This.
On the video shown at the Blizzcon closing ceremonies. The final line of this essay is the keeper.
Firelands meta achievement mount: what we did the week after we finished off 6/7 heroic modes! We went back and did the wacky things required for Glory of the Firelands Raider and got ourselves some pretty purple birds. Not a lot of those on our server yet, I noticed. (The guilds that could have easily beaten us to it are busy with the race for heroic Rags.)
Our first kill of heroic Baleroc.
I haven’t been posting, I know! But I’m still here and still playing and still druid healing and still GM of a 10-person raiding guild. We’re now 6/7 in Firelands heroics, thanks to the nerfs. We’d have reached this stage eventually, I’m sure, but we got there almost immediately once the content got nerfed.
The vid above shows a typical first kill. Baleroc is a fun fight on heroic. It requires close coordination and communication among raid members, because the link mechanic means that the Tormented debuff gets spread around randomly. I wish I could record our Mumble conversation as well as the game footage here, just so you could hear how it worked for us.
This particular kill is easy to repeat. We’re still capable of wiping on heroic Alysrazor, but we one-shot Baleroc the week after killing him the first time. Once you get the concept, the kill is just a matter of smooth execution. So if you’re still working on Firelands heroics, give this guy a shot! He might be easier than you think.
We’ll be pulling Ragnaros on heroic this week. Nobody on our server has a heroic kill of him yet, and the top guilds have been working on him for a while now. I don’t think much of our chances. About half the raid really wants to put in the time, though, so we will be. I confess that normal-mode Ragnaros has become a bit of a snooze-fest. I say this even though we’ve been two-healing it and I’m the healer who has to scurry around keeping the raid healed up.
20% nerf to T12 normal & heroic incoming
Well huh.
Seems a little early for this, doesn’t it? The obvious conclusion is that patch 4.3 is coming in faster than we think for a patch that hasn’t showed up on the PTR at all yet. Even with the buff to legendary staff quest item drop rates, I’m not sure we’ll manage to finish one before T13 lands. And we’ve been clearing Firelands steadily. Can’t imagine what a 10-person raid who’s behind us must be feeling about their staff chances.
Seems a little early to me as a raider as well. We’ve just started digging into hard mode encounters. A couple of weeks of normal mode clears to gear up (painfully slowly in the 10s) and then our first one down fairly easily. We start work on Majordomo tonight, because our raid leader read the strats for it and got interested. Seems doable. I guess we have one week to do it before the accomplishment feels so much less interesting. I am somewhat surprised, though, because T12 normal felt fairly easy for us. Even Ragnaros went down without the kind of work we had to put into something like Yogg-Saron or Lich King.
Overall Blizzard appears to have completely screwed the pooch on pacing content release in Cataclysm. Seven long agonizing tedious months of punishing T11 interrupt fests, no nerfing, only retuning of encounters that were literally impossible as released. Several long months of running two 5-person instances over and over and over and over for badges. A new raid for three months and then nerfs to all modes. 4.3 is supposed to be the last raid of Cataclysm, but the expansion isn’t yet a year old. Let’s assume it gets released in early December, at the one-year mark. When is the next as-yet-unannounced expansion? A year from then? Will we have a whole year of T13 in a repeat of the ICC thing?
On the plus side, we’re clearing T12 in a raid night and a half… so long as we spend the first night mostly working on a new heroic. New content soon is going to be good because otherwise I’m not going to have enough to keep my raiders busy.
A typical Alysrazor normal-mode kill for us. The recording isn’t perfect but I’ve had this sitting around for a bit and now that my Internet is back to working order thought I’d upload it.
We two-heal this fight when we can. In this case, we had our holy pally (Brendiall) and our resto druid (me) healing. For this night of raiding our roster was bear tank, pally tank, 2 shadow priests (the second one is a disc priest who flipped to dps for this fight), arcane mage, hunter (marks/survival, dunno what he was for this fight), assassination rogue, fury warrior. We sent the mage and the full-time shadow priest up into the air to do barrel rolls.
I spend most of the fight chasing our bear tank around on the “easy” side of the fight area. You can see the Gushing Wound debuff on him clearly and observe my technique for handling it. The video shows me executing a clean tornado phase, doing the “dodge, chase, dodge, chase” technique. I then botch the end of the burn phase by leaving my tranquility until too late. Oops. Fortunately we didn’t actually need it.
Watching the video several times over has been great for finding other ways for me to improve my play. For instance, I’m not that great at casting on the move, even with 3 stacks of the feather buff on me. I’m still unconsciously standing and planting to cast big heals. I’ll work on that next time I heal this. (I have at times DPSed it as kitty!)
Allison Robert dares ask the hard question about 25s raiding.
Is the game outgrowing 25-man raids? Are two different raid sizes just not worth keeping around anymore?
A followup to her previous discussion of how post-Ulduar raiding hasn’t been as much fun for many people, with one possible cause being the normal/achievement/heroic triple kill need.
8 people logged in at raid time
You know what that means. Yup. We need to recruit again. We had a couple of weeks of blissful overpopulation with players on the bench at raid time. Now we’re down 2 and we nearly could not raid this week.
To compound the roster problems, I have had a very nasty Internet service degradation this week that causes packet delays of up to 5 seconds. In a raid this translates to all action freezing for several seconds then zipping forward in time very quickly. We had only 10 people logged in on Tuesday, so we ran Ulduar 25 instead of Firelands-10, on the theory that my inability to play at full capacity wouldn’t doom us. On Wednesday, somebody made an effort to log in especially to cover for me. On Thursday, that person couldn’t do it again, so we had exactly 10. And I raided.
On recruiting and guilds throwing the towel in.
I just read the above link, on the decision of a long-running guild to stop raiding. The raid leader who wrote the blog talks about all the reasons for burnout: constant recruiting, constant churn, no loyalty from players looking to hop up the progression ladder, little reward from the work done other than the ability to raid. And when you succeed and you have a full raid plus a bench in case of emergencies, you make the people who aren’t raiding miserable because they’re sitting instead of having the fun they thought they were signing up for.
I have experienced all of that, though on a much smaller scale. I haven’t put enough work into my guild to burn out like that yet. I take steps to make sure I don’t. Today, for instance, I will not even launch WOW if all goes well. Saturdays are my day entirely without the game. Well, not entirely: I am writing this blog entry. Recruiting and GM stress talk in the next post.
If Blizzard's game is full of assholes, it's Blizzard's fault.
Let’s try this theory on for size.
Alison Robert on why raiding isn't as much fun
A different approach from the last link on this topic: Allison considers how achievements and heroic modes have changed our experience of encounters. Note that she also ends up at “Ulduar’s model was the most fun”, which again, is something everybody but Blizzard seems to think.
Leafie has a fire kitty stick! This replaced the ilvl 342 blue she’d been rocking in her kitty set. (We had very bad luck with +agility weapons in T11. As in, only 2 dropped in the entire 7 months we were clearing that horrible tier. So I didn’t get one.)
We completed our third full clear of Firelands last night. We killed heroic Shannox this week for the first time, put in some time on heroic Rhyolith, and proved we can two-heal Ragnaros. I hope patch 4.3 is out sooner than the 7 months it took for 4.2 to hit us, because we seem to be mastering T12 much more quickly than we did T11.
I healed Alysrazor last night instead of doing lolcat dps on it. (To be clear: feral druids do nice DPS these days. It’s just me who’s lolkittying it up. Though partly that was because I had a blue weapon. Heh.) So I recorded a video of it. It’s the one boss we don’t have a kill vid for because I wasn’t in the raid that got the first kill. “Baby’s On Fire” is probably not an appropriate soundtrack for it, huh?
Heroic Shannox kill vid & tactics. Here are my notes on the fight.
In Shannox heroic, the dogs cannot be killed. Instead you must juggle them and minimize the damage they do while steadily DPSing Shannox down.
Crystal prison traps will all be used to trap Rageface and reset his stacks. The Shannox tank must be ready to kite the boss around to make sure she/she & the Riplimb tank drop Rip stacks regularly. If you have a rogue around, have him or her disarm immolation traps when possible, to reduce the chances Rageface will have the Wary debuff when you need to trap it.
One ranged DPS is assigned to manage Rageface. This person must be able to hit with a crit when it starts face-raging. Have a backup assigned for when this DPS gets raged. This player will also be the person most likely trapping the dog in the prisons. Right after each rage is a good moment to do it; with that timing the dog will not be raging immediately after coming out of a prison. The healers should pay extra attention to this player as well.
Choose the area you’ll be fighting in. Set up two markers. Left side and right side. Or near the hills, near the road. Whatever your landmarks, have two spots for the raid to shift back and forth between. When the dog is trapped on one side, everybody shifts to the other to maximize his travel time. Swap back. When Rageface is chasing you normally (not raging on you), kite him so he does as little damage to you as possible.
Keep doing this until the boss hits 35% or whatever it is. Pop heroism and burn while continuing to do the shuffle.
I found this fight much easier to heal than the normal mode: the tactics are all about limiting damage taken. There’s more steady tank damage and there’s some nasty burst damage from the loose dog, but the raid isn’t taking as much as it does when you kill dogs with the usual normal-mode tactics. If you find this fight too nasty to heal, it’s probably because you’re not managing the dogs well enough yet. You want to minimize the damage, not heal through it. (This insight was the key to solving the puzzle of the fight for us.)
As usual for us with heroic-mode bosses, our first kill netted a boatload of hunter loot. Our hunter felt this was fitting, since Shannox is a hunter himself.
The video soundtrack is Ulrich Schnauss, “Nobody’s Home”, from the amazing Far Away Trains Passing By.
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