Not quite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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*

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

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.

On a Slab

"Slab's not so bad if you know what you're doing" says Hawksy. I suppose so, but when it's already 3am, nobody really remembers the pulls anymore after all this time and most of the dps is alts, well, I suppose it's not that surprising that you might make a couple of visits to the GY.

It was late because first I tried to get an SSC run together last night. I knew it was a long-shot, but I mostly wanted to re-introduce the idea of raiding nights to the /l8raid channel hoping that we might build back up, especially when 3.0 releases.

Then we ran Sherider through a "quick" Heroic SH so he could start catching up with the Trials quests on the Champion chain. So it was a late start to a long Shadow Labyrinth run. But we finished eventually.

I just need Heroic Arcatraz and I'm ready for Magtheridon. I'm hoping it won't be hard to put together a pug for Mag, although it'll probably still be a couple of days until all of us trying to get through the questline catch up. Phage is where I am, but Ragonbadger and Sherider need to do Steamvaults. Yeah, Ragon was there on Wed, but he said I'm not supposed to make him look bad by explaining why he needs to run it again.

Islowlykill is back from his business trip, so we should have the dps to do another bear run tonight. We technically will have a few more mount run opportunities before the patch. I'm not entirely sure what to do with those. I've been getting increasing numbers of requests to help out other groups. There are still a few l8raiders it'd be fun to get a mount for, but many of them I don't see around that often lately. There's also a thought in the back of my mind of seeing if people would do the run to help out somebody like my friend Themouse -- he's an RL friend who is basically a total scrub because he only started playing recently and doesn't have the gear and class knowledge yet. But part of me likes the idea of getting a mount for somebody who really doesn't "deserve" one just to prove we can.

Champion

Based on a little prodding by Ragonbadger and also because I'm bored with leveling the professions on my kids' toons, I've decided to try to knock off the Champion of the Naaru questline before 3.0. Two night ago, I polished off the SMV questline with a little help from Phage. Last night, we got Sherider started on that line, but then went off with Ragonbadger, Sariana and Uglykid to start the Trials heroic runs.

Neither the Shattered Halls nor the Steamvaults runs were particularly hard exactly, although we did manage to wipe once or twice in each. I dunno, isn't there some way to make instances challenging without resorting to caster mobs who don't come when pulled (even when you break LoS) and then fear you into adjacent groups when you go get them? You can be fully geared out and play your class just fine and you're still going to randomly wipe. I suppose you could just run 100yds away after every pull -- pull and run, pull and run, pull and run further -- doesn't seem that heroic actually. Whatever.

Next up is Shadowlab and Arcatraz. Although we'll probably also have to redo SH & SV. Ragonbadger forgot to grab the SV quest and Sherider is going to want to complete those quests too once he gets the quest line done. There should be time to get it all done and still throw together a Magtheridon run to cap it off when everybody is ready before 3.0 releases.

I hab a code

Er, have a cold even. I thought it was behind me after spending most of last week feeling fuzzy, but apparently not yet.

So I didn't do more that toss out a "anybody want to raid anything bigger than the brewfest boss?" when people were grouping up for said boss. I would have pushed harder, but I only saw about 15 l8raiders kicking around anyway. I'll keep trying to organize on the regular raid nights and hope we get back to critical mass sometime. Or maybe I'll LFM on the Elune forums again and try to pull back together the SSC/Vashj group.

After killing the Brewfest boss a few more times (no mounts), I headed over to SMV to catch up on the long-neglected Champion of the Naaru questline. I moved it along to the point where you need to kill the fiery boss with 5. Then we'll need to run all the heroic Trials quests. And then go back and kill Magtheridon again. There might be time for all this before the patch hits and it's at least worth a shot before 3.0 releases, especially if we're not raiding.

Should be another bear mount run tonight. Could be a Trials run after, or instead if we're short dps again. I think we learned that 3 "replacement" level dps is too many for a comfortable run, so if it's more than 1-2, we'll try again Friday.