Icing the Frost Queen

I’m still in shock we pulled this off. I mean, not completely, I did know it was going to happen. Mathematics demanded a kill, and we gladly complied. Still, it’s a pretty big deal for the guild that all our hard work paid off. I could not be more proud of our raiders, this was a kill we all needed to keep the faith.

We started the week with a rough patch, to say the least. Tuesday was… brutal… and we’ll leave it at that. So Wednesday we had something of a chip on our shoulders that demanded satisfaction. We buckled down and righted all the wrongs that held us back on Tuesday and still managed to get to Sindragosa with the usual 2 hours left in raid. Our game faces on, we got to work.

The first attempt was ok. We had a flawless first air phase, then a disastrous second. The second attempt we did immaculately until the third air phase, then the attempt collapsed. Shaking the rust off, as we say.

Subsequent attempts were so-so, generally requiring battle rezzes to be used in air phases, which was killing me. At least at this point we were hitting phase 3.

Finally after another attempt where the same mage (who I don’t often bring, but was dragging along as an Unchained Magic human shield) died for the umpteenth time to a Frost Bomb, I removed him from raid–something I should had done attempts ago–and brought in a newly recruited shadow priest.

Around this point we also imposed some pretty severe discipline onto vent. Basically, the rule became in phase 3: no talking unless it’s a healer announcement, a tank swap, or something life threatening. Everyone else just focus and lock it down. I think this was a huge key to our success.

The next attempt we got the fight to 7%. It was going fantastically, but Ana was cut off from heals momentarily and died, and then I went to pick it up but was eventually rocking way too much buffet stacks. Still, everyone was filled with hope. There was not a single air phase death that attempt. There was even a great raid awareness moment where a block got dropped the opposite way from where we were taking them, and everyone got out of the way, and then we kept the correct direction going afterwards. All in all, the mojo seemed to be back.

So we lined up again, and after a quick stupid wipe, we did what was destined to be the money shot. Air phases were nearly perfect, we had one death because someone was DC’d, but we kept going. Phase 3 starts and I get to work. Ana and I swap like clockwork, blocks go down with expert precision, healers are calling out roles and switches through vent without interruption. Finally we hit the single digits and it’s just gogogo time.

The enrage timer was ticking down, leaving us about a minute at that point. Everyone just pushed it as hard at they could and as I watched Sindy’s health slowly tick away from 3%, to numbers I never dreamed could lie beyond that. The “holy bleep” moment of “this is going to die” hit me in a euphoric wave, and then the Frost Queen crashed over dead and coughed up her purples.

I scored the 277 token from her for a hefty, hefty amount. Worth it nonetheless. Everyone was elated, and for some reason we rode that high over to heroic Putricide just to throw in some faux-attempts and get some idea of the mechanics of the fight.

Obviously we didn’t get very far. This is indeed our next dragon to slay, so to speak. I look forward to our coming weeks together, Putricide.

Oh, and as a humorous sidenote: remember how I said I was going to start rolling for Abom Duty? Well, prior to the first pull Ana, Nordic, and I rolled off for the right of riding the Abom. Nordic always wins, and I thought I finally had him when he rolled an 11. I then rolled a 6. Ok, well, Ana could be our last hope, right? Wrong. She also rolled a 6!

Curse you Nordicslayer.

Nonetheless, with five minutes left in raid we swapped it over to normal mode and quickly did the achievement in preparation for our eventual drakes scramble.

Great raid night overall, and a fantastic end to an ignominiously beginning week.

TIL: The Putricide Abom is a lot of fun

Why wasn’t I told?!

10man last night and I was tanking with Morvain, the Death Knight with the cat problem, and when we got to Putricide there was a moment of pause. Usually Nordic just takes the Abom, or him and Ana roll off for it in the 25man. And yet last night, on a whim, I decided to take it for a spin.

I knew the long and short of it: mash 1 when standing on a puddle, 2 to slow (though we were doing the achievement, so no slows), and apply sunders with 3. I spent the fight running around, gulping puddles, and applying sunders as needed. And I had a blast. It was a nice change of pace over just ducking around with the good Professor in tow.

I need to start ninjaing that job in the 25man.

The rest of the night we wrapped up some outstanding achieves that various people needed, like a Heroic Blood Princes kill for Gulliveig, and Portal Jockey for myself.

We then moved on to Sindragosa to finally put away the heroic kill. It took us three shots but we finally got the old girl down (in 10man at least). One of my main goals last night was to use the spinning strategy and to prove to myself that it can be done, and that it doesn’t hamper the raid. It seemed overall to be a huge help, if only to keep blocks uniform, so I’ll remain firmly in the “pro-spinning” column.

We had issues with the enrage timer because we’d lose a dps here or there in phase 3 to what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds. Namely, Chilled to the Bone being stacked too high. I’m sympathetic to the idea that if the healers can get you, you’re golden, but crunch times happen, Unchained can be unkind, and healing might be stretched. And then suddenly having so many stacks of that debuff is going to kill you.

In any case, good practice for Wednesday I hope.

With the heroic Sindy kill, a bunch of us got our drakes. (This is the part where Ana comments “MONTHS BEHIND!”) It’s a nice achieve to have, but I don’t particular care for a boney dragon. I’ll probably still to my Rusted Proto for now, I like the cut of his gib far more. Is that weird?

So very, heart-breakingly close

We’ve been working on Heroic Sindragosa since at least the beginning of August and it’s be steady progress ever since. While it sucks to only realistically have a max of three hours a week to work on the old girl, it’s been pretty obvious we’ll soon have the kill. The first week we were wiping at 60%. Then we were kissing phase 3 the next. Then wiping at the 26% mark the next. Then 13% last week. Last night we got her to 3.9% before giving up the ghost, on our best attempt.

3.9%

Mathematically it’s impossible not to drop her next week. I like our odds.

One thing I did to shake things up was to force the raid to adopt the AYCE strategy I came up with the other night. Our third phases were hectic, blocks were going in crazy places, or too far away. I figured my strategy would tighten that up a bit, make for a cleaner close to the fight. And of course I got push back.

I don’t mean reasonable pushback, with intelligent, well reasoned concerns, but just snark. Determinations that “this couldn’t work” and “why are we changing the strategy after getting it to 20% last week?” And then this person went on to rage to an audience in a separate channel that I am not party to. It was infuriating, to say the least. Give me some credit, I’m not a complete goddamn moron.

After the third try with the new strategy, we got her to 8%, our best attempt up to that point. Before that, the naysayer whispered me and said something to the effect of “You know you can’t adopt a new strategy and expect it to take off in a few attempts, right?” After that 8% try, the naysayer whispered me again and said “You’re allowed to say I told you so, you know.” I just smiled and replied, “Not my style.”

As for the 3.9% attempt, what kills me was that could have very well have been a kill attempt. It was the last attempt of the night, so it had that mythical Last Attempt Aura that we’ve benefitted from in the past. Air phases were golden, with I think only one death across all three (which was quickly remedied with a brez).

And then finally, we were at the 8% mark with just about everyone alive, and I had this heavy hope that we were going to come out victorious. I don’t think I was breathing much at that point. We’re about 40% around the rotation, at least four blocks have successful gone down, and the next person gets marked.

They don’t move. I call out the name, and “I DC’d!” is the response in vent. My heart sinks.

I see the symbol over his head, and the dps standing next to him. “Move away from X!” The dpser doesn’t listen, tunnel visions. Gets chain blocked. Some scramble to start breaking them out, but the death blow was just dealt. We’re at 5% now. The next person to be marked for a block ran way far away to drop Unchained Magic, and was caught with their pants down. No way they can make it to the proper spot in time, and the block is too far away. So we resolve to start rotating the other way and catch up to the last block to go down.

I’m almost there, and the next person marked decides to drop the new block counter clockwise, rather than to the right of Sindy’s face and thus resuming the proper rotation like I intended. At this point it’s around 4.5% and people are dropping like flies because blocks have been garbage and no one could drop their Buffet stacks.

I bite it around 4.2%, Ana tries to pick up the slack, but she’s quickly overwhelmed. We soon wiped ingloriously at 3.9%.

So close. So goddamn close.

Things we need to work on: control is getting better, but people really need to watch their debuff and do what they can to reduce damage taken. This especially includes healers not tunnel-visioning and neglecting to run out when they have Unchained Magic.

Next week.

The Not-So-Farm Farm Night

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.

Been waiting a long time for all you can eat

Another step closer to getting my ICC drake, as we wrapped two of the harder achievements in the 10man meta last night. One was the terrifying All You Can Eat, the other the endurance-testing Been Waiting a Long Time for This. With these two under my belt I need only Portal Jockey and a heroic Sindragosa kill, and I’m golden. Or… boned… in this case.

And yes, I know Ana’s team has had their drakes for a few weeks now. But Team Alpha is all about catch up! It’s how we roll.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s talk about how we did each achievement.

All You Can Eat

The first attempt we did for this achievement was using a zerg strategy that Anafielle had touted in the past. I’m always very wary of zergs, and this was no exception. Having one healer get consistently Unchained was not fun, and having two mainspec healers go to offspec roles that they don’t typically raid with didn’t help either. We quickly wiped.

So we started doing it the non-cheese way. For the next two hours (and I know it was two hours because we had trash respawn), we kept breezing through phases 1 and 2 and then crashing hard in phase 3. People would stack a debuff too high and die, or blocks would go in the wrong place (since we were trying to keep them close to the head)… in short, it was a series of clusterfarks.

A lot of us were tired, some were hungover, and basically the general raid wasn’t operating at peak efficiency. I was questioning whether this was going to happen.

After the trash respawned, I had a brain storm: positioning blocks and getting them in the ideal spot seem to be our biggest issue, so why not change how we drop blocks? We’ll drop that first block in that ideal spot, and then every time we need to put down a new block, the tank rotates Sindragosa slightly so that a new ideal block spot opens up to the left of the existing block. Then there’s a close, pristine block to hide behind for the tank swap, and dps can instantly identify which block to nuke down.

Here’s a terrible diagram (nothing to scale) to demonstrate my crazy talk:

Sindragosa starts with her face at position A. First block goes down just to the right of her face where that white dot is. Next time someone gets frost beaconed, the current tank rotates Sindragosa to a point halfway between A and B, and the block goes to the next white dot. Old block is burnt down, raid has a close block to hide behind, and dps still have access to Sindragosa’s stomach.

Just crazy enough to work, I thought. And anything else was preferable to the same old that we were doing and wiping with for so long.

So we tried this new strat, and got the achievement on the first try with it.

I’m so going to try this strategy with our 25 heroic run on Wed.

Anyway, some other helpful tips–and apparently I’m the last one to know this–but if you’re LOS’d at the 2 second mark on your Buffet debuff, it’ll fall off. So you can start running at the 1 second mark, which gives you a whole ‘nother two seconds to beat feet and relieve the other tank so they can drop their debuff. Moreover, the RaidAchievement addon is amazing for this. Will instantly tell you if someone screws it up so you don’t kill Sindragosa and miss the achievement because some dope wasn’t watching their debuffs.

Been Waiting a Long Time for This

We went into this achievement with an equal mix of tiredness (it was 30 minutes before raid end), confusion, and ignorance about the mechanics of the achievement. After talking with Ana about the rules (you need to get >30 stacks and hold that til transition) it became obviously that no one did their homework. Thankfully, Ana is an achievements expert.

So anyway, first attempt we did the first phase like normal, stacking diseases and just holding off transition, and by the time the disease got to about 20 it started murdering ghouls instantly. The disease fell off and we had to wipe.

Again, didn’t do our homework! We consulted Ana and she explained with great patience that we should RTFA and actually do the strategy: basically, cleanse the first disease far away so it doesn’t pass to the group or the mobs, then dispel the second disease onto the mobs, then after that dispel the rest of the diseases far away so no one gets it.

You skip the first disease so you can gather up the first wave of ghouls, giving you time to build up a solid base of fodder for the plague. I know this now because on our next attempt the first person to get the plague forgot and ran to the mobs. Diseased passed onto the mobs, and we just shrugged and kept going. But the plague hit >20 stacks, it was quickly murdering mobs left and right. We had the LK at 72%, and held him there, and I frequently had to run back to him and get the disease passed either to a freshly spawned ghoul or to a teammate to keep it alive.

Utter chaos.

Finally, we had it up to 32, and pushed LK hard. We finally pushed him over with the disease on someone at 31 stacks, it got cleansed, passed to ghoul that somehow survived, I pulled them aside on the edge as we worked through the transitions. Each ghoul dropped dead in short order, then I self-cleansed the plague off of me, removing it from the fight.

We then went back to autopilot through LK10, eventually downing the fight with the only moment of difficulty being when Gandy the Rogue accidentally overshot the ledge while his rocket boots we active and plummeted to his death. We almost wiped because people started laughing, but Frank whipped everyone back into line.

Towards the end, I was eyeing the enrage timer nervously. We were down one rocket man dps and had about 3 minutes left at the 30% mark. My fears abated, we hit 10% with 1:30 to go. …I so did not want to have to play plague-juggling again.

This achievement is definitely easier than the Sindragosa one, but the tradeoff is it’s a much bigger pain.

And now that both of those are done, time to start worrying about Sindragosa 10H for next week…

The good kind of wiping

Last night we spent a good 2 hours on Heroic Sindragosa 25, and while we didn’t down her, we got closer than ever before with 13% as our best attempt.

The whole night was generally moving in the same direction, upward. I remember when we first started working on this fight three weeks ago we were losing five people to the frost bombs every air phase, with a further number being cut down by asphyxiation. Last night, not so much. We had many air phases where no one got nuked. It got to the point where I didn’t have to obsessively watch grid to look for the little boxes to grey out and inform me of deaths, people were taking care of themselves.

Progress!

Unchained Magic was a lot better too, with fewer instances like three weeks ago when a mage blew us all up with some massive stack of Instability immediately following a Blistering Cold. He did more than 1 million friendly fire damage and set a new record I suspect the casters are secretly aspiring to topple. I’m watching them.

But in any case, in the flight to the steps at the beginning of the air phase, people were really good about standing aside and minimizing damage.

Likewise people were amazing about getting on the proper spots when Frost Beaconed. In the 36 air phases we did last night I can only think of two times when someone was in the wrong spot. And we only got an extra block once.

More progress!

Stuff to work on, though: people panicking in phase 3 and forgetting to not blow up the raid, to pay attention to their debuffs, the works. I always shout “Marathon, not a sprint!” when the third phase starts. Not that that helps much, but it carries the philosophy of the fight–phase three is the main show, and it’s about endurance, not zerging down the boss.

We’re getting there. We are totally getting there and I fully expect a kill on this fight, one of the hardest in the game, in the next two weeks. If not next week. It’s just a matter of time.

Despite the fact that we didn’t get a kill last night, I think morale still remains pretty high. We didn’t spend the attempts raging at people who got Frost Bombed to death, or hit some people with Instability. Frank didn’t ever poke up his bilious head at any point. We’re really not that kind of guild ultimately. And besides, that’s what the knee-cappings are for.

Instead people were joking and having fun and trying to keep people positively motivated. We had some good laughs at points like right after a fourth Bomb hit, Falowin was watching his block’s health diminish (but not his DBM apparently) and started shouting “NOT MY BLOCK, DON’T BREAK MY BLOCK” in a blind panic. Once he was broken out he realized air phase was over. We all got a good laugh and I’m sure that will come back to haunt him.

And speaking of events that will come back to haunt people, poor Morvain. The guy last night was hopped up to the gills on vicodin due to a horrible tooth-ache. Ever a trooper (and with a Gollum-like devotion to his Shadowmourne shards) he still raided, without much of any performance lost. Except for one moment last night when we switched it back to normal at the last 30 minutes of the raid to wrap up the LK and were kind of blowing off steam on the far less deadly Sindy Normal.

We’re deep into phase 3, with myself and a swath of people hiding behind a block dropping our Buffet. Morvain is there and gets targeted by Frost Beacon. “Morvain,” someone mechanically notes, reading off DBM. Nothing happens. “Morvain move.” … “MORVAIN!”

Then a woosh and about 10 of us are encased in ice blocks. “Sorry guys,” Morvain meekly pipes up, snapping out of his haze. “I was looking at my cat.”

Everyone is caught up in the sheer absurdity of it all, and in the haze of laughter and tears the other half of the raid gets iceblocked. We lose it, and–of course–the fight. Wipe.

It was kind of worth it. Like Antigen said, definitely the birth of an in-joke. That damn cat.

My Huge Ego & Festergut 25H

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!

Tanking Halion

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone! You get to deal with me all week…. so, like I always tell my 10 man, get excited!!

Several of us popped in to see Heroic Halion 10 last night.

Although the other tank was a DPS on a pally alt, he was the more experienced shadow side tank. He tanked Shadow Side earlier this week & they decided to leave him with it. This left me up in the physical realm.

Physical side tanking sucks when you are a massive control freak, like I am. I firmly believe every tank has a bit of control freak in them somewhere…

You get to sit there while the raid wipes on the hardest part of the fight… doing absolutely nothing except staring at raid frames. NOTHING. Last night, I couldn’t even really tab out to complain to twitter or walk away to get a beer (umm… definitely things I have not done while tanking normal 25) because the void zones persist in both phases. God knows the moment I looked away, someone would spawn a void zone under me and I’d die.

Shadow Side Tanking (normal)

I’m going to pause to complain a little here about our Normal Mode strat.

For Normal Halion, the strat we use involves constantly spinning the dragon throughout phase 2 and 3. The tank keeps the single orb we can see on the dragon’s left hip, which means the other orb is over the tank’s left shoulder – this in general keeps the beam at a good angle through the dragon the whole time. But we turn him throughout this phase, not just when the orbs are about to activate.

Learning how to do this was…. fun. Yeah, that’s the word. Listening to Rhidach on vent figuring out how to turn constantly at the right speed certainly was fun. It’s got to be that “talk me off the ledge,” panicked tone in his voice sometimes.

I find it way too amusing when he panics & try to cause it as much as possible. I know, I know, I’m such a good offtank.

Then he left me All Alone a few weeks ago, before we’d killed Halion, and I had to do it myself. I failed miserably. Not going to lie. It was probably the most miserable failure I’d ever encountered in my time tanking. I did just about everything wrong that could possibly go wrong. I even lost threat to some DPS. So embarrassing….

So. End result – our normal mode Halion strat is hard on tanks. At least, hard on these two pally tanks. While the jury is still out on me, Rhidach knows his freakin’ shit when it comes to tanking. When I take a while to figure something out, I assume I’m just slow or stupid. When Rhidach takes a while to figure something out, that something is probably overly complicated. My assumption is that our Halion strat is overly complicated.

But in the end, this is how we learned the fight, and we both have learned how to do it now. So why fix what’s broke? That’s how we do it.

Shadow Side Tanking (heroic)

Unlike normal mode, on heroic our tank doesn’t constantly turn the dragon. Rather, the tank sits still and repositions the dragon as needed right before the cutters activate.

The other tank told me – and I firmly believe it – that this is so, so much simpler and much easier than the constant turning we do on normal mode. In fact, he told me he had no trouble tanking heroic once he’d learned where to watch. Then the raid switched to normal and he had a ton of trouble with our “constantly turns” strat and never quite got the hang of it.

I’d heard from twitter (always an excellent source of information – and I’m not kidding) that most people who do Normal Mode also sit still for as long as possible & only turn when they’re positioning for beam activation.

Boy, that sure would be nice.

Tank Overruled

After wiping a few hours on heroic, we switched the raid back to normal. I wanted to try the “Not Moving A Whole Lot” strat on 10, but the whole 10 man raid nixed me.

“The beam will be in the wrong place!” they said. “You get four reference points on Heroic. It’s much easier. But you only get two reference points on normal. It’s not worth repositioning the dragon right just for the cutters. You’ll tail swipe someone or something.”

I wasn’t leading the raid. I didn’t want to push 9 people into something new, seeing as they’d just wiped in the shadow realm for two hours while I /danced with void zones up top. I shut up and readied my strafe keys.

Honestly, now that I have figured out how to constantly turn, it’s not TOO bad… it still sucks though. I have figured out how to do my normal rotation while turning constantly, which is something I really should never have fucked up in the first place. I still need to practice strafing in a perfect circle. I stopped and started a lot, and it’s a good thing I’m way overgeared because I got hit by the beam at least once.

I really hate this fight.

I want to see Shadow Side on Heroic, mostly because I’m a lazy tank and I can’t wait to sit my ass down a little and rest between cutters in phase 2 and 3.

Team Bravo: A History

Welcome to another guest post by Anafielle! Rhidach is gone on vacation again and forgot to remove my guest posting privileges. Righteous Defense is mine! All mine! Be warned, the beta coverage is temporarily suspended in his absence. In his place, I’d like to talk about one of my favorite topics – 10 man raiding.

I lead a 10 man, something I stress out about on twitter all the time. I actually lead the second 10 man in the guild, while Rhidach leads the first. These raids are called Team Bravo and Team Alpha, respectively. Despite our names, my raid is actually the more progressed of the two.

How did this happen? Oh, this is one of my favorite topics…

A 25 Man Guild with Two Tens

Like many casual-progression 25 man raiding guilds, Enveloping Shadows has long had an unofficial “officer” 10 man. Rhidach leads and MTs it, and mostly takes the officers and a few top DPS. For a long time, this was the only solid guild 10 man.

There was no real second 10 before I arrived. Several of the DPS had tried to start one, but they never quite got enough tanks and ran into troubles. There was, before I came, a fair amount of resentment focused on Rhidach’s 10 as the only successful 10 man. “They steal all the best players,” “They don’t care about the rest of us,” “They have all the guild tanks” (this was true), etc etc.

Enter Anafielle ….. I randomly appeared on the server, a mainspec tank just as geared as Rhidach, and one of the first things I told the guild was, “Hey, I like 10s. Is there a 10 man that needs a tank?” Needless to say, within hours of my server transfer I was approached by a bunch of people about the “second” 10 man.

Thus a second guild 10 man raid was born. The “officer” 10 became known as Team Alpha and my “second” 10 became inevitably known as … Team Bravo.

The Team B Underdogs

We were the underdogs from the start. No officers. Scattered schedules. A rotating roster that never looked the same from week to week. Even our name meant Team B. Fueled by passion and stopped by nothing, full of righteous indignation from months of watching Team Alpha get 10 man progression kill after progression kill, my raid started out like a beat up rebel with something to prove. We had a chip on our shoulder the size of Texas and a nasty streak as wide as the Mississippi river.

The DPS in my raid knew they were good. They had all spent time at the top of Recount. They knew they had the capability to get all those achievements – they’d just never had an organized raid to do it with. I was less a leader and more a guide, funneling their skill into useful accomplishments.

Our First Big Kill

I still remember our first progression kill. I carefully stacked my first Team Bravo raid for Heroic Saurfang specifically because I knew Rhidach’s officer 10 hadn’t downed the fight. (Me? Competitive? Nooo.) I picked out the top ranged DPS I could, spent so much time learning the strat, and carefully assigned CC and kill targets.

When we killed H Saurfang, I went wild with glee. It was a guild first! A GUILD FIRST! TAKE THAT, TEAM ALPHA!

I barely knew Rhidach at this point. He’d just recently trusted me with his cell phone number in case of emergencies. I knew I couldn’t misuse this power. Giving an Internet E-Friend your cell phone number can be dangerous and is definitely a sign of trust. But, in my euphoria, I had to brag to him and he was rude enough to be offline. So I took a screenshot of our kill, labeled it in big obnoxious letters “WE WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!”, transferred it to my cell phone and text messaged him with it.

Man, I’m such an asshole!

Team Bravo, The ES Progression 10

Over the last few months, despite setbacks, Team Bravo has risen to glory. We have gotten almost every single recent guild 10 man first. Most importantly, three weeks ago, Team Bravo achieved Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

It hasn’t been a completely smooth ride for Team Bravo. We’ve suffered from all sorts of ups and downs. I’ve personally fucked up all manner of things, from scheduling to simple Raid Awareness issues to leadership decisions like how we do a fight. Scheduling has really been the worst – our roster has rotated a ton over the last few months. Only now are we settling down into something approaching a regular schedule and roster. And still, I struggle with it… I’ll have to do a whole blog post on this, because scheduling a raid is the absolute bane of my existence as a raid leader.

Anyways. Our glory and success.

Team Alpha vs Team Bravo

I’m under no illusions – Team Alpha has often not run, and has been very casual about the fights they hit. It’s hard to be proud of beating someone who’s not really fighting back. They really only started focusing when we started beating them!

By contrast, Team Bravo was very, very focused. We started basically from scratch, but we had our eye on the goal from Day One. This is probably my fault – I was absolutely obsessed with getting my drake. A 10 man drake was my private dream, and I was not shy about telling everyone that I planned to get it for myself and for everyone around me. The 10 man was my personal vehicle for the drake. I privately thought of it as a fair trade – I would MT and lead for them, and my raid in turn would carry me to a pretty skeleton mount.

We finally made it. It took a lot of work, but three weeks ago we triumphed over All You Can Eat and Heroic Putricide (our last two hurdles) and scored our drakes.

And then, of course, we went back again over the last 2 weeks and killed pretty much every fight a second time to finish drakes for everyone who’d worked with us. I had always been very clear about my promise of drakes for everyone who was there for “the hardest fights”, and I spent a very long time carefully planning our last two weeks of raids to finish drakes for everyone I could manage. A raid is a team, and I was determined not to leave anyone out.

Amazing. Absolutely phenomenal. I look at my raiders and their drake, and despite the 30% buff… it feels like a real accomplishment. I feel really happy to have helped us achieve something really great, something indicative of hours and hours of work!

I have learned a ton about raiding, raid leading, management, and scheduling from my raid. And despite the stressing out I do about leading… my nights with Team Bravo are, without a doubt, the most fun I have during the week.

More Posts!

So, as you can tell, 10 man raiding is one of my favorite topics. While Rhidach is gone, you can expect some posts from me on 10 man strategies and a very long Drake Achievement guide for those of you trying to work your way to some pretty mounts. Stay tuned for more fun stuff!

A night of frost and glory

Interestingly enough, I haven’t done a raid recap post in a long while. Nothing much to report lately–we’ve been plugging along on Heroic Sindragosa, having our first real night on her last night. Our showing wasn’t very impressive, we’re having some trouble with the whole buffet of what the fight demands: block positioning, Unchained Magic people not blowing others up, etc. Survival issues.

So, I’m thinking next week we’ll do what we did when we were learning normal Sindragosa: max survivability. DPS wears extra frost resist gear, add a seventh healer, then the goal is to live til the enrage timer. Once we make it that far we’ll dial back survivability until we can find the sweet spot that gets us in under the clock.

This is a strong contrast to last night with our second kill of Heroic LDW where we were mastering the hardest parts of the fight, people were failing at the easiest, most fundamental part of the fight: the ghosts. A ghost would pop up next to someone–melee, ranged, heals, whatever–and they wouldn’t notice til it exploded, or notice late and not be able to get away. We did about four attempts of differing degrees of success, each splashed with the delightful stench of ghost ‘splosions, and each time I got a little closer to completely Franking out. (Yes, it’s a verb now.)

Finally, before the last attempt I snapped and let Frank take over. I told everyone that we were not going to spend two hours on the fight. I don’t care if we wipe, but it was not going to be to ghosts. Everyone was on notice, one more ghost-induced wipe and we would switching it to normal and move on. I felt like crap after declaring that, cause I don’t want to be that raid leader, the Troxxed-style douchebag that issues ultimatums and leads by making people feel bad.

Frank was vindicated when we then went on to perfectly kill H LDW, with no deaths by ghosts. It was… shocking. I don’t know if I should feel good that we pulled it off, or worse that it could so easily be done. I guess we’ll see next week!

Anyway, back to last night. As I tweeted yesterday we were starting the night with our Shadowmourne guy, Nordicslayer, having 48 shards. He’s been collecting them slowly, but surely, since May 11th and we’ve had the extra drop chance of heroic modes since the beginning of June. His poor luck aside, the raid was pumped for him to finally finish the damn axe that night. Or to listen to him cry when he only got one shard from the five bosses we were doing. Either way.

Much to my surprise, a shard dropped off of heroic Festergut, first boss of the night. And then the last one he needed dropped off of heroic Rotface. Finally, some luck!

A parade of us then ran downstairs to watch him turn in the quest and the shards and finally collect his damn axe. Nevertheless, this was months in the making–congratulations Nordicslayer!

I tried to get a nice screenshot of him for the guild site, but he must have moved at the last second, only leaving behind the swirling soul that apparently used to inhabit Antigen’s mortal shell.

We reached Sindragosa at around 7:45 server time, giving us a good 2 hours or so to work on the fight. But you know the rest.

To give us a break, I switched it to normal and we dropped her easily and then moved on to the Lich King to collect the Sealed Chest. The Lich King was another clean kill, excellent for the second wave of dpsers getting dropped off the side of the map. Oops. Personally, I was most excited that that was the first time in a long time I didn’t have to go into a rambling 10 minute explanation of the fight for some new person. I’m sure everyone else was pretty stoked about that too.

Nordic looted the Sealed Chest, and per our agreement he kept one of the vanity items for himself and gave the other four up for the guild. He chose the mount, I took three items to hold to give as prizes in a series of off-night guild events/games, and then per my constant nagging requests over the last four months, took the tabard for myself.

It’s weird. Achieving Shadowmourne feels like we’re turning the page on one of the last chapters in ICC. I know we still have Heroic Sindragosa to kill, then Putricide–and then by some miracle a choir of angels is going to come down and push Arthas off the side of the Frozen Throne for us–but it feels like we’re running out of time in there. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get some major ennui about ICC. Not bad ennui (if there’s such a thing), just… 9 months is a long time to do an instance, you know? It’s time to move on to bigger Internet dragons.

But then again, we have a much more literal Internet dragon to work on right now.

Sidenote on the latest beta build: I’m not going to do too much prodding with the changes, because we know things will be majorly changing again soon. I will however check out how hard ShoR is hitting for tonight. I’m hoping to have a post titled “IT’S OVER 9000″ tomorrow.