of phat level 80 lewtz off of his/her loot wishlist. Long live the Loot Council. And Long Live the other Hunter and Shammy who chose to defer on the boots, thus making the Council's decision pretty easy.
Long Version:
And I do mean long. And thick, too.
Where to start? Where to start?
How about "at the beginning"?
The big boss man with the corner office at work got a bug up his butt about something. Something that I take care of for him. So my trip home was delayed by an hour and a half. As if you, my precious reader, actually care about my trip home, or my boss's boss's random whims and sometimes agonizing sense of urgency. But I digress.
The bottom line was that I had a very small window of time in which to square away the 101 Details of Raiding, all of which are unfamiliar since they moved my cheese from 70 to 80.
Fiddlin' with Gear
Start with Hit Rating. I'd like to be as close to Hit Capped as I can be. I was still sporting nearly entirely level 70 epic gear. And pretty far from the hit cap for level 80 (296 with no talents, 197 with 3 points in Focused Aim).
So I browse my bank of random quest greenies and bluies that I'd collected along the way to 80. Painful level of detail trying to choose between roughly 25 pieces of gear, balancing across all the families of stats that BM Hunters like, while pushing as far into the Hit Rating as I could.
Not sure if it was the ongoing discussion at BRK about entry-level Hunter melee weapons or not, but I've always hated the look of the Season 3 axe that I've been carrying for nearly a year.
Decided to go for the dual Fang of Truth. This requires Honored with Wyrmrest Accord. I was 450 rep away from Honored. Ok, quick like a bunny, get over to Dragonblight and do that annoying flying dragon fight daily quest. I say "annoying". I actually hate that quest. It reeks of something very grindy that I don't enjoy, is kinda buggy and the interface is sloppy and they just rushed it out the door to make something "cool". Meh. But, in a pinch, I've got no problem with grindy or annoying. Gimme shiny!
Complete the quest, hoping for a nice fat 500 rep reward. Nope. 250. F#$K! Time's ticking!
Some guildies advise me that there's a daily out in Coldarra. Ah, yeah. I remember that one. Harpoon a Dragon. Long ass flight out to Coldarra. Quick quest completion and turn-in.
Ding Honored, ding long ass return flight to Wyrmrest, ding dual Fang of Truth.
Ding Weapon Skill of ONE (1) in 1H Swords. Ding LOL.
STFU with the "dings" already.
Back to the bank. Time still ticking, and invite time is getting closer.
Decided on replacing some of the level 70 PvP gear as a first step towards the Hit Cap. Green chest replaces Merciless Gladiator's, Green boots replace Vindicator's, Blue Fangs of Truth replace Vengeful Waraxe, Blue necklace replaces Guardians. I didn't have anything nearly powerful enough to make me consider dropping my T5 2-piece bonus just yet, but I'm sure that sad/happy day will come soon enough.
An Enchanted Evening
Time pressing ever onward, I venture off to the AH.
These new puppies are gonna need some polish.
Decided to check the price of Enchanting mats. If the cost for 2x Enchant Weapon - Accuracy was reasonable, I'd go for no talent points, and get close-ish to the 296 hit cap. Otherwise, its 3 points in Focused Aim.
Yeah. Lets just say...respec. The mats available on the AH at the time would have put the cost at 1,200g for each Accuracy enchant. 2,400g on some blue weapons? I know I bought a Mini-Van, so you guys already question my sanity, but this just ain't gonna happen.
As always, WoW Wiki's Enchants by Slot page is outstanding. Although their links to each specific enchant are bunk, and you have to manually go over to WoW Head for details. But the Wiki summary is the best launching page I've found.
Settled upon roughly 1,500g worth of enchants, a new Meta Gem, and one or two new regular gems. Annoying as balls to have to buy individually listed pieces of Infinite Dust when you're buying 50 or so, only to have to go to the mailbox and individually click on all 50 again.
Bottom line is I'm hit capped with the 3 talent points, and I'm pretty happy with the balance in my stats, maybe a bit too high on the Stamina for my point in raiding, but whatever. Hopefully the next few weeks will see a full swap out of all this level 70 crapola.
Quick respec to 53/18/0. Not sure if I'm 100% happy with it, but I was in a rush, and its reasonable if not perfect. I sense tweaking in my future.
Fill 'er Up
Time to fill the bags with consumables.
Wyrm Food (+crit), check.
Kibbler's Bits, check.
Mix mash of Outlands potions, flasks, elixirs, and Northrend potions, check.
Heavy Frostweave Bandages, check.
4 Saronite Arrow Machines, check. I have no idea how the change to "Steady Shot now Uses Ammunition" will impact my quiver. (EDIT: 3 hours of near constant firing used 75% of the 24-slot quiver. Upgrading to a 28-slot should eliminate any worry of running short on arrows).
So where's the instance?
Little things you take for granted. Karazhan had this long windy path that takes you right to the raid portal. Pretty easy to find, especially back when you had to do the Master's Key quest chain, since that guided you right to the door.
Where the f is Naxx? Wiki and Head only give some screen shots of what it looks like, and what zone its in, but no specifics.
So I figure I'll hang out near Wyrmrest and work on my Sword weapon skill until invites start up.
They tell me we're going to Obsidian Sanctum first. Ok. Where's that now?
I see all the little mini-map dots representing my teammates, all right on the spot that I'm on. But where the f are they? That stupid Wyrmrest tower....must be on a different level. Check ground floor, middle floor, tippy top of tower. Nobody.
Ok, I'll be the new guy....."so where's the instance?"
Find the crack in the ice and go underneath the tower. kthx.
And all the rest
Lot of build up in this story, but honestly, from here on it, it was....follow the Main Assist (who of course has a ridiculous "é" in his name so I had to ask how the F do you type that accented e so I can make my assist macro, thus cementing my position as team noob), manage your cooldowns, stay out of the fire, and just generally don't do stupid stuff. Every now and again, take a peek at Recount, and cry as you watch the others absolutely crush your damage output. Don't forget to loot your emblems.
The night went exceptionally smoothly considering its the first time most of us have played together, although many of the team used to raid together in a previous life.
Swift pace, effective reactions to mis-pulls or unforeseen pats, concise boss explanations and assignments, and efficient Loot Council activities for loot distribution.
Kicked the sht out of Obsidian Sanctum, Naxx Spider Wing, and Naxx Plague Wing. One-shot everything, until with only minutes till quitting/bed time, we took one stab at Patchwerk and he made Quickwerk of us.
What Next?
So what's next for Conquest?
Raid ID is due to reset so Tuesday's run will basically be the exact same thing, only focused on more speed. Clear the farm stuff like its going out of style, and have more time in the week for progress. Considering we one-shot everything in the first two wings with only 6 healers, the goal is pretty realistic to fully clear Naxx in our first week.
So what's next for Amava?
Hanging out in vent after the raid, randomly end up with just me and the GM/RL in the channel.
"Amava, you still awake?"
Oh, sht. Time to get chewed out for being absolutely piss poor DPS'er :-( "um, hey, how's it goin" (averts eyes to the ground and kicks stone around nervously).
"What'd you think of the raid? How do you think the officers and I did tonight?"
What now? No beating? or is he just softening me up for the kill? "pretty cool. [this] was awesome, [other thing] was good enough, [yet another thing] could improve, but will surely get better as the officers and the team work work together over time"
"Thanks, keep letting us know if there's anything we can do better."
"Ok, cool. ttyl. Oh, and btw, if you happen to NOT look at WWS for tonight, that's fine by me XD"
Along the way, spoke with the DPS Officer. Nice to hear him reassure me that they're withholding judgment until everybody's on a vaguely even gear scale. Good, because I'm gettin ready to delete my account after tonight's performance, but maybe i'll just log out and go to sleep and reconsider the delete in the morning.
Time to get some Heroic action going and get those next couple upgrades that're right within reach!
Oh, yeah, and while trying to find some Chilled Meat for the daily cooking quest after the raid, ding 400 Swords weapon skill.
Oh oh, yeah, and as always, its a pleasure to have an enchant on the green boots that got replaced who's lifespan was roughly 2 hours from the time the Greenie got enchanted to the time the purple was equipped. I fully believe in the old adage "good things happen to those who enchant".
Showing posts with label boss kill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boss kill. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Triumphant in the Black Temple
Suffice it to say Naj'entus has been nerfed to the ground, like Ret Pallies should be.
Happily, we're still raiding strong with decent numbers of folks showing up and raids kicking off close to schedule.
Waltz up through the sewers, stomping everything in our path.
Nature Resist Totem raid-wide, FTW! Lets me not have to fiddle with hunters and Aspect of the Wild in each party.
Trash that was previously troublesome, no hesitation, practically Leroy our way through the pulls.
During the two massive trashies infront of Naj'entus, our favorite Rogue does his new trick that bounces him between 5 targets and he pulls the boss.
Three choices here:
1) Eat the wipe. Stop healing, stop bandaging, stop avoiding AoE effects. Everybody die and lets regroup to kill the two trash mobs and the boss..
2) Kill the trashies and then eat the wipe. Since we're already in combat, lets finish off the two trash mobs and then die and regroup for Naj'entus only.
3) F it! We're here, lets just f'ing do it!
Option 3 ended up being the winner.
Major kudos go out to the team for adjusting so quickly to the prematurely started fight. Healers were right on the ball transitioning from regular trash to the hugely stressful job of keeping everybody topped off through the tidal shield bursts.
Major kudos go out to blizzard for nerfing the tidal shield burst from 8.5k to roughly 6k, which certainly helped us survive, lol.
Well, that was easy. Quick like a bunny, lets take our first BT "dead boss screenshot" and head on into the Illidari Training Grounds.
This room just looks so cool. Seeing it for the first time really made me appreciate the fact that the team is still motivated to keep raiding, because it really is a sight to see. Scary-looking mobs everywhere. Dragons (since when are dragons called Wyrms? can we call them dragons please?).
Took out Supremus in a two-shot.
This fight is fun as hell. As a class that does kiting as a way of life, getting targeted by the boss was outstanding as I was able to keep pouring on damage while leading him around the room. Glyph of Serpent Sting + Glyph of Arcane Shot, FTW!
In the killing attempt, he targeted Skittle the Wasp FIVE (5) F'ing times!!!!!! Mend pet + T5 bonus wasn't enough, so sadly she died all 5 times. But Improved Revive Pet to the rescue.
So, we've got 2 raid nights left before WotLK, plus an old school kara run for wednesday the 12th. If all goes as planned, we're gonna hit the Sunwell Plateau and maybe even take a shot at Kael'thas for giggles. Still rockin and rollin!
Happily, we're still raiding strong with decent numbers of folks showing up and raids kicking off close to schedule.
Waltz up through the sewers, stomping everything in our path.
Nature Resist Totem raid-wide, FTW! Lets me not have to fiddle with hunters and Aspect of the Wild in each party.
Trash that was previously troublesome, no hesitation, practically Leroy our way through the pulls.
During the two massive trashies infront of Naj'entus, our favorite Rogue does his new trick that bounces him between 5 targets and he pulls the boss.
Three choices here:
1) Eat the wipe. Stop healing, stop bandaging, stop avoiding AoE effects. Everybody die and lets regroup to kill the two trash mobs and the boss..
2) Kill the trashies and then eat the wipe. Since we're already in combat, lets finish off the two trash mobs and then die and regroup for Naj'entus only.
3) F it! We're here, lets just f'ing do it!
Option 3 ended up being the winner.
Major kudos go out to the team for adjusting so quickly to the prematurely started fight. Healers were right on the ball transitioning from regular trash to the hugely stressful job of keeping everybody topped off through the tidal shield bursts.
Major kudos go out to blizzard for nerfing the tidal shield burst from 8.5k to roughly 6k, which certainly helped us survive, lol.
Well, that was easy. Quick like a bunny, lets take our first BT "dead boss screenshot" and head on into the Illidari Training Grounds.
This room just looks so cool. Seeing it for the first time really made me appreciate the fact that the team is still motivated to keep raiding, because it really is a sight to see. Scary-looking mobs everywhere. Dragons (since when are dragons called Wyrms? can we call them dragons please?).
Took out Supremus in a two-shot.
This fight is fun as hell. As a class that does kiting as a way of life, getting targeted by the boss was outstanding as I was able to keep pouring on damage while leading him around the room. Glyph of Serpent Sting + Glyph of Arcane Shot, FTW!
In the killing attempt, he targeted Skittle the Wasp FIVE (5) F'ing times!!!!!! Mend pet + T5 bonus wasn't enough, so sadly she died all 5 times. But Improved Revive Pet to the rescue.
So, we've got 2 raid nights left before WotLK, plus an old school kara run for wednesday the 12th. If all goes as planned, we're gonna hit the Sunwell Plateau and maybe even take a shot at Kael'thas for giggles. Still rockin and rollin!
Friday, October 31, 2008
Falling Down With Grace
Last week, I gave you a gem of a story about the Scryer's Tier path to the Going Down achievement. Cute, cute, you jump off the building, land on a canvas tent, get an achievement. If you've got a big enough monitor and a weak enough inner ear, the visual effect can actually make you experience a falling sensation.
But for the truly adventurous people, my guild found the perfect way to accomplish this little cherry.
BLOW UP YOUR RAID
Tempest Keep, High Astromancer Solarian
Periodically during the fight a random player will get a Wrath of the Somesuch debuff which turns them into a ticking time bomb. That player needs to run quick like a bunny away from their teammates, blow up in a secluded location, and then rejoin the group. If you blow up near your team, they fly high in the air in a spectacular fashion, and then die when they land. So be kind to your team and run away when you become the bomb.
Pretty simple mechanism.
As it would turn out, not quite so simple for e'rebody, because midway through the fight, the whole tightly packed clump of ranged DPS plus healers is flying high up into the air in spectacular fashion.
During the lengthy journey up into the sky and back down again, I take a gander at my BigWigs warning that shows me who blew us up (you know who you are !!!!), as any good Raid Leader would.
And, as all of us are plummeting back down to the ground and going splat upon impact, all of a sudden, an accomplishment dingy gets thrown up on the screen.
Yep, you got it. The guy who blew us up survived the fall and dinged the Going Down achievement in the process, while simultaneously wiping the raid.
The entertainment factor of the achievement more than overcame the sense of let down that comes with a silly wipe.
Of course, on the next attempt, when the same guy blew us up again, the entertainment factor was a smidge less, what with there being no achievement available to him. So he was asked to "stand in the corner" for our final attempt, which ended up being a beauty, with a dead High Astromancer.
Oh, and just for the record, Al'ar finally met his end by our hand in a one-shot progression kill. Too bad its a nerfed Al'ar, because he wiped us quite effectively during many'a pre-nerf attempt, but either way, revenge is ours.
But for the truly adventurous people, my guild found the perfect way to accomplish this little cherry.
BLOW UP YOUR RAID
Tempest Keep, High Astromancer Solarian
Periodically during the fight a random player will get a Wrath of the Somesuch debuff which turns them into a ticking time bomb. That player needs to run quick like a bunny away from their teammates, blow up in a secluded location, and then rejoin the group. If you blow up near your team, they fly high in the air in a spectacular fashion, and then die when they land. So be kind to your team and run away when you become the bomb.
Pretty simple mechanism.
As it would turn out, not quite so simple for e'rebody, because midway through the fight, the whole tightly packed clump of ranged DPS plus healers is flying high up into the air in spectacular fashion.
During the lengthy journey up into the sky and back down again, I take a gander at my BigWigs warning that shows me who blew us up (you know who you are !!!!), as any good Raid Leader would.
And, as all of us are plummeting back down to the ground and going splat upon impact, all of a sudden, an accomplishment dingy gets thrown up on the screen.
Yep, you got it. The guy who blew us up survived the fall and dinged the Going Down achievement in the process, while simultaneously wiping the raid.
The entertainment factor of the achievement more than overcame the sense of let down that comes with a silly wipe.
Of course, on the next attempt, when the same guy blew us up again, the entertainment factor was a smidge less, what with there being no achievement available to him. So he was asked to "stand in the corner" for our final attempt, which ended up being a beauty, with a dead High Astromancer.
Oh, and just for the record, Al'ar finally met his end by our hand in a one-shot progression kill. Too bad its a nerfed Al'ar, because he wiped us quite effectively during many'a pre-nerf attempt, but either way, revenge is ours.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Mt Hyjal Quickies
A couple'a quickies about Mt Hyjal:
1) Breaking news (not so much): Its been nerfed into the ground.
2) Breaking news: I dont give a hoot. Its fun as h3ll. I'm sure that wipe after wipe on a boss, after dealing with wave after wave of trash would get old in a hurry. But, I'm lovin the one-shot whirlwind tour of bosses we're gettin post-3.0.2.
3) Trash waves for Kaz'rogal are outstanding. Gargoyles? What's not to love about Gargoyles? And massive frost-breathing dragons? Bring it!
4) Thrall is the f'ing man. Way more fun than Jaina. Perhaps we know now why all my toons are chicks.
5) One-shotting two new progression bosses in a totally nerfed environment? As long as there's massive chaotic waves of trash, I'm a huge fan.
6) I've found my Kryptonite, and it is Rage Winterchill. Amava has yet to be alive at the end of a dance with this guy. Not sure if its random bad luck, or I just suck (yep, that's the one). Death & Decay, ok run. Doh, ice bolt. Ok, hit your trinket, good, now run out of DnD. Doh, frost nova and you're still in DnD. You are now a spectator. F! THAT! If I wanted to watch a fight, I'd be searching youtube.
7) Recount shows the following top 3 raw damage dealers for the entire run: BM Hunter, Retribution Paladin, MM Hunter. IN MOUNT HYJAL!!! If somebody had said that 4 months ago, they'd have been locked up, or their Warlocks and Mages would have been fired. Its a new world, and we're here to stay (until the inevitable nerf that's gonna turn Volley into the whoopie cushion novelty fart that it once was). And to add insult to injury, the Beast Master spent 75% of the Rage Winterchill fight as a spectator.
8) All our tanks are so effective at AoE threat generation now. All 4 tanks would stand right on top of eachother and the nice, neat, crisp, compact circles of corpses after each trash wave was just a sight to behold.
9) Nerfed, you say? Progression kill on Anatheron, a one shot that was total ez-mode. Progression kill on Kaz'rogal, a one shot in our first ever viewing of him. The Officers hadn't even read about him up until 1 minute before we started the fight. Ends up being..."Tank and spank, tanks share the cleave, others avoid the front. If your mana is low, run away. Go Go Go!"
1) Breaking news (not so much): Its been nerfed into the ground.
2) Breaking news: I dont give a hoot. Its fun as h3ll. I'm sure that wipe after wipe on a boss, after dealing with wave after wave of trash would get old in a hurry. But, I'm lovin the one-shot whirlwind tour of bosses we're gettin post-3.0.2.
3) Trash waves for Kaz'rogal are outstanding. Gargoyles? What's not to love about Gargoyles? And massive frost-breathing dragons? Bring it!
4) Thrall is the f'ing man. Way more fun than Jaina. Perhaps we know now why all my toons are chicks.
5) One-shotting two new progression bosses in a totally nerfed environment? As long as there's massive chaotic waves of trash, I'm a huge fan.
6) I've found my Kryptonite, and it is Rage Winterchill. Amava has yet to be alive at the end of a dance with this guy. Not sure if its random bad luck, or I just suck (yep, that's the one). Death & Decay, ok run. Doh, ice bolt. Ok, hit your trinket, good, now run out of DnD. Doh, frost nova and you're still in DnD. You are now a spectator. F! THAT! If I wanted to watch a fight, I'd be searching youtube.
7) Recount shows the following top 3 raw damage dealers for the entire run: BM Hunter, Retribution Paladin, MM Hunter. IN MOUNT HYJAL!!! If somebody had said that 4 months ago, they'd have been locked up, or their Warlocks and Mages would have been fired. Its a new world, and we're here to stay (until the inevitable nerf that's gonna turn Volley into the whoopie cushion novelty fart that it once was). And to add insult to injury, the Beast Master spent 75% of the Rage Winterchill fight as a spectator.
8) All our tanks are so effective at AoE threat generation now. All 4 tanks would stand right on top of eachother and the nice, neat, crisp, compact circles of corpses after each trash wave was just a sight to behold.
9) Nerfed, you say? Progression kill on Anatheron, a one shot that was total ez-mode. Progression kill on Kaz'rogal, a one shot in our first ever viewing of him. The Officers hadn't even read about him up until 1 minute before we started the fight. Ends up being..."Tank and spank, tanks share the cleave, others avoid the front. If your mana is low, run away. Go Go Go!"
Friday, October 24, 2008
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner
"...and the Sun did'th shine, and down from the Heavens reach'eth yon holy hand. And that thither hand shall typeth "/roll" and thine Lord doth smile upon thee, and upon thy screen shall appear 72 for thine raid to see, and the Lord boometh in deep James Earl Jones'eth voice'th....Thou Can Haz T5"
-Amava 25:17
So, any long-time readers here in my little corner of the information superhighway know that my WoW career, nay, my very existence, lives and dies by the never ending insatiable desire for phat lewtz and winning at WWS. And you've also likely figured out that my reasons for lusting after shiny purplez is purely so I can make those less fortunate or those with a smaller....er...um...dps bar, feel like the dirt under my dog's paws, and that burning drive nothing to do with lame and wishy-washy pursuits like seeing gear as a means to access more content for the team or using data to analyze my personal performance in my primary job of hurting bad guys.
Additionally, if you truly are a long-time reader over here, you've probably picked up on my sarcastic side.
As a player who has done most of his raiding during the "nerf content / buff players" phase of The Burning Crusade, I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the Random Number Generator or Loot Envy issues that can plague raiders.
For me, most gear comes from faction rep, battlegrounds, arenas, badges. Makes it nice to have rarely even rolled "against" my teammates for loot.
But there is a strange thing that did happen. When we progressed into the 25's, the occasional loot item started becoming upgrade-quality, and as such, Amava threw a couple rolls out there. And wouldn't you know it, all that karma from earlier comes back and stings you in the tush, and you go ahead and win the first two rolls you go for.
Instant Looters Remorse! Go back to passing on everything. Ah, feels nice again, no rolling the dice, no feeling like you've taken from your teammates.
This little process takes us all the way to T5 and beyond. Kill Void Reaver a couple times, ok, now its time to start rolling on T5.
Wouldn't you know it, wham-o, win the damn roll.
Ok, ok, fine. Up to this point in life, no piece of loot or any roll for loot really made a profound impact or was something I was actively seeking or wanting.
Until the possibility of that tasty morsel of 2-piece T5 Bonus was dangled in front of my face.
With the introduction of all the new pets and capabilities in patch 3.0.2, the draw to T5 is just too great. Like Gollum on Mt Doom, I'd bite Elijah Wood's finger off for something to match my shoulders. A girl's got to accessorize, after all.
The 2-piece "indestructible pet" bonus is simply too game-altering for any sane hunter to NOT drool over.
Luckily, the T5 bonus is something lots of classes drool over, so the Guild made a decision to include some new T5 bosses into our raid schedule before WotLK, and while our focus is primarily on progress and new bosses, trying to farm T5 for people is also a priority, since its game-altering for a variety of classes.
So Wednesday night. SSC. Included in our raid is a trial tank we're reviewing, a friendly healer visiting, and a guildie playing on her out-of-guild alt (its complicated). Ultra smooth one-shot of Leotheras the Blind, and a progression kill of Fathom-Lord Karathress. Six T5 tokens!!!!
3 of the first 4 tokens go out of Guild!!!!!!
ZOMG! Never before has loot ruffled our feathers, this is just silly :-( But fair is fair, so to speak, and that's our loot policy, so gratz on you.
Then, on the fifth and most beautiful of all the Leg Tokens......I can haz T5.
Indestructible isn't even the right word.
I took Bubbles, at level 66 (note: not my raid pet...skittle the wasp is a nice and healthy level 70), straight over to western Nagrand to farm snakes for Cobra Scales, since these new pants are gonna need some polish.
Using instant-cast halloween broom mount, very easy to sneak in between the patrolling elites.
What fun is that?
Level 66 pet against level 71 elite. Pish posh. Ok, so threat was a bit of an issue and I had to shadowmeld once while FD and MD were on cooldown, but T5 bringeth health, not threat, and she misses a lot given the 5-level difference. Not even a scratch. Did have to keep Mend Pet running, but come on, this is a 71 elite here, high enough that he could deliver a crushing blow (four or more levels different). Probably been nerfed on 3.0.2 to hit more lightly, but don't tell Bubbles that.
Didn't have the balls to try out the 73 elite, largely due to the threat thing, so I'm gonna have to try that out, maybe with Aspect of the Beast to buff my pet's threat production. And I'm soooo going to see how many Outlands dungeons can be solo affairs as she gets closer to and actually dings 70.
Never thought I'd see the day!
Now, lets go farm whoever drops the T5 chest, because I'd rather put my Leggings of the Pursuit back on in favor of Merciless Gladiator's chest, but lets not get greedy here.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Alive and Progressin'
In a dramatic turn of events, Amava was still standing at the end of a progression boss kill.
Its been a while since that's happened. There was much rejoicing.
Anybody try a 25-person raid since tuesday's world shattering patch?
Its...i dunno...different?
Raid Setup
Sending out invites. Tanks do so much damage in their tanking spec/posture/gear that you can stack the raid with 'em.
No survival hunters to invite..oh yeah, mana battery now, not expose weakness.
On and on.
Try to setup the raid groups. Eh, not really much to do there, nearly everything has been converted to raid wide.
Mage leader tries to coordinate buffs amongst her colleagues. Nope, raid wide.
Paladins...well nevermind here, auras go raid-wide and blessings are totally changed.
On and on.
The Joy of a Dead Boss
Serpentshrine Cavern, Leotheras the Blind.
Wiki gives lots of descriptions for how various non-DPS classes can kill their Inner Demons.
Bah! Everybody does so much damage now, its just plain old silly.
Trash pulls were over in seconds. SECONDS! Even the ones with 9 mobs in them leading up to Lurker/Leo.
Massive Bog Lord guys, could barely target them before they were dead. Give the tank 0.5 seconds before opening fire and he's already got 6k threat built up.
First attempt at Leo. His health bar dropped faster than my sale price shoots up while pumping gas lately.
It really felt like Keystone Cops running round throwing whipcream pies and spraying seltzer on eachother. There's something comical about how silly the fights have become.
That said, took a couple tries, but we killed him on our first night trying.
A Pack of Loot Whores
T5 Yo!
Everybody's been drooling over the 2-piece T5 bonus, not just the Hunters.
Now we've got a second T5 dropping boss under out belts, which is nice.
The Hunter who landed himself a second piece of T5 will likely find himself spitefully placed in a party with the...oh wait....party composition barely matters. /doh, how can I spite people now :(
A Pack of Ego Maniacs
No combat log successfully captured the night, which is a pity since we're all anxious to seewho won at WWS how our new talents and attacks and such were performing.
Recount for the total run (newly installed and I didnt know how to reset it between boss fights) showed BM Hunter & MM Hunter nearly equal at the top (booya, BM tops by 700 damage for the night), followed by a Rogue. Didn't have a Ret Pally, so nothing hugely crushing to our ego. In other news, our main tank Prot Warrior was roughly 8th in overall damage, which is just insane. Lets stack the raid with tanks, no CC. Ever. Every mob gets a tank.
Mana, Mana, Everywhere
Strangely, I had ZERO mana issues the entire night.
When I say ZERO, I really mean ZERO. Felt like anytime I looked, I was at 100% mana or maybe 90%.
I walked into the fight with serious concerns about mana.
Dramatic changes to Aspect of the Viper, no chain drinking Fel Mana Potions, nearly every glyph for hunters involves mana conservation in one way or another.
Given all that, I was pretty worried about mana.
Nope.
Raid had a single Shammy dropping Mana Spring, a single Shadow Priest in the mana battery buff category. That's basically it for mana regeneration.
Individually, I was rolling with a 2H wep with Superior Mana Oil, drinking Elixir of Draenic Wisdom. I had no Glyphs installed because I discovered to my chagrin that you need to be near Lexicon of Power to apply them.
In my bag was my usual stock of 35 Fel Mana Potions.
When I went back to Aldor Bank to unload at the end of the night, I had in my bag...35 Fel Mana Potions.
I don't get it.
My shot rotation was manually chosen (poor poor macro, my #3 button was a sad panda from neglect), primarily Steady Shot. I tried keeping Serpent Sting up during boss fights, which is an interesting exercise to say the least. Arcane shots were added whenever I remembered to check the cooldown.
That said, the addition of more Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting had me worried that it'd be more mana guzzling than my old 1:1 macro.
Nope. Nearly 100% the entire fight.
Taste the Rainbow
Skittle the Purple Wasp seemed to do nicely. Only level 69 but plenty survivable as long as her mama remembers to recall during whirlwind.
610 armor penetration is nice. I am under the impression that its a raid-wide armor debuff for all physical attacks, but I can't find anywhere that'll confirm that 100% for me or not.
Other hunters showed up with Silithid, Ravager and Cat. Gonna have to have a sit down and make sure somebody brings a Wolf too, pending the outcome of my "is it raid wide?" research above.
Buh Bye
So there you go, still raidin and progressin after the 3.0.2 patch. The Officers decided to go with 2 weekly raids instead of 3 until level 80 raiding, so we've got probably 5 more nights to cram in as many bosses as we can. Keep fingers crossed for another kill in Tempest Keep (Al'ar, you evil evil bird), and some sweet lovin in Black Temple.
Its been a while since that's happened. There was much rejoicing.
Anybody try a 25-person raid since tuesday's world shattering patch?
Its...i dunno...different?
Raid Setup
Sending out invites. Tanks do so much damage in their tanking spec/posture/gear that you can stack the raid with 'em.
No survival hunters to invite..oh yeah, mana battery now, not expose weakness.
On and on.
Try to setup the raid groups. Eh, not really much to do there, nearly everything has been converted to raid wide.
Mage leader tries to coordinate buffs amongst her colleagues. Nope, raid wide.
Paladins...well nevermind here, auras go raid-wide and blessings are totally changed.
On and on.
The Joy of a Dead Boss
Serpentshrine Cavern, Leotheras the Blind.
Wiki gives lots of descriptions for how various non-DPS classes can kill their Inner Demons.
Bah! Everybody does so much damage now, its just plain old silly.
Trash pulls were over in seconds. SECONDS! Even the ones with 9 mobs in them leading up to Lurker/Leo.
Massive Bog Lord guys, could barely target them before they were dead. Give the tank 0.5 seconds before opening fire and he's already got 6k threat built up.
First attempt at Leo. His health bar dropped faster than my sale price shoots up while pumping gas lately.
It really felt like Keystone Cops running round throwing whipcream pies and spraying seltzer on eachother. There's something comical about how silly the fights have become.
That said, took a couple tries, but we killed him on our first night trying.
A Pack of Loot Whores
T5 Yo!
Everybody's been drooling over the 2-piece T5 bonus, not just the Hunters.
Now we've got a second T5 dropping boss under out belts, which is nice.
The Hunter who landed himself a second piece of T5 will likely find himself spitefully placed in a party with the...oh wait....party composition barely matters. /doh, how can I spite people now :(
A Pack of Ego Maniacs
No combat log successfully captured the night, which is a pity since we're all anxious to see
Recount for the total run (newly installed and I didnt know how to reset it between boss fights) showed BM Hunter & MM Hunter nearly equal at the top (booya, BM tops by 700 damage for the night), followed by a Rogue. Didn't have a Ret Pally, so nothing hugely crushing to our ego. In other news, our main tank Prot Warrior was roughly 8th in overall damage, which is just insane. Lets stack the raid with tanks, no CC. Ever. Every mob gets a tank.
Mana, Mana, Everywhere
Strangely, I had ZERO mana issues the entire night.
When I say ZERO, I really mean ZERO. Felt like anytime I looked, I was at 100% mana or maybe 90%.
I walked into the fight with serious concerns about mana.
Dramatic changes to Aspect of the Viper, no chain drinking Fel Mana Potions, nearly every glyph for hunters involves mana conservation in one way or another.
Given all that, I was pretty worried about mana.
Nope.
Raid had a single Shammy dropping Mana Spring, a single Shadow Priest in the mana battery buff category. That's basically it for mana regeneration.
Individually, I was rolling with a 2H wep with Superior Mana Oil, drinking Elixir of Draenic Wisdom. I had no Glyphs installed because I discovered to my chagrin that you need to be near Lexicon of Power to apply them.
In my bag was my usual stock of 35 Fel Mana Potions.
When I went back to Aldor Bank to unload at the end of the night, I had in my bag...35 Fel Mana Potions.
I don't get it.
My shot rotation was manually chosen (poor poor macro, my #3 button was a sad panda from neglect), primarily Steady Shot. I tried keeping Serpent Sting up during boss fights, which is an interesting exercise to say the least. Arcane shots were added whenever I remembered to check the cooldown.
That said, the addition of more Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting had me worried that it'd be more mana guzzling than my old 1:1 macro.
Nope. Nearly 100% the entire fight.
Taste the Rainbow
Skittle the Purple Wasp seemed to do nicely. Only level 69 but plenty survivable as long as her mama remembers to recall during whirlwind.
610 armor penetration is nice. I am under the impression that its a raid-wide armor debuff for all physical attacks, but I can't find anywhere that'll confirm that 100% for me or not.
Other hunters showed up with Silithid, Ravager and Cat. Gonna have to have a sit down and make sure somebody brings a Wolf too, pending the outcome of my "is it raid wide?" research above.
Buh Bye
So there you go, still raidin and progressin after the 3.0.2 patch. The Officers decided to go with 2 weekly raids instead of 3 until level 80 raiding, so we've got probably 5 more nights to cram in as many bosses as we can. Keep fingers crossed for another kill in Tempest Keep (Al'ar, you evil evil bird), and some sweet lovin in Black Temple.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
So, what else have you been up to?
The babies are fun and all, and the continuous dinging is pretty neat, but a girl's gotta do more than just run her little babies through dungeons.
We'll start with Black Temple. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
And the T-Shirt reads "I got Na'jentus down to 50% before the nerf. Boo-ya!"
The place is awesome, you pretty much get your ass kicked immediately upon entering the dungeon. The music is cool, the visuals are cool, the AoE pain is not cool. Even the spell names are cool. Sludge Nova soooo sounds like something that happens in a Tijuana latrine.
Guides recommend that every raider have 8500 health unbuffed or somesuch. Yeah, not even close for about a quarter of the raid, so we knew it was a mess going in. But we wanted to take a couple shots in BT before the nerf.
Made it past a royally nasty 6-pull right before the boss, which took a massive amount of trial and error and creativity to get past it given our experience and gear level. But we did it. And fiddled around with Naj.
Second night, made it past the trash much more effectively, and on our best attempt, got Naj to 50% which is not too shabby. If we were to improve, would require (A) toons with more stamina (B) more precise timing on throwing the spikes. Too soon and you sacrifice players who are below 8500, too late and najentus heals himself lots.
Black Temple, Yo!
And what's with this silly fel reaver-looking thing taunting us?
Lets kick his ass.
You got it baby. Dead Doomwalker!
And the true beauty of it is, we killed him sunday night, and his 2-3 day respawn timer will put his next appearance AFTER the patch and the health nerf.
So we get to put the feather in our hat of "Server Last Pre-Nerf Doom Walker Kill" which is more for amusement than it is for actual accomplishment. But we killed Doomwalker which is nothing too shabby either.
EDIT: I just read the patch notes. Looks like Sunwell Plateau, Black Temple and Serpentshrine Cavern are the three places impacted by the nerf. So seems to be remaining full strength. Whatever, I'm still happy we killed him :-P
Also swung by for a one shot of HKM and Gruul, but that's old hat at this point, lol.
So there you have it. The true end of my pre-nerf pre-patch pre-insanity raiding career. I'm a big fan.
We'll start with Black Temple. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
And the T-Shirt reads "I got Na'jentus down to 50% before the nerf. Boo-ya!"
The place is awesome, you pretty much get your ass kicked immediately upon entering the dungeon. The music is cool, the visuals are cool, the AoE pain is not cool. Even the spell names are cool. Sludge Nova soooo sounds like something that happens in a Tijuana latrine.
Guides recommend that every raider have 8500 health unbuffed or somesuch. Yeah, not even close for about a quarter of the raid, so we knew it was a mess going in. But we wanted to take a couple shots in BT before the nerf.
Made it past a royally nasty 6-pull right before the boss, which took a massive amount of trial and error and creativity to get past it given our experience and gear level. But we did it. And fiddled around with Naj.
Second night, made it past the trash much more effectively, and on our best attempt, got Naj to 50% which is not too shabby. If we were to improve, would require (A) toons with more stamina (B) more precise timing on throwing the spikes. Too soon and you sacrifice players who are below 8500, too late and najentus heals himself lots.
Black Temple, Yo!
And what's with this silly fel reaver-looking thing taunting us?
Lets kick his ass.
You got it baby. Dead Doomwalker!
And the true beauty of it is, we killed him sunday night, and his 2-3 day respawn timer will put his next appearance AFTER the patch and the health nerf.
So we get to put the feather in our hat of "Server Last Pre-Nerf Doom Walker Kill" which is more for amusement than it is for actual accomplishment. But we killed Doomwalker which is nothing too shabby either.
EDIT: I just read the patch notes. Looks like Sunwell Plateau, Black Temple and Serpentshrine Cavern are the three places impacted by the nerf. So seems to be remaining full strength. Whatever, I'm still happy we killed him :-P
Also swung by for a one shot of HKM and Gruul, but that's old hat at this point, lol.
So there you have it. The true end of my pre-nerf pre-patch pre-insanity raiding career. I'm a big fan.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Chilly Willy
The whirlwind tour of Burning Crusade end-game raid instances continues.
Mount Hyjal.
Rage Winterchill.
Dead.
Boo-ya!!!
Short Version: Two Prot Paladins, Focus Fire, Situational Awareness, and team-wide buff called Balls of Steel, all contribute to our first T6-level progression kill.
Medium Version: Mastering the trash came relatively easy for the team, with slight tweaks to positioning, NPC engagement, and improvements to communication and coordination between the Main Assist and the tanks. Additionally, with repeated exposure to the Rage Winterchill part of the encounter, most raid members learned how to effectively overcome the Ice Tomb and also avoid excessive Death and Decay damage. And lastly, Jaina Proudmoore is a badass. Engage her in the fight, and engage her early. She just stands there during a Death and Decay, and takes maybe 1% damage. She, too, has the Balls of Steel buff going on (and yes, despite what you think, that buff is gender neutral).
Long Version: I can haz a bad night.
Amava was just plain off on wednesday night. I'll personally blame it on the beginnings of a sinus cold that's developing, along with impending sadness at the thought of missing the uber gf while she journeys around the Mediterranean Sea on a vacation with some friends for the next two weeks.
The end result of the combined reduced physical/mental state was multi-fold:
1) I serve as the Main Assist. In a fight as chaotic as those waves of trash, having an effective MA is vital. I was just plain old sloppy. Picking targets too far away, resulting in the whole team needing to reposition. Choosing targets that nobody was tanking, perhaps just caught in a consecration. Picking a target that a tank was kiting around to engage the NPC's, resulting in us killing the mob before the target NPC's were active. Bad. Bad, Main Assist. No soup for you.
It is a testament to the team how well we did despite this sloppiness. I apologized for the sloppiness, and everybody was very patient with me, which was a huge relief. To help fix it, I did take some time before the last attempt. I talked with the tanks briefly to share with them how I use my tank frame to choose targets, and ways they can help me choose better targets. I gave each tank Raid Assistant privileges and designated an icon for each tank. When they grab a target they intend to tank for a bit (as opposed to jumping around to tank multiple mobs), they should put their individual icon on the mob. Also, I designated one of the warriors as the "starting tank" which means he was to pay special attention to picking up a mob at the onset of each wave, and specifically NOT change target, as the whole raid would be focusing on his dude. This allowed the other tanks to be multi-mobbers.
These changes worked well and the Main Assist targeting, and team-wide focus firing was golden during that attempt. Kudos go out to the tanks and the whole DPS corps for reacting very well to the slop and helping/being patient with corrections to the slop.
2) I also serve as one of the Guild's Single-Target DPS Specialists. In this role, Amava and Condoleezza bring massive noise onto our chosen target, generally resulting in a mob crying for mercy and a massive bar-chart induced ego boost.
While there are many ingredients to delivering MQoSRDPS, there is one key ingredient that is shared across all DPS classes. One inescapable basic truth to all delivery of pain:
Dead Toons Do No Damage
It was simply embarrassing.
We made it to Rage Winterchill three times.
First attempt: Very first Ice Tomb he fires is aimed at Amava. I get tombed, Death and Decay appears below me. I react slow and sloppy, basically hit the wrong key and even if it was the right key, the reaction was too slow to make a difference anyway. Dead hunter. Maybe 15 or 20 seconds into the fight. I was rather pleased with this turn of events. NOT.
Second attempt: Ok, ok. Amava, don't be stupid this time. Keymap your PvP trinket to the key you normally map it to for arenas and BG's, since that's your natural reaction. Pew pew pew, kill trash waves. Pew pew pew, get Ice Tombed. Quick like a bunny, trigger the trinket. YOU STUPID IDIOT, YOU CANT USE A TRINKET THAT'S NOT EQUIPPED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This time, at least I lasted maybe 40 seconds into the fight, lol. Then I watched for another 10 minutes while the team brought him down into his 20%'s
Third attempt: Now we're down to just plain old bad luck. Before the start of the event, I assigned one of the other officers to announce loud and clear during the 7th trash wave for everybody to equip their trinkets. Good. Now heading into the Rage part of the fight I've got a nice easy instinctual key mapping of a trinket that is actually equipped this time. All signs point to "yes". Ice Tomb comes in, Ice Tomb successfully gets removed. Pew Pew Pew, avoid DnD, Pew Pew Pew. I'm watching my PvP trinket timer, and each second that the little hand sweeps around like the hands of a clock, I sweat just a little bit more.
And then, the pure and utter agony, with 6 seconds. SIX MUTHA-F'ING SECONDS. with 6 seconds remaining in the cooldown, I get nailed with Ice Tomb and die. SIX SECONDS!!!!
And watch for another 7 minutes or so while the team does a simply amazing job frying him into the ground.
A giant shout out to the team on this one. Their trusty leader and DPS Queen might as well have not even showed up, and they went in and 24-manned it. Probably would have been cleaner that way.
But that's why there's no i in team, so I can bask in the glow of a team effort where everybody works to overcome the absolutely abysmal performance of somebody on the team having a bad night.
And in the end, we did kill off our first T6-level boss. w00t !!!
Mount Hyjal.
Rage Winterchill.
Dead.
Boo-ya!!!
Short Version: Two Prot Paladins, Focus Fire, Situational Awareness, and team-wide buff called Balls of Steel, all contribute to our first T6-level progression kill.
Medium Version: Mastering the trash came relatively easy for the team, with slight tweaks to positioning, NPC engagement, and improvements to communication and coordination between the Main Assist and the tanks. Additionally, with repeated exposure to the Rage Winterchill part of the encounter, most raid members learned how to effectively overcome the Ice Tomb and also avoid excessive Death and Decay damage. And lastly, Jaina Proudmoore is a badass. Engage her in the fight, and engage her early. She just stands there during a Death and Decay, and takes maybe 1% damage. She, too, has the Balls of Steel buff going on (and yes, despite what you think, that buff is gender neutral).
Long Version: I can haz a bad night.
Amava was just plain off on wednesday night. I'll personally blame it on the beginnings of a sinus cold that's developing, along with impending sadness at the thought of missing the uber gf while she journeys around the Mediterranean Sea on a vacation with some friends for the next two weeks.
The end result of the combined reduced physical/mental state was multi-fold:
1) I serve as the Main Assist. In a fight as chaotic as those waves of trash, having an effective MA is vital. I was just plain old sloppy. Picking targets too far away, resulting in the whole team needing to reposition. Choosing targets that nobody was tanking, perhaps just caught in a consecration. Picking a target that a tank was kiting around to engage the NPC's, resulting in us killing the mob before the target NPC's were active. Bad. Bad, Main Assist. No soup for you.
It is a testament to the team how well we did despite this sloppiness. I apologized for the sloppiness, and everybody was very patient with me, which was a huge relief. To help fix it, I did take some time before the last attempt. I talked with the tanks briefly to share with them how I use my tank frame to choose targets, and ways they can help me choose better targets. I gave each tank Raid Assistant privileges and designated an icon for each tank. When they grab a target they intend to tank for a bit (as opposed to jumping around to tank multiple mobs), they should put their individual icon on the mob. Also, I designated one of the warriors as the "starting tank" which means he was to pay special attention to picking up a mob at the onset of each wave, and specifically NOT change target, as the whole raid would be focusing on his dude. This allowed the other tanks to be multi-mobbers.
These changes worked well and the Main Assist targeting, and team-wide focus firing was golden during that attempt. Kudos go out to the tanks and the whole DPS corps for reacting very well to the slop and helping/being patient with corrections to the slop.
2) I also serve as one of the Guild's Single-Target DPS Specialists. In this role, Amava and Condoleezza bring massive noise onto our chosen target, generally resulting in a mob crying for mercy and a massive bar-chart induced ego boost.
While there are many ingredients to delivering MQoSRDPS, there is one key ingredient that is shared across all DPS classes. One inescapable basic truth to all delivery of pain:
Dead Toons Do No Damage
It was simply embarrassing.
We made it to Rage Winterchill three times.
First attempt: Very first Ice Tomb he fires is aimed at Amava. I get tombed, Death and Decay appears below me. I react slow and sloppy, basically hit the wrong key and even if it was the right key, the reaction was too slow to make a difference anyway. Dead hunter. Maybe 15 or 20 seconds into the fight. I was rather pleased with this turn of events. NOT.
Second attempt: Ok, ok. Amava, don't be stupid this time. Keymap your PvP trinket to the key you normally map it to for arenas and BG's, since that's your natural reaction. Pew pew pew, kill trash waves. Pew pew pew, get Ice Tombed. Quick like a bunny, trigger the trinket. YOU STUPID IDIOT, YOU CANT USE A TRINKET THAT'S NOT EQUIPPED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This time, at least I lasted maybe 40 seconds into the fight, lol. Then I watched for another 10 minutes while the team brought him down into his 20%'s
Third attempt: Now we're down to just plain old bad luck. Before the start of the event, I assigned one of the other officers to announce loud and clear during the 7th trash wave for everybody to equip their trinkets. Good. Now heading into the Rage part of the fight I've got a nice easy instinctual key mapping of a trinket that is actually equipped this time. All signs point to "yes". Ice Tomb comes in, Ice Tomb successfully gets removed. Pew Pew Pew, avoid DnD, Pew Pew Pew. I'm watching my PvP trinket timer, and each second that the little hand sweeps around like the hands of a clock, I sweat just a little bit more.
And then, the pure and utter agony, with 6 seconds. SIX MUTHA-F'ING SECONDS. with 6 seconds remaining in the cooldown, I get nailed with Ice Tomb and die. SIX SECONDS!!!!
And watch for another 7 minutes or so while the team does a simply amazing job frying him into the ground.
A giant shout out to the team on this one. Their trusty leader and DPS Queen might as well have not even showed up, and they went in and 24-manned it. Probably would have been cleaner that way.
But that's why there's no i in team, so I can bask in the glow of a team effort where everybody works to overcome the absolutely abysmal performance of somebody on the team having a bad night.
And in the end, we did kill off our first T6-level boss. w00t !!!
Friday, September 5, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Fonts, Spite, and Progress
So to keep life interesting, I'm typing this in Comic Sans MS font and gonna see if it pastes into Blogger's input window and keeps the font. Let me know what font you see this display in. But in the mean time, don't I feel fancy while I'm typing?
Think of somebody walking past my cubicle now......Woah. That's not Times New Roman!!! Where'd that out-of-the-box-thinking, innovative, ponytail wearing, go getter come up with that font? He must be destined for corporate greatness.
Edit: Although my pumpkin pie hair cut is long and shaggy enough for a pony tail, my early-mid-life crisis hasn't yet hit the point that I'm willing to go out in public with a pony tail. What I do in the privacy of my own home is my business.
I'm back to my "renewed focus on work so as to maintain enough income to justify the ponytail" kick, so I'm trying to keep it short. ish.
So there'll be some speed topics to gloss over the normal braindump. Which I seem to be falling back into as I sit here and write. /doh
Progress
Brief recap. The other day. Raid about to face Lurker. Amava disconnects. Amava pouts. Amava stews. Raid figures out how to kill Lurker. Trash respawns seconds before iminent boss death. Raid wipes. End of recap.
In the heat of excitement following that near-kill, the GM announces that there shall be a raid the following night to finish the job.
That's a thursday.
In the nearly 9 months that we've been raiding, we've never deviated from Wed,Sun,Mon schedule.
Knowing that we never stray from the schedule, Amava specifically makes arrangements in RL whenever possible to accommodate said rock-steady raid schedule.
While Amava was in an airplane at 30,000 feet, on a normally raid-free thursday night, the Guild killed Lurker below.
Amava lands, claims baggage, drives home, checks guild's WWS site and reads report of one-shot Lurker progression kill.
Amava becomes angry. Childish, immature, prima dona-esque. But angry.
The anger has passed, and I am now in an emotional state where I can bask in the Guild's accomplishment and not cuddle with my spite.
After allowing the feelings to pass, I calmly shared my feelings with the other officers. They also feel that the Thursday move was perhaps not the best idea in the world, for more reasons than just Amava's spite.
Go Team!
/golf-clap
Amava puts her feet up
Sunday. Normally scheduled raid night. This one is our short night, only 2 hours.
Head into Magtheridon.
Amava is visiting family, and has sleeping folks right nearby, so doesn't want to speak on voice. Plus, I'm still clinging to spite a little bit at this point. Hell hath no fury like a man-playing-a-night-elf-chick scorned. Somebody else has to lead the raid.
Holy ez-mode, Batman.
I got to sit back, put my feet up, eat some haggis (was at a Scottish festival earlier that day. Actually quite tasty, if you can kinda block the mental image of the food's contents).
No pressure about finding the players. No stress about ensuring everybody knew their assignments. No onslaught of whispers with random thoughts, suggestions, complaints, desires.
Just pew pew pew. And a cube click here and there.
Ok, so somewhere during this raid was when I was able to let go of the spite. Watching my fellow officer serve as Raid Leader, and doing an admirable-but-harried job, showed me that I'm perhaps being petty. /sue-me
Lots of new Champion titles were earned that night. There was much rejoicing.
Progress. Almost
Monday. Another normally scheduled raid night. Some bickering over whether to try two ZA raids or one 25-man, and if 25-man, which one.
Decide to head on up to Tempest Keep for our first visit to that dungeon.
Amava was back in the driver seat, free of any childish hard feelings from a few days ago.
Holy hard hittin trash, Batman.
Took a lil bit to figure out how to manage the trash, but we nailed it.
Went to Void Reaver.
Wiped in a bloody mess our first try. Didn't realize quite how fast those Arcane Orbs come at you.
About to try again, with a nicely organized setup before we started.
Tank gives countdown for pull. While tank was running in to the boss, somebody starts a heal going. Pulls boss. Major chaos ensues.
But we did get a very nice feel for how to position and how to maneuver away from orbs.
Trash respawn ended the night, but me thinks Void Reaver will die soon.
I hope people realize what I mean when I say "when targeted, you need to run straight away from the center of the room, towards the back wall. Turn with your mouse, because if you turn with your keyboard, not enough time to run away". I got a lot of vacant stares from that one.
T5 Shoulders, you will be mine. Oh yes, you will be mine. Oh, wait. I'm passing on loot for the next few weeks to spread the wealth. So maybe not "mine" in the personal sense, but "mine" in the royal Guild sense.
Think of somebody walking past my cubicle now......Woah. That's not Times New Roman!!! Where'd that out-of-the-box-thinking, innovative, ponytail wearing, go getter come up with that font? He must be destined for corporate greatness.
Edit: Although my pumpkin pie hair cut is long and shaggy enough for a pony tail, my early-mid-life crisis hasn't yet hit the point that I'm willing to go out in public with a pony tail. What I do in the privacy of my own home is my business.
I'm back to my "renewed focus on work so as to maintain enough income to justify the ponytail" kick, so I'm trying to keep it short. ish.
So there'll be some speed topics to gloss over the normal braindump. Which I seem to be falling back into as I sit here and write. /doh
Progress
Brief recap. The other day. Raid about to face Lurker. Amava disconnects. Amava pouts. Amava stews. Raid figures out how to kill Lurker. Trash respawns seconds before iminent boss death. Raid wipes. End of recap.
In the heat of excitement following that near-kill, the GM announces that there shall be a raid the following night to finish the job.
That's a thursday.
In the nearly 9 months that we've been raiding, we've never deviated from Wed,Sun,Mon schedule.
Knowing that we never stray from the schedule, Amava specifically makes arrangements in RL whenever possible to accommodate said rock-steady raid schedule.
While Amava was in an airplane at 30,000 feet, on a normally raid-free thursday night, the Guild killed Lurker below.
Amava lands, claims baggage, drives home, checks guild's WWS site and reads report of one-shot Lurker progression kill.
Amava becomes angry. Childish, immature, prima dona-esque. But angry.
The anger has passed, and I am now in an emotional state where I can bask in the Guild's accomplishment and not cuddle with my spite.
After allowing the feelings to pass, I calmly shared my feelings with the other officers. They also feel that the Thursday move was perhaps not the best idea in the world, for more reasons than just Amava's spite.
Go Team!
/golf-clap
Amava puts her feet up
Sunday. Normally scheduled raid night. This one is our short night, only 2 hours.
Head into Magtheridon.
Amava is visiting family, and has sleeping folks right nearby, so doesn't want to speak on voice. Plus, I'm still clinging to spite a little bit at this point. Hell hath no fury like a man-playing-a-night-elf-chick scorned. Somebody else has to lead the raid.
Holy ez-mode, Batman.
I got to sit back, put my feet up, eat some haggis (was at a Scottish festival earlier that day. Actually quite tasty, if you can kinda block the mental image of the food's contents).
No pressure about finding the players. No stress about ensuring everybody knew their assignments. No onslaught of whispers with random thoughts, suggestions, complaints, desires.
Just pew pew pew. And a cube click here and there.
Ok, so somewhere during this raid was when I was able to let go of the spite. Watching my fellow officer serve as Raid Leader, and doing an admirable-but-harried job, showed me that I'm perhaps being petty. /sue-me
Lots of new Champion titles were earned that night. There was much rejoicing.
Progress. Almost
Monday. Another normally scheduled raid night. Some bickering over whether to try two ZA raids or one 25-man, and if 25-man, which one.
Decide to head on up to Tempest Keep for our first visit to that dungeon.
Amava was back in the driver seat, free of any childish hard feelings from a few days ago.
Holy hard hittin trash, Batman.
Took a lil bit to figure out how to manage the trash, but we nailed it.
Went to Void Reaver.
Wiped in a bloody mess our first try. Didn't realize quite how fast those Arcane Orbs come at you.
About to try again, with a nicely organized setup before we started.
Tank gives countdown for pull. While tank was running in to the boss, somebody starts a heal going. Pulls boss. Major chaos ensues.
But we did get a very nice feel for how to position and how to maneuver away from orbs.
Trash respawn ended the night, but me thinks Void Reaver will die soon.
I hope people realize what I mean when I say "when targeted, you need to run straight away from the center of the room, towards the back wall. Turn with your mouse, because if you turn with your keyboard, not enough time to run away". I got a lot of vacant stares from that one.
T5 Shoulders, you will be mine. Oh yes, you will be mine. Oh, wait. I'm passing on loot for the next few weeks to spread the wealth. So maybe not "mine" in the personal sense, but "mine" in the royal Guild sense.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Felt Great. Felt Empty.
At the end of the previous night of ZA with a guest uber tank (T6/Sunwell geared main tank for most advanced alliance guild on the server), there were a few mutterings of a desire to return and finish off the dungeon.
We normally don't raid on tuesdays, so the concept just sorta died there.
But the idea festered overnight, and most of the team was online and thirsty for blood.
Aside: was also cool to see a bunch of guildies doing an in-guild PuG of Kara on an off-raid night. We took Kara off the official guild schedule and its nice to see that ppl who still want to get in there can do it without looking outside the guild.
Onward and upward, or something like that.
Waltzed in and sat the Hex Lord Malazras down on his ability-stealing rump in one shot. Actually, I think he died face down, but we forgot the screenshot, so who knows. Or cares.
Secret to the fight: three healers - two resto shammies, one tree druid.
Not sure if its a secret or not, but the dual chain heals during those Spirit Blasts were clutch. We also had some peeps put on some stamina gear pieces for added survivability.
Other secret: Keep a Priest waiting outside the instance. Have him buff the raid with fortitude, spirit, and shadow resistance. Kick him from the raid. Repeat after any wipes.
This little trick felt like cheating. The T6 guys said it's standard operating procedure. Whatever.
The fight went pretty smoothly, 'cept for when Amava died and received a timely combat rez from her friendly neighborhood Druid. Then died again with boss at 1%, along with half the raid. lol, dead boss, FTW.
On to Zul'jin. Naturally, never saw the fight before. Not planning on raiding on a tuesday, I hadn't read about the fight at all either. Quick read of the WoW Wiki article, quick description from our visiting tanky tank.
Couple wipes, having a really rough time with that Phase 3 and its damn Tornados and "you take damage when you cast spells" thingie.
I looked at my combat log after a wipe, noticed that Tornado is Nature Damage. Aspect of the Wild, FTW. I split the two Hunters into separate groups, and also the Warlocks, resulting in each party receiving an AotW nature resist buff and a Blood Pact stamina buff.
Bingo!
Dead Zul'jin
Zul'Aman cleared for the first time.
Felt great. Felt empty.
Nice accomplishment for a team mostly in T4 stuff. Gotta repeat it without the uber tank to really feel satisfied.
We normally don't raid on tuesdays, so the concept just sorta died there.
But the idea festered overnight, and most of the team was online and thirsty for blood.
Aside: was also cool to see a bunch of guildies doing an in-guild PuG of Kara on an off-raid night. We took Kara off the official guild schedule and its nice to see that ppl who still want to get in there can do it without looking outside the guild.
Onward and upward, or something like that.
Waltzed in and sat the Hex Lord Malazras down on his ability-stealing rump in one shot. Actually, I think he died face down, but we forgot the screenshot, so who knows. Or cares.
Secret to the fight: three healers - two resto shammies, one tree druid.
Not sure if its a secret or not, but the dual chain heals during those Spirit Blasts were clutch. We also had some peeps put on some stamina gear pieces for added survivability.
Other secret: Keep a Priest waiting outside the instance. Have him buff the raid with fortitude, spirit, and shadow resistance. Kick him from the raid. Repeat after any wipes.
This little trick felt like cheating. The T6 guys said it's standard operating procedure. Whatever.
The fight went pretty smoothly, 'cept for when Amava died and received a timely combat rez from her friendly neighborhood Druid. Then died again with boss at 1%, along with half the raid. lol, dead boss, FTW.
On to Zul'jin. Naturally, never saw the fight before. Not planning on raiding on a tuesday, I hadn't read about the fight at all either. Quick read of the WoW Wiki article, quick description from our visiting tanky tank.
Couple wipes, having a really rough time with that Phase 3 and its damn Tornados and "you take damage when you cast spells" thingie.
I looked at my combat log after a wipe, noticed that Tornado is Nature Damage. Aspect of the Wild, FTW. I split the two Hunters into separate groups, and also the Warlocks, resulting in each party receiving an AotW nature resist buff and a Blood Pact stamina buff.
Bingo!
Dead Zul'jin
Zul'Aman cleared for the first time.
Felt great. Felt empty.
Nice accomplishment for a team mostly in T4 stuff. Gotta repeat it without the uber tank to really feel satisfied.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
YAPK.K.
Yet Another Progression Kill. Kinda.
Headed on over to Zul'Aman. In an attempt to more seriously focus on the timed events and maybe even push further into some progression bosses, we formed up a raid of our best performing toons.
Only sticking issue was that only one of the tanks that were on is appropriately geared for ZA.
So 9 of us went looking for a tank. Fire out a general message in Shattrath City.
Get a response from The Man!
A well-known Paladin tank, revered as the Main Tank for the most progressed Alliance guild on the server. Fully geared in T6, progressing in Sunwell Plateau.
Apparently, since nearly every one of his friends already has a Bear Mount, he has trouble getting ZA raids together, and he's looking for a piece of gear from Hex Lord.
I let him know that we've never beaten Lynx boss, and never even seen Hex Lord, to give him the option of bailing out before we even start. He's good to go.
Our guild's Main Tank wisely says The Man should lead, so I let him know a little bit of what level of raider he is dealing with. He should feel free to set the pace and try to treat us the same as any raid he normally runs with. I was pretty excited to see what sort of pace and cadence for pulling he would work with.
The goal was to do Akil'zon and Nalorakk within the timed events, and then progression attempts at Halazzi.
Nice 'n Easy, two bosses down within the timer. Then on to Halazzi.
There's a short-cut where you leap through two huts to bypass a bunch of trash on the way to the boss. Both weeks that we've tried doing it, just miserable. Gonna have to get people to be more aware of their pets and their own toons during this little trek.
But we made it.
And we spanked Halazzi.
Not sure if we get to consider it a Guild First kill or not, because an overpowered visitor was Main Tanking the boss. Everyone else was from the guild though, so I'm gonna go with "Yes", just because I want to.
Went over to kill Jan'alai. A little sloppy, but we one-shot him, which is not unusual for us.
Then, on to some new territory, forging the way up to Hex Lord.
Based on The Man's suggestion, I had a Shadow Priest respec to Holy to make 3 healers, and our Protection Warrior respec to Fury to make 6 DPS.
Made lots of attempts at Hex Lord, came close, but in the end, only got him to about 20% or so.
So, here's some thoughts I had about working with someone who is among the top 3 progressed tanks on the server...
It was a great night, filled with fun, new boss encounters, and even some tension at not wanting to seem like scrubs in front of The Man.
I felt bad at having to call the raid without killing the one and only boss that our visitor was here for, but it was late and we even threw in two more attempts after our normal end time.
The night left us with some good ideas for how we can improve our team's performance and speed. I'm thinking I'd like to try to have a quick de-brief with him to hear what the experience was like for him. We take pride in trying to do a good job, and I'd love to hear the first-hand reflections of a more veteran raider.
Headed on over to Zul'Aman. In an attempt to more seriously focus on the timed events and maybe even push further into some progression bosses, we formed up a raid of our best performing toons.
Only sticking issue was that only one of the tanks that were on is appropriately geared for ZA.
So 9 of us went looking for a tank. Fire out a general message in Shattrath City.
Get a response from The Man!
A well-known Paladin tank, revered as the Main Tank for the most progressed Alliance guild on the server. Fully geared in T6, progressing in Sunwell Plateau.
Apparently, since nearly every one of his friends already has a Bear Mount, he has trouble getting ZA raids together, and he's looking for a piece of gear from Hex Lord.
I let him know that we've never beaten Lynx boss, and never even seen Hex Lord, to give him the option of bailing out before we even start. He's good to go.
Our guild's Main Tank wisely says The Man should lead, so I let him know a little bit of what level of raider he is dealing with. He should feel free to set the pace and try to treat us the same as any raid he normally runs with. I was pretty excited to see what sort of pace and cadence for pulling he would work with.
The goal was to do Akil'zon and Nalorakk within the timed events, and then progression attempts at Halazzi.
Nice 'n Easy, two bosses down within the timer. Then on to Halazzi.
There's a short-cut where you leap through two huts to bypass a bunch of trash on the way to the boss. Both weeks that we've tried doing it, just miserable. Gonna have to get people to be more aware of their pets and their own toons during this little trek.
But we made it.
And we spanked Halazzi.
Not sure if we get to consider it a Guild First kill or not, because an overpowered visitor was Main Tanking the boss. Everyone else was from the guild though, so I'm gonna go with "Yes", just because I want to.
Went over to kill Jan'alai. A little sloppy, but we one-shot him, which is not unusual for us.
Then, on to some new territory, forging the way up to Hex Lord.
Based on The Man's suggestion, I had a Shadow Priest respec to Holy to make 3 healers, and our Protection Warrior respec to Fury to make 6 DPS.
Made lots of attempts at Hex Lord, came close, but in the end, only got him to about 20% or so.
So, here's some thoughts I had about working with someone who is among the top 3 progressed tanks on the server...
- I'll start with attitude. I was expecting impatience with us bunch of n00bs. Not at all, he was great. He consulted with us about our normal strategies, he provided suggestions but never mandates. He explained fights well. He didn't treat me as a n00b raid leader, but instead asked me what I wanted in most situations. At no point did he make the people in our Guild feel inferior or that he was holier than thou. Very grounded and relaxed about his approach, which made the rest of the raiders feel comfortable.
- Perspective. At one point, he said "these two guys are just like those guys in Black Temple". Um, er, yeah. We just killed Maggy on wednesday. Got another way to describe the mobs? We all got a chuckle out of that one.
- Pace. It was eye-opening to see that the pace between pulls was very similar to what our Main Tank normally pushes. The Man did go a little faster, specifically during transitions between a boss kill and getting ready for the next trash. Once the boss was down, loot, and he was mounted up and already stationed at the next trash pull location. I can definitely see this as an area we can learn from and improve.
- Kill order and pull-planning. The pulls were not very planned. Only when absolutely necessary was there anything besides his primary target marked. When CC was needed, he communicated clearly via voice and raid icons what was needed. As an overpowered pally tank, it really allowed lots of room for error. The only thing I'd like to change about how this went is to have the DPS use an assist macro. We've never used one before, and in a situation like this, all we'd need is for one player to choose targets and everyone else to assist that person. No need to communicate a kill order, just make sure that Main Assist player is smart about choosing targets.
- Buffing. Dead toons were given nearly zero time for re-buffing during trash. Rebuff before bosses, definitely. He did not allow downtime during trash, which I am a huge fan of. None of our toons absolutely NEEDS buffs during the trash, and we're going to move faster overall if we do not waste time rebuffing until the bosses. This left some of our raid feeling upset, but I think it is a really good habit for the raid.
- Relative difficulty of bosses. Leading up to Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk boss, The Man was actually pretty concerned about the difficulty level. Not sure if it was the "inspiring" performance we were putting in up to that point, or if it was a result of his previous experiences in ZA with his normal raid, but he was worried about how tough that fight is. I assured him that we've killed Jan'alai 6 times or so, including some one-shots, with our all-T4 team. He seemed satisfied, and we then went on to one-shot the boss.
- Changing raid composition. The tank felt pretty strongly about swapping players in and out of the raid to tailor the composition to each encounter. We've never done that before, plus, we had the best performing toons from our guild already in the raid, so not too many options there. I compromised with the Shadow/Holy and Prot/Fury respec before Hex Lord. But it was another eye-opener to discuss with him how frequently and often his very advanced guild does this. It is a normal, accepted way of life for their raids.
- Threat Management. I was happy to discover from my overall feel for threat and aggro management is that the tanks in my guild do a great job generating threat. Sure, The Man put out a little more threat than I'm used to, giving me a little more room to open the flood gates on the DPS, but not a whole lot more room. Amava's resisted FD's were still brutal to our progress through a trash pull.
It was a great night, filled with fun, new boss encounters, and even some tension at not wanting to seem like scrubs in front of The Man.
I felt bad at having to call the raid without killing the one and only boss that our visitor was here for, but it was late and we even threw in two more attempts after our normal end time.
The night left us with some good ideas for how we can improve our team's performance and speed. I'm thinking I'd like to try to have a quick de-brief with him to hear what the experience was like for him. We take pride in trying to do a good job, and I'd love to hear the first-hand reflections of a more veteran raider.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
I Can Haz Wheaties
I had a bowl of Wheaties this morning, 'cuz its the breakfast of Champions of the Na'aru.
What a hell of a night.
In case you don't want to be crit'ed by my wall of text, here's a taste of what's to come:
Start off with one of our most dependable DPS'ers giving some drama about not wanting to leave the guild, but wanting to run in TK with some other people instead of raiding with us wednesday night.
Not so much.
On an off-raid night, no problem, we may or may not even get to TK before the expansion. But on a raid night? And telling, not asking, but telling me that you're doing this, 45 minutes before our scheduled raid? Go ahead and join your fancy TK friends or guild or whatnot. Then try some baloney like that with them. See how long you last. He ended up not raiding with either group wednesday night.
This kind of stuff is unfortunate, because he really is a big part of the team, and brings tons of flavor to the Guild's culture. Normally very dependable, but sometimes the lure of more advanced content clouds things.
Fresh off of the shenanigans, I start forming up the 25-person raid.
The sun was shining and we actually had 4 Shammies with us. Actually gave me some issue trying to figure out how to optimize their positioning in the raid groups, since I know very little beyond the surface of what a Shaman brings to their party, I've had so few of them to work with. So I did what any good leader should do, Imade someone else make the decision delegated. I turned to the most veteran Shaman and asked him to suggest which party to put each Shaman in, and provide me a reason for his suggestions. Additionally, he should tell each Shaman what totems they should drop to make his suggestions work.
Was great. He came up with some solid ideas for each player, shared reasons for the decisions, and clear communication to each individual Shaman on what totems they need to drop. Feels great when you can delegate responsibility to people and get strong results. Makes the entire raid work better.
Ultimately, we formed up the raid and got moving 20 minutes after scheduled start time. In cosmic irony, we spent the last 12 minutes of those 20 looking for 1 more DPS only. This, on the same night we have an issue with that one raider earlier.
But, we got the team ready to rock.
Yours truly was the culprit. One time, I stood too close to my cube too early, a Conflagration dropped on me and my cube, killed me, then my backup came to click and she got burned also.
Ouch. And Uggy.
Sloppy start.
Next attempt, I was clicking again, and just taking massive amounts of damage. I'm not sure what was hitting me, because I was definitely avoiding any damaging effects I could notice, but at the moment the Main Tank went down (very prematurely), I was less than 1000 health, and I had just bandaged, health stoned, and health potted, so something is very very wrong. And it wasnt Blast Nova, no ticks of that got off during this attempt.
Did a few more tries.
Wiped a few more times. Nobody was saying anything negative, but you could hear the energy level going down in their voices.
We got him down to 14% before one of the wipes. These are pretty long fights. Wiping after 11 minutes of battle is a little deflating.
This is our third night of wiping on Magtheridon this week.
But I give huge credit to the team, because despite the dropping energy level, the tone was still positive.
I had to do something to change the momentum.
Everybody go, take 5 minutes, do bio stuff, get drinks, punch walls, but please don't break your knuckles, we need your fingers for the next hour or so.
I did a few yoga moves, some of the simpler ones that my still-recovering-from-surgery hand allows me to do.
Pretended to smash my bar stool on the floor.
Got my game face back on.
Oh, and this time, lets have Amava NOT be a clicker. She's clearly mentally challenged in this capacity.
Not being a clicker, I was free to do full DPS. This is just plain old FUN. Clicking is stressful, and leaves me out of range for Mend Pet for lots of the fight. Standing basically in one spot and pew pew pew'ing is nice.
But, we actually lose the primary and secondary clicker for one of the cubes, so I had to Aspect of the Cheetah and run all the way across the battlefield, avoiding frontal cone cleave, and sub'ed in. We wiped anyways.
At this point, its clear to me that our DPS is sufficient. We are burning down 4.75 Channelers before Magtheridon activates, assuming Amava's first or second FD doesnt get resisted. Its strange, how much of a huge difference a one magical resist on a single player can actually impact the raid. One attempt, my first two FD's resisted, and we only got 3 Channelers down before Maggy. On another attempt, my first FD resisted, and we got 3.75 Channelers down. On attempts where my FD works properly in the first 2 minutes of the encounter, we get between 4.5 and 4.75 channelers down.
But I digress.
Knowing that DPS across the whole raid is sufficient, I decide that survivability is lacking.
I asked our Shadow Priest to spec Holy, and we'd try it with 8 healers.
Seconds before the pull, our new healer gives me a gentle nudge "Amava, you did put a replacement on my cube clicking assignment, didnt you?"
Oops. Thx for the reminder, glad somebody is paying attention.
So I return to official clicking duty.
Everything came together perfectly.
Good progress through the Channelers, no resists on Amava's FD, good handling of the Abyssals, good healing of the tanks/raid/clickers.
Was one silly Battle Rez that got me a tad irked with my Druid.
We had 5 tanks. Once Channelers were down and Abyssals are de-spawned, one tank was Main Tanking, a second tank was backing him up incase MT died, two of the tanks were clickers, and the fifth tank was simply performing minor DPS on Magtheridon.
That tank died.
Without any instruction, one of the Druids announced that a BRez was being sent out.
I tried to call out "He's an off-tank with no tanking job right now, save it", but it was too late, Druid called on voice AFTER the cast was already committed.
Not happy, but W/E, lets keep the fight moving.
Properly handled the transition past 30%, including a small pause in DPS at the 33% mark to allow a Blast Nova interrupt to occur, and to allow the Healers and self-bandagers to ensure all raid members were topped off before the ceiling collapsed.
And then smooth sailing from there.
Dead boss.
He drops lots of goodies.
A bunch of T4 tokens, a 20 slot bag, some plate belt, and a Magtheridon's Head.
Nobody had any clue what the hell this thing was for.
I checked WoW Head.
Ah, turn it in for a ring.
Ok, everybody who didn't get something yet, /roll
Lots of posing for screen shots, including lots of Olympic Tabards and Companion Pets.
Nothing eventful here, just a little line of text telling me that the Na'aru are big fans of my work.
Then some fiddling with the Interface options so we could all look at our own names and titles.
Mostly just basking in some ego-stroking glory.
Then we all flew from Shatt over to Honor Hold to let the guy who won the head turn the quest in.
And we all took great joy in posing on our flying mounts around the giant head on a pole.
Unfortunately, I didn't get a screenie of it, but supposedly somebody's gonna post one up on the guild website, because it was nice.
We put all the Swift Purple Gryphons together in front, then all the dark colored Netherdrakes up above, and all the light colored Netherdrakes around the edges.
We're dorks, but it was lots of fun.
Oh, wait, i already covered the rejoicing up above. kek.
I'm hugely thankful at the contribution of each and every raid member. We all stuck together through three nights of wiping on this guy, and only hit pay dirt at the very end of the third long night.
For a casual guild, trying to maintain that level of involvement while facing difficulty is a challenge. The team worked hard, stayed positive, adjusted to mistakes and new strategies, provided feedback, and also joked around a bunch. I'm really proud of my teammates, even the damn Rogue who topped me on the damage meter for the progression kill. I told him that he's being put on clicking duty next time :-) Its good to be the RL.
Seems that a little progress has infused some fighting spirit back into the Guild and our Officer corps. Everybody's gung-ho to get back at some Gruul and more Maggy, with sights set on getting these two into a 1-night affair.
And then the big moment, two weeks out, we're gonna get started in T5 country with Serpent Shrine Cavern.
How long till November?
What a hell of a night.
In case you don't want to be crit'ed by my wall of text, here's a taste of what's to come:
- Start the night with a lil helping of drama
- Delegate decision for Shammy group positioning and get great response
- Rocky start with some sloppy clicking
- Wipe a bunch of times
- Take a timeout to allow everybody to regain some focus
- Wipe again
- Respec from Shadow to Holy
- Kill Magtheridon
- Get confused about what his head is for, but WoWHead to the rescue
- Visit to A'dal and get Champion of the Na'aru title
- Visit to Honor Hold and take screenshots around giant head on a pole
- Much Rejoicing
- Amava informs DM-topping Rogue that next time, he's on clicking duty, lol
Start the night with a lil helping of drama
Start off with one of our most dependable DPS'ers giving some drama about not wanting to leave the guild, but wanting to run in TK with some other people instead of raiding with us wednesday night.
Not so much.
On an off-raid night, no problem, we may or may not even get to TK before the expansion. But on a raid night? And telling, not asking, but telling me that you're doing this, 45 minutes before our scheduled raid? Go ahead and join your fancy TK friends or guild or whatnot. Then try some baloney like that with them. See how long you last. He ended up not raiding with either group wednesday night.
This kind of stuff is unfortunate, because he really is a big part of the team, and brings tons of flavor to the Guild's culture. Normally very dependable, but sometimes the lure of more advanced content clouds things.
Delegate decision for Shammy group positioning and get great response
Fresh off of the shenanigans, I start forming up the 25-person raid.
The sun was shining and we actually had 4 Shammies with us. Actually gave me some issue trying to figure out how to optimize their positioning in the raid groups, since I know very little beyond the surface of what a Shaman brings to their party, I've had so few of them to work with. So I did what any good leader should do, I
Was great. He came up with some solid ideas for each player, shared reasons for the decisions, and clear communication to each individual Shaman on what totems they need to drop. Feels great when you can delegate responsibility to people and get strong results. Makes the entire raid work better.
Ultimately, we formed up the raid and got moving 20 minutes after scheduled start time. In cosmic irony, we spent the last 12 minutes of those 20 looking for 1 more DPS only. This, on the same night we have an issue with that one raider earlier.
But, we got the team ready to rock.
Rocky start with some sloppy clicking
Yours truly was the culprit. One time, I stood too close to my cube too early, a Conflagration dropped on me and my cube, killed me, then my backup came to click and she got burned also.
Ouch. And Uggy.
Sloppy start.
Next attempt, I was clicking again, and just taking massive amounts of damage. I'm not sure what was hitting me, because I was definitely avoiding any damaging effects I could notice, but at the moment the Main Tank went down (very prematurely), I was less than 1000 health, and I had just bandaged, health stoned, and health potted, so something is very very wrong. And it wasnt Blast Nova, no ticks of that got off during this attempt.
Wipe a bunch of times
Did a few more tries.
Wiped a few more times. Nobody was saying anything negative, but you could hear the energy level going down in their voices.
We got him down to 14% before one of the wipes. These are pretty long fights. Wiping after 11 minutes of battle is a little deflating.
This is our third night of wiping on Magtheridon this week.
But I give huge credit to the team, because despite the dropping energy level, the tone was still positive.
I had to do something to change the momentum.
Take a timeout to allow everybody to regain some focus
Everybody go, take 5 minutes, do bio stuff, get drinks, punch walls, but please don't break your knuckles, we need your fingers for the next hour or so.
I did a few yoga moves, some of the simpler ones that my still-recovering-from-surgery hand allows me to do.
Pretended to smash my bar stool on the floor.
Got my game face back on.
Oh, and this time, lets have Amava NOT be a clicker. She's clearly mentally challenged in this capacity.
Wipe again
Not being a clicker, I was free to do full DPS. This is just plain old FUN. Clicking is stressful, and leaves me out of range for Mend Pet for lots of the fight. Standing basically in one spot and pew pew pew'ing is nice.
But, we actually lose the primary and secondary clicker for one of the cubes, so I had to Aspect of the Cheetah and run all the way across the battlefield, avoiding frontal cone cleave, and sub'ed in. We wiped anyways.
At this point, its clear to me that our DPS is sufficient. We are burning down 4.75 Channelers before Magtheridon activates, assuming Amava's first or second FD doesnt get resisted. Its strange, how much of a huge difference a one magical resist on a single player can actually impact the raid. One attempt, my first two FD's resisted, and we only got 3 Channelers down before Maggy. On another attempt, my first FD resisted, and we got 3.75 Channelers down. On attempts where my FD works properly in the first 2 minutes of the encounter, we get between 4.5 and 4.75 channelers down.
But I digress.
Respec from Shadow to Holy
Knowing that DPS across the whole raid is sufficient, I decide that survivability is lacking.
I asked our Shadow Priest to spec Holy, and we'd try it with 8 healers.
Seconds before the pull, our new healer gives me a gentle nudge "Amava, you did put a replacement on my cube clicking assignment, didnt you?"
Oops. Thx for the reminder, glad somebody is paying attention.
So I return to official clicking duty.
Kill Magtheridon
Everything came together perfectly.
Good progress through the Channelers, no resists on Amava's FD, good handling of the Abyssals, good healing of the tanks/raid/clickers.
Was one silly Battle Rez that got me a tad irked with my Druid.
We had 5 tanks. Once Channelers were down and Abyssals are de-spawned, one tank was Main Tanking, a second tank was backing him up incase MT died, two of the tanks were clickers, and the fifth tank was simply performing minor DPS on Magtheridon.
That tank died.
Without any instruction, one of the Druids announced that a BRez was being sent out.
I tried to call out "He's an off-tank with no tanking job right now, save it", but it was too late, Druid called on voice AFTER the cast was already committed.
Not happy, but W/E, lets keep the fight moving.
Properly handled the transition past 30%, including a small pause in DPS at the 33% mark to allow a Blast Nova interrupt to occur, and to allow the Healers and self-bandagers to ensure all raid members were topped off before the ceiling collapsed.
And then smooth sailing from there.
Dead boss.
Get confused about what his head is for, but WoWHead to the rescue
He drops lots of goodies.
A bunch of T4 tokens, a 20 slot bag, some plate belt, and a Magtheridon's Head.
Nobody had any clue what the hell this thing was for.
I checked WoW Head.
Ah, turn it in for a ring.
Ok, everybody who didn't get something yet, /roll
Lots of posing for screen shots, including lots of Olympic Tabards and Companion Pets.
Visit to A'dal and get Champion of the Na'aru title
Nothing eventful here, just a little line of text telling me that the Na'aru are big fans of my work.
Then some fiddling with the Interface options so we could all look at our own names and titles.
Mostly just basking in some ego-stroking glory.
Visit to Honor Hold and take screenshots around giant head on a pole
Then we all flew from Shatt over to Honor Hold to let the guy who won the head turn the quest in.
And we all took great joy in posing on our flying mounts around the giant head on a pole.
Unfortunately, I didn't get a screenie of it, but supposedly somebody's gonna post one up on the guild website, because it was nice.
We put all the Swift Purple Gryphons together in front, then all the dark colored Netherdrakes up above, and all the light colored Netherdrakes around the edges.
We're dorks, but it was lots of fun.
Much Rejoicing
Oh, wait, i already covered the rejoicing up above. kek.
I'm hugely thankful at the contribution of each and every raid member. We all stuck together through three nights of wiping on this guy, and only hit pay dirt at the very end of the third long night.
For a casual guild, trying to maintain that level of involvement while facing difficulty is a challenge. The team worked hard, stayed positive, adjusted to mistakes and new strategies, provided feedback, and also joked around a bunch. I'm really proud of my teammates, even the damn Rogue who topped me on the damage meter for the progression kill. I told him that he's being put on clicking duty next time :-) Its good to be the RL.
Seems that a little progress has infused some fighting spirit back into the Guild and our Officer corps. Everybody's gung-ho to get back at some Gruul and more Maggy, with sights set on getting these two into a 1-night affair.
And then the big moment, two weeks out, we're gonna get started in T5 country with Serpent Shrine Cavern.
How long till November?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
'Spitey Sense
The ongoing saga of our Guilds friendly competition to see which Karazhan could down Netherspite first and close the ugly gap that is our 12/13 record in the WoW Jutsu report.
We've been "clearing" kara for months now, but never decided to take the time to down Ole 'Spitey, always choosing to farm a few extra bosses for badges and loot.
With Team 1 on the verge of stopping Kara runs, and Team 2 romping and stomping through the place, we dropped our gloves and went for it. Who's gonna get the progression kill?
Monday night. Both Kara teams have a mostly cleared dungeon waiting for them.
Unfortunately only 16 raiders showed up (summer-itis, damn you), half saved to one Raid ID and half to another Raid ID (blizzard, damn you).
After much deliberation, the Command Decision was made to have Team 2 sit out for their first time so far, and provide one member who was not yet saved to a Raid ID.
This put us at 9 players, made up of a mix of T1 and T2. PuG a 10th. Discover 5 minutes later that he's saved to another Raid ID.
Doh. Now we're faced with not being able to run.
Having just come off a conversation with a member about the impacts of canceling raids I decided tospitefully cancel the raid, just to prove a point suggest we 9-man it.
/train
"Chugga Chugga Choo Choooo"
Warm up with Nightbane. Bang.
Since we're in the mood to kill Dragons, lets go try out Netherspite.
Some analysis and discussion based off of WoW Wiki's write up.
First try. 38%
Ok, some fuss about ppl running through the red beam to get to their assigned beams after a phase transition.
Next try. Pay attention while running around immediately following the Banish Phase. (A) let the tank build aggro (duh) and (B) run around the Red Beam's generator. Use Aspect of Cheetah if you need to get to the Blue Beam quickly (silly hunter).
At about 80%, the Warlock who was blocking the Blue Beam DC's. We're at 8 people now.
Amava takes the next Blue Beam, which was planned, followed by substituting a Mage in on the next cycle.
At about 40%, the Warlock reconnects. Back to 9 people.
Netherspite. Bang.
Dead dragon. Guild First kill. 9 people, made up of players from both kara teams.
Continue on to one shot Illhoof and Prince with 9.
Nice ending to what started as a possible glum evening.
General Strategy we used:
Beam Phase 1: Red-Warrior (MT), Blue-Warlock, Green-Rogue
Beam Phase 2: Red-Prot Paladin, Blue-Hunter (me), Green-Warrior (MT)
And of course, during the DC, we had our Mage sub in the Blue Beam for the Warlock.
I just stood there and absorbed all ticks for the entire Blue Beam duration. No problems at all, although I did have a Holy Priest paying pretty close attention to me. The attack power boost is lovely and left me delivering about 1550 DPS for the encounter.
We've been "clearing" kara for months now, but never decided to take the time to down Ole 'Spitey, always choosing to farm a few extra bosses for badges and loot.
With Team 1 on the verge of stopping Kara runs, and Team 2 romping and stomping through the place, we dropped our gloves and went for it. Who's gonna get the progression kill?
Monday night. Both Kara teams have a mostly cleared dungeon waiting for them.
Unfortunately only 16 raiders showed up (summer-itis, damn you), half saved to one Raid ID and half to another Raid ID (blizzard, damn you).
After much deliberation, the Command Decision was made to have Team 2 sit out for their first time so far, and provide one member who was not yet saved to a Raid ID.
This put us at 9 players, made up of a mix of T1 and T2. PuG a 10th. Discover 5 minutes later that he's saved to another Raid ID.
Doh. Now we're faced with not being able to run.
Having just come off a conversation with a member about the impacts of canceling raids I decided to
/train
"Chugga Chugga Choo Choooo"
Warm up with Nightbane. Bang.
Since we're in the mood to kill Dragons, lets go try out Netherspite.
Some analysis and discussion based off of WoW Wiki's write up.
First try. 38%
Ok, some fuss about ppl running through the red beam to get to their assigned beams after a phase transition.
Next try. Pay attention while running around immediately following the Banish Phase. (A) let the tank build aggro (duh) and (B) run around the Red Beam's generator. Use Aspect of Cheetah if you need to get to the Blue Beam quickly (silly hunter).
At about 80%, the Warlock who was blocking the Blue Beam DC's. We're at 8 people now.
Amava takes the next Blue Beam, which was planned, followed by substituting a Mage in on the next cycle.
At about 40%, the Warlock reconnects. Back to 9 people.
Netherspite. Bang.
Dead dragon. Guild First kill. 9 people, made up of players from both kara teams.
Continue on to one shot Illhoof and Prince with 9.
Nice ending to what started as a possible glum evening.
General Strategy we used:
Beam Phase 1: Red-Warrior (MT), Blue-Warlock, Green-Rogue
Beam Phase 2: Red-Prot Paladin, Blue-Hunter (me), Green-Warrior (MT)
And of course, during the DC, we had our Mage sub in the Blue Beam for the Warlock.
I just stood there and absorbed all ticks for the entire Blue Beam duration. No problems at all, although I did have a Holy Priest paying pretty close attention to me. The attack power boost is lovely and left me delivering about 1550 DPS for the encounter.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Best Buffalo Wings in Azeroth
When I think of Buffalo Wings in WoW, my mind typically goes straight for Skettis, and my hate/hate relationship with the Kaliri flying around the place like overgrown mosquitoes. One of the more common daily cooking quests has you head up to the mountains and farm a Buffalo Wing off of one of them puppies.
But, last night we found out that the best wings in the game come off of Jan'alai in Zul'Aman.
Not quite as easy to come by as the Kaliri, but when we finally fried him up, it was quite the feast. Mmmmm, Frank's Red Hot.
Zoned into ZA. Our goal for the evening was Nalorakk and Akil'zon within the timed event, followed by attempts at Jan'alai with the hopes of killing him. Our previous attempts had us pretty close, but not quite there yet.
We also had a change in our team. Our previous Team 1 off-tank is having a rough time with the conflict between bed time and raid time, so he's opting out of 10-man stuff. So the team has a new Paladin tank, and visions of a dead Eagle Boss.
Here's where we admit the complete and total incompetence of our raid.
The Gong. That stupid gong that Indiana Jones bangs, and five of you need to bang in concert with him.
I think this is the hardest part of the dungeon for the team. We laugh on and on with the Guild Master as he counts down repeatedly to coordinate our actions. Never works. We wasted a full 9 minutes trying to bang the gong last night.
But, eventually the stars aligned and the timer began. Nalorakk, Akil. No sweat. Both timed events nailed, with what feels like a reasonable amount of time to spare for when we decide to try an additional boss within the timer.
The loot in ZA is outstanding. Nalorakk dropped some mail shoulders that look like little bear heads that rest next to your head. I passed on them in favor of our Survival Hunter, since they were agility upgrade for him. Expose Weakness, FTW!!!
Cruised through the Scout gauntlet section.
Made 5 unsuccessful attempts at Jan'alai. Each attempt was progressively better, but was mostly the same strategy each time, only tweaking the number of eggs we allowed to hatch each time.
At 30% health, he spawns all remaining eggs. At 25% health (or 5 minutes elapsed time), he enrages, painfully messing with his aggro table and wacking anybody he can find.
For the 6th try, we changed it up a bit.
Rather than treat the eggs as purely an AoE thing, we went hybrid.
When the first set of hatchers arrives, Amava kills one before he can hatch anybody. Concussive Shot does the trick, and he's dead before he even enters the bridge towards the eggs.
Everybody else focuses on the other side, with Amava joining in once his hatcher is dead.
The first 3 eggs get treated as normal, single-target mobs, not AoE. Pally tank picks them up, DPS hammers them down.
Allow the hatcher to hatch all remaining eggs on the one side.
Now its AoE time. Seed of Corruption, Arcane Explosion, Volley, 2xConsecration (Ret Pally, FTW).
So, in the first arrival of Hatchers, we cleared one full side in this manner.
Next arrival of Hatchers, same routine on the other side.
The reason we did the hybrid "single-target mode / AoE mode" approach was that the Mage doing Frost Nova had to wait for large quantites of dragons before she froze them in place. Plus, and I'm no expert on Warlock-iness so take this with a grain of salt, Seeds of Corruption would go off too early if he cast it on the 1 or 2 initial mobs. By waiting for the large pack of mobs to be present, maximum value out of the AoE damagers.
Now its just Pew Pew Pew, and avoid the fire bombs. When he starts throwing the bombs, rotate camera to directly overhead looking down, and the safe spots are clearly visible.
Hunters, save your Misdirection for when he enrages, because his aggro table will get all funky.
And that's all there is to it :-)
Its the first progression boss we've had to struggle through lately, wiping for two weeks, followed by a 6-try night ending with a kill.
He dropped a Leather chest with over 200 Ignore Armor. I was drooling over it, but no way I could justify using it over the Merciless Gladiator's Chain Armor S2 Chest I just got.
We probably would have DE'd it, but we really wanted the WoW Jutsu scan to register the kill, so we forced a Resto Druid to take it in case she ever wanted to play Cat Woman.
And we're now 3/6 in ZA, which feels pretty good for a bunch of jokers who just recently set foot in the Big Boy Raids.
But, last night we found out that the best wings in the game come off of Jan'alai in Zul'Aman.
Not quite as easy to come by as the Kaliri, but when we finally fried him up, it was quite the feast. Mmmmm, Frank's Red Hot.
Zoned into ZA. Our goal for the evening was Nalorakk and Akil'zon within the timed event, followed by attempts at Jan'alai with the hopes of killing him. Our previous attempts had us pretty close, but not quite there yet.
We also had a change in our team. Our previous Team 1 off-tank is having a rough time with the conflict between bed time and raid time, so he's opting out of 10-man stuff. So the team has a new Paladin tank, and visions of a dead Eagle Boss.
Here's where we admit the complete and total incompetence of our raid.
The Gong. That stupid gong that Indiana Jones bangs, and five of you need to bang in concert with him.
I think this is the hardest part of the dungeon for the team. We laugh on and on with the Guild Master as he counts down repeatedly to coordinate our actions. Never works. We wasted a full 9 minutes trying to bang the gong last night.
But, eventually the stars aligned and the timer began. Nalorakk, Akil. No sweat. Both timed events nailed, with what feels like a reasonable amount of time to spare for when we decide to try an additional boss within the timer.
The loot in ZA is outstanding. Nalorakk dropped some mail shoulders that look like little bear heads that rest next to your head. I passed on them in favor of our Survival Hunter, since they were agility upgrade for him. Expose Weakness, FTW!!!
Cruised through the Scout gauntlet section.
Made 5 unsuccessful attempts at Jan'alai. Each attempt was progressively better, but was mostly the same strategy each time, only tweaking the number of eggs we allowed to hatch each time.
At 30% health, he spawns all remaining eggs. At 25% health (or 5 minutes elapsed time), he enrages, painfully messing with his aggro table and wacking anybody he can find.
For the 6th try, we changed it up a bit.
Rather than treat the eggs as purely an AoE thing, we went hybrid.
When the first set of hatchers arrives, Amava kills one before he can hatch anybody. Concussive Shot does the trick, and he's dead before he even enters the bridge towards the eggs.
Everybody else focuses on the other side, with Amava joining in once his hatcher is dead.
The first 3 eggs get treated as normal, single-target mobs, not AoE. Pally tank picks them up, DPS hammers them down.
Allow the hatcher to hatch all remaining eggs on the one side.
Now its AoE time. Seed of Corruption, Arcane Explosion, Volley, 2xConsecration (Ret Pally, FTW).
So, in the first arrival of Hatchers, we cleared one full side in this manner.
Next arrival of Hatchers, same routine on the other side.
The reason we did the hybrid "single-target mode / AoE mode" approach was that the Mage doing Frost Nova had to wait for large quantites of dragons before she froze them in place. Plus, and I'm no expert on Warlock-iness so take this with a grain of salt, Seeds of Corruption would go off too early if he cast it on the 1 or 2 initial mobs. By waiting for the large pack of mobs to be present, maximum value out of the AoE damagers.
Now its just Pew Pew Pew, and avoid the fire bombs. When he starts throwing the bombs, rotate camera to directly overhead looking down, and the safe spots are clearly visible.
Hunters, save your Misdirection for when he enrages, because his aggro table will get all funky.
And that's all there is to it :-)
Its the first progression boss we've had to struggle through lately, wiping for two weeks, followed by a 6-try night ending with a kill.
He dropped a Leather chest with over 200 Ignore Armor. I was drooling over it, but no way I could justify using it over the Merciless Gladiator's Chain Armor S2 Chest I just got.
We probably would have DE'd it, but we really wanted the WoW Jutsu scan to register the kill, so we forced a Resto Druid to take it in case she ever wanted to play Cat Woman.
And we're now 3/6 in ZA, which feels pretty good for a bunch of jokers who just recently set foot in the Big Boy Raids.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The Proper Way to Welcome New Guildies
Celebrating the 4th of July weekend properly, I was outdoors and with family the whole time, and as such, away from WoW for 3 days.
Ok, so we weren't outdoors the whole time, and we did get some family time on the Wii, including me blasting away most of my sister's high scores in the Wii Fit balance games. I think its because I mostly stand up when I play WoW, but I digress. Oh, and while I'm digressing, they need to rename the movie to "White Men Can't Dance", which some recent video footage of Dance Dance Revolution will readily confirm.
So sunday night, I drive 400 miles home, and log in for Gruul's.
Looking through the Guild, I see a Paladin that I worked with back in my 30's in a leveling guild, and he's now been invited. We whispered a little of the good old days, then it was down to business getting the raid set up.
My chief concern of the evening was how to properly welcome him to the Guild. You can't treat these things lightly.
While getting set up, we also had a Resto Shaman who was a friend of a few players join our guild.
Now a true celebration is in order.
I got to thinking, how about a raid to celebrate? Sure, lets do it.
Form up the team, zone on into the instance, and raise some h3ll.
Took a few tries, but HKM goes down.
Both new invitees do awesome. Our Mage Tank, in her shiny new stamina set, did awesome. Overall, the entire team did a fantastic job. We handled three wipes with dignity and remained focused on learning from our defeats, and making small incremental changes each time. I'm fully confident that next week, this fight will be much less chaos and that much closer to farming.
On to Gruul. Last week, our first visit to his Lair, we got him down to 24% in our best attempt.
This week? Best attempt, 0%.
Yep, we've got a shiny new screenshot of 25 combatants standing before a face-down Gruul.
The fight was interesting. Survivability was king. Stay away from other folks so you don't Shatter. I spent most of the fight shimmying from side to side, trying to find a safe little nook between adjacent players. Although I'm happy with my DPS output, all the jockeying for position did hurt my numbers, so I'm looking at this as the biggest area for my own personal improvement.
The raid generally did a nice job moving around and adjusting to the chaos. Some nice usage of bandages also helped reduce the healing burden, although it did slow the DPS down and cause the fight to go longer than I'd like. I think we had him at growth 13 or 14, but I'm not 100% sure, the end of the fight was a blur.
Judgment of Wisdom was absolutely wonderful for mana regen.
Aldori Legendary Defender dropped and the Main Tank won the roll. Good stuff, from what I hear, its a pretty nifty shield. A couple Hunters/Mages/Warlocks got T4 love. w00t.
So I exclaimed "Welcome to the Guild, [Pally] and [Shammy]. This is how we do things around here!"
I have a tendancy to get a little passionate about things, and the excitement must have come across in my voice, because someone texted out "I bet Amava's jumping up and down right now" as I was in mid-leap.
Ok, so we weren't outdoors the whole time, and we did get some family time on the Wii, including me blasting away most of my sister's high scores in the Wii Fit balance games. I think its because I mostly stand up when I play WoW, but I digress. Oh, and while I'm digressing, they need to rename the movie to "White Men Can't Dance", which some recent video footage of Dance Dance Revolution will readily confirm.
So sunday night, I drive 400 miles home, and log in for Gruul's.
Looking through the Guild, I see a Paladin that I worked with back in my 30's in a leveling guild, and he's now been invited. We whispered a little of the good old days, then it was down to business getting the raid set up.
My chief concern of the evening was how to properly welcome him to the Guild. You can't treat these things lightly.
While getting set up, we also had a Resto Shaman who was a friend of a few players join our guild.
Now a true celebration is in order.
I got to thinking, how about a raid to celebrate? Sure, lets do it.
Form up the team, zone on into the instance, and raise some h3ll.
Took a few tries, but HKM goes down.
Both new invitees do awesome. Our Mage Tank, in her shiny new stamina set, did awesome. Overall, the entire team did a fantastic job. We handled three wipes with dignity and remained focused on learning from our defeats, and making small incremental changes each time. I'm fully confident that next week, this fight will be much less chaos and that much closer to farming.
On to Gruul. Last week, our first visit to his Lair, we got him down to 24% in our best attempt.
This week? Best attempt, 0%.
Yep, we've got a shiny new screenshot of 25 combatants standing before a face-down Gruul.
The fight was interesting. Survivability was king. Stay away from other folks so you don't Shatter. I spent most of the fight shimmying from side to side, trying to find a safe little nook between adjacent players. Although I'm happy with my DPS output, all the jockeying for position did hurt my numbers, so I'm looking at this as the biggest area for my own personal improvement.
The raid generally did a nice job moving around and adjusting to the chaos. Some nice usage of bandages also helped reduce the healing burden, although it did slow the DPS down and cause the fight to go longer than I'd like. I think we had him at growth 13 or 14, but I'm not 100% sure, the end of the fight was a blur.
Judgment of Wisdom was absolutely wonderful for mana regen.
Aldori Legendary Defender dropped and the Main Tank won the roll. Good stuff, from what I hear, its a pretty nifty shield. A couple Hunters/Mages/Warlocks got T4 love. w00t.
So I exclaimed "Welcome to the Guild, [Pally] and [Shammy]. This is how we do things around here!"
I have a tendancy to get a little passionate about things, and the excitement must have come across in my voice, because someone texted out "I bet Amava's jumping up and down right now" as I was in mid-leap.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Guild Visits Gruul's Lair
Lol, I said "the next post is a doozy". Not this one, the next one, so go get another cup of coffee.
So, Sunday night. Our normal night for Team 1 to go to Zul'Aman and Team 2 to continue progressing through Karazhan.
Not this week. The time was right for the guild to move into 25-person raiding.
Gruul's Lair was on the calendar.
19 people signed up. There was much buzz and excitement in the days leading up.
I log in about an hour before the event. Immediately get an invite from the Guild Manager / Raid Leader. I see the other officers in the group already. To delegate some of the duties and spread out the responsibility of leading the group, they want me to be Raid Leader.
I was blown away. A mix of feeling happy from the respect my friends have for my performance leading a group, and a huge overwhelming feeling of the weight of just how challenging it will be. More on that later, as the experience leaves me with lots of thoughts. This post is about the raid.
All those who signed up were logged in and ready to rock on time. We ended up with 21 from the guild. Partnering with another guild at our stage of progression, we picked up 3 more players, although filling in the extra slots took us a long time. We started the night with only 24 players because time was ticking and we were anxious.
5 tanks (2 Warriors, 2 Paladins, 1 Druid)
7 healers (4 Priests, 2 Druids, 1 Paladin)
12 DPS (6 Hunters, 3 Rogues, 1 Mage, 1 Warlock, 1 Priest)
Generally a good blend of classes, with the only real issue of 6 Hunters, which is too many, and zero Shamans, which is too few.
We started the run 49 minutes later than our scheduled start time, which is my only complaint for the evening. I'm ok with it for our first night, but this is the chief area that I want the team to improve.
Waltz through the three trashies.
Spend some time figuring out strategy for High King Maulgar. The only people who did the fight before had done it in raids where the Raid Leader pretty much knew the fight and just told people where to go, so they didn't really know how to explain the fight.
First shot. Complete and total chaos.
Second shot. Lets put those 6 Hunters to work. I gave out clear Misdirection assignments for each tank. Much more control over the fight.
Third shot. The only missing piece that was really causing chaos during the Second Shot was the Mage Boss. We got that under control in the third fight.
And we kicked his @ss.
First night, three shots, High King Maulgar down.
For the first time in Guild History, Amava decides to roll for T4 loot. And with 9 people rolling, drops a 98 and wins the shoulders. I actually felt bad and wish I hadn't rolled, I'd much rather see the gear go to a Guildie, but I suppose I won't complain, I like the look better than my Beastmaw Pauldrons.
We pushed on to Gruul.
The group agreed to extend our raid by 30 minutes to allow for some Gruul experimentation.
2 shots, both wipes. 24% at 9 growths.
And there you have it. Our first foray into 25-person content, a smashing success. Positive attitudes abound. Good progression for the guild. Lots of good things on the list, and only a start time issue on the bad side.
So, Sunday night. Our normal night for Team 1 to go to Zul'Aman and Team 2 to continue progressing through Karazhan.
Not this week. The time was right for the guild to move into 25-person raiding.
Gruul's Lair was on the calendar.
19 people signed up. There was much buzz and excitement in the days leading up.
I log in about an hour before the event. Immediately get an invite from the Guild Manager / Raid Leader. I see the other officers in the group already. To delegate some of the duties and spread out the responsibility of leading the group, they want me to be Raid Leader.
I was blown away. A mix of feeling happy from the respect my friends have for my performance leading a group, and a huge overwhelming feeling of the weight of just how challenging it will be. More on that later, as the experience leaves me with lots of thoughts. This post is about the raid.
All those who signed up were logged in and ready to rock on time. We ended up with 21 from the guild. Partnering with another guild at our stage of progression, we picked up 3 more players, although filling in the extra slots took us a long time. We started the night with only 24 players because time was ticking and we were anxious.
5 tanks (2 Warriors, 2 Paladins, 1 Druid)
7 healers (4 Priests, 2 Druids, 1 Paladin)
12 DPS (6 Hunters, 3 Rogues, 1 Mage, 1 Warlock, 1 Priest)
Generally a good blend of classes, with the only real issue of 6 Hunters, which is too many, and zero Shamans, which is too few.
We started the run 49 minutes later than our scheduled start time, which is my only complaint for the evening. I'm ok with it for our first night, but this is the chief area that I want the team to improve.
Waltz through the three trashies.
Spend some time figuring out strategy for High King Maulgar. The only people who did the fight before had done it in raids where the Raid Leader pretty much knew the fight and just told people where to go, so they didn't really know how to explain the fight.
First shot. Complete and total chaos.
Second shot. Lets put those 6 Hunters to work. I gave out clear Misdirection assignments for each tank. Much more control over the fight.
Third shot. The only missing piece that was really causing chaos during the Second Shot was the Mage Boss. We got that under control in the third fight.
And we kicked his @ss.
First night, three shots, High King Maulgar down.
For the first time in Guild History, Amava decides to roll for T4 loot. And with 9 people rolling, drops a 98 and wins the shoulders. I actually felt bad and wish I hadn't rolled, I'd much rather see the gear go to a Guildie, but I suppose I won't complain, I like the look better than my Beastmaw Pauldrons.
We pushed on to Gruul.
The group agreed to extend our raid by 30 minutes to allow for some Gruul experimentation.
2 shots, both wipes. 24% at 9 growths.
And there you have it. Our first foray into 25-person content, a smashing success. Positive attitudes abound. Good progression for the guild. Lots of good things on the list, and only a start time issue on the bad side.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Akil'zon is Akil'gone
I couldn't resist the title.
Second boss in Zul'Aman sleeps with the fishes for the first time at the hands of my guild.
The wowwiki description confused the hell out of me, so I'll just go ahead and give it the old "this fight comes down to one thing and one thing only". If you've got the gear to kill Nalorakk, beating Akil'zon really only requires one little detail to master.
Team movement during Electrical Storms.
When your Boss Mod tells you there's about 6-ish seconds before the storm, cancel anything you're casting, and run into melee range of the boss. Everybody. And wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. Electrical Storm casts. Target raid member lifts up way high in a beautiful display of blue lightning, and then he drops back down. Now you can go back to max range and pew pew pew.
It really was that simple.
Oh, and you've got to space yourselves, but if you've beaten Maiden of Virtue this is no surprise. We ignored the little eagle adds entirely.
On each of the 3 failed attempts, the fight was totally under control, but each time, somebody would fail to run close enough fast enough during the storms. OR, since its a random amount of time from when the warning shows up to when the spell is actually cast, somebody would get impatient and run back into position before the storm gets cast.
The result is the same, you blow up.
So, show up with the gear to beat Nalorakk, and Akil'zon is just a matter of figuring out the movement for electrical storm. Assuming you've got enough AoE damage to clear the gauntlet up to him :-)
What a beautiful sight to behold as we strolled in with 1 Holy Priest, 1 Holy Paladin, and 1 Resto Druid. For a 10-man raid, that's a pretty sweet combo.
And next time I'm gonna expirement a little bit, perhaps at the expense of blowing my team up, but don't tell them that. During Electrical Storm, I was running into melee range, and just firing off Raptor Strikes and dropping Immolation traps. This gimps my DPS hardcore. Next time, I'm gonna try standing at minimum ranged distance and see if we're safe.
Shhhh, don't tell anybody.
Second boss in Zul'Aman sleeps with the fishes for the first time at the hands of my guild.
The wowwiki description confused the hell out of me, so I'll just go ahead and give it the old "this fight comes down to one thing and one thing only". If you've got the gear to kill Nalorakk, beating Akil'zon really only requires one little detail to master.
Team movement during Electrical Storms.
When your Boss Mod tells you there's about 6-ish seconds before the storm, cancel anything you're casting, and run into melee range of the boss. Everybody. And wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. Electrical Storm casts. Target raid member lifts up way high in a beautiful display of blue lightning, and then he drops back down. Now you can go back to max range and pew pew pew.
It really was that simple.
Oh, and you've got to space yourselves, but if you've beaten Maiden of Virtue this is no surprise. We ignored the little eagle adds entirely.
On each of the 3 failed attempts, the fight was totally under control, but each time, somebody would fail to run close enough fast enough during the storms. OR, since its a random amount of time from when the warning shows up to when the spell is actually cast, somebody would get impatient and run back into position before the storm gets cast.
The result is the same, you blow up.
So, show up with the gear to beat Nalorakk, and Akil'zon is just a matter of figuring out the movement for electrical storm. Assuming you've got enough AoE damage to clear the gauntlet up to him :-)
What a beautiful sight to behold as we strolled in with 1 Holy Priest, 1 Holy Paladin, and 1 Resto Druid. For a 10-man raid, that's a pretty sweet combo.
And next time I'm gonna expirement a little bit, perhaps at the expense of blowing my team up, but don't tell them that. During Electrical Storm, I was running into melee range, and just firing off Raptor Strikes and dropping Immolation traps. This gimps my DPS hardcore. Next time, I'm gonna try standing at minimum ranged distance and see if we're safe.
Shhhh, don't tell anybody.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Nalorakk, Schmalorakk. Akil'zon, Schmakil'zon
After everybody was done paying homage to their mothers, we gathered up our forces and headed into Zul'Aman for our weekly wipefest.
The raid looked a drop different than usual, with our normal off-tank not logged in at raid time. Or, even an hour later than raid time, which we ended up bumping to because of two raiders not being on. In retrospect, probably should have not scheduled a raid for Mother's Day, but what you gonna do? The delay did let me get my arenas in, but that's another story all together.
So we find a friendly Bear in the neighborhood who wants to join us.
Plus, joining our ZA team for the first time is a long lost friend of mine who returned to WoW and who also joined my guild.
So we figure that with two combat rez'es and a soul stone available, we should be in decent shape.
Plus we had a new strategy for healing. Two tanks, three healers. In the past, we had one healer handle the tank during troll phase, and the other two handle the other tank during bear phase. The purpose of this trick was to allow a mana-regen phase during your off-phase. I'm no healing expert, but they tell me that this meant they had to spam their least mana efficient spells, thus leading to troubles, specifically during bear phase.
This time, all three healers were on bear duty, and two of them were on troll duty. This allows one healer to mana regen during troll, and all three can be using their most mana efficient heals since they'd be backing eachother up at all times.
Plus, having a tree in the tanking group, the buff to tank healing is very nice. Plus he was wearing a pair of gloves I crafted for him, so I felt special. lol.
Soooo, entering the fight with like 50 things changed from how we did it last week, we set forth to battle.
And one-shot the mutha.
No combat rez, no soul stone needed.
Just pure and simple pew pew pew for about 5 minutes.
I happily broke 1100dps, despite needing to take a mini DPS break to bandage, as was our plan for DPS'ers who get charged by the boss.
In a somewhat recent posting, BRK told a story of how he does fights in two stages. One is DPS phase, the other is mana-regen phase. Aparently he waits for mana to get low, then drinks a potion, turns on aspect of the viper, perhaps some other buffs like rapid fire or some such? During this phase he doesn't use any magical spells, not even kill command, for about 10 seconds. Supposedly, in 10 seconds he regens about 60% of his mana pool, which is much larger than mine.
I tried this a few times recently. I must be doing it wrong, because I really don't get the benefit that BRK illustrates.
Instead, I proactively drink Fel Mana Potion. Nearly immediately at the beginning of a fight. It is a MoT, mana over time. So once down 500 or 1000 mana, I drink it, blowing the cooldown as soon as possible during the fight, which allows another potion to be available pretty early.
I find this works for me substantially better than the two phase approach. Although, if I still do get down low, I do go into a mana regen phase with Viper and Rapid fire and no spell usage for a little while.
Either way. Nalorakk down in a first ever kill. Not sure whether to call it a guild first or not, because our bear off-tank was from outside, but we're working on that :-)
Went on to Akil'zon.
Love the gauntlet approaching his roost.
Well, love/hate it. That was total chaos, but it is fun to watch the team try to coordinate and react together, as opposed to most trash pull situations where you carefully plan out each and every mob's fate. The mobs jumping us from behind was a really cool touch. Me and the other hunter stood in the rear of the pack, with traps at our backs, and that took care of most of the trailers.
Cleared the gauntlet without much fuss.
Got to the boss.
Did an experiemental fight. Pretty cool. The visuals of his electric storm are awesome.
Went back in to fight him for real.
And GOT HIM DOWN....
....to 6%
And it was pure stupidity on the part of many of our raiders that we wiped. We successfully handled all the electrical storms, until the last fateful one. There's a random delay between when DBM tells you the storm is here, and when it actually casts. So we all collapsed in on the boss when the timer was up. Delay. Delay. Delay. Most of the team got antsy and ran back to their positions before the electical storm cast. Then it cast and crushed us.
But the stupidity is totally forgivable, as it was only first night and second time we were ever seeing the boss.
We got this guy nailed. Lets head back in there.
Doh. Trash in the gauntlet had respawned. Which sux because that really was a quick respawn. Not sure how much time it gave us, but it really was fast.
And then this is when the late start stings you in the butt. Half the team, including the key member that caused us to start an hour late, wanted to continue past our scheduled end time.
As much as I complain about my job, I'd really prefer to not get fired. Thus, being (A) on time, and (B) alert/attentive/well rested is a good thing. Going to bed was my top priority.
Hopefully we can get started on time next week, because if so, Akil'zon is gonna make me some fine Buffalo Wings. Way better than those gamey kaliri wings I eat a couple times a week.
The raid looked a drop different than usual, with our normal off-tank not logged in at raid time. Or, even an hour later than raid time, which we ended up bumping to because of two raiders not being on. In retrospect, probably should have not scheduled a raid for Mother's Day, but what you gonna do? The delay did let me get my arenas in, but that's another story all together.
So we find a friendly Bear in the neighborhood who wants to join us.
Plus, joining our ZA team for the first time is a long lost friend of mine who returned to WoW and who also joined my guild.
So we figure that with two combat rez'es and a soul stone available, we should be in decent shape.
Plus we had a new strategy for healing. Two tanks, three healers. In the past, we had one healer handle the tank during troll phase, and the other two handle the other tank during bear phase. The purpose of this trick was to allow a mana-regen phase during your off-phase. I'm no healing expert, but they tell me that this meant they had to spam their least mana efficient spells, thus leading to troubles, specifically during bear phase.
This time, all three healers were on bear duty, and two of them were on troll duty. This allows one healer to mana regen during troll, and all three can be using their most mana efficient heals since they'd be backing eachother up at all times.
Plus, having a tree in the tanking group, the buff to tank healing is very nice. Plus he was wearing a pair of gloves I crafted for him, so I felt special. lol.
Soooo, entering the fight with like 50 things changed from how we did it last week, we set forth to battle.
And one-shot the mutha.
No combat rez, no soul stone needed.
Just pure and simple pew pew pew for about 5 minutes.
I happily broke 1100dps, despite needing to take a mini DPS break to bandage, as was our plan for DPS'ers who get charged by the boss.
In a somewhat recent posting, BRK told a story of how he does fights in two stages. One is DPS phase, the other is mana-regen phase. Aparently he waits for mana to get low, then drinks a potion, turns on aspect of the viper, perhaps some other buffs like rapid fire or some such? During this phase he doesn't use any magical spells, not even kill command, for about 10 seconds. Supposedly, in 10 seconds he regens about 60% of his mana pool, which is much larger than mine.
I tried this a few times recently. I must be doing it wrong, because I really don't get the benefit that BRK illustrates.
Instead, I proactively drink Fel Mana Potion. Nearly immediately at the beginning of a fight. It is a MoT, mana over time. So once down 500 or 1000 mana, I drink it, blowing the cooldown as soon as possible during the fight, which allows another potion to be available pretty early.
I find this works for me substantially better than the two phase approach. Although, if I still do get down low, I do go into a mana regen phase with Viper and Rapid fire and no spell usage for a little while.
Either way. Nalorakk down in a first ever kill. Not sure whether to call it a guild first or not, because our bear off-tank was from outside, but we're working on that :-)
Went on to Akil'zon.
Love the gauntlet approaching his roost.
Well, love/hate it. That was total chaos, but it is fun to watch the team try to coordinate and react together, as opposed to most trash pull situations where you carefully plan out each and every mob's fate. The mobs jumping us from behind was a really cool touch. Me and the other hunter stood in the rear of the pack, with traps at our backs, and that took care of most of the trailers.
Cleared the gauntlet without much fuss.
Got to the boss.
Did an experiemental fight. Pretty cool. The visuals of his electric storm are awesome.
Went back in to fight him for real.
And GOT HIM DOWN....
....to 6%
And it was pure stupidity on the part of many of our raiders that we wiped. We successfully handled all the electrical storms, until the last fateful one. There's a random delay between when DBM tells you the storm is here, and when it actually casts. So we all collapsed in on the boss when the timer was up. Delay. Delay. Delay. Most of the team got antsy and ran back to their positions before the electical storm cast. Then it cast and crushed us.
But the stupidity is totally forgivable, as it was only first night and second time we were ever seeing the boss.
We got this guy nailed. Lets head back in there.
Doh. Trash in the gauntlet had respawned. Which sux because that really was a quick respawn. Not sure how much time it gave us, but it really was fast.
And then this is when the late start stings you in the butt. Half the team, including the key member that caused us to start an hour late, wanted to continue past our scheduled end time.
As much as I complain about my job, I'd really prefer to not get fired. Thus, being (A) on time, and (B) alert/attentive/well rested is a good thing. Going to bed was my top priority.
Hopefully we can get started on time next week, because if so, Akil'zon is gonna make me some fine Buffalo Wings. Way better than those gamey kaliri wings I eat a couple times a week.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
A Helluva Week
Vacation was outstanding. Beautiful weather, fun RL stuff, fun WoW stuff. Although the kid got scared and backed out of a helicopter ride over the falls (seconds before daddy paid for the tickets, FTW!!!!!!!), she did have the courage to ride the giant ferris wheel that overlooks the natural wonder. If you're ever up for a laugh, try to get a 3 year old to pronounce Niagara. Its a hoot.
Ok, highlights of the WoW week.....where to start where to start?
Karazhan
Smashed up the place some more. Killed Prince pretty easily, although the positioning of Infernals is sorta like ordering from the drive thru. They F you at the drive thru.
In bigger news, Nightbane is dead. I had the extreme pleasure of staring up the dragon's @ss for 11 and a half minutes as a corpse during our 14 minute first kill. Holy frustration, Batman!!!!! Proud of the team. Ready to smash something at being cornered by some Charred earth and then being feared right into a tail swipe one-shot. Grrr. but in the end, Yay!
Netherspite is all that remains.
And then to start off the next raid week, we cleared everything up to and including Shade of Aran and Illhoof on our first night, which basically signifies that we can consider Kara to be only a 2 night event.
Zul'Aman
With Nightbane down, we're pretending that we've cleared Kara. Sure, one boss left, but whatever, we're anxious.
New raid schedule is 2 nights Kara, one night ZA.
First night in ZA, what a blast. The music score constantly reminds me of something out of Red Dawn. Wolverines!!!!!
Pretty big jump on the difficulty scale from Kara. Died several times on trash. Died several times on Nalorak. Only had 2 healers, which for our level of gear progression, is probably just on the fringe of do-able. This night, it came out on the not-so-do-able side of the fringe.
43 gold worth of repairs. 80 gold in elixirs. 25 gold in foodstuffs for me and Condoleezza. 12 gold in oils and scrolls. 5 gold in arrows.
2.5 hours of fun in a new challenging instance. Priceless.
Shrimpin' Aint Easy
Unless you're a 375 fisherman. Which I now am. Look out, Mr. Pinchy, here I come.
249 Resil
Went out and bought three of the new blue PvP gear items available in patch 2.4 to put together a resilliance set. In my PvP set, I'm at 249 resilliance. The difference is just remarkable. So much more staying power in BG's.
I'd solo defend AB nodes against three attackers.
I ran back lots of WSG flags.
Defended towers in AV.
The difference is huge, and made BG so much more fun.
And I return to the Arena
Just a few days after getting my PvP set, a long lost friend logs in and pst's me for the first time in months. He was my arena partner before he took a WoW break. I haven't arena'd since.
So now we've got a 2's team WeHeartWelfare.
Haven't played yet, but I'm hoping to win 3 of 10 games per week to maintain sanity and a steady stream offood stamps arena points.
Exalterated
The folks over at the SSO just adore me. Theylet me buy gave me a new necklace to show their love. Pretty cool when it procs, but does leave me 8 points under the hit cap.
And the real big news....
I finally caved in and went Skinning / Leatherworking. Dropped Mining, took up skinning. Spent a day or two traipsing around Azeroth one-shotting low level stuff for skins. Ding 375. Dropped Herbalism. Cried for an hour or two. Took up Leatherworking. Spent a day or two using mats farmed while levelling skinning, grinding the buhjeezus out of the scorpids in the Blasted Lands, and then killing every Clefthoof in Nagrand about 150 times. Ding 375.
I did cheat and buy a few stacks of Thick Leather because that was just getting tedious.
Also cheated when a yellow recipe at level 372 failed to give me a level up on THREE CONSECUTIVE TRIES. Frustrating. Got sick and tired of slaughtering Clefthoofz. Bought a few stacks of Thick Knothide Leather. Joy.
The jury is still out on whether I'm happy with the choice, but that's the fuel for another post.
Ok, highlights of the WoW week.....where to start where to start?
Karazhan
Smashed up the place some more. Killed Prince pretty easily, although the positioning of Infernals is sorta like ordering from the drive thru. They F you at the drive thru.
In bigger news, Nightbane is dead. I had the extreme pleasure of staring up the dragon's @ss for 11 and a half minutes as a corpse during our 14 minute first kill. Holy frustration, Batman!!!!! Proud of the team. Ready to smash something at being cornered by some Charred earth and then being feared right into a tail swipe one-shot. Grrr. but in the end, Yay!
Netherspite is all that remains.
And then to start off the next raid week, we cleared everything up to and including Shade of Aran and Illhoof on our first night, which basically signifies that we can consider Kara to be only a 2 night event.
Zul'Aman
With Nightbane down, we're pretending that we've cleared Kara. Sure, one boss left, but whatever, we're anxious.
New raid schedule is 2 nights Kara, one night ZA.
First night in ZA, what a blast. The music score constantly reminds me of something out of Red Dawn. Wolverines!!!!!
Pretty big jump on the difficulty scale from Kara. Died several times on trash. Died several times on Nalorak. Only had 2 healers, which for our level of gear progression, is probably just on the fringe of do-able. This night, it came out on the not-so-do-able side of the fringe.
43 gold worth of repairs. 80 gold in elixirs. 25 gold in foodstuffs for me and Condoleezza. 12 gold in oils and scrolls. 5 gold in arrows.
2.5 hours of fun in a new challenging instance. Priceless.
Shrimpin' Aint Easy
Unless you're a 375 fisherman. Which I now am. Look out, Mr. Pinchy, here I come.
249 Resil
Went out and bought three of the new blue PvP gear items available in patch 2.4 to put together a resilliance set. In my PvP set, I'm at 249 resilliance. The difference is just remarkable. So much more staying power in BG's.
I'd solo defend AB nodes against three attackers.
I ran back lots of WSG flags.
Defended towers in AV.
The difference is huge, and made BG so much more fun.
And I return to the Arena
Just a few days after getting my PvP set, a long lost friend logs in and pst's me for the first time in months. He was my arena partner before he took a WoW break. I haven't arena'd since.
So now we've got a 2's team WeHeartWelfare.
Haven't played yet, but I'm hoping to win 3 of 10 games per week to maintain sanity and a steady stream of
Exalterated
The folks over at the SSO just adore me. They
And the real big news....
I finally caved in and went Skinning / Leatherworking. Dropped Mining, took up skinning. Spent a day or two traipsing around Azeroth one-shotting low level stuff for skins. Ding 375. Dropped Herbalism. Cried for an hour or two. Took up Leatherworking. Spent a day or two using mats farmed while levelling skinning, grinding the buhjeezus out of the scorpids in the Blasted Lands, and then killing every Clefthoof in Nagrand about 150 times. Ding 375.
I did cheat and buy a few stacks of Thick Leather because that was just getting tedious.
Also cheated when a yellow recipe at level 372 failed to give me a level up on THREE CONSECUTIVE TRIES. Frustrating. Got sick and tired of slaughtering Clefthoofz. Bought a few stacks of Thick Knothide Leather. Joy.
The jury is still out on whether I'm happy with the choice, but that's the fuel for another post.
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