Raid Engagement

A raid is defined by its bosses, the complexity of encounters, the design and scale and scope of the place, how it guides us through the space and gives us a new environment to explore - but does a raid have to engage us emotionally? What part does that play in our enjoyment of a raid?

While browsing YouTube at work during lunch (as one does), I found along the list of "see also" videos on the side, a link to a Lich King kill video. It has been a long, long time since I did that fight, and much longer since I really thought about it, but I thought - what the hell, I'll watch it again. And man, it really brought everything back in spades. The feeling of hopeless despair, the anguish and anger that Arthas brought out in me, the frustration of seeing him slip away time after time, while waiting to get a chance to take our own crack at him.

And we did, eventually, and we did kill him. I remember how jubilant and exhausted and satisfied I was after the ordeal, how happy to be done with a whole story, it felt like an arc was complete, a resolution was reached. That's what made Wrath the best expansion to date - it was about the god-damned story. That's what people remember, that's what got us engaged, and that's what the game resolved - it gave us a full-stop, at the end of the book. Close it, it's done. But of course, this is a franchise, and it needs to continue, so it did.

Cataclysm's failure I think, had more to do with following up Wrath. There was no way that they could personalize the terror of Deathwing the way the Lich King was personalized for us through the RTS games. We had (most of us, anyway) walked in his shoes, as a Paladin, then as a Death Knight. We came out the other side, and committed atrocities with him, killed Uther with him, raised Sylvanas as a Banshee from her dying breath - we did all this, and now we were back for vengeance. There was no way Deathwing could live up to that.

There is no raid in all of Cataclysm that comes close to Ice Crown Citadel in terms of emotional impact. Nothing carries the weight or gravity that the Citadel had. Even now, thinking of it, I feel nothing but melancholy as if I really did go to war there, even though I was just playing a video game. I left a piece of myself there, and I wrote a story to cement my relationship with the place.

Now, we have Pandaria, and I'm trying, so hard, to engage with the raids here as emotionally as I did the raids in Wrath - and I just can't do it. Part of it is the scope of things - it's just smaller in a lot of ways. We're raiding a tomb in Mogu'shan Vaults. That's it. Nothing noble or heroic about it, there's the thin veneer of trying to save Pandaria from the Guru'bashi as they try to get a weapon to use to regain the Thunder King but face it - we're mercenaries and treasure hunters. It does not inspire the hand-shaking awe of the Citadel.

Take then, the Heart of Fear - a lovely construction and a wonderful raid to explore and fight in, grand cathedral like rooms and lovely work all-around. But the stakes aren't there - we have only the most tenuous grasp of the Empress and while the Sha is a terrifying enemy, the engagement is recent. The ending of Jade Forest was amazing, but man, that didn't inspire me to lust after killing the Sha, especially after killing another Sha over and over again in Kun'lai.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the Hell out of these raids - some of the best fights in the game since Tier 11 and I'm super excited to kill them all. I just wish I felt for them the way I did for Arthas. Does anyone else need this kind of emotional and personal impact in the raid to really enjoy it on a visceral, sub-dermal  level? Can Blizzard put out another raid with that level of emotional impact?

I hold out hope.

The (Heroic) Lower Spire

Last night we made our way in for a couple of hour of work in the Heroic mode bosses of the lower spire. We were running one person short and a friend graciously stepped in to save our skins.

Marrowgar
3-shot. Mostly because I was trying to work out a 3-point ping-pong strategy till someone mentioned that he only targets the farthest character so we started to have our OT run out to range with 10 seconds to go on Bone Storm and then I split out to the opposite end of the room just as he cast, so he spent the whole time ping-ponging between us. 1-shot with that positioning. Easy mode.

Lady Deathwhisper
2-shot. Once we figured out that the adds needed a LOT more attention in phase 1 and to stay away from Dark Martyrdom, phase 1 cleaned up and phase 2 was just a matter of DPS switching off to kill adds while tanks tried desperately to build threat with stacks of Touch. Not too hard, and we were miles away from the enrage timer with three healers. Not as easy as Marrowgar but easy enough.

Gunship
What is this I don't even.

Deathbringer Sourfang
This is actually the first challenging fight. Our first two attempts were really sloppy and he built Blood Power way too fast. After we cleaned tank taunts and adds up, we started running into deaths right about the 3rd mark popping up. We would have the boss around 15% when the third mark went out and that'd be too much for two healers to handle, we'd loose a mark and it was essentially a wipe. The best we got him down to was around 12 - 11%.

How to fix this? Well, I have a couple of ideas. For some raeson we had melee running out to blood boil to avoid extra ticks on the AoE splash. "But wait," you say, "Blood Boil doesn't splash, only Blood Nova, and that's not a DoT!"

To you I say, "Where were you last night?!"

I don't know what I was thinking. And no one corrected me. Anyway, we'll clear that up. Also, I think we'll just have to hope RNG plays well, and we get at least one mark off on a healer so we can start chain-HoPing them (we havea a couple of paladins) sub 30% to minimize the amount of BP he gains. We had a minute and a few seconds on the enrage when we got him to 12% so I think maybe we can afford to do it with three healers?

We have some options and when I suggested a normal mode kill last night just to get on to a few easier bosses, the raid revolted.

I love my little turtles.

In other news, can ICC PLEASE stop dropping mail shit that goes to OS? PLEASE?

Le Roi Est Mort

It's good to be the King(slayer). Here's how we got there (not the actual strat, our phase 3 was still pretty messy and I want to clean it up before I post a strategy.)

With our second extension, we walked up to the Frozen Throne.

For the first time, we had a full guild run, on a fresh night with our three best healers, two tanks who knew the fight well, three ranged DPS pushing 9k on stand'n'cast fights and two melee DPS, only one of whom was here for the first time.

I was feeling good about it.

We spent 15 minutes talking about the whole fight, and then pulled. Phase 1: easy. Phase 2: just about perfect. We have a valk spawn just at transition and pick up a healer, the healer drops due to being in the AoE as the Valk slowly flew out and we started loosing people in the transition as tanks failed to pick up the adds fast enough and we hit Phase 3 down three or four folks and then exploded.

At that point, my feeling good went up to, "The cat's in the bag."

Every attempt there after was cleaner, and cleaner and we got to Phase 3 every single time. An hour in, on our fourth or fifth attempt, we wiped in Phase 2 for the first time due to a messy Defile and I called a 10 minute bio/walk/afk break, took a much needed stretch, walked about the apartment, and then when I sat down again, I broke down how to go from Phase 2 into transition - we stop at 43%, wait for the next Valk, kill it, move to the edge, and transition.

Bang. Phase 2 transition with no deaths, very clean. We pop hero, tanks grab the adds, DPS burns like crazy the phase transition goes perfectly and we hit phase 3 with only one spirit up and no deaths.

Lichy starts casting Soul Siphon on our ranged over and over which gibs us a bit on Vile Spirits but we manage. Defile dodging in Phase 3 is a piece of cake. His health plummets pretty fast - 40% gets to 30% and then sinks to 20% and suddenly Hammer of Wrath lights up before I realize it... and then inexplicably healers start to OOM.

We start loosing people in Frostmourn. Tanks start chaining CDs as he starts to soft-enrage and suddenly we loose our OT and I realize it's down to me, two healers and one DPS.

Behind LK I see our Holy Priest blossom into an angel and LK starts to cast Vile Spirits. 11%. With DP on CD, I pop wings, pop trinkets, and call for everyone to start DPSing, healers too. 11% dissolves to 10%, then painfully crawls down, 10.8%, 10.7%, 10.6%. The spirits are starting to come down and I'm out of CDs. 10.5%

Raid chat is going nuts. Vent starts going crazy.

I move him away from the spirits. 10.5%. 10.4%. My brain tells me to watch for any CDs, my finger hovers over Holy Wrath to hold off the Vile Spirits for another second when BANG. I'm dead.

0.4% to go? Really? What? How? We had ages to go on Enrage, I had AD up still, what happened? My heart sinks.

But then I realize he hasn't despawned and someone on Vent is screaming "We did it!"

I look up from a frantic scan of combat log and see him start his monologue - " No question remains unanswered. No doubts linger..."

Vent. Explodes.

After much squealing, /hi5ing and so forth, we collect loot, and with an hour and change left on our raid timer, we go do the weekly, try to pull the entire first room in Military Quarter and... because I forgot to rebuff RF after the rez, we then wipe on Naxx trash.

It's good to be brought back down to earth sometimes.

To make up for it, two days later, we decided to go in on our second raid night of the week and delivered what I had been promising the guild once we cleared through Lich King - an Algalon kill.

Half the raid had never seen him. First attempt was great but our Starkiller DC'd. Second attempt, he DC's again, I ask our lovely Elemental Shaman to switch to kill stars, but we still wipe to enrage at 5%. We swap out our DCing Boomkin from Australia for another healer, switch a healer out to shadow to kill stars, and then bang, down goes Algalon with a good 40+ seconds on the enrage.

After Lich King, the Algalon fight seems ridiculously easy.

We preened around Dalaran for a while with our second set of shiny new titles (Starcaller) and then went back in to Ulda and cleared all the way down to Yogg, doing a handful of hard modes along the way, and as it was an hour over raid time at that point, we called it after a messy swipe at Yogg with Freya down as our Keeper to guard our Sanity.

A bunch of us are one achievement away the Rusted Protdrake (One Light, wouldn't you know it)so maybe we'll knock that out one of these nights.

I'm very pleased with the way things are with the guild right now. I'd love to continue this sort of progression for the next few weeks in ICC Hard Modes and hopefully we'll see 3.3.5 on live servers in a couple weeks, and that will carry us through to Cataclysm.

My goal for the day Cataclysm drops?

Hover over the gates of Stormwind on a Bloodbathed Vanquisher with a Bane of the Fallen King title.

Almost There Is An Inch Too Far

Someone needed to leave early last night so we got about an hour and a half of work in on Arthas, and it was pretty productive.

Phase 1 is a piece of cake, the transitions are almost effortless at this point, and Phase 2 is getting a hell of a lot cleaner. Even on messy Phase 2 attempts we can pretty reliable dodge Defiles and kill the Val'kyr before they drop someone off the edge.

We finally broke through to 40% last night, got through the transition okay, with one raging spirit still up but we totally fucked up the positioning into Phase 3 and wiped after the first Vile Spirits and that was on our last attempt.

So, after the person left, we pretty much 9-man'd 7 bosses in about an hour and called it a night. Next week we'll go back in on Lich King again on Tuesday. My team is giving me a lot of latitude here, and they are hungry for a kill, so I'm glad to have them with me. No one is complaining, no one is bitching, we're all here to be supportive and do our best.

--

Warning: Sloppy emo whining ahead...

I don't know what else to say about this fight. I've wanted to kill this son of a bitch for ages. When the raid opened in December, I was RL for a guild that was trying to do so much that it didn't get ANYTHING done and I was raiding 4, 5 nights a week and was on the path to burnout and insanity trying to fit 18 people into one 10-man or run 2 10-mans with alts.

When Frost Wing opened, I went Horde side to join a guild, that was very professional, but it lack any sense of fun or camaraderie and I felt like I was just a number which is no fun for me. I lost all responsibility, but I also lost everything else that was fun about raiding.

When I came back, it was mid-March and joined up with some friends from the old guild, and we didn't get a stable raiding core together until about a month ago. And even now we regularly have people dropping out due to emergencies and issues, which is understandable, but when my two most geared healers are offline, and I'm relying on an under-geared druid playing his off-spec to pre-HoT Infests - and he is a damned good healer! - it's frustrating.

I feel like this is the third time I'm starting from scratch on my journey to killing Arthas. And now that the end of the road is in sight, I feel like I keep snatching for the ribbon that marks the end and just keep missing it with the tip of my fingers.

I'm ready. I'm eager. I just want to kill him and I think I want him dead so much, it's making me desperately hungry. I know I shouldn't be this attached to a kill for a game, but I want this very much. I want this, for myself, but more than anything, for my team, for my friends who've stood by me while I went on my Horde Adventure... I owe this to you guys.

We're almost there. The lights in the house on the mountain are on, warm and inviting, we just need to get through the last bit of snow in our way, just get over that last hill and we'll be Kingslayers, drinking mead and sitting with our feet up in that house on the mountain top and I'll buy all the rounds all night long.

The Lich King Makes Me Aware Of Something

Lich King is getting there. My team has put in some good time on him by now and I can smell blood in the water. People are eager and discussing the fight in GChat without any prompting from me and that's always a good sign.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about my gear since facing up to the King, and I think I need to reevaluate a lot of my normal tanking set and tweak it for Lich King (and eventually, hard modes) which requires a lot more survivability than I was anticipating. Part of this was also inspired by Rhidach's post on Righteous Defense, about the stats revealing from the latest Armory Data Mining efforts.

I'm going to scale back on my threat a bit and start going for a bit more armor, a bit more Stamina, and a tiny bit less mitigation.

What does that mean?

It means getting rid of all of my DefenseRating+Stam gems and replacing them with pure Stam unless I have a huge Stam socket bonus.

It means getting rid of all my Strength+Stam gems and replacing them with Agility+Stam gems for the bonus armor.

It means replacing my Armsman enchant with Stamina.

It means replacing my +10 stats with stamina.

I might also finally cave and get the Pillars of Might crafted. And I might also buy the off-set hands, even though that's going to kill my Hit Rating.

But if I do that, my threat will go in the toilet and I don't always have a rogue or a hunter to Tricks/MD me, so unless in 25s, where I can always depend on those, I think I have to stick with SOME level of threat.

I guess I've been so heavily invested in my Retribution set lately that I've sort of neglected my Protection set for a while. I've even taking to having the other Paladin Tank and a Death Knight who's also spec'd for tanking but usually goes DPS tank so I can go Ret on farm kills (which is, essentially, all content but the King). So, while doing 10k DPS as Ret is fun and all, I need to focus on my real passion and make sure my gear is as good as it can get for Lich King.

Nothing major, but these minor little things might let me stay alive an extra second through a cooldown less Soul Reaper if I absolutely need to tank him through it while the other tank is running away to drop a defile or something.

Anyway. It's interesting how harder encounter make you reevaluate your gear set that you've been comfortable in for ages. Lich King has been the most fun in raids I've had in a while. And I'm proud of my team for sticking with it without complaints or issues.

I hope to report back tomorrow with a kill shot. Wish us luck. :-)

The King, However, Is Still Alive

So, we faced up to Arthas last night.

We cleared up Phase 1 after 1 wipe and consistently got to phase 2 after that. The Transition is a bit messy, but I have some thoughts on how to clean that up. I don't want to go into too much detail about what we did since I'm just learning the fight now and once I have a strat down, I'll type it all out.

We only spent about an hour and change on him, so it wasn't nearly enough time, and I think I will extend the raid lockout into next week, though what I really want is to clear up the achievements (I think we only have 4 or 5 left to do).

But. Putting in time with the King is important and I want to maintain progression momentum. And I know we need more time on him. We just do. Once Phase 2 clears up, I'm confident we'll coast to a smooth kill in a couple of weeks, just like we did with Sindragosa.

We wiped on her for two weeks in a row before killing her this week very smoothly in three attempts, and I think the time you put in does good, you put in attempts, you learn the rhythm of the fight, you go to sleep and process it over, you think about it during the day or remember the sequence of events better or whatever, so the next time you come in you're much more ready for it.

But the issue is, when a boss is that difficult, how do you keep coming back week after week for more? How long do you beat your face on a boss before it gets tedious? How do you keep coming back and motivating and encouraging people to keep coming back?

Well, I'm trying very hard to do that.

I typically tend to be a chatterbox as my guild will tell you, but I think it helps to take a minute or two after every raid to talk over how it went (though I tend to take 5 - 10 minutes *cough*), congratulate everyone on progression, encourage them to show up, set expectations, and also, review the progression plan! I go over our plan on a regular basis, let everyone know what I want to do and discuss any questions.

I think it helps keep the guild engaged, and hopefully, they feel like a part of a team. That does a lot more for morale than all the cold-hearted efficiency you can muster, and people will show up time and time again to progress, and be loyal because you're showing your own loyalty to them.

I typed this as part of a comment in another thread on wow.com but I think it fits in here as well:

Encourage your raiders, talk to them, treat them like a team, motivate them, and engage them. Make coming to progression content a privilege and most of all, make them feel appreciated. I never get tired of saying, "Thank you for coming," and I mean it. I couldn't raid without every single person who logs in and stands next to me to raid - and I want my raiders to know that.

I'm really happy to be in the guild that I'm in, with all the people I'm in it with. They're good players, but more importantly, they're good friends.

Good luck to us all! I can't wait to down him and move on to hard modes.

The PuG Raid: ICC Through Rotface

So, as per my last post, you might imagine me being relegated to the PuG raid completely, standing alone on the steps of Tanks For Everything, with a sandwich board around my neck - "Will Tank For Emblems of Frost " - but you'd be wrong. Sort of.

My current guild is a collection of old friends that forms most of a really good group and a new PuG or two that we've met and grown fond of, who have thrown their lot in with us. However, that still leaves us short a few folks to field a team of our own, so I'm more likely standing at the Landing, begging for another DPS slot or two to be filled up.

Even with a few DPS, some of whom are occasionally new to ICC, we manage to make pretty good progress. Last night, in about two hours, we cleared through RotFace on 10s, for example, including some silly wipes that shouldn't have happened at all, and without them, we could probably have done it in about an hour and a half, which is about ideal.

So, how is this accomplished? With two healers and six DPS.

The Two Heal Raid

We have been running with an amazing holy priest and an awesome resto shaman to pull this off for ages, and with both healers being used to the fights, we can easily two-heal all the content up to Festergut and Rotface's doorstep. Six DPS also allows you to do things like easily clean up the Boned and I've Gone And Made A Mess very easily, and we always clear up Deathwhisper's first phase in about 2 add phases which is super fast.

In the Plague wing, I still see people wipe on the dogs in the Plagueworks, so here's how I do it:

Precious: One Big Gay Pile on the tanks. Yeah, melee will bitch about their DPS being curbed due to standing in front, whatever, just make one big pile so the adds all come to the same spot and your healers or DPS won't get eaten when they sprout agro, this lets you burn them down as they spawn with a ton of AoE and incidental damage will just kill the boss anyway. Tanks swap as per normal, etc.

Stinky: The opposite of the big gay pile - ranged and healers stay at maximum range, and melee run out to the ranged group just before the Devastate to avoid his AoE. Paladin tanks can pop party-wall here but shouldn't be neccessary if Melee are quick on their feet and get out of range. This way healers can get tanks up quickly, and as melee get healed, they can run back in. Tank swaps, etc, as per normal.

Festergut and Rotface: You can do these bosses with 2 healers, but 3 are just a nice security to have since the enrage meters are really not a danger for Festergut anymore with so much 251 gear in our hands, and Rotface is more about control than zerg-speed-burn anyway.

Fester is easy, so I'll just give a few tips on how I do Rotface as people are still wiping on him a lot:

• If you're injected, get to the Ooze tank. Stop what you're doing, and move. Your job now is to make sure your ooze gets to the big ooze, drop that spell, don't finish your rotation, get your ooze out there. This is even more important as the injection rate speeds up. With 3 healers, you shouldn't have an issue even dropping that big heal you've got queued up - trust the other two healers to pick up the slack.
• When Rotface starts to cast Slime Spray, get the hell out of his way. There's no reason to finish whatever you're doing, you have a 1.5 second cast to just even run through him if nothing else, so no reason to get hit and make the healers heal unnecessary damage.
• Watch the ooze chunks when the Big Ooze explodes. Don't just collapse blindly after x-seconds or whatever, let the ooze explosion chunks hit and then move into position.

Also, some general tips for kiting the Big Ooze:

• If you're tanking the Big Ooze, be aware that some AoE will build agro on the Big Ooze. You're not just beating the healers but also any stray AoE that might hit the Ooze. Watch Omen.
  
• I've tanked this fight on my bear and my paladin, here are notes from both. Both classes are equally capable of tanking and I'm sure DKs can do it just as easily with Icy Touch spam, Death Coil and Dark Command. Frost Tanks also get Howling Blast.
  
• Bear tanking: I found this to be the easiest as I could keep FFF ticking on every CD without ever stopping my run, and that build a lot of threat. Just keep running, kite smart, and Rotface will be dead before you know it.
• Paladins also have an easy time with Avenger's Shield, Hand of Reckoning, Judgment, and when you have a lot of range, Exorcism. It also helps if you take responsibility for cleansing the infected folks so healers have one less thing to do. You're running with Decursive or something similar, right? *arched eyebrow*
  
• If you need to run through ooze, make sure you're getting a snare removing buff like Hand of Freedom or something. Watch your health, and be smart about when you go in to take damage, as slime spray might also hit you.
• If you get injected, get cleansed immediately and try to hook the slime into the big ooze by stopping short, turning towards the big ooze, and then turning around again away from the big ooze so the small slime swings around you and winds up in the big ooze.

I'll talk about Dreamwalker and the Blood Princes once I get more experience running PuGs through them. Of the end-bosses, I imagine Blood Queen will be the easiest of the 3, and Putricide will be less difficult than Sindragosa.

Good luck out there, folks!