AoE Tanking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.