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.

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!)

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.

We finally killed Ragnaros last night. Here’s my video of the fight.

If you watched the 3% wipe video I posted last week, you’ll notice that this pull is messier. (For one thing, I fat-fingered the start-recording shortcut and missed the first few seconds of the fight.) We lost our bear tank in phase 3 when he stood in a meteor landing spot… not for the first time that night. He’d wandered into the fire zone on an earlier pull, victim of tunnel vision. Fortunately I was right there and I had a brez and we got through the rest of it. The key for us was learning how to handle meteors.

As our hunter Serix said, that was the slowest 10% of a boss’s health ever.

This kill followed a miserable time on Alysrazor, who is the boss that gives us the most trouble in the tier. Our holy pally & I usually two-heal that fight. This week he’s on vacation, so I was paired up with our new discipline/holy priest. She was completely new to the fight and there’s a learning curve there. You have to move properly to stay out of fire & think about how you’re going to handle the Gushing Wound debuff on your tank. And then you need to blast out the AOE healing on that initial phase in the cycle. If you ask me, Alys is the healing fight in T12, not Baleroc. Alys is the one that makes me think & plan & plot. And our disc priest had a hard time of it.

The thing I noticed that was by accident, we’d given her the tank who was taking the most damage (our warrior was taking noticeably more than our bear and our pally when they tank it) and we’d assigned the pair of them to the side of the zone with the annoying terrain. So she was new to the fight, healing a tough assignment, and learning to move on ground that made it difficult to move. Now I know this and can plan better in the future, but it made for a series of frustrating wipes. And I’m not yet perfect on that fight and can lose my own tank target (doesn’t help when he stands in fire again cough).

Upshot: We wiped more on Alys this week than on Ragnaros. Final result: Leafie now has the Eye of Blazing Power. However, I’m not sure I like it. I think the internal cool down is a bit long. It’s providing about 3% of my healing, judging from last night’s logs, and I’m not hurting for mana just now, so I’ll continue using it along with Jaws of Defeat. I need to investigate the Molten Front trinkets, now that I almost have access to everything there.

Last night’s 3% wipe on Ragnaros. A heartbreaking end to what had been a perfect attempt until the 3rd phase.

Notice that what does us in the 3rd phase is simple mistakes. People kiting meteors when they should just be knocking them back. Knocking them back too soon. Knocking them back in the wrong direction. Backing off instead of holding the line and knocking them back. This happens because of inexperience in the phase. It takes 7 minutes at least to get there, and sometimes you don’t get there because somebody makes a mistake in the first two phases. Or the transition phases— those are particularly unforgiving stages of the fight.

There’s an editing error in the first caption in the version of the movie YouTube has. It should read “first transition” instead of “first meteor”.

Soundtrack is Cell, “Hanging Masses”.

Majordomo dies for the first time! Here are my notes on how we did it. I will assume that you’ve read the basics about the fight.

The fight is about controlling how often and when Staghelm switches forms. He has two major forms: scorpion (does a high-damage aoe cleave; in this form when the raid is clumped up) and cat (leaps on random targets leaving a flame pancake; in this form when the raid is spread out). The attacks come faster every time he repeats them, so you will eventually be forced to make him shift. Every third swap he does a special that depends on which form he’s switching to. The scorpion -> cat special is flame orbs & it’s particularly difficult to handle. Your goal, therefore, is to make that special happen last, and ideally to have the boss die while he’s still in that phase.

You’ll want strong AOE healing. Our team was holy pally, resto druid, resto shaman. It was significantly harder on the attempts where we had a disco priest instead of the shammy.

Scorpion first. Pop Heroism/BL/TW almost immediately, because this is your best shot at uninterrupted DPS. Take 8 cleaves. Have a plan for raid cooldowns on the last two, which will come very fast.

Cat form second. Spread out fast before healing up after the 8th cleave. Have the raid position itself in a circle around where the boss is tanked. Take 7 leaps. The problem with trying to push an 8th is that the 9th leap might come while you’re still trying to move into the center. It might happen even after 7, so move in as soon as you see him start the leap.

The next transformation will proc the special. People should run out, explode, and run back in again as quickly as possible. Don’t run out early. Nine people should be enough to soak the cleaves; 8 is dicy. Try to push it to 8 cleaves again if you have the cooldowns to heal it. 7 cleaves is fine.

Repeat until he procs the scorpion -> cat special. Have a plan for pairing up & swapping off on the flame orbs. At least 1 healer will need to help on this. Healing can get painful. Our plan was to have him die in this phase if possible, and if not force the transformation to scorpion as soon as the orbs went down.

We didn’t quite manage this, as you can see. We started falling apart a bit when the flame orbs came out. We got through the phase, however, and he died only a few seconds into scorpion form.

Baleroc first kill. It was a wipe in progress, as you can see. A healer mis-cast a heal on a DPS soaking torment stacks. We lost the dps, and the wipe commenced. We got him down though. If you look closely at the end, you can see that I gave up on healing and just started moonfiring & wrathing the boss.

We killed a spider last night! Here’s our Beth’thilac kill video. We worked out tactics for this fight quickly then had some execution messups. Even the kill was a little messy. Despite that, this is one of the easier fights in the what’s feeling like a more forgiving T12.

We repeated the Shannox kill last night, giving our new tank recruit a solid tryout. Tonight we’ll try Baleroc. Rhyolith will be Thursday’s kill, most likely, because it’s two-healable and I’ll be out of town. Annual trip to Vegas with friends. Heh. I’ll enjoy the break.

I’ve been far too busy playing the game to blog about it much. The new dailies are chewing up my time, particularly because I was trying to do them on 3 characters for a while. That was 1 too many. I’ve cut back to just doing them on Leafie and Aegidius, who are my mains on each faction.

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.