38% solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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