A weekend of achievement
I’m delaying the UI post one day so I can tweak some things tonight. It will go up tomorrow! In the meantime you can see my new UI in these screenshots.
Friday we were supposed to wrap up ICC-10 and finally kill the Lich King. Hell, I even named the calendar event “The Dethroning”. I was going all in on any possible, and probable, jinxes. Unfortunately, raid didn’t happen. One invited person didn’t show and two couldn’t make it. And those in guild were either severely undergeared or all ready saved. To salvage the night we instead went for some good ol’ fashioned Uld10 hardmodes.
They went last weekend (when I wasn’t around) and cleared up to Firefighter but couldn’t down that fight. So Friday we started on Mimiron and after finally managing to scrape up a healer (one of our super geared raid healers came on) we were good to go. We then defied our expectations and easily one-shot Firefighter. The glories of severely overgearing an encounter!
With that easily acquired feather in our caps, we then double backed and opened up Algalon’s lair. Because, why not? We had the keys, none of us had ever seen the fight, it would only take an hour max. Might as well take a few whacks at it.
Algalon is, to put it lightly, a very intense fight. I can only imagine what it was like to do this when it was end-game content rather than the playground of a pack of drunkards. There are multiple counters letting you know when different dooms are going to befall your raid, the least of which was definitely not the Big Bang. The way we ended up handling that was Morvain, the DK, would tank initially then when I picked it up from him, after my first phase punch, the first Bang would occur.
I’d get hotted up and a everyone would go in a black hole and the hit would typically proc Ardent Defender, and the hots would push me back up to nearly full health immediately afterward. The second one Morvain would take, using a guardian spirit for similar effect. The third I would have AD back for, so I’d eat it and maybe pop Divine Protection if I got uncomfortable.
We did a bunch of attempts just working out the various mechanics, usually wiping to some little mistake that would kill someone and then domino effect into a wipe. That would lead to us quickly sprinting back to our corpses ASAP to get another lick in.
With about 30 minutes to go I was getting a bit nervous if we were going to get it that night. Then that attempt everything clicked, I guess, and we pushed it to the sub-20% phase for the first time. Suddenly waves of enemies were appearing and Morvain and I just went crazy taunting as much as we could. In a blur, Algalon dropped combat with us and then went into his monologue. It was pretty cool to get to see the fight, let alone kill it, however cheap the victory might have been.
Also, Algalon is hands-down the most beautiful boss encounter I have ever seen.
After Algalon I started debating with myself which Keeper I wanted to send down for One Light. Normally you’d want Thorim to get rid of the Immortal Guardians, but at our gear levels Phase 3 would probably go by really quickly, and I would be capable of holding a huge number of the guardians. As long as I kept them far enough away to prevent Yogg from getting free heals. I was trying to talk myself out of sending down Freya who would bend the difficulty curve a bit by giving us sanity wells.
I eventually settled on sending down Freya, dooming that lockout perhaps. Nonetheless, during my epic wasting of time up top running back and forth between Freya, everyone continued to clear down to Vezax. Once I got down there we finished off the trash and then went on to one-shot Vezax’s hardmode with little difficulty.
The real challenge was, as I suspected, Yogg. And not because of the hardmode. A lot of us were tired, some of us were clumsy, others rusty. It was pretty late and we kept stalling on the normal mechanics of the fight. People not getting out of the brain room in time and getting mind controlled, not enough dps being done to the brain, etc. If it was earlier in the night, I doubt that fight would have been much trouble. We ended up calling it at midnight, server time because a few had to go.
On the last attempt, as we were wiping, I ran into a portal to check off at least one the visions from my In His House He Lays Dreaming achievement. The wages of being a tank, eh? Certain achievements you usually have to finagle or trick your way into getting, like Hot Pocket or Denyin’ the Scion or Take Out Those Turrets, or snatch them mid-wipe.
Then yesterday was, in addition to Easter, the beginning of Noblegarden. The latter being the last holiday I needed to get my Violet Proto. And of that holiday I only needed three achievements: Chocoholic (I was 25/100 on this), Desert Rose, and Spring Fling. So in the morning I buckled down and headed over to Falconwing Square, which was crawling with pink bunnies darting from egg to egg and I was immediately reminded why I hated Noblegarden so much.
I eventually just camped in one spot in Falconwing that had near me three to four different eggs, and just darted between the four spawns grabbing them as they popped. Eventually my eyes started to bleed, so I bought the Spring Robe for Desert Rose and moved on to Brill, determined just to do Spring Fling and not hunt anymore eggs.
Then I saw how nearly deserted Brill was and what easy pickings the eggs there could be. I found another fruitful camping spot and hung out for a while, getting enough eggs to finally put me over the top for Chocoholic. From there I finished up my epic rabbit breeding journey and then did a quick tour of the various dry spots in Azeroth. Finally I finished up the last achievement of the last holiday I needed for What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.
I’m so glad that’s over.
… I should do Noblegarden on my druid if I’m going to use him in Cataclysm. Ugh.
Armory Feed
Trust me. Always bring down Thorim unless you’re going for no lights. The guardians pile up in a hurry, and you lose the 20% DPS boost that Thorim gives you. Yogg+3 without Thorim is about as hard as Yogg+1 with Thorim.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..At What Price, Victory?
@Rhidach
5 April 2010 at 1:28 pm #
I figured that was going to be the case. Sigh.
So even if a raid group isn’t familiar enough with the fight that you’d risk constant insanity wipes, yet said raid is decked out in 245+ gear, it’s still wiser to bring down Thorim over Freya?
I’m kinda in Rhidach’s boat here, I’ve got a raid group going to try this this weekend, and I’ve been back and forth with my fellow raid leaders about which one to send down, and it’s always come down to Freya. I’ve kinda agreed with them, thinking at this gear level it wouldn’t matter much anymore, but if it’s true that Thorim is still going to make such a big difference in P3, then I’d like something solid to back that up with when we go this weekend.
@Rhidach
5 April 2010 at 4:05 pm #
Yeah my thinking was this:
Thorim: He kills the immortal guardians, we get a dps boost.
Freya: Sanity wells (gives a safety net while learning the fight), and 20% healing boost.
With Thorim we’d have wipes brought on by sanity losses, but an easier time in P3. With Freya we’d have extra healing throughout the fight along with an easier time getting to Phase 3–in theory. I erred on the side of the latter. I wish I got to Phase 3 to see what the guardians were like. If they just swarmed but dps burnt Yogg down before they got too numerous, then I’d know if I made a good choice.
Your DPS needs to burn through 3.6 million health in phase three on yogg alone. An immortal gaurdian spawns every 15 seconds, and a shadow beacon goes out every 45 seconds. Each guardian swings for roughly 11k damage on a 264 geared tank when at full health, and swings every 2 seconds. Your DPS will also only be able to put effective DPS on yogg for about 2/3s of phase three due to lunatic gaze. Either you turn away to avoid it, or you eat it and spend the same amount of time regenerating sanity.
Assuming that you have roughly 60% avoidance and 60k health raid buffed, you can survive tanking about ten of them if you don’t get unlucky with avoidance. Beyond that, and the odds are in the favor of the guardians intagibbing you at any moment. This gives you an max theoretical soft enrage of 150 seconds, however, it is much more likely to go pear shaped much earlier due to the constraints of healer throughput.
With these constraints in mind, you can figure out that each of your seven dps need to average 5.2k DPS in phase three. Not an impossible task, but one that’s much more difficult to hit on Yogg than it is on other fights, due to the constraits of rapid movement the phase enforces which will interrupt DPS rotations. And that’s assuming that you’re lucky with your avoidance. Worst case scenario, if you go a stretch with no avoidance, as few as 6 guardians could kill you faster than server latency. This means that the average DPS in phase three needed to ensure that luck plays no role in the fight is 8.7k.
The other option is to due the two hunter distracting shot dance for every shadow beacon, and AOE the guardians low enough that they don’t hit you for anything worth mentioning. But that’s introducing all the complexity of Yogg+0 into the fight, when, if sanity is that big of an issue, your group might not be prepared to handle from an execution standpoint.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..At What Price, Victory?
@Rhidach
5 April 2010 at 5:40 pm #
So what I’m hearing isssss… send down Thorim? :P
If I were in your shoes, I would send down Thorim, and use this lockout as a training day. Freya’s already down, but you don’t have to use the sanity wells. Forbid your group from using them, and work on getting your execution down. At the end of the night, know it down, collect your two lights achievement, and be ready to go next week. Burn through the required bosses in the fastest manner possible, and work on yogg with just thorim.
The final bosses of Wrath have all been about execution, rather than brute force. Try and zerg yogg with anything less than 7 aff locks, and you’re gonna get your head handed to you, regardless of gear level.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..At What Price, Victory?
Well done on the achievements. I have to admit I will never get the proto drake cos I hate Noblegarden which such a vengeance!! I promised instant raid/guild kick if anyone even thought about doing anything with rabbits that made that awful ‘dinga ding ding’ noise in ICC tonight.
@hazmacewillraid
5 April 2010 at 9:43 pm #
That sucks about people not showin’ up for LK…. although I do have to admit I missed out last night on our guild’s 25m LK attempts, if they even happened. Why you’d schedule a raid on Easter…
By the way, did you stack your Recount and Omen together or something? Because in your Vezax SS you have Recount showing, while in your visions SS you have Omen, and they’re both where the other should be. If you could tell me how you did this that would be AMAZING, it’s such a waste of space to have them side by side like I do.
Edit: “I’m delaying the UI post one day so I can tweak some things tonight. It will go up tomorrow! In the meantime you can see my new UI in these screenshots.” I guess I could just wait a day haha
Oh, and nice bubble hearth on Yogg :P
@Rhidach
6 April 2010 at 12:32 pm #
LK was actually scheduled on Friday, but I guess the weekend as a whole was bad timing, haha.
And yeah the last attempt basically went *three people get mind controlled on first portal* “Ok, that’s a wipe, have a good night!” *jump in portal* “Armageddon outta here!”