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.