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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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