38% solution

I was "cautiously optimistic" about the Illidari Council in BT last night. I find it's hard to really predict confidently what encounters we're capable of and when we run into a roadblock (e.g., Vashj pre 3.0, Archimonde after). I usually try to guess based on my estimate of how well I'm doing -- how often do I screw up my job, how likely do I think I can execute on the next pull. And then what are the consequences of an error. One reason I got pessimistic about Archimonde is that I felt like I was up around 95% as was most of the raid, but with 25 people at 95% it's a virtual certainty that somebody will still make an error (the math is left as an exercise for the reader). You kinda need everybody up near 99% to beat Archi. Vashj pre-3.0 was similarly unforgiving, but the patch nerf dropped the necessary performance rate a lot.

The Council is a complicated battle, so I mostly saw my own perspective. I quickly realized that I couldn't perfectly prevent the poison dot (Darksorrow appears to cast it while stealthed for 30s) but I made a shield throw macro and was able to grab him a couple of times before he had fully even rematerialized.

OTOH, it was very concerning that the stupid Mage would periodically vaporize Wiseman with an unsurvivable 16k bolt and we couldn't figure out a way to guarantee it wouldn't happen. We managed what we could, figured there was a risk of bad luck, and trying sending over backup (Taalo) in case of an emergency. On the winning pull, I don't think we even needed the backup and everybody executed their jobs (and avoided the AoE) very nicely. Although, I accidentally let a few people die to Darksorrow when I got carried away trying to help with the burndown at 5% and used up all my mana hitting Malande and couldn't shield pull Darksorrow back to me.

After a very extended discussion of the loots (gratz Hawksy, Dethno and Barantir on the T6), we went up and danced with Illidan for an hour. As advertised, it's a pretty hard fight. And Phase 2 is the key one. We got the pattern on Phase 1 down solidly (I'm guessing the fact that he doesn't Shear makes it a lot easier and less random). Phase 2 brings 2 big fire elementals. We experimented and found you can't seem to slide by with just 1 FR tank. I also explored all the conditions in which you can get one of the elementals to enrage -- bringing their dmg/swing from 5k to 40k (a lot even if you are resisting most of it).

On one magical pull, we pulled through Phase 2 with a bunch of people cranking and got a good look at the next piece: alternating Phase 3/4 where Phase 3 is similar to Phase 1 and Phase 4 is warlock tanking like in Leotheras. At 30% we get to see Phase 5, which is similar to Phase 1 with some kite-tanking to traps set by Maiev (assisting NPC).

Since we were left with the sense that we *almost* had it, we're going back. Tonight or tomorrow, whenever we can fill the raid.

One of the challenges we had last night was that the AoE spell effects, particularly the fire, completely overwhelmed Bloc's computer. I was worried about that, especially when he hearthed to go spend badges on FR gear. In hindsight, we should have had Bloc take Illidan and got Dethno to do FR tanking. Or some other rotation.

Post-raid there was some discussion of upgrading comps & video cards. Bloc's not sure he can afford to upgrade right now and as a result, it's impossible for me not to make a political point here. I'm actually fairly politically active and although I avoid bringing politics online as much as possible, sometimes it's unavoidable. There were reasons I celebrated myself into oblivion last Tuesday, but I won't go into those in detail now.

Something is just freaking wrong when a cop who works as hard as Bloc does and cares as much about his job as Bloc does can't afford to drop a hundred and a half on a new video card for his comp. Why is this a political point? Because cops, like firefighters, teachers, armed forces, etc., are paid by the taxes collected from the rest of us from our paychecks. Americans in general like to bitch about how much taxes they are paying and I think a lot of that comes from not being in tune with where the tax money goes. There was actually some (very) mild complaining about paying taxes in random chatter last night (it comes up periodically, like I said, it's typically American). Everybody across the political spectrum agrees that tax money shouldn't be wasted, but I'd like to think everybody should also agree that cutting taxes to short out the compensation to people like Bloc (or any of our friends who served/are serving overseas) is fundamentally immoral.

Maybe I'm just sensitive from some of the late recent campaign rhetoric that got thrown around about fearing "socialism" and/or the popularity of some forms of "taxes are theft" libertarian ideology to be popular on the internet. I find I run into two types of libertarian types -- young, smart, thoughtful people who go through a "libertarian" phase, and more entrenched types. Partly why I feel compelled to bring this up is that I've personally seen the smart ones get caught up in how cool and effective free markets are and then eventually drift back to the center as they start realizing life is a little more complicated (and sometimes markets fail). Being aware of the issues facing cops and the armed forces members in our group might be a useful step towards realizing that the world is complicated and therefore, so is policy.

Beasting new content

Yeah, it's nerf city in BT these days. We started with Reliquary of Souls, which is a fairly complicated battle. Practically, that meant we wiped once. Then we headed over to Teron Gorefiend. Not too many people had practiced on the simulator for how to react when the ghosts come, but we lucked out that one who had invested "several hours" (Tsuki) got ghosted first and handled it easily. Dethno got it second and having seen it before also handled it easily. Then we cruised through the trash to Mother Shahrazh and one-shot her as well.

As expected, we hit the first major bump at the Illidari Council. There's an awful lot going on in that battle. We did get a few looks at it and got them to ~80%. I felt pretty optimistic about the fight, but I guess I also felt pretty optimistic about Archimonde and we never managed to get that together.

The plan is to go back Saturday and see if we can get another win. It'd be pretty cool to actually get to pull Illidan before the expansion releases.

Bloc whispered me during the raid a slight touch of disappointment that we hadn't been doing more BT previously. I can see what he means since it seemed so easy. We could have taken a night or two we spent on Archi and come to BT, but it was hard to guess what was going to be the best investment of time. I think my original idea of working up from the old world raid instances to the T5's to build momentum worked out pretty well (we've been overfilling lately). Maybe we would have had the enthusiasm anyway, but it did seem to fire people up about raiding and it's nice to spend the majority of the time succeeding.

My experience with l8raid over the past year and change is that the hard part of raiding is keeping enthusiasm, morale and attendance up during the hard parts. We never seemed to quite have a big enough core of willing-to-wipe-all-night players. For awhile we had a big enough pool of people to choose from that we could always fill in enough people to field 25, but that meant always having new people, always re-explaining, regularly worrying about the gear or raiding knowledge of the new players. Over time, I know those worries wore out some of the core raiders, too.

The original idea for Noctambulists for WotLK was that we'd take advantage of running with 10 and form regular, consistent groups each night. Imagine showing up 5-10m before raid start time and knowing exactly when, where and with whom you were going to be raiding that night. Just the thought of not scrambling to find another healer, or explain to the overfull dps who was going to have to take the night off -- that happened again last night and I didn't enjoy it.

There will still be some challenges. First, forming up those groups of 10 runs the risk of somebody feeling left out. Second, we don't really have a lot of people who seem excited to be RL and we'll need at least 2-3 of them. Third, based on turnout from nights like last night, we're going to be back in the 25-person territory again pretty soon.

With luck, it'll sort out ok. Having a couple different 10-person groups means we can have one for people who want to raid 4 times/week and other groups that run slightly more casually and everybody can find their comfort zone. Also, the guild website has decent raid management and signup capabilities, which means we can pre-organize the 25s a little more easily. And if we suddenly find that 25-person Kel'thuzad is kicking our ass and we can't fill the raid, we can break back down into 10s and go raid the next 10-person instance instead of grabbing scrubs or sitting around for an hour or so waiting for people to log on.

More raiding, more winning, less waiting around, less uncertainty. That's the long-term plan.

The short term plan is back to BT on Sat. Sunwell was proposed for next Tuesday and was a popular suggestion. I'm even tempted to try a bonus raid on Sun or Mon. Maybe some extra BT on Sun? Maybe another crack at the Vials bosses for people on Mon?

Midnight next Wednesday is just not that far away...

Outland Loremaster

I found the last quests I needed in Netherstorm to finish off the Outland Loremaster achievement. Of course, while I was wrapping it up, Hawksy dinged the Kalimdor Loremaster achievement in guild, which is about a thousand times more impressive (I'm at 230/730 in Kalimdor -- that's just never happening to me). Then he explained to me over /guild where to find the last 4 quests I needed in Netherstorm, which I think shows you our relative loremastery status.

I guess the next things to grind before the expansion are the close-to-exalted reputations. I'm pretty close with Argent Dawn and Consortium so I can probably try to set up some runs to knock those off. I might take a shot at Sporeggar or maybe Kurenai. I'm actually not too far from exalted with Arathi Basin either, but I think I'll let that sit until I feel like killing an evening or three in AB some point down the road (e.g., at 80). I think I'm too far from the city factions to make a real run at those.

But none of that tonight, it's BT night again. I'll see if I can arrange a sober, on-time arrival. Or at least one of those. Looking forward to seeing some new content in there.

Gratz on Gurtogg

The problem with logging on to explain that you're too drunk to raid is that you might accidentally get caught up and end up raiding anyway. That's what happened to me after celebrating the election last night. At least I think that's what happened to me. I vaguely remember something about BT and I'm pretty sure I remember some bosses dying. I don't remember running back from the GY, so maybe it went pretty well? I wonder if I tanked anything.

I heard the raid went on to the first kill of Gurtogg Bloodboil after I finally gave up trying to get my eyes to focus and went to raid my pillow. That's impressive. Also impressive was raiding with effectively 24 people in the raid since I can't imagine I contributed much of anything. I hope nobody got left out so I could be a paperweight.

Of course, since I don't feel like I raided this week, I'm kinda wishing I could go back to BT tonight and kill some more. We only really have one week to see how far we can get in BT before the expansion next week. I wonder if everybody else would be interested in raiding every night, or at least every night until we hit a major roadblock. Or maybe people want to have a couple of nights to knock off the last couple of achievements before we don't worry about those for awhile either.

Black Temple tonight?

Did some achievement-oriented questing last night. To get Outland Loremaster, I just need ~20 more quests in Netherstorm, the other zones are all clear now. I don't seem to have a lot of them on my list atm, though, but maybe if I clear up some of these [2] and [3] quests, new ones will open up. I wouldn't mind a little more Consortium rep on the way either. I think I may try to get in one more Heroic Mana Tombs run, too. I'd like the key for that Stasis bubble just inside, but I think I'm going to need more Etherium Prison keys first. And to get help again like last night knocking off the bosses who come out of the Bashir's landing bubbles.

Pre-questing, Hawksy and I visited the dragon again. Still no joy, though. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Maybe the mitigation/prot strategy is misguided. The other possible way to go would be dps & healing in some combination of Ret/Holy spec and gear. If I could push my dps to 1500, it would certainly shorten the battle, but could I self-heal enough to live for 15 minutes? I wonder how much dmg she does if I go no def gear, no shield.

Last night we encountered an issue that with her knockbacks, Hawksy kept creeping up on me in threat during the long grind-down. I was able to counter it with Hand of Salvation mostly, but it did cut into our dps. I'm not sure why the threat was so touchy, I don't remember that fight being quite so tricky that way before (but it was a long time ago). The way we were doing it, it was clearly going to be a 30-40m fight. One the first attempt, we got a Warder respawn mid-Phase 2 that we couldn't cope with. On the next couple of attempts, we ran into trouble with Hawksy getting aggro or going oom during Phase 2. We decided to call it there and think about creative approaches rather than keep trying to execute perfectly for 30-40m.

Tonight, we planned to do BT, but there's this little election thingy going on down here in the U.S. today. It sure looks like waiting on returns isn't exactly going to keep us up real late, but there's always the possibility it'll be more exciting than the latest polling suggests. And then there's the possibility that the recent polling is way, way off. In which case, I'll probably end up delayed by the riots. It takes us middle-aged white guys awhile to flip over a car and set it on fire, don'tcha know?

Come to think of it, if the results come in anywhere near expected, it's a virtual certainty we're going to be celebrating with at least one pitcher of daquiris or similar. I realized this morning, I've never cast a presidential vote for a guy who got more than 50% of the vote. Even beyond the other reasons to celebrate, Mrs Beros + pitcher of daquiries >>> BT anwyay. So, I think I'm just gonna be late. Possibly real late. I certainly don't mind if the raid gets started without me. I can sub in late or even wait until the next leg. Or if other people are delayed too, maybe even just go tomorrow?

Outland Dungeon Hero

I guess I are one now. Ran 3 quick heroics last night. Which meant lots more pull-and-run-away, which still doesn't actually feel very heroic. Wtb, better mechanic than LoS pulling trash groups to keep an instance interesting.

Now what to achieve? Quests? Reps?

A little more T5

I got held up by RL, but Bloc got the ball rolling for SSC. It still took a little while to fill, but we got Vashj in a couple of tries. We briefly considered going back to MH, but decided to hit up TK and get Kael'thas for a handful of people who wanted that achievement. That took a few tries too, but in the end the mission was accomplished.

The consensus feeling was that next week we should probably see how far we can get into BT and see some new content there. Looks like we'll probably just have to come back at 80 to get the Archimonde, Illidan, and Kil'Jaedin achievements.

I should probably whittle my list of achievement goals down some since there aren't really that many more days before release. I still want to go back and get Onyxia first, though.