10% ICC buff is live

So Hellscream’s Warsong/Strength of The Chynn is now up to 10%. Putting aside any misgivings about the nerf to the instance, etc etc, the bigger question is what this means to us tanks?

With the free health this buff gives (potentially in the neighborhood of a free 5,000 hp), the issue arises of how much health is too much health? And, if we reach this hp plateau, should be start to gem or gear differently?

Wrathy thinks the time is now and proposes gemming beyond straight stamina again. Obviously, because he’s in the 25man hardmodes he’s dealing with a different animal, but nonetheless the lessons trickle down to us normal 10/25 raiders as well.

Does a tank really need to have 60k hp in 10man normal mode? At that point wouldn’t it make more sense to scale back and boost avoidance, to free up some mana for your healers?

Perhaps. I need to do some more thinking about this, and particularly see how the buff to the buff affects tonight’s raid.

The LK fight doesn’t seem that hard

First of all, the die is cast:

My first act was to kick all the Taurens out of the guild and put out all the basic campfires to prevent future challenges to my rule.

Moving on, last night we went back into ICC for our weekly 10man foray against the Lich King (I say weekly, though this is only the second night of attempts). There was some raid lockout shuffling because most of the people in the group went Wednesday night and cleared up to Sindragosa, so I ditched the raid lockout I was baby sitting and we starting the night two-shotting Sindragosa and then moving on to Arthas.

This just speaks to how disillusioned I seem to be with 25man raiding right now, but the group we had last night was so much fun. There was no impatience to speak of, everyone tried their hardest, no stupid mistakes were ever repeated. Spirits remained high the entire time. It got to the point on the last few attempts where we were just joking around during phase one because we had it down so pat.

But I get ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, 10 > 25.

Offtanking phase one

I’ve learned that tanking the Shambling Horrors in the first phase is something I excel at. I hold it off to the side, picking each up with a Hand of Reckoning and use my stuns every so often during enrages if Cendra (hunter) is otherwise pre-occupied. Picking up the little ghouls isn’t an issue either, saving the shield toss for when they spawn can usually pick them up. If not, I wait til they inevitably target the Ret pally and then Righteous Defense them all back to me.

We did an attempt or two at first with some issues killing off all the Horrors before Remorseless Winter began but afterwards we easily started coasting into phase 1.5 with the Horrors getting picked off by a disease megahit. We also got to the point where we were pushing it past 70% after the second Horror spawned.

Remorseless Winter we then had an attempt or two to streamline. Our biggest issue seemed to be when the phase ended and people would run for the middle but run smack dab into the orb chasing them. We had a few hilarious deaths with people getting blown right off the side of the Citadel.

Phase two issues

At this point I would take over maintanking Arthas because Soul Reaper was kind of a non-issue for me. The attack would hit, and provided I was at full health it would take me into the AD-reduced zone, paring down the 50k hit to a very manageable 47k hit. And, if worse came to worse, I had the extra life proc backing me up. Basically I could ignore the mechanic provided I was fully healed. If a healer got picked up by a Valk that’d be another issue, and then I’d pop a cooldown to be safe.

Defile was another one of those issues that popped up early but was quickly squelched. We got down a system of scattering a bit right before Defile’s cooldown was up, then the targeted person would hastily run out of the affected area. The first time we got to phase two, there was a hilarious Defile wipe where in short order the entire platform was covered in the oleaginous effect because we were so horribly stacked.

The last roadblock that we ended the night on was Valks carrying people off. This is easily fixed those with some discipline on stuns. It looked like everyone was blowing stuns immediately off the bat, which is a terribly dumb idea, if only just because it screws with the diminishing returns on stuns and makes future attempts to slow them down nigh impossible.

Our best attempt we got him to 43%. Next week I’m sure we’ll be cruising in the phase three territory… which honestly doesn’t seem that difficult. No Valks, just Defiles and keeping people alive during Harvests. Considering how amazing the healers are I’m not concerned about that in the slightest. I think next Monday or the Monday after I’ll be rejoicing in a LK kill here.

Back in the seat

Muscle memory is a huge convenience. After a week spent in the icy tundra of Orlando (I brought a cold snap down with me, sorry Floridians), I came back from the conference this weekend and was bamboozled into an ICC-10 run last night. Still sitting on a raid lockout I had the foresight to extend before leaving for my work trip, I reactivated it and we hopped in right to Sindragosa.

And despite having not tanked in a week and being incredibly rusty feeling, my fingers apparently were able to jump right back into the flow and managed to do the thinking for me. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what key Holy Shield was mapped to, but when the point came in 969 to use it my middle finger instinctively shot up and pushed 2 down. I felt like Doc Ock with his sentient mechanical tentacles.

I was just, as a lark, reading the wikipedia article on muscle memory and it mentioned that you need to repeat an action 740 times for your brain/muscles to “memorize” it. I have no idea if that’s true, but think about how many times I use Holy Shield over the course of a raid. According to this log it was almost 200 times in one raid.

Sorry, stupid digression–I just found the whole concept fascinating. Some people use muscle memory to make repair cars better, some for surgical procedures, I use it to lower my reaction time while tanking.

Anyhoo, Sunday night. Raid. Sindragosa.

We did a few attempts on the crazy harpy (BETRAAAAAAAAYS YOU) each time doing fantastic and then having some issues with phase 3. After a chunk of attempts people got the hang of getting away when targetted for ice blocking, breaking people in their group out, etc. The second to last attempt we got her to 5% or so, then the last one it was a photo finish, killing her with a few people dead and two people blocked, along with the boss nearly almost enraged. It got to the point where people shouted out “ignore the blocks! Kill the boss!”

So we did and then she dropped. It was messy, but the way attempts were trending we were probably going to kill her cleanly the next time. I’ll take a sooner messy kill over a perfect kill ten minutes later. Time is always a luxury.

Another digression: let’s talk about raid leading philosophy for a second. What did in the 5% attempt was two people got extra-blocked (ie, stood too close to the targeted person) and the attempt fell apart. On the run back I named names and stressed paying attention not just to where you are when targeted but also where others are when they are targeted.

I was then (jokingly, though) accused of bitchery. In your raids, do people get called out when the make mistakes? I know personally I usually let people chastise themselves in private, but lately I’m not so sure that’s effective. I feel a dignified public shaming would better reinforce “oh hey, standing next to this guy is a bad idea” the next time around.

Whenever I screw something up my first response is to apologize in vent and explain how I screwed up. I’m just extending that courtesy to everyone else now, haha.

But, again, I digress. After Sindra was downed we excitedly bounded over to the Upper Spire and then up the teleporter to the Frozen Throne. We all posed for pictures with Arthas (hence my pic above) and then kind of dawdled about how we were going to deal with the fight. It was a Sunday night and already kind of late, and as much as I’d like to take a 15 minute break to watch the video, we didn’t have the time for that.

I alt-tabbed and browsed stratfu’s strategy a bit (I know, for shame, not being prepared!) but I got lost in the mountains of descriptions and all the cascading diagrams. Ironically (maybe) for someone who writes a blog and guides about fights sometimes, but I for the life of me, cannot learn a fight by reading a description. Words just blend together and I get bored of what I’m reading. I’m a much more visual learner, or at least I need to wipe a few times for something to “click”.

Anyway, we decided to wing it. Yes, wing Arthas. We had about 20 minutes, we weren’t going to kill him that night, might as well have some fun.

We had some basic understanding of how Phase 1 worked based on how much we read before giving up and after the second try we were basically getting through it pretty easily, once positioning was worked out.

The Remorseless Winter phase went a little oddly with us dying in new and exciting ways each time we tried it. The first time we weren’t expecting the floor to crumble when it did (I blame Gandy’s saronite bombs) and a few of us tumbled to our deaths. Another time one of the ice clouds burst too close to a few of us and we got blown off the side of the map.

Like I said, we didn’t have a shot in hell of dropping Arthas in our short time window. I’m rolling over the lockout to next weekend and we’ll get a full night on the sucker then. At this point I doubt many people care about the 251 gear or the easy badges, we want our Kingslayer titles.

Once bitten, twice wiped

I’m trying to think of a fight that puts as much of an emphasis on personal responsibility as Blood Queen does. And, by personal responsibility, I mean each raider paying specific attention to a buff that they have that realistically the raid leaders cannot see the status of and cannot feasibly direct the execution of in the midst of the encounter.

I suppose Thaddius would be a good analogue, since you really didn’t know if people were paying attention to their polarity until they had managed to zap-fry to death a huge swath of innocent people, their whole lives ahead of them, like a toaster dropped in the pool at the youth center.

Blood Queen presented a unique challenge for us if only because while we excel in many areas, coordination and good old fashioned attention-paying is not especially our strong suit. The attempts done on Blood Queen were a few weeks ago, done mostly as exploration, and resulted (I’m told, I wasn’t there) in some fantastic wipes. Then, last week after murdering Putricide we gave her the ol’ college try and, while failing, had enough success to know the fight was definitely feasible.

Last night we put the first serious night of attempts on her. We finally got to her lair at around 8:30 server or so, giving us a solid 90 minutes to lock down the fight.

Aiding us in our journey of pain would be an amazing addon that Demogar found called BloodQueen. You put in a priority list of bites and the addon will track who has the vampire debuff, the timing on their bite, and assign for them (communicated through raid warnings and whispers) who they have to bite.

So in the screenshot above Cendra got the debuff first, and then ten seconds before he could bite someone the addon told him to go for the first person in the priority list: Morvain. A /rw went out, an icon was put on Morvain’s head, and Cendra would then run off at the proper time to bite his assigned target.

The addon was working pretty well last night, and despite some issues with the mechanics of biting (mostly people not standing close enough to their target) we’re doing pretty well on bites until the third wave. At that point we were having issues with people losing track of who they had to bite in the endless sea of notifications and raid warnings. At that point someone came up with the idea of making a separate chat window for whispers so you can see and not lose track of your assignments. Brilliant, definitely helped.

Another suggestion was made by Zilga, apparently the ambassador of Healsylvannia, who declared “the healers claim the middle.” During air phase they would immediately retreat there, spread out, and begin tossing out whatever heals they could to keep people up while bloodbolts whirled overhead. Once they started doing that the air phases went super clean with only an occasional death. Game changing strat swap.

Tonight we have the whole night drop BQL. At first last night I was filled with fear and loathing that she would turn into a new Putricide, a fight that would take weeks for us to down and even then would hardly be clean enough to henceforth be declaredly a farm fight. BQL however, once we made those strategy changes, didn’t seem so bad. We have the dps, it’s just everyone executing their jobs precisely and maximizing personal dps. I think tonight we can drop her… our last attempt things were really clicking and I think if someone didn’t drop a swarming shadows in the middle of the room and kill a swath of people we could have killed her. We wiped at 14%, with half the raid dead.

And I want my damn shield to drop.

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!

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.

So close, yet… actually, pretty damn close

Wednesday night, the second and last raiding night according to the new schedule, we went into ICC intending to hammer out some progression–FINALLY–and maybe kill a wing boss. We’ve been taking potshots at Putricide, and barely at that, over the last month thanks to some seriously crappy attendance.

As I said, finally, we had good attendance Wednesday night and the stars seemed aligned for a wing boss kill. We got some quickie tries in on Putricide the night before, getting him to no more than 70%, but that was with us really only half-trying at the end of the night. The remainders of Tuesday night indicated two issues: rDPS on the boss was low, because those 70% attempts were lasting 6 minutes or so, meaning the boss wasn’t going down fast enough, and that we’d have to go through a bunch of wipes before everyone got used to avoiding the environmental damage.

To remedy the first issue (the low rDPS) we adopted the “stay on green” strat that would minimize how much time melee (and god, do we run melee-heavy) had to run to get to their target. Staying on green side meant that the Volatile Ooze would die expediently, and give us downtime to work on the boss. This definitely resolved the issue, suddenly we were forcing Phase 2 after the first Gas Cloud.

We went through a few wipes working out the kinks, like moving away from flasks, positioning for when the green ooze explodes so people don’t get knocked against the wall or a corner, avoiding the malleable oozes, etc. Everything was slowly coming together and suddenly our 70% attempts jumped to 50% attempts, and then we were dancing on the precipice of Phase 3.

Sidenote on phase transitions: one of the Rogues discovered if you Vanish during the Tear Gas cast (phase transitions) you don’t get stunned and can continue dpsing the boss/slime. A mage also pulled this off with Invisiblity. I’m guessing anything that takes you out of combat will do the same–Feign Death, etc.

Anyway, so we through the motions attempt after attempt, watching the health counter be lower and lower every time we wipe: serious progression. The bonus dkp flows like wine to keep everyone motivated. Honestly, I didn’t care if we didn’t kill him, I was having fun learning the fight.

Finally we start consistently pushing the good doctor into phase 3, although the first time it happened we weren’t prepared, had an add still up, and in the confusion managed to die one by one. But we were getting there!

We followed up with a few more phase 3 attempts, getting Putricide at the lowest to 20%. By this point it was getting late (attempts add up quickly when each can take up to 10 minutes), and performance was starting to reverse course. Thirty minutes before raid end we shuffled off and closed the night with VOA.

Am I disappointed we didn’t kill Putricide Wednesday? A little, but not totally. Last month we spent a whole night wiping on Rotface when he first came out, not scoring a kill, and then the following week we two shot him. I’m fully optimistic that next week we’ll build on what we learned and drop this sucker.

The Blood Council has a 10 min enrage timer

How do I know this? Oh, we fought them for 10 minutes and 3 seconds last night.

But how? you might ask. Wouldn’t that require most of your raid being de–

Yes, yes it would. And yes, yes they were.

The jinx was Demogar promised us twice the dkp we would normally get for the kill if we one shot the Princes. I scoffed, but whatever.

So, the fight stats … and 18.5% of the way in (according to WoL) we lost a healer and four dps. A little bit later we lost some melee and another healer. At this point I would have been prepared to wipe it and try again. But oh no, there was extra dkp on the line, everyone wanted to keep going. So we did.

About five minutes in we lost another chunk of dps. And we kept going.

Eight minutes into the fight and we’re at the 15% range, and Demo buys the farm. Taldaram goes wild and one shots a few people before I can pick him up. Now I’m tanking both guys with few healers left up and watching my hp yo-yo up and down.

The enrage timer is starting to get really close. By the 9 minute mark there was still 8% or so to go with only 9 of us left standing. It was going to be a photo finish.

Timer finally counts down the last few seconds, people yelling out health percentages in vent, and then it hits 0. The Princes enrage, their big one-shotting attack misses me and someone manages to pluck away the last bit of health.

The Princes go down with the nine of us left standing. Epic kill.

And yes, we all got our extra dkp.

Trying to keep the faith

If you’ve been following me on twitter (and hell, even here on the blog) I’ve been pretty down about my guild lately as it pertains to raiding. There’s been a few issues of nascent drama in addition to some very annoying attendance issues that have nearly cost us the ability to raid for the last two weeks. The problem isn’t so much we don’t have people, it’s that the people we do have are being fickle about showing up or have had scheduling issues (I myself had to miss the raid Wednesday because of a scheduling issue).

In one sense, the problem could be solved with recruiting, but the problem remains that there are capable people in guild, and we just need them to show up. I guess our first step is to work on getting those people to log in and get some of the lesser geared people into raids. We’re probably going to change the raid schedule from three three-hour days to two four-hour days, so we don’t have a stretch of raid nights that may be untenable for some folks. We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime I’m going to console myself with the knowledge that the core of the guild is strong, and made up of awesome people. Half of our ICC raid core weren’t even in guild during Naxx, so if we eventually have to build up again, it’s not the end of the world.

Some funny things form guild chat last night, so I may take comfort in the hilarity of the people I am blessed to raid with.

Slyke when he was asked for his gearscore when trying to get into a ToGC-10 pug:

And Zilga (a healer) from the attempts we put in on Dreamwalker last night:

Speaking of Dreamwalker …

Interesting fight. We tried it for the two hours or so we could and mostly got the hang of the adds, but we need to work on them a bit more. I really can’t offer any observations other than the Blazing Skeletons hurt like a mother, and need to die asap, and dps really needs to be on the ball with target switches. The fight reminds me a lot of when we were first trying Deathwhisper and the adds seemed unmanageable. Once we figure out what to kill when and how, it’ll go a lot smoother.

Ultimately though I regret trying Dreamwalker last night. We should have built on our experience with Putricide or Blood Queen rather than splitting our progression three ways.

Whack goes the nerf bat

Just to revisit this topic again briefly–I’m going to reiterate my lack of surprised that we were nerfed. I saw this coming earlier this week, the warning signs were all there.

The one thing that bothers me about the nerf (other than how it was just sprung on us in the middle of the night) is that Blizzard thinks that other tanks are “fine”. Specifically, warriors. Warriors right now are at the bottom of the heap across most, if not all metrics, and have very little to show for it. I don’t understand Blizz’s mentality that if a tank can tank a boss then they are fine. Tank survival should be the same across all four classes, much like how pure dps classes are more or less balanced against other pure dpsers.

The situation is now that the tank classes are a lot more balanced than they were a week ago, but warriors are still coming up short. They need some serious loving.

I can’t imagine there will be anymore Paladin nerfs in the near future, so don’t worry that we’re in the crosshairs or something. If any other changes are to be made they might involve making Seal of Command require a two-hander so Prot can’t use it anymore (thus, sadly, killing heroics spec). Beyond that… I just can’t see it.

But then again, I can’t imagine why Blizzard would be so willfully blind to how behind Warriors are in EH, dps, etc. So, who knows?