Beros' Blog

AoE Tanking

2009-06-05T10:47:00.001-07:00

Ok, it's been awhile, but lets try just diving back in...

Once upon a time, Paladins were the undisputed kings of AoE tanking. I was the most beloved toon in all of Mt Hyjal for many moons way back in the day. I spent a lot of time spamming Consecration and Shield Block and trying to find a camera angle that let me see anything at all beyond a screen full of dizzying spell effects. Or I'd just give up on the screen and watch the raid display to taunt off the warlocks and mages whose AoE would very occasionally outpace Consecration threat.

But that was a long time ago and with 3.0 came AoE tanking abilities for all tanks. The mechanics all differ a little bit, but Blizzard was clearly flattening out the niches that had existed for tanking. In theory, my hp/mitigation caught up with the prot warriors a bit and they got some talents for grabbing a room full of mobs all at once. While it was nice to be less reliant on specific classes for specific fights, you do also miss being able to best fill a specific job. It's a obviously constant balancing act for Blizzard between maintaining class distinctiveness and not requiring hardcore raid stacking and toon swapping for specific fights.

Of course, then we gradually learned that we were both lacking the best elements for tanking Sarth+3 -- the ridiculous hp pools of a bear tank and the zillions of cooldowns of a DK tank. Look, niches again. Except that this time, we didn't have anybody ready to fill the niche and so we never managed to beat that last fight. :(

But on AoE tanking, since Ulduar came out, I've been gradually coming around to the idea that I'm actually maybe currently the worst AoE tank. We've been running into the problem that Consecration doesn't work that well on rapidly moving mobs and the Warriors ability to stun/slow while building AoE threat -- Sarth + 2/3 whelps were a good demonstration of that, too. And it looks to me like the Consecration threat building hasn't kept pace with the level of AoE damage that the locks and mages can put out.

For awhile, I've been thinking I wasn't doing it well enough (and that might be true, I have some ideas for improving). But I think if there is a current niche for pally tanking, it's not actually full AoE tanking, but 2-3 multi-mob tanking. I have several abilities that hit 2-3 mobs hard so it's very easy for me to spike threat in situations like this. Then the extra shield blocks and consecration should be plenty to hold them. So I think I should be looking for fights where we have a few more mobs than tanks and be thinking about mechanics for collecting them rapidly. Macro targeting works well for one mob. I wonder if it's possible to construct 2-3 mob macros -- something like a /targetsequence chain instead of a /castsequence chain. Currently, getting exactly the correct 2 mobs tanked is occasionally a problem. I grab one and the other runs and I have to try to grab and taunt it with the mouse, which is sometimes slower than ideal. If I shield throw, sometimes I get the wrong mob or one of the targets isn't in range of the bounce. If I can't come up with a macro solution, maybe I should just contract out initial threat on one of them to a hunter or rogue. If only we had more hunters and rogues.

Speaking of nostalgia, remember when the whole server was overrun with NE hunters and rogues? You couldn't swing a Thunderfury in MC without hitting 10 or more of them.

I've also been thinking about how to improve my AoE tanking efficiency. There are a couple of Glyphs that help with multi-mob damage that I don't use in my normal single-mob tanking gear (+2s to Consecration and +1 target to Hammer of Righteousness). That lead me to think about setting up a dual spec just to keep an alternate set of Glyphs around. I think I could tweak a second tanking spec to have a little more generic Ret damage too, which could also help. I've also been wondering about the Consecration mechanics. I know it gets buffed from both attack power and spell power. I wonder if it's affected by +haste. If so, maybe I can swap in a piece of either Ret or Holy +haste gear and increase the output a little. I could spare to lose a little defense if necessary. I think a little experimentation on the target dummies might let me figure the gear issue out.

I had been mulling over changing to a 2-tank dual spec even before I noticed last night that during some recent patch, my Holy second spec got reset. So now, I think I'll just bank the Holy gear for a bit and experiment with setting up a single and multi mob tanking specs/glyphs/gearsets.

If I get a some time to work on it over the weekend, I should be able to try out improved AoE tanking by Thorim next week. We struggled a lot with Thorim this past week and I really felt like my inability to keep the whole room of mobs locked down was a big part of the problem. I'd like to reconquer that Keeper next week so we can get back to properly wiping all night on Mimiron. :)

Heroic Flame Leviathan

2009-04-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

Technically it was a 1-shot, but I think at least half the raid had see the boss fight before either on the PTR or in a 10-person group. The long vehicle fight preceding the boss fight is pretty fun and I suspect will be a nice warm up to raiding each Tuesday after Ulduar resets. It also gives time for people to learn the vehicles so they are ready for the boss battle.

We took down all four towers, of course. Maybe we should consider leaving one up next week just to see what happens.

After, we went to try Ignis, which we found to be hard. I think everybody is finding it hard, I didn't see any guilds on the server that got him. We didn't either, although it felt like we were making progress and maybe getting close. It's an awfully hard fight to heal through, though, and I think that will be the remaining challenge. Bloc came up with a nice approach to positioning and Ragon and I worked out a decent approach to the adds (I think).

When the trash respawned we went and took a look at the Deconstructor boss (sometimes called XT). It appears that boss is quite a bit easier and so is Razorscale, the third boss you can choose from after Leviathan.

Monday we'll go back again and maybe get one of these down (or even 2 if we're on a roll). Over the next couple of nights, hopefully we'll get some 10s going to give people some practice and experience on those bosses to prep for Monday.

10 < 25

2009-04-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

I logged on early again last night, found I was still in the raid from Tuesday and zoned right in to Ulduar with no trouble. Talked to the NPCs, aggroed some mobs and ran out. So I was feeling pretty optimistic about our raiding chances as I went afk for a few minutes to take out my contacts and settle the rest of the regular evening stuff.

When I got back in, there were 3 of us in Ulduar (me, Kyoka and Sherider) but apparently everything was broken again and nobody else could get in. After yet another frustrating hour of standing around, we gave up on running 25 at 12:30 once more.

A bunch of people logged off to sleep and I was going to, but didn't right away. And then about 30m later, suddenly I hear some excited voices on vent -- "hey, I'm in. It's working." So we decided to pull together a 10 and at least see the mechanics of the first boss vehicle battle.

So we start randomly jumping in vehicles and driving around blowing stuff up, gradually working out the abilities, mechanics and goals as we went. There are a whole bunch of towers that spawn guys that need to be destroyed and 4 key towers that are marked with glowing spheres. Mandie told us that not killing those makes the fight harder in a Sarth + drakes style. We'll have to check that out someday.

I got my vehicle blown up by being a little too aggressive and spent most of this phase of the fight riding as a sidekick in Wiseman's motorcycle with no buttons to press. Which was annoying at first, but let me concentrate on figuring out the mechanics and positioning for that fight. It took awhile, but we actually ground our way through the whole gauntlet on the first real try. And then we found the boss, pulled and died.

We took another couple of cracks at it while working out the roles for the 3 vehicle types and when/how to catapult people onto the Flame Leviathan. We decided to catapult Sirtank and Hawksy right away (one dps and one healer to keep him alive). But we missed with Hawksy and ST was only able to kill 2 of the 4 things to kill up there. That problem persisted through a couple of attempts even as we got better at dpsing the boss.

We actually never figured out the catapult thing properly but somehow managed to scramble to a nearly-all-dead win on about the 4th try. We got a bonus for failing though when we all procced an achievement for winning the fight without dealing with the catapult/turrets properly, heh.

We pushed on a little bit after even though it was late. We wiped some on the trash to Ignis -- I think 2 tanks would have been better than 1 (just me) and we will need some practice on avoiding the flame cyclones. Then we pulled another boss (Incapacitator?) that had no trash and was pretty amusing -- it's a gigantic toddler robot boss. Again, >1 tank would probably be helpful for summons management, but it was nice to pull and see it.

With a little luck, we'll have a full 25 able to zone in tonight and do it again in real, Heroic mode. That should be even more fun.

Server capacity

2009-04-15T14:40:00.001-07:00

3.1 released last night. I made special effort to clear my schedule, logged on early, paid for dual-spec, respecced, set up both specs. I even set up Major Glyphs for my holy spec although I couldn't figure out which Minor Glyphs I should have (Lay on Hand and ?). I cleaned up my inventory, checked consumeables, repaired, got symbols and headed off to Icecrown.

And sat there. Periodically trying to zone in to Ulduar and getting kicked out with the "instance not available" message. After about an hour or so, we gave up and decided to try to raid it tonight instead. I poked around on the forums as we waited and found a blue post indicating that their instance servers simply couldn't keep up with the demands to create new instances.

I wondered about why that was. Maybe the relative ease of Naxx meant that a much higher proportion of warcraft players were ready to set foot in Ulduar the moment it released? Or maybe the extra extended maintenance time meant even more groups were trying to get started at the same time. Normally, you probably see a distributed range of raid start times, but obviously a lot of people were trying to get in just as we were, which is later than most.

Hopefully it'll be sorted out for tonight.

In a somewhat curious contrast, I realized this morning that I never finished up submitting my taxes. I did them online via turbotax a few days ago, but wanted to check a few last things with my wife before sending them in. I was worried that their servers would be overwhelmed on tax day and I had this clever idea of doing it post-raid last night -- who'd be doing taxes at 2am? Well, fewer of us anyway. But disappointed with the raid not going, I forgot and so I was a little nervous this morning at 9am when I logged on to their site. But it worked fine. Not even any real lag or anything. I guess their servers held up just fine.

There might be 11million warcraft players, but there are probably more people than that who file their taxes on April 15th. Something for Blizzard to think about. ;)

Sarth + 2.5

2009-03-25T12:54:00.001-07:00

We were making progress on Sartharian with 3 drakes up last night. It feels like we could do Sarth+2 without too much difficulty but we weren't quite executing well enough to get through the encounter with all 3 -- we seem to be at about 2.5/3 in performance.

So instead of dropping down to Sarth+2 to practice that at the end of the evening, we pressed on until respawns with +3 with the plan to go back tonight for more if we didn't get it. In the past, getting 2 running nights on a boss seemed to have good consequences for our progress.

There's some relevant neuroscience research about memory consolidation processes that occur during sleep. There's mounting evidence that lots of good things happen about strengthening knowledge while we are sleeping. Of note, this applies not only to knowledge of the fight plan, like where to stand and which drakes are coming next, but also to skill learning like juggling the intense demands on play execution while simultaneously tracking the environment (walls, void zones, blazes, etc). So we should be all good and consolidated for tonight's attempt. :)

I think the particular remaining hard part will be coordinating the cooldown rotation for the MT during the super-high-damage breaths going from Shadron to Vesperon. We got a look at the challenges of that moment on a couple of attempts and it'll be tricky. To get there reliably, we need to stay sharp at flame wall avoidance, avoid the void zones, maintain high dps and keep the adds under control.

Keeping the adds under control was my job last night and it's still very demanding. After watching the whelps run through my consecration and go after the healers yet again, it finally occurred to me to ask for an earthbind totem near the portal. That made a big difference in that I was able to reliably gather all the whelps with at most 1-2 exceptions. The blazes were still not always perfectly tanked and I'm not even sure they can be. For one thing, the number and location of the blazes is highly random. Sometimes there will be very long periods with no blazes spawning. Othertimes, 3 will spawn simultaneously and go after 3 different healers. It feels like there is some pattern to it, but maybe it's just RNG.

And there's a chunk of time right after the whelps initially spawn where I simply cannot see anything on the screen easily. I'm zoomed way out and looking down to spot adds on the edges and possibly untanked, but moving, keeping up the consecrate & shield block, finding new loose blazes and watching the flame wall is ridiculously complicated. However, I resisted the urge to ask for collecting help (e.g., via MD) to ensure the hunters kept their focus and dps on the drakes, which I think is more important. I wonder if some more slowing tricks would help some, at least for helping healers get away from an enraged blaze. Perhaps there's a moment/place for another earthbind or slowing trap. Just not as the 3rd drake spawns because we can't slow the drakes when Bloc moves to Vesperon. Or maybe we could MD Vesperon to the South and have Bloc not move? The dps is all on Shadron there and maybe moving isn't ideal anyway.

But overall, it was very nice to get to this crux point in the fight. We solve it and I think we're through to the end. Fingers crossed for tonight.

Speed clear

2009-03-24T10:52:00.001-07:00

That worked just as intended -- pick the night people can come and launch on time with a full raid going full out and speed clear the instance. We even picked up a bunch of the achievements we hadn't intended to re-run, just because.

On the Grand Widow, we meant to remove the Frenzy, but the dps was going so balls out that when Kyoka got knocked back, we ended up killing her frenzied by accident, lol. So a bunch of people got that achievement who missed it before.

The dps was going off all night. I couldn't tell if everybody was just sharp, prepped or if we had some better than average synergy going on. We did have our boomkin, enhancement shaman and 2 DK's which we don't always have. Whatever it was, it was working.

We picked up Arachnaphobia too, in passing, but I think we do that every week. In the plague quarter, we had two people unsure on the Safety dance, so they stood outside and the rest of us nailed it perfectly. We were even still alive for an Immortal run through two wings, although we had handfuls of random deaths on trash due to speed-overpulling.

We rolled through the Military Wing still deathless until taking down the very final Horsemen of the 4 -- Zeliek managed a chain lightning that killed 3. Our first deaths of the night. The dps was so off the charts that I think everybody was stunned into complacency how quick the first 2 Horsemen went down. That's a bit sloppy, though. We shouldn't lose anybody on that fight if we play carefully.

But we know Thaddius is potentially a tough one for Immortal, so we didn't kick ourselves too too much over the premature deaths. Before we got there, we did Patchwerk in 2m 57s for another round of that achievement as well. But then we had sloppy deaths on Grobbulus and Gluth that we'll need to avoid. And then, as always, we had a bad moment on the first polarity cast in Thaddius. Hawksy had suggested bringing red and blue flares to mark positive and negative and I forgot about it. We should do that next time.

It was so early when we got to Sapphiron that when there was a request to do the fight w/o FR gear for the achivement, we decided to go ahead and do it that way again. After all, we had planned to raid for three hours, so why push to be done in 2h 30m? It's not like we don't actually like hanging out on vent together. Then we did Kel'Thuzad in the extra abombs version. I hadn't gotten to pull all the abombs like crazy before, so that was minor bonus amusement for me.

Tonight we'll do OS+3 again. Eyvindur has some ideas for helping handle the adds. I think I'll go back to either add or drake tanking and let Ragonbadger MT Sartharian since both big warrior cooldowns work but only one paladin cooldown does. It felt like we were getting pretty close last time and our dps was terrific last night in Naxx. If we are sharp about flame walls and keep the dps cranking, I like our chances.

Calendars

2009-03-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

That didn't quite work as I had hoped. On Wednesday, we realized we'd need another raid night this week. Sunday's hadn't been getting big turnouts but we weren't sure Monday would be better. So I put up invites to both and told everybody one would get canceled. But then I couldn't get online all weekend to cancel Sunday's raid. We just had a crazy weekend of kid activities, soccer games, birthday parties, etc. The final straw was the fantasy baseball draft Sunday evening -- which I forgot about too, even though I'm league commish. I missed the first round trying to get the stupid draft applet to load. At least it auto-picked Ryan Howard for me. I hear he's good, right?

I just hope people didn't show up expecting to raid and get disappointed. I was even on kicking around a little on Friday night. I should have canceled Sunday then, but I really thought I'd get on Sat or Sun during the day.

On Friday, it seemed like everybody else is coasting a bit at this point too. There was hardly anybody on and I couldn't really think of anything exciting to run. I almost went over to play an alt, but then decided to listen to music and just take it easy instead.

But even so, I'm looking forward to raid night again tonight. It seems like lately, I'm getting even more strongly focused on raiding to the exclusion of the other parts of the game. I used to do pvp, play alts, or just mess around with quests and such. Oddly, now that raiding is 2-3 nights/week and you don't need a ton of prep time to be ready, I end up only really playing 2-3 nights/week. I suppose that's probably good long-term for burnout control. But it seems funny that as we've gotten more hardcore about raiding, we've also gotten more casual about everything else.

Dragonage

2009-03-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Sartharian with 3 drakes up is hard, as advertised. We did a nice chunk of work/practice on it last night for ~2 hours. We didn't quite have a perfectly ideal group and I don't think we fully optimized the tanking role, but I personally found it useful to see/hear the fight from a different perspective.

I tried doing the MT thing last night while Ragon & Dethno did adds and drakes. There's a fair chunk of time during the 2nd into the 3rd drake where every fire breath is fatal to me (~40k+). Because the damage from the breath is instant, neither my Ardent Defender (-30% dmg at <35% health) nor my Lay on Hands is useful as a cooldown. So I only have the one (Divine Shield) and long-term that probably means I shouldn't MT the fight in favor of a warrior who can both Shield Wall and Last Stand.

We didn't actually reach the point where the missing cooldown mattered, though. I'd do the first one, then the priests would do Guardian and Pain Suppression. That's about 48s of protection, which is almost enough anyway to get through the critical period.

In the end, we mostly practiced getting the drakes and whelps down as fast as possible and worked on getting used to the flame wall and void zones both being insta-death. Since I'm moving around a lot less as MT, I was able to see when/how people were dying and watch the dps, etc. I also found that the MT has a pretty good perspective on the flame walls although it was hard to call the south wall on vent because my push-to-talk button is right near my strafe-left button. But I think the MT should probably go voice-activated on vent and call the flame walls for everybody else. As soon as Tenebron is down, you end up with such a solid grip on threat that you can afford to watch walls and Sarth's Flame Breath casts to use cooldowns reactively. The MT will also have to call for the priest cooldowns as they wear off. I found that hard because I wasn't used to the buff icon hiding in my 4 rows of buffs during the fight. It should be doable with practice, though.

When we got near the respawn timer, we downed Shadron and did Sarth+2, although that also took us a couple of tries. Several people suggested making it harder by downing Vesperon and leaving Tenebron and Shadron up. I said we'd do that next week if we 1-shot it but I didn't want to risk have to spend 20m reclearing the trash. We didn't 1-shot it, but if we don't get +3 down next week but it looks pretty close, I think Tenebron+Shadron is the way to go for practice.

I'm hoping we'll be back to full strength next Tuesday and get another solid night in there. We may have to consider recruiting another player or two. Hopefully we can do it by word of mouth or via finding good players in pugs instead of forum recruiting spam.

After Sarth+2, we went to do Malygos. It would be nice to get that fight down closer to 6m, but we went in with 3 tanks, 7 healers and only 24 players, which is about 5-6 dps light. I think play was reasonably strong until Phase 3, but we still have people dying or failing to dps well on Phase 3. At least we've figured out how to track drake damage by player in Phase 3, so we can give feedback to the people who are having trouble dpsing. There's usually a handful of people in the 600-800k range and another chunk in the 400-600k range. The second chunk is often people who got a lot of the Arcane Surges (although in theory, you should be able to not let this clobber your dps if you are playing very tight). But there's also a chunk of people below 400k and they are probably still working on the movement and cast patterns.

Maybe we should be running more Malygos-10s. And instead of the usual Bear/Badger group, we can stack one with super-high dps for a 6m attempt and a second, slower group aimed at getting more experience for the players still learning the fight.

Turnout

2009-03-18T15:18:00.001-07:00

Another low turnout Tuesday. Seems to be a running theme, but was at least partly affected by the holiday last night. We broke down into smaller groups. The Badgers did Sarth+1 and the Bear group did Malygos with 8 and then Construct Wing with 8.

I was also a bit late too. Part of the problem or sign of the times? Since my wife had been out of town for a few days, we were catching up and although I could have bailed on her to play, it would have been personally annoying to do that and then not raid anyway. So I messaged a few people to txt me if we got to 25 (e.g., I'd be needed for Sarth+3) and nobody did.

I think we just barely have 25 regular raiders currently, so it seems to be hard to get a full raid going. I've been reluctant to recruit because I'm afraid of people all coming back at once and creating drama over whose slots they are. And if we're going to recruit, I'd much rather do it by, "hey, I have a friend who'd like to raid" rather than the generic " is recruiting" post on the forums.

Hopefully we'll have 25 tonight and we'll get rolling in the OS.

A few things

2009-03-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently I haven't blogged in awhile. I'm not sure why, it's not like interesting things haven't been happening.

Like on Thursday, the Badgers completed an Undying run through Naxxramas -- 10 people, no boss deaths through the whole run. Very, very, nice.

Then on Saturday, I found myself in a bar in Wrigleyville having green beer with Dethnotronic, Ragonbadger and Sariana. It was a very fun evening and great to get to chat with some people from online face to face. But there's still something funny about the game/RL divide where talking endlessly about online adventures is all good and fun, while somehow a lot of RL stays somewhat private. I've been mulling over that a lot lately and I'm wondering about why a lot of us keep a lot of RL stuff more private and whether it's worth bothering. For example, I learned that there are a handful of Noctambulists who are all on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook page myself. Not because I'm old, so much, but mostly because the different social networks I have at work, old RL friends, gaming are generally somewhat distinct. I've been wondering about that. Perhaps I should be blogging about it more to play around with the ideas.

Sunday we re-convened for more Heroic raiding but once again only had 20. There was a little bit of back channel stuff going on among the officers that really derived from some overall concerns about the lower turnouts we've been getting. Are we drifting from our mission of a fairly consistent 25 gearaed mains -- no pugs, no alts, no respecs? Or are we just in a holding pattern between beating most of the content and 3.1 and Ulduar releasing? Nobody really knows and some people tend to worry.

But we did Sartharian with 20 and it was as easy as expected. Then we went to Malygos and did not expect it to be easy. It wasn't, really, but it only took us 3 tries. It felt a little like Thaddius -- pushing everybody to play a little more perfectly. Except it went a lot faster.

But a bunch of us really want to do Sartharian with 3 drakes up and we're going to need a turnout of 25 to make that work.

On Monday, we went and tried for Sartharian w/2 drakes with 10. We just couldn't get it rolling, though. We had a couple of very promising looking pulls, but a lot of pulls where something would go wrong. We tried with 2 tanks, 2 healers for awhile and that looked decent. Then Lenina got d/c for a bit and we brought in Ragonbadger for a 3rd tank and that also looked promising. But we couldn't manage to play quite mistake-free enough for long enough. I think that's the 3rd or 4th Monday we've wrestled with 10-man Sarth+2. I wonder if we need to have a couple of nights in a row to build on the experience better in order to get on a roll.

Tonight it's back to regular Heroic raiding and hopefully we'll see a solid 25 turn out and try Sarth+3. If not, we'll just keep farming Naxx and see what we can do to try to get a full raid another night.

Dedication

2009-03-13T10:53:00.001-07:00

Wednesday night we wrapped up the Dedicated Few, but it took the whole night to do it. We had a little trouble getting rolling with Patchwerk -- not having a pally healer to use Beacon and double big heal seemed to make a big difference. I suspect it changed the healing demands on all the other healers, but they adjusted and we got it. Grobbulus and Gluth were still easy with 20. But Thaddius was quite challenging.

As an indication that it's challenging, you get a separate achievement for beating Thaddius with 20. And over the first few pulls it was clear why. Not only are we down 5 players for dps purposes, we only have 20 players to stack for the polarity buffs. As we quickly learned, that means any early switching deaths are really painful and dropped our dps down to where we couldn't beat the enrage timer. Likewise, missing the jump down to fight Thaddius costs a lot of precious time.

So winning the fight requires a lot of perfection from all 20 people in the raid. And it took us awhile to achieve that. Although it was occasionally frustrating, as we got incrementally better with each try, I got a real sense that there was realy training value in working through this encounter. Naxx has been very easy, so it's been a long while since we've been under the kind of pressure where every single person in the raid has to perform and perform at a high level for the duration of the encounter. The encounters are generally forgiving, so if you screw up a transition or a move and you die, you can just shrug it off. But not on Thaddius with 20.

As we died a few times, I was a little worried about frustration and tempers, but jokes and Rizion playing random music over vent broke up the tension. I was also a little worried about frustration directed at 1-2 people who were more likely to die early. There's a balance there of calling people out to inspire them, but not breaking down somebody's confidence to do their job. But at the same time, I'd look at recap and see even the top dpsers inching their way up by pure numbers of dps done. I saw people starting to elixir up and bring out the special use potions. And all of that made me happy. I think we were remembering how to do a finely tuned fight again and that's going to serve us well in Ulduar.

In fact, unlike pretty much any other special achievement in Naxx, I'd be tempted to do that one again at some point for the people who missed it just to treat it as a training exercise. But I'd probably get a lot of groaning on vent if I propose it next week. :)

We're going to need a 3rd raight night this week to get the dragons. I meant to post something for Sunday, but I didn't make it online last night (typical Thursday). I should be able to get that set up tonight. I hope we get decent turnout. Sundays aren't always the best turnout day anyway and everybody seems distracted. I guess we could try Sarth & Malygos with 20 in a pinch (Sarth = easy with 20, Malygos = not).

The Dedicated Few

2009-03-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

Turnout has been a bit light for the Heroic raids lately. I'm not too surprised. I think we're in a kind of "silly season" between defeating almost everything and new content being released and it's hard to maintain focus. There's a certain risk of drama or sniping at this kind of time too. For example, it's tempting to think that people not showing up might be less motivated because they have all their gear.

Even if that's a minor factor, the fact is when new content is first tackled, everybody is jazzed up for it. It's novel and you also get the most upgrade rewards. As it gets routine and farmed, not only are the rewards fewer, but you find yourself willing to take a night off now and then. Early on, you might have rearranged your schedule to make sure you never missed a raid and later, you might not be as aggressive about it. For those of us with demanding RL, I think that's actually the right thing to do. Now is the time to farm those husband/wife points because everybody is going to be all geeked up again when Ulduar releases.

And it's almost like Blizzard anticipated this by including achievements like The Dedicated Few. Last night at 11:25, we only had 18 people online. I started the raid anyway and shortly we had 20, so we stopped there and decided to do the "less than 21" achievements. It fit perfectly, rewarding the people who raid and weren't distracted and also upping the challenge level just slightly.

Actually, the challenge level didn't seem upped at all through the Spider and Plague wings. By Loatheb, we had collected the Heroic: The Safety Dance achievement and were actually still on pace the Heroic: The Immortal. Heading to Razuvious, I realized this was going to be a tough one with 20, so I couldn't resist jinxing the run by pointing out the lack of deaths. A lot of people groaned and complained, but I wanted to make sure everybody knew so they could blow all their cooldowns if it was close. But the jinx was too strong and it wasn't close. We actually wiped a couple of times there before closing out the wing.

We wiped once on Gothik too because I miscommunciated the dps assignments and left the live side short, oops. But we 1-shot the 4 Horsemen, which was nice because we thought it might be hard. I guess it's supposed to be hard with 20 since it's not even part of the achievement.

But it took us too late to do the Construct wing, although we pushed the raid endtime 30m to try to get Patchwerk (unsuccessfully). I normally try to be disciplined about that, but not raiding last week much apparently made me too anxious to press on.

We'll plan to finish it off with 20 tonight before doing dragons with 25. I wonder if Thaddius will be tricky, I think there's a separate achievement for him with low numbers.

And maybe next week, we'll stack extra healers and make a real run on The Immortal. Just for added amusment (if we have enough people, of course).

Repelling

2009-03-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

Had to sleep on Wednesday, too many late nights in NYC. Got on Thursday to say hi and got invited to sub into the Badger Naxx-10 run. That was pretty fun, quick and as a bonus, I even got the long-sought Repelling Charge trinket.

That cranks me over the def cap a bit, so I was planning to get on and see about getting the +block value plate for my shield made to replace the +20 def enchant. But Friday night and Saturday night I ended up hanging out with Mrs Beros and didn't make it online. Last night, I made it an early night so I could run interference with the little ones at 7am and she could have a rare morning lie-in for a bit. I suppose that's also a result of traveling to NYC to just have fun, I'm down a bit in the husband point category. Well I was, anyway.

Should be back in the swing of things tonight. Not sure if I'll just bounce around on Elune or maybe even try to get on the PTR. I d/l-ed the client and xferred Beros over, but I don't think I've ever logged onto the PTR. I think we are planning another Sarth-10 progression attempt tomorrow with 2 drakes up, that should be fun to work on. Then it's back to Naxx-25 farming Tues/Wed.

I wonder if everybody will be geeked up for another go at Heroic Sarth+3 on Wed. I suspect so. Heh, I wonder if they'll want me tanking the adds. I should talk to Dethno about add tanking last week and find out if it was a matter of positioning, getting threat direction help, or maybe simply that I was trying to do too much. Or even something like AoE threat gen for warriors does some slowing, which keeps the stupid whelps from running after healers immediately after spawning. Either way, Heroic Sarth+3 is the last Heroic progression point for us and it'd be super-sweet to hit it before Ulduar releases.

afk brb

2009-03-02T14:16:00.000-08:00

Hmph, I didn't realize it had been so long since I last blogged. Raiding went well Tuesday night. Wednesday too until we broke down a bit working on Sartharian +2. Then I took a couple of days off and now I'm on the road for a few days. I don't have a wow-capable laptop anymore (the laptop used to play wow once, but it has long since given up being able to keep up with the game's upgrades).

I'll be back home and should be online again Wednesday night, hopefully for more practice withe Sartharian. We had a handful of little problem to solve, but in the end, the key problem on the last few pulls was that I keep dying, a few times to the stupid flame wall.

Now, I know what I'm doing reasonably well on that fight, so I should never be dying in the flame wall. But it kept sneaking up on me. My primary focus for the fight is collecting adds, which is a fairly challenging job. And for some reason, it seemed harder than usual last Wednesday. In hindsight, I think our positioning had drifted some from the previous week's success. Part of it is likely my fault. We had once been encouraging the healers to come stand in the consecrate so that mobs wouldn't go to them. However, I'd been pointing out that consecrate actually builds threat fairly slowly and I didn't want the healers feeling like they could rely entirely on it. So I didn't encourage people to stand in the consecrate last Wednesday and I think as a result the healers scattered around more naturally.

Practically speaking, this meant I was moving a lot more. Which reduces the value of consecrate even more and also frequently pulled me out of my familiar positioning. If it takes me a couple of seconds to find the flame wall gap, I'll end up eating a wall now and then. Especially since I often try to throw an extra taunt or two before running for a gap -- the wall enrages the blazes, so anything untanked right then is extra dangerous.

So I think there was an underappreciated side effect of healers staying in/near the consecrate in that the mobs' name plates always render on my screen (making it easier to grab and taunt), the healers are always within range of my taunts, and less moving means more time for the mobs in the consecrate and I always know where the gaps are.

On the positive side, I think this is an easy tweak to make the fight more reliable. Also the dps was consistently getting Tenebron and the whelps down before a second pack of whelps could spawn. I think that puts us at or near the necessary dps for +3.

On the less positive side, I left the fight Wednesday feeling more frustrated than usual. I've been thinking for a few days that we're in sort of a "silly season" between largely finishing the content and the new content in 3.1 coming out. These periods seem to end up rife with drama as people start seeming to have/fight the urge to take more nights off, respec, change mains. Questions start coming up about optimizing the DKP system, changing scheduling, balancing the raid differently, etc. I think all these things are a by product of moving from the exhilaration of beating new content to the mundane day to day of farming content for gear. Especially other people's gear. Things seem easy, you've got most of your upgrades and you kind of drift through the raids melting a lot of stuff hoping somebody somewhere gets something useful out of it.

You'd think this would lead to more fun-oriented joking around, drinking and stuff during the raid. But it seems to be just the opposite. Since nobody should ever die for any reason any more, people seem to get even more focused on perfection all the time and maybe even more likely to point out imperfections in others.

Maybe we need to think of some ways to inject some amusement back into the raids, just to keep everybody loose and relaxed until the next big round of challenges comes in 3.1 and Ulduar.

Naxxing

2009-02-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

It's been a low-key week since we cleared everything Tues-Wed. On Friday, I did get on for a little bit for a venture into Sunwell. It was a raid in progress when I joined, so I wasn't too focused on analyzing exactly what was going on, but mostly I learned that Sunwell isn't trivial even for 25 80s. I heard Kalecgos took a couple of tries and Brutalllus just one. But Felmyst posed a puzzle. That dragon has a AoE mind control breath and we didn't have a clear sense of how to avoid it over a handful of attempts. If we go back again next week, I'll have to look into what to do.

Last night we did another jaunt through Naxx-10. It's a one-night clear, but if you are a bit slow or sloppy, it's a long night. And it was. But we got it done without too much trouble and even experimented with some achievements. (3m 2s again on Patch, heh).

Tonight is another planned attempt on Sartharian with 2 drakes up. We're hoping to experiment with some different group balances while we figure it out.

It's 2am, do you know where your content is?

2009-02-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

Theoretically, we had all the "hard stuff" waiting for us to raid last night. We started in Heroic Naxxramas at 11:30pm and quickly polished off Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. Then we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum as planned.

Sarth + 2 drakes had been giving us a hard time with 10, but we had a basic plan for 25 and some optimism. It felt like the main problem with 10 was missing various abilities and synergies in our group and all that would be fine with 25. We started off our first pull by dying in the void zones and flame walls, but we still managed to see a bit of the fight with Vesperon active. We had been trying to guess in advance whether we should take 1 or 2 or all the portals to kill Vesperon's disciple and experimented with it for 2 pulls. Then we went ahead and just killed Sartharian and made it feel pretty straightforward. :)

We were only an hour and and a half into raid time, so we headed for Malygos. Bloc had never been to Malygos because the encounter was so CPU intensive his old comp couldn't keep up. So he asked what to do and we gave him the typical "first time noob" advice: you'll just die, but try to watch and learn for next time. And we 1-shot Malygos, too.

So, now what? The only Heroic content left in the world this week is the Vault. Right then, the alliance won the zone and opened up the instance, so we headed over. Well, first we swapped in a bunch of alts, noobs and stuff and went in with just 20 people. I'm not supposed to talk about what happened next -- what happens in the Vault, stays in the Vault. But it was still early when we finished that place and sharded all the Rogue loot.

And we ended up back in Dalaran because there was nothing in WotLK left to raid. So apparently all that discussion of a third raid night was pretty irrelevant. For next week, we can discuss whether it's worth pulling Sartharian with 3 drakes once or twice just to see it. There was an opinion expressed that we should perfect +2 first before seriously working on +3 and I think that may be true. But it might be worth getting a look at +3 just to see if we could surprise ourselves.

On Monday, we will try some different group composition ideas to see if we can work out Sarth+2 with 10. Other than the Glory of the Raider achievements, there's not much other progression to work on. Rumors are that 3.1 and Ulduar will be on the Public Test Realms in the not-too-distant future. Maybe we'll go mess around on the PTR and be ready to go right at release with the next instance.

Healing again

2009-02-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

As expected I went holy again for Naxx last night. We'd discussed the use of alts and off-spec players in raids for the guild and decided our guideline would be not to when progression is at issue, but some improvisation is ok when farming familiar but lootworthy content like Heroic Naxx is currently.

I think I'm a pretty terrible healer in comparison to the experienced players. Recap showed me as pretty inferior as well. OTOH, meters don't measure healers well. I'd like to say that I never lost a tank I was supposed to heal, but I did on the Grand Widow. There was some confusion over the de-enrage and Ragonbadger got insta-gibbed while I was healing him. It might not have actually been preventable, but I should have been in constant-cast-and-interrupt mode as soon as the Frenzy hit. Dethno and Bloc went down in short order right after, but Stupidrenren picked it up from there and we managed to avoid the wipe.

Another moment that I might have erred was on Patchwerk when Bloc got insta-gibbed to 2 immediate hatefuls. Now, I wasn't healing Bloc, I think, but my Beacon on him was supposed to be helping except that Dethno didn't need any heals before he died. Again Renren stepped in but we lost 2 effective dps (Primux took the next hateful and renren couldn't dps much as bear). We ended up 7s short again. Maybe we'll get the achievement next week.

But in general, people I was trying to heal stayed alive. That doesn't really mean I wasn't useless, I don't really know how many people would have died if I hadn't been there at all. I have a sneaking suspicion the other healers would have been fine without me. I kinda expected that in advance, but the idea was with a 6th healer, we could avoid any delays during looting/afk -- at least I could keep running ahead and healing the tanks so they could keep clearing trash.

As a curious aside, I didn't actually die a single time for the whole run. Looking at recap after, I think I might have been the only person who could say that too. I guess there's something to be said for being the worst healer -- you don't ever draw aggro and die for sure.

We had a decent pace going for the evening, but started to slide a bit as it got late. We had a new MC-er for Razuvious (Draelnor in for Kyoka) so that took and extra try or two. We've ended up stopping there each of the last few weeks, so we pushed through the Military Quarter just on principle. There were some ready to press on further, but we called it there anyway. I'm trying to really stick to the raid end time to avoid burnout or too much pressure on people who have to get up in the mornings.

Tonight we should be able to do the Frost Wyrm wing quickly and head to the Obsidian Sanctum for more Sarth+2 practice. I'd actually like to be tanking for that, but maybe we need a 7th healer more. I guess I'll find out at 11:15pm tonight server time.

Sarth + 2 = Hard

2009-02-17T11:26:00.000-08:00

Two drakes is really a lot harder than one versus Sartharian. Just adding Vesperon's debuff to the first phase of the fight versus Tenebron made it extremely difficult to survive. In fact, over 3 hours of attempts, I think we only made it past Tenebron once or maybe twice with a few deaths.

The main difference is the -25% hp debuff, which pushes everybody down into fragile territory. If mobs get loose, they pwn the healers quickly. The dmg builds up quite a bit so that I'm very vulnerable to a spike when I'm holding Tenebron, the whelps and possibly a handful of enraged blazes. And Dethno is vulnerable to a spike as soon as Tenebron goes down and Sarth enrages to +25% dmg.

It's also one of those typical Blizzard "mean to the tanks" fight. I don't know of any other battles where I'm expected to tank a boss level mob, 8-10 additional mobs and still find and taunt other randomly spawning mobs off the healers (the blazes). While moving to dodge the flame walls. While maintaining max threat so the drake dies in the available time. I'm using an ability every 1.5s for the entire fight and best of all there's no regular rhythm to it, it's mostly reactive to the circumstances -- the sequence changes depending on which flame walls we get, who draws aggro, etc.

I sensed a certain amount of frustration as we beat our heads against the fight, too. I think we weren't being creative enough. It's too easy to fixate on "solutions" like, "our gear isn't good enough," or "we need a shammy for heroism," or some unavailable approach. The morning after (now), I'm thinking we should have been trying to find ways to work in some more of our abilities. For various reasons we had talked ourselves out of using AoE or Frost Nova, which we have more of than a typical 10-person group. Once or twice when mobs were getting loose, I felt the absence of a real AoE taunt that Pallies don't have and Warriors do. A couple of times, I was tempted to suggest swapping up the tanking roles just to explore and in hindsight, I wish we had.

There's a tricky balance between practicing the same strat for efficiency and execution improvements and exploring new ideas or just trying weird stuff. We don't actually have a lot of practice grinding out really new content, so we might not have found the right balance here. We typically try to reason out (or read up) on a reasonable strat and then practice it until we get it. Sometimes it works such that it feels like no progress for attempt after attempt and then it suddenly clicks. But other times are like last night, where we might have been making it harder than necessary by being so fixated on our approach.

It also worried me that 2 people got really tired about an hour before the regular end of the raid time. That's unusual and suggests that we weren't having enough fun. Maybe we need to incorporate a regular schedule of every so many pulls, we try something goofy just to stay fresh and focused. Goofy could mean strats we didn't think would work, like taking the portals or using a lot of AoE and fighting both drakes at once. Or something crazy like kite-tanking one of the drakes with a mage & iceblock, or having a non-tank tank Sartharian until Tenebron is down. Even if it's a disaster, we might learn something, or at least get ourselves a laugh.

At least, in the end, we brought Bloc in to show off his new lag-free comp and did Sarth+1. It took 2 tries -- Bloc had never seen a flame wall render on his screen before, but boy did it feel easy in comparison.

Tonight it's back to Naxx for a full-speed 1-night clear (I hope). I think I might be healing tonight since we now have 3 functional warrior tanks and Tuesdays we're usually initially short a healer anyway (Hawksy). Should be fun.

Sick Bay

2009-02-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

Who's brilliant idea was it to schedule a bunch of holidays in the middle of cold and flu season, anyway? Everybody in the Beros household is sick to varying degrees from sniffles to full-on flu. Worst, for RL management purposes, it's Mrs. Beros who's been hit hardest with the flu, which throws everything out of sync around the house.

Last night was supposed to be a raid night, but when I looked at the clock in my 2yo's room and saw it was well after raid start time but my phone hadn't buzzed with a "where are you?" txt, I knew something was up. The optimist in me thought maybe Bloc's computer had been delivered and the raid was going ahead with 3 tanks, but the pessimist wondered if the raid had fallen apart due to other no-shows. In this case the pessimist would have been right. At least my RL issues hadn't principally caused things to fall apart.

I still felt bad that I hadn't been able to warn anybody about my being late. It caught me a bit by surprise. In the late afternoon, it was clear that my 2yo was exhausted and usually that means an early bed time and no troubles with raid time. Mrs Beros had even made it downstairs to rest on the couch. But then the little one crawled onto her mommy and they both fell asleep. Which you'd think would be a good thing (and cute, too) except that the 2yo woke up full of energy an hour later and Mrs Beros didn't. So that meant a 90m+ bedtime routine that ran well past normal raid start time and my wife couldn't take over for me, as she'll do on normal evenings.

When I got on to apologize, I found out that we hadn't even had more than 15 people sign up for the raid, so there was never any real chance of going. If I hadn't been on sick duty Saturday night and all day Sunday too, I would have been able to get online and notice that, but oh well.

It seem that Sunday night may not be the best night for our 3rd raid night of the week. We'll see if Thurs or Mon are better. In the short term, we can also work on clearing everything in 2 nights -- which should be fairly doable, I think. Although long-term, when 3.1 & Ulduar are available, we may want to find a reliable 4-day/week schedule. Practically speaking, given that there are a few people who seem to prefer to keep raiding to 3, we may want to increase the size of our raid force again. I think we have the dps, but it looks like we might need 1-2 more healers. We have a handful of alt or off-spec healers available, but I think all the people who can do this also play important roles on their main in the raid.

We'll try again tonight and with any luck, RL will be kinder to all of us who had issues last night.

As a funny side effect of the raid not going last night, I actually was able to run a couple of heroics including Violet Hold, which I had never seen before. So that's something at least. I'd rather have been wiping and learning Sarth+2, though.

Some old school

2009-02-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

Got on late, as usual for a Friday night, fully intending to do some Heroics. But I got distracted by the discussions of Sunwell or a Naxx pug. Then old friend Runabout asked if I could come help with a very old school lvl 60 raid quest: Blightcaller. I haven't been able to help him much with his leveling, guild or anything since he started playing again, so it was nice to have an actual opportunity to help since I had nothing else going on.

So I ran over there and pwned Blightcaller with some lowbie help. And laughed that it used to be a moderately challenging 20-person raid quest. Although, I do remember that it wasn't actually hard at all once you even had some MC gear.

Then somebody mentioned Onyxia and that reminded me I was planning to go try to solo Onyxia one of these days. I gave up on soloing it since the lowbies wanted to come and so did a couple of Noctambulists. Well, a few were going to, but only Aishi stuck out the call for reinforcements for Wintergrasp. We pwned her in no time flat and I don't think there was a healer in our group, which bodes well for a solo attempt some other day.

At that point, the people who had gone to support Wintergrasp reported it winning, so Leoruuc pulled together a 25 person pug to run the Vault. Which was pretty fun. It drops more loot than I realized too, we should do that more often. After we finished, we realized we had around 10 guildies in the pug, so we dropped down to 10 and did it again. No loot this time, though, just hunter gear Arikado already had.

Then I hung around doing the usual JC & cooking dailies for a bit before calling it a night. Maybe tonight I can inspire some heroic runs. Or maybe I'll get distracted into a Naxx run or something. If I end up getting on late again (it's possible, I hear it's some sort of holiday that couples with fewer than 4 kids get to celebrate) and there aren't any runs or spots open, I think I might actually go level my daughter's warlock. I haven't done any alting in a very long time and why not?

Heroic Malygos

2009-02-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

But first we had to finish Naxx. Once again, we were moving a little slow with a sloppy wipe on trash heading to Gothik. Then we wiped on Gothik again. I think that happened last week too. I don't have much insight as to what the problem might be as it's happening on the Live side. On the Undead side, mostly I'm sitting around marvelling at how fast the mobs are being destroyed by the dps. I don't think I technically need to even tank anything, they don't live long enough to kill anybody.

After the wipe, Ragonbadger whispers me that it doesn't look like he's needed on the Dead side either and he can go help Live. As is the normal method for strategy adjustments, it gets whispered to me, I raise the idea on vent and implement. It worked like a charm and we won easily. At the time, though, I had the funny sense that I was stealing credit from Ragon's insight into how to improve our strat. I intended to mention it after the battle -- that seems like the ideal way to give credit to the good idea person without them getting blamed it if didn't work. But I forgot to say it.

The reason I forgot was that immediately after the battle we had a rotation issue to deal with. Eyvindur had been fighting with a corrupted version of warcraft all evening and we did the fight with 24 waiting for him to fix it. Because we couldn't wait forever, we contacted Leoruuc about subbing in after Gothik. I also wanted to do that because Leo graciously volunteered to step out last night. Hawksy doesn't usually make it on Tuesdays and we had an extra healer.

However, the timing ended up poorly. Eyvindur got on just as Leoruuc agreed to come. Eyvindur then didn't understand why he was being replaced. Much discussion ensued. Everything was straightened out by the Four Horsemen, but I forgot to credit Ragon with the improvement on Gothik.

Then, IIRC, we wiped again on the Four Horsemen, but at least I remembered to DI Barantir, so we got a quick rez and did it properly the second time. No further wobbles from there as Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad weren't hard.

But that made it later than we would have liked to start on Malygos in the Eye of Eternity. We described the new strategy -- Dethno tanks Malygos around the rim, leaving his tail in the center to max our access to sparks. This requires more moving, quick reactions to the sparks and a lot of careful threat management. But saved us a lot of time on Phase 1. We weren't totally tight on the first try, but still got Malygos back to 8% at the enrage.

On the second try, we were very tight and although we still ran right up to the Enrage timer, we had him down fairly easily even though we had 3 people d/c for most of the fight.

Which was very cool, even though I fumbled my shield button, died at the last second, and didn't get the quest item (doh). It was so quick, we were actually about 30m ahead of the normal raid finish time. We tried reconvening in the Obsidian Sanctum, but it took 15m to loot and move everybody over. And looking at all the trash made me feel tired (and I wasn't the only one). Since everything would respawn and we'd run late getting even one pull at best, we decided to just call it a few minutes early and come fresh on Sunday. With 3 full hours, I think we'll figure it out to do Sarth+2, which will be another nice progression marker.

Tonight I think I'm going to take my weekly rest night. Tomorrow is both Valentine's Day and the 100th day of School celebrations in my 5yo's kindergarten class. :) But now that I finally hit exalted with Sons of Hodir and 450 Jewelcrafting, I think I really am going to work seriously on running all the Heroics I haven't done yet on Fri/Sat. Unless I get pulled into a Naxx pug -- Construct Quarter with 8, anybody?

Leisurely

2009-02-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

Leisurely was the pace we were moving at through Heroic Naxx last night. I think it's ok not to push, push, push all the time, but maybe we'll have to work on keeping up the pace more next week.

We got slowed down at invites by having 26 people and too many healers (is that even possible?). Then we had a rash of dead people during trash, loot discussions, overpulling while all the healers were discussing loot, more rezzes, afks, d/cs and occasional losses of focus.

We also hesitated over whether to try repeating achievements and I think in the future the answer will be 'no' in advance. We'll know which things we'll try the hard way and speed pull everything else. And I think we'll avoid waiting on afks, d/cs, etc. Worst case, somebody misses a piece of loot because we did a fight with 23 or 24. Probably people won't afk before bosses they really care about. And hopefully people won't start afking before other bosses too much.

We almost called the whole raid a bit early last night because we got a handful of tells from people asking to be replaced. Maybe that's to be expected as Naxx becomes familiar and unexciting. My first thought was to get replacements. My second thought was to call it early. My third thought is that if that starts to happen, then we drop down to 20 people for the last couple of bosses and start working towards the achievement that way. If we can knock off a couple here, a couple there, we can figure out what's hard with 20 and make finishing that achievement a little easier.

On a positive note, we set kill speed records on many bosses and were within 2s of the achievement on Patchwerk. We've heard that when you can do that, you are also likely to be able to do Loatheb w/o killing Spores. We tried Loatheb without Spores, but we think we killed one by accident. However, I'm no longer sure it didn't just despawn. If it got killed by Dethno with his bare hands via Retribution Aura, that'll suck since we'll have to lose the haste buff next time. It feels like we're really close on the Safety Dance, but we're still a ways off on no-shock Thaddius.

Tonight we'll try to tackle the instance with more focus. Knock off Gothik & 4 Horseman, then the Frost Wyrm wing and KT. Then over to the Eye for a solid set of pulls on Malygos. I think we're ready to beat that dragon. And with luck, we'll have a whole night on Sunday to work on Sarth+2, which I think we are also close to.

Twilight Assist

2009-02-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

The plan was dragons last night. First some more Malygos practice, then back to Sartharian with a drake up.

However, for me, the plan started to fall apart as early as 8am in the morning. That's when the cleaning lady didn't show up. Which meant that Mrs Beros and I were trying to get the house in some sort of order around the usual bedtime routines. Suddenly it's an hour before raid time and Mrs Beros says, "now that the kids are in bed, can you wash the floors?" Besides the fact that the first rule in the Beros household is that you don't make Mrs Beros mad, I can always use the chance to earn a few more husband points. And while the guys think I'm whipped, I know the ladies like a guy who does chores (well, not-so-young ladies do, milfs, as it were). And since we're supposed to start with Malygos, I have a solution.

I had just been exchanging some emails with Themouse and he had said how much fun it was to do new content (based on our wipeage versus Herioc Sarth+1). Malygos isn't brand new, but it isn't farm mode, so I jumped online to arrange for him to have my spot. Malygos is a 1-tank battle anyway and I figured Dethno could practice moving the dragon around the sparks and we'd have him try that next Heroic Malygos. It turns out there were a few other no-shows, but subs were found and they set off.

I got my house in order and managed to rejoin the group online around the time they got Malygos down. While it can be frustrating to wipe on content we'd beaten before, having a chunk of newer people learning/practicing Malygos-10 means more people familiar with the fight for Heroic Malygos this week.

I subbed back in for Themouse, who was locked anyway, and we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum to try Sarth+1 with 10 again. Last week, we wiped for hours and then gave up and didn't even bother killing the dragon w/o drakes when it got late. So it wasn't like we expected to 1-shot it or anything. Except we did.

I'm not sure why it went so well, but it didn't feel that hard. I'm guessing it's all the practice dealing with flame walls, blazes and everything else that we've had over the past week. But I was able to hold the drake, whelps and most of the blazes (Dethno collected a few during the complicated parts) and still dodge the walls and void zones without even feeling too stressed about it. And then we just burned him down with no deaths at all.

So next week, if we want to get our minimum daily requirements of wiping, I guess we'll have to go with Sarth+2 versus 10 of us. I hear you have to be pretty tight to do 2, and pretty creative to beat 3. I heard (nee ) used a Voidwalker to hold Sartharian for the first part of the fight while their tanks took on the drakes. That's just pretty damn cool.

Tonight is more Heroic Naxx gear farming. We'll take our weekly shots at Patchwerk in 3m, Safety Dance and No-shock Thaddius. We'll have to see if we're brave enough to try Loatheb w/o spores or killing the 4 Horsemen within 15s of each other.

Incremental progress

2009-02-09T10:51:00.000-08:00

A little over an hour of practice on Sarth+2 didn't get us there, but we did start to see some solid beginnings. We started to have a few pulls where we got Tenebron and all his whelps down without much in the way of losses. But couldn't quite manage to work through Vesperon reliably.

I'm not quite sure if it's adjusting to the healing demands of the -25% hp debuff plus the increased dmg on Dethno (MT) or just lasting that much longer while dodging flame walls, void zones and Lava Blazes.

On the plus side, once we decided to kill Vesperon and just do +1, it felt very easy -- not a single death in the fight. So there's definitely learning going on.

On Malygos, we tried the split-sides dps strategy and that did solve the sudden-tank-death syndrome we had been running into last time. We were able to consistently make it into phase 3, but kept hitting the enrage timer at ~10%. We need to shave off some time on getting to Phase 3 and that might mean going back to the harder Phase 1 strategy of moving Malygos around so that more people can get the spark buffs. I think it was taking us 4.5-5minutes to get through Phase 1 and if we can get an extra minute there, we'd make it (30s might even be enough).

We'll get to try both of them again next week. It's almost tempting to schedule them even sooner in the raid week, but it's probably still better to farm up more gear in Naxx first. We'll get to one of them late on Wednesday. Right now, I'd be inclined to try Malygos first since that did feel very close.

Tonight it's 10-person raiding again. The Bear group will practice Malygos more (hopefully just once :) and take another shot at Sarth +1 with 10. I probably missed my chance to try to beg for a quick Construct Wing run in Naxx-10 to try to get the Repelling Charge off Thaddius since I bet a lot of people are locked to cleared instances already.

Maintenance days

2009-02-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

The last couple of nights got busier than expected, so I didn't get on much. Last night I just dealt with a few little maintenance issues: JC daily, cooking daily, Sons of Hodir dailies (6k to Exalted and the better shoulder enchant), fished up some Dragonfin for more +str food.

I did the Wyrmrest daily because I noticed there's a "complete in <2m" achievement. It takes me 4-5m or more to do the daily, though. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong. Then I did the Aces High daily in Coldarra for more Malygos dragon handling practice. And then I called it a night.

I forgot to get around to trying to get some more Flasks of Chromatic Wonder made. I'm going to try to use those for the Sarth & Malygos progression fights we have coming (resistance seems useful there). Maybe tonight I'll actually start working on all the Heroics I've never run. I doubt I'll ever clear all the boss achievements, but I'd like to at least run every dungeon at some point.

Heroic Achievements

2009-02-05T14:32:00.001-08:00

Over the past 2 nights, we knocked off the "easy" achievements in Heroic Naxx. I didn't know for sure, but I didn't think we'd struggle to do withe 25 what seemed pretty straightforward with 10. We even added the 'Momma said knock you out' achievement versus the Grand Widow which we hadn't managed with 10.

The next ones will probably take a bit more practice: Patchwerk <3m, Safety Dance, Thaddius with no shocks, Loatheb with no spores, 4 horsemen beat simultaneously. The first 2 seem the most reachable. We were 19s slow on Patch this week and only 2 dead on the Safety Dance. Maybe for motivation, we'll have a rule that if you die on the Safety dance next week, you have to sit out for that boss battle the following week. Of course, you know that if we impose that rule, I'm going to die on that fight for the first (non-wipe) time.

The really hard ones will be really hard: beat everything with 20 or fewer and nobody dies on any boss battle. At least for the 20 or fewer fights, we can do them a few at a time some night we're willing to annoy 5 extra people by sitting them out. The 'Immortal' achievement/title is probably going to take really tight play and stacking the raid sky high with healers. Maybe I should start keeping track of our 'no death' fights to see which ones will be hardest.

After KT last night, we went and wiped for an hour or so on Sartharian + 2 drakes. It felt like we were a bit out of sync, I'm not sure we would have beaten +1 drake trivially. But it was good practice and we did get better. It was tempting to simplify down to 1 drake, just win and go do Malygos on Sunday. But a few people whispered me that we should stick with pushing for progression and take another crack at 2 and I think that was correct.

Part of that is expecting that Malygos will come around pretty soon. I was pretty pleased with the sudden transition to easy kill with everybody alive we did with 10 on Monday. It made me feel that a few hours of practice and we should be able to beat it on Heroic the same way.

So the Sunday plan will be something like 5 pulls on Sarth+2 (then doing Sarth+1 if we don't get it) and then off to work for serious on Malygos.

I got a nice upgrade to my tanking gear by way of a new sword from the run last night too. It added enough +def that I was able to set up the 2 sets of tanking gear I had been planning for. One set is all +stam and mitigation and aimed at being the MT for something big hitting. The other set is loaded with +str and +block value to do both OT dps and AoE add tanking (a more common role for me).

I'll be able to do even a little more tweaking if I can get a better +def trinket from either HoL or Thaddius in Naxx. I don't know if I'll get to Naxx this week, but maybe I can jump into a run Fri or Sat to do the Construct wing and take a shot at the Repelling Charge. From there, I think all further upgrades are fairly small.

Learning curve

2009-02-03T06:42:00.000-08:00

Not every encounter in WotLK is trivial. Well, not for us at least. We went back to Malygos with the regular group last night and managed to wipe at <10% to the enrage timer 3 times in a row. But then on the fourth attempt, everything went exactly according to plan. We finished phase 1 ahead of schedule, didn't lose anybody in phase 2 and had 3.5 minutes for the dragon phase. We had been limping in with ~9 people at 2-2.5m on the previous attempts. Then nobody at all died during phase 3 either and we closed it out with plenty of time to spare.

The goal was primarily to increase our familiarity with the fight to have a shot at getting Malygos down in heroic mode this week and I'd say we accomplished that.

Then we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum to try Sarth+1 with 10 to match our Heroic Sarth+1. I think it's a bit harder with 10 than 25 because there are a lot of mobs to tank. Sartharian, Tenebron, the Lava Blazes and the Whelps.

Fights like this make me wonder why anybody wants to MT, when the OT gets to have all the fun. Well, I guess sometimes fun means wiping your raid repeatedly while you figure out how to organize what you have to do. But I've done that before and I'll probably do it again.

First thing to deal with is getting ahold of Tenebron when the drake lands. It should be simple because it flies to a specific spot. However, she's untargetable until she actually touches the ground and there's good chance that you get a Flame Wall within a second or two of landing. I tried pre-consecrating, but that didn't always overcome healing aggro. Then I made a macro to target so I could spam the key while moving out of the Flame Wall if necessary. It still can be a dicey transition.

Next is building some aggro while dragging Tenebron over to the portal where the whelps are going to spawn. We considered some different tanking options, but basically it looks best if I have 2 healers and tank everything I can: Tenebron, the whelps and the blazes. During this part, the blazes are going to spawn and aggro the healers. Barantir was healing with RF up to bring them to him. Sometimes I seemed to be able to pick them up easily, other times the consecration didn't seem to pull them.

For a few pulls I tried retargeting loose mobs and taunting them to keep them grouped up. However, this sometimes meant slower aggro gen and eventually I managed to click the portal while grabbing mobs and that was a curious way to wipe the raid. Instead, I put an icon on me and told everybody to group up on me and hope the consecrate worked because I wasn't going to re-target. That worked pretty well, but perhaps I should make a couple more fight-specific macros to taunt directly off Barantir and Hawksy and re-target Tenebron. I have pretty much every key mapped to something, but I think I can switch the '[' and ']' keys from emergency heals to healer-specific taunts.

We did eventually pull off the hard part and make it through Tenebron and the whelps. On the very last pull of the evening, we got to what should be the easy part of just trying to win the Sarth battle. But we didn't get into the basic wall/blaze/dps rhythm cleanly and it fell apart. I wouldn't be surprised if people were fighting mana issues by then. Or sleepiness issues.

We called it feeling pretty optimistic that we'll get it next week. It'll probably be next Monday when we get back. Tonight is more Heroic Naxx with an eye on some achievements. Several of them require mega-dps output, so I put up a guild note asking everybody to do extra prep. Nothing in basic Naxx seemed to require full flask/elixir/food buffs, but I think we'll need every edge we can get to beat Patchwek in 3m or the other dps races.

I'm expecting we'll actually go slower this week than last in Heroic Naxx, but we should still finish it up by tomorrow night. Then we'll work on Herioc Sartharian +2 drakes. I also want to save a decent chunk of time to work on Heroic Malygos as well, maybe the whole 3rd raid night (probably Sunday).

That means I may not get into non-heroic Naxx this week. That's too bad, I could still use upgrades to my trinket and sword. They'll come eventually. In the meantime, I may spend some time this week beating up on the dummies in IF to test out some ideas about setting up multiple gear sets. I have pretty much 2 full sets of high-quality tanking gear (T7 plus equivalent) and I think I want to set up one as full mitigation & stamina for actual tanking and a second as all strength and block value for AoE tanking adds and OT dps. I want to make sure it makes an actual difference to dps before I spend a few hundred gold on re-enchanting and re-gemming and figure out where I need to be on defense for the OT/dps set. I shouldn't need to be capped, but I may want to carry my higher-def shield to swap in just in case I'm in that gear and end up as MT accidentally (e.g. Thaddius). If it works out, I'll end up carrying ~4 sets of gear around with me again, just like the old days. :)

Naxx-8

2009-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

Due to some scheduling confusion, we ended up running Naxxramas instead last night. And we found ourselves starting with only 9 people. So we decided to run with 8 instead, clearing the achievements for the bosses in the Spider and Plague wings to do this.

There were a few wobbles on Anub'rekhan of all bosses when I realized I had never tanked it before and didn't really know exactly when and where to run. Plus the healing demands are different with a pally tank who can't intervene to get away. But after we got that down, it was smooth through the first 2 wings.

It was a quiet run on vent, probably because everybody was having to work just a little harder than usual. I know that dealing with the trash pulls with just one tank was occasionally more stressful. For me, the boss fights were about the same, just a little slower. I suspect the healers had to work harder on the boss fights, or maybe it was just like back a few weeks ago when these fights all just took a little longer.

We went to 10 for the Construct wing and took a crack at Patchwerk in 3m. It was 3m 30s, so we weren't really close. Everybody agreed we could use a shaman. I also wonder if everybody is running Naxx maxed out with elixir/food buffs. Maybe I should remind everybody to do that for Tues and see if we can do Patchwerk in 3m with 25.

Then we cruised through Grobb, Gluth and Thaddius. It's possible we could do all of those with 8 too, maybe we'll have to try that next week. Thaddius dropped the Repelling Charge that would look really good added into my gear, but Bloc had the DKP and it looks good in his gear too. He offered to /roll it, but if I don't respect the DKP, who will? We're off DKP in Naxx-10 as of next week anyway. Which makes sense, I think we sharded almost everything and nothing was an actual sought-after up except that trinket. Someday, I'll fill in the last trinket and upgrade my sword.

Tonight we'll try to get organized for Malygos & Sarth+1 again (non-heroic). Hopefully, the scheduling confusion won't persist and we'll have our solid 10 again. If that goes smoothly, we can go back and finish Naxx, but I'd rather focus on the progression fights and miss out the end of Naxx if we have to choose.

Not running heroics

2009-02-01T10:35:00.000-08:00

I got on late again, common for a Saturday night, and most people were already rolling along with their runs of various kinds. I did some raid prep, fished, farmed meat and cooked. Knocked off the Sons of Hodir dailies to get a little more rep, then the Wyrmrest ones for dragon riding practice.

Someday I'd like to do the Wymrest temple on that has a 2m achievement on it. I haven't been remotely close to it yet. I'd like to get more automatic on Aces High too, for Malygos practice, but I got distracted chatting with Nitnoid about the latest issues with OotC and their new guild Rising Storm and got shot down a few times.

A few people, all dps, were eventually interested in running some random heroics. I was up for that but the guild healers were all engaged. We discussed pugging a healer, but one of the reasons I haven't actually run very many heroics is that I haven't actually run anything in a non-guild group with WotLK released. Maybe I should just get past that, but every time I think about going to LFG channel to look for a group, I end up just deciding to do something else instead.

It won't come up tonight, though, it's a raid night. Darson can't make the raid, so we might need another healer for Malygos (Sundays are often not good for him). I'm sure we'll get it together. Maybe we'll get Sarth+1 with 10, too.

Pacing

2009-01-31T08:18:00.000-08:00

Thursday is supposed to be a rest night, but I didn't actually do a good job getting extra rest. Then on Friday, I noticed I was super-tired for some reason. Now, you might say that this is a natural consequence of not sleeping very much, but I actually think I might be coming down with a cold. Evidence being that my throat was scratchy and that everybody else in my family has a cold.

So I didn't get online at all last night either, I fell asleep unusually early. I still think I'm coming down with a cold, but I'm not feeling as run down today. Maybe there's something to that whole "sleeping" thing after all.

Tonight I should be on to do the usual raid prep , dailies and maybe even try to pull together another round of attempts to farm my missing tank gear (HoL regular, Utgarde Pinnacle Heroic) and/or any random Heroics people want to do.

Heroic: Twilight Assist

2009-01-29T09:47:00.000-08:00

"Come on guys, lets just pull already. It's not like we're going to one-shot this..."

Yeah, well, about that. :) I don't know why it was suddenly easy-mode, but we did, in fact 1-shot Sartharian + Tenebron. I felt I had to apologize afterwards for implicitly disparaging the ability of our raiders. I guess I should have been more optimistic.

We had tried Sarth + 1 before and had a basic idea of how it looked. I'm not sure why it was so much easier last night. I had watched a video of Sarth +3 and seen that our approach to Tenebron was typical. I did learn explicitly that all the drakes will spawn immediately under the Twilight Portal, so I stood there and spammed consecrate starting early on. I also learned that you can de-enrage the blazes, which I hadn't known before. I was puzzling over why I didn't know that until I realized our 10-person group has no hunters or rogues regularly, so we don't have any regular de-enragers. Important safety tip.

It went so quickly, that we had time to go over to the Eye of Eternity for a little humility training versus Malygos. After a handful of insta-pwn3d pulls, we finally found our rhythm and started making it through to the 3rd phase. We still need improvement on Phase 3 riding the dragons (this is also true of the 10-person group, even though we scraped by successfully last week). In addition, we'll keep getting tighter on the first 2 phases so we have more time and more people alive for Phase 3.

I think there's a pretty good chance we might have a whole night to just work on Malygos next week. We could spend the first night in Naxx, finish it up if necessary the second night and then work on Sarth +2. Assuming there's a learning curve there, we'll likely spend time learning and either get it or drop back to just 1 drake at the end of the evening. Then spend the whole third night riding dragons in the Eye and see if we can put it all together.

Tonight is the night I've been making my weekly off-night. I've had to get up early the last few days unexpectedly and I've been getting up early to go hang out in my 5yo's kindergarten class on Friday mornings. So this is a good night to catch up on some sleep. I'll still have plenty of time for farming and heroics before we raid more on Sun/Mon.

Some days I think nobody reads the blog, but I had a funny comment on yesterdays:

Sorry about the connection issues.

We can check the problem on our end. If you are willing to provide the phone number listed on the account, we will make sure this is looked into.

Regards,

Mark Casem
Comcast Corp.
National Customer Operations
We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com

Comcast reads my blog? Or maybe they google blog search for "comcast hates me"? Either way, have no fear Comcast, my service seemed to be just fine last night. I'm not sure if the local service "upgrades" went through or if the problem is actually on my end (I'm beginning to suspect Apple's latest iTunes/iPhone software is interacting badly with Vista). But no random d/c's from either vent or Elune all night. Of course, when I screw up now, this reduces my excuses back down do, "I suck" instead of railing about my ISP. So, um, thanks for that, I guess.

Comcast hates me

2009-01-28T09:05:00.001-08:00

I've had two running nights of unusually bad connection problems. I think it might be related to Comcast's recent notification that they were "upgrading" my service -- at no additional charge! Hopefully if that's it it'll pass quickly. However, my computer has also been acting odd occasionally with little freezeups, which seem like they might be associated with when I have the iPhone plugged in to charge. That makes me worried that the latest iPhone/iTunes software has some glitch. Or worse, there could be something else unstable running on my system.

I still hold out hope it's external and passing. On top of the connection issues last night, we had two power interruptions to the house -- all the lights blinked off for a few seconds and came back on. Both shut down the comp. The first one required a full unplug/reboot of the cable modem as well. The second one just knocked me offline for an extra few minutes.

So I didn't raid much during the 4-wing Heroic Naxx clear last night. I did sub in for Gluth and my connection held up for that fight, but I got polarity-gibbed during Thaddius after barely making it through the first adds, had to have Renren pick up my adds on Noth, got nova-gibbed during Heigan and d/c-ed 2 or 3 times during Loatheb. So we got Dethno back in for the Military Wing.

Tonight we'll wrap up the Frostwyrm wing. I think we're almost exactly on the pace I predicted last week. Maybe power law learning applies to raiding too. ;) That will leave us time to work for awhile on either Sarth +1 (Tenebron) or maybe Malygos. On one hand, Sarth +1 is probably easier and if we give up, we can just down Sarth and get loot. On the other hand, both 10s beat Malygos last week, so that seems timely too.

Whichever we do tonight, we'll do both next week. I announced a schedule change for next week so that we'll spend 3 nights in the Heroic instances. We can slow down in Naxx and try for the boss achievements and/or work on the other progression. Naxx-10 is degenerating to Abyss crystal farming, so we'll take that off the main schedule and DKP and just do it pick-up mostly starting next week.

Malygos

2009-01-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with Malygos is that it's really a 1 tank fight. Which is annoying since the 10-person groups typically build around 2 tanks (and don't get me started on the fact that we then have to fold the 2x 10-person groups into a 25 person group that rarely even needs 3 tanks). Blizzard does a lot of really smart things in design of instances and encounters, but counting tanks is not apparently one of them.

So when Mrs Beros needed to use the computer for a bit for work last night, I txted Kyoka & Wiseman that I'd be late and figured they'd just pick up a dps and let Dethno tank it. I don't like missing the possible first kill, but Dethno missed a bunch of Herioc Naxx first kills by graciously sitting out, so I figured it was his turn.

But when I got on around midnight, they were still waiting for me. Apparently they decided I should respec ret and come dps. So I did, but I was pretty disappointed with my ret dps. I don't have much ret gear really anymore. The lvl80 tanking gear has more str than my lvl70 ret gear, but it doesn't have haste or crit. So I was just lame.

Total dps wasn't really the problem, though. Managing aggro was a bit of a problem. Also, moving around to pick up the sparks was tough. Since we didn't have a DK to grip them to a specific spot, we had to do a lot of running around and that meant keeping the healers in sync and in range of the tank. Actually, I'm still a little unclear on why we ran around quite so much. If the sparks come to Malygos, can't we stay in the middle and just rotate the dragon around? I was too distracted by dealing with adjusting to dps and remembering to cast Hand of Salvation to do much strategerizing, though.

But we got the first couple of phases under control generally. We started hitting lag and connection issues, though. I was getting a lot of bad lag and freeze-ups through the whole evening.

Then we had to learn the dragon riding phase and that took a couple more practice pulls. I wouldn't say we really nailed it even by the end, but we started to get gradually more reliable on the shield and healing. And scraped out a bare win 20s into the enrage with just Barantir still alive. Still, anytime you get loot, it's a win. :)

It was late, but we then went and did Sartharian anyway. We didn't leave any drakes up, though, we wanted it to be quick.

Tonight is the Heroic reset, so we'll go back to Naxx. Assuming it continues to get quicker, we should have some time tomorrow for something else afterwards. The question is what should our next Herioc progression target be: Sarth +1 or Malygos. It seems like Sarth +1 is actually easier (based on others' progression), but neither 10-person group has pulled it off yet and we've both beaten Malygos now (if only barely, for the Bear group). Maybe we'll flip one of those fancy Dalaran coins to decide.

Pwn3rship

2009-01-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

We rolled non-heroic Naxx hard last night. I don't even think we got off to a real on-time start, but we picked up the pace once we were going. We did the 20m achievement from Anub'Rehkan to Maexxena. Then set new kill time records on almost every boss from there. Patchwerk went down in 3m 18s, just barely slower than the achievement. At Sapphiron, we paused and decided to go ahead and try it with <100 frost resist on everybody (no auras) even with just 2 healers. It was a bit messy and Kyoka had to solo dps the last few percent, but we got the achievement.

We got to Kel'Thuzad at about 5 minutes short of the usual end raid time (2:30am) meaning we still cleared the place in just about 3 hours flat. But instead of just finishing off the instance, we decided to do an achievement that requires killing 18 Abombs first.

Which would not actually have been that hard except we were also playing sloppily by then -- maybe the late hour wasn't the best time for something complicated. We goofed up a bunch of simple things and wiped a few times. Then wiped some more by pulling way, way too many Abombs. Then finally won a messy fight that shouldn't have been messy.

We did learn that Hawksy can near-solo heal the fight for a long time if either of the non-holy spec paladins help a little (by working very hard). We also learned that Dethno can hold KT and both adds for a very long time if the healing holds up. We also learned that I don't have a very good sense of the ice tomb danger range and got pwned on both of the last 2 puls (including the win) by being caught too close to somebody else while positioning the adds (which is how we learned Dethno can tank them and KT too).

But mostly we learned that Naxx is weaksauce for us now and we got a stack of Abyss crystals to show for it. Well, and I got 2 more T7 pieces too, but I think I was the last one to get to 4/5. Post-raid, we decided that our crystal farming rate means we should drop the guild bank price of the crystals to 25g tops (free was also mentioned). I'm also thinking a lot more about the suggestion to drop DKP entirely for Naxx-10. That should happen soon.

Also hopefully soon we'll beat Malygos with the Bear group and then start doing Sarth +1 in both non and heroic modes. And Heroic Malygos.

We're closer to beating all the available content than I've ever been in any previous warcraft patch. The content is easier this time, but I think we've got a pretty good team working together too.

I guess Sarth +3 is the final, hardest content right now. Something to shoot for after Heroic Malygos.

For instance

2009-01-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

I actually ran some instances last night for the first time in awhile. I'd fallen into a raid & dailies/replenish schedule for awhile. But with Uglykid, Wiseman, Deathbecameu (Islowlykill) and Leoruuc/Hawksy we ran through HoL (normal) quickly to not get my tanking trinket, then Utgarde Pinnacle (heroic) quickly to not get my tanking sword. Then we did Utgarde Keep and Azjol-Nerub heroics as well. In Azjol-Nerub, we were able to do both of the heroic instance achievements we tried, although it took a few tries.

The first one is to kill the first boss with all 3 of his Watchers still alive. We tried having me slowly collect everything, kill the killable adds and work up to the boss, but it was very hard to stay organized. It was very easy for an add to get pulled off me and/or web cocoons to hit the healer and cause a wipe. Eventually we tried it more ez-mode -- we had the Deathknight use his ghoul to aggro all the adds and run them to the instance door and we burned down the boss. That still took a few tries and even when it worked, we wiped when they returned. But we got the achievement, heh.

The other achievement was kill the last boss in <4m, I think, and we just beasted it.

It was pretty fun. Maybe I'll get on to run some more instances tonight.

The Badger group went to Malygos instead of Naxx last night and won. I want to finish off that fight too, but we were also planning to clear Naxx. In theory, Naxx is doable in one night. But given the possibilities of bad luck (d/c's, etc.) what's the best approach? Naxx in one night Sunday and Malygos Monday? Or the other way around.

Oh yeah, I forgot to post the Sun/Mon Naxx-10 Bear group invites to the calendar. I'd better do that tonight or people will think we're not running for some reason and won't show up.

Learning rates

2009-01-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

We closed out Heroic Naxx about 2 hours into the raid last night, meaning we cleared it in about 5 hours total. Last week, we needed a 3rd night to finish up and didn't have time for Sartharian after, suggesting it took about 9 hours.

Now skill learning improvements typically follow a power law curve, which is linear in log-log space. So it's not to hard to extrapolate the trajectory that if we continue to improve at the same rate, it should take us around 3.5 hours to clear Heroic Naxx next week -- check the math yourself if you don't believe me. :)

In spite of the fact that I haven't seen power law improvement rates applied to team learning like raiding, I don't think that's a half-bad estimate. It'll mean that we'll have a nice chunk of time next week to work some more on Sartharian +1. It felt like we made some progress in the hour we spent on it last night, but it's going to take some more practice, I think.

I think we made the right decision to take down Sarth w/o a drake in the end. We'll focus the next 2 raid nights on reclearing Naxx-10 and hopefully still having enough time to go finish off Malygos.

I'll probably take tonight off. Thursday is a good rest night for me and I'm planning to spend time each Friday morning in my son's kindergarten class. And even though I'm often late Fri & Sat, I think I'm actually going to try to push for either the gear runs I still need (regular HoL for the tanking trinket, heroic UP for the sword) or start working down my woefully incomplete list of heroics beaten. I've really run hardly any instances at all since we started raiding. I've been content to rep and food farm or do dailies, but I do eventually want to knock off some of the dungeon achievements.

"Hi guys, sorry I'm late."

2009-01-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

Bloc imitated me pretty well with that when I arrived on vent last night. Late, and still stuck downloading the 3.0.8 patch. RL got complicated in mostly good (salsa dance lessons with Mrs. Beros) and some bad (whiny, needy kids) ways. That's just the way it is some days.

In fact, even after I got on, I was barely there for a big chunk of the run since distractions persisted. By the time I was able to focus and be more attentive, we were at Loatheb and finishing our second wing of Heroic Naxx.

Then we headed to the Construct wing, which has 4 somewhat challenging encounters but a lot less trash than the Military quarter. We hit our first and only wobble of the evening on Patchwerk and wiped a handful of times. In Heroic, he casts his Hateful Strike for ~26k pretty fast, occasionally with <2s gap between hits. If for any reason, we don't have 3 high-hp, high-threat tanks right there, somebody is gonna die. And so we did die a couple of times before we got in sync and did it properly.

But then it was an fast 'n easy 1-shot of both Grobbulus and Gluth and a suprisingly smooth roll of Thaddius. We lost 2 right off the bat on Thaddius and were concerned, but it was pretty much picture perfect from there.

Tonight will be Military and Frostwyrm wings. Assuming those go smoothly, and nothing there is too tough, we should have time to do Sartharian. I wonder if we're ready to try Sarth with a drake up, or whether we should just farm the 4 emblems. Maybe I'll see what everybody thinks online tonight.

Presidents and Dragons

2009-01-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

I watched the inauguration this morning with my 2yo fidgeting beside me and my older Jamaican nanny. It seemed appropriate to watch and reflect about the differences between the generations. My experience with race relations is obviously different than my nanny's. But we both kept looking at my 2yo in astonishment at the idea that she will grow up her whole life without ever doubting that it is possible for a black man to become president of the USA. That's different.

On warcraft, last night we spent dancing with a dragon again in the last unbeaten 10-person raid instance: Malygos. I missed the previous attempt, but I heard it never really got going. We got going pretty well this time, but didn't find our rhythm for the final phase with everybody riding dragons ourselves until it was about time to call it due to pressing sleep concerns.

There was some initial fear about tank squishiness, but it didn't seem to be a practical issue. In phase one, sparks spawn outside the combat area and need to be killed/extinsguished to provide a dps buff as they head for the dragon. If one reaches the dragon, it buffs Malygos's damage and then we'd sometimes run into squishiness issues (especially if 2-3 sparks stacked on Malygos). The rest of the time, I concentrated on threat and kept an eye on the Divine Protection button, but never felt I really needed to hit it.

OTOH, my vaunted threat generation seemed barely able to keep up with the task of staying ahead of the dps. I wonder if normally you try to get the tank the dps buff, but I was worried about moving the dragon around too much. So I cranked what I could w/o the buff and spammed Hand of Salvation on Sherider.

Over a full night of practice, I got more comfortable moving Malygos around so that I could turn him away from incoming sparks and in some cases even try to get myself the buff. There's room to get better with practice there, but we mostly got that first phase under control.

The second phase wasn't too bad either. Riding the disks around to combat in the air is just fun, so I started grabbing the disks when they fell after Sirtank and Eyvindur had theirs. I think the ranged dps can go from the ground, so that's dps optimal. I should double check that, though. If they sometimes have range issues, I should probably let them have the disks and just chill until phase 3.

Mostly we concentrated on getting to phase 3 with no deaths. Even as we got pretty good at 1 and 2, we'd still lose somebody to a mistake before phase 3. So it took awhile to get some pulls with a chance to learn our phase 3 teamwork. And there are a bunch of mechanical/technical things to work out: how to find each other and stay in group, how to make sure you're at 30yds+ range, how to get the buttons to work properly for healing, etc.

By the last 2 pulls, we got into a tight group pre-phase 3, then all strafed right and up to start Phase 3. We got into a 30yd group close enough for healing and then all moved right together when he did is area-specific aoe spell. We weren't quite reliable as a group on getting to the shield button on his arcane blast, so we couldn't hold it together long enough to get him down. But we did get to 20%. I had wanted to win, but it wasn't a bad night of learning attempts.

Tonight, assuming the patch doesn't destabilize the server, we'll go back to Heroic Naxx and hope to do at least half the instance. Plan is to finish tomorrow and leave 2 more raid nights for the 10s to reclear Naxx and work more on Malygos. Once we have Malygos-10, we'll move on to Sartharian with drakes up and Heroic Malygos. That's all the progression there is, so after that is just farming as much loot as possible until 3.1 and Ulduar.

Heroic Naxx Pwn3d

2009-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

Apparently all I do is raid lately -- I didn't actually get online on the non-raid days this week. We rolled through the easy and known Spider & Plague wings on Tuesday and into the Construct wing. Finished that Wednesday. So Sunday, we had one known boss in Military, Gothik, one unbeaten encounter in Military, 4 Horsemen and the final Frostwyrm wing to go.

It actually took a minute to fill the raid on Sunday. Seems like we might want to recruit a couple more players after all. I had been being discouraging to people asking to join thinking that we didn't have regular raid slots. I didn't want to end up having unhappy people around who joined to raid and then didn't get into raids. But perhaps I was too conservative.

But once we got going, Gothik went down easily. Note on boss: we split the raid 13 & 12, which is closer to even than we do in 10 (6/4) but appears to be necessary in 25. Then on through to the 4 horsemen. This time, I was prot, so I wasn't going to be the one trying to tank & self-heal one of the caster mobs. And to guarantee it, I immediately volunteered to tank Baron Rivendare, which is my usual role when we have 10.

Bloc and Barantir went to go tank the caster mobs. On the first pull, Barantir got insta-gibbed. While wipes are never fun exactly, it as at least good to know it's not trivial to tank (although he tried to blame his fiancee or some such for calling him on the phone, sheesh). Then we got 2-3 pretty good pulls with obvious minor improvements to do wrt to moving together, timing switches, etc. And then we won.

After loot and a short break, we went off and pulled Sapphiron. Got him to 50% on the first try and down fairly easily on the second. One minor wobble on the first try was that I pulled aggro right before the first air phase. More on that in a sec.

We thought Kel'thuzad might be more of a challenge, but he went smoothly in 2 tries as well. One try to get people used to not standing in the void zones, coping with the mind controls, and for me to keep taunting Bloc's big bug adds off him -- there are 4 of them and when they all come from the same side, it's hard to get them under control 2 and 2. The second pull was smooth and simple and a win.

There were a bunch of really nice tank drops through the run. They all went to Bloc and Ragonbadger. None of them would have been major upgrades for me, but my gear is probably going to continue to lag some. It's a natural consequence of me trying to build 2 different gear sets entirely through raiding. I don't run enough heroics to stack gear from those or emblems.

But that's ok, it appears I have enough gear to tank what I need to -- 4 horsemen, Thaddius, etc. In fact, I've noticed that while my gear means I'm lagging on hp by a couple of k (33k vs 35-36k) and I bet I'm lagging on mitigation, my threat/sec appears to be significantly higher.

For example, on Thaddius, I regularly crept right up and would have gone past Ragonbadger if I hadn't Salved myself. I wasn't paying attention to the meter on Sapphiron, which is how I pulled aggro there (I pulled Sarth of Dethno the other day, too). I'm not sure of the source. Some of it is that I've been stacking block value to increase my Shield of Righteousness dmg. But I think a chunk of it is simply class mechanics. I've read a couple of things on pally threat gen and I think we're slightly OP there right now. It could be an intentional thing (even at same gear, pally tank mitigation trials slightly). It could also be a mechanics bug. I think Judgment of Light may be occasionally producing crazy threat numbers -- it may be that all healing is getting attributed to my threat, so any fast hitting/casting raid members are cranking me up.

Either way, I'm good with it (although I obviously hope it's intentional or at least not getting nerfed). I'll keep an eye on the threat meter when I'm OT and it means I'm always ready to take aggro if the MT takes a late spike (like on Thaddius). I do wonder if my basic squishiness will hold up to Malygos tonight. I hope so since I'd like to be part of the first kill, but I suspect I could convince Ragonbadger to take my spot if I'm getting clobbered. It appears to be a 1 tank, 3 healer, 6 dps fight, which is annoying to us (4) tanks. But I guess we can rotate through who gets to tank it.

Progression to do:
Malygos-10
Sartharian+1 - 10
Sartharian+1 - 25
Malygos-25

I think next week, we'll shoot for clearing Naxx-25 in 2 nights and try to save some time for the 10-progression attempts. Maybe the week after, we'll try focusing entirely on progression in the 25s. That reminds me, I have to put up the calendar raid invites for tomorrow. Always so much maintenance to do, no wonder I never run heroics.

/shiver

2009-01-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

It's stupid cold here. Canadian cold even. When the temperature drops like this here, they describe it on the news as the arrival of a "blast of icy Canadian air." You Canadians can have your damn air back! It was -15F this morning when I took my daughter to high school (aka -26C) and I was left muttering bizarre things like, "oh, it's warmed up to 10 below" later when I took my son to kindergarten. And cheering at the weather report saying it'd get up to 6. That's just crazy.

In any event, I didn't get online last night. I thought I needed to take it easy for a night and was afraid that if I played, I'd get wrapped up like usual and end up staying late. Instead, I got up a bit earlier this morning and spent some time with my son in his kindergarten class, reading to the kids.

I may be able to get online tonight in time to run some heroics or something. Maybe make the epic healing ring.

Boots

2009-01-15T11:46:00.000-08:00

When I logged on yesterday early evening, I still had crappy blue rep reward boots. But then I checked my mail and had a pleasant surprise. During a recent Naxx-10, Dethno had taken some boots and then realized they weren't actually an upgrade for him. So he petitioned a GM, who had them sent to me in the mail. Nice. I enchanted them and then noticed they actually had slightly less +def than the blue ones, so I went and bought a lot of enchanting mats so I could finally get around to adding the +20 def to my shield and get back to the cap. That got me there without having to swap to another +27 def (JC) gem. Since I was on a gear roll, then I went and used badges to grab my T7 gloves for the 2-item bonus.

Then right before the raid, Ragonbadger msgs me. He upped on boots in Heroic Naxx the previous night and they're weird. First, they're BoE, which is unusual. Then, while they have a socket, they have very low defense and very low stam. If you socket for +def (seems necessary), you give up about 30 stam versus the ones I had just got. However, they have an unusually high about of +block value, +77 and a fair amount more strength. So they'll have decent extra physical mitigation. Plus, I've been becoming a big fan of block value because it directly improves my dmg and threat from Shield of Righteousness. You also give up dodge/parry, so I think they aren't actually as good for MT, but could be perfect for my frequent OT role. So I took those too (and fixed the DKP in both cases). So now I have 2 pairs of purple boots and I hadn't even killed anything yet.

We spent awhile on Thaddius. It took some time for people to get into the rhythm of rotating with the polarity debuff, moving quickly and taking the correct route. I decided to work on cranking my dps and threat so that I'd sit right behind Ragon on the threat meter. Then I'd cast Hand of Salvation on myself and keep going. This worked to let me do a little dps and also be right there if something bad happened to Ragon, like the positioning getting off and him getting pwned by 10 people with the opposite debuff. This happened a couple of times, including the final winning pull, but I was able to easily transition smoothly into the tanking role and we finally rocked him down.

To do 30m damage in 6m, you need everybody cranking dps and getting the maximum advantage from the polarity buffing. Which means nice tight grouping with the others who share your polarity. And no deaths, if possible (it wasn't possible, but we managed it with 3 dead early).

Then we went and got Razuvious down easily (much more quickly than last time). But we called it there and decided to go back for a 3rd night on Sunday. We'll warm up with Gothik and if we can get the 4 Horseman under control reasonably quickly, we'll go try Sapphiron and maybe Kel'thuzad too. That might mean no Naxx-10 for some of us this week, but I feel like progression would be good.

Gearwise, I still have crappy blue bracers and a cloak. I'm going to grab the valor badge cloak after the next Heroic raid, so that'll take care of that. Either bracers will eventually drop, or I'll wait for 60 more valorous badges for that piece. I still have the lvl 70 JC trinket to replace (with something that has lots of +def) and I should really make more of an effort to run Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle and get the good def sword. That'd get me within an item or two of best-in-slot across all gear.

Then I can work more on my holy gear, lol. The first order of business there is ~15 JC tokens to get the epic JC ring and 3x +27 int gems. Should have that in about a week. Then maybe the neck and start looking for a decent cloak, etc.

I'll be taking it easier for the next couple of nights. Probably on late, check for a heroic and just do dailies if everybody is busy and stay fresh for Sunday.

Rolling 25 Content

2009-01-14T08:53:00.001-08:00

We got off on a nice run last night in Naxx-25, rapidly clearing the Spider & Plague wings and then grinding our way through the Construct wing to see Thaddius. As we were cruising through the Spider wing, I noticed we didn't have even a single random rez on the trash or boss. I was going to bring it up on vent but I knew everybody would get mad that I was jinxing the run. Then I starting thinking of it like when a baseball pitcher is pitching a no hitter and nobody is allowed to say anything out loud. And I wondered if anybody else was noticing.

Then Sherider broke the streak (go figure, heh) on the Plague wing trash, so I mentioned the impressive lack of deaths preceding that. We were about the pull Heigen the Unclean and several people expressed some skepticism that we could pull of the 25-person Safety Dance -- no deaths on that boss is a specialized achievement. Uglykid was skeptical enough to wager. He msged me a number of predicted deaths on the fight. I told him I'd take the under and he was pessimistic enough to give me 2:1 odds.

I won the bet by a fairly significant margin. We did have 3 deaths, but they were all b-rezzed so it was nice to see 25 people standing when the boss went down. Of course, then we promptly had a bunch of people die on the short gauntlet run to Loatheb. But then we beat Loatheb pretty handily as well.

Since we hadn't been to the Construct wing before to see how the trash & bosses change in Heroic mode, it was no suprise that the body count started to pile up from there. We managed a full wipe on the trash -- "hey, that's a lot more slimes than usual, oh look and they all have an aura too." And then we wiped on Patchwerk. I was a little nervous about Patchwerk since he has a rep for hitting significantly hard. But we mostly only wiped because Bloc's computer locked up and you really need 3 tanks for the fight. We got him fairly easily on the second pull.

Grobbulus and Gluth were both messy one-shots, I believe (and we did them with 24 since Kainos's comp locked up and then wouldn't let him back onto Elune). It was late as we pulled up to Thaddius, but we decided to press on for a few extra minutes. With 25 people running around as the polarity switches, I really wanted to get at least one practice pull. It went pretty well, so we did another. But it's going to take a fair amount of precision in both movement after a polarity switch and positioning to make the polarity-buffing to get our dps up enough to do 30m within the enrage timer.

But I'm pretty optimistic that we'll get him tonight. I don't think it'll take much more practice. Then we'll head back to the Military wing. Razuvious and Gothik should be even easier than last week. And hopefully we'll find non-idiots to tank the casters (either somebody not-me, or me being less idiotic) and work out the 4 Horsemen.

If all that goes as smoothly as I hope, we'll be in the Frostwyrm Wing before the end of the night. That will definitely raise the possibility of a third Heroic raid night this week, probably Sunday, if we have a shot at closing out the instance this reset. That'd probably mean no real shot to clear the 10s, but maybe we can just use the 4th raid night to mess around with Malygos or even Sartharian with a drake up. Actually, I suppose we could do those with 25, too.

I was a bit more comfortable getting to raid as prot again last night. Dethno was delayed by work, so I took the 3rd tank role. I have a hunch I might end up healing again tonight, though. I got a few healing upgrades last Naxx-10, so with practice, I should be getting progressively less hopeless at it. I wonder if I'll be able to get on early enough to gem & enchant the gear. Plus I need to update the DKP from last night (and there was plenty of it).

Another Naxx-10 clear

2009-01-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

In spite of Dethno being called away to work and the subsequent reliance on an undergeared scrubby tank (yours truly) we rolled the rest of the way through Naxx-10 (thanks to Sirtank for respeccing and running as OT instead of mega dps) and then knocked off Sartharian for a bonus.

The run left me feeling conflicted about scheduling since it seems like we can count on a full Naxx-10 clear with 2 raid nights and there is a lot of gear people still need from there. I'd been feeling sympathetic towards suggestions that we do an extra Heroic raid night to finish Heroic Naxx, but it'd basically mean skipping Naxx-10 that week unless we ended up running 5 raid nights.

So I think it's still loot-optimal to do 2 & 2 and just take it as far as we can in Heroic Naxx tonight and Wednesday. OTOH, if we are close to having 4 wings clear tonight, it's going to be very tempting to try to finish it and maybe just have the 10-person groups do Sarth and/or wipe on Malygos for one night.

I guess we'll see how it goes tonight. If it's slow (or tiring), then we'll take anothe week to gear up further in 10s. If it looks promising, maybe we'll take a crack at pushing through. There's a part of me that thinks it might be fun to go all-25 all the time and work on Malygos, Sartharian with Drakes up and/or the harder achievements in Naxx. But as a guy who's still wearing a couple of blue and one level 70 (T6 gloves) tanking piece, maybe there's something to be said for a little more non-heroic raid gear farming before we go entirely about progression.

Half a Naxx

2009-01-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe not quite half of Naxx. We did get Plague, Construct and Anub'Rehkan before we started to lose people (Dethno called in to work, etc.). If we get started on time and get on a roll, we have a decent shot to finish the place tonight.

Somehow farming Naxx-10 seems less thrilling than trying to finish Heroic Naxx, though. Maybe we should push for more Heroic Raids next week and not worry about whether we leave enough time to clear 2x 10s, too.

Finally replaced my ZA shoulders last night. Then ran into a funny bug making a gem for them. Clicking on "Royal Shadow Crystal" casts that spell, but the result is an Infused Shadow Crystal. I put in a GM ticket after it happened twice and verified that I didn't misclick and got email today confirming it's a known bug. That's a weird one to sneak into the live release. I wonder if they'll replace the wrong-cut gems or if I'm just out of luck. I should probably go buy a Twilight Opal version of it anyway, I probably won't be replacing these for awhile, especially given how long it seems to take me to replace shoulders. If the T7 token finally drops down to me, I can use them to replace my BT healing shoulders.

Halls of Stone

2009-01-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a slightly tipsy but insistent Barantir, we ran a Heroic Halls of Stone last night. I had asked in /guild if anybody wanted to run earlier but when only a few healers replied, I just did the JC daily, then went fishing. I realized earlier in the week that I could use JC to upgrade a couple of pieces of my healing gear -- just in case I'm really going to be reliably healing in 25s (or need to optimize both sets of gear because I'll be swapping back and forth a lot). So I made the mana regen trinket and have started saving tokens for the epic ring and maybe neck.

But then Barantir got on and pulled the run together. Sadly, by then I was getting pretty tired and nearly sleptwalked through the run. I don't think it was just me either, the run started to get a bit choppy towards the end. But we finished it off.

Tonight we'll get back to raiding again and hopefully do >50% of Naxx. I'd like to get the KT this week. One of the things about working on 2 sets of gear is you start to notice how many T7 tokens you're going to want to get.

Early night

2009-01-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

"Holy hell, I'm healing spec. Was I drunk last night?"

Was basically my reaction to logging in. I didn't really forget that I had respecced holy, but after logging in, seeing Naxx (Badger) and some Heroics already going, I moused over my lame holy gear and didn't know what to do.

I looked up a few rep or quest rewards, thought about going after some crafted gear. Then considered the annoyance of doing dailies as holy spec and decided just to call it an early night.

I think maybe I'll make Thursdays a regular "off night." I've been asked to help out in my 5yo's kindergarten class one morning a week for the next couple of months and Fridays would be a decent one. They are having a behavioral problem with one of the kids in the class -- he's so unruly, disruptive and aggressive, there have already been police reports filed against him. You get some kids who have problems in the public school, but I've never seen a kid this far gone this young (kindergarten!). So there's an effort to get more parents to come help out in the classroom and try to help keep it under control. Also, the school is resisting moving the kid to special ed, which he clearly seems to need, so more parents might help document the issue. My son's teacher is really wonderful and is more than happy to have parents around a lot. We feel bad that the ongoing problem is hurting the environment so much.

I guess that's a bit of a bummer of RL blogging. I could tell more interesting RL stories about the regular New Year's party, but I've been sworn to secrecy ("what happens at New Year's, stays at New Year's").

Maybe I'll get on early enough tonight to get into a Heroic run. I wonder whether I'll end up healing or tanking.

Heroic

2009-01-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

Tuesday we finally made our long awaited foray into Heroic Raiding in WotLK with 25 instead of 10s. Things got rolling so well, it felt like we should have been pushing to start earlier. Well, a number of people were, but the holidays threw everything off.

Sartharian went off without a hitch. Well, one disco, so we 1-shot him with 24. Then off to Naxx and rolled through the Arachnid quarter without a wipe and then the Plague quarter with a fairly smooth trip to Loatheb. It did get a little harder -- we lost a bunch of people due to dancing trouble on Heigen. And then we finally wiped once on Loatheb.

We only had 24 in the raid again for Loatheb, which was a concern since it's a tough dps race. And at least 2 of us were putting out pretty low dps. Myself included, we had formed up with 5 tanks, so I tried respeccing Ret, but between slightly out of date gear and lack of practice, I wasn't very effective. I'm not even sure I couldn't have done better overall dps as prot spec in dps gear.

A few people suggested bringing in another non-guild player to help. I deflected the request, but I actually was leaning towards setting a hard and fast guild policy of no non guildies in the raid. I didn't annouce it because I didn't want to lay it out there on the spot, but I still feel like I'd rather wipe short handed and stick to guild raids right now.

Best of all, we didn't wipe again. Everybody stepped up and we pwned Loatheb on the second try.

Our second trip last night was less simple. We moved slowly through the military quarter with wipes on both Razuvious and Gothik. I decided to go holy spec and be a bad healer instead of bad dps and actually spent most of the night feeling slightly overwhelmed with finding the healing rhythm since it's been a long time since I raid healed. Given our excess tanks, I think there's some chance holy might be a regular role for me in 25s.

Being a relatively weaker healer and having tank experience, when we got to the 4 horsemen, it made sense to have me try to "tank" a caster since I could theoretically stand there and self-heal. But it didn't go so well.

First pull, I ran straight into melee Lord Keliek and discovered his holy bolt hits for 9k and I got 2-shotted. That was a bit disturbing, so for the next few pulls, I ran in trying to carefully find his aggro boundary while also making sure Quisha was still in range to heal me. I also ran in with my fingers poised over the self-heal buttons since I was going to need to cast right away. What I didn't realize was that these bosses are not like Ragnaros or Murmur that just need somebody in range, but I actually had to get on the aggro table with a Holy Shock first. That led to a handful more wipes and the end of the evening.

I probably should have read up on the encounter myself, but I was too distracted with finding and enchanting my holy gear, respeccing and redoing my UI starting a bit before the raid. Most of the raid I spent peppering Barantir with questions and trying to vaguely keep track of who I should be healing while missing people asking me to set things up in raid.

Fortunately, it'll be easier when/if I do it again next week. I'm a bit up in the air as to whether I should do our 10 person runs as tank or healer for practice this week. Probably it will depend on whether Stupidrenren is around and/or if Dethnotronic gets called into work.

There's a part of me wondering why we are even bothering going back to 10s for the rest of the week. I suppose in theory, we'll get better loot by 2x clears. Also, it hadn't occurred to me that we had a chance to clear Heroic Naxx our first week there, so I didn't even consider the idea of a full-bore switch. I thought we'd be chipping away at it for a night or two for a few weeks. I guess it really isn't that hard.

Rusty

2009-01-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

No, I didn't give up on blogging, just got overrun by the holidays, travel and such. Back as of last Saturday, we did manage to scrape up enough people to venture into Naxx Sunday & Monday. It felt a bit rusty and between that and some delays to fill, connection issues and such, we didn't actually make it to the Frost Wyrm wing last night.

Tonight marks a whole new type of adventure for the guild -- Heroic raids with 25. There's a lot about this that I'm in "wait and see" mode about. How hard will it be? How quick or smoothly will the raids go? How many people and who will show up?

A couple of people have contacted me about joining the guild and I've been holding off on deciding what to do. Until the holidays, it felt like both 10-person teams had fairly reliable groups of 12 or so and were more likely to disappoint people left out than struggle to fill. If somebody contacts me and wants to raid, I wouldn't want to take them and then have them sit on the bench all the time waiting for a chance.

But 25 > 2x10 (sometimes the math is simple ;), so I think we might need a slightly bigger pool of raiders to fill Heroics reliably. If we have ~75% attendance, we'd need 33 raiders. I think many people are already >75%, so that's probably too many. Also, I have a hunch we can do parts of Naxx with <25 in a pinch. But there's still room for around 5-7 more people who specialize more in 25s and sub occasionally in 10s. Would these new players be ok with that deal? I'll check tonight.

And then there's the issue that maybe we'll be doing more 25s than 10s sooner than I thought. I'm planning 2 & 2 this week tentatively, but if Heroic Naxx is rolling, maybe that changes in a couple of weeks. Maybe non-heroic Naxx becomes an off-night and/or pug based activity. Or maybe we grow up to have a decent shot at 35 online and run both Heroic and/or non-heroic on the same nights.

I think a lot of people are looking forward to tonight, which is good. Hopefully the transition won't be stressful, they sometimes are. I have a hunch that in addition to the new recruiting issues, we'll be running into the old filling issues of trying to pick 25 people based on class, ability and performance. It'd be nice if I could pick a list of 25 in advance of raid night like we do with the 10s, but I'm not sure how well that will work. Maybe it's time to figure out the signup system bundled in the guildlaunch website. That might work better than the in game calendar for this.

Hanging out

2008-12-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

I spent the evening wrapping Xmas presents and preparing for our holiday travels, but did pop on very late for a few minutes to do the JC and a few other dailies.

I was very happy to hear the Badger group took down Kel'thuzad without undue trouble before I got on. 2x full Naxx-10 clears is nice. I've got January 6 penciled in for a Heroic raid night. Probably Sartharian and then a little Naxx if Sarth is as easy as advertised.

I've noticed I'm having a lot of conversations about DKP with people lately, not really my favorite topic. Then when I popped in on the remaining Badger group people on vent, Bloc pointed out in jest that we'd hardly spoken since he got "demoted" to the second group. Hmm. Well, first, I really did make a conscious effort to avoid the groups getting labeled first/second (or A/B) by going with Bear and Badger, but I guess that would never be perfectly successful. And honestly, there was a little concern early on that we hadn't distributed the dps very evenly, but I think we've seen that isn't an issue. I was never worried about the tanks or healers (only that a few of us were slow to level for various reasons). But having both groups clear Naxx is just about the same amount of time should settle any issues about first/second (Bear got their earlier by calendar days by raiding more often, I think the 2 groups ran about the same number of raids to get there).

But what really dawned on me afterwards is that if I want to have conversations about more interesting things than DKP, I should be more active about seeking out better conversations. On non-raid nights, I've tended to just kick around and not even bother getting on vent. But maybe I'll start making an effort to run around checking in with people. There is some danger to guild cohesion of running in 2 groups like this, but I don't think it'd be hard to head off.

Running 25s should help a lot too. And maybe we'll start looking for opportunities to swap up some people across the 2 Naxx-10 groups as well. I think it's easy to overlook what we have going here -- a decent sized guild of strong raiders and the makings of a really good team for the Heroic raid instances. This isn't l8raid anymore. We aren't going to be struggling to fill or relying on new people who don't know the encounters or are undergeared. People used to drift in and out of l8raid, which meant the DKP system was really important. It shouldn't be that way anymore.

The crux of a lot of the DKP questions is whether we should have the same DKP for 10s and 25s. I'm inclined to have one pool for a two main reasons. First, it's a lot simpler to administer. Second, if somebody has been unlucky in the 10s, I think they should get priority in the 25s.

I see two potential problems that could arise. First, people could 'game' the system by passing over small upgrades in the 10s to save points for the best-in-slot item from the 25s. This is really only a problem if we discover the people passing on small ups can't effectively do their jobs in the 25s. Currently, I don't anticipate this being a problem (partly because Naxx is not that hard) but we'll have to see. Second, somebody could stockpile DKP in the 10s, grab a bunch of best-in-slot loot from the 25s and then leave the guild to raid elsewhere. I don't think that's going to be a problem either.

There's a side issue in that one DKP pool makes people hesitant to take off-spec gear. On one hand, that means people work harder to optimize their main spec (good). On the other hand, the flexibility of people being able to respec might be handy for maintaining class balance in the 25s. Maybe we'll re-introduce the 1/2 price offspec loot option in the 10s after a bit.

Another funny side issue is that people could basically all end up trying to farm DKP in the 10s for use in the 25s. Note that if everybody does this, nobody gets any DKP because everything gets sharded. At that point, maybe we cancel the 10s and spend all week in the 25s. Or just run 10s when we have some newer toons to gear up (who would take loot and generate DKP). I suspect this issue will self-correct quickly.

So we'll see. I'll probably get on late and hang out a little again tonight. I won't stay up late so that I won't risk being tired for driving tomorrow. Fingers crossed that I can dig up enough bandwidth over vacation to at least check in daily for the JC quest and a /wave.

Kel'thuzad down!

2008-12-18T10:33:00.001-08:00

On Monday... yeah I still suck at being timely. That was a pretty fun fight and a gratifying win. We spent about half the raid night cataloging the various ways to screw up the fight -- have somebody stand too far outside initially and overaggro the trash, try to melee Banshees, leave Abombs untanked, let skellies bleed through to the middle, stand in the void zones, forget to heal the victims of the frost block, stand in the void zones, stand too close to the tank and get him frost blocked, stand in the void zones, etc.

But sorting through all the chaos and closing it out felt pretty good. Then we went and got schooled on real balls-out chaos by trying Sartharian with 1 drake up. I think we set up the fight with too much depending on me -- tank the drake, collect the fire elementals, avoid the flame walls, avoid the void zones. Collecting the fire elementals is the hardest part of that and focusing on that caused me to screw up other things like avoiding the flame wall. We tried it again last night with a different drake and it seems like it would help if the healers are close enough to me for the consecrate to pick up the Lava Blazes. But since I'm moving around, they have to heal and also avoid the frontal cone breath of the dragon, which is also hard.

We never really felt like we got going seriously on the Sartharian+1 fight. However, I'm unsure whether it was technical/positioning or we just need a little more gear. For example, after Monday, it felt like we needed 3 healers, but maybe you have to be able to 2-heal it to manage the dps to kill the drake's portal add(s), the blazes and still get Sarth down before it gets crazy. OTOH, I think we were the worst geared group to do the ZA bear run, so I believe we're capable of fairly strong technical play with practice.

We did some more Naxx again Tues & Wed, but moved at a leisurely pace. We tried going for the achievement kill on Grand Widow without success. We also noticed we're about a full minute short of the 3m achievement kill on Patchwerk. Patch is a simple fight, so that probably indicates we're a bit undergeared for achievements yet in Naxx.

It felt like the last couple of nights were a little less joyful than last week's Naxx. Maybe a accomplishment-hangover following the excitement of our first KT kill and realizing we won't have another big accomplishment like that for a little while? Or maybe with the kill achieved, people have started thinking more about gear optimization as their next thing to work for. Sadly that depends on loot distribution, which is less team-oriented and maybe less fun-oriented. Or maybe it was anticipating the slower raiding schedule of the next couple of weeks due to holiday vacation travel. Or maybe it was just all the extra wipes testing ourselves against the harder versions of the battles.

Hopefully, the breaks over the holidays will get people pumped up again. I'll be frequently unavailable until around Jan 3rd. I will be trying to get online with the craptop to at least do the daily JC quest. If I can get >5 fps, I might try to do something more complicated, but I'm not counting on it.

I'm planning to put Heroic (25) raiding on the schedule first week of next year (Jan 6). It looks like we can clear Naxx-10 in two nights for both raiding groups, so it's time to measure ourselves against the Heroic versions and see how far we can get.

Slacking

2008-12-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Oof, I didn't post for almost a week. I don't know if anybody reads the blog anymore since I moved to blogger, but maybe they don't now.

The problem has been that RL has gotten unusually busy with preparations for the holidays and things. Plus, there's been so much to do online that I try to jump on when I have a few free minutes instead of trying to keep up the blog. And then there's the problem that jumping on all the time has led to some concerns about how much time the game can consume.

So last week (Tues) started with a night off somewhat unexpectedly. Then we got rolling again pretty well on Wednesday. I considered trying to get into a Heroic Thurs or Fri but got on late and everybody was formed up running heroics or Naxx or something. Sat, I did get into a heroic when Dethno graciously respecced dps so I could tank Heroic Azjol-Nerub.

Sadly, that run didn't really go that well and left me feeling like a bit of a slacker as a tank. I'm still trailing a bit as far as gearing up and instance knowledge and I felt that fairly acutely when we had trouble Sat night (especially with the better geared tank respecced to dps next to me). Fortunately, things started to turn at least a little bit. I picked up a good belt from the Heroic and we had a nice run Sunday including getting my T7 legs and even better, our first defeat of Sapphiron in Naxx.

I also made the epic tanking ring this week, so overall the gear is coming together. It's still clear that Dethno and Ragon are probably going to be the best geared tanks when we get to 25s, which has made me wonder whether I should be planning to go to those as dps, a third tank or poor healer. I'm starting to pay attention to dps gear some, but I've also been thinking about evaluating the OT things my spec brings:

The first 2, I'm pretty sure end up being about 10% extra effective mitigation to the MT (plus a little extra rage for low dmg bosses):
Devotion aura with +6% healing and +1291 armor (via Imp Devo in prot tree)
Blessing of Sanctuary: -3% damage and every block/parry/dodge gives 10 rage

These 2 talents seem helpful, but I haven't verified how useful they are:
Judgments of the Just: Active judgments reduce mob attack speed by 20%
Divine Guardian: 30% of damage taken by party/raid members within 30 yrds directed to the Paladin when Divine Shield is up (4m cooldown).

I've been meaning to check with recap if possible, but I worry that JotJ doesn't leave a visible debuff on mobs we fight, so I worry that it might not work on bosses. It's a Req 45 talent, so it really ought to work on everything, but I'd feel better if it were confirmed.

...wanders off mid-blog to Maintankadin.com...
Ok, JotJ rocks. I was worried might not stack with Demo Shout or something, but it does and it's a big mitigating factor. OTOH, I learned that the +heal part of Imp Devo doesn't stack withe Tree healing buff. So that's only effectively useful on the nights Darsonsind isn't in the raid. Interesting.

But when I'm a pure OT, I should probably start working on getting better use out of my under-used 'Hands' spells. I'm used to thinking about Hand of Protection and Hand of Freedom, but their use doesn't come up so often (hmm, I wonder if I could HoP on Dethon during Gluth -- can he still shockwave/thunderclap when under HoP?). I think I can improve by using Hand of Salvation and possible Hand of Sacrifice more often.

Hand of Salvation is -20% threat cast on a high dps. The few times I've thought to use it, there have been range issues. But I can find more opportunities for it, epecially when OT.

I'm wondering about using Hand of Sacrifice more often as extra mitigation for the MT. I could eat 30% of the MT damage for 12s (every 2m). Maybe if I was using this and the Div Guardian, it'd be worth setting a beacon on me to spread the healing automatically?

Mostly, I've been focusing on doing a little dps, occasional heals, but with practice maybe I can mix in some more specials, too. I wonder what will be the most utility in 25s -- fill in the gaps prot, or full ret in weaker gear. I guess we have a few weeks to work it out either way.

Dragons!

2008-12-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

We opened the evening in the Obsidium Sanctum under Wyrmrest Temple. Everybody had been saying the boss there, Sartharion, wasn't too tough with 10 and leaving none of the drakes up. I wouldn't say it was easy. It was chaotic and I felt like I was working hard to try to corral the adds, but we did win without wiping, so I guess by that standard it wasn't hard.

Thinking about how to beat the boss in the harder mode where you leave one of his (her?) 3 drake buddies up is trickier. There's an awful lot to tank, adjust and react to -- portals with a mob to jump in and fight, lava spawns, waves of fire to find the gap and hide from. That might take some creativity.

It's also tempting to practice the main fight since I think I could do better on add control. Maybe if the healers were positioned more in a group so I knew where the adds would be going. Are those random occasional meteors just effects or do they do damage?

From a dragon, we went to 4 horses. That is a complicated fight and it took awhile to (a) figure out the roles and (b) me to stop sucking at taunting. It felt easy on the win, though, so I suspect it won't be so hard next time.

I think that encounter has the longest runback from the GY, too. Between working a bit slowly across the two different instances, the extra wipe by my macro mis-writing and that runback, we didn't have much more time than a quick get-to-know-you wipe to end our evening with yet another dragon, the Frost Wyrm Sapphiron.

The frost dragon fight might benefit from a little Frost Resist gear. It may not be strictly necessary, but we'll have a few days to get a piece or two ready for next weekend. Assuming no hitches, we ought to be back to the final section of Naxx next Sun/Mon.

An optimistic schedule might be:
Tues - Sartharian, Spider & Military Wings
Wed - Construct & Plague Wings
Sun/Mon - Frost Wyrm Wing

We can probably fall a bit behind that schedule, e.g., spend a little time trying Sarth with 1 drake up, and just do Spider Wing tonight, and still have a shot at clearing. The main thing I'm even mildly wondering about is if we'll hit a roadbump by not having a Shaman to boost the caster dps, e.g., on Loatheb.

Flashes

2008-12-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

...Arthas, fearing for his minions, reaches through the ether to tamper directly with our connectivity...

...Thaddius down, Construct Wing Clear. Dethno relogs, "Did we win? I d/c-ed at 10%" Didn't impair his aggro holding noticeably...

...Loatheb down, Plague Wing Clear. Sure, if *everybody* is at or above 2500 dps (cept the lame OT, of course) you can do it in <5m.

...Gothik adds down, Gothik engaged. Why is everybody standing still? Oh s**t...

...Standing in the basement, only one little light blinking forlornly on the cable modem. Damn you, Comcast!

...Folding laundry, staring and vainly wishing for the some lights to start blinking again. iPhone chirps, Kyoka, "We got him anyway. Lol."

...Tonight, we go back to battle the famed 4 Horsemen of the Apocolypse. And maybe a dragon, or two...

Noctambulating

2008-12-05T15:21:00.000-08:00

I took the night off from raiding last night and Uglykid put together the second group of Naxx raiders from the guild. Of course, then he kept having to afk to take care of his little one but they pressed on to take down the first boss in the Military quarter and then the entire Spider wing.

So that's 9 bosses down in total in our first 3 nights in Naxx using 2 mostly different groups of raiders (there was some overlap in the groups). I'm planning to go back with the group from Wednesday this coming Sunday and try to get Thaddius and Loatheb. That'd give us 3 wings clear our first week and I think it's a reasonable shot. It's also possible we might even find a way to clear the military quarter and even pop the last wing open on Monday night.

Having the 2 groups sharing the instance makes planning a little tricky. It's also possible we could use some spare time to investigate Sartherion for additional amusement.

I was thinking of trying to run a heroic or two for badges/rep last night, but getting on late meant everybody was already in a run or Naxx. So I did some quests and JC stuff and listened in on vent a bit. I even fished up some Dragonfin and made the 40 str/40 stam food that I think is optimal for me tanking (finally hit 400 cooking and can start getting recipes). I also took some time to tidy up the DKP listings from the Tues/Wed raids. I still need to work out some options/issues with the DKP interface, but I think the data is reasonably accurate now at least.

Tonight will be another semi-off night. Maybe I'll get on in time to run heroics, or maybe I'll just end up questing for more gold again. I spend a bunch on Titanium so that Dethno could make me the cool crafted shield. I think I owe somebody a Frost Orb still for that and maybe some Eternals. I'm hoping to be able to contribute some nice crafted stuff myself from the epic JC recipes, but it'll take 10 days at least to make the first ring or neck and I'm already wondering if we'll see better drops by the time I can make them. I'll stockpile tokens until the last minute just in case.

I'm still pleasantly surprised that is getting out of the gate on raiding so well. We're probably going to have to plan the jump to Heroic mode (25 person) sooner than I expected as well.

Raid recap

2008-12-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

We had 20 people turn out ready to raid Naxxramas on Tuesday night. Sadly, we could only take 10 right away. We formed up the initial group based mainly on the group that had worked together in BC to beat Zul'Aman. However, there's a very good core of additional players who we're going to build a second raid group around tonight. On Tuesday, it didn't look like we quite had the healers to confidently build 2 separate groups (6 is probably best) so we are going to share the instance with two groups this week so that we can have some players from the first group help fill in any gaps in the second group.

Ragonbadger will MT the second group and Uglykid will help organize the raid that goes tonight. This has tempted me to label the groups as the "Bear" group (the one based on ZA running the last two nights) and the "Badger" group since we seem to have a few people obsessed with badgers around the guild these days. ;) That was to avoid any perception that one group is the first/main group and an "other" group that might be expected to have less progression since I think we have enough solid raiders to progress with both. For the first group, after considering healing options, we went with 2. The raid was Dethnotronic & Beros tanking, Sariana and Leoruuc healing, Wiseman, Kyoka, Islowlykill, Sherider, Uglykid and Barantir for dps.

Dealing with groups, raid maintenance (signups, DKP, WWS) kept me from getting around to blogging yesterday (plus the usual RL: work, family, etc.), so I'll review both runs for reference.

The first trick on Tuesday night was to find the way into Naxx. I flew around it 5 times before I spotted the entrance on the bottom middle of the ziggurat. After forming up and heading in, we had no real issues with trash in the Plague wing.

We wiped once on Noth the Plaguebringer, but got him on the second try. We weren't really trying to 1-shot everything. We'd look up the boss's abilities on Wowwiki before pulling, but expected we also needed to see what they looked like live. The basic plan was read, then dive in and wipe, then plan the strat and get to work. Heigen the Unclean took a few more tries since we all needed to learn the pattern of "dancing" to avoid the eruptions. Dethno got the pattern down right away, so I just followed him. I think it was tougher for the dps to do their jobs and manage the dance, but we got it in a small handful of attempts.

We wiped again discovering the gauntlet that leads to the final boss of the Plaguewing, Loatheb. Then we spent some time working on Loatheb, but got a bit discouraged by his apparent dps requirements -- 6.7m hp in 5-6m meant a dps rate about 1/3 higher than we were managing. We left feeling like we might need some more general gear upgrades before beating him. Or it might be possible to get by with some raid stacking (e.g., subbing out weak OT dps for somebody who can crank).

Instead of beating our heads against it, we went and tested out Patchwerk. Our first pull was marred by discovering he summons a slightly wider set of uncleared trash pulls than expected. On the second pull, we found it was hard to keep up with the healing requirements. That got us to the planned end of raid time, so we called it there.

We re-formed on Wednesday evening with Hawksy in for Leo (who will heal tonight's group) and Barantir respecced Holy to go 3-healer for Patch. That did the trick and we got him slow and steady on the first attempt. Then we went and learned Grobbulus. It sounded complicated, but we got the hang of the tank kiting pattern and planned exploding zones pretty quickly and got him down on the third attempt. Ugly had to run afk to take care of his baby, so Auroen came in to learn Gluth with us.

We read that Gluth is one of the harder and more technical fights in Naxx and we struggled at first. It sets up like a 3-tank fight, but you don't have 3 tanks in a 10 person raid. Two tanks normally hold Gluth because he does a stacking Mortal Strike debuff that reduces healing by 10% per stack -- at 7 to 8, you're not getting much heals. But then a steady stream of fairly hard hitting, high hp zombies spawn in the back of the room and have to be kited around for a long time. We did a bunch of tries with Barantir trying to kite them in his holy spec, but it was tough to go a long time without him getting hit, stunned and pwned while also keeping the spawning ones off the healers. Part of the challenge was that hunters can only keep up the frost trap half the time to slow the zombies. A shaman could keep slowing up all the time, but we'd lose the ability to tranq Gluth's enrage (which might or might not be an issue anyway since he doesn't hit that hard).

Dethno and I noticed that as we traded aggro, you could run away from the boss and help with the zombies some because Gluth doesn't hit that hard so letting the Mortal Strike stack up a bit isn't fatal. So we invented a different strat: Beros holds Gluth and lets MS stack up while Dethno kites zombies. At 7 stacks, Dethno calls for 2x frost novas from Wiseman and Sherider to hold the zombies while he pulls Gluth off me for 10s to clear the debuff and re-collects the zombies. That's a lot of work for Dethno, but he nailed it and we got Gluth in the first try with that strat.

We promptly wiped on the next pull and on rez at the GY, Islowlykill said there was free loot in Wintergrasp since the alliance controlled it. So we went there instead on a lark and killed Archavon the Stone Watcher. He's easy but drops class specific loot so while we got him on one try, the rogue and feral druid leggings weren't really useful to anybody.

This group now takes a few nights off (unless helping the group going tonight). We'll plan to go back on Sunday night and take on Thaddius, who looks easy on paper, and maybe work on Loatheb, who doesn't. The general schedule is intended to be 4 nights/week, 3 hours/night, Sun-Wed. 3 hours isn't too fatiguing and I think the Sun-Wed schedule will work out well too. It gets us a couple of nights with a fresh instance, a couple of days off and a couple more right before the reset. It also leaves Fri/Sat open for people to do other things like spend time with their S.O. or PvP. The "Badger" group can pick a different schedule next week if they'd like to since we'll have 2 instances going. I'll have to remind them to think about planning.

Raid night

2008-12-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

It's time to raid again, Naxxramas-style. I'm looking forward to getting my ass handed to me repeatedly on content that the BC Sunwell guilds all say is ridiculously too easy.

However, I'm not looking forward to making 8+ people unhappy when we set up the raid group tonight. We have 18 or so signed up for a 10 person raid. Kind of the worst possible number -- maximizing the number of unhappy people without quite having enough for a second group.

Maybe we'll improvise with more rotations or even more raid nights this week, just to try to get everybody a taste. With a little luck, we may be able to field 2 groups next week.

The Oculus

2008-12-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

We decided to try The Oculus on Heroic mode last night, in spite of the fact that most of us hadn't ever even see it on non-heroic. Beros, Hawksy, Inkx, Primux and Stupidrenren wiped our way through the instance and nearly got through, but stalled too long on the final boss and had to call it due to the late hour.

We started by wiping on the first set of trash pulls. But we got the hang of it. Later, when we had to reclear them, we cruised through in just a few minutes. By then we had worked out the CC and AoE issues. We didn't have a lot of either in our group. The mobs reliably broke Inkx's traps quickly. It was nice the rooting worked, but rooting didn't add much for the all spellcaster pulls. Even gathering up the mobs was tricky since the little whelplings are casters. As I ran around picking them up, Hawksy's healing would exceed the consecrate threat and they'd start leaving me. I think the easy time through, Renren went bear, Primux grabbed some and Hawksy just did Circle healing.

We wiped on the first boss, read over our combat logs and got him the second time with just that much practice on avoiding the bombs.

Then we got our dragons, discussed what colors we should use and figured out where the next set of mobs (constructs) were. And wiped on the constructs. I think we wiped 3-4 times on the next 4 pulls of 3-4 spellcasters + 1 construct. We were really feeling the lack of CC. Renren could root the construct, but the casters were giving us trouble. The next couple of pulls of 3 constructs + 1 caster were no problem. I think we had Mocha tank the caster and maybe that would have been better on the previous pulls too.

The we pulled the second boss and wiped again. We pre-read on wiki and it warned of the Energizing cores first and summoning Drake Captains second. However, it seemed like it was the Captains that were causing the trouble so we took a few minutes and tried completely clearing all the nearby drakes to see if that kept them from coming. I don't think it helped, but we were able to dodge the various attacks enough to get through the boss anyway.

The trash mechanic on the 3rd boss took us by surprise -- you aggro and he summons a bunch of adds and ports away. There's no time to set up CC there, so it's a bit tricky to gather them up and also figure out which is the dangerous ones to kill first.

I think we wiped a few more times on the 3rd boss getting the hang of kite-tanking away from the frost bombs and dodging his arcane explosions. It's hard to get clear of the explosion if you have the slowing debuff, so I had to plan the kiting to keep us close to the hiding spots.

The fourth boss was rumored to be the easy one, but we did not find it easy. Maybe because it was late, or we were experimenting with too many different strats, it took awhile to key in on the issue that he's summoning a lot of adds in Heroic mode (4-5 instead of 2-3 on non-heroic). By the end, we settled on a 1 red, 1 green and 3 amber drake strategy so that we could spam time stop and have everybody focus on killing the adds. But we were tired so we started running into execution issues. Plus only Hawksy and I had working mics so it was hard for the amber drake riders to coordinate the time stop. As we were hearthing out, we realized that I should just have been calling all the time stops -- whenever I was low on hp, at the enrage, whenever there were a lot of whelps.

I'd like to go back and try it again tonight if possible. I'm sure it'll be a lot easier the next time through and I'd like to wrap up the daily heroic quest from yesterday as well. I should also make some time to make sure I'm fully prepped for Naxx tomorrow.

Turkey

2008-11-29T14:08:00.000-08:00

I've been playing a fair amount over the holiday weekend, but haven't managed time to blog at all. Curiously, the holidays and my pushing for 80 set off a desire to play in my kids who have been begging for turns on the good computer and the wow accounts. So we swap around during the day and then I've been trying to concentrate on leveling at night.

Maybe that'll ease up now since I finally dinged 80 last night. I pushed hard to 79, but then repsecced prot on Thanksgiving evening and spent the night running a whole bunch of instances instead of grinding out quests.

It took a solid run to get the hang of the new tanking rotations. And I took the opportunity to move around some of my key buttons, which also meant a lot of missed keys over the last couple of days. But I'm getting used to where the buttons are now. I decided it was relatively optimal to keep my most frequent keys on '2', '3' and '9', '0', '-' and '=' with the middle ones being the less often cast. I seem to be most comfortable tanking with both hands on the kbd, although in multi-mob situations, I frequently have to reach back and forth for the mouse.

Over the last couple of days, I also started looking into the proble of the new defense cap of 540. Not only that, but it takes 4.8 pts of on-item rating to get a single point of def. It's not a trivial target. I looked up some quest & rep item blue replacements. Got a couple of pieces of the crafted tanking gear (thanks to Barantir) and started re-gemming.

While I was wrestling with the problem, I learned about the new BoP JC gems made from Dragon's Eye. These are 'prismatic' (any color slot gems) that carry a whopping 27 def or other really high stats. And you can now have 3 of them in your gear instead of 1. That pretty much solved my def problem. Or it will when I get all 3 socketed. You get them through doing the JC daily quest and you only get 1 per day.

If I've calculated correctly, I'm actually going to overshoot the 540 mark and get to undo a 'downgrade' to an old lvl 70 blue +def trinket. At first, I was annoyed that there is no new JC trinket with +def, but the Red Monarch Crab as +63 stam, 2 gem slots and a +300 dodge on use. Yeah, I'm going to go with that together with the old lvl 70 +def trinket.

So I think I'll be ready gearwise to raid very shortly. I wonder what the new consumeables will be -- flasks, best food buffs, weapon buffs (do we still get those? I remember a rumor about taking them out of the game). I was briefly tempted to try to push towards getting a quick visit Naxx run in this weekend to explore, but a few of our core raiders are going to help out OotC tonight in their first Naxx visit. So we'll give everybody a few days to gear up and prep and plan to go in loaded for success on Tues/Wed.

If I understand it properly, there are 4 wings. Two are considered eays, two harder and 2 final bosses. That sounds a lot like ZA. That makes me feel pretty optimistic.

I'll try to get in some Heroics this weekend and keep skilling up the professions. It might even be time to start fishing and cooking again.

Things I wish I had remembered earlier

2008-11-26T10:50:00.001-08:00

I hadn't really thought about it when the blue text scrolled up saying my skill in 2h swords went up another point. It always surprised me, then I'd remember I'd leveled and raised my skill cap. And then it finally dawned on me that when I respec prot, my 1h weapons are going to be badly unskilled. Boo.

It's a bit late to shift over to leveling prot and I think it was a good decision not to in the first place. Prot pally dps was nerfed post 3.0, pre-WotLK and I haven't seen any further tweaks that seem to reverse that. Prot warrior dps is still good, I hear. Plus warriors can dual wield, so they can probably mess around and skill everything as they level. Maybe I can go back and skill up on the lower level daily pvp quests or something after I hit 80.

The other thing I remembered belatedly was you can cast an enchantment on a scroll now to make it easier to give to other people. Jr was messing around with his DK looking for a profession and I suggested Inscriptions might be fun. He started skilling that up and I saw over his shoulder the enchantment parchment ability. I've burned a lot of enchanting mats recasting mid-level enchants on my gear. I guess I'll stop doing that now.

I hadn't intended to worry about professions, but I'm melting everything I get and skilling enchanting helps clear out my inventory. Maybe I didn't miss much of an opportunity since the enchants I've been skilling with were moderately lame. But they're getting better, so I'll save them and give them our or put them in the guild bank.

Jr and I logged Beros on this morning and dinged 77. Hooray for finally being able to fly again. Elpheba had mentioned that it actually made the late level questing go faster. I hope he's correct. I'm certainly looking forward to being able to fly over the random mobs to get to the quest locations. Especially since I'm generally out of rest exp these days.

So far I've been exclusively focused on solo questing. And I've also basically refused to upgrade any gear. I haven't seen a major upgrade yet and although the quest reward greens are getting closer, I'm philosophically opposed to replacing a purple with a green, so I'm melting them on principle.

But I think it may be time to change the game plan shortly. At 78 or 79, I think it may be time to start running some more instances again in order to get some decent blue gear to take to Naxx. I'll probably respec prot for those as well and get back into the tanking rhythm (and skill up my sword). I'm still cautiously optimistic about possibly making 80 this weekend even though I expect exp comes slightly more slowly in instances than solo questing outside.

76 & Zul'Drak

2008-11-25T15:34:00.000-08:00

Short night last night, just barely made 76. Trying to push for 77 or as close as I can get tonight. Hearing about how easy Naxx is is making me itch to raid again.

Random leveling conversation: I was grinding quests in some mine or other and saw a toon named Holycraap (or something similar) which I vaguely recognized. Turns out it's Prima's alt, who raided with us back in the day. She asked how the new guild was going and I said it was going well so far. She suggested that we'd do well in progression. I appreciated the compliment but was wondering how to gently inquire as to the source of her optimism when she volunteered, "because you guys are stubborn."

Well yeah, stubborn, sure, I'd like to think so. Maybe I should change the guild motd to that when I get on later to stubbornly grind more quests in Zul'drak.

BTW, I did the "ride the big giant" quest last night that was pretty good. It still took me 3 tries, though, because I was getting overrun by small mobs and had trouble targeting the healing storm clouds. Is everybody else having occasional trouble with these specialty riding/vehicle style quests or am I just a doofus?

Maintenance day

2008-11-24T09:16:00.001-08:00

No, not server maintenance, maintenance day in the Beros household. A lazy Sunday goes a little something like this:

* Get up, have breakfast with the kids while Mrs Beros heads to exercise class
* Little ones distracted by the tv, log on, ding 75 and get Islowlykill to queue me for AV to ghetto port to Dalaran
* Insulate the leaky back door. New door sweep and weatherstripping. Watch Caillou with my 2yo.
* Fail to find an AH in Dalaran, port to IF to train and look for gems for JC quest. Only one Dark Jade on the AH and it's 65g. Wtf? The other green gems are 10g.
* Head outside and rake a couple of bags of leaves. One of the rakes broke and my 5yo appropriated the handle as his staff. While I'm raking, he's patrolling the backyard in his own virtual world as an all-powerful mage. Yeah, you don't need online gaming when you're 5, you can make VR in your head on demand.
* Check the AH again, 2 more Dark Jades are up at 40g each. At least the market it moving in the right direction.
* Shrink wrap the leaky windows in the living room.
* Check the AH again, prices down to 17g. Grab 2, hearth back to Dalaran, get on a bird to Valiance Keep.
* Shrink wrap more leaky windows in the living room. Change some light bulbs.
* Turn in JC quest, log my bank alt and mail back all my food and enchanting supplies. Level each of them up a little bit. Burned up all my Cosmic Essences and greened all my cooking recipes.
* Shrink wrap the dining room windows. Look up the manual for the new rug scrubber (misplaced) so that Mrs. Beros can clean the rugs in front of the tvs (dogs + kids snacking = rugs need cleaned).
* Convince Jr to log his DK off for a few minutes, show him one of the the daily pvp quests in Grizzly, head over to the quest areas out East.
* Dinnertime, then little kids to the bathtub. Jr back on his DK.
* Jr getting bored with leveling in Zangarmarsh, agrees to let me log Beros. And even takes over the kbd for me when I have to go tuck in the little ones.
* End up spending an extra hour with my 5yo who can't fall asleep.
* Come back to find Jr knocked off a half dozen quests, parked Beros by a quest mob and headed to bed himself.
* Chat with Mrs. Beros and Jrette about Disneyworld travel, holiday plans this year and travel in general for the future. Jrette likes to travel and wants to hear about the travels Mrs. Beros and I went on when we were young.
* Log back on a couple of hours later and get back to the grind...

I expect I'll ding 76 tonight, I logged about 4 bubbles shy. With luck, I'll find a nice starting quest hub in Zul'Drak where I can knock off quests in bunches. Won't be a late night tonight, though.

I've tentatively decided to stick with my current professions. I'm pretty sure the Enchanting ring-buffs are a solid advantage. I'll gamble that high-level JC will let me make some trinket/necklace that will be best or near-best in-slot. Inscriptions was tempting for the extra Glyph, but it'd be a huge effort to start over and I suspect I'll have plenty of other things to do for awhile.

So I'm more than happy to cut any green gems anybody needs in Northrend. A few more cuts and I can start getting the blue recipes from the trainer. I'll plan to grind it myself in a few days via the AH if I don't get any customers (which I might not since I'm not the only JC around). I'm burning mats spamming enchants on my own gear and will happily share with anybody standing near me. So far, I've melted every drop and quest reward. I guess in a few levels, I might start getting upgrades. In the meantime, it's a reasonably steady stream of skilling mats.

75 in Dalaran

2008-11-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

Ground another level staying up late in Grizzly Hills last night and with a little help from Darsonsind. Everybody had been talking about how much fun the escape/escort quest from Silverbrook was, but since I failed it twice before getting through, I'm not bragging so much.

Late in the night, Dethnotronic tracked me down and forced me to level up my JC. Amusingly, he confused my Questhelper by giving me a Huge Citrine, which I need for a JC quest and now the addon thinks I should go back to the Blue Logging Camp to get another.

He also tried to queue me up for AV so I could get a free ghetto port to Dalaran, but it didn't pop for >30m so he flew to me to cut. He re q-ed but I was finishing up quests when it popped 15m later.

I logged of 10k short of 75, but remembered to turn in 2 quests this morning (to ding) and then got Islowlykill to q me again for AV. Took another 25m, but worked finally.

Tonight I can get the lay of Dalaran and work a bit towards 76, but can't put in another quite as long night. Ditto for tomorrow, but Wednesday could be good. I don't think I can keep doing a level a day for the next week, so it might be a few extra days to 80. But I'm catching up a little bit at least.

73, 74...

2008-11-22T16:49:00.001-08:00

It's still coming pretty quickly, but I expect leveling to slow down some shortly. I'm hoping to hit 75 before the end of the weekend. Might take another week, even if I can sneak in some extra play time over the holidays (in-laws permitting).

Of minor leveling note, I found I am still able to solo some lvl 73 & 74 elites without too much trouble. I also ended up working with a Deathknight who tried to solo the big bird in Dragonblight (74 elite, 100k+ hp) at 72 and wiped. Together and him tanking, we took it out easily.

I recently realized I haven't been near a trainer in a long time. I wonder what spells/ranks, I'm missing out. I'll probably have to take care of that some time too.

But I think I'll head to Grizzly Hills tonight first.

72 and off to Dragonblight

2008-11-21T09:53:00.001-08:00

Should hit 73 fairly shortly. I think I don't have to get up early tomorrow, so if I can fight off fatigue, there's a shot at 74 tonight. Solo questing + Questhelper, ftw.

A couple of people are hitting 80 shortly (gratz Islowlykill on first Noctambulist, pre-gratz to Dethnotronic who's right behind him). Maybe the first week of December will be our first Naxx raid? I'm assuming Thanksgiving next week will make some people hit or miss. I ought to be able to finish the levelling grind over the holidays with a little luck and be ready to go.

Back in town

2008-11-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

I didn't get to play more than a few minutes from Orlando, so I seem to be pretty far behind in the whole levelling game. I was able to chip away some and last night got on for a few hours and managed level 71 and almost halfway to 72.

The vacation was pretty good, but because we tried to do a fair fraction of everything in Disneyworld with the kids, I was on my feet walking all day every day and just worn out in the evenings. We were able to manage a decent mix of stuff for the littlest one (characters, shows), and bigger kids. My 5yo discovered he liked roller coasters -- his first one, Space Mountain, was rapidly followed by his 2nd, 3rd and 4th. The bigger kids were worried at first about getting on some of the bigger rides, but we worked it out over the visit.

I should be around more and concentrating on trying to level as quickly as I can. I ought to be able to get in a couple of late nights over the next couple and maybe sneak in some extra playtime over the Thanksgiving break. It doesn't look like it takes too long to really level in total hours. The guy who wrote the guide at wtbblue.com says he got there in a day and a half /played. So my plan is to race to 80 if I can and then when I have some extra spare time in December, I'll go back and fill in the skills and/or rep areas I end up skipping over.

I'm idly wondering about whether I should be adjusting my professions again, too. I'll need to look up the various BoP things you get at max skill, but for example, if there aren't new uber JC trinkets, the few BoP gems aren't super valuable I don't think. So, I'm wondering about the extra glyph slot for inscriptions or even the stam boost to mining (did that make it into the patch? I remember it being proposed).

Northrend

2008-11-13T15:54:00.000-08:00

I got my copy of the expansion last night at midnight local, hanging out in GameSpot with probably around 150 warcrafters. It was kind of funny to talk specs and raids and such with the people around me in line. At least I didn't see anybody from any of my classes.

It installed and patched faster than expected and I was on a boat to Northrend pretty soon after I got home. We decided to run the Nexus together (Uglykid, Sherider, Galein, Islowlykill). I pointed out I wasn't prot spec anymore, but it wasn't hard to do the tanking thing ret spec with sword and board. Until the final boss anyway, when I had to port back to SW and get my real tanking gear.

In the end we got everything down and I got about a third of a level of exp, which seems pretty quick for the first day. I suspect it'll slow down a bit towards the end, but it doesn't look like it'll take a month to hit 80.

It seems like exp builds faster doing quests outside (maybe less so if you have rested exp), so I think that'll likely be my levelling focus. But first, I'm going to need to take a few days off for a family vacation. I might be able to sneak in a late night hour or two, but basically, I'm offline until next Thursday. I'll probably be half a dozen levels behind or more, but at least I'll have lots of rested exp, heh.

Expansion day

2008-11-12T09:34:00.000-08:00

Technically, I suppose it's expansion night. I'll be heading out to Gamestop around 11pm or so to pick up the box as soon as they'll release it. The store says they're releasing it at midnight local, but I wonder if they could be induced to cheat -- since the East cost stores are giving it out at midnight local (11pm here), who would know if they let it go a few minutes early?

As an aside, I wonder how crowded it will be and/or if I'll accidentally run into any students from campus that I recognize.

I expect massive server instability tonight, so I'll be satisfied if I can get it installed on the 2 comps and then probably just try to log on to verify it's working.

Last night there was a extended round of server instability. I guess it took them longer to install Northrend than expected. Also they bugged a bunch of the pvp gear somehow and lots of it was available for free, heh. Mostly for clothies and hunters, it seemed, but there were a couple pieces of paladin gear too. I hung around online a little later than I intended to to knock of the last 2 close rep grinds I had my eye on: Consortium & Sporeggar. That got me to 18 Exalted. Someday when I'm bored at 80, I suppose I can go back and work on the city reps or fill in some of the other missing ones (Kurenai, Timbermaw, maybe even Arathi Basin).

Illidan down, srsly

2008-11-11T10:15:00.001-08:00

Now, that was as rewarding a kill as we've had in a long, long time. I confess that I had my doubts. And they were mostly about me and my ability to do my job FR tanking in Phase 2. Phase 2 is known to be the bottleneck and it really is a pain in the ass. You could say that we spent the last 3 days waiting for me to learn my job. Then everything else fell into place pretty quickly.

The Phase 2 tanking isn't really trivial, although I had hoped I'd get the feel for it more quickly. You have a small useable area to kite-tank the elemental around while it leaves high-dmg flame patches on your last position every ~10s. You move around "painting" the area and trying to keep track of where safe places remaining to stand are, while making sure you don't trigger the enrage either by getting too far from the glaive or the other elemental. You have to deal with the fact that about 30% of the time, the entire screen is invisible due to the flame spell effects. One of the things that came slowly, was building up a mental map of the tanking space in my head so I could maneuver basically blind -- I knew roughly where the next safe place was and as long as I wasn't disoriented, I could get there without seeing the screen.

You also learn the edge of the fire patch effect and get better at minimizing the fire dmg. That's an incremental thing where minor mistakes just use up a little more healing. But the stupid Eye Beam is not incremental. You have to spot its spawn, identify the trajectory, identify the next safe place and get there *fast*. And there's a little bit of adjusting to the other tank's eye beam. When Dethno was dodging (and he was better at it than I was), I'd move my elemental to the inner ridge to reduce the enrage possibility and I'm sure he was doing the same.

By the last pulls, I was starting to plan my kiting path from the beginning so I'd know where I'd be when the Eye Beam first spawned to get maximum time to react and intentionally leaving the inner ring open to move to if it went to Dethno's side first. I was also getting the hang of running blind into the spell effects on a hunch there was a safe spot on the other side. Eventually, it was working. Other than one random mis-timing (I was too close and with my back to the Eye Beam spawn point and died), we got Phase 2 pretty much under control by the end of last night.

And everybody else learned their jobs quick. I was very briefly worried after the 3% wipe and a couple of subs we had to make (late subs can be raid killers), but we had experienced people ready to jump in and pulled it together.

As an aside, I'd like to bitch that this fight is really Blizzard busting out the hate on the tanks. Not only do we get to farm up a full set of FR gear (spending badges or money other people don't have to), but Phase 2 is just plain mean. Nobody but the 2 FR tanks has to do anything complicated --- forcing us to react to the eye beams on top of the kite-tanking and adjusting to each other's positioning is harsh. I'm guessing every guild that killed Illidan went through a long phase of everybody just waiting and watching the FR tanks wipe the raid over and over. And any casual-style guild with rotating tanks is going to suffer even more.

None of the other notable boss fights are as particularly harsh on the tanks. Vashj, Kael'thas, Archimonde, even Illidari Council are all hard on everybody without particularly singling out a couple of resist tanks for abuse. But at least we managed it in the end.

The other thing I can mention is that last night's victory "feels" slightly different from my perspective as nominal GL of versus nominal main organizer of l8raid. I always felt a sense of pride in "my peeps" when l8raid managed a new victory and maybe it's a little more so today because we're together in the guild.

I'm moved to briefly reflect on the brief history of Noc. About 5-6 weeks ago, I had given up pretty much on l8raiding following some less-than-promising extra-puggy raids on Lady Vashj (my sense was that even as we got the technical aspects down, we didn't have the dps to finish it because a lot of our best dps was worn out from pug raiding). We were farming bears in ZA and running alt-KZ for random amusement while waiting on the patch and expac. I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on the new guild. I wanted to help hold our group together and also thought it might boost morale a little bit in anticipation of the expansion.

The reponse was actually a bit more than I expected, more people flowed in to join. But I sensed a little bit of "cool to join the new guild" that didn't necessarily predict we'd be raiding again soon. But that's ok, forming the new guild was exciting on it's own.

Then 3.0 hit with the buffs to players and nerfs to bosses. And achievements. Achievements presented the possibility of going back to the Old World for killing some overlooked bosses and a reason to do it. Thinking it'd be fun and good for general morale, we fired up those raids and it was indeed great fun. We mostly rolled, but found a few tricky points that made us actually stop and think for a minute. But only a minute or small handful of attempts. MC, BWL and AQ40 all cleared in a week (one night-ender in BWL at Flamegor, one night-ender in AQ40 at Twins).

The raids were full, people were laughing and we had some momentum. So the next natural step was back to the T5's where we could try Vashj & Kael'thas in their nerfed state. I think it took us 2 nights on each of those, but one week later we had a bunch of people with the title, an unexpected bonus. The following week, we followed our momentum back into Mt Hyjal. I confess I was nervous. I had been unable to fill a MH raid a few weeks earlier -- would the fatigued raiders be willing to dive back in? Yes, and we cleared easily to Archimonde. And there we hit our roadblock. We wiped for a few nights, feeling occasionally close but no cigar. IIRC, we went back another week but ended up redirecting back to the T5 instances as an achievement favor for people who missed the first ones.

Bloc had been agitating for more Black Temple. It was supposed to be easy now, he pointed out. Other similar groups like OotC were plowing ahead there, maybe we can too. But I thought our new-found excitement to raid was largely achievement-driven and really, what are the odds we'd beat Illidan if we couldn't beat Archimonde?

With one week left before the expansion, we came back to BT. On our first raid night, Tuesday, Gurtogg was our first new victory there in a long time -- we hadn't set foot in the instance in at least a month or more. On Thursday, we pushed through Reliquary of Souls, Teron, Mother Shahraz and stopped with wiping on the Illidari Council. On Saturday, we beat the Council and found ourselves at Illidan but got no traction. Sunday we came back and wiped for 2 more hours. Monday we came back one more time and on the very last pull of the night (the warlock tank announced he was passing out after that pull regardless), we finally put everything together and somehow we won again. 5 raid nights, 6 new bosskills and 1 major achievement: Black Temple cleared.

A nice start to our little guild. Working together for 3 solid nights of occasionally-frustrating moments ought to be a preview of what we'll see in Naxx and beyond. With hopefully lots of more similarly gratifying achievements, too.

31% and counting...

2008-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Even thought we got close, it was a very disappointing evening in BT for me. I personally killed our chances for winning about half the time we were working on Illidan by resolutely failing to get out of the way of the eye beam. It shouldn't really be that hard and I'm pretty bummed about sucking so badly. Especially given we have so few chances left to do this.

With a little luck we can get another crack at it tonight. I'll feel better if I can at least not be personally responsible for the majority of the wipes. Bleh.

38% solution

2008-11-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

I was "cautiously optimistic" about the Illidari Council in BT last night. I find it's hard to really predict confidently what encounters we're capable of and when we run into a roadblock (e.g., Vashj pre 3.0, Archimonde after). I usually try to guess based on my estimate of how well I'm doing -- how often do I screw up my job, how likely do I think I can execute on the next pull. And then what are the consequences of an error. One reason I got pessimistic about Archimonde is that I felt like I was up around 95% as was most of the raid, but with 25 people at 95% it's a virtual certainty that somebody will still make an error (the math is left as an exercise for the reader). You kinda need everybody up near 99% to beat Archi. Vashj pre-3.0 was similarly unforgiving, but the patch nerf dropped the necessary performance rate a lot.

The Council is a complicated battle, so I mostly saw my own perspective. I quickly realized that I couldn't perfectly prevent the poison dot (Darksorrow appears to cast it while stealthed for 30s) but I made a shield throw macro and was able to grab him a couple of times before he had fully even rematerialized.

OTOH, it was very concerning that the stupid Mage would periodically vaporize Wiseman with an unsurvivable 16k bolt and we couldn't figure out a way to guarantee it wouldn't happen. We managed what we could, figured there was a risk of bad luck, and trying sending over backup (Taalo) in case of an emergency. On the winning pull, I don't think we even needed the backup and everybody executed their jobs (and avoided the AoE) very nicely. Although, I accidentally let a few people die to Darksorrow when I got carried away trying to help with the burndown at 5% and used up all my mana hitting Malande and couldn't shield pull Darksorrow back to me.

After a very extended discussion of the loots (gratz Hawksy, Dethno and Barantir on the T6), we went up and danced with Illidan for an hour. As advertised, it's a pretty hard fight. And Phase 2 is the key one. We got the pattern on Phase 1 down solidly (I'm guessing the fact that he doesn't Shear makes it a lot easier and less random). Phase 2 brings 2 big fire elementals. We experimented and found you can't seem to slide by with just 1 FR tank. I also explored all the conditions in which you can get one of the elementals to enrage -- bringing their dmg/swing from 5k to 40k (a lot even if you are resisting most of it).

On one magical pull, we pulled through Phase 2 with a bunch of people cranking and got a good look at the next piece: alternating Phase 3/4 where Phase 3 is similar to Phase 1 and Phase 4 is warlock tanking like in Leotheras. At 30% we get to see Phase 5, which is similar to Phase 1 with some kite-tanking to traps set by Maiev (assisting NPC).

Since we were left with the sense that we *almost* had it, we're going back. Tonight or tomorrow, whenever we can fill the raid.

One of the challenges we had last night was that the AoE spell effects, particularly the fire, completely overwhelmed Bloc's computer. I was worried about that, especially when he hearthed to go spend badges on FR gear. In hindsight, we should have had Bloc take Illidan and got Dethno to do FR tanking. Or some other rotation.

Post-raid there was some discussion of upgrading comps & video cards. Bloc's not sure he can afford to upgrade right now and as a result, it's impossible for me not to make a political point here. I'm actually fairly politically active and although I avoid bringing politics online as much as possible, sometimes it's unavoidable. There were reasons I celebrated myself into oblivion last Tuesday, but I won't go into those in detail now.

Something is just freaking wrong when a cop who works as hard as Bloc does and cares as much about his job as Bloc does can't afford to drop a hundred and a half on a new video card for his comp. Why is this a political point? Because cops, like firefighters, teachers, armed forces, etc., are paid by the taxes collected from the rest of us from our paychecks. Americans in general like to bitch about how much taxes they are paying and I think a lot of that comes from not being in tune with where the tax money goes. There was actually some (very) mild complaining about paying taxes in random chatter last night (it comes up periodically, like I said, it's typically American). Everybody across the political spectrum agrees that tax money shouldn't be wasted, but I'd like to think everybody should also agree that cutting taxes to short out the compensation to people like Bloc (or any of our friends who served/are serving overseas) is fundamentally immoral.

Maybe I'm just sensitive from some of the late recent campaign rhetoric that got thrown around about fearing "socialism" and/or the popularity of some forms of "taxes are theft" libertarian ideology to be popular on the internet. I find I run into two types of libertarian types -- young, smart, thoughtful people who go through a "libertarian" phase, and more entrenched types. Partly why I feel compelled to bring this up is that I've personally seen the smart ones get caught up in how cool and effective free markets are and then eventually drift back to the center as they start realizing life is a little more complicated (and sometimes markets fail). Being aware of the issues facing cops and the armed forces members in our group might be a useful step towards realizing that the world is complicated and therefore, so is policy.

Beasting new content

2008-11-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's nerf city in BT these days. We started with Reliquary of Souls, which is a fairly complicated battle. Practically, that meant we wiped once. Then we headed over to Teron Gorefiend. Not too many people had practiced on the simulator for how to react when the ghosts come, but we lucked out that one who had invested "several hours" (Tsuki) got ghosted first and handled it easily. Dethno got it second and having seen it before also handled it easily. Then we cruised through the trash to Mother Shahrazh and one-shot her as well.

As expected, we hit the first major bump at the Illidari Council. There's an awful lot going on in that battle. We did get a few looks at it and got them to ~80%. I felt pretty optimistic about the fight, but I guess I also felt pretty optimistic about Archimonde and we never managed to get that together.

The plan is to go back Saturday and see if we can get another win. It'd be pretty cool to actually get to pull Illidan before the expansion releases.

Bloc whispered me during the raid a slight touch of disappointment that we hadn't been doing more BT previously. I can see what he means since it seemed so easy. We could have taken a night or two we spent on Archi and come to BT, but it was hard to guess what was going to be the best investment of time. I think my original idea of working up from the old world raid instances to the T5's to build momentum worked out pretty well (we've been overfilling lately). Maybe we would have had the enthusiasm anyway, but it did seem to fire people up about raiding and it's nice to spend the majority of the time succeeding.

My experience with l8raid over the past year and change is that the hard part of raiding is keeping enthusiasm, morale and attendance up during the hard parts. We never seemed to quite have a big enough core of willing-to-wipe-all-night players. For awhile we had a big enough pool of people to choose from that we could always fill in enough people to field 25, but that meant always having new people, always re-explaining, regularly worrying about the gear or raiding knowledge of the new players. Over time, I know those worries wore out some of the core raiders, too.

The original idea for Noctambulists for WotLK was that we'd take advantage of running with 10 and form regular, consistent groups each night. Imagine showing up 5-10m before raid start time and knowing exactly when, where and with whom you were going to be raiding that night. Just the thought of not scrambling to find another healer, or explain to the overfull dps who was going to have to take the night off -- that happened again last night and I didn't enjoy it.

There will still be some challenges. First, forming up those groups of 10 runs the risk of somebody feeling left out. Second, we don't really have a lot of people who seem excited to be RL and we'll need at least 2-3 of them. Third, based on turnout from nights like last night, we're going to be back in the 25-person territory again pretty soon.

With luck, it'll sort out ok. Having a couple different 10-person groups means we can have one for people who want to raid 4 times/week and other groups that run slightly more casually and everybody can find their comfort zone. Also, the guild website has decent raid management and signup capabilities, which means we can pre-organize the 25s a little more easily. And if we suddenly find that 25-person Kel'thuzad is kicking our ass and we can't fill the raid, we can break back down into 10s and go raid the next 10-person instance instead of grabbing scrubs or sitting around for an hour or so waiting for people to log on.

More raiding, more winning, less waiting around, less uncertainty. That's the long-term plan.

The short term plan is back to BT on Sat. Sunwell was proposed for next Tuesday and was a popular suggestion. I'm even tempted to try a bonus raid on Sun or Mon. Maybe some extra BT on Sun? Maybe another crack at the Vials bosses for people on Mon?

Midnight next Wednesday is just not that far away...

Outland Loremaster

2008-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

I found the last quests I needed in Netherstorm to finish off the Outland Loremaster achievement. Of course, while I was wrapping it up, Hawksy dinged the Kalimdor Loremaster achievement in guild, which is about a thousand times more impressive (I'm at 230/730 in Kalimdor -- that's just never happening to me). Then he explained to me over /guild where to find the last 4 quests I needed in Netherstorm, which I think shows you our relative loremastery status.

I guess the next things to grind before the expansion are the close-to-exalted reputations. I'm pretty close with Argent Dawn and Consortium so I can probably try to set up some runs to knock those off. I might take a shot at Sporeggar or maybe Kurenai. I'm actually not too far from exalted with Arathi Basin either, but I think I'll let that sit until I feel like killing an evening or three in AB some point down the road (e.g., at 80). I think I'm too far from the city factions to make a real run at those.

But none of that tonight, it's BT night again. I'll see if I can arrange a sober, on-time arrival. Or at least one of those. Looking forward to seeing some new content in there.

Gratz on Gurtogg

2008-11-05T12:54:00.001-08:00

The problem with logging on to explain that you're too drunk to raid is that you might accidentally get caught up and end up raiding anyway. That's what happened to me after celebrating the election last night. At least I think that's what happened to me. I vaguely remember something about BT and I'm pretty sure I remember some bosses dying. I don't remember running back from the GY, so maybe it went pretty well? I wonder if I tanked anything.

I heard the raid went on to the first kill of Gurtogg Bloodboil after I finally gave up trying to get my eyes to focus and went to raid my pillow. That's impressive. Also impressive was raiding with effectively 24 people in the raid since I can't imagine I contributed much of anything. I hope nobody got left out so I could be a paperweight.

Of course, since I don't feel like I raided this week, I'm kinda wishing I could go back to BT tonight and kill some more. We only really have one week to see how far we can get in BT before the expansion next week. I wonder if everybody else would be interested in raiding every night, or at least every night until we hit a major roadblock. Or maybe people want to have a couple of nights to knock off the last couple of achievements before we don't worry about those for awhile either.

Black Temple tonight?

2008-11-04T09:30:00.001-08:00

Did some achievement-oriented questing last night. To get Outland Loremaster, I just need ~20 more quests in Netherstorm, the other zones are all clear now. I don't seem to have a lot of them on my list atm, though, but maybe if I clear up some of these [2] and [3] quests, new ones will open up. I wouldn't mind a little more Consortium rep on the way either. I think I may try to get in one more Heroic Mana Tombs run, too. I'd like the key for that Stasis bubble just inside, but I think I'm going to need more Etherium Prison keys first. And to get help again like last night knocking off the bosses who come out of the Bashir's landing bubbles.

Pre-questing, Hawksy and I visited the dragon again. Still no joy, though. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Maybe the mitigation/prot strategy is misguided. The other possible way to go would be dps & healing in some combination of Ret/Holy spec and gear. If I could push my dps to 1500, it would certainly shorten the battle, but could I self-heal enough to live for 15 minutes? I wonder how much dmg she does if I go no def gear, no shield.

Last night we encountered an issue that with her knockbacks, Hawksy kept creeping up on me in threat during the long grind-down. I was able to counter it with Hand of Salvation mostly, but it did cut into our dps. I'm not sure why the threat was so touchy, I don't remember that fight being quite so tricky that way before (but it was a long time ago). The way we were doing it, it was clearly going to be a 30-40m fight. One the first attempt, we got a Warder respawn mid-Phase 2 that we couldn't cope with. On the next couple of attempts, we ran into trouble with Hawksy getting aggro or going oom during Phase 2. We decided to call it there and think about creative approaches rather than keep trying to execute perfectly for 30-40m.

Tonight, we planned to do BT, but there's this little election thingy going on down here in the U.S. today. It sure looks like waiting on returns isn't exactly going to keep us up real late, but there's always the possibility it'll be more exciting than the latest polling suggests. And then there's the possibility that the recent polling is way, way off. In which case, I'll probably end up delayed by the riots. It takes us middle-aged white guys awhile to flip over a car and set it on fire, don'tcha know?

Come to think of it, if the results come in anywhere near expected, it's a virtual certainty we're going to be celebrating with at least one pitcher of daquiris or similar. I realized this morning, I've never cast a presidential vote for a guy who got more than 50% of the vote. Even beyond the other reasons to celebrate, Mrs Beros + pitcher of daquiries >>> BT anwyay. So, I think I'm just gonna be late. Possibly real late. I certainly don't mind if the raid gets started without me. I can sub in late or even wait until the next leg. Or if other people are delayed too, maybe even just go tomorrow?

Outland Dungeon Hero

2008-11-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

I guess I are one now. Ran 3 quick heroics last night. Which meant lots more pull-and-run-away, which still doesn't actually feel very heroic. Wtb, better mechanic than LoS pulling trash groups to keep an instance interesting.

Now what to achieve? Quests? Reps?

A little more T5

2008-11-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

I got held up by RL, but Bloc got the ball rolling for SSC. It still took a little while to fill, but we got Vashj in a couple of tries. We briefly considered going back to MH, but decided to hit up TK and get Kael'thas for a handful of people who wanted that achievement. That took a few tries too, but in the end the mission was accomplished.

The consensus feeling was that next week we should probably see how far we can get into BT and see some new content there. Looks like we'll probably just have to come back at 80 to get the Archimonde, Illidan, and Kil'Jaedin achievements.

I should probably whittle my list of achievement goals down some since there aren't really that many more days before release. I still want to go back and get Onyxia first, though.

Not quite

2008-10-31T10:07:00.001-07:00

In spite of the best efforts of everybody involved, the battle with Archimonde did not go to our advantage last night. We did work up to one very promising pull, but 41% was the best we reached.

It's just a touchy fight were any one player can screw up and wipe the raid. I personally wiped the raid myself on the first pull by fumbling the basic tanking buttons and failing to generate any noticeable threat. After about an hour of practice, we took a short break and then did 2-3 "no dps" pulls where we just had people work on survival techniques. After seeing a nice solid 3.5m of no deaths, we went back to regular dps and promptly failed to make it back to 2m. D'oh.

Until we realized that Tremor Totem is only a group wide buff, I was starting to get concerned that I had made a major mistake in volunteering to MT since I couldn't berserker out of the fear. But once we corrected that, the fear was no issue at all, I think.

The basic problem was just what it was before -- the fire. Even when people remembered to run away from the boss and avoid it aggressively, it does switch targets and snake around the raid a bit. And it's very hard to perfectly protect yourself from getting feared into the fire. Plus between the fear and running from the fire, people often found themselves out of range of their decurser and/or healer. Somehow, everybody has to find a way to virtually guarantee that they just won't die.

Personally, I find myself annoyed now at having 2 running nights of doing nothing but dying repeatedly. So tonight, I think we might try a run into KZ to kill the new boss. And maybe I can find time for Hawksy and I to go 2-man Onyxia. I'm fairly certain we can kill her together, although it might take a little while. That should provide revenge and also a lot of data on how my dps/healing stacks up to what I'll need to solo it and how to cope with Phase 2 & 3 (which I didn't see a lot of on Wednesday).

But first I have a lot of trick-or-treating to do tonight, and then probably a lot of candy eating. Which will get my kids all wired up on sugar and delay their bedtime and probably my arrival online time. I ought to be on eventually, but it's a bit unpredictable when on Halloween.

Beros vs the dragon

2008-10-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

Score round 1 for the dragon. I spent several hours wrestling with Onyxia last night. It's definitely not a trivial battle. I experimented with different mixes of gear in both prot and ret spec. Onyxia has 1 million hp, so the trick is getting to an equilibrium where I'm self-healing via Seal & Judgment of Light and then slowly grinding her down.

I hit the equilibrium point in prot gear and was able to get her into Phase 2 at 67%. Phase 2 was unexpectedly chaotic -- I forgot she spawns her whelps in clusters. I was able to Consecrate and dps the whelps down, but she's fireballing me while I'm doing it, so the dmg is fairly spiky. I ended up in a pattern of kill whelps, self-heal, hit her a couple of times and more whelps would spawn. I figured she'd run out of whelps eventually, but it was going to take a while, when suddenly a Warder comes patrolling in and it's over.

I'd heard about the problem of the warder respawns before -- it's a source of much controversy in the discussions about who truly solo'd Onyxia first. Some "soloers" have had a friend out in the hallway killing the Wardens as they respawn. Since they don't dps or heal in the Ony battle, you could claim it was a solo kill. However, it seems cleaner to have nobody else in the instance at all.

To solo the instance, you need to do 1,000,000 dmg before you get the patrol. On my Phase 2 attempt, it took me about 35m to get to Phase 2, which is roughly 190dps. That is consistent with my impression of my dps rate in full tanking gear using Seal and Judgment of Light. If I could double that (or so), it'd be close. I'm thinking 500 dps is a good target to shoot for.

After that attempt, I respecced Ret to see if I could increase my dps that way, but I was unable to get back to an equilibrium point of self-healing at her dmg rate. I stared at the Recap numbers for awhile without inspiration and decided to sleep on it.

I woke up with a few new ideas. In prot spec, I think I might be able to occasionally get away from the Light/Wisdom Seals because I'm pretty comfortably mitigating most of the dmg. If I can mix in Seal of Vengeance and stack up dots on her, that should boost my dps a bit, but I'm not sure if it's enough.

In ret spec, I was taking about equal thirds dmg from her melee, her cleave and her fire breath. The big difference is the melee, which I can virtually eliminate in prot spec. I misread Recap's report of 95% misses though, as indicating that somehow she was presenting as a lvl 63 boss (meaning I didn't need so much def gear). This morning I realized that I was blocking away that dmg -- she only hits for around 500 -- and a full block is being counted as a 'miss'. I can't get the +30% block in Ret spec, so I'm taking a lot more hits. What I need is gear that approaches "passive uncrushability." No, there's no crushing blows any more, but the passively uncrushable goal is to push normal hits off the table w/o needing Holy Shield (e.g., you stack enough avoidance and block rating that you block everything anyway). I will lose some block value in Ret spec as well, so I'll probably just take more dmg overall, but maybe I can crank my mitigation up enough to get to equilibrium.

I looked at getting passively uncrushable previously and it will require re-gemming and re-enchanting gear. However, with the patch, I now have a fair amount of redundant tanking gear since I had both the warrior and pally badge gear. All of my gear is set up for stam, which isn't ideal for this project. I don't actually need much stam, just enough to survive the rare spikes.

So, I think the thing to do is to set up a full-on mitigation tanking set. Then see if I can push up the dps rate while still maintaining the dmg/heal equilibrium. I'm still unsure about a few relatively minor issues, but since the balance point is so close, they might end up being important.

1) Ret or Prot? Mitigation will be easier in prot, but it'll be harder to get to 500 dps. Higher dps is easier in Ret gear *but* only if I have the mana to use my Ret abilities. Now, Judgment of the Wise returns a lot of mana, so I have a lot more mana in Ret spec and Divine Storm actually contributes some healing, but my dps won't be so high if I'm stuck fighting with Seal of Light to maintain the healing rate.

2) Blessings: Sanc or Wisdom? Sanctuary seems helpful in prot spec since blocks produce some mana regen. For example, I noticed when the whelps were up, my mana bar immediately went full (due to blocking the low-level mobs). OTOH, mana is a big issue no matter what and Wisdom is probably better overall mana regen. Is the -3% dmg worth it?

3) FR Aura. I'm pretty sure FR aura is the right way to go. I played around with more and less FR gear to try to minimize the fire damage, but I did wonder several times whether just to focus entirely on the physical dmg (although you can't mitigate the Cleave entirely). I resisted a fair amount of fire damag with just the aura up, but I wonder if I'd resist any w/o it.

4) Find a faster weapon? I was using the relatively slow 100 dps Unbreakable Will for tanking last night. The tooltips on the Seals all say "chance on hit," which, if accurate, means I could increase the healing rate with something that swings faster. Or I could use a int/spl-power/m5 weapon, but that'd kill my white damage -- which is all I have if I'm tanking with SoL. I wonder if SoV dmg goes up with spl power. If so and I can keep it up, it might be possible to tank with a healing weapon.

5) Finding the "safe spot." According to the paladin who tanked Ony solo pre-3.0, there's a spot you can stand in her room that won't aggro the patrol. I'm a little skeptical given that you can't control Ony's position in Phase 2, plus the whelps are all over the place. But I could watch the video (I haven't watched any yet).

6) Pre-empting the whelps. I wonder if I could survive jumping in and popping all the whelps one side and getting rid of them. Maybe in prot spec with a consecrate/holy shield combo.

Some other random technical notes: you don't actually have to be at perfect dmg/heal equilibrium if it's close because you can bubble every 4m (prot, 5m ret) and bandage & holy light. I went through a lot of bandages last night, heh. LoH is also every 20m, but obviously if you cast it twice, the patrol will be up. The fight is so long, you can't really count on these, though they help with the spikes. You're a bit RNG dependent for spikes because you can avoid the Cleave occasionally and resist more of the fire breath. But you can also get a run of not avoiding/resisting anything for a bit.

At the end of last night, I was about ready to give up, but now I want to go back and experiment some more. I think the first thing I need to do is bring a healer with me so that we can run some tests (e.g., they can heal me if I'm south of the equilibrium point), maybe I can get Recap-master Hawksy to come try things out for an hour or two. I'm figuring we'd try a couple of pulls and reset by having the healer run out while I just die. If nothing else, I'm pretty confident we could duo Onyxia, which would be at least a little interesting.

I'd also really like help clearing the stupid warders in the first place. They actually hit harder than Onyxia does and although I could get to equilibrium (in prot, not ret), it takes forever to grind down their 83k hp -- and there are 4 of them. And maybe if I can figure out the equilibrium point and plan for Phase 2, I can do the lame version of the solo and have somebody out in the hallway killing the respawns for me. That'd at least be something.

But not tonight no matter what. Tonight is back to MH to kill Archimonde. Then maybe to SSC to kill Vashj in the instance Bloc arranged to have cleared for us last night while I was messing around in Dustwallow. :) And then Friday, I think Kyoka was requesting a KZ run to the new boss before he goes away (possibly this weekend). I might need some more badges too to get more epic gems for tanking gear resocketing anyway. But maybe there's time for some quick tests Friday, or maybe Sunday will work.

BTW, somebody asked in /guild last night, "what if we don't get Archi?" We're going there for up to 3 full hours tonight. We know the strat. The only way we don't win is if noobs repeatedly run the fire through the raid. Like I said last night, if that happens I'm /gkicking people. Seriously. I think everbody wants to go back to BT on Saturday.

More time-travel

2008-10-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

This time back to the Battle of Mt Hyjal, as planned. The class changes with 3.0.2 have us worrying a lot less about class balance when filling a raid lately. 5 dps warriors? No problem. But since we hadn't been back to MH specifically, we weren't sure how the tanking would work. Since it turned out that somebody was going to have to respec prot, I volunteered to tank with Dethno, who was the only other one already prot.

I think I ended up personally delaying the raid at least 10-20m as I sorted through all my tanking gear to set it up after all the stats and mechanics changes. I had to manage the harder def cap, enchant a new tanking weapon and set up the action bars with the new abilities. I stared for longer than I should at my badge tanking gear. I had gotten both the warrior and pally versions of the chest and legs and now they are only subtly different.

I finally got there and we went to work. Rage went down easily. We immediately noticed without much surprise that the dps numbers are through the roof. Harder to spot was that I think healing has gotten a proportionate buff. You can't really measure healing via a meter, you just notice who does or doesn't die. Of note, nobody died to an ice tomb. I don't think our reaction times were that much faster, but I suspect the fast heals people cast land a little harder, making it that much easier to survive.

A better indicator of the differences was seen on Anatheron. First, Dethno died, suggesting that the mobs are actually hitting a little harder now. Dethno and I had been discussing that through the run, it looks like they rebalanced avg melee dmg to be increased to compensate for the removal of crushing blows. Or something. Dethno felt like the dmg numbers scrolling up were bigger than usual all night. But on the other had, when Primux ended up with aggo, he didn't die. He's a dps warrior wearing mostly pvp gear. And the healers kept him upright for ~60% of Anatheron's health. Very interesting. I can only guess that once the healers adjusted expectations to a squishier tank, they were able to keep up with the dmg.

Kaz'rogal posed no particular problems. I was surprised to see that I was able to go pretty much all out dpsing in melee without causing mana problems, even with the nerf to JoW.

On Az'galor, we finally broke the winning streak. Dethno took 2x 9k hits in 2s somehow. We were unable to determine if that was just deeply unlucky or if something went wrong mechanically. Thrall's pets were taking dmg at the time according to Recap, so I wonder if there was a pet parry in there somewhere and Dethno got parry-gibbed in response.

We got it on the second try without much trouble, in spite of the fact that we were very heavy on melee dps, which meant a lot of us were hanging around on the felguard hill chilling most of the battle. However, it also meant a high probabiliy of a relatively useless melee dps player getting the doom, which happened several times.

Then it was on to Archimonde. We managed 3 pulls, but I wouldn't call any of them good. I think the extra time was worth it to the people who hadn't seen the battle before, but it did not appear as if we were in any danger of getting on a roll and killing him. I made an executive decision to call it before it got too late figuring we'll be better off working on it fresh on Thursday.

Several people who missed Vashj/Kael want to go back there too, so I'm thinking we work on Archi first and when we kill him, we celebrate by getting Vashj in SSC for those who still need. T6 and T5 helms all around!

On my personal todo list tonight, I'm going to spend a few minutes fixing up my gear sets on item rack. I also noticed that my spl power trinket is no longer than good for tanking, so I'm going to go make the 42 def tanking one. That's going to shoot me way over the def cap, so then I can look at swapping in dps gear into tanking since more of my threat comes from str now. I'm also going to go do the 2 easiest dailies on the Isle again. I'm idly trying to get the 5 daily quests in a row achievement among other things.

And then I think I'm going to Dustwallow to dance with the dragon for a bit. I know it's possible to solo Ony, but I don't know if it's better to be prot or ret spec, wearing dps, tanking or FR gear. So I'm going to bring everything and experiment. For extra fun, I'm not looking anything up in advance. A bunch of people wanted to kill the new boss in KZ tonight and I'm tempted by that too, but I keep putting off the Ony attempt. I think it's just time to try it.

Just a little time-travel

2008-10-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Just did a few more of the heroics last night. We got a group of 5 and ran through Heroic Black Morass, Durnholde and Auchenai Crypts. I just have Magister's Terrace and Mechanar to go now.

Speaking of achievements, in addition to the rep ones, I've got to remember to go solo Onyxia this week. Guardian reported doing it fairly easily as ret spec this past week. Not sure if he brought tanking gear, FR gear, or what. I thought it was supposed to be a couple of hours long as a battle, but he said it only took 10-15m. Apparently, you can hit her in the air during Phase 2 if you are standing right underneath, shortening the battle a lot. I'll load up all my gear and go experiment one day this week.

Not tonight. Tonight, I'm going to try to be on time to get Mt Hyjal going as early as possible.

Head Banging

2008-10-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday night down in the mosh pit at Archimonde's feet, learning the fight, getting blasted into the air and watching trails of fire get run through the crowds. We "beat our heads" against Archi for a couple of hours and I think we got a good handle on that encounter.

On one hand, it's primarily a survival battle, not a dps race. Archi does many things that can kill you and if you die, he gets a "soul charge" buff which largely means everybody else dies too. The methods he has for killing you include: a Grip curse, an Air blast and the fire you aren't supposed to stand in. The Grip is the easiest to cope with. It needs to be cleared quickly, but since both druids and mages can clear it, it's generally under control. A minor challenge is that druids can't clear the curse while in dps form (or healing?) so the decursing druids have to focus on pretty much just that.

The Air blast just takes a little practice. You pick up an item, Tears, before the encounter which slows your falling speed for 2s. You go flying up in the air, wait a bit, then proc the Tears and land with minimal damage (proportional to how well you time the item).

The fire trails are both the simplest and hardest element. Why, after all this time, is not standing in the fire so hard? That's not even meant to be critical, it just seems to be simple fact. The game pushes you to focus on your primary job so much that local area effects like fire just sneak up on you. In addition the usual "don't stand in the fire," here, the fire chases you and you have to be heads up about running away from Archi and also not at your teammates.

We focused primarily on surviving on Saturday night and not cranking the dps. But the other side of treating it as a survival battle is that if/when we go all out on dps, the fight will be significantly shorter and it'll be easier to survive. It does look like it will take 5-6m to win. We were able to get to around 2m without wipe-worthy errors on Saturday.

I did feel pretty optimistic about the fight and would like to build on our success, so I think we'll head back to MH on Tuesday. We'll have to clear it ourselves, but Nitnoid assures me it's easy now. OotC had cleared up to Archi in 2.5 hrs Sat night, did a few Archi pulls and then called their raid. And then gave us their raid id to go learn the battle since they're doing BT the rest of the week.

The rest of the weekend, I spent mucking about in the achievement lists. For personal amusement, I went and collected halloween candy from every town. I also got in a handful of heroic runs to work towards the Outland Dungeon Hero achievement. I was explaining the system to my 12yo son and he got really into it. I suggested he do achievements on his druid, but he wanted to play Beros, so I put up the tag and he ran around exploring every zone in the world.

As a curious aside, he told me that he liked getting achievments but in particular liked getting achievements that didn't involve having to kill lots of things. I have also occasionally thought that it's sort of peculiar how many parts of the game (esp questing) involving going to an area and genocidally exterminating the mob population. Mostly we put that out of our minds, but in a virtual reality game where some of the NPCs have stories about their virtual lives, I'm not entirely surprised that the murderousness of it pops to mind now and then. There are days where I think you could build an MMORPG with less pve killing in it (e.g., more like 1 mob per quest tops). I wonder if it'd end up being a lot less popular, though.

Pvp killing seems fine in comparison, fwiw. There you know it's mostly movement control -- you just make the other guys respawn at the GY. For comparison, yesterday afternoon my 12yo and my 5yo got on Beros and Wathirlin and ran around Shattrath infecting people with plague zombie disease. That didn't seem to bother either of them, they seemed to be having a blast, heh.

Whatever, he can explore and/or maybe do fishing or cooking achievements for me if he'd like to. Hopefully people won't think I'm ignoring them since he doesn't answer tells (the DND flag should help). Myself, I did the murderous rampage thing in Netherstorm for a bit late last night to grind some Consortium rep (via Zaxxis badges). I actually find myself looking at a wider range of possible achievements than I had originally considered. There's the 3 non-city rep: Consortium, Sporeggar and Kurenai, the 5 city reps, I'm a handful of quests short of the Lore accomplishments in the Outland regions. And there are a lot of heroic dungeons I need to redo. Sometimes, I think about going back to the old world dungeons too. I'm going to run out of time before the expansion, so I should probably pick a few things to focus on. I doubt I'll be thinking about achievements again for awhile after the expansion releases.

Tonight would be a good night for heroics, I think. Maybe the CoT ones.

Heroic Candy

2008-10-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

No, wait, that's not right, I'm mixing up what I was doing last night. First I ran around semi-pointlessly collecting candy (cleared Outlands and Eastern Kingdoms). Then I got recruited into a group running through various Heroics for achievement purposes.

We knocked off Heroic Mana Tombs pretty quick and then headed for Underbog. Of note in Underbog, Wiseman got d/c right before the first boss, so we just pushed on with 4. Later Stupidrenren went briefly afk and we kept clearing the trash with 3: tank (Dethnotronic), dps (Beros) and healer (Leoruuc). Practically speaking, the only effect of going with 3 was that it required more care not to double pull.

The bosses all went down pretty trivially still with 4 -- Wiseman lost power and was never able to get back on. I guess I knew we were overpowering the place, but I don't think I realized by how much.

Wiseman and Dethnotronic appear to have gone completely crazy for achievements. That's amusing to me, but I don't think I'll get the bug that badly. I do want to knock off the rest of the dungeon achievements (at least Outlands). And I might kill time collecting more candy in Kalimdor next time I'm on waiting for a group to form.

The other set of achievements that tempts me is some of the reputation related ones. I'm not exalted with Consortium, Kurenai or Sporegarr. The last two seem like they'd be real grinds, so I might never bother. But Consortium gives some more gem recipes, so maybe I need a few more Heroic Mana Tombs runs -- I think last night's run gave me a couple of K rep, bringing me to 5k/21k. I'd also be tempted by the city reps, but I need ~10k for each major city and I'm not even sure how to tackle it. Runecloth? Alterac Valley quest turn-ins? I need 10k or more with each and I'm not going to spend a million hours on it, though.

Tonight we should get back to raiding. We could farm up the loot we left behind in TK/SSC, or maybe we should just press ahead into Mt Hyjal and see if we can get to Archie for a look. There's not a lot of time left before the reset to go back if we don't get a handle on the encounter. Also, I'm not sure if the rest of MH will really be trivial. We've been running with very low numbers of healers lately (4-5) and it's still T6. I guess we'll figure it out on the fly as always.

Hand of A'dal

2008-10-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

The title, Hand of A'dal, was supposed to be removed from the game with the 3.0.2 patch. Apparently rumors of it's demise were slightly exaggerated as a bunch of us are now able to sport it at will. Either it's a bug (and might even get removed), or the fact that we had completed all the related quest lines up to Lady Vashj and Kael'thas Sunstrider meant we maintained our eligibility through the patch.

But first we had to kill Kael'thas, which we had not done before. Unlike Vashj, we had never really even practiced much on him. I was delayed by a dark and stormy night drive into the city to the train station to pick up my mother-in-law. Not only is it far (45m), but I apparently bugged the directions on my iPhone and ended up having some extra driving around (the end pin moved mysteriously, and thus directed me to a point ~3mi south of the intended location and I had to drive back).

So it was super-late, even for me, when I got on. The rest of the raid amused themselves by killing Al'ar and Solarian before I got there. Kilborne stepped out for me (much appreciated, along with waiting for me to go after Kael'thas) and I got to go in and repeatedly die embarassingly to the melee whirlwind guys.

We were light on healers initially, so Barantir and I both considered respeccing Holy. After seeing how melee-unfriendly the whole encounter is, maybe we should have. But we perservered through repeated deaths, doing what we could.

The fight is complex and technical. But overpowering dps simplifies things considerably. Phase 1 is 4 adds, one at a time, and we realized right away we could kill them so fast, that we could be patient about positioning where we defeated them. Phase 2 is 7 weapons and took 2-3 trials to get the positioning and dps order down, but we were always able to finish them off before the next Phase. Phase 3 brings back all 4 adds to deal with and is chaotic. The published strats warn that it's extra chaotic if you don't have all the weapons down. Yeah, this fight must have been a bitch before the T6 instances opened up (much less the badge and 3.0 patches). We scrambled into Phase 4 a couple of times and learned about the fire bomb on the floor and the Shock Barriar/Pyroblast combo. Phase 5 is just really the second half of KT's hp from Phase 4 and the first time we got there, we managed to finish it off.

Of course, it was 3:30am server time by then, so we couldn't keep the raid together to down VR as we had planned. But Wiseman headed straight to the Caversn of Time and when we saw he got credit for the Hand of A'dal (in addition to the uber MH ring), everybody ran over there to do it too. Not everybody got the title, so it does look like you had to complete the BT quest chain first (or maybe they can still finish it). Kind of a nice unexpected bonus.

A good question is what next. Mt Hyjal and Archimomde? Or try to press deep into BT? We heard a rumor that you can get past Mother Sharazz with minimal SR gear now, so BT is tempting. But I like the idea of killing another end instance boss, too. Maybe we'll /random on Saturday.

G.N.E.R.D. rage

2008-10-23T11:45:00.000-07:00

As a general rule, I don't try to keep up with the special World Events like Hallows Eve. Sometimes I find them mildly amusing, or get carried along with others who want to do events like the Headless Horseman. The new achievements system seems to have focused some people even more intensely on getting every possible quest and holiday accomplishment done than usual. So, I wasn't really that surprised at a nearly insta-invite to help out with the G.N.E.R.D. pvp-oriented event.

Of course, I also didn't know what it was, how to do it or where to get GNERDs. But Wiseman and Kyoka patiently explained it to me, so I started flying around dutifully collecting lots of GNERD candy for the buff. To do the accomplishment, you need to notch 50 pvp HKs while under the influence of the candy buff. The tricky part is that if you die, you lose the buff, so you have to have a decent run and bring lots of candy just in case.

We all loaded up on candy and queued for Arathi Basin. And I got to immediately confirm the true OPness of the Ret Pally pvp. I wasn't even playing very well in terms of using all my abilities effectively, but immediately went on a total ramapging frenzy. With 2 healers behind us (Snapdragon and Uglykid), we just walked up and flattened everything in our path. We stomped through the blacksmith, took the farm and headed up to the mill -- using the travel in a big group strat. Without defending nodes, you don't always win this way, but it can work well, especially if you cap fast enough that they don't have a place to respawn (you can get a 5-cap and quick win this way). It optimizes HKs, though and since we each needed 50, that seemed ideal.

I'm crashing through and vaporizing horde when suddenly a box pops up "Achievement: Wrecking Ball" What the hell is that? Heh, it's 20 straight killing blows in a BG without dying. I didn't die until very late in the BG, Wiseman and I finished with 37/36 killing blows (tops) and all of us had >100 HKs. Everybody got the GNERD achievement easily. Wiseman and I also got the 300k dmg in a single BG achievement.

Then we queued for Eye of the Storm since it was the daily. It wasn't a rout, but we won. And I discovered the other side of OP Ret Pallies when one walked up and vaporized me. The nerf bat's a-coming, I'm sure.

Dethno, Wiseman, Kyoka and eventually Bloc headed off to do lvl 60 dungeons. I did some more pvp with Ragon, Sariana, Sherider and Sealth. Then we noticed we had a good 5-person group and went and got Sariana her epic flight form in Heroic Sethekk (Sherider tanking on his pally since neither Ragon nor I would respec, heh). And cleared that achievement for good measure.

I meant to try out the guildlaunch mods to profile my toon, the guild and try importing Thursday's SSC run as a raid (for practice) but forgot. Maybe I'll get a shot tonight, or more likely tomorrow. I'll probably end up an hour or more late tonight, so hopefully others will start the cleaning house process in SSC before I get there. It'll be fun to empty the instance, but I really want to move on to TK and Kael'thas soon.

Vashj down

2008-10-22T11:55:00.001-07:00

It would have been nice to get Lady Vashj without needing everything nerfed to hell and back, but it's still better than not getting her until lvl 80. As expected, it's still a pretty technical fight and it took us 3 tries to get smooth on handling the Tainted Cores. But the first time we saw Phase 3 was the only time we needed to. Thanks to everybody who came out and stuck around through the stupid server reset (15m) between attempts 1 and 2.

On the running theme of pally dps, I think it did help a bit to have 3 ret pallies in the raid. I'm sure we all had about the same experience with the Elementals of vaporizing them in 2-3 instant cast spells. Probably the 3 rogues did too, but in addition to killing the elementals, the pallies could self-heal in between, which meant we were able to get by easily with just 5 healers and the stairs-positioned healers could even pace themselves to avoid aggroing incoming Elites and Striders.

BTW, one of the reasons we might see a nerf to ret pally PvE dps is I feel like we've overwhelmed the Rogue class. In theory, we were supposed to have a dps penalty to balance our healing, buffs and extra armor. Maybe at lvl 80, rogues push back out in front in dps or something (or Evasion tanking becomes relevant), but with a 1m in-combat "sap" (Repentance) for pallies now, I wouldn't blame Rogues for saying "wtf? why the hate, blizz?" Note that this is particularly about Rogues, not the ranged dps (Mages, Warlocks, Hunters) because in general Blizz makes melee dps harder to use than ranged. And Warriors catching rogues in dps seems less OP since they can't heal or CC (their buffs are an advantage, armor less so in a raid where the dps isn't supposed to take physical dmg).

OTOH, I noticed my dps dropping down the chart through the run last night and it wasn't really unexpected. I actually like reacting to circumstances more than standing and delivering, so I was trying to watch for loose mobs on the healers during trash and ran around a lot on the Lurker adds (although I also amused myself by dpsing through the Spout by strafing around the Lurker instead of getting in the water). I was also already noticing the different feel to being the one setting the pace, e.g., yelling "incoming" and grabbing the next group instead of "ok, go get 'em Ragon."

I *think* I can resist respeccing back to prot before the expansion and try to make my contributions with the extra dps. I'll almost certainly level as Ret, but I'm pretty sure I'll be insisting on tanking again at 80 (still negotiable based on need, I'm willing to dps or heal if that what completes our raid group in Naxx).

Side note on gear -- I passed on the T5 helm and let Guardian take it (does anybody else find it amusing that *every* single person who jumps into a l8raid from a progression guild acts almost exactly the same way? Knowledgeable and fairly helpful, but very intense and very talkative :). According to MaxDPS.com, it would have been the tiniest of upgrades for me: +9 str, -.25% crit, -12 +hit. But I wonder if that's assuming being at the hit cap, which I'm just shy of. OTOH, I might be over-emphasizing hit. I thought it affected Crusader Strike and Divine Storm as well as melee + SoC (SoM too since it procs on every hit), but Barantir has less hit and it doesn't seem to produce a noticeable difference. Or maybe it only makes a difference at the margin, i.e., once we're both practiced enough to be optimizing the rotations already. I still see that I let the Seals lapse from time to time or don't max button pressing with cooldowns, which is probably more important and 1-2% of hit.

However, if I get a shot at the T5 chestpiece of Kael, I will not be passing. My ZA chest is one of my weaker pieces of dps gear.

But I won't /cry if I don't win. I don't think I'm too worried about any gear upgrades between now and 80. Frankly, if it makes somebody else really happy to get something, I'd probably enjoy that as much as getting it myself.

Couple notes on raiding schedule:
* I'm thinking the order of business for the rest of the week is: finish SSC & visit TK to kill A'lar and get a few get-to-know-you pulls on Kael'htas (Thurs), revisit TK to kill Kael'thas and celebrate by clearing the rest of the instance (Sat).
* However, I think I might be significantly late on Thursday (yeah, yeah, I know, big surprise) as I think I'm picking up my mother-in-law from the train station at 11:30pm server time (10:30pm local, but the train station isn't close either :().
* On the other nights (Fri/Sun/Mon), we might revisit some of the old world raids for people who missed those quick runs last week.
* I might also start working through the Outland Heroic Dungeons to make sure I have credit for all of those. I haven't really been bitten by the achievement bug generally, but the ones that are tempting to me are the raids, dungeons and faction reputations. The last surprises me somewhat, but I'm exalted with a lot of factions already, so maybe I should wrap up the cities and go get the last few missing ones like Consortium & Kurenai.

Classic Raider

2008-10-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

We found a couple of ways to wipe in AQ40 last night. There is a limit to how much trash you can pull, even with 30-something 70s. And the Twins still took 2 tries, which tells you something about how viciously tuned that fight would be for lvl 60s. I wonder about the tuning because a few of the mobs hit really hard -- the caster Twin, for example, was hitting our caster tank for 5-6k. Did anybody even have 5-6k hp at level 60? Similarly, the tentacles in C'thun's stomach were hitting for something like that as well.

I was puzzling over this as we were running last night because in the old strats I was reading on the fights, I saw things like "one healer can easily keep up the caster tank" on the Twins. This morning, I'm wondering if some of the bosses are scripted to do dmg as a percentage of the health of the player they are hitting. That's an interesting mechanic that would scale difficulty with level. It would also mean that our high-hp caster tanks are putting a more pressure on the healers than the tanks might, curiously (and it felt like we needed 3 to keep up the caster tanks). If that isn't the mechanic, it's hard to imagine how lvl60s dealth with the 5-6k hits from the tentacles inside C'thun's stomach.

C'thun was a pretty cool fight. We had a little initial issue that I think is pretty typical where somebody gets too close, aggros C'thun and the green beam exponentially blows up the raid -- I think Leorucc got hit for >11 million hp. I didn't think we'd actually get him on the first real try. I wasn't surprised we lost a couple of people figuring out how to spread out, then a few more of us not recognizing the red beam right away.

The stomach mechanic was a little tricky, mostly because of the amount of damage being done in there. But once he was vulnerable to dmg for 45s, we were able to do just about 50% of his hp. Just under, it turned out, so we had to go another whole cycle for the last 2%, but the small handful of people still standing were able to finish it.

On a dps note, Barantir out-dpsed me for the raid cumulatively again. You do have to consider the possibility of curious class balance when the former-healer and former-tank are outdpsing the "pro dps" who've been optimizing their class play for years. I think Bar was doing what I did last raid and charging in with the tanks each battle. I was doing less of that, alt-tabbing out to read up on the bosses, etc. And on C'thun, I took one look at the melee packed in around his sides and decided to go stand in a corner to avoid green beam insanity. I thought I could kill the tentacle spawns or something else useful, but I didn't see many and was afraid of bunching up anywhere anyway. When the red beam started, I realized I could run in and dps, but I was expecting it to look like Netherspite's really visible red beam, not the barely visible reddish flare that it was. Although I was able to recognize what it was when I died. Fortunately, the non-idiots were able to finish off the fight.

A lot of people msg me every night to ask when we get back to the Outland instances. The answer is "as soon as possible" which could mean tonight. Vashj first, I think. Unless we want to do Doomwalker or something quick.

20s

2008-10-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

We didn't quite have enough peoples to be confident of finishing off AQ40 last night. I think 20-25 would do, but 14 might have been quixotic (as an aside, I like the fact that when you open up the guild list lately, every single person is together in the same instance -- that was kind of the idea). Since we hadn't knocked off AQ20 or ZG yet, we decided to take care of those quickly instead. And we did them quickly indeed. Sometimes we'd pause before a boss to see if anybody could remember any important mechanisms or special elements, but generally we'd just charge in and beast it without any strat. So far, that's worked for everything in the Old World except for the Twin Emperors.

We heard from Draelnor that he was in an different AQ40 group that also broke down at the Twin Emps. Interesting that the design of that fight is technical enough that you can't overpower it with lvl 70 tanking/healing/dps.

Speaking of dps, more and more rumors are popping up about an incoming nerf to Ret Pallies. The "blue posts" keep talking about pvp unbalance, but I wonder if they'll clobber PvE dps as well. One of the blue posts I read talked about how stun-oriented crit spike damage was part of the core concept for Ret Paladins as a class. I'm not sure I understand what that's supposed to do thematically with the class or in relation to other classes. It's also pretty irrelevant in PvE. Since I can't HoJ bosses anyway, I've been using Seal of the Martyr exclusively in raids (even trash has been dying too fast for me to even have time to stun & judge SoC).

It feels to me like they've been futzing around with the pally dmg mechanics for a long time. The constant old complaint from the pally pvp community was that even when the dps was good, it was uncontrollable. You could stack ap and crit and when SoC procced, you'd clobber things. But it procs randomly 7 times/min, so you never knew when it'd go. I can attest how frustrating this was in pvp since if it went off early in a fight, your opp would immediately go into escape mode and survive. If it went off late, it generally resulted in overdmg, making your effective dps pretty low. So they added some controllable spike dmg: Crusader Strike (late pre-BC) and the HoJ mechanic that gives you a guaranteed SoC crit on judging (but not too often, since HoJ has a 1m cooldown).

But for WotLK, I now have 4 different instant-cast high-dps spells: Divine Storm, Crusader Strike, Judgment and Hammer of Wrath. HoW only goes when the mob is <35% hp, but the others hit hard enough that it comes up fast. I got some static in /guild for saying I was going to be sad when I couldn't auto-kill mobs in 2-3 instant cast spells anymore, but that's really the way it works. Run up, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm (or a Judgment if I'm low on mana/hp) and if either crits, the mob's dead. If nothing crits, I HoW and it's dead. 3 GCD's (slightly accelerated by a little haste gear) and the battle is over. I suppose I have one melee swing in there too (possibly critting, possibly proccing SoC). But, for example, *everything* on the Isle dailies dies "instantly," virtually never requiring more than the 3 instant casts and 1 swing.

That produces dps numbers like 1500 on average, so I guess that's working as intended since the lvl 70 dps target appears to be 1200-1500 for all classes. But consider pvp -- if I HoJ somebody, I now have 6s to fully unload and with the auto-SoC crit, I'm pretty sure the avg dmg is going to be >10k. I don't see how to balance that with people having 10k hp in pvp gear unless the idea is that I get to auto-kill somebody once every minute.

Whatever. I topped the dmg total for the runs last night, but mostly by sticking close to the tanks and making sure I was immediately in to every battle spamming all my spells asap. It was totally unnecessary for those instances, but there was no real cost to pulling aggro (mobs died fast and hit weak) and it was interesting to see how infrequently I even pulled aggro. Of note watching other's dps, the top of the chart also has people who formerly topped the charts (e.g., Sherider & Wiseman) plus the warriors are also going off like crazy -- in both prot and dmg spec. So if they nerf my dps back down significantly, I'll switch back to prot and let the warriors go dps and kill everything. Whatever it takes to maximize the total raid dps for our last few weeks of raiding pre-WotLK.

Hopefully AQ40 wraps up tonight. I've been getting on a bit later most recent nights for a couple different reasons including the fact that Grandma is visiting. That could happen again tonight, althought I'll shoot for 11-11:30pm as usual.

Instability

2008-10-19T13:42:00.001-07:00

Got on late and heard the server had been dodgy and unstable. There was a ZA run getting going, but I just did a few dailies. My stomach had also been dodgy and somewhat unstable all day (TMI?) so I decided to make it an early evening and rest.

Perhaps tonight we can reconvene to finish off AQ40 and such.

More schooling

2008-10-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

Knocked off Onyxia, then wrapped up BWL and headed over for AQ40. I had never done AQ40 at lvl 60, but for most of it we just powered through everything without paying attention much to specials, etc. That ground to a halt at the Twin Emperors where we discovered old-world mechanics that are still non-trivial for overpowered 70s.

One Emp has to be physical tanked, the other spell-caster tanked and they randomly switch places every minute or so. In addition to all the resultant running around, if the 2 Emps get within 30 yds of each other, they start healing super-fast. We had a few pulls realizing we couldn't just beast them. Then a few working on the positioning.

Eventually, I noticed we really only had 4 healers and the fight was long enough to want healing. We seemed to get the basic strat down, but it seems as if during the very last teleport/switch at <10%, they don't actually wipe their aggro table and tend to snap back to the previous tank. This ended up putting them next to each other in the center and they'd heal.

It appears the trick is to plan for this non-aggro wipe and have the tanks start moving asap to keep them separated. Hopefully, we'll get back there tonight and finish them off. C'thun may be complex enough to be interesting too. On World of Raids the other day, I was reading how the developers said that the C'thun battle is the most fun to observe from their perspective.

That'll clear the old world stuff, I believe. We could go kill the other old world outside dragons, but I don't remember seeing achievements for them. Maybe I just looked at the wrong lists.

Next week, we can start on Outland instances. I know some people would really like to get back to the T6 instances, but I'd also like to knock off the T5 final bosses for completeness. We can start negotiating that next Tuesday.

Old school

2008-10-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

That was pretty fun. Even with a very late start due to some "extended maintenance" or something or other for Elune, we pulled together twenty-something people and went and pwned MC rapid-style for the achievement. It was so quick and painless that we continued on into BWL, but started to slow down as it got late. We found ways to die, forgot about the boss's specials, got stuck with the port-out/summon-back/afk cycle.

Late BWL stuff hits hard enough to make it worth bringing the old Onyxia Scale Cloak. Back then a 9k blow was a game ender. It's still annoying enough for the non-tanks. We thought about going to Onyxia last night too, but it got late. I think tonight we should go, skin some scales and make a couple of extra cloaks for the non-packrats. Then we can go back for the last couple of bosses in BWL.

Of note, once we kill Chromaggus (next), we'll have covered everything I ever saw killed pre-BC. So I'm looking forward to seeing Nefarian and digging into AQ as well. The mechanics of the bosses might be enough that we'll actually have to look them up, but at least we can count on still overpowering the dps.

Speaking of dps, I noticed in MC that Barantir was carrying the dps pace for much of the run, so I checked how he was doing it on Recap. It was all Consecrate. He was obviously spamming it and had nearly quadrupled my Consecrate total damage (my dps was melee, Divine Storm and Crusader strike at the top). Interesting. I don't hit that button enough apparently. I still think of Consecrate as a mana-soak and therefore occasional use, but with JoW returning 33% of base mana every 8s, I think I can afford to get out of that mindset.

A few people noted to me that we had a pretty strong group last night and might have expected some success in the T5 or T6 instances (even though we mostly had ~22 people). I wonder how much our extra dps will simplify those battles. Hopefully we'll find out next week. I'm particularly optimistic about Lady Vashj, though. In our last couple of attempts, it was really only the dps rate that was holding us back. We couldn't quite hack getting down all the elementals, the Strider and the Elites at the same time. I suspect that won't be a problem next time. Kael'thas might be more complicated. But I think we'll only need to kill those 2 to get the instance credit if we don't feel like clearing the whole place.

OP

2008-10-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

If there was any doubt, I don't have any anymore. We did a quick and easy full ZA run last night where I edged Sherider in both total dmg and total avg dps over the entire run (all the way through Zul'Jin). There are many reasons why this shouldn't be. First, Sherider is one of the highest dps players in all of the l8raiding group (maybe the highest, although he leeches off Wiseman whenever he can). Second, he's been raiding as dps for far longer than I have and should have a much better intuitive sense of aggro management (although he was also in a new spec and tanking works a bit differently than it did last week). Third, his gear should be a touch better since I've mostly collected mine off-spec and through badges. None of this should be any reflection on Sher. We were both going all out, even though I think we were both trying to be appropriate about our non-dps abilities (cleanse, nova, sheep, etc). No, I think this attests entirely to Blizz balancing things a bit in favor of the Ret pally.

Well, whatever, I'm running with it for as long as I can. If the nerf bat comes hard like some predict, I can always shift back over to tanking (or hell, healing, I don't care). It's about optimizing. When Warlocks ended up 20% higher for pure dps, I didn't complain about it -- I got them into my raids. :)

Side note on dps last night: Taalo and Sirtank were both just another hair behind Sher and I. Which made the run super fast and easy even though the other 2 dps lagged quite a bit. I was wondering if the Mages had a big AoE dps advantage, but curiously, it was Sirtank's dps which spiked most noticeably on AoE fights. Sherider tended to be ahead of me on single-target boss fights, but I stayed ahead on trash (via Divine Storm, I think).

Something interesting was happening on healing, too. We had two alts healing: priest and shaman. But no real trouble staying mostly alive (except for really egregious aggro pulling). Even on the Lynx boss where inexperienced melee dps (i.e., me) was slow to get to the totems and we lost the priest at around 60% -- the self-described "scrub alt" shaman was able to solo heal the fight for 2 minutes. Curious.

I think I can get a bit better about sustaining dps throughput, too. I did fix up some UI issues and get my trinkets macro-ed into the regular ability cycle before the run. I also started getting my Judgment decision-making more contextual -- light when we needed healing, wisdom when we needed mana. I was not doing a good job getting the HoJ stun and SoC judge into regular sequence yet. I was able to remember to switch to Seal of the Martyr for boss fights since you can't get the uber stun spike. I gradually got better about getting Hammer of Wrath into the cycle as soon as the mob got down to 35% -- it hits for 3k virtually every cast and it has a 6s cooldown (!!! -- yes, that's 500 bonus dps at the end).

I did some quick dps tests on the dummies in IF before the run. Over about 3m, SoC dps came out around 1250dps (max casting Crusder Strike, Divine Storm, Judgment and Consecration, self-buffed with Ret aura and BoM) w/o using HoJ. Seal of the Martyr came out around 1300dps. Then I realized you could stun the dummies and found SoC+HoJ came out around 1340dps. Optimal dps is probably using SoC whenever you're going to get to cast HoJ during a battle and SoM all other times.

For ZA, I just kept SoC up on all trash and SoM on bosses. SoM does self-damage and I didn't want to distract/pressure the healers. I think I might be able to heal most of it back by alternating Judging Light and Wisdom. I'll keep experimenting.

On a completely irrelevant note, I was meaning to mention that we were looking into signing my 5yo son up for language class through our school (as an extra class taught before school starts in the morning). He had originally asked about learning Spanish -- probably because his big sister is taking Spanish in high school and/or from watching the Dora and Diego tv shows. But apparently there weren't enough kids for the Spanish class, so we got to choose between switching to French or Chinese (Mandarin). Which made me smile because I feel like I hang out with people fluent in each of those languages a lot in the evening (and some in both :). In the end, we decided on Chinese. I was in favor because there's some evidence that if you practice difficult phoneme discriminations (e.g., the tonal elements of Mandarin) at or before age 5, you might always be able to hear them (whereas I'd have to practice a lot to learn them as an adult). My son was in favor because his current best buddy in school is in the Chinese class, so everybody's happy.

Maybe I can learn some phrases from him. All I can say so far is 'ni hao' and I probably say even that wrong.

Ret pally dps

2008-10-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

After some extended dancing with the login server, the authentication server and the world server, we were finally able to log in and stay logged in for more than a few minutes at a time. We all spent some time marveling at the changes to existing gear due to the big changes about spell power/crit/haste and also the shift in stat emphasis in redone classes like Paladin.

Then I went ahead and got my Ret gear out of the bank and specced 0/5/56. The spec is:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/paladin/talents2.html?tal=000000000000000000000000000050000000000000000000000052322510033310302135231051

In the Ret tree, I skipped all the talents that looked pvp oriented -- eye for an eye, pursuit of justice, divine purpose. I also left out imp Ret aura (which might actually be better than Vindication, which I took but will only help on trash) and couldn't fit Sheath of Light, the +heal buff deep in the Ret tree.

Dethno respecced to enable good AoE tanking, so we decided to run something to test things out and relearn to play our new specs. We went to Heroic Shattered Halls first and rolled through. I was fightin UI issues for much of the run, but for the most part, Sherider, Ragonbadger and I held a steady 1150 dps. I had issues not pulling aggro, but managed to not die mostly. We decided to go run Heroic Blood Furnace afterwards for the Achievement and I had more issues. I was pulling aggro and dying constantly. The mobs seemed to hit a lot harder in Blood Furnace for some reason. So I had to scale back the dps, even though I wasn't near optimal in the first place.

Then we ran into UBRS to get the Jenkins title and destroyed everything so fast, we bugged the first boss event and had to port out. But we got the title first at least.

I've got some learning to do to optimize my dps. The basic sequence is simple, but I'm still not solid on it yet. Keep Ret Aura, BoM and Seal of Command up. Then it's 3 keys:
1. Judgment (8s cooldown)
2. Crusader Strike (6s cooldown)
3. Divine Storm (10s cooldown)

I found I was barely able to keep up with the 3 cooldowns, track the target Dethno was dpsing and make sure SoC stayed up all the time. Need practice

Next things I need to work on:
1. Using HoJ to stun the trash mobs and Judge them to get the auto-crit and bonus dmg. It's only once/min, but stuff procs off crits, so I bet that adds up.
2. Reliably casting Avenging Wrath for +30% dmg every 3m
3. Working Hammer of Wrath into the skill sequence as soon as it's eligible
4. Macroing my 2 'use' trinkets into my main spells
5. Working Consecration into the rotation (depends on mana, but JoW returns so much mana, it's probably doable regularly)
6. Remembering Exorcism when it's available (demons, undead)

After that, I need to start using the 3 Judgment spells more strategically. There's a 'no run' judgment that probably doesn't come up that much in raiding. But I should be choosing the Mana or Healing judgment depending on the circumstance. Currently, I just try to remember to Judge at all and stick almost entirely to the Wisdom. But I bet I'd have died less if I had Judged Light occasionally when I was down to 100 hp.

I also expect I'll want to experiment with Seal of the Martyr. My hunch is that it's better on boss fights when I can't get the Stun/Judge dmg spike and crit (most bosses are immune to HoJ). But since I was taking so much damage to aggro pulling, I didn't want to take any extra damage and risk distracting Kilborne any more from the tank.

And the big thing is learning to work more in sync with the tank. It was clear in BF, Sherider and Filebrothers both got right into the flow of Dethno's tanking and I fell behind in dps. I think he shifted abilities to be more single-target, but I kept running up and opening with Divine Storm, grabbing the other 2-3 mobs and dying. Managing aggro and being quick with bubble and Repentance will also take some practice.

Another minor thing I need to do are fix back up my UI. Currently my frame with my hp/mana is upper left, the mobs are central, the cooldowns are at the bottom and Omen is way off bottom right. Back when the mods worked, I kept my frame down between the mobs and cooldowns. I'd like to get that again and also move Omen in closer to the center. Or get better about using Blizz's threat UI.

And then there's consumeables. I should go figure out the easiest strength food and weapon buff. For elixirs, I assume I'll want Major Agility (? or is there a good +str elixir?). I'll need to look into it.

Couple more badges

2008-10-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

We talked about ZA last night, but decided not to try without more of the experienced high-dps players. We'll take another shot tonight no matter what since it resets tomorrow morning. Tomorrow will be the last bear mount run one way or another.

Instead, we worked on helping Quisha get the last pieces of the Champion quest line. Some people helped her get to the quest NPC in Slave Pens. Then we cleared through Nightbane in KZ quickly to get that part of the quest. We need to try to assemble another Gruul's pug before Tues for her if she's going to make it. Maybe tonight after ZA.

I was looking over the gems in my ret gear and at the last moment noticed that my meta gem is not going to work if I socket all red. I need 2 blue and 2 yellow, too. So I have 2 spots for green gems I'll need to socket. But what green gems? Crit & stam seems best, but the green gems seem very likely to be changing a lot on Tuesday when hit/crit/haste and spellpower all get folded from 2 types to one. So I'll wait until then to grab and cut the greens to see what looks best. At least I'm all set on red thanks to a generous gift from Sherider. I kinda like doing things myself as much as possible, so I think I'll return a gift of a little gold because I know he's always broke from respeccing, repair and an allergy to grinding daily quests.

Line 'em up

2008-10-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Noid ran the table on pugging the BC "easy kill" bosses last night. Gruul's Lair was already in progress when I got on, but I jumped in to help for Magtheridon (and ended up MT, heh) and stayed through Doomlord Kazzak. I had killed Doomlord before, but never tanked it. I think I wiped the raid once by being too slow to position him so the dps could really open up. But we got him the second time.

Then I just did a few dailies to be a little less poor and made it an early night.

Barantir and I discussed running ZA again this weekend. It'd be either tonight or tomorrow and it's our next-to-last chance to get somebody one more mount. I think I might have to be a bit harsher about focusing on getting more experienced people into the group and improve the success probability. Last time didn't go very smoothly.

I think we'll have most/all of the regulars back for the very last ZA bear mount run on Monday. Then we all get to respec and relearn how to play on Tuesday. Well, after we d/l the patch and crash the servers for awhile. With a little luck, maybe we'll be raiding again by Thursday.

Frontal lobes

2008-10-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

We knocked of Heroic Shadow Labyrinth and Steamvaults for Galein and Rubmytotem (courtesy of Sherider) last night. Shadow Lab went notably smoother -- just one recent reminder run and you get a lot less mispulling, forgetting who fears, etc. We did get sloppy in Murmur's room a few times, but that actually just gave Galein time to get back from rescuing Mastemodio from his broken-down car and get back in to complete the quest.

We took things at a pretty casual pace and spent a lot of time just chatting on vent. The conversation ranged pretty broadly over a very wide range of amusing and potentially controversial topics. Late at night, we touched on the issue of dealing with anger and/or frustration which reminded me today of a neuroscience point that might be worth mentioning.

The prefrontal cortex of the human brain (the frontal lobes) contains the brain regions associated with control of behavior, executive function and in particular, inhibiting inappropriate behavior. So you can sort of think of an outburst saying something you regret, or a particularly bad moment of decision making as a failure of your frontal lobes.

Of note, the frontal lobes are really slow to develop, so you see kids and younger people in general more at risk of a regrettable outburst. Interestingly, recent studies of neuro-development have pushed back the age that the frontal lobes are thought to be fully mature from late teens to late 20s (!). This finding was actually found to be comforting to mid-20s people I've discussed it with because it means that even if you still feel you experience occasional regrettable frontal lobe moments, you can expect things to get better because your frontal lobes are still growing in.

Sadly, for us older folks, we're already on the downslope of frontal lobe function, so it's probably only going to get worse from here.

Tangentially related, I found out yesterday that Google is offering to install "frontal lobes" in your email client:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html

The idea is that you can configure it to double or triple check that you really want to send that email at 3am, when you're at particular risk to be doing something like "drunk dialing" somebody you later wish you hadn't. If you try to send an email between 2am and 6am (configurable), it pops up a dialog box asking you if you really want to send that email and gives you some simple arithmetic problems to do to prove you're not cognitively impaired.

Alcohol goes pretty much straight to your frontal lobes, fwiw. Which is both pretty much what's intended when drinking and obviously also dramatically increases the risk of an embarassing frontal lobe failure.

Alcohol also ends up in your cerebellum pretty quickly too, which is why you get vertigo (balance) or gait (walking) impairments. In theory, it should throw off all sorts of other fine-motor timing functions, but in practice, I don't think it either makes me worse at Guitar Hero or less accurate at my tanking button sequence. Why that is, is a separate research topic for another time.

2008-10-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

We tried an improv ZA run last night, but wiped on the Eagle boss, so there was never any particular chance of getting a bear. The first storm hit 2-3s early -- which it did on a recent successful bear run too. The main difference was with a number of new players and people on alts, a few people were slower to react to the storm hitting them and it fell apart from there.

Then we wiped again just before the Bear boss, preventing the second chest. We perservered through a few more wipes and got the Dragonhawk down.

There will be 2 more resets. Maybe we can figure out how to try to get at least one more mount for somebody out of them.

Afterwards, I did a set of Isle dailies with Hawksy and bought some Crimson Spinels. Curiously, I noticed the uncut gems were 150g but the Bold cut (+10 str) were selling for 240g. Since I don't need them until next Tues, I decided to cut them all and list them. If they sell, I'll buy more and might be able to fund getting all epic gems this way. If not, I'm out a couple of gold in listing fees.

I was going to try to do SSC tonight, but there are a few people who need a few heroics before tomorrow's Magtheridon run. Given Vashj is going to be a lot easier next week and there's no way we'll get the Hand of A'dal title before Tuesday, I think I'll just tank heroic Trials runs tonight for people.

Resting

2008-10-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Well, sorta. I did log on and run a couple of quick dailies before resting. I think my cold is finally getting better, but I was suddenly and thoroughly fatigued last night. Today is a bit better again, at least.

I'm running dailies again because I took another look at my Ret gear and realized it wasn't actually quite where I wanted it to be. In particular, I looked at the Ret talents and realized the haste rating isn't as useful as strength because it doesn't help with any of the instant cast spells which are a significant fraction of Ret dps. So I asked Bloc to make me a Red Belt of Battle, then went and grabbed the badge dps gear upgrades I had my eye on and got everything enchanted. And then noticed that I didn't actually have everything epic socketed or even optimally socketed.

I have some blue/green gems and I think I also might have overdone +hit rating (some of the new gear has +hit built in). So I need something like 5-7 more Crimson Spinels to cut Bold and add more +10 str gems.

But I'm out of badges and can only afford to buy the gems (for 150-170g each) a few at a time. So I'm running dailies to be able to afford the rest of my gems. And I'll try to run some more badge instances like ZA or even alt-KZ. Also, I'll be willing to buy the gems from people who want to convert 15 badges into 150gp as quickly as I can afford to.

I'm increasingly sure I'm going full Ret next Tuesday and staying that way for awhile. If there's no major nerf, I might actually be topping the dps charts. Since all the tanks can AoE tank now and we always have a surplus of tanks, we can bring all the prot warriors to tank instead of rotating. The main thing that might change my mind is if the warriors can respec and actually out-dps me. But (a) I don't think so, and (b) they've rotated dps a lot in the recent past and I think they won't mind getting more chances to MT.

Speaking of badges, we should run ZA tonight.

We are the Champions

2008-10-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Weeeee aaaaaaare the Chaaaaaampionnssssss.....
(you have to sing it like the Queen song)

A few days ago while killing time waiting for 3.0 or a non-ZA raid or something, a few of us decided to go ahead and try to knock off the questline for the "Champion of the Naaru" title. It's getting removed in the next big patch before the expansion and while I never really cared too much about it before, why not get it before it's gone.

The SMW quests were easy enough, but then you have to run all the "hard" 5-person instances in Heroic mode (Shattered Halls, Shadow Labyrinth, Steamvaults, Arcatraz). Ok, fine. I think we wiped in each of them, but we have the places mostly outgeared, even given the fact that several of the people working through the questline were alts without tons of gear >T4. Then we had to defeat Magtheridon in his lair, which we also wiped on twice (once due to just silly misclicking to start the encounter before anybody was ready). I remember when that fight was considered so hard, we skipped it before going to the T5 instances. We're better geared now and it's been nerfed to hell, so it's pretty trivial.

I do remember when those "hard" instances were hard for us in Regular mode. Back before we mastered KZ and our knowledge and gear was much worse. Heroic mode is supposed to make them harder but not really. Working meticulously through the instances has given me time to think more about encounter and game design. I may write something longer about that later on.

But now I'll just mention the issue of AoE tanking. There are basically 4 common elements to any encounter in WoW: tanking, healing, dps and crowd control (CC). Dungeon design seems to have a lot of CC built in, but curiously, most raid encounters don't although the trash often does. The CC concept is that you have too many mobs to cope with, so you sheep/trap/sap/shackle/seduce one or more of them to make the fight manageable. In contrast, raid encounters build around multiple tanking targets -- you can't CC, but you have OTs to hold/control or kite the extra mobs around. One of the things Blizz did originally with Heroic mode was reduce the types of CC that could be used. I think this was supposed to make you figure out how to cope with loose mobs in other ways -- unusual OTs, kiting strategies, etc. But in reality, it just meant everybody brought a mage because sheep always worked.

However, AoE tanking breaks that model. If your tank/healer combo can out-heal the dmg coming in, then you can just fight all of the mobs at once. Especially if you are a paladin and can keep threat on them all ez-mode. This makes tankadins very popular for dungeon running (one of the reasons I'm exalted with everything). And it means the dungeon strategy is reduced to: where is the patrol? which ones fear? where do I LoS pull back to? And really, it's not that strategically interesting. Nothing really hits that hard or is that hard to kill. To be wipe-free, you need to memorize the placement, patrol path and fear/disorient/MC abilities of every mob in the instance. Boring but effective, I guess.

I think the strategic issue is because AoE tanking is relatively new. There was no AoE tanking pre-BC and it certainly seemed to get emphasized in BC as things evolved -- I'm guessing as soon as they had a design idea for Mount Hyjal, they realized it was an interesting element to use.

So I've been "the AoE tank" for a couple of years now but Blizzard is basically getting rid of those class-specific niches. This is a good thing because it's been a big challenge for casual or ad hoc groups to deal with filling each of the niches. So now all the tanks can AoE tank, which I also think will push them to more interesting dungeon design. In Raid encounters, you deal with a lot less CC and a lot more learning to react to events -- don't stand in the fire, click this box when you see the emote, get away from people when you have the debuff, etc.

Of course, one of the big ongoing challenges in our raiding is that the 25 people who come on any given ad hoc night don't all have experience in learning to react. We found it very hard to get all 25 people to stop dps on cue, move out of the flame patch, throw the spine on cue, run when you get the doom on you, etc. Especially if the basic efficiency demands of your primary job are pushing you to max the precision you press the buttons of your basic skill sequence.

I think Blizzard has figured this out, too. I'm sure they're well aware that in their first 2 big content sets for the game, in order to create content that challenged the best teams, the ended up creating content that average/casual players simply couldn't get through. In addition to removing some of these class balance niches, I'm encouraged that they've been describing their approach to dungeon design as training or ramping up. As in, Naxx-10 is supposed to be easy for experienced raiders, it's meant to get newer players a chance to learn the basics before things get hard.

snif

2008-10-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

Oi, I can't seem to shake this cold and it's got me at a low energy level all the time lately. It's spread to everybody in the family now and the additional stress isn't helping either. Yesterday, Mrs. Beros needed rest in the afternoon, so I took the kids out to soccer in the rain, then juggled a variety of distractions to keep them entertained through dinner. It was also our regular "clean up the house before the cleaning lady comes" night. So, I've just been tired when I get on.

At least we managed to knock off Heroic Arcatraz for the Trials questline last night. On Saturday night, on top of all the being-sick stress, we had another adolescent blow-up in the house as well. We haven't had one of these in awhile, but I missed a couple of raid nights last winter with these kind of events. I suspect it's just part of being the parent of a teenager, but it really takes the energy out of you.

Which was really a shame on Sat. I had really hoped to build on the energy of forming the new guild to see about getting more raiding together again. But I ended up delayed over an hour, there weren't a lot of people around still then, and I didn't have the energy left to do a proper cheerleading/recruiting job.

There were a few still high-energy people around on Sat, so we actually did an alt-ZA run. We had a tank and healer that hadn't been on a speed run in months, 3 healers total including a recent-70 alt, and of the 5 dps the 2 mains were both Enh Shamans and the other 3 were alts. In spite of all that, we still cleared the 3rd chest with 4m to spare. Swap in a 6th dps and with a perfect run in full flasks/buffs, we'd probably be within a minute of the bear mount. I think it resets on Wednesday and maybe we'll try an improv bear mount run then.

The other current project is the Champion title before the patch. We'll have two possible cracks at the Magtheridon part -- tonight and then sometime in the nex week. I think a few of us are ready tonight and a few others may be able to get in the last Trials quest tonight before the regular l8raid time. So I'm planning to try to drum up a pick-up Mag raid tonight. For the people with a few steps to go, we can run some more heroics next week and try to do another Mag run next weekend.

I'll still tentatively try for SSC ventures for Vashj this week. But with one week, the Hand of A'dal title is pretty much out of reach, so it might be just as well to wait for next week. All reports coming in from the PTR indicate that dps is getting raised 10-30% across the board and mob/boss health is getting knocked down significantly. It's almost like Blizz wants to make all of BC basically easy mode for a month so we can run through the content before the expansion releases.

I'm also waiting to see how much they knock down Ret pally dps. It's pwning everything on the PTR still, I hear. But if it looks like I can still pull >1k dps, maybe I'll go Ret at 3.0 and relieve some of the logjam we've always had at tank. I suspect the prot warriors, Dethno/Bloc/Ragon will be happy to bust out their new AoE tanking, high-dps/high-threat skillz. We'll see in a week.

Noctambulist

2008-10-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

Is an old word for "sleepwalker" but if you look at the roots, it emphasizes "night" over "sleep." I think Hawksy came up with it originally. After a few weeks of intermittent but spirited discussion, it is now the name of the new guild. We realized we needed more structure for doing what we want to do when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. What it is we want to do is raid.

After a lot of consideration, I decided to move Beros over to the new guild last night before our latest ZA Bear Mount run. Then we got Mandie her bear -- not with much time to spare, but without too much trouble. We were going to run some more Heroics for the Trials quests, but then I started getting tells...
"ginvite please"
"hey, ginvite me"
"ginvite?"

Pretty soon we had collected a lot of l8raiders in /guild chat. More even than I had expected right away. The guild appears to be off to a decent start. We're probably still in low-power mode for a week until 3.0 releases on 10/13. Hopefully the new talents/abilities will motivate a few people to try out some raiding again before WotLK releases on 11/13. Then I figure a few weeks of levelling and hopefully we'll start sorting out the last raiding details right before the holidays.