Our first night in DS was very successful as we got through the first 5 bosses in two days, and then got stalled a bit of Gunship and Spine. For that reason, I didn't do the second half of LFR as I wanted to get all the content down on normal mode rather than cheese my way to the achievements.
We've spent, maybe two and a half nights on Spine to really get it down - and not for lack of effort. It is a fun fight that requires a bit of coordination and planning and the execution is solo-play dependent and at our current gear level and DPS level, we just can't 9-man it, so anytime we lost someone without a possible Rez, we'd wipe. So many wipes on the third plate, it wasn't funny.
It was one of those fights that was dead but didn't know it, and we needed one clean pull to get it done. And we got it last night without much fanfare and wound up on the platforms for Madness.
The first pull was... Madness. I didn't know where the Corruption showed up, I didn't realize there was a facing order to it till it slammed half the raid, and then the Elementium Bolt pulsed and wiped us. It looked like a long training period was necessary... so we came back in, pulled a second time... and cleared up to the third platform where we lost to the Elementium Bolt as we weren't prepared for its speed without Nozdomu. The third pulled cleaned that up as well, and we had a very sub-par DPS with us filling in, and we were 3-healing, 2-tanking it.
To say Madness will take us less time than Spine is a given, though with next week being a Holiday week, I'm not sure we'll have any progression pulls, but soon enough. My prediction of being clear through normal modes by Christmas almost came true, and if we'd been more diligent on Spine, we'd be there now.
Anyway - point being that I enjoyed the ramp-up Dragon Soul had. The first 4 were too under-tuned but they did get more difficult as the raid went on. Zon'ozz can be difficult on 10-man if you mess up the orb bouncing and there have been instances where I've gotten myself killed by not being on top of cool-downs when the orb winds up bouncing an extra time and the damage buff stacks get very high. There are some dangerous slime combinations on Yor'sahj and Hagara is supposed to be a coordination fight, though for anyone who did Ragnaros, pre-nerf Nefarian and LK, the synergy required seems quite easy.
Ultraxion was the first road-block boss - the real DPS check, though after a couple of weeks of gear, he has become very, very easy. We lost a DPS early this week to Twilight and still cleared it under 5-minutes. To be fair, people are starting to kiss the 30k mark on that fight across the board. Gunship and Spine are both much more difficult co-ordination checks, and I enjoy tanking them a lot, especially soloing Spine. The bloods get nuts at the end of the fight, I love it.
But Madness? The ultimate boss fight?
It just much easier for some reason. And it doesn't really feel like you're fighting Deathwing at any point. I get that we can't fight him, and the feeling of being in the presence of gods is there, but I don't know. There's something missing in the feel of the fight. And with how quickly we were progressing on him, with a very conservatively setup team, it seems maybe too easy.
With our A-team, we should be able to clear the 4 platforms fairly quickly. Of course, Phase 2 could kick our ass and stall us for weeks, but I'm fairly sure I can solo-tank this and if I can do that, then we have 6 DPS to eat the adds that much faster, and honestly, there wasn't that much damage going out either, I might even suggest trying a 1/2/7 combination to see if it's viable.
Anyway. Point being - the ramp up was very nice, but it seems to have dropped off right at the end. And that feels odd. Though if you look at the Heroic raids, KIN stalled on Spine for ages, then killed Madness in one or two night.
Odd to say the least.
Showing posts with label easy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label easy. Show all posts
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Patch Day Madness
I was glad the patch dropped when it did - I think I was really bored with Firelands despite the fact that we were on Heroics. With how late we started work on that instance and how the tuning was all over the place with it, I always felt disconnected from the place. There was a lot of confusion about the raid where Blizzard seemed to mid-step change directions and nerf stuff across the board.
One of the things I'm loving lately is how stable the patch days have been. No instance server issues, no authentication server issues, really, no issues at all and you can log in and play. Even most of my add-ons were behaving fine except for a couple of LUA errors from DBM whenever I zoned into an instance. After the nightmarish patches of yesteryear, this is a sweet, sweet dream.
Remember 3.3 when you couldn't log in for two days? Or 3.4 when half the authentication servers were down? Hell, even 4.1 when Omnitron was broken and you couldn't get past him, if you could even get into the crashing instance server gateways? We used to move raid night to non-patch days because we knew we couldn't raid on Tuesday and juts hoped everything was stable by Wednesday night. Kids these days.
Anyway.
I logged in about 10 minutes before raid in typical fashion, ran around with my head cut-off for five minutes and only managed to 'mog my hideous shield and sword away for something better before clicking Accept on the Have Group Will Travel summons into Dragon Soul for the first time.
Where we proceeded to demolish the place. There is a serious tuning issue for 4.3 at least on 10-man normal modes. For better or worse, this is the easiest tier since the first wing of ICC. Even Saurfang and Deathwhisper had slightly more compelling mechanics on 10-man.
With no one having seen the bosses, no one having run the LFR, just based on the dungeon-journal, we one-shot Morchok and two-shot Yor'sahj, and I was DC'd for about a minute on that fight so my co-tank had huge stacks of Void Bolts but apparently our healers had no problem with it.
Zon'ozz took a little longer, but he died as well once we figured out a very easy way to handle the bouncing mechanic by lining up and turning it into a fool-proof ping-pong game while I jumped back and forth pointing him this way and that. He was the first boss that felt like a real raid boss with scary damage and positioning and an enrage timer that was somewhat of an issue (30 seconds left on enrage when he died, so not really but still).
We made one pull of Hagara before raid time to give our Rogue a chance to pickpocket her and got to work on her ice phase a bit, so we'll go back in and kill her tonight, hopefully and then the one fight that actually seems scary outside of Deathwing - Ultraxion. I'd love to get through both of those tonight as loot-ship looks as easy as the ICC loot-ship and that just leaves Deathwing to kill (twice.)
It could be that the first four are easy and the next four are really hard, or scale up slightly in difficulty as you went further in. Morchok was lolwut, Yor'sahj was an AoE heal, minor DPS check and a are-you-really-here check in terms of picking which add to kill each time, and Zon'ozz was a mild DPS check (he has a tight enrage timer at 5.5 minute/68 million health) and awareness check with more AoE healing. Did I mention there's a lot of raid damage? There's a lot of raid damage. And a bit of bursty tank damage too.
The one nice thing about these fights is that while the tanking isn't particularly difficult so far (I did enjoy solo-tanking Zon'ozz and looks like solo-tanking Hagara will actually require a bit of focus as well), there is a lot of ancillary stuff tanks can do to make the raid run easier. Tanking crystals with two DPS when you're not on Morchok for instance, or helping put out damage on the oozes, raid-walling with efficiency to chain cool-downs with the healers.... there is more stuff to do than just standing there and being a meat-shield.
I was lucky enough to pick up the off-set shoulders and tier legs last night, which was awesome. The weird thing is, despite loosing Mastery on both those items, without even reforging, and going for the set bonus, I was still at block-cap with Mastery food (though I am using two Mastery trinkets.)
Callooh!Callay!
I know in a month I'll be moaning about how boring normal modes are, but right now, man it was satisfying to smash through the instance and kill bosses so quickly and efficiently. Maybe we'll even be in Heroics this time next month. This was something I had known for some time - once we have a regular team of geared people who've been working together and gelled, we have zero problems in terms of progression. We can get this done. And we did.
A rather amusing side-affect of raiding so early in the week after patch is the following image:
It is, of course, an anomaly and a lie, but it is kind of nice to be listed as server first and word top 200, even if only for a day or two. We have a US top-100 guild on our server that killed Heroic Ragnaros back in early October, I think, so we're nowhere near the top, and I'm sure we'll get down-ranked very rapidly as other guilds get ranked (as is appropriate) but still.
Sometimes it's nice to lie to oneself for a minute and take a screenshot! :-)
Tonight: more raiding, hopefully knocking out the two dungeons I haven't done yet, and then mogging up my set, moving stuff into void-bank... so much to do! And so much more to write about!
One of the things I'm loving lately is how stable the patch days have been. No instance server issues, no authentication server issues, really, no issues at all and you can log in and play. Even most of my add-ons were behaving fine except for a couple of LUA errors from DBM whenever I zoned into an instance. After the nightmarish patches of yesteryear, this is a sweet, sweet dream.
Remember 3.3 when you couldn't log in for two days? Or 3.4 when half the authentication servers were down? Hell, even 4.1 when Omnitron was broken and you couldn't get past him, if you could even get into the crashing instance server gateways? We used to move raid night to non-patch days because we knew we couldn't raid on Tuesday and juts hoped everything was stable by Wednesday night. Kids these days.
Anyway.
I logged in about 10 minutes before raid in typical fashion, ran around with my head cut-off for five minutes and only managed to 'mog my hideous shield and sword away for something better before clicking Accept on the Have Group Will Travel summons into Dragon Soul for the first time.
Where we proceeded to demolish the place. There is a serious tuning issue for 4.3 at least on 10-man normal modes. For better or worse, this is the easiest tier since the first wing of ICC. Even Saurfang and Deathwhisper had slightly more compelling mechanics on 10-man.
With no one having seen the bosses, no one having run the LFR, just based on the dungeon-journal, we one-shot Morchok and two-shot Yor'sahj, and I was DC'd for about a minute on that fight so my co-tank had huge stacks of Void Bolts but apparently our healers had no problem with it.
Zon'ozz took a little longer, but he died as well once we figured out a very easy way to handle the bouncing mechanic by lining up and turning it into a fool-proof ping-pong game while I jumped back and forth pointing him this way and that. He was the first boss that felt like a real raid boss with scary damage and positioning and an enrage timer that was somewhat of an issue (30 seconds left on enrage when he died, so not really but still).
We made one pull of Hagara before raid time to give our Rogue a chance to pickpocket her and got to work on her ice phase a bit, so we'll go back in and kill her tonight, hopefully and then the one fight that actually seems scary outside of Deathwing - Ultraxion. I'd love to get through both of those tonight as loot-ship looks as easy as the ICC loot-ship and that just leaves Deathwing to kill (twice.)
It could be that the first four are easy and the next four are really hard, or scale up slightly in difficulty as you went further in. Morchok was lolwut, Yor'sahj was an AoE heal, minor DPS check and a are-you-really-here check in terms of picking which add to kill each time, and Zon'ozz was a mild DPS check (he has a tight enrage timer at 5.5 minute/68 million health) and awareness check with more AoE healing. Did I mention there's a lot of raid damage? There's a lot of raid damage. And a bit of bursty tank damage too.
The one nice thing about these fights is that while the tanking isn't particularly difficult so far (I did enjoy solo-tanking Zon'ozz and looks like solo-tanking Hagara will actually require a bit of focus as well), there is a lot of ancillary stuff tanks can do to make the raid run easier. Tanking crystals with two DPS when you're not on Morchok for instance, or helping put out damage on the oozes, raid-walling with efficiency to chain cool-downs with the healers.... there is more stuff to do than just standing there and being a meat-shield.
I was lucky enough to pick up the off-set shoulders and tier legs last night, which was awesome. The weird thing is, despite loosing Mastery on both those items, without even reforging, and going for the set bonus, I was still at block-cap with Mastery food (though I am using two Mastery trinkets.)
Callooh!Callay!
I know in a month I'll be moaning about how boring normal modes are, but right now, man it was satisfying to smash through the instance and kill bosses so quickly and efficiently. Maybe we'll even be in Heroics this time next month. This was something I had known for some time - once we have a regular team of geared people who've been working together and gelled, we have zero problems in terms of progression. We can get this done. And we did.
A rather amusing side-affect of raiding so early in the week after patch is the following image:
It is, of course, an anomaly and a lie, but it is kind of nice to be listed as server first and word top 200, even if only for a day or two. We have a US top-100 guild on our server that killed Heroic Ragnaros back in early October, I think, so we're nowhere near the top, and I'm sure we'll get down-ranked very rapidly as other guilds get ranked (as is appropriate) but still.
Sometimes it's nice to lie to oneself for a minute and take a screenshot! :-)
Tonight: more raiding, hopefully knocking out the two dungeons I haven't done yet, and then mogging up my set, moving stuff into void-bank... so much to do! And so much more to write about!
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