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.