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…
Armory Feed
Proper way to do All You Can Eat:
1 Tank
1 Healer (Paladin is beast)
8 DPS
Get to phase 3, pop heroism, pop all DPS cooldowns. You should have her down at 4-5 stacks.
@Rhidach
23 August 2010 at 1:40 pm #
Maybe with a more optimized set up, definitely not with the group we had last night.
Grats bro! You guys are beasts.
On a total sidebar; how the piss do you have 41,000 gold!? WTB your secrets. /shiftyeyes
@Rhidach
23 August 2010 at 1:41 pm #
Prudent investments? haha
/shiftiereyes
@hazmacewillraid
23 August 2010 at 3:38 pm #
I don’t like change. I fear it, actually.
Seriously though, we were getting so so close last week with the standard strat; I think we can do it this week!
… Although you’re the raid leader / guild master / superior tank (to me, at least), so I’ll bow to your expertise. But only in one of those “I’m bowing to you, but not breaking eye contact” bows.
@Rhidach
23 August 2010 at 3:48 pm #
But only in one of those “I’m bowing to you, but not breaking eye contact” bows.
Does this involve some kind of weird torso pivot?
Ana’s trying to talk me out of it. I think practice will bear this one out without needing extra layers of strategery.
@Anafielle
23 August 2010 at 6:19 pm #
Excuse me! I didn’t tout the zerg strat! In fact I was rather disgusted that we didn’t manage to do it in any one of the (numerous) “real” ways to do that achievement!
You guys clearly have what I think is a winner with the turn strat. Should we ever have to do that achievement again (god I hope not) or we do it on 25, I would definitely be a fan.
3 tanks is the “safe” way to do it, and Entropia fails to mention that he did it that way most of the time :) But niether of our 10s tried it. We got through it in other ways.
Also – GRATS!!!! Sorry I was so stressed out when I popped into your vent for the explanation/help. Glad to have been of some service :)
Nice! I’ll definitely plan to use this strat as we’re down to just the two achievements you outlined today and H:Putricide and H:Sindragosa.
BTW, did I miss your write up of Heroic Le Bon Professeur on 10? If not, maybe I could incentivize you with, um, er, offers of better bribes?
saif’s last blog ..Writing in a hurry
I have a question about your strategy with Sindragosa. Do you continue rotating Sindragosa clockwise for each subsequent ice block, or do you alternate back and forth between two positions?
@Rhidach
24 August 2010 at 5:02 pm #
Continue rotating clockwise for every block.