My great white, armored whale eludes me

As I’ve declared in Twitter and my fevered dreams, my goal before the expansion pack is to hit the armor cap. Initially it was just to see 75.00% damage reduction in that armor tool tip on my character sheet (45,697), but them’s small potaters. I have bigger fish to fry–the raid boss armor cap–49,905 armor. That number has seared itself into my soul.

During a 25man raid I have about 44,000 armor (which is an obscene yet seductive number) in my armor set. With in-combat buffs, correct consumables, and the like I can push that much higher.

Last night I asked Antigen to pop an Aura Mastery-enhanced Devotion Aura for me once we were in Saurfang’s frenzy period and I had chugged an Indestructible Potion. The results were impressive, maybe, but disappointing in that they could have been a lot better. For example, I should have gotten the Holy Pally with Improved Devo Aura to do it (no offense, Ani).

In any case, I definitely did not bring my A-game.

46,294. Pitiful!

Here’s what I did wrong:

1. Mongoose on my sword. The proc offers a nice chunk of agility, but you can’t count on that. Exceptional Agility is a much better, more consistent bet. Worth 52 armor, before Kings.

2. Had a Stoneblood Flask up. The better consumables choice for armor would have been an Elixir of Protection (800 armor) mixed with an Elixir of Mighty Agility (90 armor before Kings).

3. Didn’t have Pillars of Might equipped, which cost me 1088 additional armor.

In total we’re talking 2030 additional armor I could have had at that moment. My hit would be abyssal, but sacrifices must be made in the name of science, eh?

I doubt that 2030 armor will be enough to close the 3611 armor gap, even with buffs and procs. I’ll probably have to grab some additional pieces to push me over the finish line. Specifically, I’m thinking of the following:

• Heroic Bile-Encrusted Medallion for +84 armor
• Heroic Sanctified Lightsworn Handguards for +213 armor
• Heroic Gargoyle Spit Bracers for +714 armor
• Heroic Unidentifiable Organ for +238 armor

In total that’s worth 1249 armor. Hell, upgrading my shield to the heroic version is also worth 389, though clearly only one of them exists. So, sum total we’re talking an additional 1638 armor from upgrades.

Combine that with the 2030 armor from not being an idiot and I’m looking at 3668 armor, easily enough to put me over the hump. And that’s before buffs.

Back to the seas, Queequeg!

Beta Journal: Deepholm, 83, Vashj’ir, Kezan and Gilneas

After admitting the problem last week, that I’ve been terrible at spending time in beta, I was determined to rack up some quality time there over the long weekend. I ended up burning through the entire zone of Deepholm, dipping my toe in the pool that is Vashj’ir, hitting a roadblock in Kezan, and then finishing up the Worgen starting storyline in Gilneas. This is going to be a pretty heavy post full of screenshots and minor spoilers, so I advise skipping if you want to stay pristine when Cata launches. I’d put it behind a more tag, but I hate when people do that, so you all must suffer for my vanity.

First thing I did after firing up the beta was get my Draenei paladin set up with glyphs (I’ll talk about that a little later on) and then head over to Stormwind to follow the breadcrumbs to Deepholm. This involves going to the Maelstrom itself where Thrall is working to repair the rift. You talk to the big guy himself, then the wyvern rider nearby who will shuttle you through the whirlpool and into Maelstrom. It’s a pretty incredible sequence, eye candy galore.

Just that minor area with the whirlpool and the sea splashing all around you is probably one of the most beautiful locations in game.

Once we dove into Deepholm, the sound bites the wyvern rider was spouting off seemed to fade off at the end of every sentence. Which is funny, because at the same time the Fungalmancer Glop’s little speech being spoken on the other side of the zone was echoing like the little bastard was sitting right next to me. They need to work on speech distance/triggers I think.

This is probably part and parcel for a new trend in making the world seem more “alive”, in the sense that everyone talks more. With actual speech. I kept running into little scenes or events where once a simple text bubble would have sufficed, but instead it’s fully voiced.

So storyline progression definitely got bumped up a notch in Deepholm. How about questing? Well, truth be told, I found Deepholm’s quests intensely boring. There were a few really fun ones (like a fight against a dragon where you get tossed onto a floating rock and have to hop from stone to stone dodging breath attacks and dealing damage, lots of fun!) but the majority of the quests were “go to this hub”, “do these six quests involving killing certain mobs or retrieving items”, and then “here’s the next hub to go to”. I guess that’s the bread and butter, but still… yawn.

In the end, Deepholm felt like a chore to rip through. I started there at level 82 (which I realized after the fact might have been a bad idea) and finished the normal quests/storyline about two bubs short of 83. It was bizarre going through a whole zone and not dinging once.

Another thing I noticed while in Deepholm was how tough the mobs were. I usually finished each at about 70% health, and would have to pop cooldowns if I managed to get two or three. Of course, I was still in a mix of half 272 gear from Hyjal and half 251 gear from ICC10 (came with the premade character) while quests were doling out between 288 and 300 pieces. Not to mention I was only level 82, while the zone mobs were between 82 and 83, so I think I was generally unprepared for the whole place. So don’t take it as gospel that whole zone is crazy hard.

Lastly, speaking of loot, the tanking gear in Deepholm was pretty sparse until the last few quests. Even so, with defense now automatic from talents, the tank gear has basically devolved into three kinds of pieces: avoidance+master, avoidance+avoidance, or avoidance+hit. Oh, or threat+mastery, though one could say that’s really a dps piece.

In any case, I found myself favoring mostly the latter for questing, while hoarding avoidance pieces for dungeons. Mastery is fun to accumulate. Avoidance remains less so.

Under the sea, under the sea

After Deepholm, I returned to Stormwind to sit on the docks and wait for the boat to Vashj’ir. While sitting there I was surprised to see a troop of soldiers walk up and (true to all the extra blabbing going on) muse in full voicing about the mission ahead of them and the military prowess of Nagas, and other minutiae. It was a nice break from sitting there like a dope, or alt-tabbing a waiting for the sound of a boat pulling up.

Once we set sail, I recognized the “mercenary crew” as the guys from outside ZA and other locales. There was Budd, who seems to have picked up an interesting accent, and Samir the shirtless repair guy, and other fine folk. I could already tell who would be a story driver in the zone ahead.

Eventually a released Kraken ripped the ship apart and we all tumbled into the briny deep.

When I “came to” I was stuck in a bubble. I believe what was supposed to happen was I’d regain the ability to move, or float towards the air pocket that some npcs were hiding in, but instead I was stuck in place and couldn’t move or cast. So I drowned. Annoying.

Unlike Deepholm, the sparse time I spent in Vashj’ir was a lot of fun. I wasn’t doing the hub-clearing dance autonomously, I was actually engaged in the world around me. I don’t know if it was just because I was enchanted with the zone design, but it felt like what Cata questing should be: interesting,

Underwater movement is usually terrible in video games, but it was actually very fun in Vashj’ir. Totally intuitive too. You touch the ground and run, or you jump and fly/swim around. Made total sense and wasn’t a hindrance at all. Well, the only drawback I can think of is sometimes it was hard to judge my distance from a mob or item in a three dimensional, floating space. I’d have to pan the camera to get the proper sense of depth. But that wasn’t really a huge deal.

Hitting 83, and Tankadin combat thus far

After some questing in Vashj’ir, I finally dinged 83. Two to go.

Nothing much gained outside of a new talent point and a healing spell. I allocated the point somewhere stupidly and went merrily on my way to continue questing under the sea.

Before I pivot to starting zones, I wanted to speak a little bit about how it was to play my tankadin. I know we haven’t been receiving as much design attention lately and generally it’s because we’re in a pretty good place in terms of rotation. We have our Holy Power, we have our 15% block, we have our stable of attacks. The pieces are in place and it seems like all that’s left in the numbers game–how much does this attack hit for, how much damage does this reduce, etc.

The rotation as it stands now is predictable, but still varied, thanks to Grand Crusader. The framework we’re operating in is: CS, _, _, CS, _, _, CS, HP dump, _, CS, etc. Every other other attack is Crusader Strike (or HotR), we weave in Judgement, Holy Wrath, or Avenger’s Shield/Grand Crusader procs, and then dump Holy Power when needed on ShoR, a heal, or Inquisition.

I’m still hopelessly in love with Grand Crusader, so ignore any fanboi-ish squeal about how awesome it is to have a proc emanating from me. Here’s the “power auras” for it, by the way:

I also stopped being a dope and figured out how to show glyphs (thanks to the kind folks that offered tips in the comments and Twitter) and ended up going with Judgement, ShoR, and HotR for Prime and (initially) Seal of Truth, Consecration, and Holy Wrath for Major glyphs. After noticing that my Holy Wrath still wasn’t stunning elementals, I swapped that out for the Focused Shield glyph.

You know what’s more than a Grand Crusader proc? A Grand Crusader proc critting for 15k damage. Focused Shield is a beast of a glyph and definitely amazing for questing. I wasn’t aoe tanking as much out of fear for my life, so any extra single-target damage was icing on the cake.

Kezan, before the Fall (and Gilneas during)

After a while my mind wandered and I decided to roll a Goblin toon to take their starting zone for a spin. If only because I love Goblin character design and cannot wait to roll one on live. Just looking at the character creation screen you can see this impressive amount of detail that puts even the crisper Blood Elves and Draenei to shame, let along the terrible-by-comparison vanilla races.

They really need to redesign the vanilla races’ appearance.

Unfortunately the tenth quest in or so was broken as of the latest patch so I couldn’t get further than level four or so. What I did see though was a lot of fun, if not a bit depressing. Kezan is awfully bleak.

One thing about the Goblin starting zone that I absolutely hated was the storyline. (Sorry the following is a spoiler.) The basic idea of the starting experience is you’re in line to be the next Trade Prince, and you’re trying to “out-Goblin” the guy with the job currently so you can take over. A lot of the characters at the company you run call you Boss, and act like your employees. You go to a football-ish game and the coach says you’re some fantastic player who is the only one who can pull out a win in the game.

It’s like an institutionalized Mary Sue situation. It’s awful storytelling and just doesn’t make any sense… why would the boss be the one who goes down to the mines and knock around the dissenting jungle trolls? Why would the boss be the one who goes and kneecaps some deadbeats in Drudge Town? Why would the boss do his own shopping, on a quest given by his assistant?

“You’re the usurping Trade Prince-wannabe Goblin” sounds like something a terrible fanfic writer would vomit up. How will this jive with future dealing with the faction leader? How is it that you have an entire race of potential Trade Princes? Can they also be the half-Draenei son of Garona too?

Bah.

In terms of the overarching story, Gilneas is leaps and bounds ahead. Though, to be fair, I only saw the first four levels of Kezan, and it could redeem itself. For the time being though, I am in utter awe of the Worgen starting experience. Blizzard totally knocked this one out of the park.

When I last played my Worgen I was having a fun time dealing with no passive health regen, incredibly tough mobs, and a constant snuffling sound that made any further leveling torture. I set aside the Worgen until the next build, and I’m glad I did.

I finished up the quest I stopped on, went into a cellar to turn in the quest, and when I emerged the fields I was questing in were swallowed up by the sea. Now THAT is phasing

Later quests involved evacuating some npcs and doing random quests to get them to flee for you. One quest involved going into an apple orchard, and when I entered there I had to stop for a second and take in everything. Perhaps it’s the wistfulness I’m feeling at the imminent start of Fall and end of Summer, but I was completely caught up in the scenery. The haunting music, the twitching tree branches with orange leaves, the stomp of a raging Ettin in the distance. I forgot I was playing WoW. This really is a whole new experience.

Also, apparently my Worgen’s human form is Venom.

I also was witness to a fantastic take down of someone in general chat. Some mouth breather was complaining about bugs and specifically why they had to “play a buggy piece of crap” and some rational soul responded with “If you think you’re here for any reason other than discovering and reporting bugs, you should not be in beta.” The mouth breather had no reply. Well done for the responder.

Later quests took me around the zone and then finally to the Battle of Gilneas, which was one of those “get this ridiculous buff from this npc and kill waves of mobs” deals, ala the Battle for Undercity. Droll as it was, the fun part was in the aftermath when Tobias (spy worgen) and I snuck into the cathedral where Sylvanas was meeting with her lieutenants over how the Battle was going.

She is such a malevolent badass, I love it. I’m looking forward to the storyline turn of the Horde becoming less the “noble savages” and more a real antagonist in the story arc.

Afterwards, I assaulted the Horde forces assembled in Gilneas with a glaive thrower, and then snuck aboard a zeppelin to sabotage it. The quest that officially has the Worgen evacuating Gilneas seems to not be done yet, so all that was left was to take a Captain Placeholder-esque fellow across the ocean, into the sunset, and over to Darnassus.

Build 12857 brings in the glyphs

I know my beta reportage lately has been nothing short of abysmal, and I apologize for that. I finally got my lazy self back on there last night to check out the changes applied in the latest build that dropped earlier this week, as well as poke around with all the glyphs.

First things first, let’s talent about talent and spell changes. Here’s what’s pertinent to Prot:

The Vindication change isn’t that shocking, since they mentioned earlier their intention was we were not going to let us aoe-attack power debuff. The Grand Crusader change makes sense as well, since HotR was basically giving multi-fold chances to proc the effect over just Crusader Strike.

Sanctuary’s new damage reduction effect brings us in-line with the baked in damage reduction that other tanking specs currently enjoy with their respective tanking stances/forms. The wages of our tanking “stance” being usable by Holy or Ret.

And lastly, Consecrate is just getting slapped around a bit more as part of the tanking aoe nerf. Hurrah.

Oh, and apparently the Guardian of Ancient Kings animation is now in beta!

As for glyphs, I was excited to check out the new interface and all the new (not yet finalized) glyphs available for the class.

So, I logged onto my Draenei pally and attempted to fly to the nearest flight master (at the World Tree) to make my way to Dalaran in the most round-about way possible.

After three crashes while trying to enter the part of Hyjal where the world tree is, and a bug report later, I then just hearthed to the Exodar and fumbled around for some way to get to Stormwind. I then got hopelessly lost, huffed, puffed, and logged over to my Belf pally who was in Orgrimmar.

One zep later and I was up in Northrend. I flew my way over to Dalaran and found the various Glyph vendors outside of the Inscription building. I loaded up on all the Paladin ones and started learning them, one by one.

Many minutes later, I then happily opened my glyph window and found …

And nothing had changed. This begs the question: where are my glyphs, exactly?

I’m sure I missed some little trick to make them appear in beta, so playing musical chairs with them will have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, let’s look at the list of glyphs pertinent to our spec. Some of them are pretty cool.

Prime Glyphs

• Crusader Strike – Increases Crusader Strike’s crit chance by 5%
• Hammer of the Righteous – Increases the physical and Holy damage dealt by HOTR by 10%
• Judgement – Increases Judgement’s damage by 10%
• Shield of the Righteous – Increases ShoR’s damage by 10%
• Word of Glory – Increases Word of Glory’s healing by 10%

Major Glyphs

• Consecration – Increases Consecration’s cooldown and duration by 20%
• Dazzling Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now also dazes
• Divine Protection – Removes the physical damage reduction of your Divine Protection, but increase the magical damage reduction by 20%
• Focused Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now hits 2 fewer targets, but deals 30% more damage
• Holy Wrath – Your Holy Wrath now also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin
• Salvation – No longer reduces threat over time, but completely removes threat as long as the Glyph is active
• Seal of Truth – Increases expertise skill by 10 while Seal of Truth is active

Minor Glyphs

• Blessing of Kings – Reduces mana cost by 50%
• Blessing of Might – Increases duration by 20 minutes
• Lay on Hands – Reduces cooldown by 2 minutes
• Truth – Reduces Seal of Truth’s mana cost by 50%

In case you’ve missed the explanation given by Ghostcrawler, Prime Glyphs are meant to be obvious, useful glyphs that directly affect threat or damage taken (in our case), Major Glyphs are situational, and Minor Glyphs are more for quality of life or cosmetic changes.

I’ve already said in the past that in Cata I intend to dual spec a trash/threat spec and a boss/survival spec, and these glyphs (while not final) are totally playing into that.

I can see my threat spec using HotR, ShoR, and Judgement for Primes; Consecration, Seal of Truth, and Holy Wrath for Majors; and, well, Minors don’t matter in this scenario.

Contrawise, a survival spec would possibly use Crusader Strike or Judgement (depending on what does more threat), ShoR, and Word of Glory (assuming us using WoG in our rotation pans out) and then Seal of Truth, Focused Shield, and Consecration for Majors. Then, for say a magic-heavy fight, I could swap in Divine Protection instead of Consecration.

Of course, the glyph design is not anywhere near finalized. Case in point:

That Avenging Wrath glyph no longer exists. It’s far too obvious a dps increase to be a major under the new paradigm.

The Seal of Truth one is on the bubble. It’s still in for now, but it’s pretty much a no-brainer given the stat savings it offers.

Overall, I like the design of situational major glyphs, it makes character customization more interesting and cerebral than running around with the same three glyphs all the time.

Now, how about some minor glyphs that are actually interesting? Too much to ask for?

Icing the Frost Queen

I’m still in shock we pulled this off. I mean, not completely, I did know it was going to happen. Mathematics demanded a kill, and we gladly complied. Still, it’s a pretty big deal for the guild that all our hard work paid off. I could not be more proud of our raiders, this was a kill we all needed to keep the faith.

We started the week with a rough patch, to say the least. Tuesday was… brutal… and we’ll leave it at that. So Wednesday we had something of a chip on our shoulders that demanded satisfaction. We buckled down and righted all the wrongs that held us back on Tuesday and still managed to get to Sindragosa with the usual 2 hours left in raid. Our game faces on, we got to work.

The first attempt was ok. We had a flawless first air phase, then a disastrous second. The second attempt we did immaculately until the third air phase, then the attempt collapsed. Shaking the rust off, as we say.

Subsequent attempts were so-so, generally requiring battle rezzes to be used in air phases, which was killing me. At least at this point we were hitting phase 3.

Finally after another attempt where the same mage (who I don’t often bring, but was dragging along as an Unchained Magic human shield) died for the umpteenth time to a Frost Bomb, I removed him from raid–something I should had done attempts ago–and brought in a newly recruited shadow priest.

Around this point we also imposed some pretty severe discipline onto vent. Basically, the rule became in phase 3: no talking unless it’s a healer announcement, a tank swap, or something life threatening. Everyone else just focus and lock it down. I think this was a huge key to our success.

The next attempt we got the fight to 7%. It was going fantastically, but Ana was cut off from heals momentarily and died, and then I went to pick it up but was eventually rocking way too much buffet stacks. Still, everyone was filled with hope. There was not a single air phase death that attempt. There was even a great raid awareness moment where a block got dropped the opposite way from where we were taking them, and everyone got out of the way, and then we kept the correct direction going afterwards. All in all, the mojo seemed to be back.

So we lined up again, and after a quick stupid wipe, we did what was destined to be the money shot. Air phases were nearly perfect, we had one death because someone was DC’d, but we kept going. Phase 3 starts and I get to work. Ana and I swap like clockwork, blocks go down with expert precision, healers are calling out roles and switches through vent without interruption. Finally we hit the single digits and it’s just gogogo time.

The enrage timer was ticking down, leaving us about a minute at that point. Everyone just pushed it as hard at they could and as I watched Sindy’s health slowly tick away from 3%, to numbers I never dreamed could lie beyond that. The “holy bleep” moment of “this is going to die” hit me in a euphoric wave, and then the Frost Queen crashed over dead and coughed up her purples.

I scored the 277 token from her for a hefty, hefty amount. Worth it nonetheless. Everyone was elated, and for some reason we rode that high over to heroic Putricide just to throw in some faux-attempts and get some idea of the mechanics of the fight.

Obviously we didn’t get very far. This is indeed our next dragon to slay, so to speak. I look forward to our coming weeks together, Putricide.

Oh, and as a humorous sidenote: remember how I said I was going to start rolling for Abom Duty? Well, prior to the first pull Ana, Nordic, and I rolled off for the right of riding the Abom. Nordic always wins, and I thought I finally had him when he rolled an 11. I then rolled a 6. Ok, well, Ana could be our last hope, right? Wrong. She also rolled a 6!

Curse you Nordicslayer.

Nonetheless, with five minutes left in raid we swapped it over to normal mode and quickly did the achievement in preparation for our eventual drakes scramble.

Great raid night overall, and a fantastic end to an ignominiously beginning week.

The game is afoot… race

Unlike the last game, last night’s actually lasted a decent amount of time and was (at least for me) much more fun.

We did this concept before, everyone rolls a level 1 and then races from one point to the other on foot, with deaths a plenty just about every mob over level 10. Last time we did Orgrimmar to Everlook; last night we did a track I thought would be much more ambitious, Silvermoon to the Dark Portal (by way of the Tirisfal zep).

Starting at the gates of Silvermoon in a huge naked pile, the gun first and we all broke for it.

Eversong, as you can imagine, was little trouble. I’ve leveled through the zone many times and knew the danger spots. I cross the Dead Scar at the north end than dodged down the road into the halfway point and crossed east towards the scar, and then down into the Ghostlands.

Ghostlands was pretty breezy, with only one rough spot at the beginning that was promptly cleared for me by the pack leaders who were torn apart by lynxes.

Towards the end of Ghostlands I was chasing Antigen, and then took a screenshot of my pursuit. I didn’t realize screenshotting made you stop running momentarily, so I had to shelve that after it cost me a chance at passing him.

We soon passed into EPL, which was definitely the hardest zone of the race. It wasn’t just the mob levels (though that did result in bats flying from across the zone to eat our faces), it was that there was no clear way to pass into WPL without crossing through huge groups of mobs. I elected to go south down the road and then cut southwest along the mountains, north of the Infectis Scar, rather than follow the road and go through Corin’s Crossing.

That was a huge miscalculation and cost me any chance at a win, I suspect. The graveyard was way too far away to make corpse hopping viable.

At this point the leaders for the rest of the game were established, and those that fell behind terminally quickly settled into a perma-bottom place. Poor Falowin tried to cross the mountains at some indeterminate point and ended up spending most of the race in EPL.

Eventually I squeezed my way out of EPL, probably in 7th place, and started making my way through WPL. The West was all about following the road and then corpse hopping past choke points where mobs were parked on either side of a road. There was a bear pincer moment, a spider pincer, and one point where you pass a field with caster skeletons on your right and a spider on your left. No way out there.

I think I ended up gaining time in WPL, because once I crossed into Tirisfal I started seeing people again.

I barely made the zeppelin, and the entire time I dashed up the tower I could hear Vili (already on the boat) shouting “GO ZEP GO, LET’S GO!” To his consternation I disembarked with the rest of them to STV.

Heading north through STV wasn’t terrible, though somehow I fell far behind Vili, but ended up ahead of Antigen. Either way, a few tigers later and I was cruising into Duskwood, land of the roaming soldiers. The only make up for the annoyance of all the mobs camping the road was how close graveyards were to each other.

You could tell we were in the final phase of the race at this point. The leaders were passing through Swamp of Sorrows while myself and the two immediately behind me were barely entering Deadwind Pass. The next two zones (Deadwind and the Swamp) were amazingly easy, not a mob in sight. Well, I got chased by a crocodile at one point, but I easily outran him.

Eventually Cendra took the win and crossed the ribbon (aka, the Dark Portal) and passed into Outland. Vili and Freezedealer quickly followed taking respective second and third place. I managed to pull fourth, and the stragglers (except for Falowin, who was in WPL at this point) began to trickle in one by one.

While waiting there I’m sure we drew a few questions from the various 50s and 60s that crossed through the portal into Outland. How often is it you see a pack of level 2 and 3s just hanging out there?

At one point a demon ran up the steps and caused a minor panic, thinking he was coming for us. Once he passed someone, everyone opened fire, but obviously didn’t do much of a scratch. As Antigen said, “where was the defense on that?!”

Once the rest of the close-by stragglers came by, I took a picture and we called it a night.

I hope everyone who participated had fun. I personally had a blast, and was immensely relieved the results seemed by the books. One more game to go!

TIL: The Putricide Abom is a lot of fun

Why wasn’t I told?!

10man last night and I was tanking with Morvain, the Death Knight with the cat problem, and when we got to Putricide there was a moment of pause. Usually Nordic just takes the Abom, or him and Ana roll off for it in the 25man. And yet last night, on a whim, I decided to take it for a spin.

I knew the long and short of it: mash 1 when standing on a puddle, 2 to slow (though we were doing the achievement, so no slows), and apply sunders with 3. I spent the fight running around, gulping puddles, and applying sunders as needed. And I had a blast. It was a nice change of pace over just ducking around with the good Professor in tow.

I need to start ninjaing that job in the 25man.

The rest of the night we wrapped up some outstanding achieves that various people needed, like a Heroic Blood Princes kill for Gulliveig, and Portal Jockey for myself.

We then moved on to Sindragosa to finally put away the heroic kill. It took us three shots but we finally got the old girl down (in 10man at least). One of my main goals last night was to use the spinning strategy and to prove to myself that it can be done, and that it doesn’t hamper the raid. It seemed overall to be a huge help, if only to keep blocks uniform, so I’ll remain firmly in the “pro-spinning” column.

We had issues with the enrage timer because we’d lose a dps here or there in phase 3 to what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds. Namely, Chilled to the Bone being stacked too high. I’m sympathetic to the idea that if the healers can get you, you’re golden, but crunch times happen, Unchained can be unkind, and healing might be stretched. And then suddenly having so many stacks of that debuff is going to kill you.

In any case, good practice for Wednesday I hope.

With the heroic Sindy kill, a bunch of us got our drakes. (This is the part where Ana comments “MONTHS BEHIND!”) It’s a nice achieve to have, but I don’t particular care for a boney dragon. I’ll probably still to my Rusted Proto for now, I like the cut of his gib far more. Is that weird?

My guild, casual or hardcore?

Stoneybaby of Big Crits/WoW.com was asking on Twitter for posts regarding the variations of play and commitment between casual and hardcore guilds (to steal his wording). Through his tweet I realized that this is something I’ve always wanted to write about, but could never build up the courage to force myself behind a keyboard and expound upon, if only because I wasn’t prepared for the time investment such a topic requires.

Considering it’s now officially timely, I’m forcing myself to take the plunge. But only lightly… it’s more like dipping my toe in the pool. I won’t go into too many specifics, but I want to speak a little bit on the gaming “philosophy” that guides our guild and why I think that our MO has delivered the success that we currently enjoy.

I don’t want to get into the whole messy business of defining what is casual and what is hardcore, because I think such a task is sisyphean at best, and impossible at worst. It’s completely subjective, ultimately. It varies from person to person, much like the taste of Soylent Green.

Like the old saying goes, “it’s a recession when my neighbor loses his job, and a depression when I lose mine.” Well–one could say a common definition for many is “a guild less progressed than mine is casual, one more progressed is too hardcore.”

If I had to–subjectively–define my guild, my first answer from that dichotomy that comes to mind is “casual”. We only raid ICC-25 for 7-8 hours a week, two days out of the seven, we don’t maintain a military-like discipline when raiding, and we don’t always approach fights 100% optimally. And yet, we’re ranked 2013th in the US. We’re 9/12 ICC-25 HM. Obviously, we’re not that casual.

But then again, I guess casual isn’t so much the results, but rather the approach… right? If that’s the definition, then yeah, casual all the way. If not, then I guess we’ll wear that hardcore label, though we’re surely not as hardcore as many others.

Hell, we used to be a lot more hardcore in terms of our schedule, with far sparser results. Up until March we were running a schedule of raiding Tuesday to Thursday, which sucked, frankly. It was too much raiding, too clustered together. (Woops, my casual is showing.) Finally as part of the first wave of reforms to stem the bleeding we were experiencing at the time–and that’s another post for another time–we cut it back to two days a week. The result unexpectedly paid huge dividends.

We started doing more in those first two days than we did across three. It was like the Laffer Curve, but for raiding schedules.

And why did we cut back the schedule? Because at three days, the general consensus was that it was too hardcore! People didn’t want to spend three days straight in front of their PC. The vast majority of my guild’s raiders have RL commitments: significant others, spouses, children, night jobs. It was onerous for us to raid so much.

Of course, there is a downside: only raiding for those 7 hours limits how many progression shots we get on a boss week to week. We spent 2-3 hours every Wednesday for weeks while learning the LK fight. Then we extended the lockout to get a full 7 hour block on the guy, only to down him the first night of that week. Likewise, we’ve been pouring our energies into Heroic Sindragosa lately. Progress has definitely been steady, but I can’t help but think we’d have the old girl down by now if we had an extra 3 hours a week to spend on her.

But I digress. Surely the schedule we operate under is a tick in the casual column, with regards to time invested. Now, let’s talk about effort invested.

More of my dps than not read EJ. They do their class research. The two main raiding rogues are total spreadsheet junkies, a discipline that they’ve taught to every other rogue that have joined the raiding ranks. The healers spend their off time thinking and researching about strategies and techniques. Antigen obviously has his own blog, and knows his stuff. Ana and myself write about tanking, as well… as you know. We spend an unhealthy amount of time bouncing ideas off each other and diving through Maintankadin threads.

I think that’s a tick in the hardcore column. Not all guilds have a majority of their members spending time “off the clock” to work on improving themselves and their performance.

But we’re not 12/12 ICC 25 hardmodes. We’re not farming Invincibles. Which is partly why I am hesitant to deign myself fit to don such a moniker as “hardcore”. It doesn’t feel right upon my head.

Yet, ultimately, I think we’ve found a “sweet spot” in the casual/hardcore spectrum. Our input is casual–we don’t raid that often–but our output is in many respects hardcore. We get results, we kill bosses, we get loot. We might do it more slowly than other guilds, but in the end we’ll reach the same destination.

So very, heart-breakingly close

We’ve been working on Heroic Sindragosa since at least the beginning of August and it’s be steady progress ever since. While it sucks to only realistically have a max of three hours a week to work on the old girl, it’s been pretty obvious we’ll soon have the kill. The first week we were wiping at 60%. Then we were kissing phase 3 the next. Then wiping at the 26% mark the next. Then 13% last week. Last night we got her to 3.9% before giving up the ghost, on our best attempt.

3.9%

Mathematically it’s impossible not to drop her next week. I like our odds.

One thing I did to shake things up was to force the raid to adopt the AYCE strategy I came up with the other night. Our third phases were hectic, blocks were going in crazy places, or too far away. I figured my strategy would tighten that up a bit, make for a cleaner close to the fight. And of course I got push back.

I don’t mean reasonable pushback, with intelligent, well reasoned concerns, but just snark. Determinations that “this couldn’t work” and “why are we changing the strategy after getting it to 20% last week?” And then this person went on to rage to an audience in a separate channel that I am not party to. It was infuriating, to say the least. Give me some credit, I’m not a complete goddamn moron.

After the third try with the new strategy, we got her to 8%, our best attempt up to that point. Before that, the naysayer whispered me and said something to the effect of “You know you can’t adopt a new strategy and expect it to take off in a few attempts, right?” After that 8% try, the naysayer whispered me again and said “You’re allowed to say I told you so, you know.” I just smiled and replied, “Not my style.”

As for the 3.9% attempt, what kills me was that could have very well have been a kill attempt. It was the last attempt of the night, so it had that mythical Last Attempt Aura that we’ve benefitted from in the past. Air phases were golden, with I think only one death across all three (which was quickly remedied with a brez).

And then finally, we were at the 8% mark with just about everyone alive, and I had this heavy hope that we were going to come out victorious. I don’t think I was breathing much at that point. We’re about 40% around the rotation, at least four blocks have successful gone down, and the next person gets marked.

They don’t move. I call out the name, and “I DC’d!” is the response in vent. My heart sinks.

I see the symbol over his head, and the dps standing next to him. “Move away from X!” The dpser doesn’t listen, tunnel visions. Gets chain blocked. Some scramble to start breaking them out, but the death blow was just dealt. We’re at 5% now. The next person to be marked for a block ran way far away to drop Unchained Magic, and was caught with their pants down. No way they can make it to the proper spot in time, and the block is too far away. So we resolve to start rotating the other way and catch up to the last block to go down.

I’m almost there, and the next person marked decides to drop the new block counter clockwise, rather than to the right of Sindy’s face and thus resuming the proper rotation like I intended. At this point it’s around 4.5% and people are dropping like flies because blocks have been garbage and no one could drop their Buffet stacks.

I bite it around 4.2%, Ana tries to pick up the slack, but she’s quickly overwhelmed. We soon wiped ingloriously at 3.9%.

So close. So goddamn close.

Things we need to work on: control is getting better, but people really need to watch their debuff and do what they can to reduce damage taken. This especially includes healers not tunnel-visioning and neglecting to run out when they have Unchained Magic.

Next week.

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…

Fun while it lasted!

I’m debating how to phrase the toning of this post. While what happened was definitely fun (while it lasted) it was also very frustrating in that it definitely ended with suspicious circumstances.

Alright, cynical skepticism, you’re up.

So last night was the first of the “ES Olympics”, the three games we would use to disperse three of the Shadowmourne loot items: the Favor, the Music Box, and the Pendant. And last night’s game was “Hunt the GM”.

I made the ugliest human I could stomach to craft and fled south to what I thought would be a pretty ingenious hiding spot. The rules generally were I’d be in a contested zone and not move.

I considered several dick moves I could pull, like rolling a Night Elf and Shadowmelding, or rolling a druid, getting it up to Aquatic Form and hiding in the ocean somewhere. But I decided against being mean.

Here’s where I ended up, and you can see the path I took:

Believe you me, it was a pain in the ass to get to Darkshire as a level 1 with a wolf chomping my face off every 15 feet.

There’s a small grove behind the tower on the border between Duskwood and Deadwind Pass. I ducked in there and camped out behind a tree. I indulged in some masculine giggling while waiting for my eventual executioner.

I hung out in vent while I listened to everyone talk about trying to find me. It was like hide and seek on steroids. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and at 7:20 I dispensed the first of my six prepared hints, which was just a throw away.

And then a moment later, the guild’s resident shifty warrior found me. This is while everyone still barely had a clue what zone I was. And so the game ended, twenty fast minutes later.

To harken back to the cynicism I summoned at the beginning of this post, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the warrior did a /who check for each zone on another account and found the one level 1 character that was out of place, focused on Duskwood and then zipped around with a /target macro with that level 1′s name. If I was going to cheat that’s how I would do it.

Not that I would because, you know, I have principles. And stuff.

In any case, I have no proof; but 20 minutes is awfully suspicious. Eyebrows are firmly cocked.

Annoyances aside, the 30th is my guild’s 2 year anniversary, so the second game will be that day. Probably another lvl 1 naked alt race. That was a lot of fun, and is basically impossible to cheat at without being ridiculously obvious. And as for the third game, I have no clue what to do. Any suggestions are welcome in the comments.

And of course with the pace Morvain is getting Shadowmourne shards, we’ll be having another series of games soon enough.