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.