AoE Tanking

Ok, it's been awhile, but lets try just diving back in...

Once upon a time, Paladins were the undisputed kings of AoE tanking. I was the most beloved toon in all of Mt Hyjal for many moons way back in the day. I spent a lot of time spamming Consecration and Shield Block and trying to find a camera angle that let me see anything at all beyond a screen full of dizzying spell effects. Or I'd just give up on the screen and watch the raid display to taunt off the warlocks and mages whose AoE would very occasionally outpace Consecration threat.

But that was a long time ago and with 3.0 came AoE tanking abilities for all tanks. The mechanics all differ a little bit, but Blizzard was clearly flattening out the niches that had existed for tanking. In theory, my hp/mitigation caught up with the prot warriors a bit and they got some talents for grabbing a room full of mobs all at once. While it was nice to be less reliant on specific classes for specific fights, you do also miss being able to best fill a specific job. It's a obviously constant balancing act for Blizzard between maintaining class distinctiveness and not requiring hardcore raid stacking and toon swapping for specific fights.

Of course, then we gradually learned that we were both lacking the best elements for tanking Sarth+3 -- the ridiculous hp pools of a bear tank and the zillions of cooldowns of a DK tank. Look, niches again. Except that this time, we didn't have anybody ready to fill the niche and so we never managed to beat that last fight. :(

But on AoE tanking, since Ulduar came out, I've been gradually coming around to the idea that I'm actually maybe currently the worst AoE tank. We've been running into the problem that Consecration doesn't work that well on rapidly moving mobs and the Warriors ability to stun/slow while building AoE threat -- Sarth + 2/3 whelps were a good demonstration of that, too. And it looks to me like the Consecration threat building hasn't kept pace with the level of AoE damage that the locks and mages can put out.

For awhile, I've been thinking I wasn't doing it well enough (and that might be true, I have some ideas for improving). But I think if there is a current niche for pally tanking, it's not actually full AoE tanking, but 2-3 multi-mob tanking. I have several abilities that hit 2-3 mobs hard so it's very easy for me to spike threat in situations like this. Then the extra shield blocks and consecration should be plenty to hold them. So I think I should be looking for fights where we have a few more mobs than tanks and be thinking about mechanics for collecting them rapidly. Macro targeting works well for one mob. I wonder if it's possible to construct 2-3 mob macros -- something like a /targetsequence chain instead of a /castsequence chain. Currently, getting exactly the correct 2 mobs tanked is occasionally a problem. I grab one and the other runs and I have to try to grab and taunt it with the mouse, which is sometimes slower than ideal. If I shield throw, sometimes I get the wrong mob or one of the targets isn't in range of the bounce. If I can't come up with a macro solution, maybe I should just contract out initial threat on one of them to a hunter or rogue. If only we had more hunters and rogues.

Speaking of nostalgia, remember when the whole server was overrun with NE hunters and rogues? You couldn't swing a Thunderfury in MC without hitting 10 or more of them.

I've also been thinking about how to improve my AoE tanking efficiency. There are a couple of Glyphs that help with multi-mob damage that I don't use in my normal single-mob tanking gear (+2s to Consecration and +1 target to Hammer of Righteousness). That lead me to think about setting up a dual spec just to keep an alternate set of Glyphs around. I think I could tweak a second tanking spec to have a little more generic Ret damage too, which could also help. I've also been wondering about the Consecration mechanics. I know it gets buffed from both attack power and spell power. I wonder if it's affected by +haste. If so, maybe I can swap in a piece of either Ret or Holy +haste gear and increase the output a little. I could spare to lose a little defense if necessary. I think a little experimentation on the target dummies might let me figure the gear issue out.

I had been mulling over changing to a 2-tank dual spec even before I noticed last night that during some recent patch, my Holy second spec got reset. So now, I think I'll just bank the Holy gear for a bit and experiment with setting up a single and multi mob tanking specs/glyphs/gearsets.

If I get a some time to work on it over the weekend, I should be able to try out improved AoE tanking by Thorim next week. We struggled a lot with Thorim this past week and I really felt like my inability to keep the whole room of mobs locked down was a big part of the problem. I'd like to reconquer that Keeper next week so we can get back to properly wiping all night on Mimiron. :)

Heroic Flame Leviathan

Technically it was a 1-shot, but I think at least half the raid had see the boss fight before either on the PTR or in a 10-person group. The long vehicle fight preceding the boss fight is pretty fun and I suspect will be a nice warm up to raiding each Tuesday after Ulduar resets. It also gives time for people to learn the vehicles so they are ready for the boss battle.

We took down all four towers, of course. Maybe we should consider leaving one up next week just to see what happens.

After, we went to try Ignis, which we found to be hard. I think everybody is finding it hard, I didn't see any guilds on the server that got him. We didn't either, although it felt like we were making progress and maybe getting close. It's an awfully hard fight to heal through, though, and I think that will be the remaining challenge. Bloc came up with a nice approach to positioning and Ragon and I worked out a decent approach to the adds (I think).

When the trash respawned we went and took a look at the Deconstructor boss (sometimes called XT). It appears that boss is quite a bit easier and so is Razorscale, the third boss you can choose from after Leviathan.

Monday we'll go back again and maybe get one of these down (or even 2 if we're on a roll). Over the next couple of nights, hopefully we'll get some 10s going to give people some practice and experience on those bosses to prep for Monday.

10 < 25

I logged on early again last night, found I was still in the raid from Tuesday and zoned right in to Ulduar with no trouble. Talked to the NPCs, aggroed some mobs and ran out. So I was feeling pretty optimistic about our raiding chances as I went afk for a few minutes to take out my contacts and settle the rest of the regular evening stuff.

When I got back in, there were 3 of us in Ulduar (me, Kyoka and Sherider) but apparently everything was broken again and nobody else could get in. After yet another frustrating hour of standing around, we gave up on running 25 at 12:30 once more.

A bunch of people logged off to sleep and I was going to, but didn't right away. And then about 30m later, suddenly I hear some excited voices on vent -- "hey, I'm in. It's working." So we decided to pull together a 10 and at least see the mechanics of the first boss vehicle battle.

So we start randomly jumping in vehicles and driving around blowing stuff up, gradually working out the abilities, mechanics and goals as we went. There are a whole bunch of towers that spawn guys that need to be destroyed and 4 key towers that are marked with glowing spheres. Mandie told us that not killing those makes the fight harder in a Sarth + drakes style. We'll have to check that out someday.

I got my vehicle blown up by being a little too aggressive and spent most of this phase of the fight riding as a sidekick in Wiseman's motorcycle with no buttons to press. Which was annoying at first, but let me concentrate on figuring out the mechanics and positioning for that fight. It took awhile, but we actually ground our way through the whole gauntlet on the first real try. And then we found the boss, pulled and died.

We took another couple of cracks at it while working out the roles for the 3 vehicle types and when/how to catapult people onto the Flame Leviathan. We decided to catapult Sirtank and Hawksy right away (one dps and one healer to keep him alive). But we missed with Hawksy and ST was only able to kill 2 of the 4 things to kill up there. That problem persisted through a couple of attempts even as we got better at dpsing the boss.

We actually never figured out the catapult thing properly but somehow managed to scramble to a nearly-all-dead win on about the 4th try. We got a bonus for failing though when we all procced an achievement for winning the fight without dealing with the catapult/turrets properly, heh.

We pushed on a little bit after even though it was late. We wiped some on the trash to Ignis -- I think 2 tanks would have been better than 1 (just me) and we will need some practice on avoiding the flame cyclones. Then we pulled another boss (Incapacitator?) that had no trash and was pretty amusing -- it's a gigantic toddler robot boss. Again, >1 tank would probably be helpful for summons management, but it was nice to pull and see it.

With a little luck, we'll have a full 25 able to zone in tonight and do it again in real, Heroic mode. That should be even more fun.

Server capacity

3.1 released last night. I made special effort to clear my schedule, logged on early, paid for dual-spec, respecced, set up both specs. I even set up Major Glyphs for my holy spec although I couldn't figure out which Minor Glyphs I should have (Lay on Hand and ?). I cleaned up my inventory, checked consumeables, repaired, got symbols and headed off to Icecrown.

And sat there. Periodically trying to zone in to Ulduar and getting kicked out with the "instance not available" message. After about an hour or so, we gave up and decided to try to raid it tonight instead. I poked around on the forums as we waited and found a blue post indicating that their instance servers simply couldn't keep up with the demands to create new instances.

I wondered about why that was. Maybe the relative ease of Naxx meant that a much higher proportion of warcraft players were ready to set foot in Ulduar the moment it released? Or maybe the extra extended maintenance time meant even more groups were trying to get started at the same time. Normally, you probably see a distributed range of raid start times, but obviously a lot of people were trying to get in just as we were, which is later than most.

Hopefully it'll be sorted out for tonight.

In a somewhat curious contrast, I realized this morning that I never finished up submitting my taxes. I did them online via turbotax a few days ago, but wanted to check a few last things with my wife before sending them in. I was worried that their servers would be overwhelmed on tax day and I had this clever idea of doing it post-raid last night -- who'd be doing taxes at 2am? Well, fewer of us anyway. But disappointed with the raid not going, I forgot and so I was a little nervous this morning at 9am when I logged on to their site. But it worked fine. Not even any real lag or anything. I guess their servers held up just fine.

There might be 11million warcraft players, but there are probably more people than that who file their taxes on April 15th. Something for Blizzard to think about. ;)

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.

Naxxing

It's been a low-key week since we cleared everything Tues-Wed. On Friday, I did get on for a little bit for a venture into Sunwell. It was a raid in progress when I joined, so I wasn't too focused on analyzing exactly what was going on, but mostly I learned that Sunwell isn't trivial even for 25 80s. I heard Kalecgos took a couple of tries and Brutalllus just one. But Felmyst posed a puzzle. That dragon has a AoE mind control breath and we didn't have a clear sense of how to avoid it over a handful of attempts. If we go back again next week, I'll have to look into what to do.

Last night we did another jaunt through Naxx-10. It's a one-night clear, but if you are a bit slow or sloppy, it's a long night. And it was. But we got it done without too much trouble and even experimented with some achievements. (3m 2s again on Patch, heh).

Tonight is another planned attempt on Sartharian with 2 drakes up. We're hoping to experiment with some different group balances while we figure it out.

It's 2am, do you know where your content is?

Theoretically, we had all the "hard stuff" waiting for us to raid last night. We started in Heroic Naxxramas at 11:30pm and quickly polished off Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. Then we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum as planned.

Sarth + 2 drakes had been giving us a hard time with 10, but we had a basic plan for 25 and some optimism. It felt like the main problem with 10 was missing various abilities and synergies in our group and all that would be fine with 25. We started off our first pull by dying in the void zones and flame walls, but we still managed to see a bit of the fight with Vesperon active. We had been trying to guess in advance whether we should take 1 or 2 or all the portals to kill Vesperon's disciple and experimented with it for 2 pulls. Then we went ahead and just killed Sartharian and made it feel pretty straightforward. :)

We were only an hour and and a half into raid time, so we headed for Malygos. Bloc had never been to Malygos because the encounter was so CPU intensive his old comp couldn't keep up. So he asked what to do and we gave him the typical "first time noob" advice: you'll just die, but try to watch and learn for next time. And we 1-shot Malygos, too.

So, now what? The only Heroic content left in the world this week is the Vault. Right then, the alliance won the zone and opened up the instance, so we headed over. Well, first we swapped in a bunch of alts, noobs and stuff and went in with just 20 people. I'm not supposed to talk about what happened next -- what happens in the Vault, stays in the Vault. But it was still early when we finished that place and sharded all the Rogue loot.

And we ended up back in Dalaran because there was nothing in WotLK left to raid. So apparently all that discussion of a third raid night was pretty irrelevant. For next week, we can discuss whether it's worth pulling Sartharian with 3 drakes once or twice just to see it. There was an opinion expressed that we should perfect +2 first before seriously working on +3 and I think that may be true. But it might be worth getting a look at +3 just to see if we could surprise ourselves.

On Monday, we will try some different group composition ideas to see if we can work out Sarth+2 with 10. Other than the Glory of the Raider achievements, there's not much other progression to work on. Rumors are that 3.1 and Ulduar will be on the Public Test Realms in the not-too-distant future. Maybe we'll go mess around on the PTR and be ready to go right at release with the next instance.

Healing again

As expected I went holy again for Naxx last night. We'd discussed the use of alts and off-spec players in raids for the guild and decided our guideline would be not to when progression is at issue, but some improvisation is ok when farming familiar but lootworthy content like Heroic Naxx is currently.

I think I'm a pretty terrible healer in comparison to the experienced players. Recap showed me as pretty inferior as well. OTOH, meters don't measure healers well. I'd like to say that I never lost a tank I was supposed to heal, but I did on the Grand Widow. There was some confusion over the de-enrage and Ragonbadger got insta-gibbed while I was healing him. It might not have actually been preventable, but I should have been in constant-cast-and-interrupt mode as soon as the Frenzy hit. Dethno and Bloc went down in short order right after, but Stupidrenren picked it up from there and we managed to avoid the wipe.

Another moment that I might have erred was on Patchwerk when Bloc got insta-gibbed to 2 immediate hatefuls. Now, I wasn't healing Bloc, I think, but my Beacon on him was supposed to be helping except that Dethno didn't need any heals before he died. Again Renren stepped in but we lost 2 effective dps (Primux took the next hateful and renren couldn't dps much as bear). We ended up 7s short again. Maybe we'll get the achievement next week.

But in general, people I was trying to heal stayed alive. That doesn't really mean I wasn't useless, I don't really know how many people would have died if I hadn't been there at all. I have a sneaking suspicion the other healers would have been fine without me. I kinda expected that in advance, but the idea was with a 6th healer, we could avoid any delays during looting/afk -- at least I could keep running ahead and healing the tanks so they could keep clearing trash.

As a curious aside, I didn't actually die a single time for the whole run. Looking at recap after, I think I might have been the only person who could say that too. I guess there's something to be said for being the worst healer -- you don't ever draw aggro and die for sure.

We had a decent pace going for the evening, but started to slide a bit as it got late. We had a new MC-er for Razuvious (Draelnor in for Kyoka) so that took and extra try or two. We've ended up stopping there each of the last few weeks, so we pushed through the Military Quarter just on principle. There were some ready to press on further, but we called it there anyway. I'm trying to really stick to the raid end time to avoid burnout or too much pressure on people who have to get up in the mornings.

Tonight we should be able to do the Frost Wyrm wing quickly and head to the Obsidian Sanctum for more Sarth+2 practice. I'd actually like to be tanking for that, but maybe we need a 7th healer more. I guess I'll find out at 11:15pm tonight server time.

Sarth + 2 = Hard

Two drakes is really a lot harder than one versus Sartharian. Just adding Vesperon's debuff to the first phase of the fight versus Tenebron made it extremely difficult to survive. In fact, over 3 hours of attempts, I think we only made it past Tenebron once or maybe twice with a few deaths.

The main difference is the -25% hp debuff, which pushes everybody down into fragile territory. If mobs get loose, they pwn the healers quickly. The dmg builds up quite a bit so that I'm very vulnerable to a spike when I'm holding Tenebron, the whelps and possibly a handful of enraged blazes. And Dethno is vulnerable to a spike as soon as Tenebron goes down and Sarth enrages to +25% dmg.

It's also one of those typical Blizzard "mean to the tanks" fight. I don't know of any other battles where I'm expected to tank a boss level mob, 8-10 additional mobs and still find and taunt other randomly spawning mobs off the healers (the blazes). While moving to dodge the flame walls. While maintaining max threat so the drake dies in the available time. I'm using an ability every 1.5s for the entire fight and best of all there's no regular rhythm to it, it's mostly reactive to the circumstances -- the sequence changes depending on which flame walls we get, who draws aggro, etc.

I sensed a certain amount of frustration as we beat our heads against the fight, too. I think we weren't being creative enough. It's too easy to fixate on "solutions" like, "our gear isn't good enough," or "we need a shammy for heroism," or some unavailable approach. The morning after (now), I'm thinking we should have been trying to find ways to work in some more of our abilities. For various reasons we had talked ourselves out of using AoE or Frost Nova, which we have more of than a typical 10-person group. Once or twice when mobs were getting loose, I felt the absence of a real AoE taunt that Pallies don't have and Warriors do. A couple of times, I was tempted to suggest swapping up the tanking roles just to explore and in hindsight, I wish we had.

There's a tricky balance between practicing the same strat for efficiency and execution improvements and exploring new ideas or just trying weird stuff. We don't actually have a lot of practice grinding out really new content, so we might not have found the right balance here. We typically try to reason out (or read up) on a reasonable strat and then practice it until we get it. Sometimes it works such that it feels like no progress for attempt after attempt and then it suddenly clicks. But other times are like last night, where we might have been making it harder than necessary by being so fixated on our approach.

It also worried me that 2 people got really tired about an hour before the regular end of the raid time. That's unusual and suggests that we weren't having enough fun. Maybe we need to incorporate a regular schedule of every so many pulls, we try something goofy just to stay fresh and focused. Goofy could mean strats we didn't think would work, like taking the portals or using a lot of AoE and fighting both drakes at once. Or something crazy like kite-tanking one of the drakes with a mage & iceblock, or having a non-tank tank Sartharian until Tenebron is down. Even if it's a disaster, we might learn something, or at least get ourselves a laugh.

At least, in the end, we brought Bloc in to show off his new lag-free comp and did Sarth+1. It took 2 tries -- Bloc had never seen a flame wall render on his screen before, but boy did it feel easy in comparison.

Tonight it's back to Naxx for a full-speed 1-night clear (I hope). I think I might be healing tonight since we now have 3 functional warrior tanks and Tuesdays we're usually initially short a healer anyway (Hawksy). Should be fun.

Sick Bay

Who's brilliant idea was it to schedule a bunch of holidays in the middle of cold and flu season, anyway? Everybody in the Beros household is sick to varying degrees from sniffles to full-on flu. Worst, for RL management purposes, it's Mrs. Beros who's been hit hardest with the flu, which throws everything out of sync around the house.

Last night was supposed to be a raid night, but when I looked at the clock in my 2yo's room and saw it was well after raid start time but my phone hadn't buzzed with a "where are you?" txt, I knew something was up. The optimist in me thought maybe Bloc's computer had been delivered and the raid was going ahead with 3 tanks, but the pessimist wondered if the raid had fallen apart due to other no-shows. In this case the pessimist would have been right. At least my RL issues hadn't principally caused things to fall apart.

I still felt bad that I hadn't been able to warn anybody about my being late. It caught me a bit by surprise. In the late afternoon, it was clear that my 2yo was exhausted and usually that means an early bed time and no troubles with raid time. Mrs Beros had even made it downstairs to rest on the couch. But then the little one crawled onto her mommy and they both fell asleep. Which you'd think would be a good thing (and cute, too) except that the 2yo woke up full of energy an hour later and Mrs Beros didn't. So that meant a 90m+ bedtime routine that ran well past normal raid start time and my wife couldn't take over for me, as she'll do on normal evenings.

When I got on to apologize, I found out that we hadn't even had more than 15 people sign up for the raid, so there was never any real chance of going. If I hadn't been on sick duty Saturday night and all day Sunday too, I would have been able to get online and notice that, but oh well.

It seem that Sunday night may not be the best night for our 3rd raid night of the week. We'll see if Thurs or Mon are better. In the short term, we can also work on clearing everything in 2 nights -- which should be fairly doable, I think. Although long-term, when 3.1 & Ulduar are available, we may want to find a reliable 4-day/week schedule. Practically speaking, given that there are a few people who seem to prefer to keep raiding to 3, we may want to increase the size of our raid force again. I think we have the dps, but it looks like we might need 1-2 more healers. We have a handful of alt or off-spec healers available, but I think all the people who can do this also play important roles on their main in the raid.

We'll try again tonight and with any luck, RL will be kinder to all of us who had issues last night.

As a funny side effect of the raid not going last night, I actually was able to run a couple of heroics including Violet Hold, which I had never seen before. So that's something at least. I'd rather have been wiping and learning Sarth+2, though.

Some old school

Got on late, as usual for a Friday night, fully intending to do some Heroics. But I got distracted by the discussions of Sunwell or a Naxx pug. Then old friend Runabout asked if I could come help with a very old school lvl 60 raid quest: Blightcaller. I haven't been able to help him much with his leveling, guild or anything since he started playing again, so it was nice to have an actual opportunity to help since I had nothing else going on.

So I ran over there and pwned Blightcaller with some lowbie help. And laughed that it used to be a moderately challenging 20-person raid quest. Although, I do remember that it wasn't actually hard at all once you even had some MC gear.

Then somebody mentioned Onyxia and that reminded me I was planning to go try to solo Onyxia one of these days. I gave up on soloing it since the lowbies wanted to come and so did a couple of Noctambulists. Well, a few were going to, but only Aishi stuck out the call for reinforcements for Wintergrasp. We pwned her in no time flat and I don't think there was a healer in our group, which bodes well for a solo attempt some other day.

At that point, the people who had gone to support Wintergrasp reported it winning, so Leoruuc pulled together a 25 person pug to run the Vault. Which was pretty fun. It drops more loot than I realized too, we should do that more often. After we finished, we realized we had around 10 guildies in the pug, so we dropped down to 10 and did it again. No loot this time, though, just hunter gear Arikado already had.

Then I hung around doing the usual JC & cooking dailies for a bit before calling it a night. Maybe tonight I can inspire some heroic runs. Or maybe I'll get distracted into a Naxx run or something. If I end up getting on late again (it's possible, I hear it's some sort of holiday that couples with fewer than 4 kids get to celebrate) and there aren't any runs or spots open, I think I might actually go level my daughter's warlock. I haven't done any alting in a very long time and why not?