Back in the seat

Muscle memory is a huge convenience. After a week spent in the icy tundra of Orlando (I brought a cold snap down with me, sorry Floridians), I came back from the conference this weekend and was bamboozled into an ICC-10 run last night. Still sitting on a raid lockout I had the foresight to extend before leaving for my work trip, I reactivated it and we hopped in right to Sindragosa.

And despite having not tanked in a week and being incredibly rusty feeling, my fingers apparently were able to jump right back into the flow and managed to do the thinking for me. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what key Holy Shield was mapped to, but when the point came in 969 to use it my middle finger instinctively shot up and pushed 2 down. I felt like Doc Ock with his sentient mechanical tentacles.

I was just, as a lark, reading the wikipedia article on muscle memory and it mentioned that you need to repeat an action 740 times for your brain/muscles to “memorize” it. I have no idea if that’s true, but think about how many times I use Holy Shield over the course of a raid. According to this log it was almost 200 times in one raid.

Sorry, stupid digression–I just found the whole concept fascinating. Some people use muscle memory to make repair cars better, some for surgical procedures, I use it to lower my reaction time while tanking.

Anyhoo, Sunday night. Raid. Sindragosa.

We did a few attempts on the crazy harpy (BETRAAAAAAAAYS YOU) each time doing fantastic and then having some issues with phase 3. After a chunk of attempts people got the hang of getting away when targetted for ice blocking, breaking people in their group out, etc. The second to last attempt we got her to 5% or so, then the last one it was a photo finish, killing her with a few people dead and two people blocked, along with the boss nearly almost enraged. It got to the point where people shouted out “ignore the blocks! Kill the boss!”

So we did and then she dropped. It was messy, but the way attempts were trending we were probably going to kill her cleanly the next time. I’ll take a sooner messy kill over a perfect kill ten minutes later. Time is always a luxury.

Another digression: let’s talk about raid leading philosophy for a second. What did in the 5% attempt was two people got extra-blocked (ie, stood too close to the targeted person) and the attempt fell apart. On the run back I named names and stressed paying attention not just to where you are when targeted but also where others are when they are targeted.

I was then (jokingly, though) accused of bitchery. In your raids, do people get called out when the make mistakes? I know personally I usually let people chastise themselves in private, but lately I’m not so sure that’s effective. I feel a dignified public shaming would better reinforce “oh hey, standing next to this guy is a bad idea” the next time around.

Whenever I screw something up my first response is to apologize in vent and explain how I screwed up. I’m just extending that courtesy to everyone else now, haha.

But, again, I digress. After Sindra was downed we excitedly bounded over to the Upper Spire and then up the teleporter to the Frozen Throne. We all posed for pictures with Arthas (hence my pic above) and then kind of dawdled about how we were going to deal with the fight. It was a Sunday night and already kind of late, and as much as I’d like to take a 15 minute break to watch the video, we didn’t have the time for that.

I alt-tabbed and browsed stratfu’s strategy a bit (I know, for shame, not being prepared!) but I got lost in the mountains of descriptions and all the cascading diagrams. Ironically (maybe) for someone who writes a blog and guides about fights sometimes, but I for the life of me, cannot learn a fight by reading a description. Words just blend together and I get bored of what I’m reading. I’m a much more visual learner, or at least I need to wipe a few times for something to “click”.

Anyway, we decided to wing it. Yes, wing Arthas. We had about 20 minutes, we weren’t going to kill him that night, might as well have some fun.

We had some basic understanding of how Phase 1 worked based on how much we read before giving up and after the second try we were basically getting through it pretty easily, once positioning was worked out.

The Remorseless Winter phase went a little oddly with us dying in new and exciting ways each time we tried it. The first time we weren’t expecting the floor to crumble when it did (I blame Gandy’s saronite bombs) and a few of us tumbled to our deaths. Another time one of the ice clouds burst too close to a few of us and we got blown off the side of the map.

Like I said, we didn’t have a shot in hell of dropping Arthas in our short time window. I’m rolling over the lockout to next weekend and we’ll get a full night on the sucker then. At this point I doubt many people care about the 251 gear or the easy badges, we want our Kingslayer titles.