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.

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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 Queen Is Dead

Tuesday night, it all came together.

The funny thing was, we had 2 PuGs last week that we replaced with guildies this week, and I said to myself, I said, "Joachim, we're going to spend some time catching these folks up to Phase 3, so be ready for a few wipes."

"But Joachim," I said to myself, I said, "I don't understand, we just spent a while learning the fight, I don't have the patience to sit through two hours of wipes again!"

But of course, you do what you have to do, so I girded my loins, took a breath, skipped Plague and Blood wing entirely, and dove right into the Frost wing. We approached Dreamwalker with our usual swagger and realized that we'd done her on 9-man before, so we could easily get Portal Jockey, and I volunteered to catch the 3rd portal (we typically have 3 healers, 2 taking every portal, our magnificent Guild Leader heals the raid on her Holy Priest, while we use one tank to tank everything, 1 DPS on the Suppressors and everyone else eats everything else).

Since we could obviously afford 1 extra DPS doing nothing I decided to take the portal. Of course, I never realized the portals move around so when the 2nd set of portals spawned on the other side of the room, I missed them while killing a Blazing Skeleton and there went the achievement. Oh, well. Next week.

After the Elevator Boss and Spider Room of WTF we came up to Sindi, and pulled. First two attempts were cluster fucks. People spreading tombs everywhere in the air phase, people not LoSing the Frost Bombs and I hit that vent button, like I meant it, and I said, "I don't know what the hell is going on. And I don't care. Now shape up, or ELSE!"

Else what? I dunno. But the threat worked. And the next attempt we get to phase 3 with no deaths or anything. So I go, FINALLY! And get ready to start calling out names for people to move and do what they need to do but.... after about two tomb runs I realize I don't need to because everyone, including the 2 folks who've never seen this phase, and doing everything right!

People move out, ranged switches over to explode one, then clip their debuff on the other, people give each other room, when we get a double tomb at one point, nobody panics and they clean up both of them. At about a minute to go, while I'm LoSing, we loose the tank but somehow I was still 2nd on the meter so she rushes up the stairs at me, I pull her into place away from the raid, raid gets to her side, I realize her health is down to 1% and two more seconds later, she's keeling over, and the raid is spamming achievements.

It was a good night. We went and cleared through a few more bosses before calling it a night. Tonight, we kill Putricide, and then the blood wing, before going in to work on the Lich King.

I am fucking excited. And really proud of my boys and girls. Way to go, my turtles. Way to go.

The Sindragosa Blues (again)

Sorry I've been away. Was on vacation and then work ate my life.

Anyway. Now that we have a (relatively) stable group, we've been working on Sindy for two weeks now, last night was our first serious series of attempts and we got her to ~10% on our best try.

Previously, Icy Grip was the bane of our raids, people would die and I'd gnash my teeth but after much thought, I changed our positioning to hold Sindy horizontal to the stairs and have people just DPS and heal from the stairs things worked out very well. It gave people a very specific point to run towards (up the stairs) and dropping blocks on the stairs makes Ice Bomb dodging trivial.

So, ever since the first attempt last night, I saw that Phase 1 and 2 are down rock solid, we barely ever lost a person to Icy Grip, and we got her into Phase 3 right after her 3rd air phase with 3 full time healers.

But people seem to panic on phase 3.

We manage to hold it together for about 2 or 3 blocks, I assigned 2 melee burn 'em down, people clipped their debuffs, tank swaps happened whenever the other tank's debuff dropped, and then either an Icy Grip or a misplaced block would disrupt the process and then we'd fall behind and never catch up to switching to the boss because blocks start coming too soon and then, we hit enrage with anywhere from 15% - 20% left to go.

Our best attempt got her to 14% or so, I think, which was still a solid million and a half hit points.

I think our current strat will work, we just need to spend a little bit more time on her and focus our energy.

On a side-note, I'm especially pleased with the guild's membership right now. Lots of friends, both old and new, and only one or two trouble spots that I think will settle down soon. It's good to be in such company in pre-Cata days.

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!

Inbetween Guilds

So I'm kind of in-between guilds right now.

A long, long time ago (until June of last year) I was in mostly RP/casual raiding guilds. They were fun and happy affairs where logging in was enough of a reason to celebrate, friends would regale you with greetings, smiley faces were thrown about hither and yon, every fucking achievement was reason to throw a parade and clearing Naxx was reason enough to pat people's backs.

Then I joined a 25-man raiding guild. And was abused and beaten and cried and cut myself and all that emo stuff, but eventually I got better and did awesome, and led raids, and tanked with my fucking face. Well, not really, I was a paladin, and tanked with my fucking shield.

That guild transitioned from a 25-man group into a 10-man group with 25s in an alliance and that went south because we didn't get along with an officer in the other guild, drama drama drama, and the guild split. We went back to doing 10s, I tried being nice and running two balanced groups of 10s and that was about as successful as you might imagine. After putting in 12 hours into Ice Crown and barely squeaking by Rotface, I punched myself in the testicles, RAGEQUIT, switched factions, and joining a dedicated 10s group that was doing awesome progression.

Long story short, that didn't work out, I transfered back, a few old friends from my 10s group all piled into a small guild to raid together aaaaaaaaand here we sit. In the In Between State.

This is the zone of the PuG raid.

This is the zone of meeting people, making friends, socializing, realizing how diverse your server population is. This is the zone of, "I'm undergeared and I've never seen this fight and I want to learn and I'm really earnest and polite and kind but my DPS kind of blows screaming chunks of shit at the moon and you will take me anyway because what choice do you have?"

And... and... oh god, I want it to end. I want a dedicated group of raiders who are in my guild and know the fights and have the gear and I want to kill Arthas already.

Please, please, help me. I don't want to PuG really nice people who stand in fire until my Nourish button breaks. I don't want to see my tank DPS be number three on recount and wipe on enrages. Please rescue me from this zone.

I don't want to be an InBetweener. TAKE ME WITH YOU!

Raiding Less (and why that's better)

I was standing in Dalaran staring into the fountain newly decorated with garish gold statues and thinking deep thoughts as usual about what an egotistical bastard Tirion was for erecting a statue of himself in the middle of the city when I saw an old friend wander by.

We said hello, and began to talk, mostly about raiding as that's what everyone seem to be into lately, and as we wandered northward, I invited her to come along with my raids as we often have gaps in ranged DPS and she is a good warlock.

We stopped to peer into the most displaced well in the midst of a busy boulevard, "As long as you run at a normal pace."

I blinked, "Normal pace?"

"Oh, you know," she sighed, leaning against the bricks, as mammoths, unicorns, bears, kodos and other horrible things went whizzing by, "I was running with this other big guild on the server and they just kept pulling the whole time with nary a pause. Kind of stressful."

"Huh," I said, swallowing the compulsion to push her into the well just to hear her yelp, because I'm really ten years old, "Well, I set a reasonable stride. I think."

She shrugged, and then we waved farewell, she went on to the bank in the north and I wandered into the smithy, to hem and haw at various tier pieces, and began to think about the pace of my runs.

See, when I run a raid, people laugh a little because I tend to cover things very, very quickly over vent and end with a brisk, "Gogo!" even as I toss a shield into a mob pack or charge a boss' face.

I know it's funny, but I'm really doing it to make a point. Trash should take minimal time. Once you're through a dungeon more than twice, you should know what the pulls are, you should know know how many packs to pull, the patrol patterns, all of that jazz. The tanks should be pulling continuously unless the healers ask for a slowdown. Dead folks should get raised as the pulls happen, and rebuffs aren't important.

I first learned that you can run as quickly as this whilst studying this video by Kyth of StratFu fame (BTW, I think I have a small crush on Kyth) but have adopted it to most of my dungeoneering, whether 5-mans or raids.

When I walk into a 5-man, my gear level is at a place where I feel comfortable saying, "I'm just going to chain-pull the dungeon, please tell me to slow down if you need room." And then 10-15 minutes later, almost every dungeon in the game is done.

And I for one think this is great.

Another major killer is downtime for AFKs - having set points are great for this. As Blizzard has really adopted the wing structure for raids this expansion, I usually don't take a break in the middle of a wing. If we're flying along, I'll take a break every other wing. Or whatever. It's a lot more structured that way and people feel accomplished and ready to take on the new wing when they get back.

Of course, learning a boss is different, I'm mostly talking about farm content here. Once you know a dungeon, you as a raid leader should give your tanks permission to pull aggressively and tanks should pull aggressively, and healers should coordinate to make sure raid heals are covered at all times - there is no need to pause between packs of mobs if your DPS and healers are keeping up with you without a problem. Chain-pull, get to the bosses, don't linger over the "is everyone ready?" and just get shit down.

I typically throw up a /readycheck when we reach a boss and as soon as the last person checks off, I'll shout out any last minute instructions, "I'll take left side, Issacc take right side, melee clear all adds before switching to boss, on phase transition wait for her to be moved off the platform before ripping your CDs, ranged open up, GoGo!" And if ranged doesn't open up, I'll just throw a shield and get it started. My raids have NO ROOM for dillydallying.

Pull hard, pull fast, pull clean, don't wipe, and someone tell Tirion he's an egotistical bastard for sitting frozen in an iceblock all fight long and then taking credit at the end for everything.

Sick bastard.

Sindragosa

The once noble prime-consort of the Blue Dragonflight, Sindragosa was killed by Neltharion and left to die in the glaciers of Icecrown. Full of hatred for everyone that let her die, Sindragosa's bones lay buried for thousands of years until she was raised by the Lich King as the ultimate Frost Wyrm.

You might have seen her trying to aggro you through the log-in screen for the last fifteen months or so. She also tried to murder you in the Pit of Saron before Jaina or Tyrande yanked you to safety. Now, finally, in Icecrown Citadel we have a chance to strike back at her for all the endless cycles of flap-flap-roar as we waited for the crawling queue numbers to tick down to zero.

After possibly the most annoying trash in the entire raid (I actually liked most of the trash in ICC until I encountered this colossal waste of time and mana), the murder of some frost-wyrm hatchlings (which - explain to me the point of baby dragon skeletons? They're dead so it's not like they're going to grow up to be eviler or anything... I mean, they're cute and all, but still. WTF?) and two mini-boss dragons - one of whom is Rhimefang of Pit fame and another dragon with a name but if she's a named mob from somewhere I'm forgetting it - you finally get to pull the boss... oh, no, wait, she'll actually agro as soon as the second dragon dies. Nevermind.

Also, holy run on sentence, batman.

Pro-tip: Pull the second dragon to the stairs so the raid has time to adjust positioning and the tank doing the pull can get into place without a freakout-scramble-clusterfuck.

Thankfully after that first pull (and wipe) she'll fly up above the platform, patiently waiting for you to descent onto the platform below the stairs.

Anyway. We put in about 2 hours and change on her last night, including a ten minute break where I ran and grabbed my Frost-resist set, realized I hadn't touched it since Hodir, and re-gem'd with Dragoneye's and Epic gems on the spot. Our DPS is generally pretty fucking awesome, and they were epic as always last night, but we still kept running into multiple sub-5% enrage-wipes.

The primary culprit was the 3rd phase unleashed magic mechanic and the tanks (the raid lead, Alex is the main tank, and the bum who's writing this blog, me, helps out) were swapping every time a tomb came down. At the end, we were trying to clean-up even the smallest clip on the DoT pulse to try to get the tombs down faster - trust me, when you wipe at 440k with the entire raid alive due to hitting the enrage, you'll gnash your teeth, fist-pound your keyboard and bemoan getting clipped by the DoT just before you stepped around the tomb.

Anyway, the raid timer ticked down, we were a half hour over the time we normally run so the raid was called and I had a severe case of the blue balls.

She's going down next week. But I still look like I have blueberries danging from my scrotum.