A Tribute to Skill October 23, 2009

RAWR! Last night EoTS finally cleared TOGC with a really messy Anub kill! We were having some major issues with the healability of P3, and last night we had a couple of sub-10% wipes. Our tanks died on our kill. Our shadow priest Dispersion-tanked the adds. Our hunter Deterrence-tanked Anub. It was down to two DPS at very low health and I’m pretty sure we all thought it was a wipe when the achievements flashed up on our screen.
 

 
We managed to finish with 37 attempts left, which means we gots an extra weapon and a couple of Trophies. We managed to snag the following heroic weapons this run: Blade of the Silver Disciple for me (!!!), Reckoning for our DK tank Balion, Fordragon Blades for our hunter Karazorel, and Lothar’s Edge for our retadin Allrik.
 
It’s great to have finally downed TOGC, and the fact that we got a bunch of useful loot doesn’t hurt, either! Here’s the parse from last night. There are bits of missing data here and there because I kept on getting disconnected, but the Anub kill is there.

Finally, some progress October 16, 2009

We had not made any progress in weeks. We had been spending most of our time getting Ulduar hard modes down for people who still needed them for their GotUR metas since we were making zero progress on heroic Faction Champions.
 
Heroic Faction Champions has caused a lot of frustration in our guild. None of us could figure out why we sucked so hard at it (not even taking one of the opposing team down). Tensions were running far too high. It seemed that every new idea we tried just flopped.
 
Last night we finally got them down, and I wish I could tell you why. But I can’t. We tried to use the pet healing exploit, but even that didn’t seem to work too well. I know for a fact that our CC was shit and that our healing was not assigned. I guess you’re just bound to get it down if you try enough times.
 
Kill order: resto shaman -> healy priest -> rogue ret paladin -> lock -> balance druid
 
We definitely identified the shaman’s Healing Stream Totem has being the most dangerous thing in this fight. It was outhealing the shaman and priest’s healing combined. After killing the shaman, it was all about survival. One of our DKs swapped at that point to focus exclusively on shutting down one of the enemy melee (previous to that I believe we were simply cycling some Chains on the melee between our two DKs). We finally got it and we were happier than pigs in mud. Parse.
 
We struggled for a bit with the Val’kyr. We had melee and healers on the “inside” with one colour, while ranged were “outside” with the opposite colour trying to soak while doing DPS. That did not work. We had low DPS, people were getting hit by the little orbs anyway, and with our losses we could never get the shields down in time and the Twins would heal.
 
After four or five attempts, we decided to try a burn strategy instead (more in-line with our strategy for normal). Everyone took one colour, and we stood at the opposite-coloured portal and did our thing. On our kill we just got lucky and only had to burn down one shield.
 
We got them down. I managed to push almost 7500 HPS by using my mind-numbingly boring RJx5-WG rotation. (In 10-man since you only have two groups to worry about you can use every third RJx5 spot in the cycle to put RGs on the tanks or Nourish spam.)
 
We did get Anub about five tries and have learned how to get through P1 very reliably and set up for getting Anub to P2 in two surface phases. Now we have to perfect P2 and P3 … and hope that we can down Faction Champs again next week.

In heroic TOC, Faction Champions assist trains you! October 1, 2009

And don’t they? We still can’t seem to develop a workable strategy for getting past these guys, and it is starting to wear on our members. Part of it is that we don’t seem to ever have a great comp for controlling the enemy team. The other side of it is failure to see what we do have and therefore not using it when it could make the difference between a breakthrough and just another failure. There is simply too much emphasis on damage and not enough on damage control. Also, not being able to cast Cyclone in TOL really sucks.
 
We have been going back through Ulduar and grabbing achievements for people so they can finish their GotUR metas. We managed to down Yogg-3 a second time, which was a good feeling.
 
I picked up a Trophy of the Crusade a couple of weeks ago in a TOC-25 PUG, and I finally gathered up the 75 Emblems of Triumph I needed to turn it in for my balance helm. Just call me birdman.

Prepare for oblivion! September 22, 2009

Hebestia returned to raiding yesterday, giving us a chance at Algalon (surviving Big Bangs now!). We wiped to him for an hour before moving on to TOGC.
 
We finally managed to take Jaraxxus down after a couple of attempts. The fight just seemed to stretch on and on. Our kill was over seven minutes long.
 

 
There is definitely a lot going on this fight, and slow DPS on portals or volcanoes meant lots of Kisses/Infernals, which spelled almost-certain death for somebody. This week I felt a lot more confident in my ability to get Kiss off after last week’s kerfuffles. It’s basically 1) make sure you have a target (by frantically mashing the Tab button), and then 2) cast Starfire. A double Kiss means that I have to stick to instants for 12 seconds (or until my arcane spells come off lockdown, if I have time to pay attention to that).
 
After Jaraxxus went down we went on to give Faction Champions a bunch of tries. We got our asses handed to us. I don’t think we got our first target (priest) down even once. Oy.
 
In other news, my guildies say that 3.2.2 is going live today, so it’s patch time once I get home from the office!

I Love the Smell: A Closer Look September 17, 2009

When Hebestia told us he was going on vacation for a week or two, I thought, “Okay, cool, I’ll just heal while you’re gone.” Then I remembered what they did to poor druids (poor, overpowered druids) in the General Vezax fight in 3.2, and I thought, “… FUCK, I don’t know if I can to do this …”
 
While Hebs was away, I was partnered up with long-time healing pal and guild master Kristos, our holy priest. I turns out that I didn’t have anything to worry about.
 
Hard mode Vezax is a fight where a druid-priest combo can really shine. We strayed from our usual “healing in shifts” strategy and decided to jump in together. Communication was key. We planned to each keep a HoT up on the MT for the entire length of the fight (Renew for Kristos and Rejuv for myself), and then coordinate to fill in as necessary (during Surge of Darkness, for instance). Rejuv gives insane HPM with Idol of Awakening (which I equip for this fight) and Spark of Hope (which I always have equipped), a high HPS, and can be Swiftmended in a pinch. Because Kristos has the talent Empowered Renew and I run with the 4-T8 bonus for resto druids, we timed our casts to take advantage of the instant Renew and Rejuv ticks as much as possible.
 

 
Here you can see our HoT uptime for the fight. Due to some unlucky hits, Kristos healed up more damage than we usually encounter pre-Animus and ended up going OOM during the Animus phase and renewing Renews dropped off towards the end. Other than that, we have high Rejuv and Renew uptimes. As you can see, we precast OOC at the beginning of the fight to give us a bit of a cushion while we run (we regen before pulling). I then abandoned Regrowth until the end of the fight. The start of Regrowth uptime at the end of the fight coincides with the spawning of the Animus when the tank starts to take heavier damage consistently.
 
We tried to wait for Borzak’s health to dip to around 50% before we would hit him with nukes (exception: during Surge of Darkness). My go-to “nuke” was Swiftmend. If on cooldown, I used Nourish. I used Wild Growth a couple of times after the Animus spawned when it seemed like the Animus phase was dragging on a bit and we needed a booster, but other than that it was four spells for me. Check out the spell breakdown below, with amounts healed and overhealing percentages.
 

 
The overhealing percentages for Nourish and both of Kristos’ nukes are low (0 – 1.5%), which is a good showing. The overhealing on my Swiftmend is too high (almost 20%), which I attribute to getting a little nervous during some of the more sketchy healing moments of the fight. Our healing is graphed below. Spikes are approximately one minute apart and coincide with, you guessed it, Surges.
 

 
Even with Vezax’s sketchy healing crunches, I am really looking forward to seeing this guy again next week. It’s probably the one fight in Ulduar-10 that I would call, “A fun exercise in healing.” I wonder if Hebestia will go elemental and let me heal Vezax even after he gets back from vacation!
 
(A link to the actual World of Logs report for this Vezax kill here.)

Strict 10-man is strict: GotUR September 17, 2009

First off, a rant. GuildOx has recently implemented “strict” 10-man rankings for progression and achievement points to separate 10-man guilds from 25-man guilds who get 10-man achievements. This is a huge and awesome change. However, the requirements are rather stringent. Guilds are disqualified if any Ulduar-25 hard mode or ToC-25 (i.e., non-heroic) boss is killed by any ten of their members at any time or any five of their members simultaneously. People who join the guild have their achievements counted retroactively, so strict 10-man guilds must be careful with recruiting. Checking yesterday, EoTS was 3rd in progression in 10-man guilds on Bonechewer. Then the achievements updated and we were disqualified from strict 10-man progression because of our Beast-25 and Jaraxxus-25 kills.
 
I am disappointed. First of all, the first couple of bosses in ToC-25 are a joke as compared to even Ulduar-25 non-hard bosses. The item level of the gear that drops is also equal to gear that can be obtained in ToGC-10 and by using Emblems of Triumph. I don’t feel that having run a guild-organized PUG of ToC-25 should have disqualified us from the strict 10-man rankings on GuildOx, but that is GuildOx’s prerogative. I hope that GuildOx will reconsider its qualification criteria for strict 10-man in the future. In the mean time, EoTS has some other big issues to consider …
 

 

 

 
… do our Rusted Proto-Drakes make us look fat?
 
I’m getting ahead of myself.
 
Last night we went into Ulduar-10 and started clearing Mimi trash. As you know, our resto shaman extraordinaire Hebestia is on vacation, so it was up to our priestly GM Kristos and myself to heal through to Yoggie. We did not have high hopes for Firefighter at all. We brought in our DPS DK recruit who had never done Mimi before (see a pattern here?). We figured we’d try Firefighter once, write it off as impossible, wipe the floor with Mimi on normal, and then move on to General Vag. To our surprise, we got Firefighter on our second try. Okay. That’s good.
 
General Vezax was a pushover as usual. Our DK recruit got a nice 232 sword that no one else could use.
 
On Yogg we were making it to P3 in various stages of disrepair. Tentacles up, DPS already dead, adds one-shotting healers because the tank’s taunt was on CD … there was a lot of clusterfuckage and we just needed that one perfect attempt to get it down.
 
Fast forward to the tenth attempt of the night. We lose our hunter in P2. That’s okay, my Rebirth is off CD from its previous use and I get her up. P2 is clean and we make it to P3 with everyone alive and well. The tank picks up the first add and we get into it. The atmosphere in Vent is a tense one. Healers call for control of the situation: control the adds and don’t lose any sanity. We have almost six minutes on enrage timer, so the name of the game is survival. Healing is strangely manageable as long as adds drop fast. Our Rebirthed hunter goes insane. Our DPS kill her. Focus is back on Yogg-Saron, who is at 7% health. I go back to watching Immortal Guardians and healing. Out of nowhere, an add comes up and one-shots me. FUCK! But a split-second later the achievements flash up on my screen. EoTS downed Yogg-3 and seven of us finished our Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievements.
 
Regardless of what GuildOx has to say on the subject, I consider EoTS to be a 10-man raiding guild. If you look at our 25-man achievements, you should also find this to be the case IMO. GotUR was our holy grail, as GotUR(H) is to 25-man guilds. EoTS was server tenth on Yogg-3 (and GotUR), behind nine 25-man raiding guilds.
 

 
We are small, but we have the fight.
 

 
World of Logs report for last night here.

We made it count September 16, 2009

To my one or two faithful readers (hi mom!), please “bear” with me as I continue to wrestle with this new layout. For some reason the style sheet that governs this entire page didn’t want to put actual font point-height line breaks in between paragraphs and each post ended up looking like a wall o’ text. WordPress ignores consecutive line breaks in your post codes, so that didn’t work. I spent a good half hour searching for options before finally narrowing down on a solution in a blog comment somewhere: stick a space between two line breaks. I really should have thought of that myself.
 
Anyway, that’s fixed. So I would like to direct your attention to …
 

 

 
Yay! Finally. Yesterday we went in with our super trash clearing group (DK tank, holy priest, shadow priest, fire mage, balance druid) and owned that place up. Death and Decay, two Mind Sears, Blizzard, and Hurricane helped us rip through every trash pack like a hot knife going through butter. I got the last two achievements I needed for GotH and finally got my Red Proto-Drake.
 
We did end up letting our Ulduar raid ID reset so we could clean up the first part of the instance for those who had missed it. We cleared ToC-10 and then razed a chunk of Ulduar:
 

 
Kologarn was Disarmed, Auriaya was the Crazy Cat Lady, and we did it all without Heroism (boooo!). Shaman-less guilds, I salute you. You are all freaks. I want Hebestia back.
 
This was only the second guild downing of Freya+3, and our first go at it with two healers. With the group we had we would not have made it damage-wise with three healers, and no one else in the raid was capable of healing at Uld-10 hard mode level anyway (at least, no one who wasn’t our MT). The encounter was stressful. The absence of our third healer for this was very noticeable. I used my Innervate at around 65% mana and then at every CD afterwards, popping my potion somewhat early. By the 5th or 6th add wave I was almost completely OOM (and Kristos was close). Luckily, we managed to scrape by. I can see now how the encounter is possible with two healers (mana-wise), but the raid definitely has to be better about spreading unnecessary damage. Some people in the group are still having trouble with killing Detonating Lashers when people are low on health and during and immediately after Tremors. I don’t know how many times Kristos and I had to comment on this in Vent. Unfortunately, it is very hard for us to notice who the guilty parties are because we are too busy paying attention to other things.
 
Our goal for this week is to reach Yogg-3 again, of course. On Monday we managed to make it to P3 a couple of times, so I am hopeful that Yogg-3 will go down this week with the right group and a bunch of us will get our Rusties.

I can’t make it count September 14, 2009

I have failed to get this achievement the past two times I have tried. Make It Count and Experienced Drake Rider are the two achievements I am missing for the Glory of the Hero meta achievement after cleaning up five achievements yesterday. Make It Count always goes smoothly until Ley-Guardian Eregos. Then we wipe. Admittedly, one of those wipes was my fault as I hadn’t been in the instance for many, many months and stopped kiting a Phase Anomaly too soon. The second time we wiped because we were trying to stack the Amber Void achievement on top of Make It Count for one of our group members, and it bombed. Pro tip: don’t stack the Void achievements with Make It Count unless your group rocks the socks off of 5 Ambers.
 
Anyway, hopefully a group of guildies will be able to go into Oculus some time today or tomorrow in order to clean this up.
 
In raiding news, we did manage to down heroic Northrend Beasts last week with two healers. Then we got monsterly owned by Jaraxxus. That guy does not play nice. We have got the portal-killing down to an art, but the infernal wrangling definitely needs more cowbell.
 
We’re still waiting for a perfect group for Yogg-3, and in the mean time we may let our raid ID reset so we can farm some of the other bosses again. Yogg-3 is the last achievement that a lot of us need to get our Rusties so we are anxious to try it again … but not anxious enough to run in with a group that will guarantee that we /headdesk fruitlessly all night.
 
Pookies became a Bloodsail Admiral two weekends ago and has since been (half-heartedly) repairing his goblin rep. The fastest way to do this while maintaining Bloodsail rep is to grind non-Bloodsail pirates. I have been working the ones in Tanaris since it’s super-easy to get to Tanaris thanks to that CoT portal in Dalaran. The more efficient way to grind the rep back for those who are going for the Insane in the Membrane feat of strength is to do the repeatable quest in Dire Maul, since you have a chance to collect Librams at the same time. The trek from Moonglade to Dire Maul just isn’t worth it though, IMO!

Mimi inferno September 9, 2009

All I have to say is, “Wow.”
 
Well, actually, that’s not all I have to say, so listen up.
 
Last night we reformed our Firefighter group (after spending all of Monday wiping). We were missing two people, and we filled their spots with two of our veteran raiders who haven’t really been around for much of Ulduar and had never even done Mimiron on normal before. One of these raiders was a feral druid who was our Bomb Bot soak in P3, and the other was a high output mage.
 
We went in there and we got Mimiron down on our fourth try. It was amazing. Of course, much credit goes to the bulk of the group who had already wiped for eight hours to Firefighter and had the basics down pat, but the ability of the two new raiders to follow directions in this rather complicated encounter was nothing short of amazing.
 
Pointers:

• comp: 1 tank; 3 healers (disc. priest/shaman/druid); 3 melee; 3 ranged;
• ranged maintain a healthy spread in P2 (instead of stacking, which we found to be unmanageable) and pray for good fire spawns;
• double up cores in P3 (thanks to PlusHeal for this); and
• treat it like Council v2—don’t stand in shit and don’t die (which I suppose goes without saying, really).

Grats to Monedra on his Fusion Blade
 
Mimiron parse.
 
After killing Mimi we had a couple of people in the raid who were ready to turn in their Sigils for the Algalon quest. We quickly killed AOI on normal mode (so we could get it ticked off for our Champ achievement—we’ve been doing it with Steelbreaker last which requires a tank death). Our resto shaman and hunter were able to turn in their quests, and we spent the last hour of the raid working on this amazing fight.
 

 
… but not before we killed Vezax and got some tries in on Yogg-3! Vezax’s second kill gave us a second Aesuga, Hand of the Ardent Champion, which I picked up! Sexy, sexy, sexy:
 

 
Vezax parse.
 
And that’s it. Our resto shaman is on vacation for the next two weeks, so we may not be able to do Yogg-3. We’ll definitely give it a couple of tries to see if the extra DPS eliminates the need for a third healer in P2.

Knock Knock Knockin’ on Mimiron’s door September 4, 2009

After clearing 10N ToC and wiping to 10H Northrend Beasts all night Tuesday, we spent Wednesday clearing straight to Auriaya and then wiping to Freya+3. We kept getting behind on add waves and only reached P2 once and with the remnants of two add waves still up. But we did get a lot of practice in.
 
Last night (Thursday), we went into Ulduar and one-shotted Freya+3 (getting the Con-speed-atory achievement at the same time). We had some more burst DPS and a shit ton of practice under our belts (two full nights of wiping, one pre-nerf and one post-nerf). We used our usual 1 tank/3 healer/6 DPS strategy:

• tank: prot paladin;
• healers: holy priest, shaman, druid;
• melee: rogue (Ancient Water Spirit), retadin x2 (Stormlasher);
• ranged: SV hunter (Snaplasher), destro lock (Gift/Snaplasher), shadow priest (Gift/Snaplasher)

When the fight ended, I could feel my entire body shaking with excitement. We got the wand—grats goes to our shadow priest Getnmahbelly for winning it.
 
Parse for Freya+3 here.
 
After Freya+3 we went on to one-shot Thorim and Hodir (Belly got his Icecore Staff too!).
 
Then we tried Firefighter (Mimi hard) for the first time. We ended up trying 12 times, and actually made it to P4 once (albeit not with enough time or manpower to finish the fight!) There’s a lot I could say about this fight (we learned a lot last night), but I’ll save it for another day.
 
It’s Friday and I am ready for this weekend!