Note: This actually happened last weekend, I just let this sit in drafts for a while.

The very first time we tried Undying it was on a whim, a drunk Naxx run that we suddenly realized was going perfectly. We kept going through each wing until we reached Kel’Thuzad. Seconds from victory, one of our raidmembers (while very inebriated) died in a voidzone.

The second time we tried, months later, we got up to Sapphiron before one of the healers forgot you need to hide behind the iceblocks and was killed by a frost bomb.

The third time, a few weeks ago, I didn’t have my pet frame enabled, couldn’t quickly dismiss my mind controlled Student on Razuvious, and a warlock got killed. Raz died from dots before we could make a break for it.

Fourth time, we did it on a whim after a drunk Ulduar run and managed to fail on the second attempted boss (Sapphiron) because someone was too far to the left of an iceblock and couldn’t LoS the frost bomb.

Saturday night we went to Naxxramas for the fifth time to attempt an Undying run. With seven people: myself, two healers, and four dps (with one dps a possible OT).

We started on Razuvious, with me double checking my pet frame was active, and dropped him with no trouble. Considering each dps in the raid was doing 2-3 times the dps that someone was doing when Naxx10 was progression, that wasn’t much of a worry. Our main concern was making sure no one died to environmental hazards during boss fights.

After Raz we ported up to Saph to drop the two “hardest” bosses in the raid. When Saph died I’m sure you can imagine my relief, considering so many of our attempts have ended with her. After the dragon we took out KT, though that was a bit more stressful than I thought it would be. I knew we generally would have no issues, but I was still getting constant flashbacks every time a purple ring formed on the floor or someone got trapped in an ice tomb.

It didn’t help that DBM added this awful noise whenever someone got ice tombed–like a “woooo-ong… woooo-ong”. Very unnerving to say the least!

So KT was dead and we were raid for some less stressful fights. Or, at least, less stressful to me. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while I was seeing spots and grinding my teeth down into nubs.

The rest of the run went generally smoothly with only a few bumpy spots. Our biggest hurdles (or so we imagined) were going to be Heigan and Thaddius. For the former, it wasn’t bad at all, despite the fact that all the damn casters made me and the two melee do the dance rather than just camping on the platform for most of the encounter. Somehow I managed to not screw up all the dancing and we got through all right.

Once Plague was cleared it was on to Construct for what we assumed would be a straight run to Thaddius. And then we remembered. Gluth.

We had one tank and one dps switching to tank here and there. Moreover, there were only seven of us total. How the hell were we going to kite adds and pull off a tank switch.

As we stood on the pipe, eating the slow ticks of damage from the slime, the answer came to me. The offtank, Morvain, would kill zombies and I would solo tank Gluth myself. Once the stack hit 10, it should fall off rather than renewing, and I was pretty sure I could hold out that long.

How wrong I was.

We started the fight and I’m watching my stacks steadily climb, hitting about 80% healing reduction by the time the first Decimate was approaching. My first instinct was to bubble off the stacks, and I suppose I got lucky because I bubbled right as Decimate hit, didn’t take any damage, and yet my stacks continued to climb. In short order they were at a full 10 (and, eek, not falling off) and I was at 84% health. For the rest of the fight I basically dodged/block/parried/and absorbed (thanks to disc shields) every incoming hit. I never dropped below 80%.

So despite the odds we managed to pull that one out pretty smoothly. Likewise, Thaddius went according to plan with some minor dps pacing issues on Fuegen/Stalag and then I guess at some point during the fight someone got zapped denying us the achievement for that. Ah well. Nonetheless, no deaths and we marched onward.

At this point we started to debate our next step. It was obvious the biggest hurdle now was going to be doing Four Horsemen with seven people. Finally, we decided to bite the bullet and head right for 4HM, doing spider wing last. One way or another Undying would end on that fight.

We ended up bringing in the pally healer’s fiance, a warlock, for some extra dps since we were stretching ourselves out so badly. Two priests went in the back, as heals, and healed themselves. In the front Morvain tanked Baron and I tanked Thane with the rest of the dps plus the pally healer. As soon as the fight started we burnt down Thane very quickly, so I yanked Baron off Morvain so he could go to the back and relieve them. We burnt the Baron down, then fled to the back to kill the remaining two Horsemen.

Once Zeliek dropped we got an interesting surprise.

Considering we hadn’t cleared Spider wing yet, looks like the achievement is bugged a tad. I wonder what the requirements are? KT and 4HM? Sapph, KT, and 4HM? Everything but Spider wing? Who knows!

At this point I was feeling a little hollow about the achievement. It wasn’t bad enough we severely outgeared the place, but it was just adding insult to injury that the damn achievement was bugged. Nonetheless, we went and cleared Spider with no deaths, scoring our Dedicated Few achievements in the process.

Perhaps not as epic as it would have been pre-3.1, but it was pretty fun overall. And it’s nice we finally put that nagging desire to nab Undying to rest, finally.

First, yes, the title of this post is meant to be ironic in the sense that I pre-excoriated everyone prior to Putricide coming out, telling them not to title their kill-posts with that famous line from Farnsworth/Putricide. Although, I guess it’s not as ironic if I have to explain it… hrm. And it probably isn’t ironic at all to begin with… double hrm. Hrm hrm.

But, good news indeed, and this doesn’t involve the Death Zone, or the Zone of No Return, or for that matter anything from the Galaxy of Terror… we did it, we killed Putricide!

First and foremost I’d like to thank Renne of Malfurion (apologies if I got your name or server wrong, doing this from memory) who rolled a level 1 alt on the Hoof to wish my guild good luck and offer encouragement. That was totally unexpected and helped motivate people to know that others were rooting for us.

The night started off with Demo offering a poll via ready check: yes to do Blood Queen, no to go back to Putricide. Just about everyone hit no, it was an overwhelming response. Indeed, everyone was gung-ho about finally downing the sucker and reclaiming our honor. Poor Morvain had recurring dreams that night before that we were fighting Putricide, getting him down to 4%, and then the fight would reset. If anything, we had to do this so Morvain could sleep once more.

For about the first hour we were trying a tweak strategy that involved more movement to attempt to minimize opportunities for raid damage. That didn’t work though, dps was slowed considerably. Where we used to get to P3 with 3 minutes left, now we were getting there with 1:30 left.

When we finally switched back to the tried and true method we had a few attempts with people dying to the same old stuff. Once we worked that out though, we were starting to get cleaner add kills and the boss’s health was dropping ever more precipitously. Once he was dancing around the 38% mark I had to play footsie with his positioning. He couldn’t stay in too long or he’d push over to P3 with an add up. Stay out too long and we’ll get another add. We needed that Goldilocks middle where I get him to 36% with cleaves, then drag out and whittle him down to 35.1% myself, and then bring him back in as add was dying to be pushed over.

I managed to pull it off, getting him to dps at about 36% as the green ooze died. With five seconds til the next ooze cast, everyone gunned it and quickly pushed him to P3. All the slime was gone and… holy cow… everyone was still alive. This was our most perfect shot at P3 yet.

Phase 3 was crazy, with everyone nearly panicking (me especially) as we tried to push him down as soon as possible and as fast as possible. The first two stacks went up on each tank, then I got it to 4, Demo to 4, and Nordic took it. At the 3 mark people started dying with Putricide at under 3%. 1:30 still on the hard enrage timer.

We pushed it with all our might, the healers doing their damnedest to keep the tanks up and when it hit about .5% this golden light washed over me, all sounds on vent ceased, a radiant warmth shone down, and I was granted peace in the knowledge that our long weeks of struggle were finally coming to fruition.

With a gasp, Putricide keeled over and coughed up his purples.

Finally.

Great job, ES!

What is Hellscream’s Warsong? I like to imagine he’s yelling out the Olympics anthem for us. I know that would inspire me to give 105%.

Last night was probably our best night ever on Putricide. One attempt we got him to 9%. Another, our best attempt, we had him at 4%. And that was with us going into P3 with 3 dps dead. If those three were up, it would have been lights out for the good doctor.

After all this time and all the struggling, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I think our biggest problem is the strat allows for too much raid damage. We currently camp on the green side at all times, so we eat 2-3 green slime explosions each time one is up. That gives a lot of room for error for someone to get targeted and destroyed with others no having the time to stack on them. I think we can fix that issue with a strategy tweak…

Sidenote: sorry for the light posting this week. I’ve been swamped at work. I’ll be traveling to Orlando in two weeks, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I have a feeling the guild is getting back on track. Attendance is a lot better, buoyed by new recruits, and nothing would improve guild morale more than finally dropping that malodorous malpracticer.

And if part of our victory is due to a 5% buff… so be it. I’ll take the kill without reservations.

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

And so it was, my guild is recruiting.

This has been a long time coming for sure. Reading my raid recaps (when I’ve been in a good enough mood to do one) you could see how poor attendance has been lately. In the last month we’ve been on the razor’s edge in terms of whether or not our 25mans were going to go off. Despite having about 30 geared raiders, from night to night 6-8 decide to take the night off. If one or two were doing this, that’d be fine, but that huge a number makes raid unpredictable. Moreover, would it kill people to give some heads up that “hey, I can’t make raids next week”?

Two weeks ago when this problem first cost us a raid night it was obvious that the only real solution was to recruit, but I held off because I knew we had the people, they just were taking nights off en masse. So we shortened the raid week to two nights, though a bit longer, to make raiding less onerous on everyone’s schedules. That seemed to help a little, but now it’s plain to see we can’t ignore the root of the problem anymore. It’s time to shut up and do the hard thing and bring more dps into the fold and acclimate them into the raid core.

I’m currently attempting to find five or so new dps for the guild, qualified folks requiring minimal gearing so we can get back on track and get the progression train rolling again. We’ve been stuck at 7/12 for a while, giving Putricide the stink eye, and we really need to make good on our threats.

Wednesday was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We spent all Tuesday night literally mopping up all farm content as quickly and efficiently as possible: first four bosses, Festergut, Rotface, Blood Council, all one shots. Hell, we even killed Svalna in the Dreamwalker hallway for the free Emblem of Frost. Then we went and did Toravon and the raid weekly for good measure.

And then Wednesday only 23 people showed up for progression.

30 minutes past raid start it was becoming obvious that ICC-25 wasn’t happening, and as a back up plan I told everyone to hang tight and I’d carve out two 10man groups so we could at least get something done in ICC-10. I spent a good ten minutes huddled over a pad of paper and a pen, sweating profusely, and trying to expertly craft two balanced groups that could equally complete ICC-10 content. I thought I did pretty well, passed off the group two list to an officer for him to invite for and lead, and then went to Icecrown to start mine.

A few minutes and it occurred to me (by way of healer complaints in /o) that group two didn’t have Replenishment. Total facepalm, didn’t even enter into the equation for me.

I’m doing my best, dammit

Apologies in advance if this reeks of QQ.

On a side note, the common denominator over every moment I’ve spent raiding over the course of the last month has been unmitigated stress. Demogar, the guild leader and my brother tank, has been spotty in attendance since he got his new job, for good or ill. It’s fallen on me to pick up the pieces when he isn’t there; this normally isn’t so bad, but I’m not cut out to be the leading type, I just kind of keep getting stuck with it.

I like to think of my situation in very “Charge of the Light Brigade”/Cincinnatus-esque terms–I hate raid leading but I will shoulder the burden to that the raids can actual happen. I take the tank gear, I bear the “Co-Guild Lead” rank, it’s my job.

I was mulling around these feelings in my head when two posts popped up on twitter. One at The Hunter’s Mark, which then spawned one by Wrathy. Both touched on raid leading and the philosophies and difficulties there of.

The common thread between these two are “you rank and file don’t know how good you have it, do your job and stop making mine so hard.” Money quote from Lass’ post:

My point is, raid leaders have to do everything the average player has to do… for 25+ other people and themselves. They also have to work out the logistics of scheduling and populating raids, which doesn’t sound difficult on the surface, but if you’ve ever tried throwing a PuG raid together, you sort of get a feel for what it can be like to do that every week. You get about a dozen people whispering you back and forth constantly, asking what gear set to bring, what spec they should use, who else is going, what bosses they’ll be focusing on, what the strategies are, what loot will drop, etc etc ad infinitum.

I completely agree. For that spotty 30 minute period on Wednesday when the night’s events looked in doubt I fielded a slew of whispers from various people asking when invites were going out, why weren’t they out yet, what were we going to do, and boy does it suck that we aren’t raiding.

Yeah, no kidding guys, believe me, I feel the same way.

If you’re not one of the lucky few that have taken it upon themselves to shoulder all this torture on your behalf, then please be kind to your raid leaders. All you have to do is come to raid and worry about if some piece of gear will drop that you want, and whether you personally are having fun.

I, and my many self-medicating cohorts, must worry about a panorama of things: is everyone having fun, why hasn’t that boss died yet, does anyone need go soon, who do I have to replace them, are we spending too much time between pulls, is the dkp addon working, is anyone afk, how are we going to do CC on this Blood Wing pull, what made us wipe on that boss, why is that hunter doing so little dps, what can I do to make people stack better, and so on and so forth.

I’m doing my best, dammit, to make sure the raids happen and the bosses die and the purples flow like wine. All I request in return is that everyone shows up. Is that so much to ask for?

10>25

The ten man I put together, however, was awesome. 10s as a rule tend to be more fun due to fewer personalities clashing, the ability to be more selective with whom you take, and a more casual atmosphere. Less seems to be at stake in ICC-10 when you’re a 25man guild.

My run was neck and neck with the other group up until Putricide when they had issues downing him while we wiped a few times at 1%. On the third try we smoked the Professor and continued on to eventually down Blood Council and the Blood Queen (a very messy one shot as you could see above).

We’re continuing the run Sunday night at Dreamwalker. I’ve got high hopes to see the LK fight, I think we can do it.

As for the other run, they killed Putricide on the fifth or so attempt, which is a bit rough, but on the bright side now 20 people in guild have killed Putricide in some format, as opposed to 10. This is knowledge we can parlay into the 25man encounter.

You know, if we can ever get the group together.

Wednesday night, the second and last raiding night according to the new schedule, we went into ICC intending to hammer out some progression–FINALLY–and maybe kill a wing boss. We’ve been taking potshots at Putricide, and barely at that, over the last month thanks to some seriously crappy attendance.

As I said, finally, we had good attendance Wednesday night and the stars seemed aligned for a wing boss kill. We got some quickie tries in on Putricide the night before, getting him to no more than 70%, but that was with us really only half-trying at the end of the night. The remainders of Tuesday night indicated two issues: rDPS on the boss was low, because those 70% attempts were lasting 6 minutes or so, meaning the boss wasn’t going down fast enough, and that we’d have to go through a bunch of wipes before everyone got used to avoiding the environmental damage.

To remedy the first issue (the low rDPS) we adopted the “stay on green” strat that would minimize how much time melee (and god, do we run melee-heavy) had to run to get to their target. Staying on green side meant that the Volatile Ooze would die expediently, and give us downtime to work on the boss. This definitely resolved the issue, suddenly we were forcing Phase 2 after the first Gas Cloud.

We went through a few wipes working out the kinks, like moving away from flasks, positioning for when the green ooze explodes so people don’t get knocked against the wall or a corner, avoiding the malleable oozes, etc. Everything was slowly coming together and suddenly our 70% attempts jumped to 50% attempts, and then we were dancing on the precipice of Phase 3.

Sidenote on phase transitions: one of the Rogues discovered if you Vanish during the Tear Gas cast (phase transitions) you don’t get stunned and can continue dpsing the boss/slime. A mage also pulled this off with Invisiblity. I’m guessing anything that takes you out of combat will do the same–Feign Death, etc.

Anyway, so we through the motions attempt after attempt, watching the health counter be lower and lower every time we wipe: serious progression. The bonus dkp flows like wine to keep everyone motivated. Honestly, I didn’t care if we didn’t kill him, I was having fun learning the fight.

Finally we start consistently pushing the good doctor into phase 3, although the first time it happened we weren’t prepared, had an add still up, and in the confusion managed to die one by one. But we were getting there!

We followed up with a few more phase 3 attempts, getting Putricide at the lowest to 20%. By this point it was getting late (attempts add up quickly when each can take up to 10 minutes), and performance was starting to reverse course. Thirty minutes before raid end we shuffled off and closed the night with VOA.

Am I disappointed we didn’t kill Putricide Wednesday? A little, but not totally. Last month we spent a whole night wiping on Rotface when he first came out, not scoring a kill, and then the following week we two shot him. I’m fully optimistic that next week we’ll build on what we learned and drop this sucker.

How do I know this? Oh, we fought them for 10 minutes and 3 seconds last night.

But how? you might ask. Wouldn’t that require most of your raid being de–

Yes, yes it would. And yes, yes they were.

The jinx was Demogar promised us twice the dkp we would normally get for the kill if we one shot the Princes. I scoffed, but whatever.

So, the fight stats … and 18.5% of the way in (according to WoL) we lost a healer and four dps. A little bit later we lost some melee and another healer. At this point I would have been prepared to wipe it and try again. But oh no, there was extra dkp on the line, everyone wanted to keep going. So we did.

About five minutes in we lost another chunk of dps. And we kept going.

Eight minutes into the fight and we’re at the 15% range, and Demo buys the farm. Taldaram goes wild and one shots a few people before I can pick him up. Now I’m tanking both guys with few healers left up and watching my hp yo-yo up and down.

The enrage timer is starting to get really close. By the 9 minute mark there was still 8% or so to go with only 9 of us left standing. It was going to be a photo finish.

Timer finally counts down the last few seconds, people yelling out health percentages in vent, and then it hits 0. The Princes enrage, their big one-shotting attack misses me and someone manages to pluck away the last bit of health.

The Princes go down with the nine of us left standing. Epic kill.

And yes, we all got our extra dkp.

If you’ve been following me on twitter (and hell, even here on the blog) I’ve been pretty down about my guild lately as it pertains to raiding. There’s been a few issues of nascent drama in addition to some very annoying attendance issues that have nearly cost us the ability to raid for the last two weeks. The problem isn’t so much we don’t have people, it’s that the people we do have are being fickle about showing up or have had scheduling issues (I myself had to miss the raid Wednesday because of a scheduling issue).

In one sense, the problem could be solved with recruiting, but the problem remains that there are capable people in guild, and we just need them to show up. I guess our first step is to work on getting those people to log in and get some of the lesser geared people into raids. We’re probably going to change the raid schedule from three three-hour days to two four-hour days, so we don’t have a stretch of raid nights that may be untenable for some folks. We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime I’m going to console myself with the knowledge that the core of the guild is strong, and made up of awesome people. Half of our ICC raid core weren’t even in guild during Naxx, so if we eventually have to build up again, it’s not the end of the world.

Some funny things form guild chat last night, so I may take comfort in the hilarity of the people I am blessed to raid with.

Slyke when he was asked for his gearscore when trying to get into a ToGC-10 pug:

And Zilga (a healer) from the attempts we put in on Dreamwalker last night:

Speaking of Dreamwalker …

Interesting fight. We tried it for the two hours or so we could and mostly got the hang of the adds, but we need to work on them a bit more. I really can’t offer any observations other than the Blazing Skeletons hurt like a mother, and need to die asap, and dps really needs to be on the ball with target switches. The fight reminds me a lot of when we were first trying Deathwhisper and the adds seemed unmanageable. Once we figure out what to kill when and how, it’ll go a lot smoother.

Ultimately though I regret trying Dreamwalker last night. We should have built on our experience with Putricide or Blood Queen rather than splitting our progression three ways.

Whack goes the nerf bat

Just to revisit this topic again briefly–I’m going to reiterate my lack of surprised that we were nerfed. I saw this coming earlier this week, the warning signs were all there.

The one thing that bothers me about the nerf (other than how it was just sprung on us in the middle of the night) is that Blizzard thinks that other tanks are “fine”. Specifically, warriors. Warriors right now are at the bottom of the heap across most, if not all metrics, and have very little to show for it. I don’t understand Blizz’s mentality that if a tank can tank a boss then they are fine. Tank survival should be the same across all four classes, much like how pure dps classes are more or less balanced against other pure dpsers.

The situation is now that the tank classes are a lot more balanced than they were a week ago, but warriors are still coming up short. They need some serious loving.

I can’t imagine there will be anymore Paladin nerfs in the near future, so don’t worry that we’re in the crosshairs or something. If any other changes are to be made they might involve making Seal of Command require a two-hander so Prot can’t use it anymore (thus, sadly, killing heroics spec). Beyond that… I just can’t see it.

But then again, I can’t imagine why Blizzard would be so willfully blind to how behind Warriors are in EH, dps, etc. So, who knows?

I think now that the Lich King is vulnerable he must be attempting to slow down raids with buggy boss encounters. How else can I explain the painful nonsense we kept running into last night?

First of all, thanks to Patch Day a swath of people were either late or having huge performance issues. Lag was also a major issue for some, though we were thankfully spared the dreaded Gunship lag. Nonetheless, all these little nibbling bites that were slowing people down were invariably cutting into raid performance.

And then there was the brand new buggified version of Saurfang we ran into last night. Usually we don’t see the first Mark until sub-50%, last night we had it at around 70% or so, and a second one going out before 60%. We assumed maybe someone was having issues kiting or people were standing too close together, but instead it just seemed like his Blood Power generation rate was off the charts.

We reset the fight by fleeing to the boat, but then the second time we had the same BP generation issues. We just decided to go with the flow and ended up killing Saurfang with something like six Marks up, no deaths. It wasn’t ultimately an issue for us, but this bug can probably prove to be a roadblock for others. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

After Saurfang we were already pushing against the clock and just went to cement our Blood Council kill last week with an equally clean kill. No luck on our part though, because in addition to melee dps assuming being told to scatter when Empowered Shock Vortex was being cast actually meant clump with other melee and get one shot, we had to deal the Kinetic Bombs deciding to randomly explode in midair.

We probably had a few wipes caused by bombs going off and killing too many people, especially ranged dps, which was tight last night and led to more Bombs hitting the ground and exploding. We kept getting ground up in the negative feedback loop.

Based on some cursory research I did it sounds like putting dots on the Bombs was making them explode as they were preparing to despawn. Does that make sense? Anyone have any insight into this?

Finally at around 15 minutes before raid end we dropped Blood Council after eeking out the kill with half the raid dead.

Overall not the best raid night, by far. Still, as long as attendance holds all week we can finally get some progress done on a wing boss. That’s all I ask, dammit.