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!
Showing posts with label raid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raid. Show all posts
Thursday, September 2, 2010
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 18, 2010
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! ;)
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!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Ramblings
Rambling the First, on Hybrids
My apologies to the author whose post inspired me, I cannot recall which blogger it was to give credit. I can, however, use a post from my own blog's history as a starting point.
In examining the fact that Druids simply don't follow the rules, I mentioned the fact that we can, to a certain extent, shift roles mid-fight by shifting forms. While this remains true and does showcase our hybrid capabilities, we aren't and can't be good enough at a backup role to be truly hybrid, with half an exception for bears and cats.
Blizzard has made a point of making characters with multiple roles specialize and remove their hybrid capabilities in order to be competitive with other classes. While this is a good thing in general - hybrids shouldn't be able to be the best simultaneously at 2 things - it has the (I hope) unintended consequence of removing some of what I consider the key benefits of playing a hybrid class. While being able to switch between tank, healer, and 2 different forms of DPS is nice, we can't effectively switch in the middle of a fight, which would seem to me to be one of the key benefits of being a shapeshifter.
The shifting of stats for bears means that bears and cats can fake it - the gear they want shares stats, with the exception of cloaks, amulets, rings, and trinkets - but you're not going to have "enough" survivability as a bear or be solid enough at DPS as a cat to make this worthwhile, and if you've taken the talents to be really great at one you're going to be missing key talents for the other, not to mention the glyph clashing. The other two forms that share key stats - boomkin and tree - cannot really share because the forms that make each great are not attainable at the same time, and even if they were, you need spirit as a tree and hit as a crit chicken, and each is not needed by the other. This means that unlike cats and bears, where the gear (if not the gems and enchants) can be shared, trees and boomkin are unable to really move between each other.
They are doing away with a number of secondary stats in Cataclysm. Perhaps some of the Druid's hybrid-ness will return, but I doubt it.
In this blogger's humble opinion, the era of the true hybrid is over, and has been for quite some time. Being one of the things that drew me to this class, I hope it can come back, but I mourn its loss and expect that it is gone for good.
Rambling the Second, on Dual-spec
On a side note, Blizzard can we please have 7 specs? I would so have one of each Druid spec and a PvP spec or three. I would even pay 1000g apiece, at least for 2 more than I have now, so I could have a cat and boomkin spec. What's that you said? No other class in the game could use more than 3, and most couldn't even really do that? So what, *I* could use it! ;)
Rambling the Third, on My Specs, My Guild, and Raids
Speaking of specs, I'm toying with a couple of ideas. While I enjoy making like a tree and leaving (ooooh, bad pun!), I have an issue that I've been pigeonholed into that role in my guild's raids (long story, if you've read my earlier posts you should have a taste) and it causes me to have an issue with gear. Specifically, I don't get the opportunity to roll on gear for my main spec.
I've attempted to discuss the issue with my guild and raid leader, and while a resolution may still be forthcoming, I'm not hopeful.
This leads me to some decision making regarding my options. The last resort, always, is to leave and try to find another guild. I'd like to avoid that if I can, because frankly I love my guild, I'm friends in real life with a number of the members, and I don't really relish the thought of trying to find a new one that I would fit in to. Since I don't want to do that, I'm left with trying to find options that simultaneously allow me to stay in the guild, continue running raids, and actually have a chance to roll on gear for my main spec sometime.
The second-most extreme (beyond /gquit) option I have thought of is removing the ability to do anything but tank by respeccing by secondary spec into another bear spec. I think I've just about ruled that out though, because I believe that would lead to no guild raids for me.
I could also forsake the 25-man raids to run my own 10-mans. However, with Wednesday and Thursday claimed for 25-man runs and Tuesday a hit-or-miss night to have the folks in my guild on to play, that seems like an iffy proposition at best. I tried running Mondays in the past, and by then most of our players have their mains locked. My Friday and weekend availability is not steady enough to run then. Plus, given that I have committed to my significant other that I will only raid on a regular basis on one night a week, that would preclude me from running in the guild 25-mans, which I also would like to continue doing.
The option that seems to present me with the best situation is to change my offspec from tree to kitty DPS. This would allow me to roll on leather gear and weapons that I would actually use for my main spec even if I'm in my offspec, because the two forms share stats now. The major downside to this plan is that I lose the flexibility of having a healing spec. If I'm not tanking I become just the meat in the room. (For all you DPS out there, I'm kidding. I love you guys.) Also, I still couldn't roll on tanking accessories for things such as the cloaks, rings, amulets, and trinkets, but I can get by with Emblem items for most of those.
Of course, this plan also requires me to do the research and take the time to learn how to be good with the class with the hardest DPS rotation in the game... or so I've been told it is. Stay tuned, my blog name may become somewhat of a misnomer.
Rambling the Fourth, on Blog Changes
Check out some changes on the site, I added some perma-links to the bear and tree primers on the right, and a real blogroll and limited the blogroll updates to the latest 5. Also, I actually touched my profile. No pics yet, but I'm working on it!
Rambling the Fifth.... ok I'm done.
As always, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week!
My apologies to the author whose post inspired me, I cannot recall which blogger it was to give credit. I can, however, use a post from my own blog's history as a starting point.
In examining the fact that Druids simply don't follow the rules, I mentioned the fact that we can, to a certain extent, shift roles mid-fight by shifting forms. While this remains true and does showcase our hybrid capabilities, we aren't and can't be good enough at a backup role to be truly hybrid, with half an exception for bears and cats.
Blizzard has made a point of making characters with multiple roles specialize and remove their hybrid capabilities in order to be competitive with other classes. While this is a good thing in general - hybrids shouldn't be able to be the best simultaneously at 2 things - it has the (I hope) unintended consequence of removing some of what I consider the key benefits of playing a hybrid class. While being able to switch between tank, healer, and 2 different forms of DPS is nice, we can't effectively switch in the middle of a fight, which would seem to me to be one of the key benefits of being a shapeshifter.
The shifting of stats for bears means that bears and cats can fake it - the gear they want shares stats, with the exception of cloaks, amulets, rings, and trinkets - but you're not going to have "enough" survivability as a bear or be solid enough at DPS as a cat to make this worthwhile, and if you've taken the talents to be really great at one you're going to be missing key talents for the other, not to mention the glyph clashing. The other two forms that share key stats - boomkin and tree - cannot really share because the forms that make each great are not attainable at the same time, and even if they were, you need spirit as a tree and hit as a crit chicken, and each is not needed by the other. This means that unlike cats and bears, where the gear (if not the gems and enchants) can be shared, trees and boomkin are unable to really move between each other.
They are doing away with a number of secondary stats in Cataclysm. Perhaps some of the Druid's hybrid-ness will return, but I doubt it.
In this blogger's humble opinion, the era of the true hybrid is over, and has been for quite some time. Being one of the things that drew me to this class, I hope it can come back, but I mourn its loss and expect that it is gone for good.
Rambling the Second, on Dual-spec
On a side note, Blizzard can we please have 7 specs? I would so have one of each Druid spec and a PvP spec or three. I would even pay 1000g apiece, at least for 2 more than I have now, so I could have a cat and boomkin spec. What's that you said? No other class in the game could use more than 3, and most couldn't even really do that? So what, *I* could use it! ;)
Rambling the Third, on My Specs, My Guild, and Raids
Speaking of specs, I'm toying with a couple of ideas. While I enjoy making like a tree and leaving (ooooh, bad pun!), I have an issue that I've been pigeonholed into that role in my guild's raids (long story, if you've read my earlier posts you should have a taste) and it causes me to have an issue with gear. Specifically, I don't get the opportunity to roll on gear for my main spec.
I've attempted to discuss the issue with my guild and raid leader, and while a resolution may still be forthcoming, I'm not hopeful.
This leads me to some decision making regarding my options. The last resort, always, is to leave and try to find another guild. I'd like to avoid that if I can, because frankly I love my guild, I'm friends in real life with a number of the members, and I don't really relish the thought of trying to find a new one that I would fit in to. Since I don't want to do that, I'm left with trying to find options that simultaneously allow me to stay in the guild, continue running raids, and actually have a chance to roll on gear for my main spec sometime.
The second-most extreme (beyond /gquit) option I have thought of is removing the ability to do anything but tank by respeccing by secondary spec into another bear spec. I think I've just about ruled that out though, because I believe that would lead to no guild raids for me.
I could also forsake the 25-man raids to run my own 10-mans. However, with Wednesday and Thursday claimed for 25-man runs and Tuesday a hit-or-miss night to have the folks in my guild on to play, that seems like an iffy proposition at best. I tried running Mondays in the past, and by then most of our players have their mains locked. My Friday and weekend availability is not steady enough to run then. Plus, given that I have committed to my significant other that I will only raid on a regular basis on one night a week, that would preclude me from running in the guild 25-mans, which I also would like to continue doing.
The option that seems to present me with the best situation is to change my offspec from tree to kitty DPS. This would allow me to roll on leather gear and weapons that I would actually use for my main spec even if I'm in my offspec, because the two forms share stats now. The major downside to this plan is that I lose the flexibility of having a healing spec. If I'm not tanking I become just the meat in the room. (For all you DPS out there, I'm kidding. I love you guys.) Also, I still couldn't roll on tanking accessories for things such as the cloaks, rings, amulets, and trinkets, but I can get by with Emblem items for most of those.
Of course, this plan also requires me to do the research and take the time to learn how to be good with the class with the hardest DPS rotation in the game... or so I've been told it is. Stay tuned, my blog name may become somewhat of a misnomer.
Rambling the Fourth, on Blog Changes
Check out some changes on the site, I added some perma-links to the bear and tree primers on the right, and a real blogroll and limited the blogroll updates to the latest 5. Also, I actually touched my profile. No pics yet, but I'm working on it!
Rambling the Fifth.... ok I'm done.
As always, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
On Raids, and the Leading Thereof
I had an interesting experience Tuesday night that involved pugging into a raid that I ended up leading. At the end, I thought it would make a good blog post and started thinking about how to compose it into a story worth hearing.
So imagine my surprise Wednesday morning when I look at my feeds and see that Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs has posted an article about pretty much the exact same thing. I'm still going to forge onward, however, because I have a slightly different tack than him.
There was over an hour 'till Wintergrasp, I had done a HoR for my chance at a Battered Hilt and Ephemeral Snowflake, I had completed my daily random, and the weekly raid quest was Marrowgar, which I'll get via our weekly trip into ICC anyway. Consequently, I was trying to decide if I wanted to hop over to Alrom and keep working him toward 80 or go do the Argent Tournament dailies and make a little money. I'm always short of the money I want, so I used my Argent Tabard and ported in to start picking up dailies.
Before I got more than 2 picked up, I saw somebody calling for tanks and heals for ToC10.
"What the hell," I thought, "that's my two specs and I can still use a couple of items out of there." I offered to go and was invited.
Upon informing the raid leader that I was tank/heals with a preference for tanking, he asked me to heal. A couple more minutes for them to pick up another tank (which actually flipped once found, from a DK to another bear), and we were "ready" to start.
I say "ready" because other than a definition of the tanks, nothing was really said in vent, I couldn't find another definitive healer in the group (turns out it was a shaman), and nobody really talked about a strategy. AT ALL, despite the fact that they had us all hop into a vent channel.
The shaman was new to raiding (as I later learned), and DID stand in the fire and die. And rez himself in the fire, and die again. And got battle rezzed... and died again, but I'm not sure if that was in the fire or not. Even given that, we lived a surprisingly long time with only me healing. I do an amazing amount of HPS when there's no other healers to turn half of my heals into overheals.
After that fiasco I guessed we were in for a very long run.
One of our only two ranged dps (don't go there), both of which happened to be warlocks, offered to bring his healer in, popped out and came back on a druid (which gave us 4 in the group, another was kitty), and during the interim I took the time to organize the heals, put the shaman on raid healing and split the tanks between the trees. I kept waiting, at this point, for the raid leader to lay out some sort of strategy. Mostly, all that was said was to kill the snobolds and run to the raid if you got one.
We made it through Gormok almost flawlessly on this run regardless, and the worms came out to say hello, and upon this event we ran into problems again. I don't remember all the specifics, but among other things they weren't both turned away from the raid, and at one point I stood in front of one even though it was turned away from the rest of the raid (I know, I'm a fail druid) and I died.
I actually got battle-rezzed and going again, and enough of the raid lived long enough to kill the first Jormungar. Soon after one of the two worms died, though, we had the bear tank, a rogue, and me alive, as everyone else had succumbed in one way or another. The other rogue actually released, thinking it was a wipe. But when the remaining Jormungar went underground, the bear rebirthed the second tree. Once our health was stable again (the burning debuff hit both of the healers), I rebirthed the cat druid, and we were back in business with half a raid.
Icehowl was a piece of cake, although he took forever.
It was one of the most stressful boss fights I've ever healed through, and I absolutely loved the challenge of it. We got congratulated for "epic healz", and thinking back I actually feel bad for not telling the bear what an awesome job he did.
About this point, the original raid leader said something about his DBM being messed up and asked for somebody else to lead the raid, the response to which was crickets chirping over the vent channel.
Despite my experience leading raids and especially ToC10 raids, I didn't exactly leap at the opportunity. I HATE leading PuG raids, with the rare exception of a weekly raid quest like Patchwerk that involves finding enough bodies of the right kinds to fill spots and saying go. I like our guild runs - I know everybody, more or less, and they're generally nice people who won't rip into somebody for screwing up, or go all elitist on me, or generally exhibit behavior that would warrant a kicking. In a PuG, however, there's really no such safety net, and I don't like being the person that has to deal with it. In addition, our guild folks generally know what they are doing, as even the ones that aren't seasoned raiders know enough NOT TO STAND IN THE FIRE. Oh, and one last thing - I've never been a raid leader as a healer. It's a different way of doing things than what I'm used to.
All this went through my head once, twice, maybe three times. Then, at the continued silence, I finally said, "Kaethir can lead if nobody else wants to."
Of course, being the first one to speak up meant that I got handed the reins. Yay me. I found out very quickly that we had a fairly knowledgeable, nice, and well geared group, and ended up not minding leading this raid at all.
I can skip the play-by-play from there on out. I took the time before each boss to lay out the general strategy (with some help from the more seasoned raiders in the group.) We only wiped one time the rest of the way, on our first attempt at the faction champions, despite only having one ranged for permafrost and adds during Anub, three folks learning the fights as we went, and our shaman healer being new to raiding at all. The warlock got lucky, as a LOT of dps caster gear dropped, with him being the only main spec to use it.
It was one of the more enjoyable PuGs I've gotten into, despite the fact that I got handed the lead I didn't want.
Tamarind waxes poetic about what calls people to lead raids and why, despite the fact that it can be stressful, people come back and do it again. I won't comment directly on what he said, but he made me think about why I'm willing to do this when the call comes. To me, it's really quite simple. I know the fights, I know what people are supposed to be doing, I like helping people learn, and perhaps the most important thing of all...
If I'm the one leading, I can't complain about the quality and/or skill of the raid leader. Perhaps, a bit more bluntly, if I'm the one leading, we're not going to screw up because there's no strategy in place, or because the healers aren't assigned, or some other silly thing (although I have been known to occasionally leave a point or two out of the explanation of a fight.) Having cut my teeth, so to speak, leading guild raids in an environment where I could make a few mistakes as a leader and not get reamed for it, I've developed the confidence that I know what I'm doing enough to lead others, provided of course that they're willing to be led.
Finally, a request to all those out there that want to get a raid together but don't want to lead... find a raid leader BEFORE you start the instance. It will make things easier.
So imagine my surprise Wednesday morning when I look at my feeds and see that Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs has posted an article about pretty much the exact same thing. I'm still going to forge onward, however, because I have a slightly different tack than him.
There was over an hour 'till Wintergrasp, I had done a HoR for my chance at a Battered Hilt and Ephemeral Snowflake, I had completed my daily random, and the weekly raid quest was Marrowgar, which I'll get via our weekly trip into ICC anyway. Consequently, I was trying to decide if I wanted to hop over to Alrom and keep working him toward 80 or go do the Argent Tournament dailies and make a little money. I'm always short of the money I want, so I used my Argent Tabard and ported in to start picking up dailies.
Before I got more than 2 picked up, I saw somebody calling for tanks and heals for ToC10.
"What the hell," I thought, "that's my two specs and I can still use a couple of items out of there." I offered to go and was invited.
Upon informing the raid leader that I was tank/heals with a preference for tanking, he asked me to heal. A couple more minutes for them to pick up another tank (which actually flipped once found, from a DK to another bear), and we were "ready" to start.
I say "ready" because other than a definition of the tanks, nothing was really said in vent, I couldn't find another definitive healer in the group (turns out it was a shaman), and nobody really talked about a strategy. AT ALL, despite the fact that they had us all hop into a vent channel.
The shaman was new to raiding (as I later learned), and DID stand in the fire and die. And rez himself in the fire, and die again. And got battle rezzed... and died again, but I'm not sure if that was in the fire or not. Even given that, we lived a surprisingly long time with only me healing. I do an amazing amount of HPS when there's no other healers to turn half of my heals into overheals.
After that fiasco I guessed we were in for a very long run.
One of our only two ranged dps (don't go there), both of which happened to be warlocks, offered to bring his healer in, popped out and came back on a druid (which gave us 4 in the group, another was kitty), and during the interim I took the time to organize the heals, put the shaman on raid healing and split the tanks between the trees. I kept waiting, at this point, for the raid leader to lay out some sort of strategy. Mostly, all that was said was to kill the snobolds and run to the raid if you got one.
We made it through Gormok almost flawlessly on this run regardless, and the worms came out to say hello, and upon this event we ran into problems again. I don't remember all the specifics, but among other things they weren't both turned away from the raid, and at one point I stood in front of one even though it was turned away from the rest of the raid (I know, I'm a fail druid) and I died.
I actually got battle-rezzed and going again, and enough of the raid lived long enough to kill the first Jormungar. Soon after one of the two worms died, though, we had the bear tank, a rogue, and me alive, as everyone else had succumbed in one way or another. The other rogue actually released, thinking it was a wipe. But when the remaining Jormungar went underground, the bear rebirthed the second tree. Once our health was stable again (the burning debuff hit both of the healers), I rebirthed the cat druid, and we were back in business with half a raid.
Icehowl was a piece of cake, although he took forever.
It was one of the most stressful boss fights I've ever healed through, and I absolutely loved the challenge of it. We got congratulated for "epic healz", and thinking back I actually feel bad for not telling the bear what an awesome job he did.
About this point, the original raid leader said something about his DBM being messed up and asked for somebody else to lead the raid, the response to which was crickets chirping over the vent channel.
Despite my experience leading raids and especially ToC10 raids, I didn't exactly leap at the opportunity. I HATE leading PuG raids, with the rare exception of a weekly raid quest like Patchwerk that involves finding enough bodies of the right kinds to fill spots and saying go. I like our guild runs - I know everybody, more or less, and they're generally nice people who won't rip into somebody for screwing up, or go all elitist on me, or generally exhibit behavior that would warrant a kicking. In a PuG, however, there's really no such safety net, and I don't like being the person that has to deal with it. In addition, our guild folks generally know what they are doing, as even the ones that aren't seasoned raiders know enough NOT TO STAND IN THE FIRE. Oh, and one last thing - I've never been a raid leader as a healer. It's a different way of doing things than what I'm used to.
All this went through my head once, twice, maybe three times. Then, at the continued silence, I finally said, "Kaethir can lead if nobody else wants to."
Of course, being the first one to speak up meant that I got handed the reins. Yay me. I found out very quickly that we had a fairly knowledgeable, nice, and well geared group, and ended up not minding leading this raid at all.
I can skip the play-by-play from there on out. I took the time before each boss to lay out the general strategy (with some help from the more seasoned raiders in the group.) We only wiped one time the rest of the way, on our first attempt at the faction champions, despite only having one ranged for permafrost and adds during Anub, three folks learning the fights as we went, and our shaman healer being new to raiding at all. The warlock got lucky, as a LOT of dps caster gear dropped, with him being the only main spec to use it.
It was one of the more enjoyable PuGs I've gotten into, despite the fact that I got handed the lead I didn't want.
Tamarind waxes poetic about what calls people to lead raids and why, despite the fact that it can be stressful, people come back and do it again. I won't comment directly on what he said, but he made me think about why I'm willing to do this when the call comes. To me, it's really quite simple. I know the fights, I know what people are supposed to be doing, I like helping people learn, and perhaps the most important thing of all...
If I'm the one leading, I can't complain about the quality and/or skill of the raid leader. Perhaps, a bit more bluntly, if I'm the one leading, we're not going to screw up because there's no strategy in place, or because the healers aren't assigned, or some other silly thing (although I have been known to occasionally leave a point or two out of the explanation of a fight.) Having cut my teeth, so to speak, leading guild raids in an environment where I could make a few mistakes as a leader and not get reamed for it, I've developed the confidence that I know what I'm doing enough to lead others, provided of course that they're willing to be led.
Finally, a request to all those out there that want to get a raid together but don't want to lead... find a raid leader BEFORE you start the instance. It will make things easier.
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!
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.
Friday, December 18, 2009
New Mount!
So I forgot to mention this the other day...
I'm pretty sure it was after our first wipe on Lord Marrowgar, we had released and run back in, and were buffing up the group.
Somebody mentioned, looking at the crazy-looking undead boss...
"That would be a sick mount!"
Universal agreement followed.
Blizzard, MAKE IT HAPPEN.
I'm pretty sure it was after our first wipe on Lord Marrowgar, we had released and run back in, and were buffing up the group.
Somebody mentioned, looking at the crazy-looking undead boss...
"That would be a sick mount!"
Universal agreement followed.
Blizzard, MAKE IT HAPPEN.
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!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Impromptu Weekend ToC10
I don't often get time to play much on the weekends - family commitments, time with the spouse, and my other two geek-related time consuming hobbies (Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons) combine to form just about the ultimate WoW blockage on the weekends.
Last weekend rolled around with no major plans for Saturday afternoon, I figured I had a good chance to get something done. I haven't had a chance yet to go in to the Icecrown Citadel raids, illness and houseguests had prevented me from having a chance to do ToC last week, and the weekly raid quest was for Lord Jaraxxus's head, so I decided to try to put together an impromptu run for ToC10. Encouraged by the fact that we had cleared it last week, I was hopeful to get a run in before dinner plans with the wife, and started putting a group together about 2:00.
Luckily for me, the two friends that have been my co-leaders for the raids weren't able to get into a ToC10 earlier in the week, so their mains weren't saved, and another guildie who has been bringing her healer almost every time was able to come, so we had most of the core tanks and heals we brought previously. We filled in with one pugged healer and 3 pugged DPS and set off. It took us until after 2:30 to get it all together, but it worked! The breakdown:
Tanks (2):
Bear (me!) and DK
Heals (3):
2 Holy Paladins and 1 Disc/Holy Priest
DPS (5):
2 Hunters, 1 Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enh. Shaman
I was hoping for 3 ranged DPS. Lord Jaraxxus is a little easier with more ranged DPS - there's less need for melee DPS to switch to Mistresses, and those pesky Infernals die that much faster - and gives you more chances to survive issues with Anub. I was confident that this would work, however, so we ran with it.
The Northrend Beasts!
Everyone was familiar with this fight (even though one of the pugs had only seen it on 25-man), so it went fairly smoothly. Gormok went down like the chump he is - I started with him, the other tank taunted off of me, I taunted back... I think that was the last time I taunted until he had barely 30k health left. We lost one of the hunters during the jormungar portion... so when the first worm fell, the other tank picked up the remaining one, and I shifted out and battle-rezzed him. Druids cheat so hardcore. Nobody got hit by Icehowl's charge, so he was easy. One down, 4 to go.
It's difficult, on our server, to pug into good groups for ToC. One of our pugs commented at this point, "finally got a good group!" When everybody knows what they are doing and most of them are geared well for the instance, things tend to go well! :)
We moved on...
Lord Jaraxxus!
A little stategery and we're ready to go for the next boss. Jaraxxus started out normally, although it took a little long to drop the first Mistress - I don't think the melee DPS switched to her right away, but once they did she fell quickly. The infernals came next, and this is where we started to get into a little trouble. It was my fault mostly, I think, for not marking which infernal to focus on. They're already difficult to really hold aggro on (at least for me... maybe I'm doing something wrong...) and without either excess ranged DPS or me marking a clear target it took too long to down them and they ran too wild near the melee, did too much damage, overstressing the healing. There were still one or two of them up when the second Mistress came.
Things got a little crazy after the second set of infernals came. We were already behind due to the craziness of the first round of adds, and at some point, I forget exactly when, the DK, the other tank, went down. I immediately had to stop what I was doing, of course, and pick up Jaraxxus, trying my best to keep the adds aggro'd on me. We lost a couple other folks - three or four in total - but beyond me trying to keep ahold of them we ignored the adds the rest of the way and we'd done enough damage before starting to lose people that he went down just before things were really about to get out of hand. It was a little close, but two bosses down, and no wipes yet!
The Faction Champions!
Our kill order: Priest (not Shadow, I don't remember if he's Disc or Holy), healing Shaman, Warlock, Rogue, Boomkin, Paladin. We wiped once or twice - our first run went pretty well and we downed three of them, especially good considering our hunters forgot to use frost traps and I called out the wrong target after the priest went down. (I was sloppy that day, I don't know why.) The DK pestered the paladin, keeping him (or is it a her?) essentially out of the fight. The rogue went down early the first try due to burst damage, and losing his kick interrupt really hurt.
The champions continue to give us more trouble on our runs than any of the other bosses, and I'm not entirely sure why. We're getting better with them, though, and I consider that a good sign.
The Twin Val'kyr!
We one-shotted them. There was a little confusion as to which people were supposed to be on which side of the room, but the fact that we pull the two of them fairly close together in the center of the room made that a little less important - we had a fairly even distribution of light and dark and that's all that really mattered. None of their special abilities did much of anything, and we didn't have issues with too many of the wrong-colored orbs hitting our guys.
I felt a little bad when I won the Loop of the Twin Val'kyr, as that is just about the only upgrade left in ToC10 for Illorien (our DK and co-leader).
You might think, from what I've said, that we were moving fast! No, one of our pugs complained because it was taking us awhile in between bosses. Admittedly, we had a few folks go afk for a couple minutes for issues that probably could have waited, but we don't fly like that. It's one of the endearing features of our guild, I think, that we understand that people are human and things happen, and we're willing to work with the time people give us. One of our breaks was because all of us leading the raid were a little under the weather and one of us went to make tea because her throat felt like it was wrapped in ropes of fire, and another break happened because one of the healers had a puppy get into a roll of toilet paper. I can understand the desire to get through things fast, but please... people are human, cut them a little slack if they can't stay 100% dedicated to a game for nearly 2 hours at a time.
Anub'arak!
Before we started up the event that drops you into Anub'arak's cavern, our pug shammy opened up a trade and gave me 8 gold. Luckily I figured out what was going on before I hit the water, and clicked off the water-walking buff he had put on me. Our DK escaped a similar fate, but I'm not sure if he saw it and clicked it off or had another method. I gave him his gold back, 'cuz I'm just a nice guy like that, but it was funny anyway.
One of the folks on the raid had never been to Anub before, so we had to explain the entire fight. Much like our last clear, we had a slightly sub-par healer setup - 2 paladins and 1 priest. Determined, however, we set out to vanquish our foe!
Our first attempt was doomed fairly early on. We lost both our hunters to some craziness in Anub's first underground phase. Our shaman made a valiant effort to use his small ranged arsenal to pick up the slack in dropping permafrost, but we lost a healer as well and had an add still up heading into phase 3. We wiped shortly thereafter.
Despite our relative success during our demise, we decided to switch one of our paladin healers to tanking the adds, move the DK to Anub himself and I pulled out my tree gear and filled in the healing slot. In addition to providing a steadier flow of smaller heals for phase 3 goodness, that helped the other 2 healers a bit by providing the Tree of Life aura.
The second attempt was nearly flawless, as we didn't lose anybody until Anub was well into phase 3 and our victory was nearly assured.
It took us about 2 hours in total, and while I was ready (and actually started trying to refill the spots of folks who left) to give ICC a shot, I was out of time.
Tuesday, I expect my little crew will be giving our first shot (or at least, the first shot with me there!) at ICC's 10-man raid. I haven't even had a chance to do the 5-man in heroic mode yet. We'll see what happens though, and I'm hopeful we can get through it!
Last weekend rolled around with no major plans for Saturday afternoon, I figured I had a good chance to get something done. I haven't had a chance yet to go in to the Icecrown Citadel raids, illness and houseguests had prevented me from having a chance to do ToC last week, and the weekly raid quest was for Lord Jaraxxus's head, so I decided to try to put together an impromptu run for ToC10. Encouraged by the fact that we had cleared it last week, I was hopeful to get a run in before dinner plans with the wife, and started putting a group together about 2:00.
Luckily for me, the two friends that have been my co-leaders for the raids weren't able to get into a ToC10 earlier in the week, so their mains weren't saved, and another guildie who has been bringing her healer almost every time was able to come, so we had most of the core tanks and heals we brought previously. We filled in with one pugged healer and 3 pugged DPS and set off. It took us until after 2:30 to get it all together, but it worked! The breakdown:
Tanks (2):
Bear (me!) and DK
Heals (3):
2 Holy Paladins and 1 Disc/Holy Priest
DPS (5):
2 Hunters, 1 Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enh. Shaman
I was hoping for 3 ranged DPS. Lord Jaraxxus is a little easier with more ranged DPS - there's less need for melee DPS to switch to Mistresses, and those pesky Infernals die that much faster - and gives you more chances to survive issues with Anub. I was confident that this would work, however, so we ran with it.
The Northrend Beasts!
Everyone was familiar with this fight (even though one of the pugs had only seen it on 25-man), so it went fairly smoothly. Gormok went down like the chump he is - I started with him, the other tank taunted off of me, I taunted back... I think that was the last time I taunted until he had barely 30k health left. We lost one of the hunters during the jormungar portion... so when the first worm fell, the other tank picked up the remaining one, and I shifted out and battle-rezzed him. Druids cheat so hardcore. Nobody got hit by Icehowl's charge, so he was easy. One down, 4 to go.
It's difficult, on our server, to pug into good groups for ToC. One of our pugs commented at this point, "finally got a good group!" When everybody knows what they are doing and most of them are geared well for the instance, things tend to go well! :)
We moved on...
Lord Jaraxxus!
A little stategery and we're ready to go for the next boss. Jaraxxus started out normally, although it took a little long to drop the first Mistress - I don't think the melee DPS switched to her right away, but once they did she fell quickly. The infernals came next, and this is where we started to get into a little trouble. It was my fault mostly, I think, for not marking which infernal to focus on. They're already difficult to really hold aggro on (at least for me... maybe I'm doing something wrong...) and without either excess ranged DPS or me marking a clear target it took too long to down them and they ran too wild near the melee, did too much damage, overstressing the healing. There were still one or two of them up when the second Mistress came.
Things got a little crazy after the second set of infernals came. We were already behind due to the craziness of the first round of adds, and at some point, I forget exactly when, the DK, the other tank, went down. I immediately had to stop what I was doing, of course, and pick up Jaraxxus, trying my best to keep the adds aggro'd on me. We lost a couple other folks - three or four in total - but beyond me trying to keep ahold of them we ignored the adds the rest of the way and we'd done enough damage before starting to lose people that he went down just before things were really about to get out of hand. It was a little close, but two bosses down, and no wipes yet!
The Faction Champions!
Our kill order: Priest (not Shadow, I don't remember if he's Disc or Holy), healing Shaman, Warlock, Rogue, Boomkin, Paladin. We wiped once or twice - our first run went pretty well and we downed three of them, especially good considering our hunters forgot to use frost traps and I called out the wrong target after the priest went down. (I was sloppy that day, I don't know why.) The DK pestered the paladin, keeping him (or is it a her?) essentially out of the fight. The rogue went down early the first try due to burst damage, and losing his kick interrupt really hurt.
The champions continue to give us more trouble on our runs than any of the other bosses, and I'm not entirely sure why. We're getting better with them, though, and I consider that a good sign.
The Twin Val'kyr!
We one-shotted them. There was a little confusion as to which people were supposed to be on which side of the room, but the fact that we pull the two of them fairly close together in the center of the room made that a little less important - we had a fairly even distribution of light and dark and that's all that really mattered. None of their special abilities did much of anything, and we didn't have issues with too many of the wrong-colored orbs hitting our guys.
I felt a little bad when I won the Loop of the Twin Val'kyr, as that is just about the only upgrade left in ToC10 for Illorien (our DK and co-leader).
You might think, from what I've said, that we were moving fast! No, one of our pugs complained because it was taking us awhile in between bosses. Admittedly, we had a few folks go afk for a couple minutes for issues that probably could have waited, but we don't fly like that. It's one of the endearing features of our guild, I think, that we understand that people are human and things happen, and we're willing to work with the time people give us. One of our breaks was because all of us leading the raid were a little under the weather and one of us went to make tea because her throat felt like it was wrapped in ropes of fire, and another break happened because one of the healers had a puppy get into a roll of toilet paper. I can understand the desire to get through things fast, but please... people are human, cut them a little slack if they can't stay 100% dedicated to a game for nearly 2 hours at a time.
Anub'arak!
Before we started up the event that drops you into Anub'arak's cavern, our pug shammy opened up a trade and gave me 8 gold. Luckily I figured out what was going on before I hit the water, and clicked off the water-walking buff he had put on me. Our DK escaped a similar fate, but I'm not sure if he saw it and clicked it off or had another method. I gave him his gold back, 'cuz I'm just a nice guy like that, but it was funny anyway.
One of the folks on the raid had never been to Anub before, so we had to explain the entire fight. Much like our last clear, we had a slightly sub-par healer setup - 2 paladins and 1 priest. Determined, however, we set out to vanquish our foe!
Our first attempt was doomed fairly early on. We lost both our hunters to some craziness in Anub's first underground phase. Our shaman made a valiant effort to use his small ranged arsenal to pick up the slack in dropping permafrost, but we lost a healer as well and had an add still up heading into phase 3. We wiped shortly thereafter.
Despite our relative success during our demise, we decided to switch one of our paladin healers to tanking the adds, move the DK to Anub himself and I pulled out my tree gear and filled in the healing slot. In addition to providing a steadier flow of smaller heals for phase 3 goodness, that helped the other 2 healers a bit by providing the Tree of Life aura.
The second attempt was nearly flawless, as we didn't lose anybody until Anub was well into phase 3 and our victory was nearly assured.
It took us about 2 hours in total, and while I was ready (and actually started trying to refill the spots of folks who left) to give ICC a shot, I was out of time.
Tuesday, I expect my little crew will be giving our first shot (or at least, the first shot with me there!) at ICC's 10-man raid. I haven't even had a chance to do the 5-man in heroic mode yet. We'll see what happens though, and I'm hopeful we can get through it!
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Cue the Final Fantasy "Win!" Music
I had a great night last night, and I'm gonna tell you about it. If you don't want to know, be a grinch and go away.
It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily. Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared. We churned through it in under 30 minutes. Piece of cake.
Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid. Let me back up a little before I get into it.
So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about. The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity. One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts. Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.
So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before. Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.
Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up. We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids. Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.
We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.
The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):
Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK
Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)
DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid
We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly. We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.
Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue. I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked. The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed. Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.
Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us. The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).
We moved on to the Twins. I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel. So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.
We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready. Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad. The second try was flawless.
I was extremely excited at this point. We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.
I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.
Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down. It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.
Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10... The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing. Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end. I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off. Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.
Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata. Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.
As always, thanks for reading. I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....
See you all on the flip side!
It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily. Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared. We churned through it in under 30 minutes. Piece of cake.
Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid. Let me back up a little before I get into it.
So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about. The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity. One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts. Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.
So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before. Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.
Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up. We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids. Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.
We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.
The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):
Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK
Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)
DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid
We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly. We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.
Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue. I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked. The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed. Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.
Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us. The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).
We moved on to the Twins. I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel. So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.
We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready. Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad. The second try was flawless.
I was extremely excited at this point. We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.
I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.
Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down. It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.
Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10... The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing. Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end. I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off. Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.
Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata. Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.
As always, thanks for reading. I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....
See you all on the flip side!
Monday, November 30, 2009
Of Loot and RNGs
Welcome back! I hope everyone had a fun holiday weekend!
The world is funny, sometimes in what it gives you. No matter what the odds of something happening are, that slim chance sometimes wins out. You love it or hate it (or sometimes just have to laugh!) depending on which way the long odds went... and I had an example of this last week that I thought was so ironic I could do nothing but laugh.
If you read about our loot rules last week and thought about it a bit, you may have realized that it's rather difficult in *most* of our 25-man raids to get gear that you have to roll for as an off-spec roll, because there will usually be at least one main spec in the raid that can use it and thus will get to roll first. This makes it a little rough on those of us that raid in our non-main spec, but it's really probably for the best this way.
That's neither really here nor there. Since I don't normally get a chance to bear up in our 25-man guild raids (because we have 3-4 designated progression tanks ahead of me), I usually end up rolling on healing gear, which has been mysteriously slim of late, and I don't usually get to roll on tanking loot.
Last week, due to illness, I had a chance to tank on our Ony/Vault/ToC run. I was ecstatic at the chance to run my main spec in our guild raids as well as having the opportunity to roll on tanking gear as my main spec.
I was disappointed, then, when the only real tanking upgrade that dropped was a sideways one for me - a chest item with identical main stats and gem slots, and a few shifted secondary stats as the one I'm already wearing. (I passed on rolling for that, since we had folks that could get much more use out of it.) I had to laugh, though, because two pieces of leather casting gear (that I would have really expected to be snapped up by one of the casting druids on the raid) fell to off-spec rolls, and for a change of pace my rolls were decent enough to win.
Why is it that the RNG decides to ship me healing gear on the one night I'd really like to see tanking gear drop?
The world is funny, sometimes in what it gives you. No matter what the odds of something happening are, that slim chance sometimes wins out. You love it or hate it (or sometimes just have to laugh!) depending on which way the long odds went... and I had an example of this last week that I thought was so ironic I could do nothing but laugh.
If you read about our loot rules last week and thought about it a bit, you may have realized that it's rather difficult in *most* of our 25-man raids to get gear that you have to roll for as an off-spec roll, because there will usually be at least one main spec in the raid that can use it and thus will get to roll first. This makes it a little rough on those of us that raid in our non-main spec, but it's really probably for the best this way.
That's neither really here nor there. Since I don't normally get a chance to bear up in our 25-man guild raids (because we have 3-4 designated progression tanks ahead of me), I usually end up rolling on healing gear, which has been mysteriously slim of late, and I don't usually get to roll on tanking loot.
Last week, due to illness, I had a chance to tank on our Ony/Vault/ToC run. I was ecstatic at the chance to run my main spec in our guild raids as well as having the opportunity to roll on tanking gear as my main spec.
I was disappointed, then, when the only real tanking upgrade that dropped was a sideways one for me - a chest item with identical main stats and gem slots, and a few shifted secondary stats as the one I'm already wearing. (I passed on rolling for that, since we had folks that could get much more use out of it.) I had to laugh, though, because two pieces of leather casting gear (that I would have really expected to be snapped up by one of the casting druids on the raid) fell to off-spec rolls, and for a change of pace my rolls were decent enough to win.
Why is it that the RNG decides to ship me healing gear on the one night I'd really like to see tanking gear drop?
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Raiding and Loot Rules
I was wondering if any of the two readers I have would care to share their guild's loot rules for raiding?
My guild has tried a few things, but being the way we are we've always decided to stick with generally simple rules, adding one now and again to further the best interests of progression, fun, or fairness. While I personally think we have too many rules (and we're considering adding another one!), I do think our system works pretty well, is not too complicated, and is mostly fair to all involved.
Here's our rules:
1. Rolls are called for main specs first, then off spec.
1a. Your main spec is the role you are performing on this particular raid. If you wish to roll on a different spec, clear it with the raid leader first.
1b. If you have already won an item from either of the two main general categories we set out (see #2 below) as a main spec item, you roll as if it were an off spec item.
2. There are 3 categories of items we separate: tier pieces/trophies, normal gear, and random stuff. Random stuff, for example, is Onyxia's Enlarged Onyxia Hide Backpack - everyone can roll on random stuff provided it's something they can use (i.e. they don't already have Onyxia's backpack.) For the other two categories, winning an item in one category does not preclude you from rolling on an item in the other as main spec.
3. We are working on progression and feel that appropriately geared tanks are essential to success. In addition to anyone performing the tank role on the raid, our designated progression tanks get first pick of tank loot.
4. On caster items, +hit gear goes to DPS casters first, and +critical strike gear goes to healing casters first.
We have no other rules beyond that. The one we are considering is giving first pick rights to different melee classes based on which stats benefits them more, especially on accessories such as rings and trinkets that multiple classes can use - i.e. agility rings go to rogues before warriors. That is a complicated one, especially for specs such as my main, where it's not agility vs. strength that is looked for, but, in logical terms, (agi OR str) AND stam.
We decided against using tools such as DKP because our guild does not want to completely discourage PUGs or guildmates that don't have very much time to raid from coming - if they don't have time to come 2 nights a week, that's ok, they'll still have their shots at gearing up.
We're a pretty mature group in general, almost always willing to help each other out, and that helps - we have regulars that will step out to let folks that don't get a chance to go every week have a turn, and folks that are willing to pass on items that are small upgrades for themselves to let others get much bigger upgrades.
So... is this kinda normal, or are we way out in left field?
My guild has tried a few things, but being the way we are we've always decided to stick with generally simple rules, adding one now and again to further the best interests of progression, fun, or fairness. While I personally think we have too many rules (and we're considering adding another one!), I do think our system works pretty well, is not too complicated, and is mostly fair to all involved.
Here's our rules:
1. Rolls are called for main specs first, then off spec.
1a. Your main spec is the role you are performing on this particular raid. If you wish to roll on a different spec, clear it with the raid leader first.
1b. If you have already won an item from either of the two main general categories we set out (see #2 below) as a main spec item, you roll as if it were an off spec item.
2. There are 3 categories of items we separate: tier pieces/trophies, normal gear, and random stuff. Random stuff, for example, is Onyxia's Enlarged Onyxia Hide Backpack - everyone can roll on random stuff provided it's something they can use (i.e. they don't already have Onyxia's backpack.) For the other two categories, winning an item in one category does not preclude you from rolling on an item in the other as main spec.
3. We are working on progression and feel that appropriately geared tanks are essential to success. In addition to anyone performing the tank role on the raid, our designated progression tanks get first pick of tank loot.
4. On caster items, +hit gear goes to DPS casters first, and +critical strike gear goes to healing casters first.
We have no other rules beyond that. The one we are considering is giving first pick rights to different melee classes based on which stats benefits them more, especially on accessories such as rings and trinkets that multiple classes can use - i.e. agility rings go to rogues before warriors. That is a complicated one, especially for specs such as my main, where it's not agility vs. strength that is looked for, but, in logical terms, (agi OR str) AND stam.
We decided against using tools such as DKP because our guild does not want to completely discourage PUGs or guildmates that don't have very much time to raid from coming - if they don't have time to come 2 nights a week, that's ok, they'll still have their shots at gearing up.
We're a pretty mature group in general, almost always willing to help each other out, and that helps - we have regulars that will step out to let folks that don't get a chance to go every week have a turn, and folks that are willing to pass on items that are small upgrades for themselves to let others get much bigger upgrades.
So... is this kinda normal, or are we way out in left field?
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!
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Monday night raid report
I run a guild-hosted raid every other Monday night, 10-man, with the help of a couple of my good friends. We've experimented with a couple of different raid formats and I think we've finally settled on a 10-man version of our guild's 25-man Wednesday night raids. Which is to say, for the moment, Onyxia and Trial of the Crusader, with the loot pinata that is Vault of Archavon if the situation arises properly.
Two weeks ago, we skipped Onyxia because I didn't put that as part of the calendar invite and a few of our folks were saved. Monday night we did it right, although we struggled a bit. Due to the size and nature of my guild, we bring along pretty much whoever we can get, no matter whether they're "properly geared" or not. Last night we had quite a few alts or relatively new 80's along with us, and one wonderful pug healer. One of our healers for most of the night was a druid alt of one of our rogues, as we are perpetually overabundant with DPS and tanks and perpetually short on healing.
As an aside, while as a competitive jerk I would rather we have 10 fully geared mains, I much prefer our guild structure, where folks who are a little behind or haven't had the time to dedicate to getting fully geared with Emblem gear get a chance to go, even if it means we wipe a time or three, and people CAN play their alts if they so desire. It gives folks that only perform one role on the big guild runs or any other runs they do the chance to do something different.
Back to the raid. We had only 2 ranged DPS, a mage that had never been to Onyxia before, and a warlock alt of one of our solid tanks/healers. This makes phase 2 and its craziness all that much harder. The OT for Ony was a DK. We wiped once due to hardware (mouse driver) issues, and once or twice while some of our newer folks (new to level 80 or new role-wise) figured out the intricacies of the fight. One more wipe due to a little bad luck, and then we finally beat her down.
We moved on to ToC and traded out a DPS for a tank, with the OT switching up to take the DPS spot. We brought in a second bear for dual furry tanking. I will admit I was a little nervous as the new bear had a lot less HP than I had expected, but we went with it. After a wipe with Gormok, we got to the jormungar and wiped on them a couple of times. Our alt healer then convinced one of our awesome priests to step in, and on the last attempt of the night we downed the Northrend beasts.
I'm a little out of it this morning, so just a short post and sadly nothing all that interesting to talk about. My one reader will be disappointed, but hey I've got to break down those expectations some day. Thanks for reading!
Two weeks ago, we skipped Onyxia because I didn't put that as part of the calendar invite and a few of our folks were saved. Monday night we did it right, although we struggled a bit. Due to the size and nature of my guild, we bring along pretty much whoever we can get, no matter whether they're "properly geared" or not. Last night we had quite a few alts or relatively new 80's along with us, and one wonderful pug healer. One of our healers for most of the night was a druid alt of one of our rogues, as we are perpetually overabundant with DPS and tanks and perpetually short on healing.
As an aside, while as a competitive jerk I would rather we have 10 fully geared mains, I much prefer our guild structure, where folks who are a little behind or haven't had the time to dedicate to getting fully geared with Emblem gear get a chance to go, even if it means we wipe a time or three, and people CAN play their alts if they so desire. It gives folks that only perform one role on the big guild runs or any other runs they do the chance to do something different.
Back to the raid. We had only 2 ranged DPS, a mage that had never been to Onyxia before, and a warlock alt of one of our solid tanks/healers. This makes phase 2 and its craziness all that much harder. The OT for Ony was a DK. We wiped once due to hardware (mouse driver) issues, and once or twice while some of our newer folks (new to level 80 or new role-wise) figured out the intricacies of the fight. One more wipe due to a little bad luck, and then we finally beat her down.
We moved on to ToC and traded out a DPS for a tank, with the OT switching up to take the DPS spot. We brought in a second bear for dual furry tanking. I will admit I was a little nervous as the new bear had a lot less HP than I had expected, but we went with it. After a wipe with Gormok, we got to the jormungar and wiped on them a couple of times. Our alt healer then convinced one of our awesome priests to step in, and on the last attempt of the night we downed the Northrend beasts.
I'm a little out of it this morning, so just a short post and sadly nothing all that interesting to talk about. My one reader will be disappointed, but hey I've got to break down those expectations some day. Thanks for reading!
Monday, November 2, 2009
Some thoughts on healing assignments
For those out there who are raid leaders, how do you make healing assignments? Do you base it purely on Recount's healing meter? Do you base it on the class of the healer? Do you factor in a healer's individual spec (for, say priests?) or do you bother yourself with asking the healer how his or her gear is arranged?
I would suppose that some combination therein is the best way to do it, but I'm curious how folks generally do it. I haven't led enough raids myself to have a perfectly clear understanding of how difficult it is to bother with any of it, but I can tell you for a certainty that it can make a difference.
Most of my tree gear was patched together before the last couple rounds of lifebloom nerfs. As such I have the lifebloom idol, and my spec is geared a bit towards lifebloom and rejuvenation rather than nourish and/or healing touch. This means that I'm going to do much better with my healing output if I'm healing a tank. With the nerfs, that's the only way lifebloom is really that incredibly useful. I'm going to be switching to the rejuvenation idol (234 free spellpower seems nice mmkay?), but until then I'd much prefer to be healing a tank than general raid healing.
Druids make pretty darned good raid healers. The only reason Wild Growth isn't completely unadulterated awesome is the 15 yd range limitation on the smart splash heal. Rejuvenation runs fairly long, heals for a reasonably large amount, and is a low enough cost to be effective at healing a fairly large chunk of a raid.
But if the druid's focus is nourish or lifebloom, do you want to put them on raid-wide responsibility?
I would suppose that some combination therein is the best way to do it, but I'm curious how folks generally do it. I haven't led enough raids myself to have a perfectly clear understanding of how difficult it is to bother with any of it, but I can tell you for a certainty that it can make a difference.
Most of my tree gear was patched together before the last couple rounds of lifebloom nerfs. As such I have the lifebloom idol, and my spec is geared a bit towards lifebloom and rejuvenation rather than nourish and/or healing touch. This means that I'm going to do much better with my healing output if I'm healing a tank. With the nerfs, that's the only way lifebloom is really that incredibly useful. I'm going to be switching to the rejuvenation idol (234 free spellpower seems nice mmkay?), but until then I'd much prefer to be healing a tank than general raid healing.
Druids make pretty darned good raid healers. The only reason Wild Growth isn't completely unadulterated awesome is the 15 yd range limitation on the smart splash heal. Rejuvenation runs fairly long, heals for a reasonably large amount, and is a low enough cost to be effective at healing a fairly large chunk of a raid.
But if the druid's focus is nourish or lifebloom, do you want to put them on raid-wide responsibility?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
RAWR!... and the bigger they are...
Thus I begin my foray into the blogging world.
Since I don't expect anybody to know who I am, a (very) little about myself before I venture into the real content of my first post. I'm a Systems Engineer at a communications company, I got married earlier this year, and I've been playing WoW since before TBC came out. I didn't get to 70, however, until a month or so before Wrath was released, so most of my end-game experience is colored by that fact. My main is an alliance druid, main specced into bear tanking and offspecced into tree. Enough about me, on to the show!
I had a number of ideas on how to start around here, but on the path of positive thinking, I decided to start with a high note from my past week in the World.
Everybody that's ever pugged in WoW has had at least one experience with a bad group. The leader can't get the right people, the dps keeps going afk, the healer lets the tank die and then says "sorry I was afk/eating/bio/etc." In raids it can often be worse, if pugs come in and don't know the fights, or can't play their class. If you pug, you know how this goes, and just hope that you don't get saved to something before you can escape.
I got an invite to tank a 10-man Onyxia last week from someone I had never met. Apologies to those involved, I can't even remember their names at this point. I happily accept and start looking at the raid composition to see if I might be able to get any of my other guildies that are on invited. That, you see, is where my worry started.
There seemed to be some confusion as to how many healers were there already, and how many we still needed, as well as DPS. By the time I was able to sort it out we've managed to get a full raid invited in - but from what some folks had said, we had only 2 heals. This seems 1 light to me, but I'll let the raid leader do his job - then somebody drops. Another join, and another drop.
By this point I'm groaning on the inside. The raid channel is full of chatter, half of which makes me think I'm the only one around that actually knows anything. I tell myself that it'll be ok, it'll be a rough run but we'll get through it.
I should mention, at some point, that I was being told I'll be the main tank, and while I was confident that I could do it, I had never, at that point, even gone in to Onyxia 10-man, and the 25 man version I had only healed. (Yeah, I know, I said I was main spec tank, I'll address that some other time).
By the time we start in, we've had 3 changes in the last raid spot.
On the first trash pull the raid leader died because somebody wouldn't wait until we could do just one at a time. At this point I'm quite certain we're going to wipe, hardcore.
You know the feeling. It's the same one you get watching horror flicks, when you know something bad is going to happen. You don't always know when, you don't always know how, but you know it's coming, and you can't stop it. It gets even worse as folks try to run past the Warder that's off on the side and ignore it. A couple of folks insist that we do need to kill it, and when a DPS gets a little too close and pulls it I growl at it and hope I have a healer close by. Insert universal expression of exasperation here.
Finally, we get down to Onyxia herself. In what surprises me as a remarkable show of organization, we do set out roles and responsibilities for each phase - I'm taking her in phase 1, in phase 2 the OT (a paladin) will take the whelps and I'll take the larger adds, and when she lands, if I don't have an add I'll take her, if one is still up the OT will take her. The raid leader assigns some DPS roles for phase 2, and off we go.
It was perfect.
Phase 1, I get my furry butt backed up against the far wall. I think the DPS starts going a little early, but it doesn't cause me any issues. What seems like an amazingly few seconds later, she turns and heads south to take off. The whelps spawn and are gathered up by the pally. The AOE starts to burn them down as Ony flies around, and one of the larger adds spawns and comes down the ramp. I pick it up and turn it around.
I really don't realize, at this point, how fast we are going, and I start to get a little worried about how "slow" the dps is going after the add I'm tanking, and the whelps that are still dying around the pally. As my big dude starts to get a little low on life, I'm looking around for where Ony is in case I need to move for a deep breath, as I'm sure it's past time for one, whatever DBM says.
Then Onyxia lands, without ever taking a deep breath. In shock I look for the pally to see if he's moving to pick her up, but can't find him. A couple seconds later my add drops, and I run down the big dragon, berserking through the first fear. I pick her up and get her turned back where she should be, and the DPS goes nuclear. In what seems to me like a remarkably short time from when I first went snout-to-snout with the big girl, she comes crashing down.
My screen spams yellow boxes - More Dots!, She Deep Breaths More, and the achievement for Ony herself, all at once.
To say the least, I was pleasantly surprised.
While I've gotten better, I have occasionally had problems outpacing threat for people with extremely high DPS output. I had no issues, and we had a 5.9k and 5.2k DPS, plus a couple more at 4k+. Hats off to all the folks that were on that raid, despite my misgivings on the lead up, everybody performed to perfection and made a bear happy.
If you've somehow managed to find your way here, I hope you enjoyed my little story. I hope in upcoming posts to do some thoughts on bear tanking, tree healing, life in general, and anything else that happens to strike my fancy. Welcome, and thanks for reading!
Since I don't expect anybody to know who I am, a (very) little about myself before I venture into the real content of my first post. I'm a Systems Engineer at a communications company, I got married earlier this year, and I've been playing WoW since before TBC came out. I didn't get to 70, however, until a month or so before Wrath was released, so most of my end-game experience is colored by that fact. My main is an alliance druid, main specced into bear tanking and offspecced into tree. Enough about me, on to the show!
I had a number of ideas on how to start around here, but on the path of positive thinking, I decided to start with a high note from my past week in the World.
Everybody that's ever pugged in WoW has had at least one experience with a bad group. The leader can't get the right people, the dps keeps going afk, the healer lets the tank die and then says "sorry I was afk/eating/bio/etc." In raids it can often be worse, if pugs come in and don't know the fights, or can't play their class. If you pug, you know how this goes, and just hope that you don't get saved to something before you can escape.
I got an invite to tank a 10-man Onyxia last week from someone I had never met. Apologies to those involved, I can't even remember their names at this point. I happily accept and start looking at the raid composition to see if I might be able to get any of my other guildies that are on invited. That, you see, is where my worry started.
There seemed to be some confusion as to how many healers were there already, and how many we still needed, as well as DPS. By the time I was able to sort it out we've managed to get a full raid invited in - but from what some folks had said, we had only 2 heals. This seems 1 light to me, but I'll let the raid leader do his job - then somebody drops. Another join, and another drop.
By this point I'm groaning on the inside. The raid channel is full of chatter, half of which makes me think I'm the only one around that actually knows anything. I tell myself that it'll be ok, it'll be a rough run but we'll get through it.
I should mention, at some point, that I was being told I'll be the main tank, and while I was confident that I could do it, I had never, at that point, even gone in to Onyxia 10-man, and the 25 man version I had only healed. (Yeah, I know, I said I was main spec tank, I'll address that some other time).
By the time we start in, we've had 3 changes in the last raid spot.
On the first trash pull the raid leader died because somebody wouldn't wait until we could do just one at a time. At this point I'm quite certain we're going to wipe, hardcore.
You know the feeling. It's the same one you get watching horror flicks, when you know something bad is going to happen. You don't always know when, you don't always know how, but you know it's coming, and you can't stop it. It gets even worse as folks try to run past the Warder that's off on the side and ignore it. A couple of folks insist that we do need to kill it, and when a DPS gets a little too close and pulls it I growl at it and hope I have a healer close by. Insert universal expression of exasperation here.
Finally, we get down to Onyxia herself. In what surprises me as a remarkable show of organization, we do set out roles and responsibilities for each phase - I'm taking her in phase 1, in phase 2 the OT (a paladin) will take the whelps and I'll take the larger adds, and when she lands, if I don't have an add I'll take her, if one is still up the OT will take her. The raid leader assigns some DPS roles for phase 2, and off we go.
It was perfect.
Phase 1, I get my furry butt backed up against the far wall. I think the DPS starts going a little early, but it doesn't cause me any issues. What seems like an amazingly few seconds later, she turns and heads south to take off. The whelps spawn and are gathered up by the pally. The AOE starts to burn them down as Ony flies around, and one of the larger adds spawns and comes down the ramp. I pick it up and turn it around.
I really don't realize, at this point, how fast we are going, and I start to get a little worried about how "slow" the dps is going after the add I'm tanking, and the whelps that are still dying around the pally. As my big dude starts to get a little low on life, I'm looking around for where Ony is in case I need to move for a deep breath, as I'm sure it's past time for one, whatever DBM says.
Then Onyxia lands, without ever taking a deep breath. In shock I look for the pally to see if he's moving to pick her up, but can't find him. A couple seconds later my add drops, and I run down the big dragon, berserking through the first fear. I pick her up and get her turned back where she should be, and the DPS goes nuclear. In what seems to me like a remarkably short time from when I first went snout-to-snout with the big girl, she comes crashing down.
My screen spams yellow boxes - More Dots!, She Deep Breaths More, and the achievement for Ony herself, all at once.
To say the least, I was pleasantly surprised.
While I've gotten better, I have occasionally had problems outpacing threat for people with extremely high DPS output. I had no issues, and we had a 5.9k and 5.2k DPS, plus a couple more at 4k+. Hats off to all the folks that were on that raid, despite my misgivings on the lead up, everybody performed to perfection and made a bear happy.
If you've somehow managed to find your way here, I hope you enjoyed my little story. I hope in upcoming posts to do some thoughts on bear tanking, tree healing, life in general, and anything else that happens to strike my fancy. Welcome, and thanks for reading!
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