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.

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.

Entry Number Two

I seem to have avoided asshatery in my Random Dungeons, for the most part.  Perhaps it's the times I'm running them, perhaps it's that I typically run with 1-3 guildmates, or perhaps it's my sunny disposition, but typically the worst I've had to deal with is people that are a little slightly overeager and are willing to slow down if they die once or twice.

Saturday, however, I was running a random and apparently found the Worst Rogue Ever (tm).

I was running with no guild members this day and got dropped into a fresh Nexus run - piece of cake, right? ... Right?  Oh the immortal Warning Signs.... before we've even really had time to buff, the rogue is running off saying "go go go!"

We progressed through the Horde Commander and up the tunnel towards Ms. Many-of-Me-Deal-With-It.  The rogue was generally being annoying, pushing the limits of idiocy that I allow in groups I tank for.  Once he pulled while we were still fighting a group (I think/assume, I was busy tanking and didn't see who pulled) but it wasn't an issue due to the rest of the group.  He attacked the last frozen enemy well before I was even in the area.  Since he did this quite deliberately, I skipped my typical warning and went right to "you pull it, you tank it" mode... which didn't matter because he essentially stun-locked it until it died.

We cleared the group at the top of the tunnel, and I used FFF to pull the group from inside the boss's room... shortly after which, the rogue aggro'd the two groups on the far side of the room that no group has killed since it was realized that you don't have to.  Unfortunately, the idiot rogue got them over towards us and then Vanished... and people took a LOT of damage (including one dead DPS) before I realized what had happened and Swiped.  The rogue died shortly thereafter (thankfully) but the healer was a bit undergeared... and combine that with myself trying to get used to a new unit frames addon (Shadowed UF) and I missed my defensive cooldowns and we wiped.

Intensely irritated at this point, but still just wanting to finish the instance, I told the entire group to let the tank (ME!) pull.  The rogue spouted off with something, at which point I pointed out that he was the one who had pulled multiple groups (and to be fair, I think I called him a name which might have vaguely insulted his intelligence).  I found the response back of "NO U!" to be bothersomely childish, so I proceeded to add him to my Ignore list and attempt to continue on.

When we got back in and buffed and ready to proceed, I once again FFF'd the remaining mobs from the boss room.  Watching carefully this time, I saw the rogue go attempt to pull the other two groups... which promptly killed him and returned to their locations.  Oddly determined to continue on this course of action, the other 4 players downed the adds and went after the boss.

Partway through (during her second split), the rogue made it back to us... and pulled those two groups into the room.  I found out at this point, that you cannot vote-kick while (a) in combat or (b) during loot rolls.  More prepared for asshatery at this point, I was able to collect the mobs and keep them under control until the sane members of our DPS crew could down them.... and then we found out that, for reasons unknown, we could not kick this idiot for another 15 minutes.

Determined to press on, we attempted to continue.  When the rogue proved that he intended to continue causing as much disruption as he could (pulling a group and tricks-of-the-trade to the healer!) we backed off a bit and all basically said "BRB 15 mins" and stopped doing anything.

He left after 10, wasting 10 more minutes of our time.

I actually kind of feel sorry for that pally healer; the replacement DPS that came in told him to stop hitting this and worry only about healing and was generally just a butthead - but at least he didn't deliberately try to get us killed.

In any case... Åries of Emerald Dream... you are my Asshat of the Day

Thoughts on the First Beta Rebuild of Talent Trees

Of course, the first day after I finally post some thoughts about the changes to Cataclysm talent trees, MMO Champion gets ahold of the first pass at redoing the talent trees.

I went over and took a gander at it.  I'm still cautiously optimistic, but the hope that my optimism isn't misplaced has taken a hit.

EEEEEEwwwww....

I understand that this is a first pass, and it's a bit harder for Druids, and feral Druids especially, but oh lord did they rip our trees to shreds.

Blizzard stated one of their goals to be making each choice count while still allowing some flexibility - as I see it, there is very, VERY little flexibility in the Druid trees that are currently in Beta - in fact there are only, give or take, two to three points that can even be in the discussion to move as a Bear tank, and we are forced to take kitty talents to even get to that point... and a big part of the issue is requiring 5 points to get to the next tier each tier... if the requirement were slightly lower (say, 3 points?) it would actually allow us to select the talents we really want as opposed to those we HAVE to take to get to the next tier.  Heck with the way the trees were shown there, you could have the second tier require 3, the third require 7, the fourth require 12, the fifth require 18, and so on, or maybe even just 3/10/15/etc....

Plus... Mangle at Level 10??? Interesting choice... should take a lot of the pain of low-level levelling away...

Blah.  I suck at writing today.  What do you think?