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. :)