Various and Sundry

Bah-humbug.

Deathwing, after six-odd weeks of kills, has dropped two rogue axes, not once, not twice, but multiple times.  In addition to the agility polearm and the bow for a raid with no main-spec ferals or any hunters, Deathwing can go DIAF. I'm tired of disenchanting the same goddamned things while pining for a Souldrinker and the rest of the raid is still using crappy 397 gear week after week.

In fact, the loot-tables have been just miserable. I don't think we've seen more than one or two healer trinkets drop and other than Resolve of the Undying (which drops every week like clockwork) we have seen no Tanking trinkets. I could also complain about the fact that this week we saw 4/5 tier token drop for the Hunter/Warrior/Shaman set which we have none of, but that would be just the icing on the cake.

Bah. Normal mode Dragon Soul has gotten super-boring at this point, as we're mostly finished with all of the achievements as well, except for the Gunship and Madness ones. At least we started working on Heroic bosses finally, which has been incredibly gratifying. We're also nearly finished with the Firelands meta achievement, which I'm eager to put behind us, and we're maybe three weeks from finishing the legendary. And then I never have to do Firelands again!


You know what would actually be kind of fun? Going back to T11 and doing the hard Heroics there. These Heroics are still a hold-over of the super-hard T11 tuning and they didn't really nerf this content so I'm kind of hungry to go see it. Heroic Yor'sahj kicked our ass for a while this week though, so working on the current tier isn't a bad thing either, for me.

Other than that, and some mid-level Arena, and occasionally playing my Death Knight, I really haven't had a whole lot to do in game. I wound up almost emptying my bank last night to buy a relatively cheap Deathcharger (60k) and immediately liquidated some assets on the AH overnight to get back up to 35k, so maybe I'll play the AH for a few weeks.

Mostly, I'm working on some off-line writing and programming projects, and I'm excited for MoP to start so we can leave Cataclysm behind for good. I did pay for the year-long subscription, but I likely won't be logging into Beta as I hate spoiling myself, or having to do all that work twice on the same character. I might log in to test the class changes and talent tree stuff and so forth, but I won't do any leveling or dig into the new zones at all.

As far as when to expect the game, my crystal-ball gazing has revealed the following to me:

Alpha: This month
Beta: Mid-April
Release: Mid-August

Unless I'm very wrong and my Insider Source(tm) has been misinformed.

And finally, have you guys seen the new Paladin tree? It's pretty interesting and I want to chew it over and write a full post about it. And for those of you freaking out about Ardent Defender missing from the talents, it has been made a base-line ability under protection. Relax.

Why am I logging in again?

I've been having a "blah" few weeks in WoW that are leading up to severe boredom.

Our progression has stalled to a point where it's just log in on autopilot wipe on heroics for a while, then switch to normal and sleepwalk through kills. I don't mind it so much, it's just not very much of an incentive to log in and be excited to raid. It kind of doesn't matter how well I play, or how well 90% of the raid plays, if one or two people aren't pulling their weight, the raid fails.

I could use one more upgrade from normal modes, but otherwise, I could more or less walk into Dragon Soul with what I have on now and probably clear through most of that content without feeling undergeared.

I've been trying to play alts more, and getting to DPS on my warlock or playing my DK is quite entertaining, and I kind of want to focus on one of them a bit more, but I can't, really. I need to be on my Paladin for Raids since we're pretty low/short on tanks. And my DK is horde side on another server anyway.

Honestly, the only really fun stuff I'm enjoying in game right now are the PvP nights on my Warlock. I'm slowly, slowly, slowly getting better, I think. Our 3's team hit 1400 ranking after only two weeks of play. But we only do the 8 or 9 wins we need to cap out Conquest so it's not even like it's a long-term thing. It's just about two hours of fun and then it's done till the next week. Our Warlock/Priest/Rogue combo is pretty great... when we remember to save the healer from melee cleaves but otherwise we do pretty well for a team that's still finding its feet. I think with how geared we're getting we'll do very well in the next season as we zone in the first week in full Ruthless gear.

And I kind-of have fun on my Horde DK lately, as I've geared her up through at least T11, when I can find some PuGs for her but her server seems to be a bit slow in terms of PuGing content and I can't always find stuff to do so I just wind up running dungeons and being bored there too. I would actually love to DPS on her but searching for slots for DK DPS is pretty goddamned fruitless - still, Blood tanking is different enough from Paladin tanking to be entertaining.

But anyway. Again. What's the point? Working on my 'lock or DK would involve raiding with another group and I just don't have the time for it. I want the commitment I have to my raid group to pay off.

So it all leads up to, what's it all for? I don't know. When progression on my main stalls for me, everything goes out the window - all motivation to log in and raid just evaporates and I just roll my eyes when we swap to normal mode and kind of tune out, more or less. We've been killing normal modes for months now. It's literally like running a heroic at this point, down to one-shotting Rag last week with a death in phase two.

There are different reasons people play this game, and when I hear about how many other groups can't do Firelands or whatever, it doesn't matter - I'm never comparing myself to those behind me or ahead of me, I'm just comparing myself to the expectations I have set for myself.

I think that any decent raid group should get through more than 50% of the content provided to it. Normal modes are the first 50% of content in any tier, that's more or less how Blizzard has setup the raiding game. If you can't get through a majority of hard modes pre-patch, then that's content you're missing out on.

That's what I want to do. I don't want to go back and get kills after I've geared up in Dragon Soul, I want to kill these fuckers now when it's still relevant. When I'm not working towards that, I'm tapping my feet wondering why I'm logging in instead of working on another project.

Paladin Tank Stats in Normal Firelands Gear

I recently hit the threshold of achieving an iLevel of 378 worn gear in my tank-set which makes me pretty happy as it more or less insulates me from Firelands drops. There are a couple of items I would love to swap in and out of course - the Mastery trinket I'm using isn't perfect, and my helm isn't ideal, but with a 4-set bonus and full block-cap with raid buffs, I think I'm pretty pleased with where my stats put me.

Here is my in-game character sheet with self-buffs, no flask or elixirs, but with mastery food:

This essentially gives me a mitigation rating of 101.23% - which is very close to 102.4% to achieve full block-cap. If I wanted to get to block-cap purely on my own buffs, I could probably use a Mastery Elixir and swap out some of the gems I'm using.  Keep in mind, this is without things like Horn of Winter and the Dodge proc from the Windwalk weapon-enchant, which push the Parry and Dodge numbers higher, so in-combat, I'm typically at or over the block-cap.

I'm enchanted as per normal, nothing special there, and I'm gemming to get my bonuses using Mastery + Stamina gems in blue slots, instead of full Mastery gems, to pick up a bit of Stamina as I was getting a little low compared to my Death Knight co-tank. What is interesting is that I'm using a Mastery trinket and a Dodge trinket with some of the Dodge forged into Mastery, just to balance mitigation stats a bit. My Epic Jewelcrafter gems are Mastery and my ring Enchants are Stamina instead of Strength (for Parry). I'm not using pure-Stamina gems yet, and I'm not using a Stamina trinket either.

Now keep in mind - this is purely in normal Firelands gear. Once I start picking up some Heroic gear, that block-cap will be over the magic number, and I will start swapping Mastery for Dodge and Parry further reducing the incoming damage.

I've long since given up my dreams of being hit-capped as a tank even though I still hate missing, so the Dodge/Parry sum will start to climb and the Block chance will draw down. I don't know where the pure-mitigation cap will be - maybe 35%? More than 40% with 4.3 heroic gear?

That's just silly at some point, where nearly half the incoming swings will be missed, dodged or parried. Tank damage at this point will drop and that's one of the reasons we've seen things like Chill of the Throne and Sunwell Radiance in the past to reduce tank mitigation in the last tier of raids.

And that was without the benefit of Mastery, which has gotten, frankly, just too good for Paladins. Are we going to see anything like that in the Demon Soul raid? Who can say.

I'm sure part of this is the fact that I've just gotten lucky with drops, and I'm sure the folks who've been farming heroics for a while now have a lot better gear and their stats look a lot better - but point is, even in just normal Firelands gear which is easily accessible at this point to any semi-serious raid group, paladin tank stats are kind of freaking crazy right now.

Now what?

The nerf lists finally made an appearance today and man, they're taking the entire tier out at the knees. It's tremendously disappointing to me that we didn't clear Ragnaros, though things weren't helped by all the other crap that hit us in the meantime.

We lost our third healer two weeks ago and haven't had a third healer in that time other than our top DPS respecing to fill the slot really, really, really set us back. The last two weeks let us barely squeak past Domo on the second night let alone get 6-kill nights like I was expecting to after we cleared through Domo the first time and realized how simple things should be getting. Our third healer situation got so bad we wound up 2-healing Alysrazor just to make it go faster and it actually worked out just fine.

Though starting tonight I imagine it really won't be necessary to three-heal anything but maybe Baleroc, Beth'tilac and Domo. Or maybe we'll just do everything with three so that the night has that much allowance for mistakes...

I'll be frank, this has really taken the wind out of my sails. Even two weeks ago, I was dedicated to achievements, kills and getting a few hard-modes down before 4.3 but now it all feels worthless and pointless and I'm spending less and less time logging in or playing other games instead.

It's not even a hardcore/casuals thing honestly, it's a disappointment in myself and not achieving the goal I set out for myself a few weeks ago. A lot of my guildies seem to see this as me being upset with them, or with their performance, or me being critical of them, or of our server ranking, or whatever else, but it has nothing to do with any of that.

I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to achieve what I wanted to in the game, and now I'm looking at months of farming nerfed content with Heroic Ragnaros being the exception, and he's the other end of the pendulum in terms of difficulty - the Heroic Lich King of this tier that guilds will throw themselves at for months just to squeeze out that one kill.

A lot will depend on the raid tonight - if it feels like T11 and is just a faceroll as I'm expecting, then we'd better at least get Rag down, so I can, with my tail between my legs, go into Heroics next week and never look back.


But right now, I don't know. I don't know. Raiding is why I play this game. If I don't enjoy the one raid left to me, why am I logging in?

4.2 Nerf and the bitter taste of failure

When the nerf hits next week, it will be the first time in a long time that we will have missed the end-boss of a raid pre-nerf. And it's killing me.

I've always taken pride in killing bosses in their normal incarnation and we've only had a little bit of time on Ragnaros this time around, we had a slow, slow start, it took a while for a raid-team to fall into place, and we're dancing around a million issues with the roster but I was confident we would get through it.

And then this news comes along and it's just crushing my motivation. Unless I push for an extension this week and just spend two nights straight on Rag with maybe a third night added for progression, I think we're going to miss killing this guy pre-nerf.

My pride is tied up into it, and I won't deny it, but that doesn't make the experience any less frustrating. We've always raided on the lower end of serious progression, but I've never let that check my ambition. When I play the game, I want to play it with some level of competitive end in mind - not competing against other people, but against our own expectations of what we can achieve.

A lot of folks in my own guild seem less disturbed by this than I am, and I guess that's good - I'm sure I'll get over it myself, but right now, it smacks of failure.

Ragnaros: Night 1

Phew. Ragnaros reminds me a lot of Lich King - very tightly tuned mechanics, very high individual raid performance requirements and a very fun fight.

Trash:
The first Lava dude puts slabs of lava cutting off travel over the platform  every so often - we just kind of hopped around and it wasn't too onerous, but I saw that on the first cast, we were stacked and it forced him to put one right under his own feet and since he has a cast, if we backed up or moved up, we should be okay. Not bad at all.

Killing two Magmaws so easily is a bit sad. They put fire under your feet, dodge it. When they submerge and re-emerge, make sure tanks are in place to pick them up. Focus one down then the other. Doesn't matter which one you do first. Or it didn't for us.

Phase 1:
We actually cleared all the way through the first phase into the first transition on our very first pull! Of course, I'm pretty sure that was exclusively on the shoulders of the healers who got us through a ton of mistakes. But we quickly spent the next hour cleaning up Phase 1 so it has become a non-issue at this point - it's a very simple phase as long as a few things happen exactly the same every time:

• Everyone has to be the right distance from each other and they need to make sure they're not getting knocked into lava from the knock back
• The person who's triggering the traps (our awesome mage took every trap) needs to give the healers a heads-up and watch the timers to make sure two AoE's don't go off at once
• Everyone needs to dodge the lava waves from the hammer (especialyl if there's a knock-back coming right afterward - tanks and melee need to be smart about how they're dodging the lava here)
• The melee WAIT for the tanks to be in melee range before getting into melee - especially on the pull and after the knockback. Our feral kitty and rogue were dashing in over and over and getting hit for 150k until we figured out they were just getting to the boss faster than the tanks after knock-backs. Just have them wait 2 secs

That sounds like a lot but it's really not. It's very rhythmic and organic once you get into it.

Phase 2 and 3:
We didn't get too much time in this, but with so many abilities gone from this phase, it should be significantly easier (no knock-back, no traps). The Seed seem to be like the Defile/Valkyr mechanic - run out/group up/run out - but I think we should be okay, as long as we can dodge the flames on the ground. It feels kind of like a Heigan dance. While being chased by living bombs. And getting 30% of Rag's health down. But I'm not too worried about it. Yet.

Phase 3 replaces the seeds with Meteor tanking - which I don't know how complicated it is. We should be able to push him over before we get more than 3 hopefully as the more meteors we get the lower our DPS will be on Ragnaros. Our DPS has been pretty high lately, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed - our basic strat on LK was that if we got to phase 3 and all the adds from transition were dead, we could basically just kind of bum-rush him the rest of the way. Blunt, but it worked. I'm hoping the same sort of thing (or something similar) works here.

Transition Phase:
This is the hard part of this fight.

The first transition and second transition are the same except for the second transition having 2 extra adds that complicate things significantly. 8 adds spawn around the platform and rush towards a randomly placed Sulfuras and if they hit the hammer, it's a wipe. You need the 5 DPS and 2 tanks to split up and handle the adds, stun, slow and kill them before that happens. But the nature of the thing is that it's very random and the placement of the Hammer gives you about 5 seconds to figure out where everyone is going and what to do, communicate that, and get into position at the same time. So it took us probably ten attempts in the transition phase to put something together that looking like it was starting to work.

We had to be very explicit about where the melee were going and where the ranged were going with relation to the hammer - the melee and tanks would always take the 4 closest with specific people assigned left to right and the ranged would be on the rest. It worked a couple of times, but we were still having the odd add slipping through. I really want to nail this to the floor and put a rug on it before we get to the second transition phase because we need this phase to be like clockwork before we handle the two extra adds in that phase.

I was talking to Thistle afterward  and she said she wished we could just replay the fight to get an idea of what's going wrong in the transition and I so wish you could do something like that. Starcraft lets you watch a whole match but there it's just a series of action that have to be duplicated, the amount of data in a 4 minute long raid encounter can be significant. Maybe I should try FRAPsing a raid...

It was a fun night learning this fight and I wish we had one more night to go back to him with, but we'll get there again next week, and we'll have another handful of items upgraded which should help numbers across the board. Every week we come back it will get easier, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm not ready to push lock-outs yet - maybe in a couple of weeks, but not yet. The way I do lock-outs is that I will push a lock-out on the first night, and if we can't kill him, we just go back the second night, drop the lock and do the other bosses - this lets us have the best of both worlds. If we kill him - yay! If not, we can still get our gear without risking getting stuck on an old boss for whatever reason and not getting to him on the second night.

Anyway. It's fun to have a really tough boss to sit on for a couple of nights. I'm already hungry for next week. Rawr.

Too Soon, Majordomo?

Just an update on where I am raid wise. I keep trying to make time to write up some productive things but this last month has been crazy with Earthquakes and Hurricanes hitting New York City. What is going on? Anyway. I hope the coming months are more quiet.

We've had some really awesome raids over the last three weeks - consistent people, who're actually getting geared and learning fights - it's kind of crazy. And full guild groups too. Of course, it wasn't meant to last, and this is the last week for one of our three core healers for a little while as he goes off to college to settle in, and we'll miss him, but it's an awesome time in his life and I hope he makes the best of it.

That does leave me a bit in the hole, and I'm hoping to find someone within the guild to swap characters or step in to heal for a little while until our AFK Healer makes it back. That's an odd recruitment call to make, isn't it?

LF 1 Healer (preferable Paladin) in T11+ gear for progression raiding, 2 weeks only. PST.

Er. Not so much.

This week was our most solid performance yet, clearing all farm content and Baradin Hold in a little over two hours on Tuesday. Shannox is almost on auto-pilot at this point, and Beth'tilac is getting easier and easier - this time she accidentally snagged a few spiderlings and healed up but we were still able to get her down with only a bit of a hiccup. After that we went on to solo-tank Baleroc successfully for the second week in a row, and then cleared up Rhyolith to leave Alysrazor and Majordomo for Wednesday.

The loot tables were stacked in my favor and I was able to snag both Beth'tilac's Mandible and the Shard of Torment (tanking with a DK has its perks!) That leaves me with only the head and shoulders to upgrade. Last night, after Alysrazor went down after a few very good pulls, I hit Revered with the Avengers and snagged both the Mastery/Strength and Dodge trinkets for some awesome CTC action.

I've been at 102.4% for some time now, so now it's just a matter of balancing mitigation for total avoidance rather than blocking. CTC is awesome on Rhyolith where I single-tank the adds and barely take any damage (though my shield tends to break or turn red each time even if I repair right before the pull.)

In addition to Alysrazor, we also pounded Majordomo into the ground after just four pulls, after cleaning up orb tanking (wipe 1), healer placement (wipe 2) and seed management (wipe 3.) I love when we can be super coordinated like this and just knock stuff out of the park - this is what I mean by having a good group that shows up for a few weeks in a row. We could've been here a month ago if we'd had this team then. But I don't mind - we're here now. Tonight, we'll face up to Ragnaros and say hello. I imagine it might take a couple of nights for him to plunge back into his lava pool but we'll get there just as we got here.

And afterward? I'm not sure I really want to push us into hard-modes too much after we clear up Mr. Ragnaros. I think a good project to do next might be Heroic Shannox since he seems like a roll-over, more or less, and then farming out the mats for our Legendary. Maybe going back to Heroic:T11 for titles - maybe Sindragosa or Nefarian though Al'akir seems like he is the easiest of the three.

With the end of normal-mode Firelands starting to take shape, I want another project to keep us focused and working towards and Heroic Tier 11 and the Legendary seem like they will be less stressful than diving right back into Firelands Heroics.

Speaking of the Legendary I think we're at 12 fragments right now, which means another three weeks where we kill at least 6 bosses before the law of averages grants us the rest of the fragments and then our Shadow Priest can at least get the 378 staff. Then starts the long hawl towards the next part. Augh. I really hope we can complete the Legendary and get started on a second before 4.3 comes out.

As for Firelands - I'm quite enjoying these fights. They're challenging, but not back-breakers like a few fights were in 4.0. Majordomo is the only fight that seems ridiculously under-tuned. But hey, I don't mind, makes it easy to farm up some Tier. If we can manage this performance again next week, we'll be in solid shape to clearing farm content in a single night and leave the second night for Ragnaros.

The only fight I'm worried might give us trouble is Alysrazor but the more we kill her the easier it becomes. But at ~12 minutes, it's a long, long fight and requires solid attention the whole time.

Good times. I'm excited for tomorrow.

HOW TO: Solo tank Baleroc as a Paladin

The first three bosses in Firelands are fairly simple in their current incarnation, though I do plan to write up brief strategies on how we do those anyway. The two challenging ones are Baleroc and Alysrazor, and both are heavily tank-dependent, so I'll do those first. I actually really love this tier as tanks have a lot to do in almost all the fights and solo-tanking Blaeroc is a good example of this.

We've been working on Baleroc for some time now and while our healers have figured out a rotation that works well for them, a couple of our DPS are struggling to meet the shard-tanking requirements while putting out the necessary DPS. We have come shavingly close to killing the boss, and our first kill was nearly 20 seconds past enrage with one healer and DPS remaining as DoTs finished him off.

42 million health in 6 minutes is a lot of damage you need to put out. It's just a pure gear and DPS check, and unfortunately not all of our raid is geared as well as it could be. So, even after we killed him, we kept coming excruciatingly close to Enrage for subsequent kill, and we decided to try and have me solo tank while the other tank went DPS just to eliminate Enrage as a factor in the fight. It worked out beautifully.

Using one tank on Baleroc lets you do a few things:

1. DPS can take only 9 stacks and stop there without having to worry about a person taking too much damage with 12 stacks or being short a person if someone clipped a shard accidentally and wound up with a debuff
2. It streamlines things for your healers who don't worry about taunts around Decimation Blade and being on the right tank
3. It lets you finish the fight sooner which will hopefully lead to one or two fewer blades and fewer stacks of Blaze


Glyphs and Gear:
I was at block-cap for this with 102.4% block + avoidance - double Mastery trinket, Mastery food, Mastery Elixir, the belt from Omnotron, the Thrall quest cloak, etc. You know what to do here, use your full-avoidance set. Once I get the Stay of Execution trinket I will probably sub it in and go with Stay of Execution/Mirror of Broken Images for this fight. Block capping is great for Inferno Blade and his normal melee which also comes hard and fast.

Prime Glyphs used were Word of Glory, Seal of Truth, and Shield of the Righteous. You want to push as much damage as you can.

Major Glyphs used were Focused Shield, Divine Protection (40% reduced Magic damage? Yes, please.), and Lay on Hands.

The default 0/31/10 spec was just fine for this. I suppose you could take the points out of Pursuit of Justice and put one into Reckoning and the other into, idunno, Arbiter I guess, for a tiny little bit more DPS but I doubt it would be significant. Stay with the default.

The Fight:
Almost the entire fight is about executing a good rotation of your abilities to maximize your damage while being very aware of your abilities and having a plan for using them at the right moment to survive whatever situation you are in. Put out some decent damage (I was ~11k DPS on our one-tank kill, but I could probably do better with some gear tweaks), don't get hit by shard (really shouldn't be an issue if your DPS is properly positioned behind the boss) and execute your plan to survive the blades - that's it. So let's have at it.

Pull with Divine Plea > Inquisition > Avenging Wrath > Avenger's Shield > Exorcism > Judgment > Crusader Strike to get a big lead so DPS can go all out right from the start, and from there it's just a matter of rotating survival abilities very, very carefully.

I was using Holy Shield exclusively between blades to soften damage when I got below 50% health from his melee swings. Word of Glory was only used to help top myself off if Holy Shield was on cool-down and I was still low on health otherwise all Holy Power went into Shield of the Righteous.


Inferno Blade is very easy to mitigate with Divine Protection (glyphed) and then the on-use Resist from Mirror of Broken Images if necessary after that should he land a few hits in a row (unlikely with block-cap). Keep 3 Holy Power banked for a Word of Glory in case things get wonky and it was almost too easy to deal with this.

I was also saving Guardian of Ancient Kings for the last two minutes of the fight if I got chains of Inferno Blade with my trinket and Divine Protection both on cool-down.


Decimation Blade is the tricky one. You must have two healers swap to you for this as the fight goes on - a single healer will struggle to top you off when they have to heal through 750k+ health. The third healer can easily keep up with the shards with DPS only stacking to 9 and having 2 healers on you to get you back up past 90% health before the second swing is a great security to have. Remember self-healing during Decimation Blade is pointless as you have a 90% reduction in healing every time the blade hits.

Hopefully he will not connect all 3 times - if he does, you are having some horrifically bad luck. Should you dodge even one, your healers will have enough time to top you off between swings. If he does hit one and the next one is coming and you don't see that heal incoming and you know you're going to die - you have to hit Ardent Defender. Survive that swing and you'll be okay.

If you are in this position with Ardent Defender already used up, you have to bubble taunt and then cancel immediately after the blow. I didn't have to do this as our healers kept up with the damage and I was able to mitigate a fair number of Decimation Blades but you do have that as a last-resort option to stay alive.

One last note - do not use Lay on Hands during Decimation Blade. It is a good cool-down to use once the healing debuff has dropped near the end of the fight, or during a very bad streak with Inferno Blade, but the 90% healing reduction from Decimation makes it useless there. Don't even touch it.

That's really all there is to it. This gives you six DPS to meet the enrage timer and we comfortably killed him with, I think 30 or 40 seconds to enrage.This is probably how we will do this fight from now on, and if I understand correctly, this is the preferred way to kill him on Heroic anyway, so might as well get used to it now.

This is a pretty fun fight and you grow bigger and bigger in size as the Blaze of Glory stacks rack up, so by the end of the fight you're a looming giant almost half the size of the boss with nearly a million and a half health - it gets pretty giddy near the end. Good luck out there!

PuG Blues

Man, this is the longest gap I've taken from writing in some time. Mostly because I've been kind of glum in game as raids haven't been very engaging - not that I don't want to raid, but our raid group has been having some trouble gathering up and actually raiding and it's starting to wear on me.

I feel like we're just in this hanging phase, where all we need are a couple of good, solid, three-day weeks to push through to Ragnaros. This is exactly what it was like when we were on Nefarian - except that was one bsoss and here we have an entire raid to learn. Our core is kicking ass as usual, it's the last couple of slots that worry me. We've been picking up people, and if I look at the roster, there are 21 people who could conceivably raid... and yet I'm PuGing at least one slot every week.

There are a lot of things that happen when you have to bring in someone new.

1. You have to let your entire raid comp adjust to this new person, personality wise. We're a nerdy, smart, funny, laid-back group and we've had people join who immediately began poking, poking, poking at someone's performance, I think jokingly, and it got to be an issue. While I'm trying to figure out DPS distribution, I don't want us to be distracted by people management.

2. Things are just going to take longer. Even if they've done everything, they might not just gather up scorpions to AoE and then move out as stacks grow. Maybe they kill Shannox a completely different way, or they're used to being on the top with Beth'tilac and don't know how to manage adds on the bottom. Or worse, they don't know the fight at all and now the raid is sitting there for five minutes while you explain their role to them and suffer wipes while this person gets up to par. We're not to a point in Firelands where we can just cruise through a boss with a person down. And there is nothing worse - nothing worse - than explaining complicated things to one person while eight other people sit on their hands doing nothing.

3. The rest of your raid suffers from having to adjust around this person. Maybe you're moving people's roles around, maybe someone is playing an off-spec, and you go through all of the above with your own people. Admittedly this is less onerous, but it is still an issue where the alt-spec gear might not be up to par, or the person might be rusty or less adept with that spec, and you're wasting more time getting them used to the fight in a different role.

4. You have no reliability. The person might just have joined to get the sword from Shannox and then drops group right after the boss dies. Or they were in your raid because their own guild benched them, but suddenly asked them to swap in as one of their members left. Or maybe they forgot that they had another obligation and when you said "10 server" they thought you meant "10'o clock their time" which is an hour after you started. Sorry. And now you're stuck a boss or two in with no hope of finding someone to come into a locked instance.

5. The night is shorter because of it. You might have wasted time at the start of raid finding someone and by the time you zoned in it was 15 - 20 minutes past your start time. Now you're pulling, and explaining at the same time, and maybe someone gets confused typing or talking and half your raid just got punted off the ledge. Or you wiped. Or even if you get to the boss quickly, instead of just pulling, you're sitting there explaining again. Now it's 50 minutes after raid time was supposed to start and you do your first pull on Shannox. At this rate, you're looking at no progression work at all, and by the time Beth'tilac dies your raid is so shot and grumbly from relearning downed fights, that you might as well go see if your faction has BH just so you can come back in tomorrow with fresh brains. And you better hope like hell someone will show up tomorrow to fill that PuG slot because your odds are slim that they'll show up again.

6. You have absolutely no way to separate the good from bad. This is probably the worst problem. You can look at their armory, you can look at their gear, you can look at prior raid experience, you can even check the dates of their achievements on kills to make sure they killed Nefarian when he was far more difficult - but all of that won't guarantee a good player. Maybe they were carried through, maybe it's their girlfriend's account, maybe they're having a bad night or swapped spec because you needed a DPS and they went Shadow just to step in and haven't actually played Shadow in months. That vetting you did, checking their amazing gear, raid experience and availability for length of time just went to crap and you might not even realize it until you get to a boss.

All of that said, I'm just grateful to those who PuG with us for two things.

1. I've met some of my favorite raiders through PuGing. Three members of my core right now are people who responded to my "LF1M" calls on LFG. That's what keeps me PuGing - knowing that there are amazing people out there, looking for a chance to raid, and every time I PuG with someone, I don't know if they're going to be the next core member of my raid group.

2. I do get to go into Firelands and kill things. This is started to feel a lot like late summer from last year when we were literally begging for people to get a raid, any raid, off the ground. And other guilds are struggling far more than we are just to get started. So the fact that these PuGs let us raid and kill things is enough to make me very grateful for them.

What makes this worse is that I actually quite like Firelands and would love to get to work on it with a good, consistent team. I am enjoying these raids so much, both T11 and T12 have been fantastic raids to work on.

But. The patch is relatively young still and if our record is anything to go by, I think we'll clear the normal modes and at least a couple of hard modes before 4.3 drops, though our progression rate might move at the pace of our guild's namesake.

I hope you're having some luck out there! And if you're looking to raid, poke that link.

H. R. is my least favorite R.

I haven't been talking about raiding much lately because I haven't been able to do much raiding (well, real raiding, which is Firelands) lately. When 4.2 dropped, we went in to Firelands the first two weeks and had a lot of trouble. One of our healers was severely under geared and we had a lot of trouble keeping the raid alive.

This week, we decided we'd go do some hard-mode/T11 clearing for some gear and upgrades and then go back into Firelands for the second night, and then the roster issues rose up again. Next week I'm on vacation and that means the earliest chance I'll have to see Firelands again is 7/26. Which is not a pleasant thought. It's not that I'm trying to compete with the guilds on my server - most of them have pushed forward fairly quickly and many congratulations to them, however, it's frustrating to be side-lined.

Last night we wound up PuGging to go clear some raid achievements because hey, 2 missing raiders means I don't want to wipe for hours on Shannox, so we cleared all of T11 (which, BTW, seems easier than Zandalari these days) and Halfus on Heroic.

Our roster is growing more stable, slowly, one person by one person. We picked up one semi-regular friend from another guild which is super-awesome, and last night, yet another PuG who was raiding with us last night wanted to join after the night ended, and I hope his attendance will be stable.

Right now a third - solid, geared, aware, and reliable - healer or tank would make life a lot easier. That's the big gap in our roster right now. My co-tank has swapped to healing and one of our top DPS has taken to tanking, but I miss her epic DPS (though she's a fine tank as well) and their off-spec gear sets are not as well-tuned to these roles as their main-spec sets are, naturally.

There are maybe three or four other raiders who are on the roster, and they are all awesome and I would love to see them attend consistently, but their real-life obligations make them hit-and-miss and I can understand that, and they know that if I do find stable positions they would become bench-warmers, but these HR problems continue to crop up, and I hear about it even from the very top-end guilds on my server who never used to have a problem with their rosters.

I'm wondering if I'm noticing it so much because of the smaller size of our guild (before we formed Turtles, we were in fairly large guilds with many people and often had folks to step in to fill raid (even if they were sometimes less than ideal, which is a completely separate issue)). Or is this a Cataclysm issue? Is there just a lot of burnout with Cataclysm in general? I don't know.

There is also the time factor. I do think that the new encounters are just, plain, harder, and the biggest resource they require to clear is not gear (though it helps) but time to practice and learn. So many guilds are doing at least three nights, and often four hours per night. We're doing six hours a week, total. I can't help but stare at that fact and wonder if it's a factor in our stalling progress.

Solving HR problems is the hardest thing for me - thankfully my GM is amazing at recruitment and when we find good people PuGing with us, she is relentless at getting them to accept a Guild Invitation. I don't know how anyone can resist her pursuit. It's like the adds on Maloriak casting Fixate - she just doesn't let go  until you say yes! The problem is finding good people who are reliable.

Anyway. This post is just a ball of QQ and I didn't intend for it to be that - I'm trying to remain optimistic and it was actually a pretty fun night to kick back, crack a beer and just steamroll T11 while picking up achievements and yak with friends. Isn't that what raiding is supposed to be about, anyway?

Next week, I'm off to Cape Cod at a beach house with my wife and baby, so the only thing I'll be raiding is the Oyster bar. Lots of yummy, briny Oysters to shuck and slurp, while reading lots of books and dreaming of Dagon sleeping off the coast of New England.

You guys have fun, and I'll see you when I get back, unless I get inspired and write from vacation-land.

Hyjal is backwards

Ever since I did Hyjal back in December, I've been thinking about why I don't like that quest line. And I think with 4.2 and the invasion quests, it finally makes sense to me. Hyjal is written backwards. It starts where it should end and then tries to back out of that, and winds up feeling trivial instead of challenging and threatening.

I think one of the big problems with Blizzard is that they are writing on such an epic scale they can't see what makes stories good - they do not let us as characters experience struggle. And yet, it is exactly struggle that makes heroes what they are. It's in the wake of loss that victory has meaning. That is why Wrathgate was so widely accepted as a genius move - it was about the heroes making a massive mistake and being absolutely ruined because of it. It was about the loss of names we thought were immortal.

Cataclysm - and Warcraft in general - could use some more of that.


Think about what happened in 3.1 through 3.3 - nothing. Did we as heroes ever loose ground? Did we have even one setback? Was there ever a point where we saw Dalaran under threat even though it was a 30 second flight from the Citadel? Did the Lich-King more or less tolerate a Renaissance Faire on his doorstep for months? By the time we killed Arthas, it was a foregone conclusion. We were on a relentless march forward with barely a false step along the way.

The victory was not earned in blood and we felt cheated.

In general, Cataclysm feels half-done. We know why we're in Throne or Bastion - there are clear indications even if a few quests leading directly to raids would have helped, but what about Nefarian? There is absolutely no questline devoted to his threat in the end-game. Even something local to Orgrimmar and Stormwind where the old Lady Prestor and Lord Nefarius stories could easily have been done as they tried to re-gather their resources and suddenly we were aware of their threat and moved in before they could get too far down that line - which would explain the limited resources Nefarian seems to bring to bear.

Anyway. Back to Hyjal - I'm going to take a stab at it by looking at Hyjal and seeing how it might have been done so as to follow this back-and-forth swing of loss, regroup and victory.

So imagine, if you will, a different Hyjal storyline. One in which Hyjal is whole, or as whole as it was before the invasion - nascent forests, lush and green, blue streams of water, rich with animal life when an urgent call goes out for help to put out forest-fires. You arrive to see a small volcano and elementals - nothing too much to worry about but as you fight and quest, you find that on returning to your quest hubs, they are overrun, and you have to move back, further up the mountain to regroup - echoes of what happened when the Scourge came.

Over and over, you try to contain the fire but are pushed back, more and more powerful Fire Lords appear, and take over the lower levels of Hyjal and you continue backwards, imploring the Ancients for help but even their intervention isn't enough - only after all four are summoned are they able to put up a defense, but it's too late - by then, much of the forest is already gone, the forces of Ragnaros are on the doorstep of Teldrassil and the world-tree is truly threatened on all side, as Ragnaros' lieutenants wander openly, transforming Hyjal into a part of the Firelands itself.

We are left with dailies to combat the skirmishes against wandering fire elementals and rescuing druids from behind enemy lines and such - we are under siege. You are sent as an emissary to call for help, but the world is too fractured, too busy dealing with their own local problems to care much about a tree on some distant land.

Desperate for something to happen, we become a part of Malfurion's gambit - while the bulk of Ragnaros' forces are on the offensive, he suggests a daring attack against the enemy. He calls for resources to be gathered from the enemy, that he will collect and use to open a gateway into the Firelands itself - dangerous dailies with rich rewards, perhaps.

Imagine, further, a small instance within the barrow-dens. With all this disruption, the various prisoners held by the Wardens are breaking free as the Wardens are called out to battle. Staghelm is making a move, aided by unknown forces that have infiltrated the Dens, perhaps even druids who lead us in and then mislead us while they rescue Staghelm, we see the betrayal and corruption of Druids first hand - a sign of things to come later.

4.2 finally arrives and Malfurion, along with the Aspects and the Elders having gathered enough resources finally opens that gate - straight into the Firelands itself, bypassing all the defenses Ragnaros has put in place. The Avengers of Hyjal take a skeletal crew into the Firelands along with the adventurers and begin their own invasion - one of foliage. The quests can continue as they do now - we plant our own trees in the Firelands and solidify our foothold even as Ragnaros recalls some of his forces, aware now of his exposed flank.

The fight is two-fronted - the invasion and the repel - do dailies in Firelands to grow the trees, and do a new (shorter) questline in Hyjal to retake the land. As quests are completed in Hyjal, the Guardians move forward, take new land, open new dailies and quest hubs, regrow their lands bit by bit.

Meanwhile, the fight continues in the Firelands - adventurers raid against Ragnaros refusing him the opportunity to advance against the tree himself, and tangle up his strongest lieutenants. 4.2 ends with the fires of Hyjal finally extinguished, and Ragnaros finally defeated.

This keeps things very close to the way they are but it just changes the tone of things and adds a palpable sense of desperation to things - it brings a sense of danger. Something sorely lacking in the game right now. With phasing technology being so evocative in its ability to change the world, I think the storytellers can afford to be a little more risky and let us loose things at the end-game a little bit.

It'll make the victories all the more meaningful.

Post Patch Post

What? I like alliteration. Don't judge me.

My patch-day-jitters were ill-founded, and though I still hold on to some trepidation, things seem stable for the time being. I think we have - more or less - a steady group at this point with only one or two floater spots and I hope to fill them in soon. We even picked up a new Hunter on Tuesday night. Anyway. Enough of that - let's talk about how the last couple of days have been.

HOLY SHIELD:
After two nights of using Holy Shield - I'm still getting used to having an extra cool-down. Trying to figure out when to use it is interesting, I keep expecting to use 3 Holy Power immediately to keep Holy Shield rolling, but of course, I don't need to. Using it as a mini-cool-down every 30 seconds is fine, but I keep finding myself wishing I had it up again right after I use it and the cushion drops after 10 seconds. I'm going to need a lot more practice before I'm comfortable with this little bastard.

Right now, I suppose I'm happy to have it rather than just loosing 10% damage from blocks, which Blizzard could easily have done and called it a day.

TIER 11 in 4.2:
I wanted to do one last run-through of Tier 11 and grab a few items to slot in those blues, and boy howdy, the nerfs are something. The most common comment from healers? "I'm bored", and "I'm swapping to DPS." I'm pretty sure everything can be two-healed with a steady and solid group (except maybe Nef) and pretty much any mistakes you are making can be covered by three healing everything and just blunt-DPSing through the mechanics. We were breaking prior kill records by a minute to two all over the place. Though I suppose it's now tuned to people in blues and a few epics rather than a team with an average iLevel nearing 359.

We finished all of Bastion of Twilight in a little under an hour and all of Blackwing Descent in a little over one hour. The only wipe we had was on Nefarian when there was a miscommunication in Phase 2. Anyway. If you've been waiting for Tier 11 - now is your time!

FIRELANDS:
The raid itself is... well, not lovely, but it looks epic, and the layout is well-designed, I'm not quite sure how big it all is, but it feels roughly the size of Stormwind, maybe a bit larger. It's on par with Molten Core, AQ 40, Black Temple, and  Hyjal anyway, in terms of sheer space. The amount of trash is also a pretty shocking sight to take in at first, even after BoT's trash-filled rooms. And it's fun trash - for the most part you can just pull, AoE tank and burn it down, and when we did use CC it made the trash stupidly easy. The Hellhounds are the only except, and treating them like the kitties from Ulduar's Crazy Cat Lady helped.

It took us about two hours to clear up to Shannox without really pulling aggressively with a couple of wipes, and we did a pull or two wondering why taunts were not working (hint: they're taunt-immune) before we lost a healer and with the 2-hour trash re-spawn looming we had to run out and reset. Only later did I find out the Shannox trash was on a 4-hours lock out. Cest la vie.

We pulled much more aggressively and got all the way up Beth'tilac in about 30 minutes, which was much more reasonable. A few pulls went into Beth but we had trouble figuring out DPS balance between Drones, Spiderlings and Spinners, and with raid-time looming and people being tired, we just killed some more trash to get everyone up to Friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal so that they could pick up cloaks.

Aside from rep, there were some trash drops. My co-tank picked up the Scales of Life trinket from trash, and I picked up the Tanking boots pattern for my Blacksmith so I'll be crafting those once I get my hands on some Living Ember. By the way, the tanking cloak from Avengers reputation vendor is terrible for Paladins with Parry and Hit. Ugh. The quest reward is significantly better with Dodge and Mastery. I have both enchanted and am swapping them to see which I like better - the higher stat budget, or the purely better stats.

This is our three-night raid week so we will go back in tonight and I'm hoping we can kill one of the two bosses we saw last night which will give us a head-start for next week. I'll report back with details once I've hammered some out - likely after next weeks raid.

Good luck out there!

I Want My 7 Boss Tier Already

The current tier of twelve bosses is killing me.

My guild raids two nights a week, three hours a night. One week of the month, we have an extra night just to try to push progression but attendance for even one more night a month is iffy. Every week I have to look at the people logging in and make a decision - do I push progression or do I farm?