Not really that trying… nor grand…

What do you do when your guild can’t down 25-man hard modes?

You do what everyone else does and take your 10 best into 10-man hard modes. Duh.

So what do you do when you know your raid dips isn’t that great?

You cut tanks and healers down to the bare minimum. Duh.

Welcome to my favorite past time: two healing hard modes and pulling my hair out while I’m doing it.

Okay, I’ll admit that I find it much more exciting to do hard modes. I’m of the school of players that believes raids need to be more challenging to be fun. Hard mode is almost there – almost. The ones I’ve tried anyway. Here is what I picked up from the first 3 fights in ToGC(10).

Northrend Beasts

Two-healing Gormok leaves your group subject to a lot of luck. It will leave you with the DPS to burn through each phase before the next beast comes out but if you get an unlucky chain of Snobolds on a healer on Gormok, pray to your lucky stars that your other healer can keep both tanks up, with Impale stacking up on 1 and 3 stacks on the other. If you’ve got good DPS who are aware and hop on the Snobolds as soon as they come out, Gormok isn’t too hard. Having 6 DPS instead of 5 will let you get out of Gormok with some downtime before the Jormungar. Keep your ranged spread out so that the fire only hits 1 person at a time. When the Snobolds started flying, ranged DPS were responsible to running towards melee (and they usually ended up meeting halfway) while healers stood where they were and melee DPS ran to them instead. It helps to have a lot of instant cast heals for this phase! Transition between Gormok and the Two Jormungar is a good place to blow Hymn of Hope.

I found the worms to be much easier.  We had each tank positioned on opposite sides of the door where the bosses enter the arena. What we actually did was burn down Acidmaw first, then hop on Dreadscale and heal through the enrage. If you want the achievement, flip flop on the worms instead depending on which one is above ground. Our Acidmaw tank didn’t kite him to avoid the poison clouds. Instead, he kept Acidmaw stationary and rotated around him. Whoever had Burning Bile was assigned to run towards the people who were poisoned. Keep the middle clear for people to run through it to the tanks when needed. Healers should stay centered but off to the sides. Make sure to stay far enough away to avoid the tail swipe! Once Acidmaw goes down, pop tank-saving CDs until Dreadscale is dead (it seems like aggressive healing is enough to keep your tank up but hey, use it if you’ve got it). Keep the raid spread out until Burning Bile fades from everyone.

Icehowl, at this point, feels like a vacation. Blow your Shadowfiend if you need it. He really doesn’t hit that hard and there isn’t a lot of raid damage. All ranged should spread out around him in a circle. Both healers should stand far enough away from each other (on opposite sides of Icehowl for good measure) to avoid getting caught in Arctic Breath at the same time! Tank healing is light (compared to Gormok) so you might have time to bubble those low on health or any squishies prior to his Whirl. If you’re not the target of his Trample after the stun, you’ve got plenty of time to head to the middle and start throwing out some PoH to get the raid back up. If you are the target, run run run! If someone gets hit by the Trample, it is possible to heal through the resulting enrage. Don’t panic! (And an Ulduar-25 geared tank with 10-man raid buffs can live through a Trample but needs to be healed up fast to take aggro.) Since Icehowl’s Trample was hotfixed, no one should be getting hit anymore so phase 3 should be easy-peasy.

Lord Jaraxxus

Some things to remember:
- Kill the portals and the volcanoes ASAP!
- Off-tank Mistresses and Infernos until portal/volcano dies.
- Be aware of Mistress’ Kiss so you don’t lock yourself out of healing.

Jaraxxus himself doesn’t hit the tanks that hard but he’ll wreak havoc if the stacks of his buff aren’t dispelled/purged/spellstolen before he does a Chain Lightning or if a Fel Fireball gets off (those need to be interrupted). He’s tanked where he spawns and your entire raid should be spread out in a circle around him to avoid chaining the Chain Lightning.

The Mistress’ Spinning Pain Spike also hits for a lot more. Your average clothie will come out of it with about 15% hp left and will most likely die if hp wasn’t full before the spike. You should only let 2 Mistresses out of the portal at most. If you’ve got Mistress’ Kiss on you, cast a Mind Blast so it locks you out of using shadow magic.

The Infernos do the same AOE they always do when they land (but for more damage) so make sure everyone runs out of them. Once again, it’s probably your best bet to have both healers stand opposite of each other. If one’s incapacitated or prevented from healing for any reason, there’s a greater chance the other healer can keep going.

We had those with Legion Flame run out of the group and diagonally towards the wall behind the healer on the side closest to them. This helps to keep them in range of heals until the debuff wears off. Remind those with Incinerate Flesh to stay in place (we had DPS confused on which debuff they had and running for the wrong one… ick). Generally the rule of thumb was both healers should heal the player with Incinerate Flesh if they can afford the time. Since Jaraxxus doesn’t melee on tanks for that hard and if Fel Fireball interrupts are on the ball, you should be fine ignoring other people at this point. Rinse and repeat through adds and the fight’s actually pretty easy.

Faction Champions

I don’t have any insight for this. The end.

Heh, just kidding! Depending on the comp you get, this fight can be a HUGE pain. In general, as a priest, you  should be Mass Dispelling, fearing, and healing. We repeat the normal strat we use where we burn down the healers. Make sure to Mass Dispel Bloodlust/Heroism and pally bubbles! This means you need to stay within a reasonable range of the NPCs.

I had to do a lot of melee kiting because Mass Dispelling draws a lot of aggro. I think this was probably the first time that I had Fade on cooldown for the entirety of a fight.

Our rogue would Sap one of the plate DPS and our DK would Death Grip out our first-to-kill target. CC is assigned accordingly and make use of swapping diminishing returns.

General Pointers:
- Fade, fade, fade!
- Fear, fear, fear!
- If you have the tree with a warlock in your raid, tell them to alternate Banish and Fear.
- If you have a mage and druid in the raid, they can alternate Polymorph/Cyclone/Entangling Roots on any melee DPS running loose.
- Use any snares (Earthbind Totem, Frost Trap, Piercing Howl, Hamstring) to slow loose adds down.
- Use Psychic Scream on every cooldown (just make sure you’re not running into the middle of the mobs when if a warrior/ret pally is Bladestorming/Divine Storming/etc).
- Use your Pain Suppression, PW:S, and PoM freely.
- Use Dispel Magic to dispel any DoTs (the spriest’s SW:P ticks for 4-5k!).  Just watch out for Unstable Affliction – I usually let that one tick off and just heal through it instead.
- Speccing into Desperate Prayer (if you haven’t) will probably save your life.
- Call out for a Hand of Protection if you’ve got a pally in the group.
- Stay out of Hellfire. This will kill any melee pretty quickly if they’re slow to react.
- No, PvP gear/spec don’t help.

We gave Twin Val’kyr a shot with 2 healers but the orbs and constant AOE proved to be too beastly. The next time the group went back in. I decided we needed 3 healers for that one but I wasn’t there for the kill. The group also gave Anub’arak a try but I heard that was really difficult too. :(

I’ll have more updates when I get some experience on the last 2 fights. Happy raiding until then!

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.

(>.>)

(<.<)

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!!!!!

Healing Team Makeover

Pro:

I addressed the issue of the summer churn a few weeks ago and so far, our roster hasn’t shrunk to the point where we can’t get raids off the ground.

Con:

Our veteran raiders are becoming inconsistent while the new recruits who are beginning to take their place just don’t cut it. And frankly, they probably won’t for a while, if they ever get there.

Pro:

We picked up 2 new healers in the last few weeks – 1 holy pally and 1 disc priest.

Con:

And from the looks of it, we’ve got quite a ways to go.

Pro:

It’s better than rebuilding a raiding guild for the second time.

Con:

It’s probably going to take just as long…

Quick Update

Quick update today – the guild’s been making some progress in 25-man Ulduar this week, POST GINORMOUS LOLNERFS, yay. Downed Loot Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn, and the Assembly of Iron. We got Auriaya down to around 30% last night before the raid ending time so it’s too bad that today is Tuesday. Oh well, looking forward to more nerfs!

We got our first Fragment of Val’anyr. Or rather, I got it. :D

My own progression: 1/30.  I’m never going to get this thing.

/sigh

Finally respecced to PvP Disc too (running 60/11) and going to take Arena seriously this season. I’ve been playing with the same rogue since S4 but this season, one of our guildies (DK) lost his partner (Pally – is that a surprise?) from S5 after they both made gladiator. I created a team with the DK because he wanted to try out a Disc priest but I wanted to keep playing with my original teammate so we invited the rogue too. Let’s just say this is how it went:

DK/Priest: 7 W – 15 L

His MMR rating ate my face and spit it back out in the form of 2400 rated teams where I just can’t support him. Every team we got gained single-digit points from us. FML

Rogue/Priest: 17 W – 15 L

We got more even teams with super high rated teams littered throughout. It was, in general, an easier time than playing with the DK. However, playing with the DK should help with the learning curve and hopefully, I’ll be able to improve more drastically, which in turn, will help while playing with the rogue.

Taking PvP seriously definitely helps me improve my PvE play. I just wish the reverse were true.

Achievements-wise, I am now Matron Raesa the Noble. <3

Requiring Competence Is Not Elitist

Courtesy of icanhazcheeseburger.com

Progression on Shattered Halls has always been slow, especially on the Alliance side. Guilds form and disband on a bimonthly basis, with each new guild trying to be the leader in progression. Ever since Wrath hit, these new guilds were formed by a handful of transfers who, for whatever reasons, left their old servers to start anew on our humble little home. Both guilds that tried to do this have now disbanded. One of them actually managed to revive themselves after a third guild disbanded with the same GM but that’s a story for another day.

We had a solid group of raiders for TBC progression. We got things done. And then half of them transferred off or stopped playing. For Wrath, the guild took on some new people, got them to shape up, taught them a thing or two about their classes, and we cleared all content up to 3.1.

Fast forward to heroic Ulduar.   ——————>  …………………..

We downed Flame Leviathan.

We didn’t have the DPS/coordination/heals for XT or Razorscale. So we managed to down the one boss where we didn’t actually have to play our own classes. /golfclap

The guild is good for this server, relative to other Alliance guilds on the server. But we are not good in any absolute sense at all. Our DPS is lacking, half of our healing team can’t keep up, and coordination is terrible. We are a 3D guild but that fight looks like a joke compared to the constant attention to detail that Ulduar requires for all of its boss fights.

We have DPS who say, and I quote, “Everyone’s doing over 3k DPS, we should be fine.”

Seriously? This is why we are not a good guild on an absolute basis – the majority of guilds out there had DPS doing 5-6k DPS before the DPS buff in 3.1. No, stop holding onto 3k DPS like it’s godly because it’s not. Learn to play your class. There’s no reason why anyone does less than 4k. Do we need to start min/maxing talent specs? Maybe we need to start doing that.

It was great opening up Wrath entry-level raiding content to everyone with half a brain and could button mash but it has pretty much spoiled everyone who never saw TBC or vanilla WoW end-game.

At least our 10-man group has managed to down 7 bosses this week. /sigh

This whole rant might sound elitist but it isn’t when you have to deal with this right before XT (25):

Me: I’m going to call out for people to blow Divine Hymn during Tantrum just so we can chain it.

Holy Priest: I don’t have Divine Hymn. I can’t find it in my spell book, I’m not specced for it.

Me: Have you visited the trainer to see what you could get in in the last month at all???

Him: No, I haven’t. You can replace me while I go to SW.

Me: Can one of the mages open up a portal to IF?

Him: I don’t know where the priest trainers are in IF.

Me: It’s right next to where you port in, on your right, as you face the doors. (in my head, “How the effing efff EFFF do you not know where the EFFING TRAINERS ARE?! Have you never effing EFF eff ported into IF??!?!?!?!” after the whole ordeal with him not having any of the hymns.)

Him: (after heading to IF) Okay, ready.

Me: Did you pick up the hymns?

Him: Yeah, I had three new spells to train – Divine Hymn, Hymn of Hope, and Divine Spirit.

/FACEPALM

Patch Update

I was lucky enough to be busy well into the evening on Tuesday so I only missed about half an hour of server uptime before I was able to get home and log on. Out of the choices I had for my second spec, I initially went with 2 Disc specs – 1 for PvE and 1 for PvP. Of course, I failed to realize I wouldn’t use the PvP spec until Season 6 began so I ended up respeccing to a raiding Shadow build last night for Naxx (we had more than enough healers, imagine that).

The only roadblock I had was amassing the correct glyphs, as in, there were none available on the AH and my scribe is only able to make 1 of the requisite 3 major glyphs. QQ

I ran 1 wing with PvP glyphs until a very generous guildie brought in his spriest to the raid and gave me the glyphs I needed from the stockpile he had amassed previously due to respeccing back and forth for 3D. <3

I don’t really have a good baseline for what my DPS potential was in 25-man raids in Wrath but I was able to pull about 2.3k DPS in a 10-man a few weeks ago. Last night I was doing over 3k on bosses last night on average, normalizing for fights where I had to AOE and fights that required mobility. Considering the moderate buffs made to the spec, it’s probably still pretty average for my gear (sitting in heroic/10-man epics and 3 pieces of Valorous, with pieces of my healing set to fill in the gaps). At least I’m hit capped. Bleh. I am definitely rusty at managing my rotation. I’ve come a long way since Karazhan and Gruul. And not in a good way. :(

I also forgot to shift back into Shadowform for Heigan after rezzing someone so Outfitter had switched me into my healing gear (automated changing depending on Shadowform) so my DPS was further gimped by the lack of hit rating…

What a nub.

And then the instance servers died right as we started Loatheb…

So… Who cares about addons when they’re going to break today?

Well, I’m sure everyone knows by now but in case you don’t – Patch 3.1, Secrets of Ulduar, goes live today!

I’m not really prepared and this is why:

1. I don’t know what my second spec will be. It’s either going to be PvP Disc or PvE Shadow.
2. I don’t have glyphs for my second spec. Well, that’s partly because I don’t know what it’s going to be!
3. I don’t have flasks for  Ulduar (but we’re going to be doing the 25-man raid this weekend anyway so I’m not in that big of a rush).

PvP Disc might win out because my partner for the last 2 seasons promised he’s going to take the next season more seriously so we might stop hovering in the high 1600s-low 1700s and actually do something. Enticing. But so is delicious, purple pew pew. Oh what am I going to do?! It would make dailies a lot faster, that’s for sure… And it seems like such a waste to go Disc for both specs. /cry Or I can just go holy again…

Anyway, I have the following builds and glyphs saved:

PvE Disc 57/14/0

PvP Disc 57/14/0

PvE Holy 14/57/0

PvE Shadow 14/0/57

I guess I’ll have to see how often my teammate wants to do games. At this point, I respec more often to PvP than I do to DPS and there’s really no reason to expect that to change, considering I’m definitely going to heal through progression raids. I will never be a serious DPSer in raids that count but I can be a serious PvPer while raiding so I guess I would get more use out of PvP Disc.

Now, should I go Disc or Holy to heal in raids? THE CHOICES!

I think it’s time to do another 2-parter for which pieces of T8/8.5 are worth keeping. o.O

How are you preparing for Ulduar?

Our guild is a little behind in terms of finalizing things but we’re on the move now. We’re getting our raid roster set up, designating times for pure progression runs, and have each person’s role specified. Dual specs might be coming out but we’re using that for back-up and won’t materially affect our decisions.

Our raid strategist has been on the PTR the last few weeks. He has drawn maps of the zone and written strategies up for everyone to read in advance.

Everyone seems to be working quietly in this calm before the storm to get themselves ready so we can hit the ground running.

What is everyone else doing out there?