Great raid week, or *the greatest* raid week?

In the past few weeks we’ve been running two 25 nights, doing most of Coliseum on Tuesday and then VOA and finishing up Coliseum on Wednesday. Worked well, we got stuff done, people got their purps, everyone was happy.

So I wake up Tuesday and find out that Blizz is throwing a monkey wrench in the works: they’re releasing patch 3.2.2. Obviously, I’m shocked. I wasn’t away from WoW so I was not expecting a patch to come out–

Actually, I’ll explain this. Running joke is patches only come out when I’m on vacation or traveling for work. For example, 2.4 came out when I was in Florida for work (bee tee dubs, running Heroic Magister’s Terrace on a crappy hotel wireless connection while loaded on minibar booze = best thing ever), 3.0 when I was in Marseilles, 3.2 when I was in New Hampshire, etc.

Right, so back on topic: suddenly we had Onyxia to squeeze into the calendar, and by squeeze, I mean we actually had plenty of room for the old girl. To appease the masses yearning for dragon’s blood we decided to go after her after VOA that night. Moreover, the initial thought was Onyxia was resetting Tuesday night so it’d be stupid not to kill her when we could do her again the next day. Though, as we learned, not so much.

So we rip through VOA25 and then get our butts down to Dustwallow for Onyxia. The pvpers were out in force with a contingent of Horde sitting on the summoning stone, making getting the stragglers a little easier.

Once inside we burnt our way through Onyxia’s trash until we were face to face with the Brood Mother herself. Now, my only experience with this encounter was once at level 70 when I completed the huge quest chain for the hell of it, and then a few times at level 80 to gather scales for cloaks and to nab my t2 helm and Quel’Serrar (originals, both). I was not familiar with how the mechanics would work when at the proper raid level, aside from what I learned from the hilarious and classic Onyxia Wipe Animation.

So ES charges down the hill with the DK picking up Ony and me hanging in the rear on whelp and add duty. We get her to 70% quickly and she takes flight. The whelp train leaves the station and I immediately do my best to round as many as possible and help with the burn down. The AOE must have been intense because my fps dropped to 19 quickly, when it’s usually 60 in raids. A few people actually got dc’d, hah.

The adds go down and someone cries in vent “Deep Breath, look at her and move away from it!” Contrawise, the mouth breathers all stare at the ceiling in confusion and get roasted alive. The rest of us darted away and fall back together to deal with the eventually descending Onyxia. Of course the DK tank bought it, so I ran over and grabbed Ony to position her for phase three. The priests start rotating their Fear Wards and I used a bubble/debubble macro to slip out of one fear.

After going through the fear-break fear cycle a few more times Onyxia dropped to the floor and gave up her purples. A hunter and warlock helm dropped as well as the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade which is damn sexy. I was one for my Ret set. Loot is distributed and it’s only 7:30 server time, we’ve only been raiding for 45 minutes or so, amazingly.

A couple of us tabard hearth to the tournament and begin summoning the rest. We all pour into the Coliseum and start working our way through… and one shot every boss. We were out of there in two and a half hours, a few minutes shy of the 10pm ST cap I put on the raid.

Faction Champs in particular was an absolute joke. Usually we lose 5-8 people in the encounter, but with the nerfs done to overall damage we didn’t lose a single person. Sure, some of that can be explained by “practice makes perfect” and all, but the whole danger feeling of the fight was lost. Anub itself was also a cake walk. They toned down the damage the Burrowers were doing to the point where I never felt threatened, even while holding three of them at once. I’m not going to lie, I was kind of disappointed.

Well, that was Tuesday night: VOA, Ony, Col25. All cleared, all one shots. Amazing night.

And then last night we were kind of at a loss for what to do so it was decided we’d finally put to rest one of the ghosts haunting our guild: Sarth25 3D. We went in and did two learning wipes to figure out the finer points that most guilds knew of months ago, and then killed Sarth easily on the third go. So lots of folks got their titles and my pal Gulli got the drake for his mount collection.

Speaking of progress, I was looking at wowprogress, at the suggestion of Falowin, to see how our guild was doing there. Apparently we’re ranked 10th on our server and hilariously got the 17th kill in the world of Twins25 (which obviously doesn’t mean much, considering there’s a billion guilds tied for 17th along with us). All this progress and we’ve never killed Yogg. It’s kind of funny.

After Sarth I put together a dream team for ToC-10 heroic. It’s been our goal for a while to start working on that, and after Monday’s bloodlustless snafu we marched in last night with renewed vigor, determination, and shammyness.

Beasts we amazingly one-shot, and this was after wiping to them 13 times on monday. I’m assuming there must have been a stealth nerf in there, because I swear we were too slow to kill Gormok but the worms died sickeningly fast. Then Icehowl we just went through the motions with and burnt down with a minute left on the enrage timer. A nice morale boost for sure. 50 attempts left on the clock.

Then Jarxxus we had some trouble with initially with getting the portals down in time until we decided to shrink it down to one tank and six dps. This made life so much easier, because basically if you find yourself with two Mistresses of Pain, you’re looking at a world of hurt. That’s two counterspells going around, two healers that can be pounced at a time, it’s chaos. On the attempt we killed him we executed the fight perfectly. Portals went down very fast so we were never left with more adds than there would be in the normal mode. Took six wipes to learn, but when we got it, it was a thing of beauty. 44 attempts left on the clock.

Then onto Faction Champs–and oh boy did we luck out with group composition. We had the pally and druid for healers–that is, the two easiest to control. And no warrior, which made Zilga, the one clothie breathe a sigh of relief, even if the DK was still there (ZILGA DOWN!). So the kill order we settled on was Enhance Shaman, DK, Hunter, then Druid, Pally, and Shadow Priest. Nailed the fight on the second go, leaving us with 42 attempts left.

Unfortunately that was it for the night, have hit the time most people had to bail. We’re reforming on Monday and hoping can clean up the place and score the A Tribute to Skill achievement.

Overall, though, an amazing raid week. One I’m proud to be a part of with a great bunch of people.

Don’t spec 12/53/6

I’ve seen a really dopey idea being discussed in certian quarters regarding how to spec when 3.1 drops. We only have one real “oh shite” cooldown to use, the argument goes, so the solution suggested is to create a new one with the Improved Lay on Hands talent. The spec to make such a “cooldown” is this.

This is a bad spec, don’t do it.

Here’s why: as a tank you have two primary jobs. One is to stay alive as long as possible, and the other is to generate enough threat to keep the mob on you. Just out of curiosity, how does spending valuable talent points on increasing your heals by 12% help either of those?

The ultimate goal with this silly idea is to turn Lay on Hands into an 11 minute (with the new glyph) +50% armor value boost.

But, as always, the devil in the details, and the details bear out that Imp LoH isn’t as great as it seems.

To use myself as an example, I have 23391 armor, which provides 60.6% damage reduction. Physical damage reduction. Keep that in mind, the word physical here is key.

If I popped Imp LoH I would boost my armor to 35086, and my damage reduction would jump to 69.7%. A gain of 9.1% damage reduction. And even if you had more armor, damage reduction from armor is capped at 75%.

Once again though, this is all physical damage reduction. Say what you want about Pallies, we are not hurting in the physical damage reduction department. What’s primarily keeping us from being ideal Sarth 3d tanks is magical damage, which we are just about defenseless against.

All this spec does is saddle us with unnecessary talents for a weak “cooldown” that doesn’t even help where we hurt the most.

I want a new cooldown as much as the next guy. Gimping ourselves is not the way to do it.

Craziest OS25 pug ever

One of my huge gear goals recently has been to pick up my Valorous set gloves. The reason being two fold: (1) it was the last iLevel 200 item I needed to replace (best in slot to boot!) and (2) I really wanted that Epic achievement. I’m an achievement junkie, I know.

So because the guild hasn’t been running any 25mans aside from VOA and Naxx as of late, I queued in the LFG menu for a pug. Usually this is a recipe for disaster, and I girded myself for the worst in advance. I was fully prepared to wipe about 15 times, have the Bag of Spoils ninjaed, and then get jumped on the way out by a rabid pack of Alliance. Murphy’s Law was not catching this Pally by surprise. No sir.

Mercifully Ildara and Cendra (the super resto druid/surv hunter duo that I oft adventure with) said they’d come along and joined the pug as well. At least I’d have someone to gripe to when all went to hell!

As I was hightailing it over there, the raid chat was abuzz with the normal pre-raid stuff that pugs struggle to sort out. People were asking who the tanks were (I was refusing to volunteer myself initially, I didn’t want to step on any toes), how many healers we had or needed, and if we were leaving any drakes up.

It was decided to leave one drake up (gulp), and if that didn’t go well, we’d kill it and finish the encounter normally.

The MT and the OT get sorted out and I finally peep up “oh I can OT too, I’m prot.” No one said anything, so I shrugged, getting ready to do some sweet shield slam deeps. Zoning in though, someone caught sight of my gear and said “holy crap look at Rhidach… he should MT!”

Er, no thanks. (How embarassing).

Everything gets settled and immediately I must have been pissing off the tanks because I’m ripping aggro off of them left and right with Hammer and ShoR and Consecrate. I honestly felt bad, I wasn’t trying to show off.

In any case, someone asks which drake we’re leaving up and another says Shadron (terrible idea!) and I volunteer that the one in the back should stay up. It’s the easiest to deal with. That was also a bad idea, because the raid leader then asks me to explain how to do +1d before we engage Sarth.

Whatever. We clean up the trash and the two north-south drakes and line up in front of Sarth so I can give my little pep talk. I tell them the usual, drake lands in back, tank up front, etc. I thought it was pretty thorough but we then careened into a spectacular wipe on the first try.

The DK main tank turns Sarth incorrectly and the raid’s getting tail swiped left and right. I pick up the drake and the little whelps, which was a mistake. Lava wall takes out a bunch of people. It was chaos.

However, surprisingly, everyone was resolute. RL asked me what went wrong, and I pointed out the obvious issue with tail swipes and that the warrior OT should grab the drake and I’ll focus on whelps and the fire elementals. So instructions are given out, the DK has a better idea of positioning and we re-engage.

This time we as a raid were successful, but ironically, this attempt was about thirty times more chaotic. We got the drake down in short order, and a stray whelp didn’t eat anyone, so the warrior and I did out jobs. We then moved to controlling elementals and I watching Sarth with anticipation as his health moved down.

At around 50% it started getting nuts. Flame walls took out a few people and for some reason the DK compensated by beginning to pull Sarth eastwards across the lava. Wut.

He’s yelled at to bring Sarth back, but the DK’s having a merry time out there in the slop. Eventually stuff gets under control, and after what felt like the absolute longest Sarth engagement ever–20%-0% must have been 3 minutes long, I swear, with elementals EVERYWHERE–the dragon finally goes down.

I eagerly skip over to inspect the corpus for what loot had dropped… and to my immediate joy there were two “of the Conqueror” gloves! Ok, among the 8 of us that could use those (yes I inspected everyone’s gear) that gave me 2/8 (25%) odds. Not too shabby.

Gloves are called for rolling and yellowed numbers flying across my screen.

Suddenly, someone rolls a hundred! Aw dammit, one glove gone. My odds drop to 1/7 (14%).

Hearkening back to my post on chance I repeated to myself “there’s no such thing as luck” and typed in /roll.

And I rolled a 100 as well… amazing!

For someone who doesn’t believe in her, Lady Luck sure likes to smile on me.

Raid Story Catch Up

I wrote that tanking etiquette post, I swear, and it’ll be up shortly. But I needed to play catch up a little bit with my raiding stories.

Where did I leave off? Oh, yes Monday.

Monday we had left the military wing, Sapphiron, and Kel’Thuzad. We started at the earlier raid time once more, 7 server/8 eastern. We marched in with the full 25man complement, and then realized we were about to attempt Razuvious with only one priest. Woops.

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