About the only thing I disliked about this fight was that dropping down to five healers made a massive difference. I've never really enjoyed the concept of arbitrarily shifting uncomfortable numbers of specific roles around to meet specific demands of a specific fight that drastically changed from what came before and after it. At least dual spec has made life infinity easier in that regard.
Yogg-Saron himself was a very entertaining and worthy end to Ulduar. I remember when we first starting poke around in phase one and thinking it was just a formality to blaze through to get to the real fight. Boy, was that wrong. It wasn't exactly the hardest aspect of a fight I've ever done but when I think back to the precedents they set with Illidan, Lady Vashj and Kael'thas having a first phase where you'd only really lose people if they were dribbling into their keyboard, it's a few levels over that. It's possible there are better tactics than the one we were using but everyone needed to be composed and in control to get through it in a timely manner without taking too many guardians with us. My biggest gripe about this phase was people getting released from their mind control in the middle of a cloud and spawning extras. That sucked. I also got mind controlled once and put Hand of Protection on a guardian but that was just straight up funny. There seems to be a small degree of luck in how well you do in phase one though discrepancies were easier to clean up as we dropped healer after healer.
I wish I was able to experience the visions in phase two but alas the life of a tank. I was surprised the roleplayers in my community didn't seem more excited about them to be honest. To each their own. My role was simply to mark the Crusher Tentacles and direct people into them while smacking them in the face when they started casting diminish power. Pretty simple job but one Protection Paladin is pretty amazing at due to being able to spam cleanse on people while giving the wrath deprived casters 3% extra crit and mana returns. Carrying the really shitty aspect theme into phase two, we had one or two times where the melee sent out of the portal went careering into an untanked Crusher at 99 stacks. Oh, and the time where BTB got hit with Death Coil just as he entered a portal and got feared through the brain room door causing Yogg-Saron to regen to full health. Penelo also got feared through the world once but was flinged back up top somehow.
The final phase was excellent. It was so tense as a tank knowing that stuff could spawn where I couldn't immediately spot it, that the three of us couldn't mix up who was grabbing what, that we likely never had time to renew our sanity. I remember on our kill looking at the main tank list and seeing Yogg-Saron still at 11% and feeling like it was going to be forever until he dropped only for him to just die. The bizarre actions of time for me were inexplicable. We weren't really sure whether we wanted melee or casters on Yogg or the Immortal Guardians and were discussing the pros and cons for both. In the end we went for melee on adds, casters on Yogg and it obviously worked pretty well.
I enjoyed Ulduar and I'll enjoy working on the hard modes (even if I do have my doubts) but best of all was how much our raiding community evolved over the period. We've managed to get rid of some pretty poor players under fortunate circumstances and replace them with very good ones. We got a new Holy Priest and Adarinkin this week, threw them in at the deep end and they floated spectacularly. With how awful our first week of raiding turned out compounded with the absolute shit luck our ten man faced, I'd be lying if I said it didn't cross my mind to make a hard decision and uproot myself to a poopsock guild. Then I remembered who I am.
And the day after the ten man version died.
When I say our group has had shit luck, I wasn't joking. We should've had this kill weeks ago but due to a combination of real life commitments, graphics cards blowing up, connection issues between continents, patching a US client the day before EU gets it, power going out, someone preferring arena, a tree falling on power lines and fuck knows what else, it had to wait till today.
There's not a whole lot more to say about Yogg-Saron that I didn't already cover above. The fight is embarrassingly easy in ten man. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that phase one was the hardest of all three by some distance. When we first started, the Guardian's HP was going down in blocks of 10% and we couldn't adapt the strategy we use in twenty-five to fit it. We ended up evolving it to spawning an extra one, killing that and having me run in with it then I simply taunt them off Calira and drag them into my camp in the center. I had a fantastically awesome idea of everyone just camping on top of Sara and healing through the explosions but no one was too hyped for that. Phase two we stood around doing nothing constantly and phase three I was able to solo tank while our disconnected tank ran around trying to kill our healers.
I think it's going to be a while before we start rampaging our alts through the place. I'm still paranoid our ten man group isn't 100% stable and have had to instill a planning and confirmation system for them, something that leaves a disappointed bitter taste in my mouth. We've already began working on hard modes and achievements with the greatest being Thorim thus far. I'm planning to have us do Hodir and Deconstructor this week which I know will be a formality for us if someone doesn't spontaneously combust before Friday.
(Enter the storm)
Mimiron appears to have this all-encompassing aura of sheen to him that perhaps the other bosses in Ulduar don't. Calling his trash creative would be a disservice to the rest of the zones finely crafted equally interesting yet non-epic dropping non-bosses™ but hey, it has a little battle tank you can ride! This all comes before a huge tram that drives you down to a preposterously oversized room encircled with a less lethal version of frogger. Giving the impression that a disproportionate amount of the time developing Ulduar was spent on Mimiron and his surroundings supported by his almost complete lack of nerfs, he very much comes across as the baby of the dev team.
The first phase exists if only to see a return of tank damage so high that it's tricky for a single one to deal with it. Chris and Yuna bounced the MKII between each Last Stand and Shield Wall cooldown as he fired off his Plasma Blast. I suppose it would be possible for one tank to deal with all of that but it would be pretty risky. While thumbing my ass, I took it upon myself to do a little mine sweeping so the melee always had a clear path out while running from Shock Blast. That is, of course, assuming they did. On more than one occasion, we had people stand in and die to it, more than once our Warriors. I swear both of them are devolving back to their Neanderthal state. Still, I shouldn't be surprised given how long we took to kill Thorim this week while the gibbons in the gauntlet figured out their left from their right. Oh well, despair not; faint heart ne'er won fair maid!
The damage taken in phase two just feels insane when you first start learning it. I do think a large part of that had to do with our handling of the rockets though. A lot of us were struggling to see the subtle graphic and turned the strategy into just running and making sure the graphic wasn't where you were running to. Again, having a fairly uninteractive role in this, it was pretty easy to identify that this caused a deficit in healing that was difficult to climb out of when all was safe. People eventually became comfortable in spotting where they were going to land and only those that needed to move moved. Damage was further controlled by staggering people into six groups. I think the key in getting through this phase is just accepting that a fuck load of damage is going to happen and streamlining it as efficiently as possible. I would think that one of the inevitable nerfs this fight gets will be the travel time of the rocket and it's less-than-obvious graphic coming with an epilepsy warning.
I'm not really sure what the purpose of the third phase is now. Perhaps for spirit users to regenerate some mana? Since the Assault Bots no longer need to be kited and the Bomb Bots and Aerial Command Unit's damage can be perfectly controlled by a Protection Warrior, it's become a formality. The week previous, I was tanking the head and the bots were hitting for 40k so the difference was laughable.
Until we got used to the final phase, it was a little chaotic. The times where his abilities all line up together can be brutal but, really, it's just knowing what he did, expecting what he can do and adjusting to the patterns. If they wanted to make this phase really hard, all they had to do was up the damage of the mines. Now that would've been interesting! Though he fires off two rockets now, at this point everyone was so comfortable with them that it was irrelevant. They might want to look into it's being ridiculously hard to see under his ram when it lands on the main tank though, that's retarded. Again, forecasting the tragic nerfbat, I'd guess the self repair time will get extended but the one time we got to it we killed it just fine.
Fantastic fight overall. Not only was it about as fresh as a fight seems like it can get at this stage of WoW's life but Mimiron himself was rather comical. The first one to really give the deep satisfaction when it goes down even if it wasn't quite the GOD TIER fight it had been made out to me. A pure execution fight that took us 2-3 hours to get down from first pull, incredible for how bad I tell myself that we are.
For his placement in Ulduar, Dr. John Vezax is an extremely basic fight. Learning and killing him took even less time than Mimiron, less than two hours according to trash. And lets talk about that for a moment! This is one set of trash I don't feel so enamored with. Shadowstep and Fan of Knives is funny the first time around as is discovering that one of those things does indeed fear you into everything else but by the fifth and sixth pack is a tiring chore. Faceless Horrors are really something too. Trash with PHASES? Holy fuck, where is my badge? Seriously, where, because I'm pretty sure those three big trees in Freya's room took less time to kill and dropped some.
Our kill had a Searing Flames let through, far too many people getting hit by crashes, a Holy Paladin dead early, a Mage dead a little bit after that and bugged vapors. I suppose it was thanks to Yuna miraculously resisting the armour debuff that we got the kill on the attempt we did. Considering how easy it was when so much went wrong, I can't imagine how it'd be with everything going right and it stuns me that some of the guilds on Argent Dawn that had leapfrogged us after our horrendous first week haven't killed it yet. We got server third kill, which is nice.
(5 lost | Enter the storm)
The Iron Council was an unbelievably easy fight. It's hard to know exactly what to write about a fight that was less complex than some of Sunwell's trash. So um, yeah, here goes! I tanked Steelbreaker for an instantaneous cleanse after falcon punch, someone tanked the other one who died then the last one flew around the room raping lolis with electricity, or something. I don't know a whole lot about the hard mode with Steelbreaker last but the description of Meltdown and reading a method of cheesing it involve a Hearthstone and a Flask of Petrification is enough to worry me. I don't know what we'll gain from it but I will be pushing for the medium difficulty mode next week if time is on our side.
I really enjoyed Freya. When I was watching a video before the raid, it just looked like six add zergs to deal with before finally moving onto her. I suppose at it's core it's really not much more than that but I loved the combination of having to be considered with how you deal damage yet constricted by having only a minute with which to do it in. It's probably a testament to the hard modes of Ulduar that I can't really comprehend how to deal with it at this junction. Or rather how many damn tanks you'd need for it to keep it comfortable while retaining some sort of DPS standard.
We didn't have long left after Freya so I requested that we go poke Mimiron's infamous trash with some pointy sticks. When we decided enough was enough, Luni and I bolted for the train in the hope of at least making it to him. We made it comfortably but just as Rahla was about to step on, Luni triggered it and he got left behind and squished as we cackled manically. Now that was funny. I'm not sure if it was because we activated the tram or pushed the DO NOT PUSH button or something else entirely but we're able to teleport past all the trash now. Depending on how long Hodir takes us, we may get a chance to utilize that this week but I doubt it. Still good to know for next week.
After a great many hours of raiding in Blue Garter days, my brain would feel like mush at the end of the night. It was a bizarre feeling but a satisfying one. Very few fights have been as trying in that regard but last night we found one in Thorim. To grant that a prelude, the first few hours of attempts were spent with about ten people in the gauntlet while the rest dealt with the onslaught the arena brings. This pushed each attempt up to around the 9-11 minute mark. Tanking that much stuff at that level was extremely stressful. Yuna was convinced we were overcomplicating it somehow but we couldn't see how. Of the fourteen attempts that came before the kill, we actually managed to get to a point where everyone was alive when he jumped down only for him to chain lightning a glob of people and effectively end it.
On the attempt that was to be the kill, we decided to just overload the gauntlet with as many people as we felt comfortable with and have just enough in the arena to hold out and stop the champions from stacking up. Instead of the gauntlet team getting to Thorim when he had 20 seconds until he supercharged us to waste, they got there and had to wait five seconds for Sif to do one. The arena team had everything under control, there was more margin for error and we had to tank for a lot less time. Looking at our WWS report, the times we wiped with him about 20% or so were 8:29 and 9:31; the time we actually killed him was 6:52.
The above is actually a video. Really!
Why the fuck does each person need so many eggs? What does it achieve? How would scaling back the amount each individual requires achieve anything but make it less of a time sink and more fun? They're supposed to be fun and, to a lesser extent, encouraging co-operation so they build a world event around needing, what, 305 eggs if RNG decides to take a shit in your general direction. That's standing still, looking at a wall, not being able to tab out to read something to pass the time, for hours while calling people shitcocks for camping your spawns. Once you've done that you have to run around finding female races to stick bunny ears on with an item that inexplicably has a five minute cooldown and occasionally just doesn't work. To quote James Rolfe, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?? This even makes an annual activity in FFXI seem fun but at least you didn't feel obligated to do those because they weren't a small piece of a large puzzle that rewarded something useful upon completion.
Once upon a time I viewed the Violet Proto Drake as LOLCASUAL and while it'll never reach the difficulty tier of Glory of the Raider, I certainly won't look down at someone riding one. Unless I'm literally above them of course.
(3 lost | Enter the storm)
Of the nerfs to be done in last weeks easy modes blitz, Ignis got it pretty hard. I know that whining about content nerfs is a solid way of showing supremacy but I don't think anyone can deny that for his position in the instance, Ignis was way too overtuned. He and Razorscale should be harder than Flame Leviathan but easier than XT-002 Deconstructor which is pretty much how it is now.
Ignoring the Slag Pot bug, the biggest change Ignis needed all revolved around dealing with the constructs. When we were learning the fight the previous week, we had our Feral Druid tank running around and rooting the adds in Scorch. I didn't feel completely comfortable with this as so many aspects felt out of my control. Was the add molten and rooted? Tough. Has the scorch disappeared but it's still rooted? Tough. Got two up at the same time? Hahaha, fuck you. Whatever happened, we had to jump in the fire so much of the time that it felt pointless to even complicate it with a Druid yet the scorch did so much damage that it felt like an unnecessary tax on the healers. With the 20% decrease in damage, we could just stand in them and get healed through it. We tried successfully to just be clipping the edge so that the add would continue to stack heat until molten but we would be out of it. The problem with this came back to the good ol' problem every tank faces at some point in his WoW career; shifty mob! Every time Ignis would cast Flame Jets, we'd get launched into the atmosphere and the mob would edge out of scorch to be right inside us upon landing. It became so annoying that there wasn't any point in risking slowing down the death rate of the Iron Constructs just to lower a healing requirement we were coping with.
I'm not sure I'd say that this was my favourite fight in Ulduar thus far but, damn, is the offtank role fun. It can royally suck having to look for distant adds through his fat ass and the Grandia style pillars of fire but it felt deeply satisfying watching Calira and I excel at the job and getting the adds dealt with as efficiently as possible.
TO THE GROUND! Not only did they take a massive chunk off his HP but they appear to have added a minute or two on top of his enrage timer. We were just horrible on this fight last night. The main tank died and I had to take over, a quarter of the raid was dead, we had two terribads with no vocal chords in the north west corner yet again causing four scrapbots to get through and heal him and we went over the old enrage timer by about 30 seconds and it was STILL enough to get the kill on our first pull. I'm not sure I was comfortable with how tight the DPS requirement was for last weeks iteration but it feels like they overdid it. I'm not sure who the DPS check is for Ulduar at this point. I'm also not sure exactly what they tried to do to make skipping Tympanic Tantrums harder as it seemed just as easy to brute force through the phases as before
Oh boy, and how can we forget the freshly re-added trash. On our first and second pull, the left pack linked. Yeah, you know, that bug they got rid of before they put them back in though, to be fair, I was convinced that a bug had nothing to do with the other pack linking. I noticed that the razorblades one of the mobs spawns is, for all intents and purposes, a generated mob itself and wondered if maybe it's erratic spawning and pathing patterns were causing it to fly off into the other pack. We tested it by having a long range Misdirect pull back into the corridor where not only did we avoid all links but the annoying gnomes stood in the back chain failing at casting defense matrix.
After Kologarn was dead, we had about 15 minutes of raid time left. As there's only one or two trash pulls before Auriaya and we'd perfected at least one pull a few days earlier, we figured we'd give it a try. It was pretty obvious from the video we passed around that the fight is insanely easy after the pull so we knew one clean pull was basically a kill. We even simplified the strategy further by having a Death Knight Death Grip the Feral Defender out of the raid as it was about to die so that we never had to move. I can't help but wonder if they adjusted the behavior of Pounce somehow as the guardians actually did exactly what we wanted them to do this time instead of randomly thrusting into the asshole of someone not even on their threat table.
Tonight should be the Iron Council and Freya.
(2 lost | Enter the storm)
I'd be fibbing if I said the first week of Ulduar went precisely the way I had hoped.
Heroic
The first hiccup came in the obligatory server instability every patch I've ever played this game is plagued with. That, marred with some poor decision making made our first day a complete washout. It may not seem like much but losing that day of raiding on our schedule is about 30% of the week gone. We made the foolish decision to go to Emalon first expecting him to rollover and give us free T8.25, which, after Archavon, isn't exactly hard to understand. Well, with server instability and finding out that he requires some effort now, we lost over a quarter of that raid night. We went over to Ulduar upon finding out it was up and one shot Flame Leviathan once the servers had stopped playing up. We then wasted the rest of the night on an overtuned, bugged Ignis.
On the next night we decided to pass on Ignis and push down Razorscale. A suggestion was made that we put our Mages into each add team and sheep the Watcher. I thought this was a retarded idea and made my point clear that it would be far better to have a Rogue on each one to kick as many as they could. Once the adds were dealt with, it was handling people getting out of Devouring Flame the second it dropped. This is one of the few occasions in WotLK where I actually hoped for a mod to track something. While I was waiting for Sentinals to pop, I called out as many as I could so people could move ahead of time but it's pretty damn difficult as she targets the person for a split second before choosing somebody else for fireball. Once THAT was done, it was down to figuring out how to deal with fuse armor. This wasn't actually an aspect of the fight we were aware of so we were caught off guard by it. Calira attempted to taunt it but couldn't get it so either he got stiffed with resists or she was already enraged. Either way, once we had her back down in the ground phase ready to taunt off each other while moving her in a circle, the kill was easily in the bag.
Next up was Deconstructor who ate up the last hour of our raid. The first round of attempts was mostly people failing at moving out with the bombs. Our strategy at the time consisted of everyone clumping up, Light Bombs going left, Gravity Bombs going right. When we went back the next day, we kept wiping and wiping as the adds continued to sneak through and heal him, causing us to hit the enrage timer while he'd be at 2-3%. The strategy was (and I can't emphasize this word enough) slowly refined as we realized that just hoping the adds would somehow fall over on their way in wasn't the best way to do it. It didn't help that one of our Mages on add duty was trying desperately hard to redefine the word inept. I still think that we overcompensated for the adds as our kill was a zerg through a final 2% during his enrage. Even if that repeats again next week, we have a strategy formulated that works for us and shouldn't take nearly as long to kill.
Next day we moved to Kologarn. My ten man group had already killed him and was able to add a few caveats to the strategy Yunaris was outlining. I'd said that he was simple but not easy, though I didn't truly mean that. Even so, we killed him on the third pull in pretty epic circumstances which my poor ticker can't take anymore of. Screaming "KILL THE FUCKING LEFT ARM IT'S AT 2%" as attrition caught up to us was a nice prelude to a lot of laughter and glee on Ventrilo. It's something I'd hoped to instill into the community but we don't really get that often so I relished it. Our first fragment too, coupled with one of the new enchants which I promptly had put on my weapon. Cool ass glow effect, looks like your weapon is on fire, though I'll probably switch it over to Blade Ward as soon as it becomes readily available to me or when I get Titanguard.
In the next chapter of our success/failure leapfrogging chronicles, we spent the next two hours trying to pull Auriaya. We did manage a completely flawless pull once but we were so focused on just getting the pull right and had changed the area we initially went over the tactic in that it went to shit. From the video I watched, the fight is ridiculously easy and it's all about getting the pull right so if we assume that the fight isn't about the pull then maybe we didn't do as awful as I feel we did...?
Normal
For all intents and purposes, our ten man group went as well as I expected it to. We're great players who already out-gear the instance for all our specs and can pretty much put together any composition that works. On our first Friday of the place, we got down Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Deconstructor and Kologarn. I was pretty damn pleased but it was already known that Silinde and Rahla were coming to my house on Saturday through Sunday to play Rock Band all day and go see the Dragonball movie which meant our Saturday run of the place wasn't possible. The Tuesday raid, tonight, isn't going to happen either as Penelo has to work and BTB is having someone stick long pointy things in his mouth. So that's that for the week.
Assuming we get all three raids in, I'm aiming to be on Mimiron in ten man this week. Flame Leviathan isn't even a boss, Razorscale will pretty much be a one shot with the nerfs, Deconstructor is a joke in ten man and Kologarn was killed on the second attempt once I'd switched to Holy. I'd expect us to be at Iron Council and Auriaya by Friday if we start on time.
And on some non-Ulduar news, fishing was good to me this week. Damn good. Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat and Jeweled Fishing Pole two days apart on the new dailies, and, for 41 minutes of relentless school fishing...
(3 lost | Enter the storm)
There wasn't quite the burst of excitement I'd hoped but not quite expected for when Malygos went down in 5:46 last night. Born out of necessity for Shaman and good ranged DPS, Ally and Rahla had already gotten their drakes from Yuna's group last Tuesday. Lunitun, Kasha, Penelo and Sain still had one or both eight mans remaining and there was this air of dread over whether or not an imminent 3.1 was going to deny some of them their drake. As it turned out, this is the case. Kasha and Sain will still be able to get theirs when we finish up their 8 man Naxxramas tonight but Penelo and Lunitun are fucked because they still need eight man Malygos. It's hard to know if Luni even cares that much as he never seemed that bothered and actually would have it had he not chosen to sit out our one eight man Malygos a few weeks back. Penelo, on the other hand, does, and that bothers me.
I feel pretty shitty that two people are going to miss out even if it's not directly my fault. I might ultimately see Chefs Knife as our guild but it's still me that sits at the helm, deals with the finances, controls the bank and takes the initiative to plan what we do each week. I kept trying to plan eight mans for those that needed them but shit kept coming up, one of the remaining few always had something to do and it'd get put back. I should've done more and just had us keep running the soul destroying eight mans as people became available.
Meh.
At least the logistical nightmare of eight mans aren't present in Ulduar. Even so, I'm definitely going to shift the focus of the guild and how we do ten mans. We're a far more solid group now than we were when we started and will be able to bang out the ten man achievements comfortably as the new gear rolls in. We'll still be all about our alts but not at the price of this happening again because that's just not worth it.
(4 lost | Enter the storm)
Monday, April 6th, 2009 - 8:41 pm - volenska
Chefs Knife Sartharion 3D Video | 1:46 | 41MB
WWS
As has been mentioned here before, Chefs Knife is our guild. It's a guild in a way most people would find tricky to instantly comprehend. Being on a roleplaying server, the creators of our raiding community deemed that the only level of communication necessary within the game was to use a number of custom channels. An average situation is that your guild is who you do your twenty-five man raids with and you have a custom channel for your closer friends. Flip that scenario around and that is how we are. It sounds a weird system, it sure did to me before I joined Redemption, but it's one that works. It's ideals are that you are free to continue perusing Goldshire in your wizards hat and robe pretending Arthas is your father. Obviously those are a set of ideals that don't belong to me; Chefs Knife is used as a fairly serious ten man guild. Or, as serious as one can get about ten man raids. Before WotLK was released, it had crossed my mind to quit doing twenty-five mans and focus on ten mans but then those that I had a strong disliking or lack of respect for in Redemption quit and I decided to continue building the Chefs Knife blocks onto the foundation we had firmly set. With hindsight, it was an astute choice as the whole ten man path philosophy Blizzard paraded so vigorously appears to have gone awry.
We are a group of players with a great many alts. I now personally have three alts; a Fury Warrior (with full Protection gear), a Death Knight tank and a Restoration Shaman. Lunitun has an equal amount of alts, as does BTB, and others are getting close. The point is, we all enjoy our alts and we strive to gear each others up every week in Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity and Obsidian Sanctum. This naturally caused the Glory of the Raider achievement to sit on the back burner while we explored other avenues to pass the time.
There were two major catalysts in us renewing our desire to get Glory of the Raider back on track.
Firstly, and inevitably, the announcement that once 3.1 hits, the Proto Drakes will no longer be attainable. Maybe we all just felt that we'd have all the time in the world and could do it with gear that completely trivialized the most difficult meta aspects of the achievement. Regardless, we knew time wasn't on our side and decided to pull our fingers out before it was too late.
Secondly, I think we've all come to the realization that finishing Heroic: Glory of the Raider is a pipe dream. It only takes one person from a shallow pool of shallow pools to fail every week before you realize it's just not meant to be. I mean, we only got Heroic: Shocking! last week and that was because someone, utterly sick of failing Immortal yet again, decided to keep wiping us whenever a mouthbreather failed it. Of course, there was one person in particular that was unhappy at not being able to breeze through content for week n but that same person also whined about having to use consumables for Sartharion 3D when it was still progress. It's these sorts of people that just bring every one else down to their level and fucks it up for everyone. These are the people who don't have an invitation to our Burberry clad tea party. If it wasn't for what we've built in Chefs Knife I'd have serious considerations over my future in Redemption. I don't mean to speak ill of them or anything, they're a fabulous group of personalities, but one or two of them leave a lot to be desired on the skill front. As we don't seem to have any kind of community mission statement, it's difficult to know how they'll be dealt with when this stuff happens. It only takes one and they aren't held accountable to the degree that necessitates the progression of everyone else. So, instead of whining about it any longer, it's easier to just focus our efforts elsewhere, get the Plagued Proto Drake and forget about the black one. I prefer the colour of the plagued one honestly, but I still can't help being bitter that the heroic achievements are beyond me through no fault of my own.
So, Sartharion. All we had left after a few weeks of hitting up the achievements was You Don't Have An Eternity and Twilight Zone. We decided to focus on the latter as we perceived that to be the more challenging and time consuming (six minute Malygos will be done next Monday). One of the other things that held us off doing it earlier was the lack of necessary personnel to do it. As a small guild of serious, hardcore players that are only really doing ten mans as a form of pastime, we're not going to recruit or bring people in for an achievement. Not only do we not want to, but it goes against the bring-the-player-not-the-class that Blizzard like to harp on about so fondly. It's a philosophy we embraced rather strongly, so how were we supposed to do it without a Death Knight tank? As we had two actively raiding Death Knights in our small ranks, we held off as long as we felt comfortable for them to accrue as much tanking gear as possible. We finally felt that this week should be the week to go for it so I set it for this past Sunday. Then of course, the Thursday before, the now infamous Russian video of Sartharion being zerged in 76 seconds was released.
Despite this, we had intended to do it "legitimately" even though we had floated the idea around of the DPS zerg. It wasn't until I logged into the middle of a conversation Sunday morning that we seriously considered that we could actually pull off the zerg. I have full gear for every spec on my Paladin and our other ten man healer is Silinde, a Shadow Priest main who just respecs for us. In some bizarre way, it was more natural for us to do the zerg method than any other way. So we got our math hats on and began brainstorming. It was already known that it required eight DPS to pull off a minimum of 4.6k DPS but we had to figure out how we could spread that around. For instance, we knew that Rahla would pull off an insane amount of DPS and that I would probably achieve the lowest even without taking into account the fact I wouldn't be doing any DPS at all for the final 25% of Sartharion's life. I busted out Rawr and spent a few hours maximizing my potential DPS then spent a few hundred gold getting certain pieces up to scratch. Calira respecced and put a load of Bold Scarlet Ruby's in his gear to not only add as much DPS as he could but to maximize his threat, something we were concerned with being an issue. I also turned on guild bank repairs. All in all, our bank took a hit of about 2-3k which our community leader has graciously offered to reimburse.
I never attempted Sartharion 3D in ten man the standard way so I can't really offer a proper comparison. I've done it in twenty-five man many times and I've done 2D in ten man so I've got a fair idea of how it plays out. I suppose all you're doing is shifting all the pressure onto the DPS and the person responsible for running Tenebron away at 25%. A lot of people will feel this method is a blatant exploit or cheesing a hard fight. While I won't totally disagree with those opinions, it's more complex in practice than it looks in theory. One fuck up, and you've failed. Void Zones are an absolute cluster fuck. The elementals aren't tanked at all. If you get a right side wave, it's hard to maximize DPS. Ultimately, the planets need to align with everyone playing like a champion to pull it off. It's not walk up to him, DPS for 86 seconds, collect loot. I'd actually implore people to try it because it's fantastic fun and, along with Voidwalker tanking, it's going to get nerfed real soon.
The first three people that came up in the raid roll for the mount was Ally, Silinde and myself, those with the Twilight Drake that had agreed it was a ridiculous idea to take the Black Drake. The forth was BTB, though I mistakenly called out Rahla which I felt bad about.
(14 lost | Enter the storm)
I wish we'd gotten these a month ago but stacking a group to play perfect for hours on end with the faint hope that lady luck would smile upon us didn't feel much like an achievement.
(5 lost | Enter the storm)
Friday, January 16th, 2009 - 5:22 pm - Sart+3
We finally downed Sartharion +3 last night on our third attempt. It was probably only our third full night of serious attempts on him because we're not the sort of community that will keep running into a wall head first until it crumbles. The first few nights consisted of downing a flask, eating food and systematically losing retards to fire walls and void zones until attrition caught up with the DPS requirement. On top of that, one of our best Priests had gone AWOL. Not everyone is immediately equal and you can't replace one lifelong, theorycrafting Circle of Healing faceroller for another that's still learning the class with a months experience. I'd said this privately before but pointed it out again after the kill last night. It probably irked one or two of our healers but fuck it, I seem to have degenerated into the guy that tells it how it is anyway.
Aside from having Mr. Priest back and quite possibly our strongest raid available, we made three key changes to the strategy.
- Brute force Shadron down through Twilight Torment and deal with the disciples afterwards.
- Have our two Holy Paladins spec into Divine Guardian to lower the raid's damage by 30% for 24 seconds while steamrolling Shadron.
- Using Heroism the moment Shadron lands instead of getting Tenebron down quicker.
I was really pessimistic of getting Tenebron down before he hatched a second set of eggs without the use of Heroism or class cooldowns but he went down like a sack of shit. I suppose this may be a stumbling block as to how repeatable the kill is every week. I'm not sure just how close it was to a second set of whelps, if at all, but I was informed he was playing nice yesterday with not flying out to the middle of the lava to do whatever the fuck it is he does. I really hope Blizzard get a chance to look at that because it's pretty stupid and encourages stacking casters for the fight (sounds like some other game, eh?). Even though it makes sense on paper, even his flying off to spawn the eggs is silly 'cause he never goes in the same direction. Like, you know, the direction the eggs are actually in.
Saving all the eggs for the Shadron basket paid massive dividends. Less raid damage and less time for Elayra to get shafted. I'm still a little cautious on the cooldown rotation on him. He's the type that doesn't talk on Vent so getting him in sync with the people putting their timers on him, some of whom don't talk themselves, is inffffffffffffffffffffuriating.
It's going to suck next patch when Judgement of Light threat gets nerfed. Dropping it on Tenebron just as the whelps are about to hatch made a huge difference in my ability to pick them up. Relying on just Consecrate and a Holy Paladin with RF up is gonna be ugh.
Oh, and grats to Ally on the mount. Was nice to see it go to a good friend even if we are only one achievement away from our Red Proto Drake.
(3 lost | Enter the storm)
Malygos is a damn epic fight. Really fun too, even if many in my community felt phase three was too gimmicky to make it a true classic. The floor falls, you land on a drake, and, if you play well, it's all over inside thirty seconds. Invariably people don't though and it takes a bit longer but no one's performance could really be faulted last night. The biggest challenge we faced was the horrific server lag we were all plagued with due to other guilds within The Eye of Eternity doing Malygos at the same time. It seemed somewhat ironic that earlier in the day I was ranting about my disdain for the infallible argument presented by those that blame lag for every mistake when we all know that they just fucked up. This was lag!
Thanks to Ardent Defender, WotLK's tank equality, the Shield of Righteousness bug and my gear, I was able to command tanking duties for Malygos. The first phase is straight forward; survive massive spike damage while hoping the Death Knights do their job on the sparks well, live through the Vortex and run in the correct direction upon landing. It's actually Vortex that has prevented my ten man group from trying the non-heroic version of Malygos as you're pretty much stiffed without a Druid and Priest for your healing, of which we only have only one. I was really surprised that it's damage in ten man is the same as it is in twenty-five and disappointed that wasn't a mistake. It needs toning down when they "fix" Circle of Healing and Wild Growth for sure.
The second phase is where the aforementioned lag came into play. I would guess on any other fight, the servers would be able to cope with the amount of people that were present in EoE but the new raid encounters are rife with such sparkly new features. The Lords and Scions floating around a giant spacial area above ever changing pink domes with a giant blue dragon firing a C&C-esque ion cannon at the ground must be pretty intensive. The highlight of the lag was running to a fresh anti-magic shield only for it to hover across the ground several feet. A howl of laughter erupted on vent. Beyond dodging in and out of shrinking domes, this phase is quite simple too once learned, my only irk being our DPS' slight inconsideration toward the tank's abilities to get all the Lords gathered with sufficient threat. It was bad enough when we weren't averaging five globals to every ability.
You can actually learn aspects of the third phase outside with the Aces High daily but it's really not that helpful in practice. The one thing it will teach you to do is grasp where the abilities are, what they do, how the combo point system works and if your UI will display them. Whereas the daily is about killing something that's always attacking you and having a high degree of self-preservation, the actual fight against Malygos involves certain people being designated healers while the majority keep their Engulf in Flames rolling. I like to think I learn fights pretty fast but this one even tested me as I found the entire thing a little difficult to get my head around. Eventually, we all settled for doing two Flame Spikes, waiting for 85 energy, then doing Engulf. Doing it this way ensured that we always had Flame Shield available should we get targeted. It was doing nothing but staring at my pet frame for energy and the skull icon that changed the fight from being a nightmare to comfortable for me and one I shall enjoy doing for the next few months.
Of course, the biggest challenge of this fight comes in looting your fucking Emblem of Valor from Alexstrasza's Gift.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
Within four days of WotLK being released, I'd gotten 80. As I've mentioned before, I raid in a fucked up way with what is regarded as a community (a channel of people instead of a guild of people) which frees up your guild for whatever purpose you wish. A large part of Redemption's "core" is in my guild and unsurprisingly, the first eight people to hit level 80 were members of both. The very same week the game was out, we were able to squeeze in a Naxx 10 run and get up to Four Horsemen and Patchwerk before being cockblocked. Two days later, we cleared it in it's entirety with some gear upgrades and minor changes.
It's great being back in Naxxramas. My best memories of World of Warcraft were our good old BG days of me being a noob and slowly learning the place. Part of the reason I never attended the plethora of retro raids on Argent Dawn was because I didn't wish to taint what we had back then. I'm almost glad it's so easy just so I can enjoy it to the max and know that I will be doing it at least once per week, every week till the next expansion pack comes out. I still feel that 40 man Naxxramas with BG was one of my greatest experiences in any game ever, online, offline, MMORPG or not.
One scar I have been left with is Bert's mantra of "same left, different right" for Thaddius. Along with the chaining mind flay and various Darm cleave jokes, it's one of those that still gets recited years on. Naturally, I kept the exact same method we used at 60 for my ten man group at 80 - only for my community leader to do the exact opposite in our 25 mans. I always prided myself on never screwing up polarity charges but it's a record I can no longer hold as barking out the directions in reverse every 30 seconds overwhelmed me causing me to call out the wrong instruction and get myself killed.
Aside from clearing 25 man Naxx twice, 10 man Naxx three times, Archavon (never has free loot really meant free loot) on both versions many times, Sartharion 10 twice and Sartharion 25 once, we've also done him with one drake up on 10 man and again on 25 man.
Sartharion+1 on ten man was incredibly challenging. We ended up adapting a strategy whereby Calira tanked both Sart and Tenebron while I dealt with all the whelps and elementals. Due to hit box issues, Tenebron was slowly taken down by three ranged while the melee dealt with the adds. It was incredibly backwards and something I think we can improve upon next time. The twenty-five man version of the same fight wasn't nearly as tough because the logistic issues simply weren't there. I will say though that with four Death Knights using Death and Decay, it is by a huge distance, the most graphically intense encounter I've ever done. With whelps and an enraged amount of elementals on me toward the end, I saw the fire wall go past in three movements.
Aside from having Russta decked out in both full Protection gear and Holy gear and also having Jenkem at 80 and done with heroics, this is the other thing I've been focusing on. I toyed with the idea of leveling another alt but I took a step back and considered just how much I'd done in less than a month and decided that I'd let Glory of the Hero be my crowning achievement for a little bit and scale back a bit to get some quality time in on Little Big Planet and Fallout 3.
Lockdown and A Void Dance are simple RNG achievements that we'll get in time.
Make it Count I'm anticipating having done tonight.
Less-rabi we've failed around thirty times.
Gotta Go is retarded and I'm not expecting to have it done before the time frame gets expanded in the future.
I'll probably do a post and go over some of the harder achievements once I've got the Red Proto Drake in the bag.
(10 lost | Enter the storm)
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