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.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
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:
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:
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.
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
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
"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.
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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Heroic Naxx Pwn3d
Apparently all I do is raid lately -- I didn't actually get online on the non-raid days this week. We rolled through the easy and known Spider & Plague wings on Tuesday and into the Construct wing. Finished that Wednesday. So Sunday, we had one known boss in Military, Gothik, one unbeaten encounter in Military, 4 Horsemen and the final Frostwyrm wing to go.
It actually took a minute to fill the raid on Sunday. Seems like we might want to recruit a couple more players after all. I had been being discouraging to people asking to join thinking that we didn't have regular raid slots. I didn't want to end up having unhappy people around who joined to raid and then didn't get into raids. But perhaps I was too conservative.
But once we got going, Gothik went down easily. Note on boss: we split the raid 13 & 12, which is closer to even than we do in 10 (6/4) but appears to be necessary in 25. Then on through to the 4 horsemen. This time, I was prot, so I wasn't going to be the one trying to tank & self-heal one of the caster mobs. And to guarantee it, I immediately volunteered to tank Baron Rivendare, which is my usual role when we have 10.
Bloc and Barantir went to go tank the caster mobs. On the first pull, Barantir got insta-gibbed. While wipes are never fun exactly, it as at least good to know it's not trivial to tank (although he tried to blame his fiancee or some such for calling him on the phone, sheesh). Then we got 2-3 pretty good pulls with obvious minor improvements to do wrt to moving together, timing switches, etc. And then we won.
After loot and a short break, we went off and pulled Sapphiron. Got him to 50% on the first try and down fairly easily on the second. One minor wobble on the first try was that I pulled aggro right before the first air phase. More on that in a sec.
We thought Kel'thuzad might be more of a challenge, but he went smoothly in 2 tries as well. One try to get people used to not standing in the void zones, coping with the mind controls, and for me to keep taunting Bloc's big bug adds off him -- there are 4 of them and when they all come from the same side, it's hard to get them under control 2 and 2. The second pull was smooth and simple and a win.
There were a bunch of really nice tank drops through the run. They all went to Bloc and Ragonbadger. None of them would have been major upgrades for me, but my gear is probably going to continue to lag some. It's a natural consequence of me trying to build 2 different gear sets entirely through raiding. I don't run enough heroics to stack gear from those or emblems.
But that's ok, it appears I have enough gear to tank what I need to -- 4 horsemen, Thaddius, etc. In fact, I've noticed that while my gear means I'm lagging on hp by a couple of k (33k vs 35-36k) and I bet I'm lagging on mitigation, my threat/sec appears to be significantly higher.
For example, on Thaddius, I regularly crept right up and would have gone past Ragonbadger if I hadn't Salved myself. I wasn't paying attention to the meter on Sapphiron, which is how I pulled aggro there (I pulled Sarth of Dethno the other day, too). I'm not sure of the source. Some of it is that I've been stacking block value to increase my Shield of Righteousness dmg. But I think a chunk of it is simply class mechanics. I've read a couple of things on pally threat gen and I think we're slightly OP there right now. It could be an intentional thing (even at same gear, pally tank mitigation trials slightly). It could also be a mechanics bug. I think Judgment of Light may be occasionally producing crazy threat numbers -- it may be that all healing is getting attributed to my threat, so any fast hitting/casting raid members are cranking me up.
Either way, I'm good with it (although I obviously hope it's intentional or at least not getting nerfed). I'll keep an eye on the threat meter when I'm OT and it means I'm always ready to take aggro if the MT takes a late spike (like on Thaddius). I do wonder if my basic squishiness will hold up to Malygos tonight. I hope so since I'd like to be part of the first kill, but I suspect I could convince Ragonbadger to take my spot if I'm getting clobbered. It appears to be a 1 tank, 3 healer, 6 dps fight, which is annoying to us (4) tanks. But I guess we can rotate through who gets to tank it.
Progression to do:
Malygos-10
Sartharian+1 - 10
Sartharian+1 - 25
Malygos-25
I think next week, we'll shoot for clearing Naxx-25 in 2 nights and try to save some time for the 10-progression attempts. Maybe the week after, we'll try focusing entirely on progression in the 25s. That reminds me, I have to put up the calendar raid invites for tomorrow. Always so much maintenance to do, no wonder I never run heroics.
It actually took a minute to fill the raid on Sunday. Seems like we might want to recruit a couple more players after all. I had been being discouraging to people asking to join thinking that we didn't have regular raid slots. I didn't want to end up having unhappy people around who joined to raid and then didn't get into raids. But perhaps I was too conservative.
But once we got going, Gothik went down easily. Note on boss: we split the raid 13 & 12, which is closer to even than we do in 10 (6/4) but appears to be necessary in 25. Then on through to the 4 horsemen. This time, I was prot, so I wasn't going to be the one trying to tank & self-heal one of the caster mobs. And to guarantee it, I immediately volunteered to tank Baron Rivendare, which is my usual role when we have 10.
Bloc and Barantir went to go tank the caster mobs. On the first pull, Barantir got insta-gibbed. While wipes are never fun exactly, it as at least good to know it's not trivial to tank (although he tried to blame his fiancee or some such for calling him on the phone, sheesh). Then we got 2-3 pretty good pulls with obvious minor improvements to do wrt to moving together, timing switches, etc. And then we won.
After loot and a short break, we went off and pulled Sapphiron. Got him to 50% on the first try and down fairly easily on the second. One minor wobble on the first try was that I pulled aggro right before the first air phase. More on that in a sec.
We thought Kel'thuzad might be more of a challenge, but he went smoothly in 2 tries as well. One try to get people used to not standing in the void zones, coping with the mind controls, and for me to keep taunting Bloc's big bug adds off him -- there are 4 of them and when they all come from the same side, it's hard to get them under control 2 and 2. The second pull was smooth and simple and a win.
There were a bunch of really nice tank drops through the run. They all went to Bloc and Ragonbadger. None of them would have been major upgrades for me, but my gear is probably going to continue to lag some. It's a natural consequence of me trying to build 2 different gear sets entirely through raiding. I don't run enough heroics to stack gear from those or emblems.
But that's ok, it appears I have enough gear to tank what I need to -- 4 horsemen, Thaddius, etc. In fact, I've noticed that while my gear means I'm lagging on hp by a couple of k (33k vs 35-36k) and I bet I'm lagging on mitigation, my threat/sec appears to be significantly higher.
For example, on Thaddius, I regularly crept right up and would have gone past Ragonbadger if I hadn't Salved myself. I wasn't paying attention to the meter on Sapphiron, which is how I pulled aggro there (I pulled Sarth of Dethno the other day, too). I'm not sure of the source. Some of it is that I've been stacking block value to increase my Shield of Righteousness dmg. But I think a chunk of it is simply class mechanics. I've read a couple of things on pally threat gen and I think we're slightly OP there right now. It could be an intentional thing (even at same gear, pally tank mitigation trials slightly). It could also be a mechanics bug. I think Judgment of Light may be occasionally producing crazy threat numbers -- it may be that all healing is getting attributed to my threat, so any fast hitting/casting raid members are cranking me up.
Either way, I'm good with it (although I obviously hope it's intentional or at least not getting nerfed). I'll keep an eye on the threat meter when I'm OT and it means I'm always ready to take aggro if the MT takes a late spike (like on Thaddius). I do wonder if my basic squishiness will hold up to Malygos tonight. I hope so since I'd like to be part of the first kill, but I suspect I could convince Ragonbadger to take my spot if I'm getting clobbered. It appears to be a 1 tank, 3 healer, 6 dps fight, which is annoying to us (4) tanks. But I guess we can rotate through who gets to tank it.
Progression to do:
Malygos-10
Sartharian+1 - 10
Sartharian+1 - 25
Malygos-25
I think next week, we'll shoot for clearing Naxx-25 in 2 nights and try to save some time for the 10-progression attempts. Maybe the week after, we'll try focusing entirely on progression in the 25s. That reminds me, I have to put up the calendar raid invites for tomorrow. Always so much maintenance to do, no wonder I never run heroics.
Friday, January 16, 2009
/shiver
It's stupid cold here. Canadian cold even. When the temperature drops like this here, they describe it on the news as the arrival of a "blast of icy Canadian air." You Canadians can have your damn air back! It was -15F this morning when I took my daughter to high school (aka -26C) and I was left muttering bizarre things like, "oh, it's warmed up to 10 below" later when I took my son to kindergarten. And cheering at the weather report saying it'd get up to 6. That's just crazy.
In any event, I didn't get online last night. I thought I needed to take it easy for a night and was afraid that if I played, I'd get wrapped up like usual and end up staying late. Instead, I got up a bit earlier this morning and spent some time with my son in his kindergarten class, reading to the kids.
I may be able to get online tonight in time to run some heroics or something. Maybe make the epic healing ring.
In any event, I didn't get online last night. I thought I needed to take it easy for a night and was afraid that if I played, I'd get wrapped up like usual and end up staying late. Instead, I got up a bit earlier this morning and spent some time with my son in his kindergarten class, reading to the kids.
I may be able to get online tonight in time to run some heroics or something. Maybe make the epic healing ring.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Boots
When I logged on yesterday early evening, I still had crappy blue rep reward boots. But then I checked my mail and had a pleasant surprise. During a recent Naxx-10, Dethno had taken some boots and then realized they weren't actually an upgrade for him. So he petitioned a GM, who had them sent to me in the mail. Nice. I enchanted them and then noticed they actually had slightly less +def than the blue ones, so I went and bought a lot of enchanting mats so I could finally get around to adding the +20 def to my shield and get back to the cap. That got me there without having to swap to another +27 def (JC) gem. Since I was on a gear roll, then I went and used badges to grab my T7 gloves for the 2-item bonus.
Then right before the raid, Ragonbadger msgs me. He upped on boots in Heroic Naxx the previous night and they're weird. First, they're BoE, which is unusual. Then, while they have a socket, they have very low defense and very low stam. If you socket for +def (seems necessary), you give up about 30 stam versus the ones I had just got. However, they have an unusually high about of +block value, +77 and a fair amount more strength. So they'll have decent extra physical mitigation. Plus, I've been becoming a big fan of block value because it directly improves my dmg and threat from Shield of Righteousness. You also give up dodge/parry, so I think they aren't actually as good for MT, but could be perfect for my frequent OT role. So I took those too (and fixed the DKP in both cases). So now I have 2 pairs of purple boots and I hadn't even killed anything yet.
We spent awhile on Thaddius. It took some time for people to get into the rhythm of rotating with the polarity debuff, moving quickly and taking the correct route. I decided to work on cranking my dps and threat so that I'd sit right behind Ragon on the threat meter. Then I'd cast Hand of Salvation on myself and keep going. This worked to let me do a little dps and also be right there if something bad happened to Ragon, like the positioning getting off and him getting pwned by 10 people with the opposite debuff. This happened a couple of times, including the final winning pull, but I was able to easily transition smoothly into the tanking role and we finally rocked him down.
To do 30m damage in 6m, you need everybody cranking dps and getting the maximum advantage from the polarity buffing. Which means nice tight grouping with the others who share your polarity. And no deaths, if possible (it wasn't possible, but we managed it with 3 dead early).
Then we went and got Razuvious down easily (much more quickly than last time). But we called it there and decided to go back for a 3rd night on Sunday. We'll warm up with Gothik and if we can get the 4 Horseman under control reasonably quickly, we'll go try Sapphiron and maybe Kel'thuzad too. That might mean no Naxx-10 for some of us this week, but I feel like progression would be good.
Gearwise, I still have crappy blue bracers and a cloak. I'm going to grab the valor badge cloak after the next Heroic raid, so that'll take care of that. Either bracers will eventually drop, or I'll wait for 60 more valorous badges for that piece. I still have the lvl 70 JC trinket to replace (with something that has lots of +def) and I should really make more of an effort to run Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle and get the good def sword. That'd get me within an item or two of best-in-slot across all gear.
Then I can work more on my holy gear, lol. The first order of business there is ~15 JC tokens to get the epic JC ring and 3x +27 int gems. Should have that in about a week. Then maybe the neck and start looking for a decent cloak, etc.
I'll be taking it easier for the next couple of nights. Probably on late, check for a heroic and just do dailies if everybody is busy and stay fresh for Sunday.
Then right before the raid, Ragonbadger msgs me. He upped on boots in Heroic Naxx the previous night and they're weird. First, they're BoE, which is unusual. Then, while they have a socket, they have very low defense and very low stam. If you socket for +def (seems necessary), you give up about 30 stam versus the ones I had just got. However, they have an unusually high about of +block value, +77 and a fair amount more strength. So they'll have decent extra physical mitigation. Plus, I've been becoming a big fan of block value because it directly improves my dmg and threat from Shield of Righteousness. You also give up dodge/parry, so I think they aren't actually as good for MT, but could be perfect for my frequent OT role. So I took those too (and fixed the DKP in both cases). So now I have 2 pairs of purple boots and I hadn't even killed anything yet.
We spent awhile on Thaddius. It took some time for people to get into the rhythm of rotating with the polarity debuff, moving quickly and taking the correct route. I decided to work on cranking my dps and threat so that I'd sit right behind Ragon on the threat meter. Then I'd cast Hand of Salvation on myself and keep going. This worked to let me do a little dps and also be right there if something bad happened to Ragon, like the positioning getting off and him getting pwned by 10 people with the opposite debuff. This happened a couple of times, including the final winning pull, but I was able to easily transition smoothly into the tanking role and we finally rocked him down.
To do 30m damage in 6m, you need everybody cranking dps and getting the maximum advantage from the polarity buffing. Which means nice tight grouping with the others who share your polarity. And no deaths, if possible (it wasn't possible, but we managed it with 3 dead early).
Then we went and got Razuvious down easily (much more quickly than last time). But we called it there and decided to go back for a 3rd night on Sunday. We'll warm up with Gothik and if we can get the 4 Horseman under control reasonably quickly, we'll go try Sapphiron and maybe Kel'thuzad too. That might mean no Naxx-10 for some of us this week, but I feel like progression would be good.
Gearwise, I still have crappy blue bracers and a cloak. I'm going to grab the valor badge cloak after the next Heroic raid, so that'll take care of that. Either bracers will eventually drop, or I'll wait for 60 more valorous badges for that piece. I still have the lvl 70 JC trinket to replace (with something that has lots of +def) and I should really make more of an effort to run Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle and get the good def sword. That'd get me within an item or two of best-in-slot across all gear.
Then I can work more on my holy gear, lol. The first order of business there is ~15 JC tokens to get the epic JC ring and 3x +27 int gems. Should have that in about a week. Then maybe the neck and start looking for a decent cloak, etc.
I'll be taking it easier for the next couple of nights. Probably on late, check for a heroic and just do dailies if everybody is busy and stay fresh for Sunday.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Rolling 25 Content
We got off on a nice run last night in Naxx-25, rapidly clearing the Spider & Plague wings and then grinding our way through the Construct wing to see Thaddius. As we were cruising through the Spider wing, I noticed we didn't have even a single random rez on the trash or boss. I was going to bring it up on vent but I knew everybody would get mad that I was jinxing the run. Then I starting thinking of it like when a baseball pitcher is pitching a no hitter and nobody is allowed to say anything out loud. And I wondered if anybody else was noticing.
Then Sherider broke the streak (go figure, heh) on the Plague wing trash, so I mentioned the impressive lack of deaths preceding that. We were about the pull Heigen the Unclean and several people expressed some skepticism that we could pull of the 25-person Safety Dance -- no deaths on that boss is a specialized achievement. Uglykid was skeptical enough to wager. He msged me a number of predicted deaths on the fight. I told him I'd take the under and he was pessimistic enough to give me 2:1 odds.
I won the bet by a fairly significant margin. We did have 3 deaths, but they were all b-rezzed so it was nice to see 25 people standing when the boss went down. Of course, then we promptly had a bunch of people die on the short gauntlet run to Loatheb. But then we beat Loatheb pretty handily as well.
Since we hadn't been to the Construct wing before to see how the trash & bosses change in Heroic mode, it was no suprise that the body count started to pile up from there. We managed a full wipe on the trash -- "hey, that's a lot more slimes than usual, oh look and they all have an aura too." And then we wiped on Patchwerk. I was a little nervous about Patchwerk since he has a rep for hitting significantly hard. But we mostly only wiped because Bloc's computer locked up and you really need 3 tanks for the fight. We got him fairly easily on the second pull.
Grobbulus and Gluth were both messy one-shots, I believe (and we did them with 24 since Kainos's comp locked up and then wouldn't let him back onto Elune). It was late as we pulled up to Thaddius, but we decided to press on for a few extra minutes. With 25 people running around as the polarity switches, I really wanted to get at least one practice pull. It went pretty well, so we did another. But it's going to take a fair amount of precision in both movement after a polarity switch and positioning to make the polarity-buffing to get our dps up enough to do 30m within the enrage timer.
But I'm pretty optimistic that we'll get him tonight. I don't think it'll take much more practice. Then we'll head back to the Military wing. Razuvious and Gothik should be even easier than last week. And hopefully we'll find non-idiots to tank the casters (either somebody not-me, or me being less idiotic) and work out the 4 Horsemen.
If all that goes as smoothly as I hope, we'll be in the Frostwyrm Wing before the end of the night. That will definitely raise the possibility of a third Heroic raid night this week, probably Sunday, if we have a shot at closing out the instance this reset. That'd probably mean no real shot to clear the 10s, but maybe we can just use the 4th raid night to mess around with Malygos or even Sartharian with a drake up. Actually, I suppose we could do those with 25, too.
I was a bit more comfortable getting to raid as prot again last night. Dethno was delayed by work, so I took the 3rd tank role. I have a hunch I might end up healing again tonight, though. I got a few healing upgrades last Naxx-10, so with practice, I should be getting progressively less hopeless at it. I wonder if I'll be able to get on early enough to gem & enchant the gear. Plus I need to update the DKP from last night (and there was plenty of it).
Then Sherider broke the streak (go figure, heh) on the Plague wing trash, so I mentioned the impressive lack of deaths preceding that. We were about the pull Heigen the Unclean and several people expressed some skepticism that we could pull of the 25-person Safety Dance -- no deaths on that boss is a specialized achievement. Uglykid was skeptical enough to wager. He msged me a number of predicted deaths on the fight. I told him I'd take the under and he was pessimistic enough to give me 2:1 odds.
I won the bet by a fairly significant margin. We did have 3 deaths, but they were all b-rezzed so it was nice to see 25 people standing when the boss went down. Of course, then we promptly had a bunch of people die on the short gauntlet run to Loatheb. But then we beat Loatheb pretty handily as well.
Since we hadn't been to the Construct wing before to see how the trash & bosses change in Heroic mode, it was no suprise that the body count started to pile up from there. We managed a full wipe on the trash -- "hey, that's a lot more slimes than usual, oh look and they all have an aura too." And then we wiped on Patchwerk. I was a little nervous about Patchwerk since he has a rep for hitting significantly hard. But we mostly only wiped because Bloc's computer locked up and you really need 3 tanks for the fight. We got him fairly easily on the second pull.
Grobbulus and Gluth were both messy one-shots, I believe (and we did them with 24 since Kainos's comp locked up and then wouldn't let him back onto Elune). It was late as we pulled up to Thaddius, but we decided to press on for a few extra minutes. With 25 people running around as the polarity switches, I really wanted to get at least one practice pull. It went pretty well, so we did another. But it's going to take a fair amount of precision in both movement after a polarity switch and positioning to make the polarity-buffing to get our dps up enough to do 30m within the enrage timer.
But I'm pretty optimistic that we'll get him tonight. I don't think it'll take much more practice. Then we'll head back to the Military wing. Razuvious and Gothik should be even easier than last week. And hopefully we'll find non-idiots to tank the casters (either somebody not-me, or me being less idiotic) and work out the 4 Horsemen.
If all that goes as smoothly as I hope, we'll be in the Frostwyrm Wing before the end of the night. That will definitely raise the possibility of a third Heroic raid night this week, probably Sunday, if we have a shot at closing out the instance this reset. That'd probably mean no real shot to clear the 10s, but maybe we can just use the 4th raid night to mess around with Malygos or even Sartharian with a drake up. Actually, I suppose we could do those with 25, too.
I was a bit more comfortable getting to raid as prot again last night. Dethno was delayed by work, so I took the 3rd tank role. I have a hunch I might end up healing again tonight, though. I got a few healing upgrades last Naxx-10, so with practice, I should be getting progressively less hopeless at it. I wonder if I'll be able to get on early enough to gem & enchant the gear. Plus I need to update the DKP from last night (and there was plenty of it).
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Another Naxx-10 clear
In spite of Dethno being called away to work and the subsequent reliance on an undergeared scrubby tank (yours truly) we rolled the rest of the way through Naxx-10 (thanks to Sirtank for respeccing and running as OT instead of mega dps) and then knocked off Sartharian for a bonus.
The run left me feeling conflicted about scheduling since it seems like we can count on a full Naxx-10 clear with 2 raid nights and there is a lot of gear people still need from there. I'd been feeling sympathetic towards suggestions that we do an extra Heroic raid night to finish Heroic Naxx, but it'd basically mean skipping Naxx-10 that week unless we ended up running 5 raid nights.
So I think it's still loot-optimal to do 2 & 2 and just take it as far as we can in Heroic Naxx tonight and Wednesday. OTOH, if we are close to having 4 wings clear tonight, it's going to be very tempting to try to finish it and maybe just have the 10-person groups do Sarth and/or wipe on Malygos for one night.
I guess we'll see how it goes tonight. If it's slow (or tiring), then we'll take anothe week to gear up further in 10s. If it looks promising, maybe we'll take a crack at pushing through. There's a part of me that thinks it might be fun to go all-25 all the time and work on Malygos, Sartharian with Drakes up and/or the harder achievements in Naxx. But as a guy who's still wearing a couple of blue and one level 70 (T6 gloves) tanking piece, maybe there's something to be said for a little more non-heroic raid gear farming before we go entirely about progression.
The run left me feeling conflicted about scheduling since it seems like we can count on a full Naxx-10 clear with 2 raid nights and there is a lot of gear people still need from there. I'd been feeling sympathetic towards suggestions that we do an extra Heroic raid night to finish Heroic Naxx, but it'd basically mean skipping Naxx-10 that week unless we ended up running 5 raid nights.
So I think it's still loot-optimal to do 2 & 2 and just take it as far as we can in Heroic Naxx tonight and Wednesday. OTOH, if we are close to having 4 wings clear tonight, it's going to be very tempting to try to finish it and maybe just have the 10-person groups do Sarth and/or wipe on Malygos for one night.
I guess we'll see how it goes tonight. If it's slow (or tiring), then we'll take anothe week to gear up further in 10s. If it looks promising, maybe we'll take a crack at pushing through. There's a part of me that thinks it might be fun to go all-25 all the time and work on Malygos, Sartharian with Drakes up and/or the harder achievements in Naxx. But as a guy who's still wearing a couple of blue and one level 70 (T6 gloves) tanking piece, maybe there's something to be said for a little more non-heroic raid gear farming before we go entirely about progression.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Half a Naxx
Well, maybe not quite half of Naxx. We did get Plague, Construct and Anub'Rehkan before we started to lose people (Dethno called in to work, etc.). If we get started on time and get on a roll, we have a decent shot to finish the place tonight.
Somehow farming Naxx-10 seems less thrilling than trying to finish Heroic Naxx, though. Maybe we should push for more Heroic Raids next week and not worry about whether we leave enough time to clear 2x 10s, too.
Finally replaced my ZA shoulders last night. Then ran into a funny bug making a gem for them. Clicking on "Royal Shadow Crystal" casts that spell, but the result is an Infused Shadow Crystal. I put in a GM ticket after it happened twice and verified that I didn't misclick and got email today confirming it's a known bug. That's a weird one to sneak into the live release. I wonder if they'll replace the wrong-cut gems or if I'm just out of luck. I should probably go buy a Twilight Opal version of it anyway, I probably won't be replacing these for awhile, especially given how long it seems to take me to replace shoulders. If the T7 token finally drops down to me, I can use them to replace my BT healing shoulders.
Somehow farming Naxx-10 seems less thrilling than trying to finish Heroic Naxx, though. Maybe we should push for more Heroic Raids next week and not worry about whether we leave enough time to clear 2x 10s, too.
Finally replaced my ZA shoulders last night. Then ran into a funny bug making a gem for them. Clicking on "Royal Shadow Crystal" casts that spell, but the result is an Infused Shadow Crystal. I put in a GM ticket after it happened twice and verified that I didn't misclick and got email today confirming it's a known bug. That's a weird one to sneak into the live release. I wonder if they'll replace the wrong-cut gems or if I'm just out of luck. I should probably go buy a Twilight Opal version of it anyway, I probably won't be replacing these for awhile, especially given how long it seems to take me to replace shoulders. If the T7 token finally drops down to me, I can use them to replace my BT healing shoulders.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Halls of Stone
Thanks to a slightly tipsy but insistent Barantir, we ran a Heroic Halls of Stone last night. I had asked in /guild if anybody wanted to run earlier but when only a few healers replied, I just did the JC daily, then went fishing. I realized earlier in the week that I could use JC to upgrade a couple of pieces of my healing gear -- just in case I'm really going to be reliably healing in 25s (or need to optimize both sets of gear because I'll be swapping back and forth a lot). So I made the mana regen trinket and have started saving tokens for the epic ring and maybe neck.
But then Barantir got on and pulled the run together. Sadly, by then I was getting pretty tired and nearly sleptwalked through the run. I don't think it was just me either, the run started to get a bit choppy towards the end. But we finished it off.
Tonight we'll get back to raiding again and hopefully do >50% of Naxx. I'd like to get the KT this week. One of the things about working on 2 sets of gear is you start to notice how many T7 tokens you're going to want to get.
But then Barantir got on and pulled the run together. Sadly, by then I was getting pretty tired and nearly sleptwalked through the run. I don't think it was just me either, the run started to get a bit choppy towards the end. But we finished it off.
Tonight we'll get back to raiding again and hopefully do >50% of Naxx. I'd like to get the KT this week. One of the things about working on 2 sets of gear is you start to notice how many T7 tokens you're going to want to get.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Early night
"Holy hell, I'm healing spec. Was I drunk last night?"
Was basically my reaction to logging in. I didn't really forget that I had respecced holy, but after logging in, seeing Naxx (Badger) and some Heroics already going, I moused over my lame holy gear and didn't know what to do.
I looked up a few rep or quest rewards, thought about going after some crafted gear. Then considered the annoyance of doing dailies as holy spec and decided just to call it an early night.
I think maybe I'll make Thursdays a regular "off night." I've been asked to help out in my 5yo's kindergarten class one morning a week for the next couple of months and Fridays would be a decent one. They are having a behavioral problem with one of the kids in the class -- he's so unruly, disruptive and aggressive, there have already been police reports filed against him. You get some kids who have problems in the public school, but I've never seen a kid this far gone this young (kindergarten!). So there's an effort to get more parents to come help out in the classroom and try to help keep it under control. Also, the school is resisting moving the kid to special ed, which he clearly seems to need, so more parents might help document the issue. My son's teacher is really wonderful and is more than happy to have parents around a lot. We feel bad that the ongoing problem is hurting the environment so much.
I guess that's a bit of a bummer of RL blogging. I could tell more interesting RL stories about the regular New Year's party, but I've been sworn to secrecy ("what happens at New Year's, stays at New Year's").
Maybe I'll get on early enough tonight to get into a Heroic run. I wonder whether I'll end up healing or tanking.
Was basically my reaction to logging in. I didn't really forget that I had respecced holy, but after logging in, seeing Naxx (Badger) and some Heroics already going, I moused over my lame holy gear and didn't know what to do.
I looked up a few rep or quest rewards, thought about going after some crafted gear. Then considered the annoyance of doing dailies as holy spec and decided just to call it an early night.
I think maybe I'll make Thursdays a regular "off night." I've been asked to help out in my 5yo's kindergarten class one morning a week for the next couple of months and Fridays would be a decent one. They are having a behavioral problem with one of the kids in the class -- he's so unruly, disruptive and aggressive, there have already been police reports filed against him. You get some kids who have problems in the public school, but I've never seen a kid this far gone this young (kindergarten!). So there's an effort to get more parents to come help out in the classroom and try to help keep it under control. Also, the school is resisting moving the kid to special ed, which he clearly seems to need, so more parents might help document the issue. My son's teacher is really wonderful and is more than happy to have parents around a lot. We feel bad that the ongoing problem is hurting the environment so much.
I guess that's a bit of a bummer of RL blogging. I could tell more interesting RL stories about the regular New Year's party, but I've been sworn to secrecy ("what happens at New Year's, stays at New Year's").
Maybe I'll get on early enough tonight to get into a Heroic run. I wonder whether I'll end up healing or tanking.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Heroic
Tuesday we finally made our long awaited foray into Heroic Raiding in WotLK with 25 instead of 10s. Things got rolling so well, it felt like we should have been pushing to start earlier. Well, a number of people were, but the holidays threw everything off.
Sartharian went off without a hitch. Well, one disco, so we 1-shot him with 24. Then off to Naxx and rolled through the Arachnid quarter without a wipe and then the Plague quarter with a fairly smooth trip to Loatheb. It did get a little harder -- we lost a bunch of people due to dancing trouble on Heigen. And then we finally wiped once on Loatheb.
We only had 24 in the raid again for Loatheb, which was a concern since it's a tough dps race. And at least 2 of us were putting out pretty low dps. Myself included, we had formed up with 5 tanks, so I tried respeccing Ret, but between slightly out of date gear and lack of practice, I wasn't very effective. I'm not even sure I couldn't have done better overall dps as prot spec in dps gear.
A few people suggested bringing in another non-guild player to help. I deflected the request, but I actually was leaning towards setting a hard and fast guild policy of no non guildies in the raid. I didn't annouce it because I didn't want to lay it out there on the spot, but I still feel like I'd rather wipe short handed and stick to guild raids right now.
Best of all, we didn't wipe again. Everybody stepped up and we pwned Loatheb on the second try.
Our second trip last night was less simple. We moved slowly through the military quarter with wipes on both Razuvious and Gothik. I decided to go holy spec and be a bad healer instead of bad dps and actually spent most of the night feeling slightly overwhelmed with finding the healing rhythm since it's been a long time since I raid healed. Given our excess tanks, I think there's some chance holy might be a regular role for me in 25s.
Being a relatively weaker healer and having tank experience, when we got to the 4 horsemen, it made sense to have me try to "tank" a caster since I could theoretically stand there and self-heal. But it didn't go so well.
First pull, I ran straight into melee Lord Keliek and discovered his holy bolt hits for 9k and I got 2-shotted. That was a bit disturbing, so for the next few pulls, I ran in trying to carefully find his aggro boundary while also making sure Quisha was still in range to heal me. I also ran in with my fingers poised over the self-heal buttons since I was going to need to cast right away. What I didn't realize was that these bosses are not like Ragnaros or Murmur that just need somebody in range, but I actually had to get on the aggro table with a Holy Shock first. That led to a handful more wipes and the end of the evening.
I probably should have read up on the encounter myself, but I was too distracted with finding and enchanting my holy gear, respeccing and redoing my UI starting a bit before the raid. Most of the raid I spent peppering Barantir with questions and trying to vaguely keep track of who I should be healing while missing people asking me to set things up in raid.
Fortunately, it'll be easier when/if I do it again next week. I'm a bit up in the air as to whether I should do our 10 person runs as tank or healer for practice this week. Probably it will depend on whether Stupidrenren is around and/or if Dethnotronic gets called into work.
There's a part of me wondering why we are even bothering going back to 10s for the rest of the week. I suppose in theory, we'll get better loot by 2x clears. Also, it hadn't occurred to me that we had a chance to clear Heroic Naxx our first week there, so I didn't even consider the idea of a full-bore switch. I thought we'd be chipping away at it for a night or two for a few weeks. I guess it really isn't that hard.
Sartharian went off without a hitch. Well, one disco, so we 1-shot him with 24. Then off to Naxx and rolled through the Arachnid quarter without a wipe and then the Plague quarter with a fairly smooth trip to Loatheb. It did get a little harder -- we lost a bunch of people due to dancing trouble on Heigen. And then we finally wiped once on Loatheb.
We only had 24 in the raid again for Loatheb, which was a concern since it's a tough dps race. And at least 2 of us were putting out pretty low dps. Myself included, we had formed up with 5 tanks, so I tried respeccing Ret, but between slightly out of date gear and lack of practice, I wasn't very effective. I'm not even sure I couldn't have done better overall dps as prot spec in dps gear.
A few people suggested bringing in another non-guild player to help. I deflected the request, but I actually was leaning towards setting a hard and fast guild policy of no non guildies in the raid. I didn't annouce it because I didn't want to lay it out there on the spot, but I still feel like I'd rather wipe short handed and stick to guild raids right now.
Best of all, we didn't wipe again. Everybody stepped up and we pwned Loatheb on the second try.
Our second trip last night was less simple. We moved slowly through the military quarter with wipes on both Razuvious and Gothik. I decided to go holy spec and be a bad healer instead of bad dps and actually spent most of the night feeling slightly overwhelmed with finding the healing rhythm since it's been a long time since I raid healed. Given our excess tanks, I think there's some chance holy might be a regular role for me in 25s.
Being a relatively weaker healer and having tank experience, when we got to the 4 horsemen, it made sense to have me try to "tank" a caster since I could theoretically stand there and self-heal. But it didn't go so well.
First pull, I ran straight into melee Lord Keliek and discovered his holy bolt hits for 9k and I got 2-shotted. That was a bit disturbing, so for the next few pulls, I ran in trying to carefully find his aggro boundary while also making sure Quisha was still in range to heal me. I also ran in with my fingers poised over the self-heal buttons since I was going to need to cast right away. What I didn't realize was that these bosses are not like Ragnaros or Murmur that just need somebody in range, but I actually had to get on the aggro table with a Holy Shock first. That led to a handful more wipes and the end of the evening.
I probably should have read up on the encounter myself, but I was too distracted with finding and enchanting my holy gear, respeccing and redoing my UI starting a bit before the raid. Most of the raid I spent peppering Barantir with questions and trying to vaguely keep track of who I should be healing while missing people asking me to set things up in raid.
Fortunately, it'll be easier when/if I do it again next week. I'm a bit up in the air as to whether I should do our 10 person runs as tank or healer for practice this week. Probably it will depend on whether Stupidrenren is around and/or if Dethnotronic gets called into work.
There's a part of me wondering why we are even bothering going back to 10s for the rest of the week. I suppose in theory, we'll get better loot by 2x clears. Also, it hadn't occurred to me that we had a chance to clear Heroic Naxx our first week there, so I didn't even consider the idea of a full-bore switch. I thought we'd be chipping away at it for a night or two for a few weeks. I guess it really isn't that hard.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Rusty
No, I didn't give up on blogging, just got overrun by the holidays, travel and such. Back as of last Saturday, we did manage to scrape up enough people to venture into Naxx Sunday & Monday. It felt a bit rusty and between that and some delays to fill, connection issues and such, we didn't actually make it to the Frost Wyrm wing last night.
Tonight marks a whole new type of adventure for the guild -- Heroic raids with 25. There's a lot about this that I'm in "wait and see" mode about. How hard will it be? How quick or smoothly will the raids go? How many people and who will show up?
A couple of people have contacted me about joining the guild and I've been holding off on deciding what to do. Until the holidays, it felt like both 10-person teams had fairly reliable groups of 12 or so and were more likely to disappoint people left out than struggle to fill. If somebody contacts me and wants to raid, I wouldn't want to take them and then have them sit on the bench all the time waiting for a chance.
But 25 > 2x10 (sometimes the math is simple ;), so I think we might need a slightly bigger pool of raiders to fill Heroics reliably. If we have ~75% attendance, we'd need 33 raiders. I think many people are already >75%, so that's probably too many. Also, I have a hunch we can do parts of Naxx with <25 in a pinch. But there's still room for around 5-7 more people who specialize more in 25s and sub occasionally in 10s. Would these new players be ok with that deal? I'll check tonight.
And then there's the issue that maybe we'll be doing more 25s than 10s sooner than I thought. I'm planning 2 & 2 this week tentatively, but if Heroic Naxx is rolling, maybe that changes in a couple of weeks. Maybe non-heroic Naxx becomes an off-night and/or pug based activity. Or maybe we grow up to have a decent shot at 35 online and run both Heroic and/or non-heroic on the same nights.
I think a lot of people are looking forward to tonight, which is good. Hopefully the transition won't be stressful, they sometimes are. I have a hunch that in addition to the new recruiting issues, we'll be running into the old filling issues of trying to pick 25 people based on class, ability and performance. It'd be nice if I could pick a list of 25 in advance of raid night like we do with the 10s, but I'm not sure how well that will work. Maybe it's time to figure out the signup system bundled in the guildlaunch website. That might work better than the in game calendar for this.
Tonight marks a whole new type of adventure for the guild -- Heroic raids with 25. There's a lot about this that I'm in "wait and see" mode about. How hard will it be? How quick or smoothly will the raids go? How many people and who will show up?
A couple of people have contacted me about joining the guild and I've been holding off on deciding what to do. Until the holidays, it felt like both 10-person teams had fairly reliable groups of 12 or so and were more likely to disappoint people left out than struggle to fill. If somebody contacts me and wants to raid, I wouldn't want to take them and then have them sit on the bench all the time waiting for a chance.
But 25 > 2x10 (sometimes the math is simple ;), so I think we might need a slightly bigger pool of raiders to fill Heroics reliably. If we have ~75% attendance, we'd need 33 raiders. I think many people are already >75%, so that's probably too many. Also, I have a hunch we can do parts of Naxx with <25 in a pinch. But there's still room for around 5-7 more people who specialize more in 25s and sub occasionally in 10s. Would these new players be ok with that deal? I'll check tonight.
And then there's the issue that maybe we'll be doing more 25s than 10s sooner than I thought. I'm planning 2 & 2 this week tentatively, but if Heroic Naxx is rolling, maybe that changes in a couple of weeks. Maybe non-heroic Naxx becomes an off-night and/or pug based activity. Or maybe we grow up to have a decent shot at 35 online and run both Heroic and/or non-heroic on the same nights.
I think a lot of people are looking forward to tonight, which is good. Hopefully the transition won't be stressful, they sometimes are. I have a hunch that in addition to the new recruiting issues, we'll be running into the old filling issues of trying to pick 25 people based on class, ability and performance. It'd be nice if I could pick a list of 25 in advance of raid night like we do with the 10s, but I'm not sure how well that will work. Maybe it's time to figure out the signup system bundled in the guildlaunch website. That might work better than the in game calendar for this.
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