The undying ghosts of the past

Note: This actually happened last weekend, I just let this sit in drafts for a while.

The very first time we tried Undying it was on a whim, a drunk Naxx run that we suddenly realized was going perfectly. We kept going through each wing until we reached Kel’Thuzad. Seconds from victory, one of our raidmembers (while very inebriated) died in a voidzone.

The second time we tried, months later, we got up to Sapphiron before one of the healers forgot you need to hide behind the iceblocks and was killed by a frost bomb.

The third time, a few weeks ago, I didn’t have my pet frame enabled, couldn’t quickly dismiss my mind controlled Student on Razuvious, and a warlock got killed. Raz died from dots before we could make a break for it.

Fourth time, we did it on a whim after a drunk Ulduar run and managed to fail on the second attempted boss (Sapphiron) because someone was too far to the left of an iceblock and couldn’t LoS the frost bomb.

Saturday night we went to Naxxramas for the fifth time to attempt an Undying run. With seven people: myself, two healers, and four dps (with one dps a possible OT).

We started on Razuvious, with me double checking my pet frame was active, and dropped him with no trouble. Considering each dps in the raid was doing 2-3 times the dps that someone was doing when Naxx10 was progression, that wasn’t much of a worry. Our main concern was making sure no one died to environmental hazards during boss fights.

After Raz we ported up to Saph to drop the two “hardest” bosses in the raid. When Saph died I’m sure you can imagine my relief, considering so many of our attempts have ended with her. After the dragon we took out KT, though that was a bit more stressful than I thought it would be. I knew we generally would have no issues, but I was still getting constant flashbacks every time a purple ring formed on the floor or someone got trapped in an ice tomb.

It didn’t help that DBM added this awful noise whenever someone got ice tombed–like a “woooo-ong… woooo-ong”. Very unnerving to say the least!

So KT was dead and we were raid for some less stressful fights. Or, at least, less stressful to me. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while I was seeing spots and grinding my teeth down into nubs.

The rest of the run went generally smoothly with only a few bumpy spots. Our biggest hurdles (or so we imagined) were going to be Heigan and Thaddius. For the former, it wasn’t bad at all, despite the fact that all the damn casters made me and the two melee do the dance rather than just camping on the platform for most of the encounter. Somehow I managed to not screw up all the dancing and we got through all right.

Once Plague was cleared it was on to Construct for what we assumed would be a straight run to Thaddius. And then we remembered. Gluth.

We had one tank and one dps switching to tank here and there. Moreover, there were only seven of us total. How the hell were we going to kite adds and pull off a tank switch.

As we stood on the pipe, eating the slow ticks of damage from the slime, the answer came to me. The offtank, Morvain, would kill zombies and I would solo tank Gluth myself. Once the stack hit 10, it should fall off rather than renewing, and I was pretty sure I could hold out that long.

How wrong I was.

We started the fight and I’m watching my stacks steadily climb, hitting about 80% healing reduction by the time the first Decimate was approaching. My first instinct was to bubble off the stacks, and I suppose I got lucky because I bubbled right as Decimate hit, didn’t take any damage, and yet my stacks continued to climb. In short order they were at a full 10 (and, eek, not falling off) and I was at 84% health. For the rest of the fight I basically dodged/block/parried/and absorbed (thanks to disc shields) every incoming hit. I never dropped below 80%.

So despite the odds we managed to pull that one out pretty smoothly. Likewise, Thaddius went according to plan with some minor dps pacing issues on Fuegen/Stalag and then I guess at some point during the fight someone got zapped denying us the achievement for that. Ah well. Nonetheless, no deaths and we marched onward.

At this point we started to debate our next step. It was obvious the biggest hurdle now was going to be doing Four Horsemen with seven people. Finally, we decided to bite the bullet and head right for 4HM, doing spider wing last. One way or another Undying would end on that fight.

We ended up bringing in the pally healer’s fiance, a warlock, for some extra dps since we were stretching ourselves out so badly. Two priests went in the back, as heals, and healed themselves. In the front Morvain tanked Baron and I tanked Thane with the rest of the dps plus the pally healer. As soon as the fight started we burnt down Thane very quickly, so I yanked Baron off Morvain so he could go to the back and relieve them. We burnt the Baron down, then fled to the back to kill the remaining two Horsemen.

Once Zeliek dropped we got an interesting surprise.

Considering we hadn’t cleared Spider wing yet, looks like the achievement is bugged a tad. I wonder what the requirements are? KT and 4HM? Sapph, KT, and 4HM? Everything but Spider wing? Who knows!

At this point I was feeling a little hollow about the achievement. It wasn’t bad enough we severely outgeared the place, but it was just adding insult to injury that the damn achievement was bugged. Nonetheless, we went and cleared Spider with no deaths, scoring our Dedicated Few achievements in the process.

Perhaps not as epic as it would have been pre-3.1, but it was pretty fun overall. And it’s nice we finally put that nagging desire to nab Undying to rest, finally.

How to tank Putricide in Phase 3

Well, I can claim some authority on this based solely on how many times I’ve done this fight now… although, actually I suppose that’s a lot like Danny DeVito’s character from The Rainmaker claiming authority on taking the Bar Exam. Er, but I digress. Putricide. Phase 3.

Putricide in Phase 3 is a bastard if there ever was one. Basically as soon as everyone gets control of their characters back after the tear gas transition, you have 120 seconds (give or take) to drop Putricide or you’ll terrifying–and perhaps a little joyfully–rack up killing blows against every member of your raid. Not to mention triumphantly top the healing chart for that attempt.

If you’re doing 10man, you want to space out the Mutated Plague debuffs across two tanks like so: 4 on one, then 4 on the other. This will give you the smoothest transitions for the benefit of maximizing dps.

For 25man you need 3 tanks splitting the stacks like so: 2/2/2, then 4/4/4. There are more arcane patterns you can do if you want to squeeze every last drop of dps out before the soft enrage, but the textbook way is good enough.

Do note: if any tank gets 5 stacks it’s generally lights out.

Now, when the phase starts you’ll want to immediately run towards Putricide as a group and take him to the wall. Start slowly kiting him backwards, barely moving only if a puddle or flasks are dropped. Make sure to beat it into your dps they want to be directly behind Putri, because those flasks will pop up next to his legs and the middle is a safe zone. If any of your dps eat a -75% hit debuff that is murder in such a tight dps race.

Likewise, during tank transitions avoid those flasks at all costs, or else pray for the gods to look kindly upon your taunting attempt.

Keep pacing him around the wall, with no jolts or dashes ahead that will pull Putri out of range for your melee. Tank transitions should be clean, with you stacking on the current tank and then taunting and continuing the kite flow.

Once you get the 4/4/4 range don’t be afraid to pop Divine Sacrifice/Guardian. Your healers will thank you.

I’m not going to lie, Phase 3 is rough at first, and could take a few attempts to get the flow down so no one trips up on anything or eats a wayward flask. It took us quite some time to get down pat on 25man. Best of luck!

Good news, everyone!

First, yes, the title of this post is meant to be ironic in the sense that I pre-excoriated everyone prior to Putricide coming out, telling them not to title their kill-posts with that famous line from Farnsworth/Putricide. Although, I guess it’s not as ironic if I have to explain it… hrm. And it probably isn’t ironic at all to begin with… double hrm. Hrm hrm.

But, good news indeed, and this doesn’t involve the Death Zone, or the Zone of No Return, or for that matter anything from the Galaxy of Terror… we did it, we killed Putricide!

First and foremost I’d like to thank Renne of Malfurion (apologies if I got your name or server wrong, doing this from memory) who rolled a level 1 alt on the Hoof to wish my guild good luck and offer encouragement. That was totally unexpected and helped motivate people to know that others were rooting for us.

The night started off with Demo offering a poll via ready check: yes to do Blood Queen, no to go back to Putricide. Just about everyone hit no, it was an overwhelming response. Indeed, everyone was gung-ho about finally downing the sucker and reclaiming our honor. Poor Morvain had recurring dreams that night before that we were fighting Putricide, getting him down to 4%, and then the fight would reset. If anything, we had to do this so Morvain could sleep once more.

For about the first hour we were trying a tweak strategy that involved more movement to attempt to minimize opportunities for raid damage. That didn’t work though, dps was slowed considerably. Where we used to get to P3 with 3 minutes left, now we were getting there with 1:30 left.

When we finally switched back to the tried and true method we had a few attempts with people dying to the same old stuff. Once we worked that out though, we were starting to get cleaner add kills and the boss’s health was dropping ever more precipitously. Once he was dancing around the 38% mark I had to play footsie with his positioning. He couldn’t stay in too long or he’d push over to P3 with an add up. Stay out too long and we’ll get another add. We needed that Goldilocks middle where I get him to 36% with cleaves, then drag out and whittle him down to 35.1% myself, and then bring him back in as add was dying to be pushed over.

I managed to pull it off, getting him to dps at about 36% as the green ooze died. With five seconds til the next ooze cast, everyone gunned it and quickly pushed him to P3. All the slime was gone and… holy cow… everyone was still alive. This was our most perfect shot at P3 yet.

Phase 3 was crazy, with everyone nearly panicking (me especially) as we tried to push him down as soon as possible and as fast as possible. The first two stacks went up on each tank, then I got it to 4, Demo to 4, and Nordic took it. At the 3 mark people started dying with Putricide at under 3%. 1:30 still on the hard enrage timer.

We pushed it with all our might, the healers doing their damnedest to keep the tanks up and when it hit about .5% this golden light washed over me, all sounds on vent ceased, a radiant warmth shone down, and I was granted peace in the knowledge that our long weeks of struggle were finally coming to fruition.

With a gasp, Putricide keeled over and coughed up his purples.

Finally.

Great job, ES!

5% faster, higher, strong

What is Hellscream’s Warsong? I like to imagine he’s yelling out the Olympics anthem for us. I know that would inspire me to give 105%.

Last night was probably our best night ever on Putricide. One attempt we got him to 9%. Another, our best attempt, we had him at 4%. And that was with us going into P3 with 3 dps dead. If those three were up, it would have been lights out for the good doctor.

After all this time and all the struggling, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I think our biggest problem is the strat allows for too much raid damage. We currently camp on the green side at all times, so we eat 2-3 green slime explosions each time one is up. That gives a lot of room for error for someone to get targeted and destroyed with others no having the time to stack on them. I think we can fix that issue with a strategy tweak…

Sidenote: sorry for the light posting this week. I’ve been swamped at work. I’ll be traveling to Orlando in two weeks, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I have a feeling the guild is getting back on track. Attendance is a lot better, buoyed by new recruits, and nothing would improve guild morale more than finally dropping that malodorous malpracticer.

And if part of our victory is due to a 5% buff… so be it. I’ll take the kill without reservations.

Cataclysm stat changes announced

Interesting stuff!

Stamina - Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Armor - The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

These two together are interesting: it seems like the effort is being put into tank’s time to live deriving less from health and armor mitigation (aka effective health) and more from other stats. I’m not sure how I feel about, or at least understand, declarations like stamina and armor will be similar across tanks and non-tanks alike. I suppose reforging and enchants/gems will expand that gap, but it’s sort of weird.

Block Rating - Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

Shield Block Value - This stat will no longer be present on items, since the amount blocked is always proportional to the amount of damage done. Talents and other effects might still modify the damage-reduction percentage from 30%, however.

Makes sense, they were talking about bringing Block down so you couldn’t go through a heroic with like no damage while a Druid or DK would be dealing with a lot more pain.

Parry - Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

This is the most interesting change, I think, and definitely the most unexpected. A smart idea to change Parry so it isn’t just a carbon copy of Dodge. I like this implementation, although I’m assuming that damage reduction is just applied to the next physical melee attack.

Defense - Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Operative phrase here being “versus creatures.” So a Ret or Holy Paladin can’t slap on RF and be crit immune in pvp. Great idea, and quells many concerns when this was first floated as a change to RF a few weeks ago.

Finally, they sum up our 4.0 gear adjustments as:

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:

No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

Sounds to me like Cataclysm will change tanking to be less EH-centric and more diversifying out toolset so avoidance (as we now know it) along with the new Parry and Block mechanics are worthwhile in a raid situation. Awesome.

Better Late Than Never Friday, 2/26

Better Late Than Never Friday is a random monthly feature where I pull a bunch of search terms from Google Analytics that landed folks here and try to answer questions that may not be directly answered at this site, as gleaned from their keywords used.

Apologies for not posting yesterday, I got swamped and I didn’t really have anything good to write about. I mean, not much has happened this week in the world of tanking other than the warrior and DK buffs. There’s a Dev Chat tonight on Twitter and I’m eagerly hoping some interesting revelations about design philosophy or Cataclysm will be revealed. I have a question banked, but if any of you non-Tweeters have a good one share it in the comments and I’ll steal it if it’s better than my standby.

Anyway, the column!

if icehowl charges you what do you do

Gotta go when the volcano blows. Hold down your left or right strafe key as soon as you hit the wall and run off as soon as you unfreeze.

amplify magic festergut

There are a lot of fights in ICC that Amplify Magic wouldn’t be a bad idea for, at least for the tanks. Marrowgar the tanks should only be taking physical damage and skittering out of the coldflame post haste. On Saurfang literally all the damage is physical, even his “spells”, so everyone could have Amp Magic. Festergut the tanks are going to take mostly physical damage (with only trivial nature damage from the gas in the room) but there is still some magic damage to be had, so it’s a risk.

On the flip side of the coin, for offtanking Blood Queen and tanking Sindragosa, Amp Magic is a terrible idea. Way too much spell damage to split the difference.

how hard does festergut hit

During his three-stack major-pain phase (in 25man), he was hitting me for 25k a swing. Humorously–or maybe not–in heroic mode he melees for an average of 37.5k according to this thread. I like the way one guy described it, “like Brutallus dual-wielding Algalons.”

can you fight sindragosa without downing dreamwalker

No. The door to Sindra opens after Dreamwalker is rescued.

drinking game ulduar

Every time someone asks where to port to you take a drink.

best professions for a tankadin

I like my combo of Jewelcrafting (+63 stamina) with Engineering (+885 armor). You can’t go wrong with JC/Blacksmithing (+60 stamina) for an all-purpose combination, though.

1 tanking festergut

I suppose it’s possible, with a Paladin tanking him up to nine stacks, Hand of Recking, popping Divine Shield and cancelling it immediately to drop the stack. I’ve seen Festergut dropped in 10man before the second tank switch, and an additional dps would facilitate that. Not sure about 25man with the crazy dps requirements needed to kill him there before a second tank switch.

best mobs to level weapon skill on

I’ve been trying for weeks to get my 400th point in Unarmed for the achievement, but to no avail. I’ve been just putting up Seal of Light and afking while punching those giant elite skeletons. I suppose it would be easier to try those unkillable ogres in Dire Maul… but, meh, Feralas is so far away.

conviction or socomm

If you’re choosing one over the other I’d say SoComm. That seal has been pretty handy for snap aggro in ICC, particularly tanking Defense on the Gunship or when Rotworms spawn on Dreamwalker. Plus makes the daily heroic a breeze.

does judgement of justice work on rotface ooze?

JoJ works by preventing a player or mob from speeding up past run speed (ie, faster than 100%), not slow them down, like the popular misconception seems to be. Big Oozes never speed up, so JoJ doesn’t really work.

does seal of command proc off avenger shield?

No. Only single attacks.

parry haste icc

Gravity has a great post compiling which bosses parry haste in Icecrown. Short answer is only Deathwhisper and Sindragosa, which pretty much kills expertise as a survival stat if you’re tanking in ICC. Just consider it for threat now.

so sick of elemental shamans knocking me off take your face off the keyborde and watch where your going

I know! Those ele shammies are the worstest!

The farm night cocktail

With Frost Lotus prices through the roof you probably don’t want (or can’t afford) to burn flasks on anything less than progression. For those less than important boss encounter though, you should have some degree of extra consumable survivability up. For those easy going nights I recommend the one-two punch of the farm night cocktail: Elixir of Protection coupled with the delicate, earthy tones of a Guru’s Elixir.

With a Stoneblood Flask you get a flat 1300 health for 1 hour, deaths or no deaths.

Elixir of Protection gives 800 armor (which is awesome especially at higher armor levels), and Guru’s Elixir gives 20 stamina along with other stats that works out to 220 hp (or 242 with Kings/Sanc).

Instead of the Elixir of Protection, if you’re more comfortable with straight health, you can use the Elixir of Mighty Fortitude for 350 hp, for 592 hp total. The hp5 is negligible. Overall though, the armor though is definitely better for most fights, especially once your armor pile starts getting massive.

On farm nights I probably go through a fair share of elixirs (less with no wipes, a’course) and they provide just what I need: a cheap alternative to flasking that provides comfortable survivability in exchange for not having to bum flasks off of Ildara every raid night.

Raid repair step 1: new invites policy

You know, I never saw this as an issue before this post by Cranky Healer opened my eyes, but my guild’s raid invites system sucks. We’re in the second grouping, the “show up and maybe you’ll get an invite” sort of guild. Which worked for a while, but there are several structural deficiencies with such a system that I think have been partly causing our attendance troubles.

For one, we have no idea if a raid will be good to go until about 10 minutes before start time when everyone is logged on. Moreover, while people who come to every raid can reasonably assume they’ll have an invite, those that seldom get taken along tend to just assume they won’t be invited and don’t bother to show up and be available for raid. Lastly, the “surprise” nature of invites makes it hard to reasonably rotate people so that we have an ideal distribution of folks seeing the content and getting the gear.

The new system that we’re adopting next week is based on Cranky Healer’s guild’s system. It’ll work like this:

1. All 25man raids go up on the calendar one month ahead of time
2. Everyone is to go through and sign up for every raid they can make.
3. The Sunday before the first night of the raid week (ie, Tuesday), Demo and I will go through the sign up list and mark 25 people as confirmed and 5 as standby.
4. Both “Confirmed” and “Stand By” are expected to show up, with the folks on stand by getting 100% of the dkp earned that night as compensation for being on and available for the duration of the raid.

Ideally no one will be on stand by for two weeks in a row. There’ll be some rotation to get some new faces in every week so we have a larger core of geared people ready to fill spots.

I think this new system will do a lot of good in encouraging wider participation and attendance.

Tonight is farm night so I’m sure attendance will be fine. The real test will be how progression night looks next week after I implement this.

The epic weekend

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

The die is cast

And so it was, my guild is recruiting.

This has been a long time coming for sure. Reading my raid recaps (when I’ve been in a good enough mood to do one) you could see how poor attendance has been lately. In the last month we’ve been on the razor’s edge in terms of whether or not our 25mans were going to go off. Despite having about 30 geared raiders, from night to night 6-8 decide to take the night off. If one or two were doing this, that’d be fine, but that huge a number makes raid unpredictable. Moreover, would it kill people to give some heads up that “hey, I can’t make raids next week”?

Two weeks ago when this problem first cost us a raid night it was obvious that the only real solution was to recruit, but I held off because I knew we had the people, they just were taking nights off en masse. So we shortened the raid week to two nights, though a bit longer, to make raiding less onerous on everyone’s schedules. That seemed to help a little, but now it’s plain to see we can’t ignore the root of the problem anymore. It’s time to shut up and do the hard thing and bring more dps into the fold and acclimate them into the raid core.

I’m currently attempting to find five or so new dps for the guild, qualified folks requiring minimal gearing so we can get back on track and get the progression train rolling again. We’ve been stuck at 7/12 for a while, giving Putricide the stink eye, and we really need to make good on our threats.

Wednesday was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We spent all Tuesday night literally mopping up all farm content as quickly and efficiently as possible: first four bosses, Festergut, Rotface, Blood Council, all one shots. Hell, we even killed Svalna in the Dreamwalker hallway for the free Emblem of Frost. Then we went and did Toravon and the raid weekly for good measure.

And then Wednesday only 23 people showed up for progression.

30 minutes past raid start it was becoming obvious that ICC-25 wasn’t happening, and as a back up plan I told everyone to hang tight and I’d carve out two 10man groups so we could at least get something done in ICC-10. I spent a good ten minutes huddled over a pad of paper and a pen, sweating profusely, and trying to expertly craft two balanced groups that could equally complete ICC-10 content. I thought I did pretty well, passed off the group two list to an officer for him to invite for and lead, and then went to Icecrown to start mine.

A few minutes and it occurred to me (by way of healer complaints in /o) that group two didn’t have Replenishment. Total facepalm, didn’t even enter into the equation for me.

I’m doing my best, dammit

Apologies in advance if this reeks of QQ.

On a side note, the common denominator over every moment I’ve spent raiding over the course of the last month has been unmitigated stress. Demogar, the guild leader and my brother tank, has been spotty in attendance since he got his new job, for good or ill. It’s fallen on me to pick up the pieces when he isn’t there; this normally isn’t so bad, but I’m not cut out to be the leading type, I just kind of keep getting stuck with it.

I like to think of my situation in very “Charge of the Light Brigade”/Cincinnatus-esque terms–I hate raid leading but I will shoulder the burden to that the raids can actual happen. I take the tank gear, I bear the “Co-Guild Lead” rank, it’s my job.

I was mulling around these feelings in my head when two posts popped up on twitter. One at The Hunter’s Mark, which then spawned one by Wrathy. Both touched on raid leading and the philosophies and difficulties there of.

The common thread between these two are “you rank and file don’t know how good you have it, do your job and stop making mine so hard.” Money quote from Lass’ post:

My point is, raid leaders have to do everything the average player has to do… for 25+ other people and themselves. They also have to work out the logistics of scheduling and populating raids, which doesn’t sound difficult on the surface, but if you’ve ever tried throwing a PuG raid together, you sort of get a feel for what it can be like to do that every week. You get about a dozen people whispering you back and forth constantly, asking what gear set to bring, what spec they should use, who else is going, what bosses they’ll be focusing on, what the strategies are, what loot will drop, etc etc ad infinitum.

I completely agree. For that spotty 30 minute period on Wednesday when the night’s events looked in doubt I fielded a slew of whispers from various people asking when invites were going out, why weren’t they out yet, what were we going to do, and boy does it suck that we aren’t raiding.

Yeah, no kidding guys, believe me, I feel the same way.

If you’re not one of the lucky few that have taken it upon themselves to shoulder all this torture on your behalf, then please be kind to your raid leaders. All you have to do is come to raid and worry about if some piece of gear will drop that you want, and whether you personally are having fun.

I, and my many self-medicating cohorts, must worry about a panorama of things: is everyone having fun, why hasn’t that boss died yet, does anyone need go soon, who do I have to replace them, are we spending too much time between pulls, is the dkp addon working, is anyone afk, how are we going to do CC on this Blood Wing pull, what made us wipe on that boss, why is that hunter doing so little dps, what can I do to make people stack better, and so on and so forth.

I’m doing my best, dammit, to make sure the raids happen and the bosses die and the purples flow like wine. All I request in return is that everyone shows up. Is that so much to ask for?

10>25

The ten man I put together, however, was awesome. 10s as a rule tend to be more fun due to fewer personalities clashing, the ability to be more selective with whom you take, and a more casual atmosphere. Less seems to be at stake in ICC-10 when you’re a 25man guild.

My run was neck and neck with the other group up until Putricide when they had issues downing him while we wiped a few times at 1%. On the third try we smoked the Professor and continued on to eventually down Blood Council and the Blood Queen (a very messy one shot as you could see above).

We’re continuing the run Sunday night at Dreamwalker. I’ve got high hopes to see the LK fight, I think we can do it.

As for the other run, they killed Putricide on the fifth or so attempt, which is a bit rough, but on the bright side now 20 people in guild have killed Putricide in some format, as opposed to 10. This is knowledge we can parlay into the 25man encounter.

You know, if we can ever get the group together.