I miss my Figurine of the Colossus

Oh, how many times I farmed Shattered Halls to get this trinket. It must have been at least fifty times I dragged Ildara, Cendra, and Dargu through that ooze-infested sewer system, the fiery gauntlet, and the hallway of ninjas. Unlike my amazing luck with the Sun Eater (first try in Heroic Mech it dropped), the Figurine eluded me for as long as it could.

It was an amazing piece back in BC, when being unhittable was the norm. I sent most of BC farming heroics with friends so believe me when I say the Figurine was firmly cemented into one of my two trinket slots. Where it truly shined, though, was out in the wild when AOEing down huge packs of melee mobs.

The gold standard for this activity was the Demon Hunter Supplicant farming outside of Black Temple. I spent a lot of time there, buffed with (the old) Blessing of Sanctuary, my shield-spiked Petrified Lichen Guard in one hand, Sun Eater in the other, and a Figurine of the Colossus on my bars. They never knew what hit them. The good ol’ days!

It’s a shame that a similar item doesn’t exist in Wrath. I know being unhittable has fallen out of vogue between the death of Crushing and the onset of Chill of the Throne, but there was always something about activating a trinket while in the midst of 40 meleeing mobs and watching your health continuously crawl up to full from 50%. That was one of the greatest things about being a Pally Tank in TBC, the feeling you could take on an army all by yourself (as long as there were no casters!), made all the easier with this remarkable item.

I still have my Figurine in my bank. I’ll probably never use it again, but it’s one of those items I can just never sell or delete.

Ditching the chicklet

One of my big goals when redoing my layout was to get rid of that uniform, ugly little image that Feedburner provides us to display our RSS e-peen. Rather than having the gross icon taking up some space on my sidebar, I wanted to display my subscriber count as plain text and thus format it however I pleased.

After trying a metric ton of different options and code snippets I finally found one that worked and I’d like to share it with my fellow WoW blogging buddies out there.

NB: This requires you being able to edit a php file in your layout. I inserted this code into the sidebar.php portion of my design (with heavy tweaking). Not sure if WordPress.com or Blogspot allow access to such a file, though any self-hosted blogs should have no problem utilizing this solution.

Here’s the code:

<?php

$url    = "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/
GetFeedData?uri=FEEDBURNERNAME";
$ch     = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($data) {
        echo $data;
        preg_match('/circulation=\"([0-9]+)\"/',$data, $matches);
        if ($matches[1] != 0) {
                $subscriberCount = $matches[1];
        }
}

echo "$subscriberCount"

?>

Just replace “FEEDBURNERNAME” with the username you have with that service. Mine is RighteousDefense, for example. You can get your username just by looking at your Feedburner URL.

The code block will return your total subscriber number as text. Surround it with whatever flavor you want.

I hope this works for everyone and allows you to finally ditch that awful chicklet!

I just don’t get it

I raid with an incredible group of people. People that can learn from mistakes and build upon progress to score some amazing kills. And yet, we have nights like we did last night on Sindragosa. And I just don’t get why. I see attempts where no on dies to Blistering Cold, where no extra blocks happen in air phase, where everyone is alive at the Phase 3 start, and yet we then follow it up with multiple attempts of Blistering Cold deaths, extra blocks, and multiple deaths before 35%. Maybe I expect too much.

Sindragosa, from my perspective at the business end of the dragon, seems to be such an easy fight. And, god knows, I’ve made the fight even easier. Removed so much guess work.

Using AVR I put symbols on the stairs (I’ll detail how in a future post) for each raid icon and two green dots further ahead. In air phase, people get icons from DBM and need to run to park on their symbol. Usually, this goes smoothly, but then there were so many attempts where people run up the middle of the stairs to get to safety in the back and were hit by multiple frost beacons, immediately killing them. How many times did I have to shout “if not beaconed, run up the sides!” during the course of the night? Who knows.

As for the two green dots, I explained in phase 3 I want to see frost beaconed people run to either dot and everyone else, to stay 10 yards away from those dots if they are not beaconed and not using that block to drop Mystic Buffet. And what happened? Multiple people over the course

Tunnel-visioning, that’s the problem. No situational awareness. We hit phase 3 and people panic and lose sight of the most important thing: endurance. They stand in the red circles AVR puts under people to indicate that person was beaconed, they run up too many stacks of Chilled to the Bone, they don’t drop their Mystic Buffet stacks. They die in the first phase 3 Blistering Cold because they weren’t expecting it.

For kicks, here’s the dead simple way of doing Sindragosa:

1. When sucked in for Blistering Cold immediately turn around and run out. (Mouse turn, not keyboard turn). Don’t die.
2. In air phase stand on the symbol corresponding to your mark. If not marked run up the sides of the stairs until you reach the safe spot in the back.
3. LOS the Frost Bombs. Put a block between you and the swirl out ahead.
4. During phase 3 do not stand within 10 yards of those two green dots. If beaconed drop your block on the closest one. If it’s your turn to drop Mystic Buffet, do so once the block is made. If beaconed while behind the block immediately run to the next green dot.

And yet.

I don’t write this post to cast aspersions at my raid crew. They’re a fantastic group of people. I just need to find some way to make everything click. It frustrates me to no end that I am powerless to make these stupid little mistakes go away. I know we’ll kill Sindragosa eventually, once everything clicks. I’d just prefer that was sooner rather than later.

Frost Resist Sidenote: Now that I remembered to run a log, I can affirmatively say that with ~300 FR I took about 20k damage per Frost Breath and resisted on average 14k damage per. This seemed pretty healable (especially with 60k hp), so I think more than 300 FR will be unnecessary.

Moreover, my OT and I were switching regularly during Phase 3 so I never ate a Frost Breath more than around 30k, unless the OT was dead and my stacks were out of control.

I wore Belt and Boots this time. I think my buffed FR number was 301, but I know for a fact it was more than 300.

Fun fact: I cast Hand of Freedom on myself 52 times last night. I thought it’d be more than that.

Look at my stupid luck

We had probably our best farm night in, well, forever in ICC-25 last night. Thanks to the 15% buff we steamrolled through the Lower Spire, then knocked over (or picked back up, however you want to term it) Dreamwalker, then smashed through the Blood Wing, then finally demolished the Plague Wing. Three hours are the first pull we had 10/12 bosses down, killing everything we have on farm. This completely frees up tonight for three hours of Progression Fun Time. I’m very happy.

Perhaps one of the best parts of the night was our third, and last, attempt on BQL. By all accounts we should have wiped on this attempt. Towards the end one of the dps died and one bite was put on the offtank, another on a healer in the last wave because the biters were going to get MC’d. We missed the enrage timer at the end, so Lana’thel turns gigantic, angry and red.

Seconds earlier I popped an armor pot, then as the timer hit zero I popped both my trinkets (Glyph and Key) for extra dodge and some damage absorption. Stupidly, I had Forbearance on me from popping Divine Shield when someone got feared right next to me during the second air phase. Locked out of my bubble, I basically prayed. This is what happened:

Somehow, I avoided every melee hit (except for the one that killed me and proc’d AD). I took some heavy hits from Shroud of Sorrow, but that wasn’t so bad for me. For everyone else, it pretty much blew them up immediately.

Anyway, the point being: behold(!) the improbable power of avoidance. It doesn’t always know you exist, but can be amazing when its golden countenance doth shine down upon thee.

Get the Last Word

Recently I’ve seen some folks poo-pooing Last Word, decrying as yet another one of “those sucky proc weapons.” I’d like to clear up this misconception, because nothing could be further from the truth. Here are three complaints I’d like to counterpoint:

1. It’s dependent on a proc

The proc was changed to have a 100% uptime. As long as you’re swinging that mace, you are benefitting from Blessing of Light.

2. The proc sucks

This sentiment could not be more wrong. Just focusing on the healing half of it, whenever Blessing of Light is up, any heals cast on you are increased as if the caster had 300 more spellpower. While this may seem like a small amount, it can be as much as 8% of the healer’s total buffed spellpower. That’s a lot of extra oomph to get just from a weapon proc.

This won’t translate into 8% more healing received, but it will make a noticeable difference in your healing intake and could feasibly make the difference in some sticky situations.

3. It doesn’t have any threat stats

With the proc having a constant uptime, you’re looking at 100 more strength. That’s comparable to just about every tanking weapon in ICC. Not only that, but the weapon speed is also huge. Slower weapons make your Holy Vengeance procs hit for more damage, among other abilities.

The slower the weapon is, often, the more threat your abilities will do. Indeed, according to Theck’s analysis, Last Word is the best tank weapon in the 264 range for tps. The 277 Last Word is the highest tps tank weapon in game.

In short, Last Word is a very powerful weapon. It’s a huge boon in the age of the trickle-down death, adding extra oomph to every heal you receive, and a powerful threat weapon to boot. Benefit while you can of the ignorance that surrounds this weapon and snatch it up before anyone knows any better.

New layout warning

I’m going to be monkeying around a bit. If you see the layout suddenly change and look terrible, just bear with me, that means I’m actively tinkering with it. I’ll be switching back to the tried and true one once I run out of steam chopping up CSS. New layout won’t go up permanently until it’s done.

Edit: Alright, well, I’ve decided I’m happy enough with my progress that I’m going to leave what I have up. I still have a lot more to do, of course, but this should hold pretty well for now. For example: comments are now threaded, hurray.

My to-do list:

1. Find a good font for posts
2. Change post title font
3. New color for the right sidebar
4. Add some better things on the sidebar like “greatest hits” and rss/etc links.
5. Change links color
6. New background color
7. Copy blockquote design from old layout
8. Somehow get comment avatar images to float left
9. Other things I can’t think of

I’ll take any other suggestions as well. I’m perfectly open to many design tweaks.

Rabble, rabble, rabble

The community is in complete uproar right now over the recently announced plans to change raiding in Cataclysm in regards to 10 and 25man raiding. As the announcement states, both will drop the same loot (thought 25s will drop more) and both will be of a comparable difficulty. Personally, I think this is a fantastic change, and this is coming from someone who primarily raids in 25s.

If my guild dies this summer, I would in a heart beat just switch to pure 10s and never look back. I love the reduced size, the relaxed atmosphere, the greater comraderie. The fact that more often than not in 25s you need to deal with people that if you had the luxury of choice, you would disassociate with, has always left a bad taste in my mouth for the larger raid setting.

Likewise, I’m excited for all the people that are 10man raiders, either by choice or not, and will get to have the same loot and the same prestige, provided difficulties are balanced. If that’s even possible. Sure, you can make LK-25 have more health and do more damage than LK-10, but there are some things that will be harder to balance between 10s and 25s. More existential things. For example, Empowered Shock Vortex is *so* much easier to avoid in 10man, because you have so many fewer melee. Likewise the air phases on BQL, with only 10 people spreading out is cake.

Another plus: I won’t have to run two versions of the same content every week to max out my emblems intake. I never want to go back to the ToC system where I was doing ToC-10, H ToC-10, and ToC-25 every goddamn week. That was a prescription for burnout if I ever saw one.

But overall I think the change is awesome, and as long as they find some way to normalize the difficulty between 10s and 25s (and not just make 25s as easy as 10s, but rather the reverse) then it will be a boon for every aspiring raider in Azeroth. I could care less if someone in a strict 10man gets to enjoy the same flavor of ice cream as me. As long as we both worked as hard to chase down the truck, we deserve access to the same stuff.

On AVR

Ever since this was featured on mmo-champ this weekend, suddenly everyone knows about it, for good or ill. Mostly ill.

The reactions have run the gamut from “this cheapens raiding” to “this is cheating!!!” to “good players don’t need it, bad players will still stand in fire.”

I’ve sung the praises of this mod recently, and I will continue to do so. I love it, it’s awesome, and yes I like it because it makes certain bosses easier. For Rotface we used to stack on one leg then shift to another when a Big Ooze exploded. Now we just take care not to stand in the red circle. On 10man last night, I don’t think anyone ever even got hit by an ooze rocket.

I realize now I’ve offered evidence for the anti-AVR crowd. I guess all I can offer in the addon’s defense is that where some people see cheats, I see streamlining.

Perhaps (assuming Blizzard doesn’t kill this mod) the fact that an addon can neuter their oh-so-favorite mechanic, the “don’t stand in x”, they will respond by introducing some more depth to encounters that go beyond standing in the right place at the right time. I think it’s about time we finally kill off the void zone as a staple of boss design.

And ultimately I suppose that’s AVR’s sole strength: it kills the void zone. Using this mod won’t make slack-jawed raiders keep a Valk from dropping someone to their death, or get their bite off during BQL, or not stack their Mystic Buffet too high. AVR makes raiding as easy mode as DBM did when it allowed your to see the timers on boss abilities. It’s just another tool in the box.

Account security in your raid

Ever since I took over as GM of Enveloping Shadows, I’ve been viewing just about every happenstance in the guild through the prism of “how does this affect the raid?”

My primary goal is and will remain keeping the raid viable, progressing, and upbeat, and if something conflicts or threatens one of those three things I become obsessed with it.

For example, immediately after I took over one of our dps warriors got hacked. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, he’d file a ticket and get his account restored. Might have no even missed a raid if the hacking took place later in the week.

The twist however was that this warrior did not own his account. He had purchased it at some juncture and had been using it for some time. He didn’t have the account information and had absolutely no way of getting it back from support. The dps warrior who was always in the top ten on the charts, was kitted out in 264 gear, and even had a Shadow’s Edge, was kaput.

Thankfully he had a second account (his own) with an 80 paladin, and he switched that to his main and basically jumped right back in the saddle. So I guess there’s a happy ending to that. He’s even working on another Shadow’s Edge.

Fast forward to this week. On Wednesday one of the confirmed resto shamans (or, shamen?) didn’t show. I brought in another healer from standby and we went about our business. Towards the end of the night, the shaman hopped in vent and informed us his account was hacked. The hacker had deleted his characters and put an authenticator on it. And, moreover, he didn’t own the account so he might not be able to get it back.

Another one!

Though again, thankfully, we were blessed with a happy ending. Whoever was in charge of support that morning must have been feeling generous, because the shaman got the account back without supplying much (if any) information. So, I was not faced with having to replace him with a new healer in the roster and then gearing that new healer up. A very relieving turn of events.

Now, to get back to the point: both these unfortunate incidents obviously affect the victim, but they affect the raid as well. Losing a great dps with a great gear would be a pain in the butt. Losing a great healer would be more damaging. The raid suffers when people whom you depend on are forcibly removed from the raiding pool.

Of course, your raiders have a responsibility to the 24 folks that they adventure with. Moving forward (especially after two incidents in about a month) I’m strongly considering some kind of recourse, being it dkp bonuses for having an authenticator (as incentive), benching non-authenticator’d people more often, or just plan demanding everyone obtain one.

At the very least, if you don’t own your account (the root of the issue, this is pretty dumb, honestly), you should take steps to prevent your account from being hacked. Get an authenticator. It can’t prevent the original owner from taking back the account that he sold to you, but it can prevent some low-life on the other side of the world from destroying everything you’ve worked so hard on.

Tanking the adds in the Dreamwalker encounter

I remember this being really messy the first time we tried. It was a pain to figure out which adds you wanted to pay the most attention to, and when. Er, except for the Blazing Skeletons. Those bastards make it quite clear early on how deserving of attention they are.

The key to this fight is standing in the right place and tanking the right mobs. Let’s talk about the room first:

Ideally you’ll be assigned a specific side while another tank gets the other. This side that you’re placed in is your world. Everything that enters it is now your domain. And that includes every undead creature that exits the doors on your side.

Pan your camera out enough that you can reasonably see both doors at just about all times. This is going to be key because the Blazing Skeletons are as sneaky as a Fel Reaver. You do not want them surprising your raid. As soon as one of those guys enters your domain, shout out in vent your side and if it’s the front or back door. If it’s coming from the back door, let it move far enough to clear the central pillar between the doors. If you attack it prematurely, it’ll stop moving, and place itself out of LoS for your ranged.

You want that Blazing Skeleton dead before it gets a tick of Lay Waste off, ideally. I’ve heard whispers of how the Lay Waste mechanic works, in that the Blazing Skeleton will only cast when in melee range of its target, and I’ve seen it get “confused” and delay the channel of Lay Waste. But we’ve never been able to purposefully replicate this effect. I’m not going to say having someone out of melee range taunting will delay the Lay Waste cast, but something seems to be happening. I just don’t know what.

What not to tank

Ignore the suppressors. They have no aggro, they will just run up and start channeling their healing debuff on Dreamwalker. The best way for you to help kill these is to tank mobs on top of them so the cleaves and AOEs of your dps will drop them down significantly, and usually kill them. Likewise, Holy Wrath is excellent for a quick stun on them all at once.

Moreover, avoid the Blistering Zombies. Everytime they melee you they will stack Corrosion on you. Goes up to five stacks, for a total debuff of 50% armor. Combine that with an Abom increasing your Physical damage taken by 25%, and you have an issue. Let the hunters kite these.

The Risen Archmages are kind of a gray area. They don’t hurt that much, but they can be a major threat to healers if they sneak past you and start wreaking havoc in the middle of your healing corps. I usually just throw a Hand of Reckoning on these guys when they spawn, bring them close, and then let the dps burn them down. If one of the melee dps grabs aggro, it’s not a big deal.

About face

When tanking the Aboms you want to park them on top of where Suppressors spawn and face them southward, away from Dreamwalker. Gut Spray (along with many other attacks) will hurt Dreamwalker, so let’s not make the healers’ job harder, eh?

The Gut Spray will also do some heavy damage to your melee, so make sure none of them are mouth breathing and standing in front of the Abom with you.

Swap seals

Keep Seal of Vengeance up for most of the fight, except for when the Abom dies. It’ll erupt into a pack of Rot Worm mobs that you want to pick up asap. Switch to Seal of Command, drop a Consecrate, and then HotR as they come up. Try to pick them all up and burn them down as fast as possible.

Ultimately, Dreamwalker (like all add fights) seems initially tough because there’s so much to keep track of. Once you get the hang of the adds and how to control them, and your healers get the hang of their all-too-important role, the fight quickly becomes a cake walk.

A frosty reception

We got Sindragosa to 25% last night, for the first real night of attempts on her.

Had a solid hour and a half to work on her and we made some serious progress. People learned the ice blocks, towards the end I don’t think we were losing anyone to Blistering Cold, and the idea of Phase 3 was starting to form itself in everyone’s heads. Good ol’ fashioned progression. I love it.

Next week we’re basically dedicating Wednesday to Sindragosa. I expect the following day I’ll be gracing this blog with a kill shot.

As for the fight itself, it didn’t seem too rough from a tanking perspective. The hardest part, I guess, was positioning. Picking up Sindra initially and turning her in a way that her side is perpendicular to the stairs, and avoiding cleaves right off the bat.

I also decided to go with wearing 2 pieces of Frost Resist gear, which in hindsight seemed a bit overkill. Having 313 FR was great for neutering the Frost Breaths, but I don’t think I needed that much. I wish I had run a log of the fight (I accidentally turned it off after BQL) last night so I could check damage from breaths vs melees and see if I was taking more physical damage than necessary to mitigate the frost damage. More dataz are needed!

I’m curious how much, if any, FR you all run for Sindragosa-25?

Overall I’m very optimistic about our chances in this fight. I think ES will be seeing Arthas sooner than later.