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!
Showing posts with label strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label strategy. Show all posts
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Chumpavon the Ice Failure
Am I the only one disappointed with the Toravon fight... and, well, most of what Blizzard has done lately?
Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might. The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.
When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep. As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves. Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.
Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep. By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places. The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock. Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock. I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.
I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not. Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup. We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:
"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."
... and that's really all it took. Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.
VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one. IT'S A JOKE! I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!
Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might. The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.
When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep. As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves. Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.
Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep. By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places. The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock. Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock. I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.
I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not. Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup. We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:
"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."
... and that's really all it took. Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.
VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one. IT'S A JOKE! I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!
Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Icecrown Ramblings, Part 2
So there's been a little hubbub lately (at least over at I Sheep Things..., I thought there were others but my brain fails me at the most inopportune times) over how to go after the escape from the Lich King encounter in Halls of Reflection. I thought I'd throw my $.02 into the ring on this little thing.
For those that didn't just go read the post I linked, or have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain. Everybody else can skip the next paragraph (or two).
In this, the last encounter of the three Icecrown Citadel 5-man instances, you come upon Jaina Proudmoore fighting (and losing) to Arthas. She freezes him temporarily, then you, your crew, and Jaina must escape from him before he catches you and turns you into some mindless slavering undead minion to go out and make more mindless slavering undead minions. As you run away, Arthas throws up ice walls and summons bad guys to kill you, and you must beat them as Jaina breaks down the walls - which she does, conveniently, just as you beat each wave.
What Rhii refers to as an exploit and I will refer to simply as the cheesy way to do things is that you can apparently run off to the side after you start the encounter, let Arthas meander his way past, and fight the bad guys without him sneaking up behind you.
In case you didn't get the idea from that last paragraph, I think this is just silly. Let me explain. Please take my comments with a grain of salt - I've not experimented with this, but I'll make some assumptions (yes I know) about what goes on from what I've read.
First, although this was initially not the case, there is no advantage time-wise to running the encounter this way - you still have a limited amount of time to beat each wave or Arthas catches Jaina and you all die. So advantage: push.
Second, although reports differ on how the adds spawn when you are following Arthas instead of leading him, there's at least a chance that the adds spawn in the middle of your party. In case you have your head under a rock, that's a nightmare for a tank. When leading, the adds spawn by Arthas, and while the ghouls jump a long distance and land in a semi-random pattern, you can see them coming and prepare, and the other adds run in - giving the tank a point of contact to gather them up. While this might mean that the DPS has to wait half a second to go crazy on them, it also reduces the chance of random spawn on healer causing wipes. Advantage: non-cheesy way.
Third, the most common reason I hear folks say for doing it the cheesy way is that it's easier. I can't make a definitive personal comparison because I've never run it the cheesy way, but I can say this: I have never failed at the encounter, and have been part of more than one group that has completed the encounter in time to get the Achievement. The encounter is far easier, IMHO, than the first encounter of the instance in which you face waves of undead that hit harder and have a more difficult approach in which to gather them up from. If you can get TO that encounter, there's no reason you need to try to use a poor choice in the design of the encounter to try to make it easier, because it's not that incredibly hard to begin with.
I guess I could have summed this all up by saying: I don't think there's any reason to do it that way.
Personally, since I'm the tank 95% of the time, I just run on ahead and if the rest of the group wants to try to follow him without a tank, I'll let them. I suppose I could do the same thing as the healer, although that seems slightly more suicidal. In either case, I have yet to have anybody choose to do so.
If anybody comes along and disagrees, please feel free to share your reasons in the comments.
For those that didn't just go read the post I linked, or have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain. Everybody else can skip the next paragraph (or two).
In this, the last encounter of the three Icecrown Citadel 5-man instances, you come upon Jaina Proudmoore fighting (and losing) to Arthas. She freezes him temporarily, then you, your crew, and Jaina must escape from him before he catches you and turns you into some mindless slavering undead minion to go out and make more mindless slavering undead minions. As you run away, Arthas throws up ice walls and summons bad guys to kill you, and you must beat them as Jaina breaks down the walls - which she does, conveniently, just as you beat each wave.
What Rhii refers to as an exploit and I will refer to simply as the cheesy way to do things is that you can apparently run off to the side after you start the encounter, let Arthas meander his way past, and fight the bad guys without him sneaking up behind you.
In case you didn't get the idea from that last paragraph, I think this is just silly. Let me explain. Please take my comments with a grain of salt - I've not experimented with this, but I'll make some assumptions (yes I know) about what goes on from what I've read.
First, although this was initially not the case, there is no advantage time-wise to running the encounter this way - you still have a limited amount of time to beat each wave or Arthas catches Jaina and you all die. So advantage: push.
Second, although reports differ on how the adds spawn when you are following Arthas instead of leading him, there's at least a chance that the adds spawn in the middle of your party. In case you have your head under a rock, that's a nightmare for a tank. When leading, the adds spawn by Arthas, and while the ghouls jump a long distance and land in a semi-random pattern, you can see them coming and prepare, and the other adds run in - giving the tank a point of contact to gather them up. While this might mean that the DPS has to wait half a second to go crazy on them, it also reduces the chance of random spawn on healer causing wipes. Advantage: non-cheesy way.
Third, the most common reason I hear folks say for doing it the cheesy way is that it's easier. I can't make a definitive personal comparison because I've never run it the cheesy way, but I can say this: I have never failed at the encounter, and have been part of more than one group that has completed the encounter in time to get the Achievement. The encounter is far easier, IMHO, than the first encounter of the instance in which you face waves of undead that hit harder and have a more difficult approach in which to gather them up from. If you can get TO that encounter, there's no reason you need to try to use a poor choice in the design of the encounter to try to make it easier, because it's not that incredibly hard to begin with.
I guess I could have summed this all up by saying: I don't think there's any reason to do it that way.
Personally, since I'm the tank 95% of the time, I just run on ahead and if the rest of the group wants to try to follow him without a tank, I'll let them. I suppose I could do the same thing as the healer, although that seems slightly more suicidal. In either case, I have yet to have anybody choose to do so.
If anybody comes along and disagrees, please feel free to share your reasons in the comments.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Icecrown Ramblings, Part 1
Illorien, Rena, and I took a 10-man crew back into ICC Wednesday night with hopes of getting through the lower spire in its entirety for the first time. We've managed to have the same core group for each of our runs, with the last 2-3 slots a bit of a swinging door amongst our guildmates, and for reference, this is the crew we were running with Wednesday:
Tanks (2)
Myself and Illorien (DK)
Heals (3)
Rena and Dendorian (Both Holy Paladins) and Recom (Tree)
DPS (5)
One each Warrior, Hunter, Mage, Warlock, and Elemental Shaman.
We still semi-wiped a couple times on the trash leading up to Marrowgar - those Deathbound Wards are brutal when they spawn in the middle of trying to clear other trash. We made it through to him in under an hour, though and two-shotted him. It probably would have been a 1-shot but one of our healers got hugged by him during 2 bone storms in a row, getting backed into a corner and simultaneously cold-flamed and whirlwinded.
We pushed through to Deathwhisper, and 2-shotted her as well. We've gotten our add strategy down to a science, left our Shaman on the boss full-time, and had no issues whatsoever with the add part of the fight. Our wipe occurred because we didn't really understand about the random ghosts that spawn and target a raid member - personally I'd never noticed them before, probably because we had to move her enough due to her death and decay that they never really did anything to our melee. This run, however, one decided to spawn in hugging our tree, followed by one hugging Illorien. The second run we avoided that and downed her easily.
Although I didn't talk about it much, last week we made it to the Gunship Battle but had issues with it, which was strange because we had 1-shotted it the first time. I went into a bit more explanation of the fight this time, had a little better strategy, and also had a better plan for holding the adds on our boat. There was no issue at all this time and the Skybreaker had nearly 250k hp left when Orgrim's Hammer fell from the sky.
To go into a little more detail, previously we had both cannons focusing on the rocketeers in the back of the Hammer, and had not asked our ranged DPS to try to kill the axe throwers. This was a mistake - the axe throwers get more powerful over time if they aren't killed - so this time we put our Warlock and Mage in the cannons, and had the one on the left, with the clear view of the back of the boat, target the rocketeers, while the other cannon focused on killing the axe throwers. Our healers and ranged stayed near the front edge of the boat, and our raiding party consisted of Illorien and Rena, the Shaman and the Hunter.
We cleared that with enough time for four or five shots at Deathbringer Saurfang, and while we had seen the fight once before, we had only really had time for one shot and hadn't learned much from it.
So I explained the fight again and had everyone spread out. Illorien, Chelm, and I were of course on the boss, and from my left to right we had the Mage, Paladin, Warlock, Tree, Shaman, Paladin, Hunter. I'm not sure about that spread, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and put everybody in range of at least 2 Healers.
After a wipe or two we had the tree stay in caster form and try to help with DPS and CC, and we seemed to do okay with that. Our best effort had him down to nearly 2.5M (or roughly 25%) before he enraged, and he got off at least 2 Mark of the Fallen Champion each time. I've had folks suggest we try to 1-heal it. I'm not sure if that's the best idea but it's something we may explore in the future.
I'm still running through the fight in my head, trying to determine where we need to shift our strategy or work on execution, because he was still getting blood power too quickly, although we've gotten pretty good at controlling the blood beasts.
We may try to get together again on the weekend and give it another shot.
I had intended to chat about Halls of Reflection, but this developed into enough of a post on its own so I'll touch on this later. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you on the flip side!
Tanks (2)
Myself and Illorien (DK)
Heals (3)
Rena and Dendorian (Both Holy Paladins) and Recom (Tree)
DPS (5)
One each Warrior, Hunter, Mage, Warlock, and Elemental Shaman.
We still semi-wiped a couple times on the trash leading up to Marrowgar - those Deathbound Wards are brutal when they spawn in the middle of trying to clear other trash. We made it through to him in under an hour, though and two-shotted him. It probably would have been a 1-shot but one of our healers got hugged by him during 2 bone storms in a row, getting backed into a corner and simultaneously cold-flamed and whirlwinded.
We pushed through to Deathwhisper, and 2-shotted her as well. We've gotten our add strategy down to a science, left our Shaman on the boss full-time, and had no issues whatsoever with the add part of the fight. Our wipe occurred because we didn't really understand about the random ghosts that spawn and target a raid member - personally I'd never noticed them before, probably because we had to move her enough due to her death and decay that they never really did anything to our melee. This run, however, one decided to spawn in hugging our tree, followed by one hugging Illorien. The second run we avoided that and downed her easily.
Although I didn't talk about it much, last week we made it to the Gunship Battle but had issues with it, which was strange because we had 1-shotted it the first time. I went into a bit more explanation of the fight this time, had a little better strategy, and also had a better plan for holding the adds on our boat. There was no issue at all this time and the Skybreaker had nearly 250k hp left when Orgrim's Hammer fell from the sky.
To go into a little more detail, previously we had both cannons focusing on the rocketeers in the back of the Hammer, and had not asked our ranged DPS to try to kill the axe throwers. This was a mistake - the axe throwers get more powerful over time if they aren't killed - so this time we put our Warlock and Mage in the cannons, and had the one on the left, with the clear view of the back of the boat, target the rocketeers, while the other cannon focused on killing the axe throwers. Our healers and ranged stayed near the front edge of the boat, and our raiding party consisted of Illorien and Rena, the Shaman and the Hunter.
We cleared that with enough time for four or five shots at Deathbringer Saurfang, and while we had seen the fight once before, we had only really had time for one shot and hadn't learned much from it.
So I explained the fight again and had everyone spread out. Illorien, Chelm, and I were of course on the boss, and from my left to right we had the Mage, Paladin, Warlock, Tree, Shaman, Paladin, Hunter. I'm not sure about that spread, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and put everybody in range of at least 2 Healers.
After a wipe or two we had the tree stay in caster form and try to help with DPS and CC, and we seemed to do okay with that. Our best effort had him down to nearly 2.5M (or roughly 25%) before he enraged, and he got off at least 2 Mark of the Fallen Champion each time. I've had folks suggest we try to 1-heal it. I'm not sure if that's the best idea but it's something we may explore in the future.
I'm still running through the fight in my head, trying to determine where we need to shift our strategy or work on execution, because he was still getting blood power too quickly, although we've gotten pretty good at controlling the blood beasts.
We may try to get together again on the weekend and give it another shot.
I had intended to chat about Halls of Reflection, but this developed into enough of a post on its own so I'll touch on this later. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you on the flip side!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Dungeon Walkthroughs
I've mentioned Icedragon over at Druid Main before...
I wanted to point out that she's been working on walkthroughs of Northrend Dungeons, completing guides on Oculus, Azjol-Nerub, and the Nexus so far, and she's been doing a wonderful job! For any newer players especially, go take a look!
Tomorrow I'll yak a bit about our latest foray into the Lich King's lair and maybe touch on doing Halls of Reflection the right way.
I wanted to point out that she's been working on walkthroughs of Northrend Dungeons, completing guides on Oculus, Azjol-Nerub, and the Nexus so far, and she's been doing a wonderful job! For any newer players especially, go take a look!
Tomorrow I'll yak a bit about our latest foray into the Lich King's lair and maybe touch on doing Halls of Reflection the right way.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Guns of Icecrown Citadel
Illorien, Renakashin, and I finally managed to get another scheduled guild run into ICC 10-man Wednesday night.
This is just our second outing as a group. One of our guild officers was running a second 10-man group in parallel that night as well. Epic Adventurers had not, as of the beginning of these groups, downed any boss in ICC except for Marrowgar, and the group the three of us were leading had not even done that.
Wednesday was a day for progressing!
We had a bit of a time sorting out players for each group and a lot of turnover at the last two DPS spots in our run, but we ended up with this group dynamic:
Tanks:
Illorien and Myself
Heals:
Renakashin, another Holy Paladin, and a Resto Druid
DPS:
Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Ret Pally
So a bit late we started in. My last post on ICC10 detailed our troubles with regards to the trash leading up to Marrowgar. Tonight there was no such trouble. We managed to lose a player or two to lacking of target marking and not being quick enough on taunts of the trap-spawned saber-lashing Deathbound Wards, but no wipes and we were shortly facing down the monstrosity that is Lord Marrowgar.
Lord Marrowgar!
We originally stayed with the strategy we had tried (and been getting better with) on our last run - tanking Marrowgar in the middle, spreading out the DPS and trying to contain the insanity. Our first attempt was going fairly well until I crashed and had to reboot. I didn't see what happened while my computer was starting up again, but I can't imagine it was pretty.
When I got back in it was suggested that we tank him off to the side of the room instead of the middle. Something about him only being able to use his fire in the same general direction or something - being a tank, I'm in front of him and I can't tell you what it looks like from the other side, but somebody felt this would help with being able to avoid the fire (or possibly bring everybody closer together for killing bone prisons.) It was also noted that he seemed to like to be in one corner or the other at the end of his whirlwind, which would mean less moving him and the raid having to avoid it.
It was an excellent suggestion, and our second attempt was flawless. Illorien and I occasionally had to switch sides of the room - he really did end his whirlwind in one end of the room or the other basically every time - but with Feral Charge I was able to close the distance quickly, and Illorien was quick enough to stay more or less with me. Our DPS worked well at breaking prisons and getting back on the boss, and he went down without a single player death. Progress for our crew and Frost Emblems for the win!
The trash before Lady Deathwhisper didn't provide anywhere near the challenge that the trash before Marrowgar did our first time in. Then again, if we'd known anything about the Deathbound Wards the first time in, we wouldn't have had nearly the issues we did. In any case, it was a simple matter to pull a small group at a time and down them healers, casters and melee. The two big spider-looking guys are a minor pain, but they went down without causing us any issues.
Lady Deathwhisper!
For anybody that hasn't done this fight (and if you've found your way here, you probably have!), it's not an exceptionally difficult fight, if you have reasonable DPS and good coordination. Simply put, you have to maintain enough DPS on Deathwhisper's shield to kill her before she enrages while still having enough of the right kinds of DPS to take out the adds in each wave before a new wave spawns.
We tried a couple of different plans, but the one that worked for us was this: We put the ret Pally on Deathwhisper full time. The Warrior and Hunter were targeting the Adherents, while the Warlock and Mage targeted the Fanatics. Once all of any group were down, the ranged DPS switched to Deathwhisper until the new group of adds spawned. We had the Pally and the Warrior switched at first, it took folks awhile to figure out exactly what was needed on the adds, and Ill and I found out we needed to mark targets for DPS to focus on when there were multiple targets for physical/magical DPS.
While Ill and I had to tank the Fanatics, our damage was focused on the Adherents, since that's where we were limited less. I did discover fairly soon, though, that I had one single ability that could do more than 100 damage to the Fanatics: GO GO FERAL FAERIE FIRE. Yeah, I know, 1000 damage every 6 seconds or so isn't much, but it helps, dangit! One of our attempts ended up doomed when we lost both our Mage and our Warlock with multiple Fanatics up. Let me tell you how much you're not going to be able to kill them without magical damage.
I think Illorien and I failed a little in our explanation of the fight - our successful run had more than once in which the adds went down with 15+ seconds to spare before the next group spawned. I can only surmise that we had DPS switching to the wrong adds because we were calling out to focus fire on an Empowered Adherent or Deformed Fanatic, and we hadn't clearly laid out that you need to stay on the correct type of add because you can't really help with the others.
On what was to be our last attempt of the night because of time, we broke through her shield with all adds down and just under 3 minutes left on her enrage timer. The nice thing about this point in the fight is that it takes a ton less time to take her down than it does to take her shield down. It took us less than 2 minutes to bring her down after her shield fell. On a high from a successful fight, we decided to press on and try the Gunship Battle.
The trash in between is PVP-ish except for the frost drake. None of it caused us much issue, though. Unlike the Faction Champions fight in ToC, these aren't true PVP-like mobs, and they go down a LOT easier. The drake's a chump, too, and easy to kill.
The Gunship Battle!
It took awhile to explain this fight because most of our raid hadn't been here before. There's a lot of random stuff to talk about, but here's the gist of what we did.
Our raiding party to the other boat consisted of Illorien, Renakashin, the Warlock, and the Warrior. Our guns were manned by the Hunter and the ret Pally. Everything was going well up until the end of our first raiding party trip across to the other side. Rena had issues getting back across and died. Fortunately, she was close enough to the edge that our tree was able to Rebirth from our boat, and before long we were up and going again. Our Warlock went down, then our Mage. I tried to Rebirth the Mage but a portal opened up and he got one-shotted by the mob that appeared on top of him.
We added our hunter to the raiding party going across. Somehow, through all this craziness, we managed to stay ahead of the Horde. When we lost our ret Pally shortly before the end of a raid to the other boat, some folks were ready to wipe - but we were close enough to the end that Illorien hopped in the cannon in his place, and before another battle mage came out, Orgrim's Hammer fell from the skies.
With no more trash and still on the high of success, we put off sleep for just a little longer to give a shot at Deathbringer Saurfang.
Deathbringer Saurfang!
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining this fight - I know I failed to mention why I was spreading everybody out as much as I was. We failed, but with it already being late and in a one-more-shot mode for the last 2 encounters we decided to call it for the night. The deathblow was 2 of our healers going down. I think we gave up a little too much blood power before that happened anyway - I was off on my taunt from Ill, among other things - although we did burn down the blood beasts relatively quickly. I'm positive our next run will be even more successful.
EA's other group had also reached Saurfang by the time we ended. As of the time of writing of this post I do not know if they were successful or not. In either case, our guild made a huge step in progression through the Citadel.
Thanks for joining me on this little detour! I know we may be a little behind the curve, as new content dropped this week and we haven't quite cleared the old content yet, but this was a big success for us and we look forward to more consistent success in the future.
This is just our second outing as a group. One of our guild officers was running a second 10-man group in parallel that night as well. Epic Adventurers had not, as of the beginning of these groups, downed any boss in ICC except for Marrowgar, and the group the three of us were leading had not even done that.
Wednesday was a day for progressing!
We had a bit of a time sorting out players for each group and a lot of turnover at the last two DPS spots in our run, but we ended up with this group dynamic:
Tanks:
Illorien and Myself
Heals:
Renakashin, another Holy Paladin, and a Resto Druid
DPS:
Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Ret Pally
So a bit late we started in. My last post on ICC10 detailed our troubles with regards to the trash leading up to Marrowgar. Tonight there was no such trouble. We managed to lose a player or two to lacking of target marking and not being quick enough on taunts of the trap-spawned saber-lashing Deathbound Wards, but no wipes and we were shortly facing down the monstrosity that is Lord Marrowgar.
Lord Marrowgar!
We originally stayed with the strategy we had tried (and been getting better with) on our last run - tanking Marrowgar in the middle, spreading out the DPS and trying to contain the insanity. Our first attempt was going fairly well until I crashed and had to reboot. I didn't see what happened while my computer was starting up again, but I can't imagine it was pretty.
When I got back in it was suggested that we tank him off to the side of the room instead of the middle. Something about him only being able to use his fire in the same general direction or something - being a tank, I'm in front of him and I can't tell you what it looks like from the other side, but somebody felt this would help with being able to avoid the fire (or possibly bring everybody closer together for killing bone prisons.) It was also noted that he seemed to like to be in one corner or the other at the end of his whirlwind, which would mean less moving him and the raid having to avoid it.
It was an excellent suggestion, and our second attempt was flawless. Illorien and I occasionally had to switch sides of the room - he really did end his whirlwind in one end of the room or the other basically every time - but with Feral Charge I was able to close the distance quickly, and Illorien was quick enough to stay more or less with me. Our DPS worked well at breaking prisons and getting back on the boss, and he went down without a single player death. Progress for our crew and Frost Emblems for the win!
The trash before Lady Deathwhisper didn't provide anywhere near the challenge that the trash before Marrowgar did our first time in. Then again, if we'd known anything about the Deathbound Wards the first time in, we wouldn't have had nearly the issues we did. In any case, it was a simple matter to pull a small group at a time and down them healers, casters and melee. The two big spider-looking guys are a minor pain, but they went down without causing us any issues.
Lady Deathwhisper!
For anybody that hasn't done this fight (and if you've found your way here, you probably have!), it's not an exceptionally difficult fight, if you have reasonable DPS and good coordination. Simply put, you have to maintain enough DPS on Deathwhisper's shield to kill her before she enrages while still having enough of the right kinds of DPS to take out the adds in each wave before a new wave spawns.
We tried a couple of different plans, but the one that worked for us was this: We put the ret Pally on Deathwhisper full time. The Warrior and Hunter were targeting the Adherents, while the Warlock and Mage targeted the Fanatics. Once all of any group were down, the ranged DPS switched to Deathwhisper until the new group of adds spawned. We had the Pally and the Warrior switched at first, it took folks awhile to figure out exactly what was needed on the adds, and Ill and I found out we needed to mark targets for DPS to focus on when there were multiple targets for physical/magical DPS.
While Ill and I had to tank the Fanatics, our damage was focused on the Adherents, since that's where we were limited less. I did discover fairly soon, though, that I had one single ability that could do more than 100 damage to the Fanatics: GO GO FERAL FAERIE FIRE. Yeah, I know, 1000 damage every 6 seconds or so isn't much, but it helps, dangit! One of our attempts ended up doomed when we lost both our Mage and our Warlock with multiple Fanatics up. Let me tell you how much you're not going to be able to kill them without magical damage.
I think Illorien and I failed a little in our explanation of the fight - our successful run had more than once in which the adds went down with 15+ seconds to spare before the next group spawned. I can only surmise that we had DPS switching to the wrong adds because we were calling out to focus fire on an Empowered Adherent or Deformed Fanatic, and we hadn't clearly laid out that you need to stay on the correct type of add because you can't really help with the others.
On what was to be our last attempt of the night because of time, we broke through her shield with all adds down and just under 3 minutes left on her enrage timer. The nice thing about this point in the fight is that it takes a ton less time to take her down than it does to take her shield down. It took us less than 2 minutes to bring her down after her shield fell. On a high from a successful fight, we decided to press on and try the Gunship Battle.
The trash in between is PVP-ish except for the frost drake. None of it caused us much issue, though. Unlike the Faction Champions fight in ToC, these aren't true PVP-like mobs, and they go down a LOT easier. The drake's a chump, too, and easy to kill.
The Gunship Battle!
It took awhile to explain this fight because most of our raid hadn't been here before. There's a lot of random stuff to talk about, but here's the gist of what we did.
Our raiding party to the other boat consisted of Illorien, Renakashin, the Warlock, and the Warrior. Our guns were manned by the Hunter and the ret Pally. Everything was going well up until the end of our first raiding party trip across to the other side. Rena had issues getting back across and died. Fortunately, she was close enough to the edge that our tree was able to Rebirth from our boat, and before long we were up and going again. Our Warlock went down, then our Mage. I tried to Rebirth the Mage but a portal opened up and he got one-shotted by the mob that appeared on top of him.
We added our hunter to the raiding party going across. Somehow, through all this craziness, we managed to stay ahead of the Horde. When we lost our ret Pally shortly before the end of a raid to the other boat, some folks were ready to wipe - but we were close enough to the end that Illorien hopped in the cannon in his place, and before another battle mage came out, Orgrim's Hammer fell from the skies.
With no more trash and still on the high of success, we put off sleep for just a little longer to give a shot at Deathbringer Saurfang.
Deathbringer Saurfang!
I probably didn't do a good job of explaining this fight - I know I failed to mention why I was spreading everybody out as much as I was. We failed, but with it already being late and in a one-more-shot mode for the last 2 encounters we decided to call it for the night. The deathblow was 2 of our healers going down. I think we gave up a little too much blood power before that happened anyway - I was off on my taunt from Ill, among other things - although we did burn down the blood beasts relatively quickly. I'm positive our next run will be even more successful.
EA's other group had also reached Saurfang by the time we ended. As of the time of writing of this post I do not know if they were successful or not. In either case, our guild made a huge step in progression through the Citadel.
Thanks for joining me on this little detour! I know we may be a little behind the curve, as new content dropped this week and we haven't quite cleared the old content yet, but this was a big success for us and we look forward to more consistent success in the future.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
The Trash of Icecrown Citadel
I had originally planned on titling this post the Guns of Icecrown Citadel. Turns out I was a little ambitious in thinking we would make it to the gunship battle on our first trip in.
I had heard that the trash in ICC was rough for any ill-prepared groups. In ways it was better and in ways it was worse than I had expected... but I'll get to that.
We decided to try to get as good a group together as we could, focusing on getting our best DPS. We struggled to find healers in our guild willing to come, one of them flat out stating that she was afraid of the place. We pugged in an excellent but very slightly under-geared priest for the final healing spot... Here's the breakdown:
Tanks (2):
Me (Bear) and Illorien (DK)
Heals (3):
Holy Paladin (Renakashin, co-leader), Tree Druid and Holy Priest
DPS (5):
Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, 2 Mages
The TRASH!
The first thing you encounter on the way in the door is a pair of undead that are pure melee but explode when killed, doing a fairly decent chunk of damage. Plus, every so often, another one paths in from the next room. A little mismanagement of this led to us losing a couple of folks while we cleared them out - once you've taken the top of that set of stairs, they stop coming in from the next room. There's another group of these that run around the room - we pulled them out and downed them fairly easily. Illorien held them in place, I pulled them out one at a time for the DPS to go nuts on.
We were at last able to begin moving into the room. It has essentially 5 sets of mobs, one group in each corner and one dead ahead in the back half of the room. It also has a special secret surprise, that I'll get to in a moment. The right and left corners closest to the door each have a humanoid Undead caster and three of the Damned - the exploding undead I mentioned previously. The corners further from the way in each had a spiderlike Undead caster as well as the groups of the Damned. The spiders throw random web wraps around that players must be broken out of, and don't appear to have a threat table, or at least cast randomly enough that the threat table doesn't seem to matter. The group in the middle is made up of 2 of the spiders, 1 of the humanoid Undead casters, and 2 non-explosive melee Undead. Our general plan of attack for the four corners was for the DK to hold down the melee while the DPS and myself burned down the caster, then for me to pull out the Damned one by one for the DPS to burn.
The corners went smoothly. The casters really don't like to move, and it's impossible to move the spiders via LOS if any member of the raid is in its LOS. We discovered with the last group that the DK's death grip can yank the spider out and (at least sometimes) not disturb the group of melee. It worked, though, and we decided to use a similar plan of attack on the group in the middle, singling out a caster at a time for death, followed by the melee.
Illorien dropped a Death and Decay, and I charged a spider. It was well on it's way to dying when I hear over Vent, "There's a giant coming... Giant coming!" I turned around and saw two gigantic undead slaughtering the ranged DPS and healers. It was the first of our wipes trying to deal with those two giants. The one spider went down, but that was it.
Those two giants were epic trash for us. We tried several strategies for fighting them, all of which failed for various reasons. You can't pull them out of the room - they run back in and reset. We tried several different methods to split them up so that the DPS could burn one down without worrying about the other one. We tried pulling them into the corner of the room... None of our methods worked... they were too close to the other group so we pulled them, or they managed to take out DPS somehow... Illorien noticed that they were using Saber Lash - an ability Lord Marrowgar also uses - that does melee damage to the target (tank) and his nearest ally... which meant that we absolutely had to have the tanks on top of each other to take the Saber Lashes.
When we realized that, we decided to stop trying to separate them. Illorien and I grabbed them and brought them to the front edge of the room, just inside where they would step out and reset and far enough away not to aggro the other mobs. Then we turned them away from the raid and let the DPS burn down one target, while the two of us prayed for healing fast enough that double Saber Lash wouldn't do us in. It worked like a charm.
The last group of mobs, already down one member from our first run-in with the giants, went down with ease.
The next room, smaller than the last, has just one group of adds in the center, but has two of the giants sleeping on opposite sides of the room, and there's not much room to maneuver without almost certainly waking them up.
Illorien was trying to scoot in a little bit and pull some of the smaller trash and one of the giants woke up. Since nothing else aggro'd, we counted our blessings and downed it. We were then able to move in to the now-vacated side and aggro the smaller trash while keeping some distance from the other giant.
It woke up after we had started in on the smaller trash. I picked it up and burned a couple of cooldowns to stay alive while the DPS dealt with the smaller casters, then Illorien pulled everything else with him to stand in front of the giant. With both us there, the giant wasn't going to kill us by itself, so the DPS burned down the smaller melee mobs and then we brought down the giant.
After a grueling hour plus we had made it to Lord Marrowgar.
We wiped several times on him before we ran out of time, as our pug healer had to go guild raid on his main, and several of our guild folks were itching to end early due to early mornings. We learned a bit, and tried a couple strategies, but I think our group as a whole might not have quite been there, gear-wise. We tended to do alright in Phase 1 - our folks moved out of the fire and broke down the bone prisons fairly efficiently, our healers were generally able to keep up, and things went smoothly. Then Phase 2 - the whirlwind - came along, and as long as it wasn't badly timed with respect to a bone prison, we usually handled that fairly well. Usually the issue came at the end of the whirlwind, when we had a little trouble with folks struggling to keep away from the boss while the tanks dragged him back into position while still staying out of the mass of cold fire on the ground. Several times we lost people as the second Phase 1 started because of how crazily spread out folks were and the healer's need to focus on the tanks. I think a combination of being a little short in a couple of places lead to everybody needing to be danged near perfect.
We got him down to almost 50% on one run.
For being our first ever time going in to the instance, I think we did fairly well, especially considering basically none of us have any Heroic ToC gear.
I'm not sure if we'll try again next week, or perhaps give a go at Heroic ToC10. That was pretty rough on us.
Good luck and hope you get a chance to clear it!
I had heard that the trash in ICC was rough for any ill-prepared groups. In ways it was better and in ways it was worse than I had expected... but I'll get to that.
We decided to try to get as good a group together as we could, focusing on getting our best DPS. We struggled to find healers in our guild willing to come, one of them flat out stating that she was afraid of the place. We pugged in an excellent but very slightly under-geared priest for the final healing spot... Here's the breakdown:
Tanks (2):
Me (Bear) and Illorien (DK)
Heals (3):
Holy Paladin (Renakashin, co-leader), Tree Druid and Holy Priest
DPS (5):
Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, 2 Mages
The TRASH!
The first thing you encounter on the way in the door is a pair of undead that are pure melee but explode when killed, doing a fairly decent chunk of damage. Plus, every so often, another one paths in from the next room. A little mismanagement of this led to us losing a couple of folks while we cleared them out - once you've taken the top of that set of stairs, they stop coming in from the next room. There's another group of these that run around the room - we pulled them out and downed them fairly easily. Illorien held them in place, I pulled them out one at a time for the DPS to go nuts on.
We were at last able to begin moving into the room. It has essentially 5 sets of mobs, one group in each corner and one dead ahead in the back half of the room. It also has a special secret surprise, that I'll get to in a moment. The right and left corners closest to the door each have a humanoid Undead caster and three of the Damned - the exploding undead I mentioned previously. The corners further from the way in each had a spiderlike Undead caster as well as the groups of the Damned. The spiders throw random web wraps around that players must be broken out of, and don't appear to have a threat table, or at least cast randomly enough that the threat table doesn't seem to matter. The group in the middle is made up of 2 of the spiders, 1 of the humanoid Undead casters, and 2 non-explosive melee Undead. Our general plan of attack for the four corners was for the DK to hold down the melee while the DPS and myself burned down the caster, then for me to pull out the Damned one by one for the DPS to burn.
The corners went smoothly. The casters really don't like to move, and it's impossible to move the spiders via LOS if any member of the raid is in its LOS. We discovered with the last group that the DK's death grip can yank the spider out and (at least sometimes) not disturb the group of melee. It worked, though, and we decided to use a similar plan of attack on the group in the middle, singling out a caster at a time for death, followed by the melee.
Illorien dropped a Death and Decay, and I charged a spider. It was well on it's way to dying when I hear over Vent, "There's a giant coming... Giant coming!" I turned around and saw two gigantic undead slaughtering the ranged DPS and healers. It was the first of our wipes trying to deal with those two giants. The one spider went down, but that was it.
Those two giants were epic trash for us. We tried several strategies for fighting them, all of which failed for various reasons. You can't pull them out of the room - they run back in and reset. We tried several different methods to split them up so that the DPS could burn one down without worrying about the other one. We tried pulling them into the corner of the room... None of our methods worked... they were too close to the other group so we pulled them, or they managed to take out DPS somehow... Illorien noticed that they were using Saber Lash - an ability Lord Marrowgar also uses - that does melee damage to the target (tank) and his nearest ally... which meant that we absolutely had to have the tanks on top of each other to take the Saber Lashes.
When we realized that, we decided to stop trying to separate them. Illorien and I grabbed them and brought them to the front edge of the room, just inside where they would step out and reset and far enough away not to aggro the other mobs. Then we turned them away from the raid and let the DPS burn down one target, while the two of us prayed for healing fast enough that double Saber Lash wouldn't do us in. It worked like a charm.
The last group of mobs, already down one member from our first run-in with the giants, went down with ease.
The next room, smaller than the last, has just one group of adds in the center, but has two of the giants sleeping on opposite sides of the room, and there's not much room to maneuver without almost certainly waking them up.
Illorien was trying to scoot in a little bit and pull some of the smaller trash and one of the giants woke up. Since nothing else aggro'd, we counted our blessings and downed it. We were then able to move in to the now-vacated side and aggro the smaller trash while keeping some distance from the other giant.
It woke up after we had started in on the smaller trash. I picked it up and burned a couple of cooldowns to stay alive while the DPS dealt with the smaller casters, then Illorien pulled everything else with him to stand in front of the giant. With both us there, the giant wasn't going to kill us by itself, so the DPS burned down the smaller melee mobs and then we brought down the giant.
After a grueling hour plus we had made it to Lord Marrowgar.
We wiped several times on him before we ran out of time, as our pug healer had to go guild raid on his main, and several of our guild folks were itching to end early due to early mornings. We learned a bit, and tried a couple strategies, but I think our group as a whole might not have quite been there, gear-wise. We tended to do alright in Phase 1 - our folks moved out of the fire and broke down the bone prisons fairly efficiently, our healers were generally able to keep up, and things went smoothly. Then Phase 2 - the whirlwind - came along, and as long as it wasn't badly timed with respect to a bone prison, we usually handled that fairly well. Usually the issue came at the end of the whirlwind, when we had a little trouble with folks struggling to keep away from the boss while the tanks dragged him back into position while still staying out of the mass of cold fire on the ground. Several times we lost people as the second Phase 1 started because of how crazily spread out folks were and the healer's need to focus on the tanks. I think a combination of being a little short in a couple of places lead to everybody needing to be danged near perfect.
We got him down to almost 50% on one run.
For being our first ever time going in to the instance, I think we did fairly well, especially considering basically none of us have any Heroic ToC gear.
I'm not sure if we'll try again next week, or perhaps give a go at Heroic ToC10. That was pretty rough on us.
Good luck and hope you get a chance to clear it!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Raid Composition
The last piece of the tree primer isn't ready yet, so I'd like to throw some thoughts out there about raid composition, how you choose how many and of what type of player to bring.
In my experience it's been pretty standard in 10 man raids to have 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS. For 25-man, the formula has been 2-3 tanks (depending on the raid), 6-7 healers (depending on the raid and the strength of the healers), and 15-17 DPS (depending on the number of tanks and healers).
I've run a couple of pugs lately (VoA and Ony) that have eschewed this "conventional" wisdom and run only 2 healers in a 10-man and 5 in a 25-man. The 10-man was a VoA in which the raid leader brought me - an experienced but not exceptionally well geared druid healer - and a shaman who had never healed a 10-man raid before, along with tanks that didn't know the fights exceptionally well.
In that situation, I considered our 1 wipe (on Emalon) a success. I was pushing out nearly 3k HPS and the shammy just a shade under 2. We lost a player or three each boss, but the raid succeeded and most of the players lost were due to factors unrelated to having only 2 heals, such as tanks unfamiliar with the encounters, or DPS going too fast before tanks had aggro.
The Ony raid was unsuccessful, but a number of factors contributed - the advantage of having less heals SHOULD be that you have more DPS, but we still seemed to struggle at times with killing things fast enough.
I don't have any overriding thought on this more than I wanted to put the question out there - am I being overly careful in thinking we should have better than a 1 to 4 healer to everybody else ratio? Does it depend on the strength of the healers, or the rest of the raid? Is the world going to end if anybody answers these questions? News at 11!
err... Something like that. As always, thanks for coming, and comments are welcome!
In my experience it's been pretty standard in 10 man raids to have 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS. For 25-man, the formula has been 2-3 tanks (depending on the raid), 6-7 healers (depending on the raid and the strength of the healers), and 15-17 DPS (depending on the number of tanks and healers).
I've run a couple of pugs lately (VoA and Ony) that have eschewed this "conventional" wisdom and run only 2 healers in a 10-man and 5 in a 25-man. The 10-man was a VoA in which the raid leader brought me - an experienced but not exceptionally well geared druid healer - and a shaman who had never healed a 10-man raid before, along with tanks that didn't know the fights exceptionally well.
In that situation, I considered our 1 wipe (on Emalon) a success. I was pushing out nearly 3k HPS and the shammy just a shade under 2. We lost a player or three each boss, but the raid succeeded and most of the players lost were due to factors unrelated to having only 2 heals, such as tanks unfamiliar with the encounters, or DPS going too fast before tanks had aggro.
The Ony raid was unsuccessful, but a number of factors contributed - the advantage of having less heals SHOULD be that you have more DPS, but we still seemed to struggle at times with killing things fast enough.
I don't have any overriding thought on this more than I wanted to put the question out there - am I being overly careful in thinking we should have better than a 1 to 4 healer to everybody else ratio? Does it depend on the strength of the healers, or the rest of the raid? Is the world going to end if anybody answers these questions? News at 11!
err... Something like that. As always, thanks for coming, and comments are welcome!
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