Posts tagged raiding

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.

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.

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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.

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.

Why is WOW raiding less fun now?

Liore on why BC-era raiding and Ulduar were more fun for her than recent raids have been. Partly it’s the progression model changing (the ruthless dumping of any content that isn’t the current tier into irrelevancy) and partly it’s tedious heroic modes (everyone but Blizzard agrees that Ulduar’s model was way more fun & interesting).

Two raids that always stand out for people: Karazhan and Ulduar. Why? What have they got that all the other raids don’t? What did the BC-era progression model have that worked?

Lord Rhyolith kill video!

We got the kill the first time we drove him into phase 2, which happened the instant we worked out the right tactics for phase 1. We were all surprised by the transition, to be honest. But it’ll be an easily repeatable kill. We didn’t do very well at avoiding avoidable damage, but so long as the volcanos were stomped quickly it was healable (we two-healed it). This fight is completely about the steering & the stomping. Having our rogue switch from assassination (lots of bleed & poison damage) to combat (lower dps overall, but instant on/off) was exactly what we needed to get perfect control of the boss’s steering.

Vid from our first Shannox kill! Well, perforce it was our first, since this is the first lockout of T12. Tonight we take a look at Lord Rhyolith and see if we can drive.

My view of the fight was probably not as much fun as the view of somebody chasing a dog around. I was healing the tank who held the boss. One thing you can see from this vid is how he brings the boss in toward the main raid for the spear toss, then moves him away again to make the dog fetch take even longer. We fought him on the plain to the right of the entrance. We marched down the hill & cleared everything to the right, then kept clearing until the boss was summoned.

You’ll also note that I was gibbed by face rage early in the fight. I was sure it was going to be a wipe at that point, but I hadn’t used my Innervate so I had enough mana to be effective after the brez.

Soundtrack is Solar Fields, “Kick Back”, from EarthShine.

Our Valiona & Theralion heroic kill video. Penguins ftw!

Valiona & Theralion heroic are down, leaving us at a likely 6/13 for the release of tier 12. The screenshot isn’t our killshot, but instead it shows us assembling our army of killer penguins before we charged in. We spent two nights working on the “one Subtlety rogue in the Twilight Zone” tactic, since we have a rogue and he was willing to respec Subtlety to try it. Our best attempts were mid-30%. Too much RNG: he’d be doing great then take a bomb to the face. If he died, it was a wipe. If he popped out for healing and had to spend anything more than 30 seconds out of the TZ, it was a wipe. We ultimately succeeded with the usual 10-person raid tactic of sending 1 healer + 2 dps (preferably ranged) down in shifts. This put a huge burden on the 2 healers remaining topside to keep the raid up. Mind you, healing in the twilight wasn’t a cakewalk either. It took constant mana spew to keep people alive. I sort of enjoyed how difficult it was to move around in there, though. I might need mental health assistance for feeling that way, I realize. It took a bunch of wipes for us to stabilize everything topside, learn to survive in the twilight, and then put together a solid attempt in which nobody died to mistakes. Log parse for the kill, maddeningly incomplete because it’s missing whatever was happening in the zone I wasn’t in. I have a kill vid, too, that I’ll upload later today. That’s more for my guild’s analysis, though.

Valiona & Theralion heroic are down, leaving us at a likely 6/13 for the release of tier 12. The screenshot isn’t our killshot, but instead it shows us assembling our army of killer penguins before we charged in.

We spent two nights working on the “one Subtlety rogue in the Twilight Zone” tactic, since we have a rogue and he was willing to respec Subtlety to try it. Our best attempts were mid-30%. Too much RNG: he’d be doing great then take a bomb to the face. If he died, it was a wipe. If he popped out for healing and had to spend anything more than 30 seconds out of the TZ, it was a wipe.

We ultimately succeeded with the usual 10-person raid tactic of sending 1 healer + 2 dps (preferably ranged) down in shifts. This put a huge burden on the 2 healers remaining topside to keep the raid up. Mind you, healing in the twilight wasn’t a cakewalk either. It took constant mana spew to keep people alive. I sort of enjoyed how difficult it was to move around in there, though. I might need mental health assistance for feeling that way, I realize.

It took a bunch of wipes for us to stabilize everything topside, learn to survive in the twilight, and then put together a solid attempt in which nobody died to mistakes. Log parse for the kill, maddeningly incomplete because it’s missing whatever was happening in the zone I wasn’t in. I have a kill vid, too, that I’ll upload later today. That’s more for my guild’s analysis, though.

Storm vs Nefarian. Gets a little wild near the end, resulting in our messiest kill ever.

Fun stuff, this making movies of kills thing. I’d like to see another point of view of the fights I’m in, just to understand the fights better.

Storm Medivh-US versus Magmaw-H10. Our second kill, and sadly not the vid where Ganima goes off the ledge behind Magmaw. This vid has my user interface so you can watch how I heal and second-guess my decisions. I second-guess myself every time I watch this.

Soundtrack is Cusp, “Drone Um Futurisma”.