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.

Dragonage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turnout

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

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

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

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

A few things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dedicated Few

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repelling

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

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

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

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

afk brb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naxxing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healing again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarth + 2 = Hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sick Bay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some old school

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

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

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

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

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

Heroic Malygos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leisurely

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twilight Assist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incremental progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maintenance days

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

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

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

Heroic Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naxx-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not running heroics

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

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

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

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

Pacing

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

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

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

Heroic: Twilight Assist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the connection issues.

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

Regards,

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

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

Comcast hates me

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

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

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

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

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

Malygos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pwn3rship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning rates

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

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

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

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

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

"Hi guys, sorry I'm late."

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

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

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

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

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

Presidents and Dragons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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