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!

I love the smell of nerfed Vezax August 28, 2009

We almost one-shot the hard mode last night. Granted, we had quite a bit of practice with this hard mode trying to down it pre-3.2. But it is clear that this hard mode has been trivialized. There is now a lot of room for error. We even had a Searing Flames go off AFTER the Animus was dead, and we still killed the boss.
 
Afterwards, I realized that I didn’t have my combat logger enabled. Well, fuck me.
 
We decided to try first with a two healer comp healing in shifts down to 50% mana and then together for Animus and beyond:

• MT: prot paladin;
• healers: holy priest (yes, holy), resto shaman;
• melee DPS: blood DK, ret paladin x 2;
• ranged DPS 1 (Vezax right): destro lock, affliction lock;
• ranged DPS 2 (Vezax left): SV hunter, balance druid.

We decided to use two ranged groups to control the amount of healing done by MotF (since we didn’t have a heal block effect). It ended up working just fine. We got Vezax down to about 1 million HP before the Animus spawned.
 
After Vezax was downed (grats to Kristos on Aesuga–he will be mine as well, someday!), we were going to give Yogg-3 a taste when we ran into The Great Comcast Kerfuffle. That killed our raid and we split up for the rest of the night.
 
Hopefully we’ll see some Freya+3 and hard Mimi action next week

Where is Pookies?! August 26, 2009

Whoa! Yes, I have been MIA for a month. A couple of things have happened.
 
First of all, Trusty Rusty (my laptop from when I was still in school) finally freaked out and shut down–may he rest in piece. I am now using a computer my dad built sometime last year that has more up-to-date specs and (for some odd reason) an NVIDIA Geforce video card. I don’t ask questions. For the first time ever I have seen Dalaran while flying over Crusader’s Pinnacle. For the first time ever I have seen the Crystalsong Forest floor immediately after leaving Krasus’ Landing to search for Crystalsong Carrots. For the first time ever I have been able to see past the first set of pillar towers in Ulduar from Expedition Base Camp. I could go on, but I think you get the picture: my old computer was a real piece of shit.
 
So on top of my computer completely crapping out, I was also on vacation for most of August. I was gone for two weeks trying to help my mom settle into her new apartment in Hong Kong. While I was there we took a side trip to Beijing, which was a blast (as I had never been).
 

 
Ta-da! Here we’ve got my mom and I standing in front of a section of the Great Wall of China that we later climbed up.

 
But now I am here, back at the office. I resumed my officer duties on Monday when I got my first taste of the new 5-man TotC dungeon, and last night I was introduced to the first three bosses of the 10-man TotC raid before we killed Salt ‘n’ Pepa for the first time (and nabbed that achievement somewhat inadvertently and with only 9 raiders, TYVM).
 
It’s good to be back. We are still focusing the rest of our raid week on clearing Ulduar after all of the bosses in 10-man TotC have been downed, so hopefully we’ll have some new hard modes down soon. Especially since I read in Averna’s comments that they nerfed Freya in 3.2 …

Ho hum … July 23, 2009

All boring on the raiding front. We have been running into summeritis, of course. We’ve had a couple of canceled raids and a couple of nights spent doing PVP or T7 raid achievements that we missed.
 
We’re trying to clean up some of the easier GotUR meta achievements, so we’ve gotten Stokin’ the Furnace (parse here!) and Crazy Cat Lady (I wasn’t running WOL, oops) in the past two weeks.
 
For Crazy Cat Lady our two healers said they had a very challenging time, but we they did manage to help us one-shot it. We’ve read about a lot of convoluted strategies that involve tanking the Sanctum Sentries off to the sides while the raid stands in the middle, or tanking the Sanctum Sentries out of LOS, etc. What we did was simply pull Auriaya as normal while stacking behind the post and then burn her down while ignoring all of the cats. The only AOE that was allowed was tank AOE for threat gen. I actually don’t think I saw any Savage Pounces go off, although I may have missed it if it did happen.
 
Due to attendance we have having a lot of trouble replicating our FL+4 kill in 10-man. Hard modes for XT, Hodir, Thorim, and AOI are all on farm. Due to attendance (again) we haven’t been able to work on Vezax in a while, so I’m worried about any progress lost there. We’ll see what happens with this raid week as it draws to a close next Monday.

Orbit-uary! July 8, 2009

EoTS downed FL+4 in 10-man yesterday after trying two different FL+3 configurations for the previous two weeks (one with Freya as the third tower and one with Hodir as the third tower).

A lot of 10-man FL+4 discussions stress that you will depend on a bit of RNG love in order to get this down. I think this is true. Demos getting chased can just be bad news bears and Pyrite stacks may fall off depending on what else is going on around the Demo at the time. If a Demo gets chased, drops his stacks, and then the next Shutdown doesn’t get delayed—well, you get the idea. There is no way in hell that your Chopper will live to see an extra Shutdown, not to mention that the other vehicles are also breaking down by this point in the game.

The entire team has to reduce the number of mistakes made so that when everything lines up you take that bitch down without any of that other stuff that can go wrong actually going wrong.

We used the typical 2 Siege Engine/2 Demo/1 Chopper strategy with one rotating Demo. We camped the middle of the room.

Our major problems throughout the early attempts were our Demos going down before the second Shutdown because of add damage. We tightened up our positioning so that everyone had quicker access to lit Tar. Being more central also meant that Seige Engines and their gunners were more able to assist with damaging the adds.

On one fateful attempt (I think it was #13 or #14 …), everyone did their jobs and it just clicked.

Orbit-uary … bitch!

Yup, I still died. That chopper is just so fragile, and the iLvl on my gear isn’t great. I could have taken less damage from FL as well—apparently I got hit by Flame Vents 29 times! I was just trying to stay close to the middle to lay down Tar in our add pwning area, but I guess I have to try harder to stay out of Flame Vents range next time. And there will be a next time.

Parse here.

(BTW, if anyone has any idea how to graph vehicle damage in WOL, I would appreciate that information greatly. I can’t seem to figure it out or search it on the interwebz.)

We have what it takes June 23, 2009

Last night I had one goal for our raid: Steelbreaker. We had General Vag, Yoggsies, and AOI left up, so we had some hustling to do.

We did some attempts on Vag’s hard mode and identified some of our weaknesses. Everything goes relatively well until we get to the Animus. Then healing on the tank gets a little hairy. Using our healing-in-shifts strategy, only two healers have mana at this point in the game, and only one of them should be using it. We didn’t get the Animus down even once last night, although we got very close on one attempt before killing Vag on normal mode to move on.

We had to teach one of our melee DPS the Yogg-Saron fight, but by his third time in the portals he was a tentacle pro and we got Yogg down.

Steelbreaker actually only took us a couple of tries. A paladin tanking Steelbreaker meant he could Cleanse all of his own Fusion Punch debuffs. Our priest insisted that he could Dispel and heal without a problem, but since our paladin’s threat was not an issue it made sense to give our priest the GCDs.

Our kill order was Molgeim -> Brundir -> Steelbreaker.

During Molgeim we had our enhancement shaman (our only reliable interrupt) watching Brundir full time to interrupt as much Chain Lightning as possible and call out Overcharge (which our DBMs were not catching for some reason).

Brundir was a straight burn with an emphasis on interrupts by our enhancement shaman and DK tank. Overcharge was still an issue for melee, but by this point ranged had no reason to step into range and did not have to move.

By the time we got to Steelbreaker we asked everyone to stack up as tight as possible (for AOE heals) and DPS the shit out of Steelbreaker. Heroism was popped right away (I believe I summoned my trees in time …). We did not have a heal block, but this was not an issue in the least. DPS was more than enough to bring Steelbreaker under 35% before the first tank kicked the bucket, and from that point it was a matter of managing the second tank’s health until Steelbreaker died.

We worked less on Steelbreaker than we did on Molgeim. Our experience here pretty much confirms that Molgeim is more dependent on raid coordination and composition (EoTS did it without a mage FYI), whereas Steelbreaker is a DPS race that seems to be tuned so that even guilds who are rockin’ the 213/219 can complete it.

Full parse here. Steelbreaker only here.

Composition:

• prot paladin (Steelbreaker)
• blood DK (Molgeim + Brundir)
• holy priest (Steelbreaker tank), resto shaman (Molgeim/Brundir tank)
• survival hunter, ret paladin, enhancement shaman
• balance druid, shadow priest, destro lock

Have you got what it takes to break Steelbreaker before he breaks you? June 22, 2009

They say that Steelbreaker is a mad DPS race. But just how mad is it? I tried to find numbers for normal mode online, but nothing came up. So while I’m sure that someone has considered this already, here’s my rendition of the calculations.

Tank damage and Overwhelming Power

First, let’s talk about how we’re going to factor tank damage into the equation. Estimates for tank damage in a fight usually range from 0.4 to 0.5 of a DPS. That’s all well and good, but how do we factor Overwhelming Power into the equation?

Well, let’s look at the tooltip for Overwhelming Power first to see what it even does.

Overwhelming Power
60 yd range
Instant
The target becomes overwhelmed with power increasing damage done by 200% and causes a meltdown after 1 minute

You have to look closely at the wording here to determine that whoever is under the effect of Overwhelming Power is dealing three times normal damage. (That’s right. The target has his damage increased by 200% as opposed to dealing 200% damage.)

The math here is important. We’ll use some simple calculations involving fractions to determine just exactly how many effective tanks we have (in terms of tank damage dealt) for P3 in two different scenarios.

The first scenario is a two minute P3. In this scenario, your first tank picks up Steelbreaker and tanks him for one minute with Overwhelming Power before running off and exploding. Near the end of the first minute, the second tank taunts Steelbreaker to give the first tank time to get away and gains the debuff, tanking Steelbreaker for the second minute. For my calculations, I am assuming that we had a Soulstone or battle rez available for the first tank and that the first tank comes back to DPS immediately.

So for the first scenario, we have:

1) tank 1 dealing triple damage for the first half of the phase and then dealing normal damage for the second half, and
2) tank 2 dealing normal damage for the first half of the phase and then dealing triple damage for the second half.

If we take the damage of a tank to be T, then:

1) (3* T * 1/2 + T * 1/2) for tank 1, and
2) (T * 1/2 + 3 * T * 1/2) for tank 2.

Combining these two equations yields a total of 4T damage from our tanks in the scenario of a two minute P3. Note that if you do not have any kind of combat rez available in your raid, then you will have to make do with less 1/2T (total of 3.5T tank damage). Now, this calculation is very intuitive. Of course if you have a tank doing triple damage for each half of the fight while the other does normal damage, your total tank damage will be four times base tank damage. However, hear me out.

There is a second scenario that requires the use of a combat rez. The first tank gets up immediately, rejoins the fight, and then tanks Steelbreaker again after the second tank dies. In this case, we don’t assume the presence of a second combat rez to bring up the second tank after he dies. Also, the fight now lasts up to three minutes instead of two.

The calculation is a straight-forward extension of the one already done for the two minute P3 scenario. The result is 11T/3 (7T/3 from the first tank and 4T/3 from the second). This means that we have T/3 less contribution to damage on the boss, but because of the extra minute of fight time the DPS requirement from the rest of the raid is far more lax.

Steelbreaker’s health

Steelbreaker begins the phase healed up to full health. In normal mode, this is 3 000 000 hit points.

One thing that we can not ignore is that every time someone dies—which includes deaths by Overwhelming Power’s Meltdown—Steelbreaker will be healed by 15% of his maximum health. Ouch. The heal-blocking effects of Mortal Strike, Wound Poison, and Aimed Shot work here, meaning that the healing on Steelbreaker can be reduced to 7.5% per death.

The calculation here is simple. Take Steelbreaker’s base hit points, count up the number of tanks you expect to die (1 or 2), and then add 15% or 7.5% to Steelbreaker’s base hit points for each death depending on whether or not you’ll have Mortal Strike, Wound Poison, or Aimed Shot in your raid.

For reference (this is also a very straight-forward calculation), the value of heal-blocking in this phase is 1875 DPS for a 2 minute fight and 2500 DPS for a 3 minute fight. These numbers will vary slightly (increase) as you shave seconds off your kill time from the minute milestones.

Finally, some answers

From total health comes total required raid DPS, and with our tank-DPS equivalents we are ready to see some DPS numbers.

In order to determine how much DPS each DPSer in the raid must put out, we simply divide Steelbreaker’s total health by the fight time (in seconds!) and then further divide that result by the number of effective DPS we have available.

For my raid, I expect that we will run 2 healers (6 DPS) and have the DPS to finish Steelbreaker off in two minutes. I will assume that we do have some kind of heal-block in the raid. I am also going to assume that each tank can do 40% of the DPS of a DPS raid member. First, we calculate the DPS contribution from the tanks:

DPS(tanks) = 4T = 4 * 0.4 = 1.6.

Now, we can figure out how much DPS we need for one DPS raid member to put out:

DPS(each) = Steelbreaker’s total hit points (as damage) / fight time (in seconds) / no. of DPS available;
DPS(each) = 3 225 000 damage / 120 s / (6 + 1.6) DPS;
DPS(each) = 3 635 DPS per DPS.

So the DPS required for this hard mode actually isn’t that high and should be easily achievable by all classes even in T7 quality gear. Remember the assumption I made about tanks. Each tank is expected to help out with 40% of the DPS of a DPS raid member. This works out to 1 454 DPS in this scenario (before the effect of Overwhelming Power is applied), which is a pretty conservative number when you consider what most tanks in this content are capable of putting out.

Refer to the chart below for an extension of this calculation to the different possible scenarios.

Limitations

Remember that we have made some oversimplifications, particularly in the seconds that we lose or gain here and there from tank swapping and the delay before the first Overwhelming Power is cast after the second Assembly member dies. Who knows, this may all balance out. Or maybe the errors are being compounded. Does it matter? Who wants to do the sensitivity test on the variable T? Not me.

Also, these calculations do not take into account the proficiency of your healer-tank team in keeping the tanks alive through Fusion Punch and the raid alive through the now relatively potent Steelbreaker AOE (2 250 damage every 3 seconds to each member of the raid). Cooldown coordination will probably be required by the time your second tank is tanking.

Here we go again with the fires June 21, 2009

Some of you longer-time readers may remember Phaelia’s slightly distressed post last year decrying some of us resto druids for participating in the Midsummer Fire Festival. She may be happy to know that, due to an oversight, we are unable to honour or desecrate any fires we honoured or desecrated last year. At least, for the time being. Expect this to be fixed so that people who honoured and desecrated fires last year and didn’t spend their blossoms on the Midsummer Garb are actually able get the Burning Hot Pole Dance achievement. Refer to this thread for updates.

If the Blizzard gods decide to let us re-honour and re-desecrate the fires from last year (or if you just haven’t done it yet), check out this guide for visiting all of the Azeroth fires (for Alliance only–sorry folks). Meanwhile, locations for Northrend fires are now available on WoWWiki and should give us something to do.

Sarth “3D” June 19, 2009

Last night we decided to take a short break from our regularly scheduled Ulduar romp and went to try and cheese Sarth 3D. Now, this strategy typically relies on heavy raid stacking in order to burn Sarth down before Shadron lands. Most strats say, “Use all melee.” We did not. Our build:

• pally main tank
• shaman healer
• physical DPS: shaman, paladin, rogue, hunter
• caster DPS: 2x lock, priest, druid

Not ideal at all. We did a bit of experimentation with when we used Heroism and asking our shadow priest to go discipline for Power Infusion and Pain Suppression.

We found that Heroism used immediately following the first wave gave us the most bang for our buck because burning through the lower part of Sarth’s health was more important than burning through his health when he was almost at full health. After the first wave we would typically be under 70% health.

Although we had more longevity when our shadow priest respecced to discipline because of the extra heals and Pain Suppression, we found that we didn’t have the DPS we needed even with Power Infusion. Shadron would join the fight, and Sartharion would go immune to all damage.

In the end we found that with our mixed group and the DPS we were pulling, a kill would hinge completely on a bit of RNG love in the form of ranged not having to move for lava (especially our healer for the second lava wave).

We got the kill. Congratulations to Monedra on winning the Reins of the Black Drake. Here is a parse from the fight. Our ret paladin’s DPS is so low because he was using a HoS+DS combo towards the end of the fight.