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?

Heroic Malygos

But first we had to finish Naxx. Once again, we were moving a little slow with a sloppy wipe on trash heading to Gothik. Then we wiped on Gothik again. I think that happened last week too. I don't have much insight as to what the problem might be as it's happening on the Live side. On the Undead side, mostly I'm sitting around marvelling at how fast the mobs are being destroyed by the dps. I don't think I technically need to even tank anything, they don't live long enough to kill anybody.

After the wipe, Ragonbadger whispers me that it doesn't look like he's needed on the Dead side either and he can go help Live. As is the normal method for strategy adjustments, it gets whispered to me, I raise the idea on vent and implement. It worked like a charm and we won easily. At the time, though, I had the funny sense that I was stealing credit from Ragon's insight into how to improve our strat. I intended to mention it after the battle -- that seems like the ideal way to give credit to the good idea person without them getting blamed it if didn't work. But I forgot to say it.

The reason I forgot was that immediately after the battle we had a rotation issue to deal with. Eyvindur had been fighting with a corrupted version of warcraft all evening and we did the fight with 24 waiting for him to fix it. Because we couldn't wait forever, we contacted Leoruuc about subbing in after Gothik. I also wanted to do that because Leo graciously volunteered to step out last night. Hawksy doesn't usually make it on Tuesdays and we had an extra healer.

However, the timing ended up poorly. Eyvindur got on just as Leoruuc agreed to come. Eyvindur then didn't understand why he was being replaced. Much discussion ensued. Everything was straightened out by the Four Horsemen, but I forgot to credit Ragon with the improvement on Gothik.

Then, IIRC, we wiped again on the Four Horsemen, but at least I remembered to DI Barantir, so we got a quick rez and did it properly the second time. No further wobbles from there as Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad weren't hard.

But that made it later than we would have liked to start on Malygos in the Eye of Eternity. We described the new strategy -- Dethno tanks Malygos around the rim, leaving his tail in the center to max our access to sparks. This requires more moving, quick reactions to the sparks and a lot of careful threat management. But saved us a lot of time on Phase 1. We weren't totally tight on the first try, but still got Malygos back to 8% at the enrage.

On the second try, we were very tight and although we still ran right up to the Enrage timer, we had him down fairly easily even though we had 3 people d/c for most of the fight.

Which was very cool, even though I fumbled my shield button, died at the last second, and didn't get the quest item (doh). It was so quick, we were actually about 30m ahead of the normal raid finish time. We tried reconvening in the Obsidian Sanctum, but it took 15m to loot and move everybody over. And looking at all the trash made me feel tired (and I wasn't the only one). Since everything would respawn and we'd run late getting even one pull at best, we decided to just call it a few minutes early and come fresh on Sunday. With 3 full hours, I think we'll figure it out to do Sarth+2, which will be another nice progression marker.

Tonight I think I'm going to take my weekly rest night. Tomorrow is both Valentine's Day and the 100th day of School celebrations in my 5yo's kindergarten class. :) But now that I finally hit exalted with Sons of Hodir and 450 Jewelcrafting, I think I really am going to work seriously on running all the Heroics I haven't done yet on Fri/Sat. Unless I get pulled into a Naxx pug -- Construct Quarter with 8, anybody?