... and if you don't get the reference then you fail, hardcore.
I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts while my ridiculously busy schedule of ridiculousness keeps me from writing anything meaningful.
After our bug-filled jaunt into ICC last week, we decided to start fresh this week even though we only got 5 bosses down last week... And due to illness/inability to form coherent sentences/real life causing low attendance/etc, we waited until Wednesday night to go in this week.
To make a much longer story very short: we smashed 7 bosses (Lower Spire + Fester, Rot, and Princes). A typical first night for us.
I was surprised by a couple of things during the run, though, that I wanted to share.
First, remember a few posts back? I said that the death of cat DPS was greatly exaggerated? Boy was I right.
Now, I realize they thought it was underpowered and made a couple of changes to bump it up. They may have done so even before I posted my previous thoughts. They may have done a little before then, and a little after. I'm here today to confirm that cat DPS is most definitely alive and well, even before the Cataclysm.
For the first time in my experience, I actually led the DPS chart on a couple of fights. One of them by a good margin.
At the end of the Saurfang fight I was sporting over 13k DPS. Once I get near my gaming machine again I can try to post up a screenshot - I got one that should show the Recount breakdown to show how much is attributed to melee, Rake, Rip, Shred, and Ferocious Bite. Much like pre-4.0, the breakdown was fairly even - roughly 25% each going to melee, Rip, and Shred, with the remaining 25% divided up among Ravage, Rake, and FB.
After a top half performance on Rotface, we moved to Festergut. We had a mage leading the chart for most of the fight, but I was a close second until we hit 25%. It is so incredibly liberating to actually have something to do differently when the Raid Leader announces "Kill shot range." Anyway, mere seconds before Fester fell down I passed him, finishing with 12.5k DPS to his 12.3k. The breakdown of damage was shifted slightly. I don't have the screenshots to compare at hand (I will offer more details once I do), but while the same general breakdown showed, it was shifted. (i.e. Rip had the highest percentage on Saurfang, IIRC, and Shred had the highest on Fester, again, unless my memory is failing me.)
I'm loving Nom Nom Nom, even if it did get the much less cool name Blood in the Water. Once the boss is in range, your life becomes Shred/Rake to 5 CPs, FB, do this two or three times depending on the time left on Savage Roar, then Shred/Rake to 5 CPs and Savage Roar, wash, rinse, repeat and watch the boss die. Since you don't really have to worry about refreshing Rip, the only timer you really have to watch at that point is Savage Roar.
Speaking of timers, I was moderately more impressed with my output because I haven't been using a debuff tracker addon. Last time I tried to load BadKitty, it was broken, and I haven't checked in the past week or so to see if it was fixed. I suppose it's technically harder to play this way, but given the proclamations of doom and gloom for Kitty DPS I wasn't worried about it until Cata actually dropped. So I was doubly surprised to find myself on top of the chart.
Moving on... My DPS as a tank seemed relatively high as well. There were even a couple of fights that I beat out a couple of our lower-geared folks that just must have had a bad fight that boss. I dunno *shrug*.
Speaking of tanking, my single-target threat has been WAY up - to the point where I'm stealing threat from our other tanks if I don't watch it - while my AOE threat has been way down, so-so at best. That 6-second cooldown on Swipe is a pain in my arse. Tab-targeting helps, but having the Pulverize buff fully powered helps as well, and you need to consume 3 stacks of Lacerate to get there, which requires focusing on one target. I still don't have a good handle on how to get and hold AOE threat, but I also realize that I might not have that until Cata comes and we get Thrash.
In completely unrelated matters, I finally completed the holiday uber-meta. Picked a candy bucket in Telaar and got Achievement spammed... Got my Violet Proto-Drake and danced in the... wait, I already spent 5k gold to get 310% flying. blizz can I have my 5k back? See, what I was reading over the past few weeks (sorry, I'm a bad blogger and don't have sources to link, it's been too long and I don't remember where I read them to begin with, but Wowwiki confirms it) said that if you already had a 310% speed mount, you got Master Flying for free, but this was not true if you gained the mount afterward. So, I spent my 5k, and then heard afterward that enough people complained about the holiday meta that they changed it so that it granted the Master flying skill. Thus I curse my impatience but please Blizzard give me my 5k back.
Anyway.... cheers!
Showing posts with label Icecrown Citadel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Icecrown Citadel. Show all posts
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Pre-Cata 4.0 Bear Thoughts
So my guild went in to ICC 25 this week a day late due to the patch, to try to relearn on the go how the game is played, so I got a good look at how to do things bear-wise until Dec. 7th. I was actually pleasantly surprised with a few things, but I thought I'd roll that in to how to Bear in patch 4.0!
I'll cover all of the abilities in more complete detail in a later set of posts...
But first off, here is the spec I went with for my first go around...
Bear Build for 4.0!
Without the points to get to Perseverance (which I'll want at 85), I actually had one more point to use in the Feral tree than I will when I get that far. We'll have 5 more points then, 2 of which will be in Natural Shapeshifter to get to Tier 2 resto, 3 in Perseverance, and I will find 1 point from somewhere (current odds are to take one out of Stampede) at that point for Master Shapeshifter... but we'll see.
For now... that looks like a solid build. I have all the points in everything I want in the Feral tree, plus Heart of the Wild. I personally don't think it would be bad, while using 4p t10 armor, to put 3 points in King of the Jungle to enhance Enrage even further for in-combat use, but excepting the tier bonus there's no reason to put points there at all.
On a side note, the tooltip for the four piece bonus to t10 armor still reads that "Enrage no longer reduces your armor and instead..." I'm hoping they actually updated the mechanic so that it doesn't make you take extra damage, because Enrage no longer reduces armor anyway. Even if they didn't, the bonus makes you take less damage, and more than overcomes the extra damage you take from Enrage anyway, so... I guess it all works out. Anyway, back to the task at hand.
Tanking seemed... a little clunky to me. Times were, the only rotationally used abilities Bears had on cooldowns were FFF and Mangle. Now we've added Swipe and Maul to the mix, and given us an ability that wants us to build up Lacerate stacks, then remove them, AND an ability that wants us to have Lacerate ticking all the time.
So, in short, there's more buttons for us to press, and more limitations in how and when to press them. To make matters worse, Maul and Swipe both now cost 30 rage (although Swipe's rage cost is supposed to be coming down, and word is they're reducing the threat generation to match, but keeping the cooldown.) I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with that change - the 6 second cooldown on Swipe is a royal pain - but at least we'll be able to use Swipe at the beginning of a pull for initial aggro now.
I found myself doing things distinctively different for single-target and AOE pulls, which was... not entirely true previously. For single-target, Mangle and FFF followed by Maul. Maul and Mangle when off cooldown, fill in the space with Lacerates until 3 stacks, then Pulverize. If you have the Pulverize buff up, 3 stacks of Lacerate, and Maul and Mangle are on cooldown... FFF again. If that's also on cooldown... then Swipe, or consider Pulverizing to refresh the buff duration. Doing this, I've been putting out comparatively massive threat - typically outpacing our DK and Warrior tanks. Of course, maybe they just don't have their rotations down yet, or maybe I had rogue/hunter threat help, I don't know for sure.
For AOE pulls, I tended to start out with Lacerate, Pulverize immediately to have some buff up, then Swipe. From there, I was tab-target Maul, Mangle, and Lacerate wherever I needed threat. Swipe when off cooldown, and Pulverize whenever I could a) eat more stacks of Lacerate than the current buff had, or b) the buff was about to fall off. I found myself sometimes having no issues with rage at all, and sometimes being rage-starved it seemed no matter what I did. Either way, I was getting compliments from several folks on our run with doing awesome threat. One player who has regularly had issues with generating just a little too much threat said he was going all-out and couldn't catch me. Again, maybe I had help, but that certainly gave me some confidence.
All in all I didn't have many problems with threat generation, and when I did they seemed to be tied to rage starvation.
On the downside, the first night we got to Saurfang and had to stop because the door was bugged and wouldn't open after he died. The second night, we killed Rotface before giving up because several of our players were having bug issues with the raid instances - getting dropped out of the instance, not being able to come back in, WoW crashing when they came in, WoW crashing when they were summoned - just generally annoying bugs. I hope they get it all fixed soon.
I haven't had a lot of chances to cat yet, but I have a few thoughts I'll share when I get the time to. As for my last post about it, I realized later I did my dummy testing after they buffed us a little bit. Anyway, happy hunting!
I'll cover all of the abilities in more complete detail in a later set of posts...
But first off, here is the spec I went with for my first go around...
Bear Build for 4.0!
Without the points to get to Perseverance (which I'll want at 85), I actually had one more point to use in the Feral tree than I will when I get that far. We'll have 5 more points then, 2 of which will be in Natural Shapeshifter to get to Tier 2 resto, 3 in Perseverance, and I will find 1 point from somewhere (current odds are to take one out of Stampede) at that point for Master Shapeshifter... but we'll see.
For now... that looks like a solid build. I have all the points in everything I want in the Feral tree, plus Heart of the Wild. I personally don't think it would be bad, while using 4p t10 armor, to put 3 points in King of the Jungle to enhance Enrage even further for in-combat use, but excepting the tier bonus there's no reason to put points there at all.
On a side note, the tooltip for the four piece bonus to t10 armor still reads that "Enrage no longer reduces your armor and instead..." I'm hoping they actually updated the mechanic so that it doesn't make you take extra damage, because Enrage no longer reduces armor anyway. Even if they didn't, the bonus makes you take less damage, and more than overcomes the extra damage you take from Enrage anyway, so... I guess it all works out. Anyway, back to the task at hand.
Tanking seemed... a little clunky to me. Times were, the only rotationally used abilities Bears had on cooldowns were FFF and Mangle. Now we've added Swipe and Maul to the mix, and given us an ability that wants us to build up Lacerate stacks, then remove them, AND an ability that wants us to have Lacerate ticking all the time.
So, in short, there's more buttons for us to press, and more limitations in how and when to press them. To make matters worse, Maul and Swipe both now cost 30 rage (although Swipe's rage cost is supposed to be coming down, and word is they're reducing the threat generation to match, but keeping the cooldown.) I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with that change - the 6 second cooldown on Swipe is a royal pain - but at least we'll be able to use Swipe at the beginning of a pull for initial aggro now.
I found myself doing things distinctively different for single-target and AOE pulls, which was... not entirely true previously. For single-target, Mangle and FFF followed by Maul. Maul and Mangle when off cooldown, fill in the space with Lacerates until 3 stacks, then Pulverize. If you have the Pulverize buff up, 3 stacks of Lacerate, and Maul and Mangle are on cooldown... FFF again. If that's also on cooldown... then Swipe, or consider Pulverizing to refresh the buff duration. Doing this, I've been putting out comparatively massive threat - typically outpacing our DK and Warrior tanks. Of course, maybe they just don't have their rotations down yet, or maybe I had rogue/hunter threat help, I don't know for sure.
For AOE pulls, I tended to start out with Lacerate, Pulverize immediately to have some buff up, then Swipe. From there, I was tab-target Maul, Mangle, and Lacerate wherever I needed threat. Swipe when off cooldown, and Pulverize whenever I could a) eat more stacks of Lacerate than the current buff had, or b) the buff was about to fall off. I found myself sometimes having no issues with rage at all, and sometimes being rage-starved it seemed no matter what I did. Either way, I was getting compliments from several folks on our run with doing awesome threat. One player who has regularly had issues with generating just a little too much threat said he was going all-out and couldn't catch me. Again, maybe I had help, but that certainly gave me some confidence.
All in all I didn't have many problems with threat generation, and when I did they seemed to be tied to rage starvation.
On the downside, the first night we got to Saurfang and had to stop because the door was bugged and wouldn't open after he died. The second night, we killed Rotface before giving up because several of our players were having bug issues with the raid instances - getting dropped out of the instance, not being able to come back in, WoW crashing when they came in, WoW crashing when they were summoned - just generally annoying bugs. I hope they get it all fixed soon.
I haven't had a lot of chances to cat yet, but I have a few thoughts I'll share when I get the time to. As for my last post about it, I realized later I did my dummy testing after they buffed us a little bit. Anyway, happy hunting!
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Lich King
... Also known as Prince Arthas Menethil.
Our first attempts came this week, and our progress was up and down, to say the least. The good news is that we got through the first phase and transition, and got to see the defiles and val'kyr a few times. The bad news is that we did not continually progress, and of our ~10 attempts the 4th or 5th was our best attempt.
The only oddity in our strategy was that I stayed in my bear spec and gear, to be able to have a 3rd tank available for certain parts of the fight. Most notably, it allows us to have 2 tanks available to handle raging spirits during the transition back to fighting the Lich King, allowing our MT to focus solely on getting back to the right spot with Arthas rather than having to worry about a Raging Spirit at the same time.
Although I'm not 100% certain it's necessary and I suspect we will not use that angle when we make our successful run, I do think it is extremely helpful while we are learning the fight, because it slightly increases our success rate in that transition. The downside is that it cripples my DPS during the portions that I'm trying to cat form, with me beating out only the tanks at that point.
We had a LOT of trouble, the times we got to see defiles and Val'kyr, with both proper handling of defiles AND DPS getting the Val'kyr down. Unfortunately we only got to see that a time or two. We had some odd wipes in the first phase and during transition and although we were getting better again at the end we had lost our momentum and then ran out of time.
We are resetting next week, to allow, especially for our less-well-geared members, a chance at some more gear and a heaping load of badges, as well as getting us 8 more Sanctification tokens.
I should probably write something other than our raid updates eh?
What can I say it's a convenient topic.
Our first attempts came this week, and our progress was up and down, to say the least. The good news is that we got through the first phase and transition, and got to see the defiles and val'kyr a few times. The bad news is that we did not continually progress, and of our ~10 attempts the 4th or 5th was our best attempt.
The only oddity in our strategy was that I stayed in my bear spec and gear, to be able to have a 3rd tank available for certain parts of the fight. Most notably, it allows us to have 2 tanks available to handle raging spirits during the transition back to fighting the Lich King, allowing our MT to focus solely on getting back to the right spot with Arthas rather than having to worry about a Raging Spirit at the same time.
Although I'm not 100% certain it's necessary and I suspect we will not use that angle when we make our successful run, I do think it is extremely helpful while we are learning the fight, because it slightly increases our success rate in that transition. The downside is that it cripples my DPS during the portions that I'm trying to cat form, with me beating out only the tanks at that point.
We had a LOT of trouble, the times we got to see defiles and Val'kyr, with both proper handling of defiles AND DPS getting the Val'kyr down. Unfortunately we only got to see that a time or two. We had some odd wipes in the first phase and during transition and although we were getting better again at the end we had lost our momentum and then ran out of time.
We are resetting next week, to allow, especially for our less-well-geared members, a chance at some more gear and a heaping load of badges, as well as getting us 8 more Sanctification tokens.
I should probably write something other than our raid updates eh?
What can I say it's a convenient topic.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Internet Dragons
EA is killing those internet dragons!
It took us most of the night and 4 wipes (a couple to frustrating lack-of-movement mistakes), but we had good DPS all around and killed Sindragosa dead with time to spare on the last run.
We tanked her turned to the right as you face from the door out to her ledge. Run to the stairs when she pulls you in, run to the stairs when she starts her air phase. The five marked players spread out along the bottom step just far enough not to take too much damage from the ice tombs coming down. DPS the tombs at the proper speed so that they come down just after the last ice bomb from her. Stop DPS after 4 or 5 stacks of Chilled to the Bone and let it fall off. Wash, rinse, repeat. Move to Phase 2.
That part we had pretty well down, except for one frustrating oops during the ice tombs that entombed nearly half the raid.
We struggled mostly, on 3 of our 4 wipes, with not losing players during the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2. But once we figured it out we were fine. Start by the back leg. Person with mark move to the front and get ice blocked, THEN everybody follow. Get behind, drop Mystic Buffet and DPS the tomb, then back on Sindy near the front leg. Marked player run to the back leg and get tombed. Everybody except half the melee DPS (we only had 5, so it was easy) run to the tomb, drop stacks, and kill the tomb. Player with mark run to the front, get tombed, and everybody except the OTHER half the melee DPS do the tomb thing again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Even on the winning run we had a couple of mistakes - one of our ice tombs ended up behind her tail and left for dead, and we'd lost enough folks by the end that our marked players were just instructed to get the heck away from everybody else before getting tombed, and left in the tombs to die. But in the end it was another victory for EA, another step to finishing ICC before the Cataclysm reshapes WoW.
On to other news...
Although I don't heal at the moment I've kept up with tree-like Druid news. I hate the current implementation in beta of Tree of Life, but I don't think I'm alone in that. What I actually wanted to mention was about the Restoration Mastery.
In it's original incarnation, the Restoration Mastery provided extra healing to your HoT spells if they had lower HP *when the HoT was cast*. This caused quite a stir in the resto community, as well it should have - it's exquisitely terribad. When the proverbial fecal matter hits the proverbial air movement device, the last thing we want to be casting on a player is a HoT. It may be more mana efficient over the length of its application, but it doesn't get the player healed NOW, which is what is needed at that time. Combine that with Blizzard's push to get us to stop blanketing with HoTs and you have a recipe for disaster.
On a side note, it actually wouldn't have been an awful Mastery if they had allowed it to recalculate for each tick. I think that would have encouraged thoughtful proactive pre-hotting without giving too much benefit to raid blanketing... but I digress.
The Mastery now provides additional healing to our spells cast on players who already have a HoT ticking on them. This is most beneficial, IMO, to give us some more oomph as tank healers, as the tanks will *always* have HoTs ticking on them. It also happens to discourage clipping, which I'll explain in a minute. What it really allows is for the better healers to cast a Rejuv or other HoT on a target we expect to take damage, then when the damage hits and we need that extra oomph the HoT is already there to boost our heals. I like it.
About the clipping thing? Yeah, so if you are healing the tank, and you cast a Rejuv to boost the rest of your heals, and then you start a Lifebloom stack, it becomes important not to clip the Rejuv, since you'll only refresh the original, not recognize that there are already HoTs ticking. This is true on the rest of the raid, but not quite as important as on the tank. Once it falls off, you can reapply and get the boost because the Lifebloom is ticking... Which, when you refresh, will still be getting its bonuses.
I haven't seen nearly as detailed information about Feral Masteries, but I really like the fact that (at least at the moment) shifting forms allows us to shift our masteries. We still can't shift gear, but it should help with those fights were we want/need to be able to do both roles...
As for Arthas... you better bring it, buddy. Go big or go home. EA's coming for you.
It took us most of the night and 4 wipes (a couple to frustrating lack-of-movement mistakes), but we had good DPS all around and killed Sindragosa dead with time to spare on the last run.
We tanked her turned to the right as you face from the door out to her ledge. Run to the stairs when she pulls you in, run to the stairs when she starts her air phase. The five marked players spread out along the bottom step just far enough not to take too much damage from the ice tombs coming down. DPS the tombs at the proper speed so that they come down just after the last ice bomb from her. Stop DPS after 4 or 5 stacks of Chilled to the Bone and let it fall off. Wash, rinse, repeat. Move to Phase 2.
That part we had pretty well down, except for one frustrating oops during the ice tombs that entombed nearly half the raid.
We struggled mostly, on 3 of our 4 wipes, with not losing players during the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2. But once we figured it out we were fine. Start by the back leg. Person with mark move to the front and get ice blocked, THEN everybody follow. Get behind, drop Mystic Buffet and DPS the tomb, then back on Sindy near the front leg. Marked player run to the back leg and get tombed. Everybody except half the melee DPS (we only had 5, so it was easy) run to the tomb, drop stacks, and kill the tomb. Player with mark run to the front, get tombed, and everybody except the OTHER half the melee DPS do the tomb thing again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Even on the winning run we had a couple of mistakes - one of our ice tombs ended up behind her tail and left for dead, and we'd lost enough folks by the end that our marked players were just instructed to get the heck away from everybody else before getting tombed, and left in the tombs to die. But in the end it was another victory for EA, another step to finishing ICC before the Cataclysm reshapes WoW.
On to other news...
Although I don't heal at the moment I've kept up with tree-like Druid news. I hate the current implementation in beta of Tree of Life, but I don't think I'm alone in that. What I actually wanted to mention was about the Restoration Mastery.
In it's original incarnation, the Restoration Mastery provided extra healing to your HoT spells if they had lower HP *when the HoT was cast*. This caused quite a stir in the resto community, as well it should have - it's exquisitely terribad. When the proverbial fecal matter hits the proverbial air movement device, the last thing we want to be casting on a player is a HoT. It may be more mana efficient over the length of its application, but it doesn't get the player healed NOW, which is what is needed at that time. Combine that with Blizzard's push to get us to stop blanketing with HoTs and you have a recipe for disaster.
On a side note, it actually wouldn't have been an awful Mastery if they had allowed it to recalculate for each tick. I think that would have encouraged thoughtful proactive pre-hotting without giving too much benefit to raid blanketing... but I digress.
The Mastery now provides additional healing to our spells cast on players who already have a HoT ticking on them. This is most beneficial, IMO, to give us some more oomph as tank healers, as the tanks will *always* have HoTs ticking on them. It also happens to discourage clipping, which I'll explain in a minute. What it really allows is for the better healers to cast a Rejuv or other HoT on a target we expect to take damage, then when the damage hits and we need that extra oomph the HoT is already there to boost our heals. I like it.
About the clipping thing? Yeah, so if you are healing the tank, and you cast a Rejuv to boost the rest of your heals, and then you start a Lifebloom stack, it becomes important not to clip the Rejuv, since you'll only refresh the original, not recognize that there are already HoTs ticking. This is true on the rest of the raid, but not quite as important as on the tank. Once it falls off, you can reapply and get the boost because the Lifebloom is ticking... Which, when you refresh, will still be getting its bonuses.
I haven't seen nearly as detailed information about Feral Masteries, but I really like the fact that (at least at the moment) shifting forms allows us to shift our masteries. We still can't shift gear, but it should help with those fights were we want/need to be able to do both roles...
As for Arthas... you better bring it, buddy. Go big or go home. EA's coming for you.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Invading the Dragon's Lair
For the first time on 25-man, Epic Adventurers assaulted Sindragosa in her lair this week.
Although we were ultimately unsuccessful, it was a valiant attempt, and from what I understand we did *very* well for being our first ever 25-man attempt.
In our initial two attempts, we had ice blocked folks spread out across the bottom of the stairs. We learned fairly quickly that they were too spread out in the positions we had them - it was too difficult for the DPS to get all the ice blocks down quickly enough. We moved them in a little closer - just barely far enough apart to prevent them from killing each other when the blocks come down - and we were mostly successful at that portion of the fight. It helped that we had 4-5 druids along (one traded in for a sick hunter in the middle) and 3 shamans, so lots of brezzing.
Other than that, it all essentially came down to execution - don't get too many stacks of damage, kill the ice tombs quickly, and DON'T STAND IN THE RAID when you are targeted for an ice block. We only wiped once to that - we all had a good laugh, because it was an epic wipe-causing mistake. Oddly enough, we determined at this point that if everybody outside the ice tombs dies, the boss and tombs despawn and those in the tombs don't die.
We showed good progress the entire night, with the exception of the ice block incident. By the time we had had enough, we had reached and gotten mostly through the final phase - she had around a million HP left on the last wipe of the night, and the raid leader had called for us to ignore the ice-blocked folks and just burn Sindy as hard as we could. Unfortunately we'd lost too many to gradual attrition at that point, and couldn't keep enough people alive any longer.
Based on our progress, we've been told we may extend the lockout - little more time for a few more shots and I think she would have gone down, and then we can spend time learning the LK fight. I'm impressed with our first night in, although I think 3 nights of raiding in a row might just kill me if we have to keep it up more than a few weeks.
Although we were ultimately unsuccessful, it was a valiant attempt, and from what I understand we did *very* well for being our first ever 25-man attempt.
In our initial two attempts, we had ice blocked folks spread out across the bottom of the stairs. We learned fairly quickly that they were too spread out in the positions we had them - it was too difficult for the DPS to get all the ice blocks down quickly enough. We moved them in a little closer - just barely far enough apart to prevent them from killing each other when the blocks come down - and we were mostly successful at that portion of the fight. It helped that we had 4-5 druids along (one traded in for a sick hunter in the middle) and 3 shamans, so lots of brezzing.
Other than that, it all essentially came down to execution - don't get too many stacks of damage, kill the ice tombs quickly, and DON'T STAND IN THE RAID when you are targeted for an ice block. We only wiped once to that - we all had a good laugh, because it was an epic wipe-causing mistake. Oddly enough, we determined at this point that if everybody outside the ice tombs dies, the boss and tombs despawn and those in the tombs don't die.
We showed good progress the entire night, with the exception of the ice block incident. By the time we had had enough, we had reached and gotten mostly through the final phase - she had around a million HP left on the last wipe of the night, and the raid leader had called for us to ignore the ice-blocked folks and just burn Sindy as hard as we could. Unfortunately we'd lost too many to gradual attrition at that point, and couldn't keep enough people alive any longer.
Based on our progress, we've been told we may extend the lockout - little more time for a few more shots and I think she would have gone down, and then we can spend time learning the LK fight. I'm impressed with our first night in, although I think 3 nights of raiding in a row might just kill me if we have to keep it up more than a few weeks.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Final Push
.... or the beginning of the end! Or something like that.
Our guild leader has declared that we are making the final push to kill Arthas on our 25-man raids. We are ceasing all alt activity on progression raids (we had been allowing alts through the gunship, then through deathwhisper when we began doing heroic lootship), and are scheduling a 3rd night every week in addition to more serious usage of lockouts to extend raids week to week.
With everything we've been hearing about anticipated dates for Cataclysm, it was decided that this is the time to make a serious push to complete the end game raid of Wrath.
On our first night this week we smashed everything we took a shot at, with the exception of one wipe on Blood Council due to failure to avoid AOE around black balls. Our second night, we have PP, BQL, and Dreamwalker still to go among bosses we have successfully defeated. We hope to get those three and have a go at Sindragosa on the second night.
I didn't post about it last week, but IMO we took a step back - we had a couple of failures on Dreamwalker and took 7 tries to down BQL. I'm hoping that the renewed focus on actually progressing will give folks the oomph to have clean attempts on the second night, and get down, for the first time, everything we have already downed, all in one week.
It's time for us to quit goofing around and get it done!
Our guild leader has declared that we are making the final push to kill Arthas on our 25-man raids. We are ceasing all alt activity on progression raids (we had been allowing alts through the gunship, then through deathwhisper when we began doing heroic lootship), and are scheduling a 3rd night every week in addition to more serious usage of lockouts to extend raids week to week.
With everything we've been hearing about anticipated dates for Cataclysm, it was decided that this is the time to make a serious push to complete the end game raid of Wrath.
On our first night this week we smashed everything we took a shot at, with the exception of one wipe on Blood Council due to failure to avoid AOE around black balls. Our second night, we have PP, BQL, and Dreamwalker still to go among bosses we have successfully defeated. We hope to get those three and have a go at Sindragosa on the second night.
I didn't post about it last week, but IMO we took a step back - we had a couple of failures on Dreamwalker and took 7 tries to down BQL. I'm hoping that the renewed focus on actually progressing will give folks the oomph to have clean attempts on the second night, and get down, for the first time, everything we have already downed, all in one week.
It's time for us to quit goofing around and get it done!
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Teaching the Professor
The only term I could use to properly define the Professor Putricide fight is controlled chaos.
On second thought, I'm not so sure about the controlled part.
We had faced him a few times before, but without much success, never making it to phase 3 and making it through the transition from phase 1 to phase 2 cleanly only a couple of times.
This week was destined to be different...
We smashed through the Lower Spire and Putricide's two... "sons" on the first night without much difficulty. This has been a regular ritual for us for a couple of months now, and the second night started out with a roll through the princes and their queen, and we moved on to the Professor. We've been skipping Dreamwalker the past few weeks even though we've healed her successfully a few times. Our successful strategy has involved 4 tanks, and we've been down two of our regular progression tanks and one of our backups has been spotty on attendance. Since adding me into the mix we have 4 regular progression tanks, with an extremely solid backup Paladin tank and a serviceable backup Druid for a total of 6 tanks geared enough to fill at least an OT slot. Take out 3... and we don't have the tankage necessary. I suppose at this point we might be able to do it with 2 or 3 tanks (putting our best one by himself on one side for the 3 tank setup...) but that's the raid leader's job to decide, not mine.
Where was I? Oh yes, Putricide.
Our typical MT and raid leader took the Abom - I don't have any experience with it and I think it gives him less to pay attention to so he can better direct the raid. I controlled the Professor himself, and our backup Druid - who is usually specced Balance for most of our raids, and is an excellent Boomkin at that - stayed feral but went cat form until the 3rd phase. This was the role I had on our previous attempts, when we had one of our other main progression tanks with us.
Unfortunately I'm turning into an old man, and our report isn't up yet so I can't check it to remember exactly how many times we wiped... but we made it to the 3rd phase if not every time then almost. I know we wiped once to debuff stack buildup (and my craptastic hardware crashing...) and we wiped once more due, in essence, to poor handling of Putricide by us tanks not moving him properly.
We did have an issue on 2-3 of our attempts with having an ooze or gas cloud up during the shift to 3rd phase, which draws DPS away from the boss, giving his slime puddles time to grow. Probably not coincidentally, our successful run had no slime up (and no slime puddles up!) at the time of the shift.
Malleable goos on me were occasionally a problem, but we got that worked out.
In the end, of course, we taught the professor a lesson. What it is, beyond "don't mess with us or we'll let you kill us a few times before we kill you," well, that I don't know.
We had been planning on locking out next week to have more time for attempts on Putricide and maybe Sindragosa, but after a vote revealed a decent chunk of folks that still want/need the gear and marks from the bosses we've downed we decided that we'll do a fresh run next week.
On the upside there is actually some gear to be had for me. One of our raiders took a sojourn through another guild to get a LK kill and then came back, opening up our ability to do heroic lootship, which we did succesfully this week (even though we were all dead at the end). Unfortunately, I lost the roll by 1 to a rogue on the heroic version of Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder. Add in all the additional Marks we'll be pulling, and soon I have no doubt we'll be knocking on the Lich King's door.
Onward, Epic Adventurers!
On second thought, I'm not so sure about the controlled part.
We had faced him a few times before, but without much success, never making it to phase 3 and making it through the transition from phase 1 to phase 2 cleanly only a couple of times.
This week was destined to be different...
We smashed through the Lower Spire and Putricide's two... "sons" on the first night without much difficulty. This has been a regular ritual for us for a couple of months now, and the second night started out with a roll through the princes and their queen, and we moved on to the Professor. We've been skipping Dreamwalker the past few weeks even though we've healed her successfully a few times. Our successful strategy has involved 4 tanks, and we've been down two of our regular progression tanks and one of our backups has been spotty on attendance. Since adding me into the mix we have 4 regular progression tanks, with an extremely solid backup Paladin tank and a serviceable backup Druid for a total of 6 tanks geared enough to fill at least an OT slot. Take out 3... and we don't have the tankage necessary. I suppose at this point we might be able to do it with 2 or 3 tanks (putting our best one by himself on one side for the 3 tank setup...) but that's the raid leader's job to decide, not mine.
Where was I? Oh yes, Putricide.
Our typical MT and raid leader took the Abom - I don't have any experience with it and I think it gives him less to pay attention to so he can better direct the raid. I controlled the Professor himself, and our backup Druid - who is usually specced Balance for most of our raids, and is an excellent Boomkin at that - stayed feral but went cat form until the 3rd phase. This was the role I had on our previous attempts, when we had one of our other main progression tanks with us.
Unfortunately I'm turning into an old man, and our report isn't up yet so I can't check it to remember exactly how many times we wiped... but we made it to the 3rd phase if not every time then almost. I know we wiped once to debuff stack buildup (and my craptastic hardware crashing...) and we wiped once more due, in essence, to poor handling of Putricide by us tanks not moving him properly.
We did have an issue on 2-3 of our attempts with having an ooze or gas cloud up during the shift to 3rd phase, which draws DPS away from the boss, giving his slime puddles time to grow. Probably not coincidentally, our successful run had no slime up (and no slime puddles up!) at the time of the shift.
Malleable goos on me were occasionally a problem, but we got that worked out.
In the end, of course, we taught the professor a lesson. What it is, beyond "don't mess with us or we'll let you kill us a few times before we kill you," well, that I don't know.
We had been planning on locking out next week to have more time for attempts on Putricide and maybe Sindragosa, but after a vote revealed a decent chunk of folks that still want/need the gear and marks from the bosses we've downed we decided that we'll do a fresh run next week.
On the upside there is actually some gear to be had for me. One of our raiders took a sojourn through another guild to get a LK kill and then came back, opening up our ability to do heroic lootship, which we did succesfully this week (even though we were all dead at the end). Unfortunately, I lost the roll by 1 to a rogue on the heroic version of Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder. Add in all the additional Marks we'll be pulling, and soon I have no doubt we'll be knocking on the Lich King's door.
Onward, Epic Adventurers!
Friday, August 27, 2010
Once Bitten, Twice Cheesy... and also, MOAR DOTS!
Ok, so I can't help myself with the cheesy achievement title ripoffs for post titles.
One week after our first ever BQL kill, we downed her again - this time I was DPSing, and picked up the Achievement for being both bitten and not. Despite this, I was mildly disappointed in the run. Even after we down a boss the first time, I expect the next few times we kill it to continue to be difficult, especially if we rotate in new/less geared/less skilled/whatever players. We did wipe once, due to bite issues and an early DPS death, but the second attempt saw her down with 5s left on the enrage timer - an eternity compared to our first kill - without any real drama. Am I being silly, thinking that it should still be a challenge for another few kills after the first? Or perhaps for thinking that it WASN'T a challenge the second time around? Or maybe even just for being disappointed? I don't know.
Even so, I'm still very pleased. We had issues with disconnects (not during the fight) and such all night, and still managed to deal with things and get the run as far as we were going to get it.
On the upside, since we hadn't got Fester and Rot the first night, we went to do them and I stayed all feline-ish and managed on Fester to place 2nd on our DPS chart. I'm certainly pleased with myself for it - even if a couple of our heavy hitters weren't quite doing what they could, the fact that I was even in the ballpark is impressive to me. Someone who doesn't normally DPS outside of raids, hasn't really DPSed at all in several weeks, and even then was not quite in the top rank having just started doing this a couple of months ago... yeah, I was happy.
I can't remember if I've said it before, and I'm too lazy to go looking through my archives to find out, but pretty much the most difficult thing for me to learn, to get my DPS to the next level, has been that there are times as a Feral Cat that the best thing to do is NOTHING AT ALL.
When I first started, I was unknowingly locked into the idea that the way to increase DPS was to constantly be hitting buttons - obviously, if you're doing something with your energy you're doing more DPS than if you're not, right? And that's true... for every individual second in time. But when you look at the whole...
It becomes a delicate balancing act between available energy, combo points, buffs, and debuffs. It becomes very easy to mash buttons to get MOAR DPS NOW!! but then, in 10 seconds when you need to rebuild your combo points very quickly after your Savage Roar so you don't lose uptime on your Rip, you don't have the energy to Shred in quick succession to do so, and it becomes better to just sit and watch white damage - which should be, by around a 10% margin, the biggest percentage of your DPS anyway - so that when you need that burst, you have the energy to do so.
Something else that it's taken me awhile to really understand is that when the priority system says "keep up Savage Roar" at the top, it really means that we need that buff up no matter what. Don't wait for 5 CP, don't force another ability off first, just make sure that buff stays up, because it buffs every single thing you do. If that means hitting it with 1 CP, so be it - but understand that you're going to need to do it again fairly quickly in that situation, and be prepared for it.
To critique what I did wrong on that fight, that I could do better:
92% uptime on Savage Roar. I spent 21 seconds of the fight without my most important self-buff. Need to be more precise.
91.6% uptime on Rake. 22.5 seconds downtime is too much. I also clipped this several times - poor energy efficiency.
80.1% uptime on Rip. 48 seconds downtime. While it's expected that there will be a *little* more downtime here - you need to build up CP at the beginning of the fight for this - it's still too much downtime. 20% of the fight I didn't have it going. Have to be careful with clipping here as well, although I've noticed that for some reason it occasionally won't let me clip it.
It's hard to tell, in retrospect, if I had proper use of Berserk and Mangle - I only used Mangle twice and we had a couple of warriors who were keeping Trauma up, and I used Berserk the maximum twice allowed by the enrage timer. Given the warriors I probably should have skipped Mangle altogether, although it's entirely possible I just fat-fingered it a couple of times, as it's right next to Shred.
Hope that was a helpful look at things for somebody.
Anyway, I also managed to pick up a couple of pieces to keep my healing set from falling waaaay too far behind, just in case I'm ever called on to really respec for it or I decide its time to go back. Not spending frosties on it, at least not until I have all my crafted patterns bought, but I'm still trying to keep a reasonable set together.
We didn't get a chance to go after PP - we didn't push hard for progression this week. Next week after we down our usual crew we're looking at locking out for a second week, to get good shots at PP and Sindy in.
One week after our first ever BQL kill, we downed her again - this time I was DPSing, and picked up the Achievement for being both bitten and not. Despite this, I was mildly disappointed in the run. Even after we down a boss the first time, I expect the next few times we kill it to continue to be difficult, especially if we rotate in new/less geared/less skilled/whatever players. We did wipe once, due to bite issues and an early DPS death, but the second attempt saw her down with 5s left on the enrage timer - an eternity compared to our first kill - without any real drama. Am I being silly, thinking that it should still be a challenge for another few kills after the first? Or perhaps for thinking that it WASN'T a challenge the second time around? Or maybe even just for being disappointed? I don't know.
Even so, I'm still very pleased. We had issues with disconnects (not during the fight) and such all night, and still managed to deal with things and get the run as far as we were going to get it.
On the upside, since we hadn't got Fester and Rot the first night, we went to do them and I stayed all feline-ish and managed on Fester to place 2nd on our DPS chart. I'm certainly pleased with myself for it - even if a couple of our heavy hitters weren't quite doing what they could, the fact that I was even in the ballpark is impressive to me. Someone who doesn't normally DPS outside of raids, hasn't really DPSed at all in several weeks, and even then was not quite in the top rank having just started doing this a couple of months ago... yeah, I was happy.
I can't remember if I've said it before, and I'm too lazy to go looking through my archives to find out, but pretty much the most difficult thing for me to learn, to get my DPS to the next level, has been that there are times as a Feral Cat that the best thing to do is NOTHING AT ALL.
When I first started, I was unknowingly locked into the idea that the way to increase DPS was to constantly be hitting buttons - obviously, if you're doing something with your energy you're doing more DPS than if you're not, right? And that's true... for every individual second in time. But when you look at the whole...
It becomes a delicate balancing act between available energy, combo points, buffs, and debuffs. It becomes very easy to mash buttons to get MOAR DPS NOW!! but then, in 10 seconds when you need to rebuild your combo points very quickly after your Savage Roar so you don't lose uptime on your Rip, you don't have the energy to Shred in quick succession to do so, and it becomes better to just sit and watch white damage - which should be, by around a 10% margin, the biggest percentage of your DPS anyway - so that when you need that burst, you have the energy to do so.
Something else that it's taken me awhile to really understand is that when the priority system says "keep up Savage Roar" at the top, it really means that we need that buff up no matter what. Don't wait for 5 CP, don't force another ability off first, just make sure that buff stays up, because it buffs every single thing you do. If that means hitting it with 1 CP, so be it - but understand that you're going to need to do it again fairly quickly in that situation, and be prepared for it.
To critique what I did wrong on that fight, that I could do better:
92% uptime on Savage Roar. I spent 21 seconds of the fight without my most important self-buff. Need to be more precise.
91.6% uptime on Rake. 22.5 seconds downtime is too much. I also clipped this several times - poor energy efficiency.
80.1% uptime on Rip. 48 seconds downtime. While it's expected that there will be a *little* more downtime here - you need to build up CP at the beginning of the fight for this - it's still too much downtime. 20% of the fight I didn't have it going. Have to be careful with clipping here as well, although I've noticed that for some reason it occasionally won't let me clip it.
It's hard to tell, in retrospect, if I had proper use of Berserk and Mangle - I only used Mangle twice and we had a couple of warriors who were keeping Trauma up, and I used Berserk the maximum twice allowed by the enrage timer. Given the warriors I probably should have skipped Mangle altogether, although it's entirely possible I just fat-fingered it a couple of times, as it's right next to Shred.
Hope that was a helpful look at things for somebody.
Anyway, I also managed to pick up a couple of pieces to keep my healing set from falling waaaay too far behind, just in case I'm ever called on to really respec for it or I decide its time to go back. Not spending frosties on it, at least not until I have all my crafted patterns bought, but I'm still trying to keep a reasonable set together.
We didn't get a chance to go after PP - we didn't push hard for progression this week. Next week after we down our usual crew we're looking at locking out for a second week, to get good shots at PP and Sindy in.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
How to 22-man Lower Spire
Step 1: Have a regularly-scheduled 25-man raid.
Step 2: Have a couple of your regular players be in the military and get deployed.
Step 3: Have a couple of your regular players get married. To each other! (GRATS to Trukaos and Daphne)
Step 4: Have a couple of your regular players out for a few weeks while they deal with having to move from Kentucky to New Jersey.
Step 5: Have a couple of your regular players take a pre-Cata/RL overload/etc. break.
Step 6: Have one of your regular players have random company at their house.
Step 7: Show up to said regularly-scheduled 25 man raid, with only 22 players available.
Step 8: Love the 30% buff. Faceroll through Saurfang.
Step 9: ???
Step 10: Profit
Step 2: Have a couple of your regular players be in the military and get deployed.
Step 3: Have a couple of your regular players get married. To each other! (GRATS to Trukaos and Daphne)
Step 4: Have a couple of your regular players out for a few weeks while they deal with having to move from Kentucky to New Jersey.
Step 5: Have a couple of your regular players take a pre-Cata/RL overload/etc. break.
Step 6: Have one of your regular players have random company at their house.
Step 7: Show up to said regularly-scheduled 25 man raid, with only 22 players available.
Step 8: Love the 30% buff. Faceroll through Saurfang.
Step 9: ???
Step 10: Profit
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
And then there were two...
Two bosses between EA and the Lich King.
After a few false starts, tonight the Blood Queen fell to the might of the Epic Adventurers!!
We had wipes at 6m HP left, 4m HP left, and 2m HP left (as well as a couple of "oops the first bite died"), but in the end we were successful.
Nice job everyone, now lets get Putricide and Sindy.
Edit: Now that it's morning, and my brain is caffeinated again...
In the end, of course, it all came down to execution. No DPS deaths due to:
1. Not biting in time.
2. Biting too early (and thus messing up and running away in fear during the NEXT bite phase).
3. Not being able to bite due to location/bug/etc.
4. Standing too close when she makes it rain.
5. Standing in fire.
6. Not getting close fast enough when connected by red lines.
...and only one healer death, who was promptly rebirthed. Our regular crew includes 4 druids; if a battle-rez will fix it, we're usually good.
The only sad part, IMO, is that even with the 30% Strength of Wrynn buff we only had 3 seconds left before her Berserk. Sheesh.
Our 10-man progression crew has killed the Lich King, and from what they've said and what I've read, the Sindragosa and Lich King fights are even more unforgiving of mistakes than this one. It'll be a long hard road, but I'm sure we'll get it done.
After a few false starts, tonight the Blood Queen fell to the might of the Epic Adventurers!!
We had wipes at 6m HP left, 4m HP left, and 2m HP left (as well as a couple of "oops the first bite died"), but in the end we were successful.
Nice job everyone, now lets get Putricide and Sindy.
Edit: Now that it's morning, and my brain is caffeinated again...
In the end, of course, it all came down to execution. No DPS deaths due to:
1. Not biting in time.
2. Biting too early (and thus messing up and running away in fear during the NEXT bite phase).
3. Not being able to bite due to location/bug/etc.
4. Standing too close when she makes it rain.
5. Standing in fire.
6. Not getting close fast enough when connected by red lines.
...and only one healer death, who was promptly rebirthed. Our regular crew includes 4 druids; if a battle-rez will fix it, we're usually good.
The only sad part, IMO, is that even with the 30% Strength of Wrynn buff we only had 3 seconds left before her Berserk. Sheesh.
Our 10-man progression crew has killed the Lich King, and from what they've said and what I've read, the Sindragosa and Lich King fights are even more unforgiving of mistakes than this one. It'll be a long hard road, but I'm sure we'll get it done.
I'm on a BOAT!
*smiles* I stood in the middle of *OUR* boat and swiped/mauled for 5 minutes straight. I guess that's worthy of an achievement? I dunno, but I lol'd anyway.
The Blood Queen escaped last week - some of our team really hasn't figured out how to bite the proper DPS, or stay far enough apart not to die when she rains fire down upon us. Or something like that. In any case, we didn't get as close as we did the week before. But another venture tonight, I hope, will provide the cure!
The good news is that instead of having Dreamwalker and Blood Princes still up, only Dreamwalker remains this week among bosses we have downed. We 24-manned her last week, so even if we are down a player or two I don't expect a problem there this week, and we can spend most of the night working on Blood Queen and/or Putricide.
On a completely unrelated note, my daughter starting teething while we were at GenCon 2 weeks ago. She's got 2 on the bottom, and (we think) one through on the top... and she's been amazingly not hard to deal with the entire time.
Before you know it she'll be driving the boys wild! ;)
The Blood Queen escaped last week - some of our team really hasn't figured out how to bite the proper DPS, or stay far enough apart not to die when she rains fire down upon us. Or something like that. In any case, we didn't get as close as we did the week before. But another venture tonight, I hope, will provide the cure!
The good news is that instead of having Dreamwalker and Blood Princes still up, only Dreamwalker remains this week among bosses we have downed. We 24-manned her last week, so even if we are down a player or two I don't expect a problem there this week, and we can spend most of the night working on Blood Queen and/or Putricide.
On a completely unrelated note, my daughter starting teething while we were at GenCon 2 weeks ago. She's got 2 on the bottom, and (we think) one through on the top... and she's been amazingly not hard to deal with the entire time.
Before you know it she'll be driving the boys wild! ;)
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Wish us luck
So I'm back from GenCon all ready to go, we downed our usual Lower Spire + Fester and Rot last night (and on only my 3rd time tanking Rotface, first time on 25, first time truly tanking the slimes!), and we're going in again tonight. We'll probably go after the Princes and then Dreamwalker before giving the Blood Queen another shot.
Last week we wiped with her at 1% and 0.1% (She had 620 HP remaining. Yep.) so I'm confident we'll get her tonight! Wish us luck!
Last week we wiped with her at 1% and 0.1% (She had 620 HP remaining. Yep.) so I'm confident we'll get her tonight! Wish us luck!
Monday, August 2, 2010
Comings and Goings
It's fun to have a title for a post that sounds really really interesting but the post is nothing important. Although I don't think I can afford to piss any of my (2) readers off....
Anyway, we had some trouble last week (already down a tank and then my cable went out) so we decided to extend our ICC-25 lock out for this week. Wish us luck - while we've downed (upped?) Dreamwalker once, it's the only boss remaining that we HAVE actually completed.
In other news, this will probably be a lighter-than-usual week for me, since I'm headed off to GenCon with the wife and little one Thursday, and won't be back until Sunday afternoon.
Thanks folks, and I'll be back!
Anyway, we had some trouble last week (already down a tank and then my cable went out) so we decided to extend our ICC-25 lock out for this week. Wish us luck - while we've downed (upped?) Dreamwalker once, it's the only boss remaining that we HAVE actually completed.
In other news, this will probably be a lighter-than-usual week for me, since I'm headed off to GenCon with the wife and little one Thursday, and won't be back until Sunday afternoon.
Thanks folks, and I'll be back!
Friday, July 23, 2010
I AM RENEWED!
a.k.a. That Stupid Green Dragon, redux.
Inevitably, I post things that are innacurate.
My last post went up early this past Thursday morning at its predetermined time. I tend to use Blogger's post options to set posts to appear a day or two after I write them to give me time to reread and edit them should I find errors or sections that I feel have been written poorly.
An unfortunate consequence of this is that when I post things like status updates about my guild's raids, if I write them early in the week and set them to post Wednesday or Thursday morning, it means that my guild has a chance to prove me wrong.
Such it is that now (Thursday morning as I write this, mere minutes after my previous post went up,) we are no longer stumbling over that stupid green dragon.
The fact is not lost on me that the Strength of Wrynn buff now stands at 30%, which makes several of the fights we would probably STILL be on the edge of beating go from difficult but beatable to laughably easy. One comment that came over vent on Tuesday after we downed Saurfang was, 'remember when this guy was HARD?' It would still be incredibly difficult if we didn't have that buff, I think. It has, IMO, kind of reached the level of insanity, though. I popped Survival Instincts and cracked 116k HP. One hundred sixteen thousand.
Not that I'm really complaining... if it allows us to see content that we would otherwise not be able to even attempt, I'm all for it.
Back to the dragon. We went again with a 4-tank setup with 6 healers, 3 of whom went the portals every time and 3 of whom did not. My little corner of the room had relatively few spawns until the end, and most of them that weren't Suppressors were zombies, so I spent a lot of my time being an agile little angry bear and running around trying not to get too many stacks of Corrosion until the DPS could take care of the zombie. We wiped once due to the DPS curve, and then healed her just as things were starting to get out of hand again.
PROGRESS feels so great.
We moved on to try Putricide instead of the Blood Queen, and while we did get better in general through the night we were unable to succeed in the kill. We seem to be still on the curve of success in the DPS department, and one DPS falling over to an orange slime (Gas Cloud?) or green slime (Volatile Ooze?) kills us in the long run because we can't continue to get them down fast enough to keep damage up on Putricide himself. But much like Blood Queen, we were getting better, and I think that in a few week we'll be working on Sindy.
We have now completed every boss but the main wing bosses (Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa) and the Lich King himself.
RAWR!!
Edit: and this was not supposed to go live until tomorrow morning, but I clicked "Publish" before I set the time. I am a Fail Blogger.
Inevitably, I post things that are innacurate.
My last post went up early this past Thursday morning at its predetermined time. I tend to use Blogger's post options to set posts to appear a day or two after I write them to give me time to reread and edit them should I find errors or sections that I feel have been written poorly.
An unfortunate consequence of this is that when I post things like status updates about my guild's raids, if I write them early in the week and set them to post Wednesday or Thursday morning, it means that my guild has a chance to prove me wrong.
Such it is that now (Thursday morning as I write this, mere minutes after my previous post went up,) we are no longer stumbling over that stupid green dragon.
The fact is not lost on me that the Strength of Wrynn buff now stands at 30%, which makes several of the fights we would probably STILL be on the edge of beating go from difficult but beatable to laughably easy. One comment that came over vent on Tuesday after we downed Saurfang was, 'remember when this guy was HARD?' It would still be incredibly difficult if we didn't have that buff, I think. It has, IMO, kind of reached the level of insanity, though. I popped Survival Instincts and cracked 116k HP. One hundred sixteen thousand.
Not that I'm really complaining... if it allows us to see content that we would otherwise not be able to even attempt, I'm all for it.
Back to the dragon. We went again with a 4-tank setup with 6 healers, 3 of whom went the portals every time and 3 of whom did not. My little corner of the room had relatively few spawns until the end, and most of them that weren't Suppressors were zombies, so I spent a lot of my time being an agile little angry bear and running around trying not to get too many stacks of Corrosion until the DPS could take care of the zombie. We wiped once due to the DPS curve, and then healed her just as things were starting to get out of hand again.
PROGRESS feels so great.
We moved on to try Putricide instead of the Blood Queen, and while we did get better in general through the night we were unable to succeed in the kill. We seem to be still on the curve of success in the DPS department, and one DPS falling over to an orange slime (Gas Cloud?) or green slime (Volatile Ooze?) kills us in the long run because we can't continue to get them down fast enough to keep damage up on Putricide himself. But much like Blood Queen, we were getting better, and I think that in a few week we'll be working on Sindy.
We have now completed every boss but the main wing bosses (Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa) and the Lich King himself.
RAWR!!
Edit: and this was not supposed to go live until tomorrow morning, but I clicked "Publish" before I set the time. I am a Fail Blogger.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
That Stupid Green Dragon
So in the absence of one of our progression tanks I've had quite a few opportunities over the past month or so to tank on our progression runs. Whatever our leadership had decided was holding me back from at least being a fill-in for our progression tanks has at least to a certain extent been abated, and as near as I can tell, we have our 3 main progression tanks and the 4th (fill-in) spot is run by 3-player committee based on who is available for the run and which role each of them prefers. The short version is that with one of our tanks just now returning from a bit of a hiatus, I've had a lot of chances to do that thing I do.
It's been a heck of a lot of fun.
EA has progressed to the point where we almost always 1-shot the first 6 bosses in ICC (through Saurfang plus Festergut and Rotface), and we've got the Blood Princes down to two shots, max.
I like the Blood Prince fight. There's a lot of insanity going on, but for the most part it's survivable insanity, as long as you are at least mildly situationally aware. I've only had the opportunity to tank the fight once, and I had Keleseth (or Taldaram... whichever one is not the one that requires you to run around collecting balloons... on second thought I *think* it's Taldaram) for the duration. Tanking that prince is a piece of cake. I've also had the opportunity to DPS it a time or two, and it's a bit rough on feral DPS, but it's still fun. Feral Charge comes in handy for target switching.
The past couple of weeks we've taken a couple shots at Putricide and Blood Queen. Putricide was insanity, but we only tried him once or twice. Blood Queen is fun - I think we'll get her in a week or two with a few more upgrades and a bit of patience and another couple times to figure out how all that biting stuff works.
We are, however, still stumbling over healing the Dreamwalker, which we've been putting the most work into over the past month and a half or so. We've tried going healer-heavy (which failed miserably), we've tried taking in a 2-tank team with normal healer count (which did even worse), and I think we've finally settled on a plan we believe will work - she was healed to 91% on our best attempt.
We went light 1 healer (bringing 6), and went with four tanks, one specifically for each doorway. The added tanks gives us better control over the adds as well as the opportunity to have a little extra time to handle adds because they're beating on a tank instead of DPS or heals. We are *slightly* slower downing the adds, but since we have the extra tanks it's not quite as big a deal. It does seem to matter more when a DPS dies (as we are more on the edge of the DPS curve for survivability), but it matters a little less for most of the adds to die quite as quickly. I am hopeful that we'll have this fight down within a couple of weeks as well.
That's the state of EA progression raids. Hope everything's going well with your guild's raids.
It's been a heck of a lot of fun.
EA has progressed to the point where we almost always 1-shot the first 6 bosses in ICC (through Saurfang plus Festergut and Rotface), and we've got the Blood Princes down to two shots, max.
I like the Blood Prince fight. There's a lot of insanity going on, but for the most part it's survivable insanity, as long as you are at least mildly situationally aware. I've only had the opportunity to tank the fight once, and I had Keleseth (or Taldaram... whichever one is not the one that requires you to run around collecting balloons... on second thought I *think* it's Taldaram) for the duration. Tanking that prince is a piece of cake. I've also had the opportunity to DPS it a time or two, and it's a bit rough on feral DPS, but it's still fun. Feral Charge comes in handy for target switching.
The past couple of weeks we've taken a couple shots at Putricide and Blood Queen. Putricide was insanity, but we only tried him once or twice. Blood Queen is fun - I think we'll get her in a week or two with a few more upgrades and a bit of patience and another couple times to figure out how all that biting stuff works.
We are, however, still stumbling over healing the Dreamwalker, which we've been putting the most work into over the past month and a half or so. We've tried going healer-heavy (which failed miserably), we've tried taking in a 2-tank team with normal healer count (which did even worse), and I think we've finally settled on a plan we believe will work - she was healed to 91% on our best attempt.
We went light 1 healer (bringing 6), and went with four tanks, one specifically for each doorway. The added tanks gives us better control over the adds as well as the opportunity to have a little extra time to handle adds because they're beating on a tank instead of DPS or heals. We are *slightly* slower downing the adds, but since we have the extra tanks it's not quite as big a deal. It does seem to matter more when a DPS dies (as we are more on the edge of the DPS curve for survivability), but it matters a little less for most of the adds to die quite as quickly. I am hopeful that we'll have this fight down within a couple of weeks as well.
That's the state of EA progression raids. Hope everything's going well with your guild's raids.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Kae Needs a New PC
Epic Adventurers went after Blood Princes for the first time on 25-man this week, and downed them on the 2nd try.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it, because my PC locked up with less than 500k health left to remove.
Yay!
Boo!
All we have left is Dreamwalker, Blood Queen, Putricide, Sindy, and the King.
Onward, heroes!
Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it, because my PC locked up with less than 500k health left to remove.
Yay!
Boo!
All we have left is Dreamwalker, Blood Queen, Putricide, Sindy, and the King.
Onward, heroes!
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Little Druid that Could
Awhile back I was running some regular commentary about my guild and the progress we'd been making in ICC and whatever other random game or real life thought crossed my mind. Well... I figure since I took more than a month to write the first post of my Kitty primer I should ramble on awhile about what's been going on, starting, of course, with the most important person on the planet...
WARNING: POOPY DIAPERS AHEAD!
Kaethir's Cub
My little one was born, of course, back near the end of March. She's grown from the measly 6lb 3oz she was at birth to a whopping 10lb 7oz as of a week or so ago... Needs more meat on her bones, she's not gonna tank any bosses at that size!
She's doing great, no jaundice or major problems, and she's been sleeping through the night almost since the day my wife went back to work. She's been "talking" for awhile now, smiling and giggling and generally making our lives wonderful.
Not to say she's perfect, but, well, she's perfect! She has of course the times that she decides to poop while you're changing her diaper... four times in a row... but I couldn't have asked for a better infant. The few times she's cried there's always been a reasonable reason (gas, constipation, or the doctor sticking her with a giant needle) and so far she's just been a wondrous little miracle.
Sorry, I'm a new Dad, sometimes I just have to get mushy about her.
Movies
I don't recall mentioning much of anything about movies before, but I enjoy good Sci-Fi, Adventure, and Action flicks as much as the next person and I wanted to mention that Iron Man 2 and Avatar are both really good films that have come out in the last few months. You should see them, or so I would have you believe.
Also, I saw an advertisement for The Expendables. Anything with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Terry Crews is going to be either really, really good, or really, phenomenally bad. I'm cautiously optimistic.
One final note on movies and then I'll quit. In a moment of masochism I decided to DVR Transmorphers when I saw it on Encore. I noticed this littlegem pile of awful awhile back in Blockbuster. Incidentally, it came out a little before Transformers, which was an infinitely better movie. I watched about 20-30 minutes of it (that I can't get back) before deciding that there was no redeeming quality to it, at all. IMHO, and in no particular order, it had bad acting, directing, casting, special effects, music, choreography, and writing, and the plot (which seemed like some inane mashup of the Matrix and Transformers) had to have been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee. Save yourself.
Epic Adventurers and ICC
On with the show.
When last we left ourimpaled imperiled heroes, Epic Adventurers had finally downed Deathbringer Saurfang in 25-man mode. We've had a few changes to our raiding schedule since then, but we've continued to press onward.
Our progression 10-man team (which I, unfortunately, am unable to participate in) has downed Festergut, Rotface, and the Blood Princes, while our 25-man team is regularly one-shotting the first 6 bosses (through Saurfang, plus Festergut and Rotface) in one night.
We run a fun/alt 10-man run on Sunday nights, which regularly clears through Saurfang. The group I led in this past Sunday took a couple of shots at Rotface but couldn't pull it off.
I have been learning more and more about the intricacies of playing a Feral DPS, and I've had occasional opportunities to tank even on our 25-man runs, which has been a blast for me. I've been topping 8k DPS against Saurfang, without optimizing my gems. I share some gear between my sets, so it's impractical to completely optimize for either, and I think I've done well with the limitations I have.
The big team is currently stumbling over the Dreamwalker. The strategy we've been employing is to have just 2 tanks to hold down the baddies, each one generally hanging out at the point of the wall in between the spawn points on each side of the green dragon, with the melee DPS roughly divided up between the sides and the ranged DPS and heals more or less roaming around the middle, assisting wherever it is needed. Owing to the nature of the fight, we've been running a little healer heavy.
We seem to be having some difficulty keeping up. I'm not entirely certain where the problem is. This is complicated by the fact that due to my reduced raiding schedule, I'm not there every week.
It has been suggested to me that we should use 3-4 tanks, split up the DPS more, and engage the Adds closer to their spawn points. I'm a little leery of the idea, but I may propose it to our raid leader as something to try. I'm sure we'll get it figured out soon.
Two posts in three days? Is the ground getting cold for anybody else?
WARNING: POOPY DIAPERS AHEAD!
Kaethir's Cub
My little one was born, of course, back near the end of March. She's grown from the measly 6lb 3oz she was at birth to a whopping 10lb 7oz as of a week or so ago... Needs more meat on her bones, she's not gonna tank any bosses at that size!
She's doing great, no jaundice or major problems, and she's been sleeping through the night almost since the day my wife went back to work. She's been "talking" for awhile now, smiling and giggling and generally making our lives wonderful.
Not to say she's perfect, but, well, she's perfect! She has of course the times that she decides to poop while you're changing her diaper... four times in a row... but I couldn't have asked for a better infant. The few times she's cried there's always been a reasonable reason (gas, constipation, or the doctor sticking her with a giant needle) and so far she's just been a wondrous little miracle.
Sorry, I'm a new Dad, sometimes I just have to get mushy about her.
Movies
I don't recall mentioning much of anything about movies before, but I enjoy good Sci-Fi, Adventure, and Action flicks as much as the next person and I wanted to mention that Iron Man 2 and Avatar are both really good films that have come out in the last few months. You should see them, or so I would have you believe.
Also, I saw an advertisement for The Expendables. Anything with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Terry Crews is going to be either really, really good, or really, phenomenally bad. I'm cautiously optimistic.
One final note on movies and then I'll quit. In a moment of masochism I decided to DVR Transmorphers when I saw it on Encore. I noticed this little
Epic Adventurers and ICC
On with the show.
When last we left our
Our progression 10-man team (which I, unfortunately, am unable to participate in) has downed Festergut, Rotface, and the Blood Princes, while our 25-man team is regularly one-shotting the first 6 bosses (through Saurfang, plus Festergut and Rotface) in one night.
We run a fun/alt 10-man run on Sunday nights, which regularly clears through Saurfang. The group I led in this past Sunday took a couple of shots at Rotface but couldn't pull it off.
I have been learning more and more about the intricacies of playing a Feral DPS, and I've had occasional opportunities to tank even on our 25-man runs, which has been a blast for me. I've been topping 8k DPS against Saurfang, without optimizing my gems. I share some gear between my sets, so it's impractical to completely optimize for either, and I think I've done well with the limitations I have.
The big team is currently stumbling over the Dreamwalker. The strategy we've been employing is to have just 2 tanks to hold down the baddies, each one generally hanging out at the point of the wall in between the spawn points on each side of the green dragon, with the melee DPS roughly divided up between the sides and the ranged DPS and heals more or less roaming around the middle, assisting wherever it is needed. Owing to the nature of the fight, we've been running a little healer heavy.
We seem to be having some difficulty keeping up. I'm not entirely certain where the problem is. This is complicated by the fact that due to my reduced raiding schedule, I'm not there every week.
It has been suggested to me that we should use 3-4 tanks, split up the DPS more, and engage the Adds closer to their spawn points. I'm a little leery of the idea, but I may propose it to our raid leader as something to try. I'm sure we'll get it figured out soon.
Two posts in three days? Is the ground getting cold for anybody else?
Friday, March 12, 2010
Oddities
I attempted to point out in my last post that my guild achieved I've Gone and Made a Mess on our last venture into 25-man ICC, a fact for which I am proud - it was only our second Saurfang kill, and only our second attempt that night.
I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.
So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.
We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run. I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan. Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase. So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.
He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.
Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.
He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.
I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt. I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there. I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs. Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.
Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle. I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow. I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times. Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%). Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.
I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake. I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.
All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.
Thanks for reading!
I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.
So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.
We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run. I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan. Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase. So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.
He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.
Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.
He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.
I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt. I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there. I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs. Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.
Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle. I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow. I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times. Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%). Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.
I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake. I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.
All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.
Thanks for reading!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Progress Once Again!
I have no time to write!
The impending birth of my first child and pressure to finish my project at work mean that I can't spend a lot of time commenting on blogs or writing my own posts!
However...
I have just enough time this morning to report that Epic Adventurers has finally defeated Deathbringer Saurfang in his 25-man incarnation!
We made it to him this past Wednesday with enough time for 3-4 shots before we would have to stop for the night.
Our first attempt got him down to 18%. Our second, we were doing fairly well until he decided to start picking on our healers with Mark of the Fallen Champion, and even then, we got him down to TWO PERCENT before we were overwhelmed.
One of our hunters had to leave, and we replaced with a Shaman. The third attempt of the night was the charm - we got spammed by achievements... and then got spammed by a guildmate, whose addon congratulates guildmates for achievements.
A couple quick notes - we ran 2 tanks and 6 healers for the fight. I can't speak for any of our other healers, but personally, until the first set of beasts came out and for quite a few of the gaps in between beasts, I was dropping out of tree and using Moonfire and Starfire to help out with the DPS on Saurfang himself. Actually, for about to first 50-60% of his health, I was healing only minimally, when the beasts came out. We simply didn't need 6 healers at that point. Believe me, every little bit helps when you're struggling on that fight. It was about the 2nd or 3rd Mark that I had to stay in tree form almost exclusively.
There was much rejoicing!
The impending birth of my first child and pressure to finish my project at work mean that I can't spend a lot of time commenting on blogs or writing my own posts!
However...
I have just enough time this morning to report that Epic Adventurers has finally defeated Deathbringer Saurfang in his 25-man incarnation!
We made it to him this past Wednesday with enough time for 3-4 shots before we would have to stop for the night.
Our first attempt got him down to 18%. Our second, we were doing fairly well until he decided to start picking on our healers with Mark of the Fallen Champion, and even then, we got him down to TWO PERCENT before we were overwhelmed.
One of our hunters had to leave, and we replaced with a Shaman. The third attempt of the night was the charm - we got spammed by achievements... and then got spammed by a guildmate, whose addon congratulates guildmates for achievements.
A couple quick notes - we ran 2 tanks and 6 healers for the fight. I can't speak for any of our other healers, but personally, until the first set of beasts came out and for quite a few of the gaps in between beasts, I was dropping out of tree and using Moonfire and Starfire to help out with the DPS on Saurfang himself. Actually, for about to first 50-60% of his health, I was healing only minimally, when the beasts came out. We simply didn't need 6 healers at that point. Believe me, every little bit helps when you're struggling on that fight. It was about the 2nd or 3rd Mark that I had to stay in tree form almost exclusively.
There was much rejoicing!
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