I’d Rather Be Wowing!

Our 25 raid alliance is in the brink of being put to hiatus. Even with the attempt to merge with other raid group, we are still struggling to fill up the raid by pull time. This problem is aggravated with our stagnancy in Ulduar 25. Many people in the group have voiced their opinion that we are just not ready for Ulduar yet, and we could benefit from going back to Naxx. I’m not sure why the “raid management” haven’t considered that as an option. For the first time, we cancelled our Ulduar 25 raid yesterday and it will be most likely to be cancelled again this Sunday.

But if there’s a silver lining from the whole ordeal, is that we are able to put more time on our Ulduar 10 run. Though that’s also not without any problem. We are back to our healer problem as one of our healers decided to quit (temporarily) and another healer is moving to new place (which has also hinted her burnt out from healing). That leaves us with 1 reliable healer that can make it to 90% of the raid, 1 healer that can come to maybe 50% of the raid, and me. Yes, I’m back to the healing saddle again. Most of the time, we managed. But I can imagine that we really need to start recruiting healers again. Sigh.

We made several progresses in our 10 man run. This week, we managed to finally get our guild’s first kill on Deconstructor XT-002, Ignis, and, just yesterday, Kalogarn. If our 25 man raid is cancelled this coming Sunday, we plan on tackling the Iron Council. Hopefully by Monday, we can get to Auriya.

As much as I love our 25 run, I still love our 10 man run more. The sense of closeness is different in 10 man group. We open up, talk, and joke more just because we have fewer strangers in the group. We have less downtime. And because of that we can strategize more. Overall, it’s easier to identify and fix mistakes in such a small group. If getting the best gears in the game is not an issue, I would not have cared about 25 runs at all.

On Tuesday, we hatched a last minute plan to give XT-002 another try. Yesterday, on the invite time, we ended up not having the “right” people logs in, heck, we don’t even have 10 people altogether. After scrambling around, calling people to log in, resorting to whoever happened to log, we got the group together. We were planning to at least get Leviathan — to get it out of the way so we can have more time doing the “real” bosses on Monday — and our GL/RL wanted healers to practice on Razorscale. When we gave a short try on Razorscale last Monday, it was a disaster.

We ended up killing Razorscale on the 3rd pull, with clear improvement at every pull. We should be ecstatic, right? Except that we know he was nerfed, by reducing the damage of the fireball, which was clearly our biggest hurdle on Monday. Yesterday, we even got him down with mostly just 2 healers (the other healer eats Devouring Flame and died quite early during the fight). I was happy we got him, but let’s just say, not really satisfied. And yes, I was healing again yesterday on my shammy (I’m trying hard not to rant about this).

We know that we have improved from our first fight. We did more short quick heals, we tried to detect early who is being targeted by the fireball so we can anticipate healing them.  We did much better to group up yet spreading out so that every healer, though we have our assignment, can still reach everybody in the case where we need to heal someone whose assigned healer had to stop casting and move out from the fire. Our dps were so much better in getting out from the blue fire. But were they enough improvement to get him down prior to nerf? We would never know. In that sense, it’s disappointing, because the kill was not really the kill of the boss that has frustrated us, but the lite-version of it.

What should you tell yourself when you killed a post-nerf boss?

We were trying our luck on our 10 man group yesterday. One of our healers ended up unavailable so…I took my shammy Vh instead of E (although E was specced holy as well, apparently totems + heroism > holy priest ><).

We two-shotted Flame of Levi, where our first attempt was deterred with some bugginess and misfortune. We lost one of our siege engines right from the start when apparently there’s an invisible hole in the ramp, and the siege engine just plunged to its death. What a way to start a fight, right? Then, we mis-shot the turret destroyer, and didn’t have any other dps sitting as a demolisher’s passenger. I got to drive chopper this time and it was fun, although I also felt less useful. There were several times where I drop the tar on the course and then Flame decided to change target and completely missed my tar :). But overall, easy fight.

Like on Sunday, after that comes the nightmarish part of the run.

Just because, our RL decided we tried on Ignis trash. Call it revenge if you’d like. It took us 3 times before killing the Colossal dudes. We got the position right, but there were some mishap with healing and silence (on our DK’s tank). When we finally got them, turns out that we got a debuff called something like Unquenchable Fire(?), which is a dot that ticks quite a lot - so the person would need a heal - and jumps around to what it seems indefinitely. The tooltip said that we could only quelch  it in Ignis room. Yeah…that means that we have to go through the Rager guys with the debuff on us. Not.fun.to. heal. I wonder, is there a way that we can get rid of the debuff beforehand? Should we let the person with debuff died? Can you out-range the jump while still healing the person with debuff? I can’t seem to find this information anywhere.

Well, we were much successful for the trashes. Afterward, we only wiped at the last set of trash because everybody was so eager to get into the tank and forgot about running out from the Tornado. That might be thanks to the hotfix that Blizz put, to reduce the speed of the Tornado. We were also heavy on range that day.

We put most of our effort then on XT-002, though we still failed after too-many-to-count wipes. On two occassions we get to 25% only for him to enrage soon after. We shuffled some dps afterward, and we lost a range and gain a melee. Afterward, we never got that closed again. Maybe because the new dps need to adjust with our strategy, and at that point we just have way too many wipes to be patient to stupid mistakes. Additionally, the adds phase was chaotic with two ranges, and I ended up having to dps the boombots.  I am not sure whether that’s a correct strategy. Healing was hectic. I have to put everything I got while still being aware of mana, feeling frustrated, and constantly evaluating what I did wrong and how can I improve. This is what progression fight is all about.

Though we can’t still beat him yet, we did a better job in keeping people alive during Tantrums. Except when there’s still light bomb alive during Tantrums (urgh…I hate that very much). And I need to learn to…

1. Forego my chain heal a bit more when people are spread too far apart and not to constantly forgetting Riptide. I tend to panic and fill up people with quick LHW, forgetting to weave Riptide in between.

2. Know how much heal is sufficient to get someone alive out of Tantrums. He does 10% damage every 10 second, for 12 seconds. Theoritically, we just need to heal everybody, except the two tanks, at least 50% evenly throughout the tantrum, it would be okay.

3. Watching Tantrums cooldown better and get ready with a chain heal when that happens. In that matter, I need to setup my timing bar so that it is closed to the party’s healing bar.

4. Utilize my instant critable CH macro a lot more, especially at then end when we were so melee heavy.

I know that my raid group is frustrated right now. We are supposed to be able to tackle Ulduar 10 with the gears that we have. I think in a sense, DPS needs to minimize their downtime a lot more. I don’t know if I can wait until another week before giving this guy another try.

Vh’s Week

Vh is now 80! I was originally planning to keep her ele specced for a while just because she has more chance in running heroic with the guildies, hence accumulate some gears. On Sunday, in the effort of going into a Naxx25 pug (due to some coaxing from a fellow guildie), she was respecced to resto. But then the plan fell through mostly because I don’t feel that it’s fair to go in with such subpar gears (only about 1400 sp after scrambling for enchants) and relying on the other healers to pick up for my slack.  It’s probably meant to happen, however, since later in the evening, as Vh was just hanging around in IF, she received a tell asking her to fill in a healer in someone’s (mostly) guild Naxx10 run. I told him that she doesn’t have a good gear yet, but apparently they just want an extra healer, and one that is not that geared is better than nothing.

After saying yes, I just realized that I didn’t even ask which boss they are at (proving that I’m just excited to have a chance to get in) :). They were at Patch. Could you get a better fight than that to get acquainted with your healing spelss? At least I don’t have to move around and just concentrate on the healing. I have a big mana problem on that fight, with my mana bar empty about only 3/4 of the fight - and mana tide and pot have already been used. Thank goodness for replenishment. My overall healing was much less than the two priest healers, with also significantly less overheal. Is that a good thing? I am not sure, at least I am not blowing my mana for nothing. And I desperately miss my fiend, dispersion, and hymn.

We went on to kill the remaining bosses in that wing. They are pretty uneventful, except to the fact that I was somewhat behaving noobish in a couple of the fight. In Thaddius, for example, I forgot the polarity placement (they did it the opposite to what I’m used to). I died quite early, but at least I didn’t wipe the raid - but something kills them later on, and on the 2nd try,  I was one of the 2 healers left standing. We gave Sapp a try (another noobish moment here too), after 1 really unfortunate bad luck pull and 1 wipe, we lost a healer to DC and it was getting late. And that concludes Vh’s first venture to Naxx.

Vh gets two big upgrade because nobody else seems to need them. And I get another round of understanding and appreciation to all the healers and their willingness to live such a frantic life :). Also, this guild is interested to have Vh comes regularly, but alas, one of their raiding day collides with E’s, so she just has to be happy on being their backup on Sundays. I think she will remain a resto and learn how to heal better.

E’s Week

E has been trying to sneak in Wintergrasp whenever she could. Sometimes she got unlucky and miscalculated the time and ended up logging in when the battle has already over (and when they win too - to rub it in the face!). In any case, she only needs 10 more marks to get the head gear (Titan-forged Hood of Dominance).

In term of progression, for the last 2 weeks, we are able to clear the four wings (we were a bit stumped after the Heigan’s spot was fixed). But this past week, we had a signficant improvement in term of clear time and we were able to finally take a peek of Sapp - but were totally annihilated by him. We are continuing again today, and this time with the help of a few frost resist gear. We’ll see how it goes :).

Another week, another rounds of pugs - especially for OS, VoA, and Naxx. One in particular though, kinda stood up. This happened to be the pug that Vh was trying to get in. The raid leader is a very spirited person. And when I say spirited, I mean intense. He’s very generous in dishing out sharp banters (read: insults) that I think is appropriate when running with or targeted toward guildies and friends, but not really for strangers during pug. For example, someone after responding that they can watch out for locust swarm timer with the addon, he would say “yeah, Naxx10 needs an add-on cause Naxx10 is serious business.” At first I thought he only did it with his guildies, but apparently I was wrong. Under his ruling, some of his other guildies also plays this insult game. I guess that’s just how they are.

Anyway, the run pretty much fell apart after failing to kill Anub twice in a row - which is also the first boss that we tried. I don’t know if the fact that we couldn’t get the, supposedly, easiest boss down was the one that is causing it (which cause few of the healers to leave), or it is the chain quitting after fingers were beginning to be pointed toward people with less than 1.5k dps (with one guy casually told them to get their dps to at least 1650 before coming back), and the low performing mages pointed out that they tried to get the little swarm adds under control (whether or not this caused them to have less than 1.5k dps is reasonable, I do not know).

All I know is that, the raid leader, which throughout the fight also “insulted” the tanks for not kiting Anub appropriately (which coincidentally their first time tanking as well), continously saying that we are an “Epic Fail” group, is part of the low 1.5k dps team (yet, I found it amusing that he was on the top in healing meter). His reason for the low dps is simple, he is in ret pvp spec. It seems that it’s just fun and game for him. Boredom maybe? For me, it’s one thing to demand other people to step up their game, but it’s entirely different thing when it’s done in such a crude manner and when it comes from a person that is also part of the problem.

Yesterday, E is exalted with Kirin Tor, snatched the Robes of Crackling Flame (and see her hit rating plummeted again), Design: Runed Scarlet Ruby (the casters and healers in the guild are happy about this as well), plus Pattern: Sapphire Spellthread (though I’m still 5 points short to learn it). E finally hits revered with Sons of Hodir as well. Although it’s still another long journey to Exalted, at least it’s one step closer. Now, if I could only find some Everfrost chips to speed things up. She’s still deciding which rep to work on next.

E has been pushing for getting the Loremaster of Northrend achievement as well, mainly so that she can learn the pattern for Deathchill Cloak. Two days ago, she completed the quest achievement in Zul’Drak zone, and now she’s working on the last zone - Icecrown (10% into it right now).

In term of gearing up, this week E gets a pretty significant upgrade. She won a roll for Azure Cloth Bindings. And she finally has enough points to score Plush Sash of Guzbah. The guild’s BS was kind enough to make me Eternal Belt Buckle for free to put to the belt. Unfortunately, all these, especially the belt, will be mostly non-optimal if (and when) I switch.

Enough about E :). Val hits 75 today. I love hitting 75 because of the new spell we get to learn. At 75, Val learns Shield of Righteousness, which is one of the bread and butter spells for protection paladin. Now, she has to practice the optimal 96969 rotations. Her defense rating has been slowly dropping, but she doesn’t really have a sure way to upgrade them until she’s a bit higher. She’s been eyeing some of the BS’s craftable items, but although they are filled with defense, there isn’t much of avoidance stats in them. I need to make her a gear list :). On that note, she kept hearing for her trusted healers that she’s getting a bit harder to heal. So she needs to work on finding  out why that is the case.

Vh is respecced into elemental and hits 72 yesterday. I found that with her low spell power (she’s not that well geared to begin with), it’s really hard to heal for pug, especially some think that they can just march in there, grab groups of multiple mobs, and play sloppy - especially when the tank him/herself was just barely geared and dps weren’t doing high enough damage. Not that it’s not doable, it’s just extremely taxing. Playing Vh as a bursty dps feels so much different than when playing E. When dps-ing as E, she starts slow, setting up everything before she can “nuke”. On the other hand, dps-ing as Vh just feels so free. I’m really liking the different play style.

It feels great to see some of the goals finally come (or come close) to completion this week. Although that just opens up more targets to do, right now I’m just enjoying it :).

1. Dinged to 80! Now reputation grinding time…
2. WoW armory is updated with new looks, complete with achievement, etc. Good stuff!
3. Finally finished with the quests in Scholazar Basin area. I justified picking The Oracles side because of the Mysterious Egg that can hatch to 4 different pets. Just a heads up, if you are a JC that likes to complete your recipes, don’t forget to grab either the Design: Vivid Dark Jade (The Oracles) before doing A Hero’s Burden quest if you are switching to Frenzyheart or Design: Reckless Huge Citrine (The Frenzyheart) before doing Just Following Orders quest if you are going for the Oracles. Also, as far as I know, if you ever thinking of switching factions, you can go back and kill Artruis and save the other faction’s NPC instead. Completing the repeatable quest offered by this NPC will automatically put you in Honored standing with the new faction.

Another chapter of my WoWing experience closed yesterday. Our raid alliance was officially suspended until after the expansion (most likely until people are starting to hit 80). It has been a while that our attendance has been severely lacking. We had subsequent raiding days where only 15-20 people showed up, and consequently the raiding got called off. This started a slippery slope of more people not showing up, until recently where we are lucky if we even have 10 people in attendance.

I’ve seen the decision coming, though I wish it can be postponed longer as there are more contents that I still want to see. I am a bit sad because for me, raiding is so much more than about gears, but about spending time with people that I truly like being with, joking around while busting our butt for the same goal. It’s almost like a team sport, but without the sweat and all the icky thing :). So yeah, by December (which is the month foreseen as the raid leader to when we are going to pick things up again), who knows who will stick around. All I know, I am going to miss it terribly.

We have been making some good progress in our T5 raiding content. Two weeks ago, we killed Leo for the first time and last week we had our first pull on Lady Vashj. This week, we ventured to TK, downed Void Reaver and attempted, though gotten terribly burnt, by A’lar.

Leo’s fight is arguably my favorite fight in SSC. I like the rythem in nuking and holding out on dps. I like the mobility and the demand on attentiveness to be successful. I like the rush when confronted by my inner demon. I enjoy the hilarity of killing the MC-ed tank. I even like how Leo look in close-up :). VR, on the other hand, is my least favorite fight in all raid content (so far). On our first attempt, I was lucky not to be targeted by orbs too frequently, and almost never get the explosion of other people nearby. But, I was having problem in keeping my threat lower than the rest of the tanks. On my second attempt, I felt like I didn’t do anything except running around to avoid the orbs. Even with that, I still get blasted from orbs, especially ones that target the people on my left and on my right (I guess we thought that we all far enough from each other). I guess now I know how melee dps feels during Lurker.

The plan right now is to put priority in clearing the content on TK while continuing our attempt on Vashj on the side. This is done in the hope that we can keep gearing ourselves before putting serious attempts on Vashj and Kael. With that said, Solarian, you are now on notice!

It seems like it’s a long journey just to get our hands on him (and his 3 “friends”) once again. At our last attempt of the day, after 4 wipes, we got him down! And with that our alliance is now 4/6 SSC.

On our first attempt, we tried the strategy that we did on our very first attempt. The kill order was hunter > shammy > priest > Karathress. We failed quite miserably. The main reason is that spitfire totem was way too far from the rest of dps. It doesn’t take a long time for it to annihilate the shammy’s tank and then proceed to kill the rest of the raid.

Luckily we had another raider that has gone through SSC and he shared his guild’s strategy with us and it works a lot better. The kill order was changed to shammy > hunter > priest > Karathress. Priest is tanked in the lower right corner of the room. Hunter was tanked in the upper right corner. Shammy was tanked between them, with pillars dividing us. The healers for shammy was asked to stand in front of the pillars to avoid the mana burn. Meanwhile, Karathress was kited along the platform, especially after shammy was killed.

Our next 2 attempts failed mainly because hunter’s tank kept loosing the pet, and the pet was killing all the healers. Apparently, the pet spawned when hunter was on the way to the tank and the tank couldn’t get him back. It also didn’t help when the paladin tank suddenly went offline, although due to his lead in aggro, plus the passive threat generation, we still managed to get his target down :). We switched the tank around and had a much better attempt afterward.

I quite enjoyed the fight. There’s some mobility involved, also the fast reaction to get to the spitfire totem. It certainly beats the monotony of Morogrim’s fight. This fight, however, further strengthened my existing irritation to why oh why totems have to be immune to MF.

Next would be Leo. I just hope we have enough time this coming week to give him a try (meaning everything else need to be one-shotted properly ^^ ).

Can we say finally? Our first attempt got us to 28%, and then the 2nd to 19%. And finally on the third attempt, we got him without losing too many people in the fight.

I guess what works this week was that the raid leader actually took the time before the fight to talk to each of the “important” groups: healers and aoe-rs - making sure that they know exactly what they can and cannot do.

I’d have to say, thank goodness for lightwell. I never used up that many bandages prior to this fight. And, levitate saved my arse at least once.

I admit that I was probably too paranoid of being one-shotted during watery grave that I bandaged myself right away after every single earthquake. Because of that, I often let VT and SW:P dropped. So I guess my goal when we fight him again is to time and judge the situation a bit better so I don’t spend too much time not dps-ing.

We gave Lord Karathress a try, but went nowhere. We actually lost 3 people and just did the pull to see how the fight is like.