Resto Nation

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time in game lately and that has lead me to spend less time blogging about. I’ve had a few things to say and now with the new patch, even more. I’d like to get back into the swing of things by talking about what I like about new content and what I don’t.

What I like is probably the easiest to explain. The instances in Icecrown and the new raid are beautiful. I really think that Blizz dropped the ball on the Tournament and I think they have made up for it in ICC. The lore is deep, the graphics are stunning, and fights are complex and interesting. Of course there are new shiny gear epics to get as well.

The new LFG system is also a straight-up home run. It took 5 years, but Blizz finally got it right.

So far after the first week I’m pretty happy with my progression. My 10 man has cleared all available content and picked a couple of achievements. My 25 man has downed Lord Marrowgar. I’d like to clear all 4 released bosses in 25s, but for some reason content is always harder for us there than in 10s. Either way, for the first week this will do.

What I don’t like about new content is a little more complex, but it can be boiled down to basically unfinished old content. I am completionist and when things are not complete I am not happy.

My biggest disappointment is Ulduar. 25 mans were always dismal in there and it saddens me that my 7 shards of Val’nyr will most likely never see the other 23. I’ve learned to live with the loss of the legendary, albeit begrudgingly, but it’s 10 mans that I’m really not happy about.

We’ve cleared Firefighter, the hardest 10 man fight in the game, but we’ve only put one hour in on Algalon and failed. He sat there for weeks waiting to be tried, but we were too busy with “current content”. Alas to date I have no “Starcaller” and no Rusted Proto-Drake (we just need Yogg+1). I want them both badly even now, two content patches later.

Any fail idiot can grind gear or get an occasional drop in a 25 man, so gear score means almost nothing to me. For me titles like Starcaller and the Glory Drakes are what really let the top-level raiders show off. My team deserved to have them, but getting in there and doing it feels like pulling teeth.

At the end of the day I’m happy running the new content. It’s pretty and fun. I just really hope that my team doesn’t let the low hanging fruit we’ve worked so hard for pass us by in the name of gear score. The gear will come. The Drakes won’t be there forever…

Lord Jaraxxus is the second movie in the Covenant Raid Film series.

Click to Embiggen

Tuesday for Covenant is 10-man day. For my group this means ToC and ToGC back to back. Yesterday we started off as we usually do, except we were one man light. Our resident feral druid had some RL issues to take care of so we decided to 9-man ToC (10) on normal mode to farm badges while we waited.

We one-shot everything straight through with only a few deaths in 33 minutes. It was beyond trivial. The was no challenge at all. When we were done we still had no 10th for our Tribute run. We waited a while, and then we waited some more.

People were getting antsy and annoyed, and some, more inebriated by the minute. We ended up shuffling people around and taking the Raid Leader of the guild’s Bravo Group, a DPS Blood DK. Healing was also switched around and instead of our usual Tree Druid our Enhancement Shaman went Resto.

Things went bad right away with 2 stupid wipes to Beasts. People were pissed and dropping vent so it looked like we were going to have to call it for the night. We took a quick break and regrouped.

Some how in the meantime we managed to pull our shit together. We got Beasts down on the next pull. Then Jarraxis, Faction Champs, and Twins were all one-shot. This put us back on Anub. After all the fail of the last two weeks we were eager to get the kill behind us. We had 47 chance left to do it.

When he died we had 39 left and it was 2AM. We did it. Not only had we cleared ToGC (10), we also claimed the second ever Undermine-US Horde A Tribute to Skill. I was elated. The giant monkey was finally off our back and we could rightfully claim our place as a top raiding guild on the server.

Here’s a breakdown of the final attempt. We ran with 2 tanks, a DK on Anub, a Paladin on adds, 6 DPS, a Holy Priest, and me on Koramoor, my Holy Paladin. The tanks and healers were using Flasks of Lesser Resistance.

The goal was a a hard DPS burn to 55% before the first burrow phase and then another burn to 30% before the second burrow phase. During the burrow phase we had 4 ice patches down in the corners of the room and kited in a modified X pattern (facing the back of the room, bottom left, top right, bottom right, emerge in route to top left). Scarabs were target priority over the Burrowers.

We got through the first two phases perfectly and were burning down to 30%. We hit our mark before the second burrow and Anub kicked off Leeching Swarm. I popped Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice right away. The Enhancement Shaman popped Bloodlust. At 28% the Holy Priest died.

This left me to solo heal possibly the hardest part of the hardest 10-man encounter of the game. For the record I had 4500 HPS. I was also using Egg of Mortal Essence to haste my Holy Lights. I had a full mana bar at 32K. I only lost one other toon.

Aside from Anub’arak’s hard enrage timer he also has a soft enrage in Phase Three. Through all of Phase Three the OT is off-tanking 2 adds. 2 new adds spawn every 45 seconds. Because of the stacking damage buff the adds get it is impossible for the OT to tank more than 2, So basically when the last 2 adds spawn they will one-shot the OT and wipe the raid. You can see this at the very end of the TankSpot.com video guide for this encounter.

When Anub was at 1% the last two adds spawned. It looked like a wipe. Then Anub died, achievements popped on the screen and vent exploded into violent screaming cheers. As I took my shaking hands off of the keyboard I looked up and saw we had one toon alive, the Paladin OT surrounded by a Divine Shield bubble. He almost single handedly saved us from, and almost caused, the wipe. Here’s how:

At one percent he knew two things, the last two adds had spawned and were coming for him, and once they hit him he would die and we would wipe. So he bubbled. This let the 4 adds loose on the raid killing everyone instantly. It also gave 10 seconds for DoTs to tick and Anub was not getting healed. He landed the killing blow with a Hammer of Wrath. All I can say is pure fucking genius.

I would like to congratulate the entire team on this kill. It truly is a tribute to your skill as players and team members. We have achieved an elite level of play that the vast majority never will. You should all be very proud.

Now we have time to focus on the other monkey still hanging around, Algalon. In the meantime we’ll tighten up ToGC and aim for Tributes to Mad Skill and Insanity. I know we can do it and I can’t wait. I am one very happy Belf.

Anub’arak. No boss in all of Wrath has troubled me more than the Nerubian Traitor King. He has been a stumbling block that refuses to go away for almost all of the expansion so far. This has earned the giant Crypt Lord the distinction on being my own personal nemesis.

A long time ago when I had been a fairly fresh 80 Heroic Azjol-Nerub was a place to be avoided. You would think that an instance filled with poisonous undead would be a Holy Paladin’s cup of tea but it was not so. Vemonmancers and the big guy’s Pound always gave me fits.

As we progressed through Naxx and into Uludar and Heroics became easier and then trivial I thought that the days of the big blue bug were behind me. This was not to be. Apparently being the final boss in a five man dungeon was not good enough for a major lore figure like Anub’arak. When Blizzard announced that the King was coming back as the final boss in the Trial of the Crusade I knew we were in trouble.

I could not have been more right. Armed with a new bag of tricks, Anub’arak continues to be a weekly point of frustration for me and my guild. While our 25 man group has downed him on normal mode, we are not consistent. When we have done it is usually at the cost of quite a few toons.

My 10-man has normal mode on farm. One-shots are the norm. Heroic is another story. Last night we put about 20 attempts in. The closest we got was 16%. Where as 25-man normal can be sloppy and still be a win, Heroic 10-man requires perfection. One major mistake or death and it’s a wipe.

Short of random complete fuck ups, our issue is phase two. We have a solid plan for using 3 ice patches per burrow phase. However short or ill timed spike kites due to misplaced ice orbs and the Acid-Drenched Mandibles debuff from the Scarabs prove to be our downfall.

We have tried to mitigate the scarabs by stacking Nature Resistance and this seems to be working well, except when the stacks get over 5 on multiple toons. Fixing the kiting is just a matter of execution by both the kiter and the ranged dps pulling down the orbs. What is commonly referred to as “bad rng” I think can be overcome by tighter play.

I’d like to see us try and skip the second burrow all together with a better DPS burn. I think we are nerfing ourselves with a suboptimal raid composition. Fixing the comp would give us more wiggle room in what is otherwise a very tight encounter.Anub’arak is not a full-on DPS race, but the burn phases are and we seem to be a little behind.

In these last few weeks before patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel we really need to buckle down and finish off what I think is one of the hardest encounters on the game. Anub needs to die not just for the achievement and team morale but my personal sanity as well.

Stay tuned. We’ve killed one Big Blue Fail before, this one is just a matter of time.

Click to Embiggen

Last night was a good night. Much better than the previous. Due to a RL crit at work I was unable to post yesterday about our fail Monday on General Vezax. Do not worry I have notes and I will write a post-mortem strat soon. But until then, I have the good news of last night.

I t was a night of firsts and Acheivements. We got started a little late and took a couple players who don’t usually go on the 10-man run. We down Flame Leviathan with both Tower of Frost and Tower of Storms up after a few tries and earned Orbital Devistation.

From there we ran in and destroyed XT-002 Deconstructor as usual although it was a little slow this week (3:40 vs. 3:20 last week). From XT we cleared trash and downed Kologarn.

This week instead of heading straight to Auriaya we decided to work on our boss progression and attempt Iron Council again. We were a little more well informed than the last time we tried and I was prepared to spam Cleanse the MT when Stormcaller dropped Fusion Punch.

We wiped a few times but got the hang of the fight. On the fourth run we executed perfectly. Not one death. We killed Steelbreaker first and Stormcaller last. Next week we can try try doing Runemaster last.

We decided to cap the night with a quick Razorscale kill and called for the evening. A very solid run and good work from everyone involved.

I finished up my dailies after the raid and hit Champion with my new found past-time, the Argent Tournament. Kora is now an Exalted Champion of Silvermoon. Undercity is next.

I’m looking forward to more fun tonight with the Keepers and hopefully we can clear through Vezax again tonight. Good luck to everyone. We’ll need need it for the Giant Robot of Fail.

Click to Embiggen

Last Friday was my Birthday and it started out with the best present I could have hoped for, a dead robot.

I normally don’t get a chance to raid on Thursday nights due to my travel schedule with work. However last week has slow so I was able to get home early.

I was hoping to drag my newly minted Shaman through a Naxx 25 guild farm run since my wife was going to be at a kickball game. Raid time came and only 15 people of those who had signed up were online. We waited for bit and then just decided to 15 man Anub’rehkan. We had two tanks, too many healers, and not enough DPS. The disconnects and real life we ended up with 12 and just decided to call it after a couple of wipes to his enrage time.

On a side note, who even knew that Anub’Rehkan has an enrage timer…

This effort was fail, but we had the folks on to continue our progression 10 man Ulduar group instead. Wednesday we had cleared through Freya and were on our current brick wall, Mimiron. Readers of the blog will what happened last week. It was not pretty.

So back into the fray it was. We had a few folks who did not know the encounter to we explained it and they watched the video. Then we wiped. And then we wiped again, and again, and again. Although we were making progress through the phases with the new folks it was not looking promising.

I was getting late, quarter til midnight,  and I decided to give a pep talk. I said:

“Guys, It’s 15 minutes until my Birthday and all I want is a dead robot!”

Then we wiped again. We kept at it though and people started to get a little burnt out. The attempt was called for as people had to get to sleep before work on Friday. We made into Phase 4 with no deaths. All three parts of the mob were around 20% and we lost the off tank . At 5%, 8%, and 11% we lost the main tank. We had most DPS and the healers alive and started a frantic kite and burn. We lost a couple DPS and had the bottom and middle at zero and the head at 2%. Ranged DPS finished it off and we had done it. I got my dead robot.

It was messy. It was frustrating. It was epic.

We have now beat what is widely considered one of the most difficult and complex normal mode encounters in the game. It was a Major Lift! It was a “This is why I Raid!” moment. We got a hat and some clothie gloves for our efforts and called it for the night.

Tonight we play for all the marbles. It is our first shot at the last section of Ulduar and we are going after General Vezax and then, gods willing, Yogg Saron. I very much want to complete the clear tonight and I think we can. However, win or fail we have come far and if not this week, then next.

If I have learned one thing with this group it is that we shall overcome. We have torn down many walls in our quest for progression and we will keep tearing them down as we find new ones. Patience, dedication, and practice do make perfect.

On this my birthday weekend, the dead robot was not the only present I got. Last night during our 25 man Ulduar run I received my first Fragment of Val’anyr. I was very honored that the guild thought I should be the first of us to collect them. I usually don’t care that much about loot. I like shiny things as much as the next guy, but I am all for spreading the wealth. Val’anyr may be the one exception. I want it badly.

Right now it’s assembly is my endgame goal. For me it represents the ultimate for what I’ve tried to be in this game. It is truly legendary. You can track my quest for Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings in the sidebar of the blog under Countdown to Val’anyr. It is going to be a long path. One that I am very excited to take. Wish me luck.

Last night was difficult. It was our second attempt at 25 man Ulduar this week with a few spots PUGged as we work on recruiting. We decided to skip Ignis and Razorscale and go for the easy win on Kologarn.

It was not easy, nor was it a win. In fact we wiped 4 times on trash getting to Kologarn, failed there twice and then decided to head back to Razorscale. That was even more of a disaster. We decided to call it for the night and headed to run Heroic VoA to get some loot.

For those interested here is the WoL Report.

All in all when it comes to Ulduar we failed. I took notes, went through the logs and figured out want went wrong. He is a short list on how not to fail. Follow this advise and the loot will come…

1. Enviromental Damage

This is the nice way of saying “Don’t Stand in the Fire”. Unless you are a tank the number one source of damage and death is Environmental Damage like Razorscale’s Devouring Flames and Kologarn’s Eyebeam. Look for the animation and if all else fails DBM will even tell you to move. Please listen. At best, if you can get heals you are wasting healer mana. At worst, you get one shot. Doing this will help prevent wipes.

Unfortunately Naxx taught people bad habits. Good healers were able to heal through most all environmental damage with the exception of KT’s Shadow Fissure. Even Heigen’s Eruption was not a one-shot. Ulduar is not forgiving of laziness. Everyone is responsible for their own situational awareness. Your healers can not carry you through anymore, even if they wanted to.

Adgamorix over at Divine Plea as an excellent post about Environmental Damage in Ulduar. Read it. Learn it. Live it.

2. Your Other Job

Everyone in the raid has at least two jobs. With rare exception only Tanks do both. You can win by only doing one job like you can win a boxing match with only one arm. But why make it more difficult than it needs to be? Blizzard has given you tools. Use them. Here is what you can do.

Tanks: Cooldowns

This should go with out saying and every good tank I know already does this. If you are tanking and the mob goes into “insert-type-of-mega-damage-here” mode use your Trinkets and CD Talents to stay alive while your healers try and not have a heart attack.

DPS: Interrupt

Most, but not all, big time spells that Bosses have use a cast time. These can often be interrupted. Rogues can Kick. Death Knights and Warriors have a number of skills. Most other classes have one too. Use them. Even better call it out so that others are not wasted. The Dark Rune Watcher adds during Razorscale cast Chain Lightning. It does 11K damage. It can be interrupted. You get the idea. Learn what spells on what mobs are interruptible and then interrupt them. More avoided damage equals less wipes.

DPS: Crowd Control

The was NO need for Crowd Control in Naxxramas. Now there is. Learn what you can Banish, Sheep, Cyclone, Hex, etc. Develop a CC plan before the pull and execute. Once up make sure to focus fire as to not break the CC. We wiped 3 times on the first add pack in the Antechamber last night trying to AoE pull. Once we properly used CC they we no longer a problem.

Healers: Cleanse

DoTs and debuffs kill. Period. If you can cleanse it do. Dark Rune Gaurdian adds during Razorscale use Stormstrike. After the 10K hit it adds a debuff that adds 20% to Nature damage (like Chain Lightning) for 12 seconds. The debuff could easily add another 10K in damage. Cleanse costs 1 GCD. That is basically an instant 10K heal. Wow. Use it, and when you have to, spam it. Last night during the Razorscale attempt I had 19 Cleanses. The next highest was 8 followed by 2. We had 6 Paladins (not all healing) and 2 Priests.

3. Communication

When to talk in Vent

Call out important things like Crowd Control and Interrupts. Also call out when you are incapacitated like  Stone Grip or Slag Pot. Call out when you are casting Rebirth or using an Anhk. Call out when you need backup help. Unless you are the tank, healing lead or Raid Leader that is about it.

When not to talk in Vent

We like and would love to talk with for hours, just not in the middle of a boss fight. Please keep chatter to a absolute minimum so important instructions and warnings can come across. This includes before a pull when instructions are being given. Also the less time the Raid Leader needs to repeat things, the more bosses that die. The more bosses that die, the more loot that drops.

Two things to not call for: Heals and Buffs. The healers know you need heals. If they can they will. Also, in the mean time, move out of the fire you are standing in. The Leader or their designate should handle “Buff Watch”. 15 people calling for “Kings” just clutters the channel and honestly, is annoying.

That all being said Vent chatter is fun and a great part of raiding. The only challenge is to remember time and place. If someone is AFK and we are waiting around, talk away. If we are about to pull it’s time for movie theater mode.

4. Take it like a man (or orc, or cow…)

After wipes we need to figure out what happened. If you could do something better we need to tell you. We still like and we are still friends. Constructive criticism is a good thing. Listen, learn and fix it. And remember no one is above this. If an officer wipes the raid it is their fault like anyone else.

TLDR: Raiding Heroic Ulduar is hard.

Situational awareness, communication, knowledge of class and encounter are paramount to higher level raiding. A bad guild will yell at players for mistakes. A good guild will coach them through learning. However, either way it is up to the players to pull it off. This is what it takes if you seriously want to raid and get the good loot.

Progression is a common word when discussing Raiding in Warcraft. One is supposed to “progress” through content and down one boss after another until you have bested everything Blizzard has delivered. This is very intentionally not easy.

Progress is also not free. The costs can be high. Hundreds of gold, hours upon hours of time, and seemingly endless frustration are paid to make progress. Certain bosses are progression bosses. They have frustrated tens of thousands of raiders, destroyed guilds, and brought the pain to citizens of Azeroth. These are the gate keepers to the end bosses.

Yogg, and before him Kil’Jaeden, Illidan , and Archimonde are all very hard, as the end bosses should be. But before you can fight them you have to earn the right. Bosses like M’uru, Felmyst, and Illidari Council are progression bosses.

For Ulduar it is Mimiron.

The Mimiron fight is the World Series of knowing where to stand. One may think this sounds easy. If so, they have not fought this boss. In the past two days I and 9 other NO DRAMAtics have wiped 24 times on Mimiron. 24 Times. Today is the raid reset and we have to clear back to him to try again. This has been both expensive and frustrating.

We can get to stage 4 consistently but then some one-shot mechanic gets us. Either a Laser Barrage, or a Shock Blast, or Rocket Strike. Sometime it’s bad luck, sometimes it’s our fault. This really began to wear on the raiders. Even me, and I’m about as persistent and dedicated as it gets.

The good news is that is worth it. Even beyond the stellar loot table and shiny hats is access to the final bosses and a chance to clear current content. Loot, server bragging rights, and huge epeens all sound pretty good to me.

My final message is: Do not lose hope, this too shall pass. We will look back on the day when this was “impossible” like we have with many others. Even better is that nothing in this game beats the feeling when we do down him.

Remember, in progression after The Minor Fall comes The Major Lift. Hallelujah.

I like math. That is one of the reasons I like WoW so much. Raid analysis and theorycrafting are my favorite parts of the game.

I have used WoWWebStats for a long time for all of my raid analysis and it has worked very well for me until today. Thanks to Kadomi over at Tank Like a Girl I have found something better.

World of Logs does everything that WWS does and much more. Most notably there is more and better information. The graphs are fantastic. You can do things like display DPS over time and it will shade the time Bloodlust is up. It will show death and Rebirth events as lines on the graph. There is even a default graph to compare total Incoming Damage per Second with total Heals per Second.

Disc priests should rejoice over this new site as well. For the first time it accurately reports damage mitigated through PW:S and Divine Aegis as a heal category. Recount and WWS can not do this. This will give a much better representation of the Disc Priest performance vs. other healers. For the healing lead this is awesome.

But wait it gets even better….

ZOMG REAL TIME REPORTING!

That’s right folks when you run the java client in the background you can capture data real time during the raid for on the fly analysis during wipes. If Recount would do my dishes, ironing, and laundry for me it still would not be as good as this.

Previously uploaded logs are stored by guild in an easy to use Calendar interface and you can even show raid history by guild member.

My only complaint so far is that it is hard to use behind a proxy, so it looks like I won’t be wasting hours at work uploading new data. But I’m sure they’ll fix this soon.

I plan on running the real time analysis tonight during our Ulduar 10 raid and see how it works. I am very excited.

Give it a shot and leave a comment as to your experiences. I’ll update with more of mine later.

It is a fact of life that some days are better than others. This is just the way the universe works.

Tuesday and Wednesday could not have been more different. Yet when they are viewed together, it gives great insight into the highs and lows of raiding.

For the past couple weeks NO DRAMA has been a little rocky. Tension and apathy were high and attendance was low. Even the core the raiders we feeling the stress as the officers tried to figure out how to keep progression going while getting everyone else raiding as well. After a week of unsuccessful attempts to create multiple 10 man raid groups I made an executive decision.

I sent out invites to about 40 level 80 toons for a two night Naxx 25 farm run. It was to be a rollstravaganza. Loot Council would be suspended for the run, all main spec gear was open roll, the only limit would be your own greed. The goal in this run was to spark guild wide interest and participation.

Tuesday at 9PM server time 19 toons showed up and we invited one FoND (Friend of NO DRAMA) to make 20. We had enough for an aptly named Heroic: The Dedicated Few run. Time to see if Naxx really is that easy.

We started, as always on Anub’Rehkan. It went fairly well and the loot went quickly. We cleared trash up to GWF. And decided to try and use Widow’s Embrace for the first time (we always just heal through the enrage) since we lost one and only had 19. It was quickly figured out that killing an add near her does not break the enrage in Heroic. We had a priest switch to Shadow and Mind Control the adds. This worked well.

After GWF we moved to clear trash and things went terribly wrong. Due to maintenance Blizzards network and the terrible luck that Undermine has, the server froze and was offline for an extended time. This killed any chance at getting the next 4 bosses we had scheduled down as well as the 10 man Ulduar we had planned to follow. In the end it was productive but an overall disappointing night.

After the let down from the night before I was not looking forward to the runs very much on Wednesday. 9 PM rolled around again and 20 toons, mostly the same, showed up again. We picked up where we left off and headed to Maexxna. We one-shotted her, easily. We proceeded to clear the entire Plague wing with no wipes and very few deaths. No one even died in the Gauntlet before Loetheb. Not even the Rogue on follow.

We were good. Very good. After 4 bosses we called it for the night. I logged off my tree and hopped on Kora to head to 10 man Ulduar.

The win kept on coming.

We downed Flame Leviathan with Tower of Storms up, and headed straight to XT to try for Heartbreaker. We got the heart to 1% and then we wiped ourselves to try again. Army of Dead was going to be down for 20 minutes so we went back and one shotted Razorscale and Ignis. We even got A Quick Shave on Razorscale.  More win.

At this point Armys were back off cooldown and we headed back to XT. This time we made it. We killed the heart at 75% and went into hard-mode. We were pulling it off until I got stuck by a Gravity Bomb void-zone and a Life Spark and died.  We wiped a while later. But it was very doable. At this point it wsa nearing 2AM and we all had to work in the morning so we called it.

We’ll pick up where we left off tonight or Sunday and get our second Ulduar Hard-Mode done. I am very excited. It was a great run and even better after the fail night before. Again, another reason why I raid. I love being reminded.