Yesterday’s post and last night’s raid got me thinking. We’ve had some pretty spectacular bugs in ICC since the patch.

I’m not talking about the week after 4.0 – that was madness, absolute madness. This is not the week after a patch. It’s been a long time. We’d expect most of the bugs to be worked out, right? Well…. not exactly.

Here’s a little list just from last night’s raid.

Rezzing Alive

When you release after a wipe, we’ve been spawning in the graveyard alive with 1 HP.

We are a PVP server. I absolutely love that my server is PVP, and I much prefer PVP servers. But that makes this bug a serious pain in the ass. Mages just spam Arcane Blast and wipe out half a raid rezzing and mounting. It slows down our wipe recovery by a minute or two each time. Yes, there’s a ledge you can jump down and rez on. The allies found it. They kill you there, too.

I hate this one. I hate this one so, so much.

Nothing against the lesser faction, of course. I’m not blaming you allies. I’m sure my Horde bretheren kill you just as often, if not more often. The rez alive bug, or mechanic, is at fault. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Blizz, if you really want to force us to PVP in the graveyard between wipes, we should at least rez with more than 1 HP.

Side Note: Amusing Myself At Your Expense

There are silver linings. I once saw an Ally DK die on the way back into ICC. He flew into the front hall and let his lag dismount him… and died from the fall damage. From about 5 feet up.

I laughed for a good long time.

Gunship Never Ends

Last night, Lootship went without issue. (Except the part where they pulled it without me, but let’s not talk about that.) Then it ended, we enjoyed our free heroic loots, ran over to Saurfang…. and we were still in combat. We couldn’t get out.

Then our healers started getting their asses kicked. Something was hitting them from afar. Apparently – even though the encounter was over – the enemy gunners were enraged and decided to whoop us… out of nowhere!

We eventually had to all jump off the edge to reset it. Mass suicide: the only solution.

Rotface

We pulled the boss by accident while the Raid Leader was still handing out loot in Festergut’s room. My favorite boomkin fatfingered his scroll wheel on a menu, and Wrath’d the boss. By reflex, I taunted, although half the raid sprinted out the door. We decided to keep killing him although at least 10 were locked out. The 15 of us in there would have killed him, too… but Rotface mysteriously disappeared at 18%. He must have targeted someone outside.

This wasn’t a huge problem – we’d just pull again – but the encounter wasn’t over. Oozes and puddles kept spawning outside the door… although Rotface had reset inside his room! Ugh. Someone finally reset the whole encounter by pulling and dying.

Then someone did it again. Someone at range pulled the boss with half the raid running back. Once again, oozes spawned all over the instance, and again, someone had to suicide at the boss once he’d respawned yet again to reset the whole thing.

I don’t know why we had so much trouble with encounters resetting last night.

Sindragosa Pulled Into The Room

Not really a bug, I know! This is your occasional punishment for attempting to reset Sindragosa by running away. :) I’m including it only because I have epic screenshots!

Tee hee. Sindy, u mad bro?

If you’re having trouble with this, let me give you some hints. It really helps if your whole raid comes down to the floor (no one waits up by the door) and then runs together, as a group, out of the room. If you pull the trash dragon up the stairs, you’re a lot more likely to bug her out. I promise, your whole raid can get out the door even if you kill the dragons where they spawn.

Comments Welcome

Seriously. Blizz owes us all some repair gold to make up for all these bug-resetting suicides we’ve had to pull lately.

So… anyone else have a good one? What is your favorite raiding bug?

I hope you all manage to put up with me for another week, because Rhidach’s on vacation yet again. Geez, does that guy ever raid?

Let’s talk about Sindragosa.

This fight has been massively buggy since 4.0. We’ve had some crazy issues- our first night raiding post-4.0, the 30% buff disappeared on us entirely. I’ve heard reports of tanks getting frost tombed, although we’ve never seen this, and supposedly it was hotfixed. Mystic Buffet debuff durations seem to be a few seconds longer than they should be in phase 3, which makes All You Can Eat a slightly larger pain in the ass than before. But doable.

The biggest bug, in my opinion, doesn’t seem to be a bug at all. I suspect the devs stealth buffed her breath. It’s a bit stinkier now.

Frost Breath Blues

Frost Breath is both the frontal cone attack and the 90 second attack and movement speed debuff that stacks on your main tank. In a pre-4.0 world, the debuff was just a very minor annoyance and fell off the MT by the end of each air phase. Now, it doesn’t. It appears to last about 20 seconds longer than each air phase.

I’ve seen a bunch of different explanations for why this is happening, ranging from “the debuff was always meant to act this way” to “the debuff is bugged and counting down one stack at a time” to “Paladins used to get 30% snare reduction from Toughness and they don’t anymore.” I don’t really care why it’s happening. The point is, if your MT just keeps stacking that thing up until phase 3, you’re pretty screwed.

The solution is to tank swap.

Tank Swapping Side Notes

Swap on every air phase. We also swap right as Phase 3 pops so she starts Phase 3 with an undebuffed tank.

For the swap, I highly recommend taunting the dragon before she flies into the air – instead of waiting for her to land after the air phase. Your post air phase pickup will be much cleaner.

Call for Hands of Freedom liberally. Our raid has 7 pallies. I use my own all the time on this fight, but I really like to get other people to pop theirs on me and then chain mine on the end. The pallies in our raid are already used to HoFing the tanks all the time and rarely do I even need to ask.

Use your Rocket Boots. Oh, wait… not everyone is gifted with the most glorious profession in the world, Engineering. I am so glad I powerleveled Engineering a few weeks ago. I dearly love that speed boost.

Bad Breath Won’t Stop Us

We’ve done both heroic Sindy 25 and All You Can Eat since the patch without much trouble. For All You Can Eat, the first tank swap is still a bit sticky, and we ended up holding DPS on the dragon to transition her right after an air phase. If you transition her at the “end” of a ground phase, one of the tanks will have 2 stacks of the movement debuff. If you transition her right “after” an air phase, it works much better- one tank is clear and the other is almost clear.

I don’t mind tank swapping at all. Actually, I like it better! Pre-4.0, this encounter really sucked for the off tank. It was my least favorite fight to OT (with the possible exception of being third tank on Putricide).

I’ve seen people argue that this encounter was originally designed to require two tanks the whole time. If that is true, I sort of wish it had been like this from the start.

You might have seen from the blog posts or from our twitter feeds that Enveloping Shadows recently switched from to Mumble from Ventrilo. Here’s a little story about why we switched and why I’ve fallen completely in love with Mumble.

Primary Target Can Suck It

A few months ago, the small company that used to manage our Ventrilo server got bought out by Primary Target. They changed our server information, and then a slew of technical difficulties began.

The lag was unbearable for weeks. Vent would disconnect randomly at the most inconvenient times, kicking everyone out of the raid. We ended up raiding at least once on a public vent because ours crapped out in the middle of Heroic Putricide 25, while we were learning it. To add insult to injury, Primary Target apparently “lost” the prepayment our officers made for the original server. And their customer service was plain awful – the officers got in touch with them to try to figure out what was going on, and got no information whatsoever. Their customer service sucked and gave us no hope that anything would get better, anytime soon.

After a few weeks, our poor officers sighed and decided we’d have to move. Since we were switching anyways, we opted to give Mumble a try.

Mumble For The Win

I don’t know all the technical differences between Mumble and Ventrilo, nor do I really care about going into them in this blog post. You can go read plenty of other sites for that. As a tank, a very talkative person, and a weekend raid leader, here’s my impression of Mumble post-switch.

1) Sound Quality

It just plain sounds better. Vent sounds awful and scratchy in comparison. And voice modulation! I know you can do this with Vent, but Mumble does it so much better! Hearing the whole raid swoon as Mumble automatically modulated down the voice of a certain holy pally who enjoys screeching at the raid when something goes wrong… it was truly amazing.

2) People Can Talk Over Each Other

We have a talkative vent. People talk right over poor Rhidach constantly – he doesn’t just have to yell, he has to really moan and groan and threaten to quiet us all down, and even then people will start right back up with the banter when he’s done going through a strat. We will gleefully poke at each other, mock each other, and discuss everything from class changes to whose child is cuter straight through into a progression pull until a difficult game mechanic (or an irritated tank) shuts everyone up. We will also enter into a strategy discussion – a ton of us will – with equal gusto, and we like to hang out in vent for hours after raids. When we learned Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa, the hardest adjustment might have been to keep vent “clear” for plague call outs, healer calls and tank swaps.

We talk over each other. A lot. Vent sounds like crap when two people try to talk at once. Mumble doesn’t sound perfect, but you don’t get that crazy feedback noise, and you can hear everything said by each person.

3) No Latency. No Delay.

I have a lot of silly pet peeves. Raid calls are one. I get very, very irritated when someone takes it upon themselves to call something out and they call it out late. I watch raid warnings and listen to vent simultaneously, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a raid warning pop and heard a call just a half second or second later… and thought, with irritation, “That wasn’t exact. Why call it out?”

Little did I know, this was a Vent delay issue, not a raid awareness issue. Because as soon as we switched to Mumble, that mysterious and hard to quantify delay just… disappeared. I now hear calls simultaneous with raid warnings.

Oh my god, it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. As a raid leader, I was sold from the first Heroic LK pull. You don’t understand until you hear someone call a Defile target RIGHT AS the raid warning pops. It’s really cool.

Check out my post a few days ago on Heroic Halion, where I talk about how the healers yelled at people who had Combustion. I’d be willing to bet that Mumble over Vent made a difference as far as response time goes. I am an aural person. I respond better to sounds than visual cues, which is why I always play with game sounds on. Switching to Mumble was a game-changing experience for me.

The End Result

I don’t know if Rhi feels as strongly as I do. I know the whole raid was extremely skeptical, especially the day we lost about half an hour before raid while everyone found the client and installed it. And yet within an hour or so, everyone was completely sold on the new service.

Even though we’ve had some technical difficulties with Mumble, too, the people we’ve got the server from have been great about communicating with us when something goes wrong and when it’s likely to be fixed. Customer service is really worth a lot. No one’s said a thing about returning to Vent. I’m sure Mumble isn’t for everyone, but it sure has worked well for us.

Links: Here’s a nice little Youtube video with a display of Mumble’s latency vs Vent’s latency. The Mumble website, and a link to Multiplay, the company we bought our Mumble server from (they’re great!)

Hey all, remember me? It’s Anafielle! I still have author privileges! Rhidach hasn’t taken them away since I got up on TV and claimed the blog was mine! He did threaten to gkick me, but luckily I have blackmail photos from Blizzcon. /cackle

Since Patch 4.0 killed my usual 10 man raid, I’ve been enjoying my free Sunday nights. I’ve been taking advantage of my spare time by … playing more wow. And so, on Halloween night, I found myself talked into coming along to a raid I had wanted to see for some time: Heroic Halion 10.

Ruby Sanctum

Our setup: dual pally tanks, three heals (including a priest spec’d into Body and Soul), and five high DPS. We stuck Antigen from Haz Mace Will Raid with fire side tanking in his offspec. Poor guy.

We almost wiped on a miniboss when all three healers went offline due to phone calls or Trick or Treaters ringing the door. Both tanks died, but our co-GM and resident pro hunter kited the miniboss from 11% to zero while those of us who were dead panicked and then started cheering on Mumble.

It just wouldn’t feel like a Ruby Sanctum raid without a trash wipe.

Heroic Halion: Notes on Phase 1

The fire side tank should pull the dragon from the left side of the room. We pull Halion about halfway off the center and keep him facing to the left. Each time the meteor falls, we don’t care where it lands- the entire raid runs through the dragon.

DBM gives raid warnings for Fiery Combustion / Soul Consumption targets, and several people would calmly call out the target, just to remind them. Our snare droppers got to the edges without issue. Speaking of which, our guild recently switched to Mumble, and it really shined on a fight like this. I used to hate Vent delays on critical call-outs. Mumble has no delay. It’s amazing. We’ll never go back.

I suck at Combustion / Consumption. I tunnel vision’d a few times, and jerked awake only when I heard a healer call my name. Thank god for Engineering. I smacked my Rocket Boots and got to the edge in time to drop a tiny circle like a pro. Psh. Me? Tunnel vision? Noooo. (I did this at least three times.)

Between Rocket Boots and Body and Soul, our snare droppers had no issues at all. Our ability to deal with this mechanic without screwing it up vastly simplified the fight.

Shadow Realm Tanking

I was the Shadow Side tank. No, I do not turn the dragon the whole time. I stare at orbs and only move for Cutters. I turn the dragon with pure strafing and a little bit of forward movement. Wrathy posted an excellent guide on dragon turning some time ago that’s worth a read.

Here is my own guide to cutter survival:

• Observe the two orbs across from you.
• Center yourself between them.
• Hit strafe as needed.
• Enjoy your continued survival.

You get a ton of warning when cutters pop- there’s a DBM timer, as well as a convenient emote built into the fight that gives you about 2 seconds more warning. When the cutters were a few seconds from activating, I’d made a judgement call about whether to sit in my “pie piece” or move to the next “pie piece,” whichever one took the least movement.

Positioning is scarier on heroic, because the stakes are higher, but here’s the secret: it’s easier. Two reference points is better than one.

Shadow Realm Survival

All we really had to do was keep everyone alive through cutters. This took about two hours.

It was my first time tanking Shadow Side on heroic – and I rarely ever tank Shadow side even on Normal 25 – so it took me more than a few tries to get a feel for when to move the dragon, how fast to turn him, and how to move him predictably.

Predictable movement is the key to tanking a fight over and over. No one wants a boss jerking around randomly. And Halion definitely jerked around a bit when I was first getting the hang of it. I would adjust him pretty quickly, and pretty “late”, right before cutters. My goal for phase 2 and 3 was to get my movement as smooth and predictable as possible, but at the start of the evening, I was far from smooth about it. I figured it would be ok because we were all watching the orbs to stay alive.

It turns out I was wrong. Several of my raiders were only watching the dragon.

Watch the Orbs AND the Dragon!

I know it’s my job to get the dragon positioned right, but I didn’t realize that there were people in the raid who never looked at the orbs. This wasn’t going to fly. There’s too much delay if they just position on the dragon. You need to watch both. But at least two of the healers told me that the dragon was in the way, and they were actually incapable of seeing orbs anywhere in the room. Their only possible reference point was the dragon.

I get a little irritated when people tell me they can’t do something that their fellow raiders are doing just fine. One of the healers was seriously fighting with me, like it was my fault she died to cutters. Well, I know when I screw up, and I do it all the time and call myself out on Mumble for it. But I stand my ground when I’ve got something right. I was tanking it right, and her awareness needed some work. Her survivability was partially my job, but she needed to take some responsibility for it, too.

I pulled out an argument I save for special occasions: “Maybe Rhidach can do it that way, but I’m not him, so you’ll have to deal with me. If I’m tanking, you need to figure out some way to watch orbs. I will not have the dragon moving so perfectly that you can survive just by looking at him. So let’s all agree to be better- I will adjust earlier, and tell you when I’m moving. And you will glance up at orbs when DBM shouts at you that cutters are about to come, so you don’t die. Now, pull it again.”

And then we pulled again. There’s something to be said for winning a fight by steamrolling the competition. I wasn’t even the raid leader, but most of the time when Rhidach’s not around, I end up as the de facto raid leader since no one else steps up. People tend to listen, and I take advantage of it.

To be fair to the people having trouble with cutters, I made a serious effort to be as vocal on Mumble as I could possibly be, and I moved the dragon a lot more preemptively. I tanked better for it.

The End

It really wasn’t much more complicated than that. We just had to live through cutters. Eventually, we all lived through them … and he fell over and coughed up the purps! After just two hours of work. Not too shabby. What was so hard about that? /preen /highfive

Halion Heroic… what a fun fight. I can’t believe we didn’t hit it before.

It was challenging, and very punishing of anyone with low raid awareness, yet extremely doable by a relatively competent 10 man raid once everyone watches their surroundings. I actually thought that was one of my favorite fights on 10 that I’ve done recently, and it felt good to kill it. A sunday night well spent.

My 10 man is technically working on Heroic Lich King. However, last Sunday was Labor Day Weekend – a few key raiders were missing, and I myself was exhausted from moving all week. So, instead of progression, I bowed to some pleas from five raiders very, very close to their Icecrown 10 drakes and took a “drake raid” into ICC.

We only needed to get All You Can Eat, Heroic Putricide, and Been Waiting A Long Time For This (the LK achievement). Easy, right? A few drake-owning experts came along for shits and giggles, I cracked a beer or three, and we all hopped on vent for a relaxing night.

Uhhhhh…. or not so relaxing. Some of those are still hard for us! But hell, we got them done, and it was a lot more fun than H LK would have been.

Professor Putricide 10 (Heroic)

Heroic Putricide is very much on my mind these days – he’s our current 25m progression, and I think he’s the toughest achievement you need for the drake. Here’s an overview of some of the things I’ve done to make him cough up his seriously nice purps.

Oh, a note on raid composition: I have successfully 2 healed and 3 healed this fight. It can be done either way. As I have learned, you want 4+ melee-range bodies (pets count!) to mitigate green explosions, and you really want 5 ranged to handle the disease.

Transition: Many Adds! Handle It!

There are two adds. The abom driver should slow orange. A very pro abom driver can slow both adds by slowly eating slime in phase 1 and entering the transition at 100 slime power.

We stacked most of the raid on the Green spawn point to eat explosions, burned down green while the orange target kited, and then switched over to Orange.

Green Adds: Green explosions are a lot more dangerous on heroic, and will kill people if you don’t have enough bodies stacked on the target. We had no pets, and our melee had to be very pro about stacking. Be aware that if melee are chasing behind green at max melee range, they might not eat the explosion. Their #1 priority should be STACK, so everyone lives, with the #2 priority being KILL IT DEAD. Remember, surviving is key. At 30% on 10 man, this fight is not a DPS race at all.

Remember that you can control where you fly when Green explodes by positioning yourself around him. Don’t explode towards your current Plague Carrier. Don’t explode towards Orange. If orange picks you, and you explode towards him, you will die. In fact, the best thing to do is to try to explode towards the back wall.

Orange Adds: Putricide 101 – if orange stops chasing his target and casts Gaseous Bloat again, he is picking a new target! The melee need to Run The Hell Away before he picks one of them and wipes the raid.

Unbound Plague

We set a strict Plague Order for unbound plague. Five ranged, five possible plague targets.

I copied something I saw Aliena do in the tankspot video – I made a /y macro with the plague pass order and put it on a convenient key so I could smack it every so often and remind the raid. Ranged can also, you know, write it down.

Quarantine: We designated a single spot in the room the “plague spot.” If you have plague, stand there! It’s in the center, near the door to the room – the plagued person stood in the “bar.” This simplified plague passing so much. Each ranged knew exactly where to go to get the plague. Everyone knew where NOT to stand so they didn’t accidentally get plague. If a melee got it first, the melee would run over to the right spot and stand there for a moment until Ranged #1 came and got it.

Passing Plague: Each person held it for 10-12 seconds, and passed it. The current plague’d person always called out for the next in line to come get it. I had an emergency melee paying attention in case there was a plague mixup and we needed a 6th plague carrier. (This was Antigen, whose high RA unfortunately means he gets stuck with a ton of the bitchy jobs.)

There are a lot of different ways to handle Plague. Some raids use a Quarantine area for people with Plague Sickness (the debuff). Some raids don’t bother with a safe spot or with an order – they just pass it naturally around the ranged. Different strategies work for different people. This is what worked for us.

Editor’s note: When I wrote this post, I wasn’t aware of the addon Plagued. This addon does things like counts down the plague timer in /say over the plagued person’s head. It might negate the need for a designated safe spot, and will definitely make passing a whole lot clearer! We plan to use this on 25 and I really can’t wait to see it. We will probably not have to use a safe spot anymore.

Just Kill Him Dead

The key is to keep everyone alive. Don’t mess up explosions, don’t mess up diseases. As long as your ranged can handle the disease, your DPS can handle the transition phases, and everyone can make up for the extra damage done and received on Heroic, Putricide will fall over and cough up his ridiculously sexy purps.

Oh, I suppose I already mentioned what he drops. Ah, you see, Putricide drops this trinket… it’s pretty nice… Have I linked it enough yet? No? OK, I’ll link it again.

Oh, you know, just one more time for good measure…

Patch 4.0 is upon us, ladies and gentlemen. It’s on the PTR.

MMO-Champion estimates the Cataclysm release date at November 2.

The end is nigh.

It sure took its sweet time coming.

Beta News Overload

May. That’s when the Beta opened. Cataclysm news has swamped the wow community for four full months now. And don’t even mention last year’s Blizzcon, or the months of alpha leaks. The wow community has been saturated with all Cataclysm news, all the time, for so long.

Those in the beta struggle daily now with the grossly unfamiliar and the radically redesigned, the poorly-tuned and the just plain broken. Meanwhile, the rest of us mere mortals content ourselves with the incredible volume of information emanating from the beta.

There’s a lot to take in. The people in the beta are getting an imperfect albiet closer look at it all, and the most of us left out have only the inevitably biased views of the masses by which to judge.

Mainly, we find ourselves swamped with the QQ, the fighting, the cheering and the ranting that inevitably results when an online world with 11 million incredibly passionate believers finds itself faced with a radical redesign to practically every working aspect of the game. Positive reports are few and far between.

Passionate people, angry or otherwise, are most likely to be the loudest voices online, and so those voices are the ones that seem to define the character of the beta process – at least for me.

This can be a little wearing for the rest of us.

Losing Heart and Losing Steam

Don’t get me wrong. I want people to care.

For example, I desperately wanted Rhidach in the beta – no one better to judge with a discerning eye how the my beloved class and role would function in a post-cataclysm world. I’ve followed Gravity’s detailed descriptions through alpha and beta, Kurn’s holy pally musings, the healing experts at World of Matticus, World of Raids’ occasional videos, and Rilgon’s up and down journey through the beta hunter. I even put World of Raids’ Blue Tracker in my Google Reader.

I want skilled communicators and talented players rigorously testing my beta. That’s the whole point of a beta. Cataclysm absolutely depends on the dedication of its testers and the quality of their feedback.

But I’m not a tester. I’m just a newshound. I’m your garden variety forums lurker, avid tweeter, and half-assed blogger. I’m two or three degrees of separation away from anything close to actual Cataclysm experience.

It used to make me interested. Angry. Happy. Excited.

Now? Now… I’m just tired. I can’t get engaged in it.

Cataclysm is interesting to me in a far-off, clinical way. I vaguely want to read about what’s going on, but I just can’t get worked up about it anymore – not until it’s on my live servers, affecting my life.

Cataclysm Won’t Be Perfect

I welcome new things, even broken new things. I don’t even expect it to be perfect, or close to it. Wasn’t anyone around for WOTLK? It’ll probably be ass-all broken for months! And god help me, I’m looking forward to it.

I want it to be as perfect as possible, of course, but that’s the job of the beta testers – I can get worked up about it, but it doesn’t do anything for me. All it does is make me depressed!

There will be rage when Cata drops. Oh, the world will rage. I expect enough flaws to fuel a veritable avalanche of QQ and tears enough to fill six oceans. Twitter will break, #Cataclysm will trend, and the intertubes will clog up with the cries of ten million warriors claiming paladins are still OP. Or something like that.

I can’t wait. Even if I have to rage myself. Even if I end up spending my time complaining about how my class is broken and begging for fixes – I want Cataclysm here and now!

I can’t wait for all the new information Cata will bring. There will be tons of daily, informative blog posts here courtesy of my (thank god) concise cotank. There had better be blog posts over at Avenging Wrathy. There will be so many Maintankadin forums threads from the best and brightest minds in my community, full of delicious maths, pages of code, colored graphs and truckloads of theorycrafting. Unlike beta posts, all these things will be directly relevant to my live servers. I want them here now!

For good or for ill, broken or working as intended, Cataclysm will be something fresh and new and interesting.

It’s just so far away.

But you know what’s right here? WOTLK.

The End of WOTLK Is Nigh

Patch 4.0 now – suddenly – looms before us. An end to Lich King raiding for good. If you’re anything like me, you’re suddenly thinking: 1) Thank goodness! Cata’s finally coming! And then… 2) Oh my god, I still have things to do!!

There’s a time limit on WOTLK now. Suddenly I’m jarred out of my vague beta-related depression and back into the world of Arthas. I don’t have time to wallow in indecision or lose focus. Soon, just a few weeks away, WOTLK raiding will come to an end for good. I’m glad its coming, but I still have things to do! We only have a few weeks left!

How do I want to spend the last two months of this expansion?

Do I want to look back on the end of WOTLK and see that I slowly faded away, letting my frustration with the state of the beta and my exhaustion with ICC color how I approached my endgame goals? Do I want to let my 10 man lapse out of self-doubt, laziness, or lack of focus? Do I want to slowly give up on everything, right when it’s finally getting difficult?

For me, the answer is no!

Enveloping Shadows still has tons of raid content ahead, within our grasp: an 11th heroic boss on 25, and Drake achievements to gather. I sure would like to wipe a bit on Heroic Halion 25 and (gasp) Heroic Lich King 25 as well. And I still have yet to break the top 100 on WOL for Heroic Festergut, to my great disgrace! Ugh!!

This expansion is not over for us yet!

So you guys in the beta, keep plugging away. I love your posts, but I’m not going to let the fighting and the raging screw with my head anymore.

I’m going to focus myself on the here and now, for me: the end of WOTLK.

Rhidach wasn’t around for last night’s raid. I tanked last night with Antigen of Haz Mace Will Raid, who dutifully threw on a prot set to hang out with me at the super-exclusive Boss Crotch Club.

I feel like yesterday was opposites day, but no one remembered to tell me about it. Three difficult bosses (Halion, Saurfang, and Blood Princes) were as simple as pie, while unquestionably farm bosses (Marrogar and BQL) decided to present us with a string of problems.

Halion 25N

Halion was an easy kill with no deaths at all. I really have to practice my strafing movement as per Wrathy’s excellent guide, because I strafe too much without moving forwards and have to adjust sometimes. But it was mostly right, and he died with ease.

The real challenge in Ruby Sanctum remains the trash. We made it through all the trash without wiping, even though we face-pulled two of the mob groups and failed to CC the Commander on one of them. That, in itself, I felt was worthy of progression DKP!

Marrogar 25H

I feel like Tricks of the Trade has to come with a tooltip that says something like “Best used on unsuspecting healers,” and our three rogues gleefully comply. Usually it’s a fun game to hold threat while the healer finds their Tricks cancel macro, and one Rhi and I invariably win. But I wasn’t expecting it, and so while I was positioning Marrogar (read: backing away while he wandered over to me) our resto shammy pulled threat. Marrogar cleaved half the raid. I blame only myself. Never again will I position a boss like a lazy bum.

The fun didn’t stop there. Antigen’s telepathy is strong, but just wasn’t good enough to keep up with my random coldflame dancing when I am lazy about calling out where I’m moving. We went opposite ways on a coldflame, and I ate a unmitigated Saber Lash and dropped like a rock. Battle rezzes were down. I spent the rest of the fight skillfully tanking the floor while Antigen stared down boss crotch like a pro in nothing but offspec tank gear and 3 or 4 million health to go.

It was nothing short of hilarious to watch a string of plate DPS come up to the front of the boss one by one, like a queue of lambs approaching the alter, ready and willing to be slaughtered at the whim of RNG. Each one popped whatever mitigation cooldowns they had and slowly died, one after another, until the boss finally hit the floor.

Lady Deathwhisper 25H

This is how pros kill Lady D.

Saurfang 25H

A night of farm hilarity was marked by one gloriously easy kill.

I posted yesterday on Saurfang Blood Beasts. I owe everyone on twitter thanks for helping me, but the best advice without question came from FeistTheRogue – who recommended using less healers – and Matticus from World of Matticus, who told me a fabulous DPS trick that gave us critical extra time on beasts.

One of our trees went Boomkin, giving us access to 2 Typhoons and leaving us with 5 healers. A much, much better setup.

I had been using the wrong DPS strat all along. I had originally told the ranged to burn the left side beasts first, while we stunned the right side ones and killed them second. This is great for 10, but really a stupid plan for 25s. Instead I told the ranged to kill the beasts on the opposite sides from them (as they could). The boomkins Typhoon’d, the ele shammies traded off with Thunderstorm, and we used Frost DK Chillblains for an AE slow as usual.

We had a huge positioning error in the center and Saurfang gained blood power ridiculously fast from Nova. But it didn’t matter. Beasts were cleanly, cleanly killed. He went down like butter, and the fight felt a ton easier than usual.

That felt damn good.

Blood Prices 25H was an easy one-shot with no deaths at all. The tried-and-true “If you’re melee, FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T ATTACK VALANAR” strategy proves its worth yet again.

Blood Queen Lanath’el 25H

Dear Fury Warrior #494509865069845.

I understand a little bit about how you think. I know. I have Festergut, and you have BQL. Penis size is roughly proportional to the length of the Recount DPS bar, and BQL is without a doubt the best chance to prove that you are at least four inches more e-manly than the next best asshole in the raid. Actually, I think gearscore factors into the penis math there somehow too… but I digress.

But let’s get one thing straight. If you have been DC’ing all night, if the raid waits 3 or 4 minutes on you to reconnect right before BQL, and your raid leader shrugs and says “We can 24 man this with ease, let’s just do it.” … Don’t go balls to the wall and get the first bite.

My squealing, girly admiration for the vast size of your epeen will fall before my fury at wiping on the easiest Heroic mode of them all when you inevitably DC, especially when it costs us the Blood Wing weekly.

Not to mention, doing this to my favorite holy pally:

I am very protective of my precious tank healers, and that lights my goddamn fuse. (Side note: She was annoyed at the time but later mused, “He’s getting better at it. The circle was cleaner tonight.” I guess practice makes perfect.)

So. Fury Warrior. It’s probably not worth asking me anymore if I have a spot for you in my ICC Lich King Heroic 10 man. I’ve got at least fourteen people requesting a spot every week, and you’ve now cemented your spot at the bottom of the list, somewhere after my 12 year old cousin’s level 34 rogue and Morvain’s cat. So stop asking.

We wiped, and then we killed. End of story.

Fate is a Huge, Huge Bitch

A note on Rhidach’s absence. He wasn’t on vacation. He was on standby.

This guy is 100% committed to his guild and our extensive standby system, which he forced into place despite guild politics and drama. He has endured months of complaints, rants, drama, and whining, and stood strong despite all the irritation people who hate standby have thrown at him.

He saved the guild, without a shadow of a doubt. We kept raiding throughout the summer with 30 to 35 people signed up week after week while competing guilds dropped dead from boredom or attendance problems. And his commitment to the standby system that originally brought me to this server is so strong that this week he put himself – the raid leader, GM, and main tank – on standby, just to be fair.

Fate really is a bitch.

The one, single item, that he has always wanted most out of ICC – which he has been jokingly bleeding my DKP for – the one thing which he has lusted after and posted about for ages, and fully deserved, and which I knew he’d win off me and secretly wanted him to have…

… of course, it would drop tonight.

Winning it for 1 DKP made me feel bad. I didn’t even have the heart to joke about it.

On the other hand, he has the BQL 264 shield. I however have seen absolutely nothing shield-like drop for months, and pathetically, I was using the Gunship 10 shield. The normal shield. Yes…. the 251 shield.

And so a minor upgrade for him became a massive, massive upgrade for me… and therefore, probably, a better upgrade for the raid.

RNG works in mysterious ways.

Hello everyone. Anafielle takes over the blog yet again, inflicting yet another novel of a post upon Rhidach’s unsuspecting readers! Ha ha! The ursurper tank strikes again! So let’s talk about Saurfang 25H, a fight that’s been very much on my mind lately, even though Enveloping Shadows has supposedly had it on farm for weeks.

Flashback to the First Kill: July 27th

Our first Hard Mode Saurfang kill occured about a month ago, when Rhidach was gone, an odd week when I found myself main tanking a raid I was still getting to know. Without Rhidach there, I was hoping to very quietly main tank while someone else Raid Led – after all, the main tank doesn’t have to be the raid leader, right? Yet I reluctantly found myself in the driver’s seat. Saurfang was, at that time, progression. I had taught two separate 10 mans how to do this fight on Heroic, so I was without a doubt the resident expert. I also have more than my fair share of “Well, if no one else is going to do it, I sure as hell will” in my personality.

So when we got to Saurfang, I took the lead. We killed him, and it was a point of pride for me that we progressed without Rhi. Many gloating messages and kill screenshots were text messaged to him that night. I do so enjoy misusing peoples’ phone numbers.

Rhidach eventually got his revenge. Somehow Saurfang has remained my job regardless of whether Rhidach is there. My illustrious cotank leads the entire rest of the raid, but when we get to Saurfang, he just waits for me to step up. I envision him sitting back and relaxing when we get to that 4th boss, cracking a beer and calling for his girlfriend to bring him a sandwitch while he lets his overworked and underpaid offtank do all the work for a moment.

I guess part of raid leading is delegating, and Saurfang gets delegated to me! Well, I’m not complaining. Much.

Blood Beast Blues

We’ve killed Saurfang every week since that first kill without too much trouble. So, technically, he’s on “farm.”

However, every kill is messy – and I mean 6 or 7 marks messy. We’ve even wiped a few times. This is the least “farm” fight of any of our farm fights, and that includes more recent kills.

This is totally unacceptable to the relentless perfectionist in me. Beasts are not being CC’d enough and they are not dying quickly enough – leading to dead ranged and thus Blood Power, or ranged who have to kite towards other people, which leads to Blood Nova, which leads to Blood Power.

So, I sat down this week to overhaul my strategy. This meant pulling out my Raid Leading notebook (yes, I keep a notebook next to my desk) and taking a good look at my list of Blood Beast Control Methods – a list of stuns, slows, snares, immobilizations, and general tactics to keep those beasts away from the ranged.

Blood Beast Control: A List

If something on this list is wrong, for god’s sake, comment and let me know. I don’t have every single stun, snare, slow, or tactic for this fight memorized. A great deal of thanks goes to my twitter feed for helping me out with tactics I didn’t know of & clarifying things for me. The idea is to build a useful list for everyone, and here’s my start. I’ll edit as people comment.

Knockbacks

• Boomkin: Typhoon
• Ele Shaman: Thunderstorm, if de-glyphed (every other spawn)
• Fire Mage: Blast Wave, if specced

Slows

• Mage: Slow, if specced (single target)
• Shadow Priest: Mind Flay (single target)
• Shaman: Frost Shock (single target)
• Hunter: Concussive Shot (single target)
• Frost DK: Chillblains, if specced (AoE)
• Hunter: Frost Trap (AoE)
• Shaman: Earthbind Totem (AoE; can be specced to immobilize)
• Fury Warrior: Piercing Howl, if specced (AoE)

Stuns / Ways to Immobilize

• Desto Lock: Shadowfury (AoE)
• Prot Warrior: Shockwave (AoE)
• Prot Warrior: Concussion Blow
• Paladin: Hammer of Justice (every other spawn)
• DK: Chains of Ice
• Fire Mage: Dragon’s Breath (AoE)
• Druid: Roots
• Frost Mage: Frost Nova (AoE)
• Tailoring Nets

Random Other Stuff

• Melee can taunt beasts back towards them.
• Hunters on two sides can trade Distracting Shot.
• Rogues can stick a crippling poison on a weapon, trade it in and Fan of Knives.
• Warriors, Feral Druids and Demo Locks with Felguards can do a difficult-to-pull-off intercept-type stun.

Our Strategy

In general, I like to assign 1-2 knockbacks per spawn, some way to AE slow them all (plus as many single target slows as I’ve got), and lots of stuns to keep them immobilized. A new tip I’ve learned from Matticus: Ranged DPS on the right side should prioritize the left beasts, and vice-versa, so the beasts have a little bit further to run.

I could not imagine doing this without a boomkin – preferably, more than one boomkin – for Typhoon. Ele shammies usually glyph out of Thunderstorm’s knockback; they should reglyph for this fight. Ellies will also only be able to knock back every other spawn; Boomkins can handle every wave.

There are a number of ways to AE slow all the beasts, which is critical. Our Frost DK has a Chillblains offspec and uses it on this fight to slow every beast by 50%. We raid with a shadow priest and 2-3 mages, and I also assign each of them a specific beast to slow.

Pally stuns are excellent, although pallies will have to trade off. Generally Rhidach and I get one beast, and our two DPS pallies stun another beast. Chains of Ice is also great, although it’s a bigger DPS loss, especially for a frost DK. Obviously having beasts snared is far more important than DPS, but I like to keep these things in mind.

Very important: stuns are safe in melee range; snares which immobilize are not. If the beast is unable to move yet active, it will eat a melee regardless of who is at the top of its threat table. Pally stuns and Prot warrior stuns are safe, and Chains of Ice is safe too because it’s just a glorified slow. But nets, Druid Roots, and talented Earthbind Totem are not safe in melee. You can still use them, but use them outside of melee range.

Taunts should be used effectively. Hunters can Distracting Shot a beast that’s far away, and melee & tanks can taunt a beast getting too close to some ranged. I end up taunting a fair bit, which occasionally bites me on the ass if the beast makes it all the way back to me without dying.

Tonight

We’re changing things up tonight. One of our healers is going boomkin, and everyone has decided not to move near as much to keep that vital 12 yard separation between the ranged. This means those beasts are just going to have to be flawlessly knocked back, stunned, slowed, and killed before they get to a single ranged or healer. I have faith it can happen, especially considering we are working under a 30% buff. And damn the haters, I don’t care if we wipe until it’s right.

I’ve gotten a little bit of flak for complaining about a farm fight, but I don’t care – even a farm fight should be done correctly.

You know, I had a whole string of posts planned for today, but I got completely distracted by something I think you readers might find interesting instead.

Let’s discuss offspec tank gear and who gets priority.

A Story From My Past

Gather round, children, as Anafielle spins you a tale. I’d like to tell a little story about my old guild (called Brand New Day, on Drenden) and our troubles with the very first fight in ICC …. Marrogar 25.

When Brand New Day hit Marrogar for the first time, we used a 3 tank strategy. A lot was going wrong, but a disproportionately large number of wipes were to tank death. The MT and I were fine. But our third tank was a DPS warrior in a pretty weak tank set, and the healers just couldn’t keep him alive.

Our very first Marrogar kill took two weeks and no less than eight battle rezzes. I’m not even kidding. We had eight druids in the raid, and every single battle rez got used on a tank.

No problem. He’ll gear up, right?

But our third tank was DPS main spec – in fact, he would have been our first Shadowmourne recipient – and therefore he was “offspec” for tank gear.

Let me tell you. It’s really painful to face a fight like that, struggle with it as progression, struggle specifically with tank death, and then watch some beautiful offspec tank gear go to a healer’s bank set through the vagaries of RNG.

From Marrogar forth, Brand New Day quietly put an unofficial loot priority system in place. Throughout my time there in ICC25, our “third tank” quietly got priority on offspec tank loot. Several officers made a big deal out of passing loot to him on vent until no one had the guts to roll against him. The MT and I would even pass him sidegrades and make comments on vent like, “He needs this more.”

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument For It

When you only have two mainspec tanks, you’re going to occasionally run into a situation where your DPS offspecs will play a major role in your raid’s progression.

In an ideal world, offspec loot gets distributed evenly. Only people who will use their offspecs will bid on loot. But sometimes, that doesn’t happen. Sometimes you have to give someone priority. It really just depends on how many of your raiders are polite enough to distinguish between Druid #11′s fourth set and your raid’s desperate third progression tank.

It may not be entirely fair, but it’s true. If your progression is dependent on someone’s offspec gear, you have a vested interest in making sure that offspec gets geared up.

Offspec Loot Priority: An Argument Against It.

Loot priority is entirely reasonable when it affects your progression. But in my opinion, this is the only time when it should occur. Even if someone is tanking that week – even if someone ends up tanking a whole lot of the time – even if someone is a totally excellent person who I like, and who I enjoy tanking with – my personal opinion is that they shouldn’t get priority over other, raid-capable offspec tanks.

I’m complaining, in a really circular way, about a very minor loot issue last night. Since I’m a super pro Bitcher and Moaner, I decided to hop up on my soapbox – well, alright, I decided to take over Rhidach’s soapbox – and write a big long post about it. Even though it was probably a very minor error or a reasonable part of the loot rules that I just didn’t know.

Anyways. It begs an interesting question!

How many guilds have done the same thing? Prioritized someone’s offspec tank set in some kind of official or unofficial way?

Opinion of the Reader

Am I crazy for thinking this is reasonable sometimes? Am I crazy for thinking this is unreasonable sometimes?

How about you?

Do you have enough mainspec tanks that all tank positions are filled by mainspec tanks, or do your DPS end up tanking a fair bit in raids? Have you ever given certain offspec tanks in your raid priority on loot?

Let’s hear it!

If Rhidach was here, he’d do a raid report and tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things about our raid last night. I’m sure a lot of people reading this blog would be really interested to know about things like how we turned Heroic Lady Deathwhisper from a tough progression fight into a relatively easy 2 shot, or why Heroic Saurfang suddenly gave us 5 wipes worth of trouble when we’d been farming him for weeks.

Fortunately, he’s not here. Instead, we’re going to discuss something much, much more important.

My Festergut 25H DPS.

Festergut Is My Favorite Fight

I sat in vent a few hours ago and mourned to my raid that I’d never rank on WOL for prot pally DPS because we’re not killing Festergut 25H at the right time. I wish he died earlier. My average DPS would be through the roof if he died before my buff wears off. Unfortunately, we still need 4 minutes and 11 seconds to kill his ass dead, and in that time my average dies along with my hopes of eventually joining the super exclusive Maintankadin Really Badass Paladin Club. They’re having a party at the top of the WOL rankings, and I am totally not invited.

My e-peen suffers greatly from this injustice.

Last night, before we pulled, I basically told the DPS to whoop it out and put on their awesomesauce pants so my ass could rank. They were Not Amused. Some clever wit pointed out to me that whooping it out and putting on pants were mutually exclusive activities. How the hell would I know? Who raids in pants, anyways?

Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about lust. Obviously the optimal time to pop lust is just after the tank swap, although my silly raid seems to believe that it makes the most sense at the beginning (when I am not buffed) or at the end (when I am also not buffed). Really?

Last night, no one called for it and we forgot to pop lust altogether. What kind of unobservant fool was main tanking that raid?

Well, I managed 9k DPS anyways.

Gear Swapping: A Serious Note

I, unlike my 11/12 and 12/12 ICC 25H bretheren, can’t swap out that much gear on this fight.

We still, sadly, have occasional issues with Fester 25H. Very rarely, but they happen. I recall an all too recent enrage timer wipe ending with a single live paladin and a vent full of dry comments along the lines of, “Farm!” “Totally on farm.” “Good thing Festergut’s on farm.” He is on farm. But anything can happen.

If I joke about forgetting to take off my threat gear, I’m lying through my teeth. I have a specific Festergut 25 set. I make each non-survivability-based gear choice with great care, knowing full well that if I die, it’s my own damn fault and I owe the whole raid repair fees as well as an apology for wasted time. Every itemization point I pull out of armor or stamina to devote to expertise, hit, or strength is a bit of effective health that could save my ass if some recruit mage or hunter decides to be go be BFF with the tank healers during a Vile Gas. Yes, I know this. So despite my joking about Festergut 25H and threat gear, I think hard about being conservative.

The major gear changes I recall making from an armor centric set: Bloodvenom Blade, 264 expertise boots (which I usually wear anyways), 277 hit pants (one of the most convenient places for me personally to find hit), some tank neck with expertise on it, the +200 str libram, and DMC:G in place of one of my armor trinkets. This puts me hitcapped and 32 expertise. Nothing special. I could hardcap my expertise if I threw on the TOGC expertise trinket, but Festergut hits pretty hard. I wore the Putricide 10H armor/stam proc trinket instead.

I consider this a poor man’s threat set – regular tank gear with some strength procs mixed in. I dream of wearing a Big Numbers set on Festergut 25H, but my AD proccing at the end of last night’s battle says “ROFL! Not gonna happen.” Look, a girl can dream…

Back To The Details

So I broke 9k dps. This is nothing special compared to the incredible numbers some of my cohorts can muster, but I was fairly happy with it.

On the plus side, I did beat two dps, which warms the cockles of my black and cheerless tank heart. Every time a tank beats a DPS, I fully believe said tank should take a shot. (Hey, tanks with threat sets…. I expect this rule to be followed.)

Good thing I only had Rotface 25H left to do. Big ooze kiting really requires at least one stiff drink. “Hey, you, in the dress, turn around! WHY ARE YOU RUNNING THAT WAY? COME BACK HERE! What, are we doing the achievement and no one told me? OH GOD VILE GAS–” *chug*

I uploaded the logs later last night. When I was done cursing my logs addon at great length for failing yet again to record Halion, I noticed to my great delight that my name was sitting on the right side of the Dashboard. I ranked! I really did! #194, baby!

I honestly thought I’d never do that on 25H. Alright, so it was 194th, but I’m pleased beyond measure that there are only 193 protection paladins among the guilds uploading to World of Logs between myself and Meloree’s extensively theorycrafted and simmed 16k dps in the #1 spot.

What’s that, you say? There are probably no more than 200 different guilds uploading to WOL who are running Fester 25H with paladins as first tanks? Goddamnit. I was just starting to feel like a special snowflake.

edit: I just checked the logs again and between last night & right now, I’ve been knocked out of the top 200. Hold on, be right back, crying in a corner. I’m serious, I almost cried, here at work. I have to do better next week!