Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Oops I did it again...

http://www.imagehost.co.za/image-1F70_4E6E5FA7.jpg

I equipped my "fun" set so I could abuse someone in gnome form... went bear... and forgot to switch back to tank set. Sigh, it had to happen again eventually...

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The deep end of healing firelands

I pride myself on being a true hybrid. Tell me which of the 4 druid roles you want me as with enough notice (or which 2, provided you pick 1 feral and 1 caster spec), and I'll perform them as best I can.

That said, Bear tanking is my main spec, and so unless something goes wrong, that's what I do. So far in firelands, I've had the luxury of tanking my ass off, but that came to an abrupt halt recently.

I run with the same 3 healers every week, with no healer subs. Over the weekend my Holy Priest had some RL stuff come up that took them out of action for a few days, and my Holy Pally is unavailable this coming Wednesday. Luckily, this happened as my 3rd tank came out of a break, so I quickly called on both tanks, and promptly respecced resto.

Now, most healers are able to warm up on earlier bosses. Shannox, Beth'tilac... that kinda thing. Haha no such luck. Direct to rag we go 0.o

So after some paniced reading through Lissana's healing guides, most of which I'd already read some time ago, and some careful reforging to the 1573 haste threshold (and strict orders to my warlock to keep Dark Intent on me), I stepped into Firelands.

Now, I healed some T11 fights, most notably Al'Akir, where I performed really well, so I'm confident of my healing ability. I'm just nervous going against our healing heavyweights, with their tier bonuses and weeks of experience in this content.

Thankfully, I'm a Druid, not one of those healing classes that have been broken and re-broken in an attempt to get them balanced for PvP (side note : I recently read that the reason Shammies are still underpowered is because of PvP - GG). Druids are most definitely overpowered at the moment, and it shows. I topped meters on every single Rag attempt while not being 100% sure what I was doing at times. After having a look at firelands rankings, not just for Rag, but all bosses, it's clear that druids are just completely overpowering the other healing classes.

The biggest problem I had was mana. I had to regularly hold back in order to prevent myself from going oom. Coming out of a P2 stack-up (to handle seed explosions) I often found myself looking at a "Low Mana" warning, with no time for a concentration pot, and my innervate CD giving me look that said "haha not gonna happen".

This was made even worse if I died and got a combat res from the lock or the dk. Since they don't have an awesome glyph like druids (blizz, seriously, please fix this), I came back at 25%, and had to find a way to regen mana faster than I spent it. I found myself keeping up a 3 stack lifebloom on the tank, and only using a rejuv or a nourish if someone dropped under 60%. I felt a bit like I was leeching mana from the other healers, but so be it.

The other problem I had was trusting the other healers. Not that I didn't trust them to do their job. Hell, the one is my wife, and the other is a very close RL friend. The issue was more that if the entire raid was on 100% except for one person, I felt like it was my job to rejuv them to get them up, not realising that the other two were charging a Holy Light and Healing Wave as I did so. Learning to know when to step in, and when to back off, was the biggest lesson of the whole exercise. In the end the pally focused the one tank (including his Beacon of Light), while I kept Lifebloom ticking on the other. Even when not tanking, the stacking debuff on tanks can tick for a fair amount, so this system really helped to keep both tanks stable.

Ultimately, a druid has some amazing tools for this fight. When the aoe hits, a well timed WG ticks for a ton. Aiming an effl correctly while stacked will also do the trick, and more importantly, as it's now a smart heal, will save those who otherwise would have died (in the end, of course, this matters FAR more than meters). Convince your two tanks to stay close to each other, and Effl will tick on the two of them almost constantly.

One complaint I have is about Nature's Swiftness. Activate it, and HT is an instant, right? So why is it that I get the "you cannot do that while moving" error? I often found myself looking at a tank on 10% health, while we were all rushing to stack up before seeds explode. I had to stop for a split second, make sure the heal went off, then keep running. This seems like a bug to me.

I must say, I'm loving the Resto setup at the moment. I've been tempted before to change my main spec. It's just too bad that both Bear and Resto are so incredibly overpowered at the moment. I guess I can't do both at once :) I'm looking forward to seeing how I perform on our farm bosses, and actually downing something for once. All those Rag attempts, while a fun learning curve, definitely take it out of you.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Bear tanking Baleroc

So, all of our Baleroc kills so far had our DK tank solo tanking it, with me using some good old feral hax to get silly stacks from shards of torment (kitty spec with natural reaction + perseverance for spell dmg reduction).

However, with a change in our tanking lineup, and my new pally tank being a highly experienced ret pally, it became time for me to accept that when it comes to 1 tank fights, it's going to be me. Hey, I don't mind, I love my bear - it was honestly a pain in the ass reforging and re-enchanting twice every week because of just one fight.

Here's why bears beat any other tank for Baleroc :

(1) Lower HP. Decimation blade slices off 90% of your HP, and you need to get healed over 90% before the next one hits, or you die. Less HP means that 90% is less, so healers have to heal less to keep you alive.

(2) Silly amounts of dodge. If decimation blade is dodged, it does nothing, and healers overheal with their massive heals they had timed to go off right after it hits. Sucks to be the healers, good fun to see *dodged* show up over and over.

(3) Frenzied Regen (glyphed) for Decimation. Sooner or later, it'll hit. RNG is never 100%. When it does, pop FR for 30% increased healing taken. What, more overheals? Sorry healers, I can't hear you over the sound of me not dying.

And some letter points :

(1) Savage Defence. Blaze of Glory buffs SD absorbs, so we scale nicely with the extra HP now. Then again, Death Strike scales with DMG taken, as does block.

(2) LOTP self-heal. It doesn't seem like much, but since it's a % of health, every 6s. This scales nicely with the extra HP. Combined with the SD scaling, I was just under the 3rd healer on healing+absorbs.

I'm still wondering what are the best trinkets for this fight. I did it with Bedrock Talisman (thinking dodge proc right after a Decimation blade = perfect timing), and Mirror of Broken images, macrod into barkskin, for inferno blades.

I wonder, however, if Fluid Death would be better than Bedrock. The dodge proc is fairly small, all things considered, and Fluid Death's silly amounts of Agi (plus dodge, once reforged), would give me a better chance of the first Decimation Blade never hitting in the first place.

Anyway, short version, bears rock this fight.

The new pally tank

So we've had a few developments lately. My DK offtank, who has tanked with me since shortly after we first killed LK, decided to take an extended break from raiding, due to RL issues.

As a set group, this left us in a very tricky situation. I have dps to spare, but when it comes to tanks and healers, if I lose one it becomes a game of sub musical chairs (player A goes tank from healing, player B goes from healer from dps, and we bring in a dps sub, for example). That kind of setup doesn't work long-term, sadly, and I needed a permanent tank.

Enter Aboutrika, a ret pally that last raided with us a few months ago. He was on an extended break due to a course he was doing that made him unavailable for 2 out of 3 raiding nights every week. As I'm trying to figure out what to do about our tanking situation, he reappears, announcing that his course is done, and he's ready to raid again.

I was left with 2 problems, since I now also had a dedicated raider that I needed to fit into a team that already has 4 melee. Then I realised, the two problems can cancel each other out. He had a tanking offspec that he used to beat DPS queues for LFG, and partially at gunpoint, it was requested that he tank raids for us.

The problem with our guys is they can be a little elitist and judgemental at times. The last time I brought in new raiders, and they took far longer than expected to catch up, I almost had a mutiny on my hands. I planned for a week or 2 of slower progression while he got used to prot spec, and learned fights. Out first raid night ended up being a bit of a disaster due to a number of DPS subs, although I joked at least the new tank wasn't the cause of our problems. We managed to come out of the raid night with 2 bosses down, which I saw as a victory, all things considered.

So we went into the second raid night with a full A-team, and I was still cautiously optimistic, thinking if we got 5 this week, that would be great. In contrast, by the end of last night, we'd had an hour of rag attempts, having stomped all over the first 6 bosses. Aside from Rika doing less DPS than my old DK tank, which resulted in a DPS shift on alysrazor hatchlings, the run was extremely smooth, with most bosses being 2 or 3 shot.

The best part is that our extremely critical raiders were quiet the whole week. Usually a new raider joins and I get whisper spammed with complaints about spec, glyphs, gems, enchants, dps breakdown, cooldown usage, pretty much anything you can think of. Not a peep - not one single whisper.

I don't know if my DK tank is going to return, and if he does, we might setup some kind of rotation - having sub options is never a bad thing imo.

So here's to our new tank, who has exceeded expectations, and in his first week is performing on par with those that have been doing this for years ;)

Now, about surviving that first rag transition...

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Alysrazor down

After only 1 night and a half of attempting her, the firey bitch went down, pushing The Exodus to 5/7. Well done to Horobi and Carni, who were thrown into the deep end last night, and managed to do their jobs perfectly (air DPS and interrupting on a P1 druid add).

We killed her on the last pull, and just had time to walk across the bridge and get violated by Staghelm's trash before we all had to go.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Staghelm and Ragnaros fights, and moving into HC. It'll be a nice change, after the normal mode grindfest of T11.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Finding our stride

On Wednesday night we struggled to kill Shannox, and barely got a few Baleroc attempts in before we ran out of time for the night. So I hit Sunday night's raid just hoping we'd kill Bale and Beth, and get some time on Ryo. Little did I know what would happen.

2 shot bale (2nd kill)
3 shot beth (2nd kill)
4 shot ryo (guild first kill)

We joked about 5 shotting Alysrazor, but unfortunately that didn't happen :P

We made some good progress on Alys, and everyone was in extremely high spirits throughout the night. After the pain and suffering of T11, I'm ok with this tier being a little easier. We as raiders perhaps were due the break.

So tonight we hit Alys right off the bat. I wasn't expecting to even see her last night, let alone get through all 4 phases with everyone alive. Now it's just an endurance game. Rinse and repeat until she dies, since there is no enrage timer, and healers can't go oom.

The really telling point is comparing ourselves to those in a similar spot : The top teams in Pap en Vleis and Unforgiven 2, the two guilds that most of my raiding team is from. We're now 2 bosses ahead of PNV, and on par with UF2.

Everyone is in good spirits, focused, and having a good time while killing stuff. I wouldn't change a thing :D

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Some Baelrock feral hax

We were told you needed to 2 tank Bale, and that single tanking it wasn't possible in 359. They were wrong.

We solo tanked this in 359 gear. Our DK tank popped AMS for inferno blade, and popped runic weapon for decimation blade (he dodged+parried half of them). Also, since Death strike scales with DMG taken, a DS right after a decimation blade hit was truly amazing. He ended the fight 2nd on healing, right behind our Holy Pally.

The thing I want to mention, however, is what I ended up doing on the fight. I went as kitty DPS, but took all the spell dmg tank talents (2/2 natural reaction, 3/3 perseverance), and kept my FR glyph on. When it was time for me to tank a shard, I went bear, popped BS and SI/FR (and got our disc priest to PS me on the 3rd one when SI/FR were both on CD), and tanked it to around 20 stacks (most dps can only survive to around 10 in our raid). This helped our healers get mental stacks of Vital Spark, which made the single tank strat work really nicely. I also managed to push 16k DPS, in spite of being in bearform for 40% of the fight :) I didn't check, but I suspect the shard gave me some nice vengeance.

The Holy Pally was the first one to heal me, on the very first shard, and this is no doubt why his healing was so insane on the fight.

I thought I'd try this as a gimmick - I honestly didn't expect it to work as well as it did. I can certainly recommend it for any other ferals, if you have a tank that is able to solo tank it, or even if you're MS feral kitty and you have 2 tanks... it's totally worth it.

Friday, July 8, 2011

GM "assistance" with Eternal Ember issue

So on Wednesday night we got our first Eternal Ember drop, off our second Shannox kill. We'd agreed some time ago that the most fair way to assign the legendary was for our top 2 caster dps, a mage and a warlock, to roll on the first orb, and that would randomly assign which of them should get the weapon (as both have been in guild for the same time, have the same flawless performance record, etc).

Our master looter, unaware of what the new blue item was, assumed it was just another crafting orb, and assigned it to me as the RL/GM, as I then drop crafting orbs in the Guild Bank until later. Since I'm a druid on the legendary quest line (even though I'm technically 4th in line, if I'm lucky), it turned out I could be assigned the item (I assume you'd get an error if you weren't on the quest).

Naturally, when this happened, my first response was "NNNNNNNOOOOOOOO!!!", but then I figured no stress, I can just get a GM to help me fix this. So we did the roll, the warlock (Vasjh) won the roll, and I logged a GM ticket :

Garnaph @ Twilight's Hammer 6/7/2011 21:16
"My master looter accidentally gave me [Eternal Ember], as she mistook it for a crafting orb. It was supposed to go to Vasjh. Please help. I've told the master looter to be more careful in future. I'm so sorry."

I had an ETA of 4 days on the ticket, but I figured no rush, it's not like we're going to have 25 orbs within those 4 days anyway.

This morning I got the following scripted copy-paste response :

Rennguht Customer Service Representative 8/7/2011 01:10
"Thank you for contacting the Blizzard customer support team.

Eternal Embers can by design only be looted or assigned to a player who is on the quest “All-Seeing Eye” at the time of creation and is not intended to be traded afterwards. Please be advised that the Game Master team is therefore not accommodating redistribution or transfer requests of Eternal Ember under any circumstances.

Thank you for your understanding and consideration.

Regards,

Game Master Team
Blizzard Entertainment Europe"

I had a similar issue when cata first hit. I rolled greed on a chaos orb (even though I'm JC/Alchemy) and won it. I didn't realise it would immediately and permanently soulbind, and that GMs would have a "please go @#$ yourself with a rake" attitude towards helping you clear up these mistakes. I still have that chaos orb sitting in my bank, gathering dust. Just the one, because I learned from this unfortunate misunderstanding.

So in this case, in what is likely to be another once-off (as I'm changing our master looter after this incident), a GM is again completely unwilling to assist. If it was a chaos orb I wouldn't be as stressed out, as you can just run another 5 man to get another. boss kills in firelands are few and far between, and even if you kill all 7 bosses in a week, you're not assured of 7 embers, as they're not 100% drop rate.

So why on earth are GMs so unwilling to help? I used to have an opinion of them as very friendly and helpful. Now I'm starting to feel that they're unwilling to help in any way, and are too lazy to even type an individualised response, resorting to scripted copy-paste replies, after a 2 day wait.

This morning I tried again, posting the following wall of text in reply to the GM :

Garnaph @ Twilight's Hammer 8/7/2011 07:54
"I understand that that is your standard response. However as I stated above, our master looter mistook it for a crafting orb, and that's why it was assigned to me : as the guild leader, as I normally place crafting orbs in our guild bank. By chance I happen to be a druid that's on the quest, but I'm 5th in line for the legendary, and by no means should I have got the quest item.

We performed a roll for the Eternal Ember, as per how we agreed we'd handle this over a month ago, and Vasjh won the roll. He should have got it. I'm not trying to get it transferred after the fact because I changed my mind.

I'm fully aware of how the legendary quest line works. We decided on how to assign these orbs a long time ago, and the Ember was merely assigned to me by accident. It won't happen again, as I've been giving the master looter hell since it happened. I just need you to transfer this one to fix the mistake, PLEASE :(

This isn't a chaos orb that we can quickly run another 5 man to replace. Firelands bosskills are few and far between for our guild at the moment, and the Embers aren't even a 100% drop rate. Having one wasted like this is a massive problem for us."

It would be nice if I could at least get a GM to actually read what I have to say, and hear me out, rather than brushing me off like a moron QQing on forums. I don't need to be told what the legendary questline entails - I read up on everything I needed to some time ago. The response I got was lazy, unhelpful, and a little condescending. I expected better from a "Customer Service Representative".

Monday, June 27, 2011

Permanent Restokin.com spot

So what I was hoping for has happened. My guest post got some serious love, and as such I was encouraged offer to make a second post. This quickly snowballed into me being made a permanent writer for restokin.com!

http://www.restokin.com/about-restokin/about-garnaph/
"Garnaph is now a permanent writer for Restokin, as of June 2011"

Now I'm both excited at the opportunity, and utterly terrified by the thought of having to actually produce decent content on an ongoing basis. I'm sure the topic ideas will come... it's just a little daunting right now.

Last night when all of this happened, was a bit of a surreal experience. Lissanna posted all of it on twitter, and next thing I know I'm getting SPAMMED with people following me. In the middle of a million names I don't know... "Inconspicuous Bear @Reesify is now following you (@Garnaph)". I had to double take that one. Reesi is the bear goddess, the blogger I follow religiously, without whom I wouldn't be half the bear I am right now. Yes, I am not even going to try hiding my hero worship. Having her following my tweets is a great honor, and brings it to home exactly what I just got hooked up with. I hope to have some contact with a few of the team waffle guys, and I look forward to seeing what the future brings!

Lissanna is going to be away for most of July, organising wedding-type stuff, so it looks like I'll be mostly holding the fort. I've got a 3-part series on power auras planned, and I'm currently looking for another topic to handle the 4th week - suggestions welcome!

So what this means for my personal blog is this : With the much higher numbers of viewers on restokin.com, I'll be saving my best stuff for there, and this blog will mainly stay as a space for me to mention anything related specifically to me, my raids, my guild... i.e. the type of stuff that the masses might not be terribly interested in, but for those keen to keep an eye on what we're up to, this is the place for it.

Keep an eye out for my posts on restokin over the next while. I'm hoping to be able to add a new spin on some topics, without changing the overall culture of the site, which clearly works just fine as is. It's sure to be one hell of a ride.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Preparing for 4.2

So we're officially done with our T11 goals. We've killed 12/12 normal, got the kills for all 12 in my team, and decided with the difficulty level of T11, there is no point in attempting to progress through heroic at this stage. We'll most likely come back for them in our T12 at some point.

So what's next? good question. So many options, so little time (PTR testing of firelands shows the clock is ticking).

Top prio is making sure we're 100% ready for firelands. I have 2 new raiders joining my team, and potentially one leaving. This means the newbies need to be trained up and geared (they have a lot of PvE experience, but are potentially green at PvE), and making sure they fit in with the rest of the team, both in terms of their skills, and socially.

So we're going to do a couple of farm runs to get them up to speed, and to get them some gearups (they've been farming hcs to do what they can, but nothing competes with 359 drops in the end).

Assuming there's some time left over, I'd like to take some time doing some old WOTLK achievements for the Glory of the Lich King raider Guild Edition. Currently we're just short Alone In the Darkness and Halion HC. Both should be a challenge, but with us being hideously overgeared for the encounters, they shouldn't be too hard.

The last option is just call a massive break until 4.2. Problem with that is we've had so much time off already, I think the risk here will be everyone gets out of practice (especially those that only log for raids). Also, by doing some farming to fill the last few slots of BiS gear, we'll be in the strongest possible position when 4.2 hits.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Robbed of an acheivement

So last night, to make things interesting, we decide to attempt some achievements as we reclear BWD. We managed the Omnitron acheivement Achieve-a-tron oneshot, so we decided to give the Maloriak acheivement a go : Aberrant Behavior.

Generally you pull 9 adds, and then 9 again, and after the second green phase, you push Phase2, and kill the boss. This ach requires you to allow 12 adds to spawn, keep your offtank alive long enough to make it to the first green phase, and then nuke them down asap, killing all of them within a 10 second window. We even used a bloodlust to be sure.

We managed this, all of our mods and acehievement tracking told us we were on target, but when we got the kill, nothing :(

Upon looking at logs, I saw the following :

First add died at 20:48:00.765 , last add died at 20:48:09.156 - that's a 8.391 second gap between the first and last add. Well within the 10 second window.

I'm sitting on 400ms, so that can't account for a 1.6 second gap. So I'd like to know what the hell just happened.

The raw log entries are below :

5/9 20:48:00.765 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000669,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:02.656 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000663,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:02.656 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E00000066C,"Aberration",0x10a48
5/9 20:48:03.875 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000670,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:05.671 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000675,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:06.015 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000664,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:06.796 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E00000066B,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:07.234 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000671,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:07.234 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000674,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:07.921 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E00000066A,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:08.000 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000667,"Aberration",0xa48
5/9 20:48:09.156 UNIT_DIED,0x0000000000000000,nil,0x80000000,0xF130A1E000000668,"Aberration",0xa48

Monday, May 9, 2011

Second clear

My raid team is always based on more than 10 people. A set 10 man team never works, since a single person having rl drama, line issues, power failure, and the entire raid falls apart. So you try organise some kind of sub/rotation setup, and balance progression around keeping everyone up to date in terms of both gear and knowledge of kills.

This brings me to one of the parts of raid leading that I enjoy the most. Now that we've killed Nef, we're doing a reclear of all bosses to plug the holes of those that missed kills for whatever reason. It's part of how I keep things fair, and keep everyone involved and loyal to the team.

As selfish and manipulative as that might sound, a "leave no man behind" policy is quite simply one of the best ways to encourage everyone to stick around. If everyone is going to get the kills and drops they need, why should you move? If anything, you get the kill without having to put up with the 159 nef wipes, for example.

Chogall took us a few weeks to kill last time, and Alakir was close on a month. We killed both last night without much hassle, with raids organised around those that needed the kills, rather than a perfect raid makeup.

I even included my co-gm resto druid in the chogall kill, even though thanks to work issues he hasn't been able to raid in a while, and so he was both undergeared and a little rusty on tacts. That said, he kicked the asses of both myself and my resto shaman, going to show once again that skill >> gear.

All in all, I'm very happy with my raid team at the moment. They pushed through some seriously taxing content, and are now dedicated to making sure that no one is left behind. We'll all be on even footing when T12 hits, which puts us in a very good position to hit Firelands hard right from the first week.

Tonight we reclear BWD and head for the second Nef kill, finishing the reclear for acheivements. After that, who knows. I'd like to take a look at a HC boss or two, but it all depends on who's willing. I know a lot of raiders are pretty worn out from the wiping on alakir and Nef, and a break until T12 makes more sense.

I also have two new healers coming into the raid team shortly, and both will require gearing and some rading practice before I drop them into the Firelands deep end. A more social reclear of T11 content would probably make more sense for that.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Tier 12 Feral first impressions

So wowheadnews.com and mmo-champion.com just released T12 set bonuses. As always, I open them up with a thought of "let's see how blizz gives cats great set bonuses and bears terrible ones this time".

To give some background, this is what T11 looks like :

# (2) Set: Increases the periodic damage done by your Rake and Lacerate abilities by 10%.

# (4) Set: Each time you use Mangle (Cat) you gain a 1% increase to attack power for 30 sec stacking up to 3 times, and the duration of your Survival Instinct ability is increased by 50%.

Lacerate is massively frontloaded, i.e. most of it's dmg and threat is on application, not the ticks. Also, unlike pre cata, we don't keep a full stack up. We keep resetting it and stacking to 3 again. Simply put, the 2pc bonus is a joke.

The 4pc is ok, but since SI has a 3m cooldown, it's unlikely to have a massive impact in my opinion. More to the point, in order to get 4pc, you have to take a few t11 peices with haste on, rather than items with more appropriate bear stats, like [Poison Protocol Pauldrons], [Morrie's Waywalker Wrap], [Double Attack Handguards], or [Tsanga's Helm]. The passive bonus from those stats outweighs the 4pc by miles.

Anyway, I digress. The purpose of this post is to highlight the new T12 bonuses :

* Feral 2 Pieces - Your attacks with Mangle, Maul, and Shred deal 10% additional damage as Fire damage over 4 sec.
* Feral 4 Pieces - Your finishing moves have a 20% chance per combo point to extend the duration of Berserk by 2 sec and your Barkskin ability grants an additional 10% chance to dodge for 12 sec.

The 2pc is a really nice threat increase for bears on single target... but the 4pc is just GODLY. Dodge is quite simply our best stat other than agility (which includes dodge), so I couldn't have come up with a better bonus if I tried.

On top of the theorycrafting bonuses (which is the most important thing, after all. stats > looks), the firelands theme of all of the set bonuses is also mind-blowingly cool.

Unless T12 items have truly horrific stats, I'm going to be forced to get 4pc at all costs. Plain and simple.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Nefarian down

Bloody finally. At one point someone went through worldoflogs and counted around 160 wipes. No doubt we were closer to 200 now.

In the end, two things radically changed the fight :

(1) Adding an additional crackle at the end of P1.
(2) The 4.1 nerf, which made a P2 crackle possible at long last.

Both of these, however, were not without their challenges.

The P1 crackle has to be timed PERFECTLY. As the 3rd P1 crackle results in Ony exploding and wiping the raid (which never happened to us, for the record), you need to essentially dps Nef to just over 70%, Ony to about 2-3%, then quickly push Nef under 70%, then kill Ony. Crackle has a 5s cast time, so you have that much time to get your 5 dps + your Ony tank to do enough dps to kill her.

Any earlier, Ony goes boom. Any later, and you don't have enough time to heal up before P2 starts. We had a few attempts where we pushed Nef over as he was running to the middle, but it was too chaotic trying to get to our pillars and trying to heal everyone up before the magma and shadowflame barrage damage started rolling in.

When done right, you push Nef over, kill Ony within the 5s window, and have time to heal everyone to around 90% before the magma starts to rise.

Then comes the P2 crackle. The 15% nerf to shadowflame barrage in 10 man really helped here. The reason we haven't done one in P2 before is simple. All the tacts say "when the whole raid is stable". Well, we never had such a point. Specifially one of our platforms was always all over the place. I realised recently why. It's shadowflame damage, which acts on the lowest of your shadow/fire resistences. We had a shadow resist up from our priest, but that platform was missing a fire resist (the paladin and shaman healers had their platforms covered).

In order to get around this, we switched the raid so that platform had the priest healer, and our 2 tanks, who both popped cooldowns for the crackle. throw in a bear tank tranquility, and it felt much easier than expected. As long as the priest was topped up, and both tanks were at least on 50%, the crackle didn't kill anyone. Heal up after, and it's done.

The next challenge was the timer on P2. P2 ends when all 3 adds die, but there is also a timer. If you hit the timer, P3 starts, but whatever adds are still up, don't go anywhere. So we had to balance Nef DPS with killing the adds, essentially pushing Nef as low as possible before killing the adds right around the time the timer ran out. You start P2 at just under 70% (thanks to the 3rd P1 crackle), and have to get him to just over 50% before the phase ends. On our kill I think he was around 53%.

Finally, the reason why this is necessary. P3 has a soft enrage in the form of fire that spawns faster and faster on your offtank, who is running around the room like a mad thing. The less health you have to burn through in P3, the better. Shaving 20% off what we needed to do turned our 13-17% wipes into a kill. Plain and simple.

After just over a month of wiping, it took a nerf (I call it a fix, since 10 man is overtuned at the moment) and a change of tact, and we did it in two nights. I guess that goes to show just how tenacious my raiders are. Yes we got some pretty severe burnout, people were snapping at each other etc, but in the end we held together and got it done, and I'm one damn proud raid leader this morning :)

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Procrastinating...

So we're currently sitting on around 160 Nef wipes. Some P1 wipes, some P2 wipes, and the P3 wipes we get at the moment are generally due to me struggling to get the fire kiting path down (I reset the adds once, get myself cornered, and die).

Since we last attempted Nef (13% on best attempt), I've thrown gold at my raiders (I spent 60k in a single day) on BoEs, maelstrom crystal enchants, etc. We also did a chilled farm run on sunday (5/6 BWD, 3/4 BoT), which resulted in 8 main spec upgrades, and ofc loads of VP for all.

Even with these upgrades, I'm not convinced we can easily take the bastard down. I'm not saying my raiders aren't capable of it. I know they are. It's a matter of morale. You start a new boss excited by your last kill (Al'Alkir in this case), and slowly over time that fades as you focus on the boss, and then after a few weeks of constant wiping, it fades to burnout, irritation, and finger-pointing as people make tiny mistakes and cause wipes.

In the end, I need to balance progression with morale, and right now that's a really hard job. The farm run was supposed to be a morale booster, and I suspect in some ways it was, but I still had raiders asking for a week off.

It's Easter weekend this week, and a coupld of the guys are away. Also, there are 2 nef nerfs coming in 4.1 (one of which is particularly significant), which means if I can, I'd like to put off nef until after this patch.

# The damage of Shadowflame Barrage has been reduced by 15% (10-player normal and Heroic difficulty only).

# The damage of Tail Lash has been reduced by 20% (10-player normal and Heroic difficulty only).

First up, let me say that perhaps these are less "nerfs", and more "rebalancing". It's a publicly known fact that 10 man raids are WAY harder than 25 man raids at the moment. Blizzard admitted this, and every patch contains some or other nerf to 10 man raids in order to bring the difficulty more in line with what 25 man raiders are experiencing. Some 10 man HC encounters are essentially impossible at the moment, which further proves my point.

The tail lash change isn't too big of a deal, but I guess it takes those random P1 wipes out of the equation. The Shadowflame barrage one is what really has me excited. We often wipe in P2 due to the sheer amount of dmg taken, which is why we flat out refuse to do P2 crackles at the moment. This ultimately puts a ton of strain on the DPS, who have to kill nef from around 72% in P3. If we can push a crackle or two in P2, combined with the 13% we're doing already, that should do it.

All of this adds up to the same thing. Week off for all, try the bastard next weekend. As much as I'm a raiding junkie, I can't deny the facts. Besides, it's going to be months before 4.2 goes live, so what's the rush, right?

Monday, April 18, 2011

Guest post on Restokin.com

Lissanna of restokin.com asked for guest posters a short while ago, and I figured what the hell. 15 or so emails back and forth later, my post went live 5 minutes ago.

I'm hoping this gives our guild a little bit of publicity, and perhaps gives me a chance to get more involved in the druid community. Whatever the result, it's been a pretty awesome opportunity. I don't know at this stage if it's a once-off thing or if I'll be involved in an ongoing process, so we'll have to see...

Monday, April 11, 2011

Nef on 13%

Last week we had him on 37%, last night our best attempt was 13%. We're getting there for sure. The only question is why don't we have the kill now.

The next idea I have is changing our bloodlust from 30% (the idea being it boosts "execute" abilities), back to using it early in P3. That 37% wipe was without me resetting the adds even once. If we get to 37% and reset, nef will be on say 30% when adds come back up, and then more than enough time to kill before I die... hopefully.

159 wipes and counting...

Friday, April 8, 2011

Gem vendor price change

So if you pay any attention at all to gold making in wow, you know that the vendor price of cut green gems is 9G. Cut Blue gems vendor for 5g75s. You also know that this makes the floor price of a stack of obsidium ore 54G, once you prospect, cut, and vendor all gems (uncut blues I personally keep, cut, and sell at market value for more profit). The corresponding floor price of Elementium ore is 44g (less greens, more blues).

The result of this is that any stacks of obsidium going under 54G, you can buy, prospect, cut, vendor, for profit. Zero risk. Since stacks can go as low as 40G, you're making 14G PER STACK. Since I often do this with up to 100 stacks at a time, it's a fairly reliable way to make gold, provided you have the time to sit and hit your prospect button a few million times.

In any case, this morning's PTR notes mentioned that the vendor price for these gems is dropping to 75 silver.

This is going to flat out destroy this method of making gold. Expect the prices of ore to plummet (oversupply), meta gem prices will drop (green gems worth 9g transmute into meta gems at the moment, work it out based on 75s), the price of enchanting mats will rise (people have been turning cheap gems them into cheap jc items and DE'ing them)... in short, it's going to wreck all kinds of havoc on the wow economy.

Now, I'm not going to say the sky is falling. I'll continue to make gold off JC and inscription. It's just interesting to see how such a simple change, is likely to make so many huge changes to the wow economy as a whole. Personally, I'm keen to see what happens :)

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Infected Wounds hates me

So I discovered something fairly interesting last night while tanking Nef. OK, while tanking nef adds. You need to keep 6 adds busy, while kiting them out of fire that's chasing you. Seems simple enough. Too bad that on our best attempt ever (37%), one add happened to lag behind the pack, and get hit by fire.

Naturally, being me, I started assuming someone else had done it (because I never make mistakes... clearly...), and asked my holy pally (the only one anywhere nearby) if he used holy wrath or something. Nope, not him, too busy spam healing my furry ass.

Then it dawned on me. Infected Wounds. Guess I'm banned from using Maul and Mangle in P3 from now on.

FML

Onohksia

Well as I said, we're currently working on Nef, and after some extreme wiping, we've made our way into P3. As always, it hasn't been without it's share of laughs.

I learned from Stoneybaby in Big Crits : GM abuse is good for morale. A good tact and a good team is one thing, but if they're not motivated, they're never going to be focused enough to get the job done. So I take the hits, I wear a pink dress, I endure wave after wave of pedobear jokes, because I know it's all harmless fun, and it keeps people motivated :)

I'm not the only one that takes the hits, however. When we first attempted Nef, none of us had read tacts, and we had time for one "ok what the hell why not" pull before the end of the night. My DK tank decided he was going to give us a strat rundown anyway. Halfway through his speech, he said something about tanking "onohksia". Everyone went "lolwut?". "You know, Nefarian's sister". "Dude, it's pronounced 'Onyxia'". This went back and forth for a while, until we decided to just leave him be.

So we click the orb, Nef does his speech, rises into the air, and says those immortal words :

"RISE, ONICSIIAAAA"

The entire raid almost died laughing.

And so, it begins...

Hi everyone, my name is Garnaph, and I tank in a pink dress. And I like it.

OK, so let me explain. Between pulls, while afk, or just any time we want to screw around, I equip a pink dress and bunny ears for my guild's amusement. Thanks to gear not appearing when you shift into druid forms, I didn't realise I hadn't switched back to my tanking gear on one occasion, and I proceeded to get oneshot by Blood Queen Lanathel. I'll never live it down.

PNV days

So, a bit of background. I started playing wow probably about 3 years ago, through the encouragement of a friend named Apathaia (PvP mage). My wife and I both started in Twilight's Hammer EU, quickly joining Pap en Vleis, the resident South African social guild on the server.

Soon enough, we both picked our mains, and hit max level (70 at the time, as we started late in TBC). We discovered a little thing called raiding, and wanted in. BAD. As the guild only had a single 10 man at the time, we started our own with some friends we'd made while lvling, and we soon overtook the original 10 man, which I guess is where everything started for me.

One thing led to another, and I ended up running the guild. We merged the 2 10 mans into a single 25 for Magtheridon and Gruul. We took a look at SSC and TK before the massive raid nerf hit pre WOTLK, and at that point we took a quick look at MH and BT before the new expansion hit.

Since we'd started so late in TBC, we were ok with missing most of the content, but we didn't want it to happen again. We took our existing 25 man, and tore apart Naxx and Malygos. Unfortunately, being a social guild, there was a lot of pressure in PnV to include more players, and since 25 isn't a number I can change, this became an issue. A second 25 man started up, and everything was going OK, until Ulduar hit.

With patch 3.1 and ulduar, we had a new problem. You had to have naxx gear to get into ulduar, but the second raid team, that was still working on naxx, wasn't willing to give up their best players so we could proceed. I get their point of view, but it meant that no one wins. Ultimately we ran out of players due to the normal wear-and-tear of losing raiders to RL issues, work, moving guilds, etc, and eventually the whole group dissolved. The Mrs and I left, and joined Unforgiven II, a guild where I had some friends, and I heard they had a more serious approach to raiding, something I was very much looking for.

UFII days

I raided the whole way through Ulduar with UF2, ultimately taking down yogg, which was one of the most epic raiding experiences of my wow career to date. Ultimately my time in UF2 came to an end due to older players competing with me for raid spots, and the powers that be made the call I would have also made in their position : go with the founding raiders rather than the new guy.

The Exodus

At that point I started raiding 10 man ICC with some friends, some of whom were in UF2, some of whom were old PnV friends of mine. when UF2 decided to port off the server, I took the opportunity to start my own guild, and thus The Exodus was born.

Now, first up, we weren't named after the world top guild. I knew they existed, but I picked the name for a deliberate reason. I was leaving a guild where I felt I didn't fit in, and so were a lot of my PnV friends. We were all leaving situations that were not ideal for us, and looking for the "promised land" of raiding. I realised in UF2 that if the founders ran the show, then I wanted to be a founder.

We've had some ups and downs since then, but the guild is mostly held it together. Friends from all over have ported servers to join us, and we have a thriving social community, on top of 2 very successful raiding teams. I still run my own raids as "Team Hellscream", and the other raids are under "Team Ghostbusters". The two groups have a very different feel, but both work, which is what's so great about it.

Right now team GB is 7/12, and HS is 11/12, working on Nefarian (or being farmed by him, depending on who you ask).

So anyway, the purpose of this blog is to post my thoughts on raiding, our guild, wow as a whole. I'll also share some of the funny stories of things that happen in our guild, as that's part of what makes this game fun. If it was all serious raiding, I think we all would have lost interest a while ago.