Oh Yogg, how you slay me so…

I was all set up for a /rant, as fail raids never fail to get me into that mood.

Today though, I just feel defeated. No anger, no hate, just sad for once.

I’m slowly working through the phases of dealing with grief. Bear with me.

Step 1: Denial

First night during last week’s reset, we wiped on clouds every single attempt.

“It’s okay, it’s our first week attempting Yogg. I mean, we’ve only tried him for a day on 10-man in 1 group.”

“Everyone’s just getting used to the fight. There’s a lot to remember.”

“We’ll get it down next time. Hey, we’re making progress! There were only 5 guardians up this time vs. last attempt’s 8!”

Step 2: Anger

Second and last night of attempts that week, we got to Phase 2 a few times about an hour into the raid, only to go back to failing to clouds by a large, large margin with 8 guardians running around at times.

/bangs desk with face

/throw keyboard

/livid, rabid convulsions

Step 3: Bargaining

Beginning of the raid last night, GM says, “If we make any progress tonight, we’ll consider hard modes.” For the next hour, I watched 5-8 guardians slaughtering the raid.

“Please… let us make it to Phase 2… I won’t take any loot for 2 weeks!!”

30 minutes later.

“A month? How about a month? I won’t take loot for a month?”

Step 4: Depression

So we gave up an hour ahead of our usual raiding end time. We set up a new schedule at the end of the raid for this week in hopes of getting 2 groups into Uld-10 and practicing on Yogg in 10-man. Hopefully, both groups will clear to him and we’ll see who’s popping clouds. Le sigh.

/make Tuesday morning QQ blog post

Step 5: Acceptance incoming…

 

The OS3D Zerg

I personally lack interest in doing 10-man runs. It just doesn’t feel as epic as getting 25 people together and downing bosses for me. I am, however,  of the opinion that 10-man runs are actually more difficult most of the time, especially hard modes.

Well, until you outgear the encounter.

We never attempted The Twilight Zone before Ulduar came out. Then one day out of the blue about a month ago, guildies started organizing zerg runs. I have to say, when you pick out the right people to do 5k DPS or more, it completely trivializes the encounter.

I got my first go at it last night. I finally got my title (but lost the roll on the mount, boo) and I have to say, zerging is a million times less complicated than doing it the intended way.

We run with 1 tank and 1 healer for the 80-some-odd-second DPS race. After about 82 seconds (not too clear on the timer), Shadron will land and Sarth will become immune. Between starting the encounter and Tenebron’s first portal, no one really takes any damage except the tank. Healing through the damage is unbelievably easy.

The only frustrating part is the RNG. Thirty-percent of the fight is luck. We tank Sarth in the gap of waves from one side so if the fight starts off from 2 waves from the other side and everyone has to move, it greatly narrows the margin for error in the DPS check. If you get lucky and all waves come from the side you’re standing, then it becomes significantly easier.

We ran a melee-heavy group, equipped with a feral druid and enhance shaman for Heroism. Around 30%, our feral druid taunted Tenebron and ran like hell to kite him around the entire instance so we had a significant DPS loss at this point.

And I learned that there was no escaping death for me. Ever. We did it with a warrior tank and standing on Sarth’s hind legs rendered any kind of AOE move useless while I eventually got chewed up by elementals and the first spawn of whelps from Tenebron’s portal (you’ll only get 1 spawn before he goes immune).

The DPS says the fight is a rush for them. Too bad I can’t say the same.  :P

 

Raesa’s UI v5.1

It’s that time again! Time for a UI update. I’ve been tweaking little things on and off for the last few weeks now, trying to find ways to do things better so it’s not dramatically different from the last time I made a UI update. I haven’t made any changes in a little over a week or so, which implies it’s ready for show and tell again.

It’s still got the same form factor so don’t expect anything drastic!

Changes:

• Grid frames are wider and orientation was changed from vertical to horizontal
• Using PB4 instead of PB3
• Changed color scheme of PB unit frames and visibility mechanics
• Moved UF texts onto the UF’s themselves, rather than hanging around the edges
• Changed pet, ToT, pet cast bar, and target cast bar layout
• Changed BT4 visibility mechanics
• Moved Recount & Omen positions (can’t tell from these screenshots)
• Changed Power Auras positions and glows
• Installed Minimap Button Frame to clean up minimap buttons
• Canned Proximo for Gladius
• Canned SCT for MSBT

Idle:

I’ll do a play-by-play and list the addons in this screenshot before I attack the in-combat as there are significantly more things going on there. Things you see, starting from top-left corner and going around the screenshot in a clockwise direction:

• Satrina Buff Frames
• Minimap Button Frame (currently using Entropy skin)
• pminimap
• SLDataText (for the zone text and also the text below the action bars)
• Bartender4
• ButtonFacade and ButtonFacade: Caith
• Chatter

Raid/BG in combat:

Things you see (excluding things I’ve already mentioned above), once again in a clockwise direction:

• TipTac (tooltip)
• MikScrollingCombatText
• TinyCasterStats (rainbow text below minimap visible only in combat)
• RaidCooldown Display (currently showing a pally bubbled and a rogue cloaked)
• Grid
• Quartz
• ForteXorcist (Priest module and cooldown timer enabled only)
• Pitbull4
• Power Auras Classic (the icons in the middle showing spells not on cooldown – Prayer of Mending, Power Infusion, and the Penance icon shows up left of the green timer)
• Satrina Buff Frames (Energy Siphon icon)

PB4 will only show my unit frame if my health or mana is below 100% or if I’m targeting someone or if I’m in combat. Otherwise, it stays completely hidden. All the health bars in PB4 are the same shade of gray. Power bars and character names are colored by class. Grid health bars are also the same shade of gray, thanks to EnhancedColourPicker.

My action bars are also set to fade to 15% opacity when I’m not in combat and they flip back to 100% opacity in combat using a custom conditional. I had it set to completely hide OOC for a while but it presented a problem with vehicles where I don’t have the keybinds memorized. I’ve been meaning to edit the custom conditional to do the following:

1. Hide bars out of combat
2. Show bars in combat
3. Show bars out of combat if it’s a vehicle bar

But I’ve been busy having my ass handed to me by Yogg this week so I’ll get to it eventually.

I created an extra buff frame using SBF above my character to show me 4 specific buffs: Energy Siphon (trinket on use), Lightweave procs, Heroism, and Innervate.

Things you don’t see:

• AchievementSnap – auto-screenshot upon obtaining an achievement
• Advanced Trade Skill Window
• ArkInventory
• AuctionLite
• Autobar – set to show on mouseover, anchored to the right of action bars; pots, healthstones, and mount are keybound
• BetterInbox – replaced Postal for me
• BetterOutbox
• BigBrother
• Cartographer
• Clique
• Deadly Boss Mods
• Dolemite – alt+left click disenchanting (my JC’s and scribes have Molinari to prospect/mill)
• DrDamage
• EnhancedColourPicker
• EnsidiaFails – Failbot replacement
• FishermansFriend
• Fontifer – changes UI fonts
• Getting Things Healed
• Gladius
• GetReagents – auto-refill reagents or other items at the vendor
• Grid modules: GridManaBars, GridIndicatorSideIcons, GridBossDebuffs
• GrizzlySharedMedia – contains all the custom media in SharedMedia and more
• Lightheaded – WoWHead in-game quest & NPC database
• LilSparky’s Workshop
• Multimail
• NeonChat – outlines your chat window in the color of the channel you’re speaking in
• Omen Threat Meter
• Opie – link is to WoWInterface; official website here
• oRA2 and oRA2 MT frames (MT frames sit above chat window)
• Outfitter
• Pawn
• PoM Tracker
• QuestGuru – better quest tracker and achievements tracker
• RaidCooldowns (group members need to have this installed in order for RaidCooldown Display to correctly display CD’s that have been used)
• RatingBuster – I have both this and Pawn because I want to see the actual net stat changes  to make decisions rather than solely relying on approximated stat weight scores
• Recount
• ScreenPlus – mod for preset screenshot options
• Talented
• TourGuide
• WIM

It’s a long list but I think I’ve listed all the mods I use on my priest. As you can see, I still stay right around 50mb of memory used on mods. It sometimes doubles thanks to Recount running during a raid but is easily corrected with a simple /recount reset.

I also use this layout on my alts and so far, it’s actually been pretty effective even though it’s primed for healing in a raid setting. The only difference is that I enable the experience bar in PB4 to display under my power bar, with experience text displayed on mouse-over.

I have Outfitter and Clique set up so that they switch profiles based on primary or secondary talent spec so it’s all literally just 2 clicks to get set up. Time to do Wintergrasp? No problem! Activate secondary spec and all my gear + click-to-cast settings are switched over to PvP. Time for VoA? Activate primary spec and I’m ready for PvE.

Some mods obviously seem superfluous (ScreenPlus?) but I’m the guild photographer.

As always, a WIP!

 

I gotta feeling…

… that tonight’s gonna be a good night.

Sometimes things just click together and no one knows why.

After the horrid wipe-fest that was Freya two weeks ago and the less bad but still disappointing week we had last week, this week has been amazing.

For the first time in 3 weeks, our battlegroup didn’t crash on a Tuesday night during our raid.

After spending the previous 2 weeks wiping on the same Keepers over and over again, we 1-shot every boss (minus Auriaya and a freak accident of the MT going down).

In about 4 hours or so, we cleared Flame Leviathan, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya, and got 2 tries in on Mimiron on Tuesday (SEE WHAT WE CAN DO WHEN YOU GIVE US OUR TUESDAYS BACK BLIZZARD?!).

Last night, we 2-shot Mimiron and proceeded to spend the rest of the night wiping on General Beeswax (high watermark of 20%). We downed General only this past Saturday on 10-man after neglecting Uld-10 for over a month (2-shot on our first day of getting to him woot!) so only 10 of us had seen the fight mechanics before.

I’ve got a good feeling about tonight.

From a healing perspective, I’ve been running strategies through my mind all morning and if I can get the same healers back in there tonight, I think I’ve got it worked out in my head. But we’ll see.

I can only cross my fingers and hope that range learns to not take unnecessary damage (L2 RUN FROM THE SKULL OMG).

And with all the fast boss downs of this week and essentially having our best night just this past Tuesday, the guild feels like it’s on an upswing again, while it felt like things were threatening to rip at the seams just 2 weeks ago. We’ve always described Catalyst as a social raiding guild but the behavior I’ve seen in the last month or so confirms we’re more of a raiding guild than a social guild (are we even social anymore?).

We wipe a lot = worst guild ever.
We kill lots of bosses = best place to be!

WTF?

my guild is so emo lulz

Somewhere down the line, our identity has slowly changed in the eyes of our members (which is where it really matters). I have no idea WTF the server thinks of us but I know that we’re no longer casual. Kind of stuck in that purgatory between casual and hardcore. And I’m not quite sure what to make of it just yet…

Oh, BTW, WTB DK and pally tanks! We are short on AOE tanks (i.e. we have 1 prot pally and no DK tanks). :(

 

WorldofLogs.com – A Parse of the Combat Log Parser, Part 2

Part 2 – In Which Your Entire Raid is Full of Goldfish

Let’s face it. The average guild will have those people who consistently DIAF.

On Thorim, I like to call these people Goldfish. They can’t run out of Lightning Charge. Not only can they not run out of Lightning Charge, they seem to run towards the shiny, little line of lightning on the ground before the cone actually hits.

This part is relatively quick and won’t require log browsing as the finding out who couldn’t stop hitting the Snaplasher. This won’t give you a list of just people who died to Lightning Charge either, but also those who got hit and survived (way to waste healers’ mana nubs).

1. Find someone who died to Lightning Charge.

This part is easy peasy. Open up your combat log. Go to all Thorim fights and just click on “Death Overview.” Someone will have died to Lightning Charge. Someone always does:

Notice the highlight on the words, “Lightning Charge.” I used my browser’s word search to find the spell on the page.

2. Get the list of everyone who was hit.

Now we get a list of everyone and everything who was hit by Lightning Charge:

I’ve blurred out all player names but my own to save my guildies’ dignity. Mine is expendable. They’ll thank me for it. One day.

Look at the first column under the “Hits” header. This is where you can gnash your teeth on the side rails of the failboat.

The problem here is you don’t know who was hit to expedite a wipe. There’s no faster way to wipe Thorim than to stand in the Lightning Charge (waiting for him to whack you is like asking a kid to share candy – FUTILE – or takes an unreasonably long amount of time).

You can always take time of each death due to Lightning Charge and go back to the graph of each fight and see who’s dying towards the end but even then, it’s not quite as accurate as live fail reporting during/after the fight and that is much more fun than looking at log parses after the fact.

I’m watching you.

(>.>)

(<.<)

 

When does it stop being worth it?

Everyone knows leading a guild is a headache and the job isn’t for everyone. I’ve been doing this job for 2 years now.

I’ve taken a lot of real-life examples and experiences I’ve gained from working to try to create an infrastructure within the guild that will allow it to thrive on its own merit and the merit of its members.

Raids and progression has gotten rather stagnant lately. Our battlegroup (go go Retaliation) has crashed 2 Tuesdays in a row now and the guild has been working with 1 less raiding night. We haven’t been able to repeat our success with Freya and Mimiron. We have with Thorim to varying degrees.

Frustration is mounting. People are losing focus. And efforts to try to hold those responsible for screw-ups accountable are being met with some serious QQ.

No one has any suggestions about how to improve but everyone knows how to point fingers.

I’m not so sure this job is worth it anymore.

 

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

WoL.com posts are drafted and will come out when they’re completed but this post is just something I need to get out.

Respect isn’t a hard concept to understand but it seems infinitely impossible to practice. It’s like some rare species in the wild that you almost never see but when you do, you are awed in its presence.

I’m not talking about respecting your elders or admiring your role model. I’m talking about basic courtesy. Respect is one of the most basic tenets to putting together any sort of organization. The members contained within need to respect each other, respect the leadership, and respect the basic principles upon which the organization is built.

We had a little incident in Naxx the other night where people seemed unable to keep vent clear during the Gothik fight. It clearly states in our raid etiquette thread in our forums to keep vent clear during all boss fights. Why does the raid leader have to repeat himself three times before anyone listens?

I spoke with the offenders after the raid was over. I got a response from one of them about raid etiquette and performance expectations. His response? “This isn’t my RL, Raesa.”

Well, fuck you and your RL. Seriously. There are 24 other REAL people in the raid with you. We are all doing our jobs and following the rules about raid etiquette. We respect the organization we are in, and therefore, perform as is expected of us. Don’t play the real life card when all I’m asking you to do is keep your trap shut for all of 5 minutes for a boss fight. I’m sorry you can’t stop talking about beer pong while the main tank is getting ready to pull.

Everyone dedicates some aspect of his/her real life to raiding and this game. I always find it funny how people allude to real life as though WoW is something that exists entirely separately. We all dedicate real life resources to playing this game, be it time, sleep, research, etc.

You might not feel it necessary to dedicate as many resources to the game because it’s not work or taking care of friends and family but is it not disrespecting others who might put in more or less effort (but effort nonetheless) by wasting everyone’s time in a raid?

WoW is played by real people. Guilds are run by real people who put in real effort and real time to make it into a place where you enjoy being and a tag you’re proud of wearing. You better learn to respect that and learn it fast.

 

WorldofLogs.com – A Parse of the Combat Log Parser, Part 1

WoW Web Stats has been long dead. WoW Meter Online is ridiculously slow. But World of Logs is amazing! And I loves it. This is part 1 of why I love WoL. Each segment will show how I use it for my own purposes and hopefully give you insight on how to use it for yours.

Reason #1 of why I loves World of Logs:

It helps me prove to you that you effed up and how many times you effed up when you ask me why you’re being sat out.

Imagine this. We’re doing the Freya fight. The Snaplasher tank dies because the mob got too many stacks of the Hardened Bark buff. He one-shots the tank.

Rewind 5 seconds.

Over vent, we hear the Snaplasher tank say, “No more DPS on the Snaplasher.”

“Stop hittin’ ‘im!”

“Stop DPS!”

“I’m down.”

Guess what. I can find out out who did it on each specific attempt. And here’s how:

Step 1: Isolate the time frame of the tank death.

Go to the particular fight you’re looking at, select “Damage Taken.” Then uncheck every player’s name except for the specific tank you’re looking at. Also make sure to show player deaths.

The red circle shows where the tank stopped taking damage and the red vertical line represents the tank’s death. Yes, incidentally, the flat lining of damage taken and the red line of death don’t coincide time-wise. To isolate the time frame of death, select the section of curiosity with your mouse:

The blue overlay is what I’ve selected. I’ also made a point to include the tooltip that you get when you mouse over specific events in the graph. Nifty!

So right click on the selection and then hit “Set Page to Selection” – this will render a new page that shows information for that specific time frame on the graph and chart. In fact, any link that changes the different detail shown (damage done, healing done, healing taken, deaths overview) will now only show information for the selected time frame.

Step 2: Find out WTF was happening and who was doing what in the time leading up to your tank’s death.

Enter the conditions for the query on the Snaplasher. The interface to search for events here is so. much. better. than WWS’s log browser:

Hit Save, then hit Run in the main window and you’ll get the results of your query. In my own analysis, I’ve outlined each time Snaplasher gained a stack and it’s pretty obvious who is still hitting the damned thing:

Looks like only 1 person managed to totally stink things up here. We called out for DPS to stop hitting the Snaplasher at 40 stacks. FORTY STACKS!

He actually got to 60 stacks.

W.T.F.

World of Logs – perfect tool to ensure your finger is pointing in the right direction.

Just as an aside – this rogue wasn’t even in the group assigned to beat down on the Snaplasher. He was supposed to be on the Storm Lasher… FML.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

 

The Power of the Last Attempt

Monday nights in WoW are always either cathartic or anti-climactic. Why? Because it’s the last night before raids reset and during progression, you either do it or you don’t for the week. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Well, last night was cathartic. It was our first time doing Mimiron on 25-man. After getting our asses handed to us for all of 3 hours (thanks, Mimiron!), time ticked down to our normal end time of 9PM. For those 3 hours, I nerd-raged in a private custom channel. It was the only way to keep myself together from chewing out the melee for dying to Shock Blast. It helped me bite my tongue from lashing out at anyone who died to Rocket Strike. I stayed quiet.

Our last wipe happened at 9:01. We all ran back. We had lost track of time. We usually stopped by 9. On that last wipe, we got to Phase 3 with one person down. Somewhere in there though, we lost half the raid when we finally got to Phase 4.

9:05

/readycheck

GM: All right, guys, last attempt. Going in.

Phase 1 – entire raid is alive.

Phase 2 – 23 people alive. Battle rez – full raid again.

Phase 3 – Full raid still alive.

Phase 4 – People start dying off to random things. It was our first attempt at Phase 4 with more than 20 people alive past the first 30 seconds.

<fight continues>

…

“Keep it together, guys. Don’t lose your heads.”

…

“SHOCK BLAST!!”

…

“LASER BARRAGE!!!”

…

“ROCKET!!!”

…

“It would appear that I’ve made a slight miscalculation. I allowed my mind to be corrupted by the fiend in the prison, overriding my primary directive. All systems seem to be functional now. Clear.”

Vent: WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

 

UI Inspiration

Overhauling a UI is can sometimes be a daunting task. Even more daunting is planning the layout. Serious UI junkies like to think of it as an art – it’s got to be functional, artistic, and unique. At the end of the day though, modifying the UI is supposed to help streamline your WoW playing and finding ways to make what you do more efficient.

I like to switch mine up a lot. I usually end up doing so because I spot a brilliant idea on those “Post your UI” threads on various forums and get swept up in a whirlwind of inspiration. Each forum community has its own preferences for what they like to see. Following is a list of threads I check up on periodically for new ideas:

EJ’s general UI thread:
http://elitistjerks.com/f32/t23417-share_your_interface_read_first_post_no_really_read/
EJ community members generally like the minimalistic theme. Responses to cluttered UI’s are pretty harsh. Most of the UI’s are very innovative and there are so many posts that you can look at! The best part is everyone who posts a screenshot also posts a list of addons (as is required by the EJ mods) so you can try to build something similar yourself. They also have a lot of class-specific UI’s in the class mechanics sub-forums. Great all-around place to look.

PlusHeal’s UI thread:
http://plusheal.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=210
Healers will find this thread especially useful. Spotlight normally falls on practical uses of raid frames to facilitate healers’ response times in functional yet visually appealing ways.

AJ’s UI thread:
http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=12234
UI’s with a PvP bent. Most of the screenshots will show how the players use Proximo/Gladius rather than raid frames.

Shadowpriest.com’s UI thread:
http://shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=37
Looking for DoT management mods? Want to see when Mind Flay ticks on your cast bar? This is the place to go.

Warlock Den’s UI thread:
http://wowmb.net/forums/f23/33927-show_off_your_ui_thread_3_patch_3_1_beyond/p24/
Similar to shadowpriest.com, this thread obviously puts a lot of emphasis on DoT monitoring and management, with pet management thrown in.

These are the ones I check mostly because:

• I like the minimalist approach to UI’s.
• I’m a healer.
• I do Arena.
• I do dabble in the darker magics.
• My next highest level toon is a warlock.

This list isn’t all-encompassing at all; it’s just a list of threads that I check regularly. I know TankSpot has a UI gallery, DiscPriest.com also has a thread (although it’s a pretty short one at the moment), and WoWInterface.com has a Compilations category where you can just browse what people have uploaded. WI also further separates them by theme also – it’s great for those of us who aren’t too addon-savvy but still want a bangin’ UI. The people who upload their own do great work!

If anyone keeps track of other UI sources, make sure to leave a link in the comments!