Category: facepalm

Tales of patch 3.2.2, Onyxia and many failed pugs.

Kurn / / facepalm, guide, hunters, onyxia, raiding

Onyxia has been back in our lives since the servers came up on Tuesday. That’s about 30 or so hours ago.

In the last 30 hours, I have:

– Killed Onyxia on 10m in a semi-pug with my hunter (and gotten the Dragonstalker Helmet after dying early on while pulling whelps off a priest)

– Killed Onyxia on 10m in a full pug with my shammy healing (and been one of four people left standing — me, the MT and two DPS — because people don’t understand the concept of whelps, aggro and deep breaths)

– Killed Onyxia on 25m in a raid with my paladin healing with the guild I’m applying to (with nothing bad to report)

– Killed Onyxia on 10m in a pug raid with my paladin healing (whereupon I died and the druid in the raid apparently didn’t know what “BR” or “brez” meant)

– Wiped several times on 25m Onyxia on my hunter (I think it’s three different raids?) including one where one of the “tanks” had 30k health unbuffed and was wearing PVP gear

I know I need to write a post about guild drama and why I’ve ended up on Proudmoore, but honestly, that can wait.

HOW TO DO ONYXIA WITHOUT BEING A DUMBASS

It kind of astounds me that I feel I even have to think about writing this, but apparently, there are a ton of people out there who never killed Onyxia the first time around. I used to lead Onyxia raids. Granted, they weren’t altogether successful (due primarily because we would go in with 30 instead of 40 people) but I DID down her pre-BC and I have my Rhok’delar to prove it.

Step 1: Trash

If you’re new to the Onyxia encounter, you don’t know about her trash. Which is okay. But as with all new encounters, there are two ways of learning about them — researching and experiencing.

Onyxia’s trash consists of four mobs, called Onyxian Warders, and they are pretty easy to dispatch. Key points to bear in mind:

– They have a Cleave. Do not stand in front of them unless you are a tank.

– They have an AOE fire nova ability. Do stand at range if you can.

– Do attempt to pull one at a time. (Hot tip! If you’re a tank, do not stand over that hump in the tunnel, because your healers do NOT have line of sight on you! You’ll know the hump in the tunnel when you see it.)

Once the trash is taken care of, it does not seem to respawn within 20 minutes or whatever the old timer was. For this, we should all be grateful.

That brings us to…

Step 2: Lady Katrana Prestor, I Presume?

So there she is. Lying there on the ground in her lair. The environment hasn’t changed at all and most of Onyxia’s abilities haven’t changed. In fact, the fight is remarkably similar to how it used to be. Old-school raiders shouldn’t have any problems.

Phase 1

Your tank, presuming he or she is not a complete moron, will run in and turn Onyxia around, so the tank’s back is to the north wall and Onyxia’s back (and tail!) is facing the south tunnel where you came in from. If your tank is not doing this, your tank is likely an idiot and I urge you to hearth the hell out of there ASAP. :P

Once positioned, Onyxia in Phase 1 is pretty simple. Phase 1 lasts from 100% ’till 65%. Things for everyone to bear in mind:

– Standing in front of her is only for the tank. By “in front” I mean anywhere in front of her front legs. She has a 180 degree CLEAVE, breathes fire and has a wing buffet that bounces you quite some distance — which is why your tank should position themselves to bounce off the north wall to land, more or less, exactly where he or she was pre-wing buffet.

– Standing in back of her is for NO ONE. You hear me? NO ONE get anywhere near that damn tail! You get hit by her tail and it’s not some stun like on Sartharion, ohhhhh no. You get hit by her tail and you get shot over into the whelp eggs. Upon doing so, you will break the eggs. And in so doing, you will likely wipe your raid. So do not stand behind her.

– Melee (and OTs) should stand at her midsection, preferably closer to her hind legs than her front legs. OTs should watch for whelps to pick up.

– Ranged should be, you know, at range, and keep an eye out for whelps to DPS down when the OTs have aggro on them.

Phase 2

Phase 2 begins when Onyxia has hit 65% health and ends when she lands at 40%. She’ll be all “screw YOU guys, I’m gonna fly around and ruin you!” I think the phrase is actually “I’ll incinerate you from above!”. Don’t say she didn’t warn you.

Several things happen in Phase 2.

a) 20 whelps spawn from each side every 90 seconds. This can be poor. Give the OTs a chance to grab aggro before you AOE things. Healers should watch your healing at the spawn so you’re not ruined by 40 whelps right off the bat.

b) Lair Guards are a new twist to the fight. They’re a lot like Onyxian Warders. They ALSO cleave. They ALSO have a blast nova. And they also have this thing called “Ignite Weapon“. So that’s 25k damage to targets in a 5 yard radius on 25m and 17.5k damage to targets in a 5 yard radius on 10m. The trick is that Ignite Weapon can easily be dealt with by… that’s right, disarming them. The blast nova still sucks, but since melee have to be directly underneath Onyxia to beat on her, you can put melee on these Lair Guards to help disarm them and have them run out during the 5 second cast on Blast Nova. Basically, you want to burn these suckers down ASAP.

c) Onyxia needs to be taken down to 40% health primarily by the ranged DPS in your group. Due to the fact that she moves around a LOT, dots are here to save the day. That means every single dot you can think of. Whatever does the most damage the fastest wins. Ranged should primarily down the whelps whenever they spawn (after giving tanks a chance to get aggro) and then return to focusing on Onyxia. It’s best to refresh your dots right when the whelps spawn to ensure maximum damage done on Onyxia while you AOE.

d) Onyxia will be flying around the room, as I mentioned. She’ll also be casting two spells. One is Fireball and it hits people for 5-8k damage (10m/25m) and has a 10yd splash radius, so do /range 10 and stay away from people.

The other spell is, of course, Deep Breath.

When you see the emote that Onyxia is taking a deep breath, you have exactly 8 seconds to not be fried by it. What you need to do is this:

a) Look up.

b) Find Onyxia.

c) Run behind her or to her sides.

d) If it’s not possible to run behind her or to HER sides, run to your closest side of the cavern, without spawning whelps, please. Or, if you’re REALLY in trouble, you can iceblock or bubble through it. It’s a cone-shaped breath that doesn’t last too long, but if you take the full brunt of it, you’re literally toast.

Assuming your raid can handle the whelps and the Lair Guards and doesn’t get fried…

Phase 3

Give your tank Fear Ward or, at the very least, Tremor Totem. Strength of Earth or Stoneskin totems are fail in Phase 3. Shammies should be split up so one is in each group, assuming you have that many shammies. Tanks, then healers, then DPS should have priority on Tremor Totem. Why? She does a Bellowing Roar that fears you like a moron for three seconds. You’ll know it’s coming because the screen will shake just beforehand.

In conjunction with that, lava now spews out of the cracks in the floor. So don’t stand on cracks in the floor. Oh, and she still does EVERYTHING she did in phase 1. So watch where you’re standing!

Unlike classic Onyxia, 3.2.2 Onyxia no longer resets aggro between phases. She should come right back down to your main tank. MTs, you should be in position when Onyxia hits about 43-45% health so that she comes to you and positioning isn’t so much of a pain in the ass.

Then you burn her and collect your phat lootz.

Loot:

In addition to the helms (there are 3 different Judgement, Stormrage Ten Storms helms, 2 different Frostruned helms, 2 difference Transcendence helms and 2 different Wrath helms — all for different specs) and other gear she drops, she will drop an Enlarged Onyxia Backpack (Unique, 22 slots), an Ashen Sack of Gems (similar to Magtheridon’s gem bag, containing 1-3 epic gems) and, of course, her own head. Her head leads to a quest, which leads to some nice loot, which you can check out here.

But what about the Mature Black Dragon Sinew? Does Onyxia still drop it?

Way back in the day, hunters had a class quest for an epic bow, staff and quiver. To start the quest, you had to get the Ancient Petrified Leaf from Majordomo’s chest in Molten Core. He would always drop EITHER the leaf or the priest item for their quest, the Eye of Divinity.

But even without being on the quest, you could acquire the Mature Black Dragon Sinew (needed for the bow and the staff) from Onyxia. That’s what happened to me. I was in a pug Onyxia run and was the only (nub) hunter who hadn’t already gotten her bow. So I got the Mature Black Dragon Sinew and eventually got the Leaf and then got my bow.

Bornakk, a blue poster, has said that the Mature Black Dragon Sinew would still be available in-game, though probably not off Onyxia herself. WoWHead comments attest to this, claiming a drop off a non-elite dragon somewhere outside of BRD (possibly the Burning Steppes? That would make sense, as there are dragons from level 50-60 in the zone, and it’s a levle 60 quest.).

What this means is that hunters can still get their bows, if they so desire, which means my brother should start farming dragons for his sinew. :)

3.2 – Sob.

Kurn / / coliseum, facepalm, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I’m probably making too much of it, but I’m still very sad about the nerfs to Divine Intellect and Illumination. Bastards.

Anyways. Got an achievement the other day that, frankly, shocked the living crap out of me. So surprised was I, I forget to screenshot it as it happened.

lightning1

I had no idea what the hell that was.

lightning2

… I’m still dumbfounded that the raid I was in, my guild raid, got that. Week after week, people get ruined by that dumb lightning… and yet, we get THAT achievement? It’s not like it’s difficult to avoid or anything, but it’s kind of surprising. Sort of like The Safety Dance.

Anyways, I’m still unsure how the hell I’m going to be healing in 3.2.

I guess something along these lines:

1) Cast Sacred Shield on the tank I’m healing.

2) Beacon the tank I’m not.

3) FoL the tank every 12ish seconds to keep my hot up (must configure Grid to show hots AND my own one…)

4) … FoL the other tank if they have SS on them?

5) Continue to spam Holy Light and pray to God I don’t run OOM.

Ugh. I guess we’ll see how things go in the Coliseum (anyone else think that should be spelled Colosseum?!) tonight. Assuming the servers and such get all sorted out okay.

Sigh.

Kurn / / classes, facepalm, general, healing, paladins, ramblings

2-piece HOLY T9 bonus is extending the duration of our judgements by 10 seconds, to last 30 seconds.

Blizzard hates us.

Not only that, but I’m trying to figure out what to do with regards to the Illumination nerf. 30% of mana back on a crit instead of 60% (and all that is instead of the original 100%!!!).

Do I stack spellpower so my FoL/Sacred Shield hot is huge? Do I keep stacking int so that I can cast close to forever? Do I stack even more crit so that even if I’m only getting 30% of mana back on a crit, at least 50-60% of my heals ARE crits? Do I respec back into ret for the +crit?

I should probably go read up on this stuff at EJ, PlusHeal and other places, but part of the problem is that I’m just so SAD about our bonuses and our nerfs. And I’m sorry, I don’t particularly like the idea of beaconing the tank and healing the raid so that the heal can transfer .5 seconds later, even if it’s now going to count overhealing. I’ll probably still beacon the other tank and spam heal the current tank. The only places in current content where I can see beaconing the tank and raid healing as viable are:

– Freya +any elders (’cause the tank doesn’t take a lot of damage, but good LORD, does the raid)

– Head tank on Mimiron, MAYBE?

– Thorim in the arena, I guess? I still foresee a squished tank.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I LOATHE Beacon of Light with all my heart. I use it so sparingly. I use it on a second tank, I use it on my tank on Mimiron’s Plasma Blasts and use Hand of Sacrifice and then heal the crap out of myself, I use it on myself on Kologarn and Iron Council and Hodir… and that may be it.

I want the new expansion to come out and I want a decent 61 point talent, please. Sigh.

Improved Judgements… Why?

Kurn / / classes, facepalm, paladins, raiding, ramblings

When speaking of PVE content, one of the typical holy paladin specs is 51/5/15. Another is 51/0/20. And another is 53/0/18.

All three of these specs bring you deep into the Retribution tree to pick up Conviction (15 points) and then perhaps Sanctity of Battle (3 points).

What cheeses me off is the idiot holy paladins who pick 2/2 Improved Judgements over 2/2 Improved Blessing of Might as they spec down into the Ret tree.

Why? Honestly, why on earth would you ever pick something that lowers your Judgement cooldown?

There’s one reason I could possibly see for PVE content: do more DPS.

What the hell? You’re a holy paladin. You heal people. Your DPS is poor at best. Judgements of the Pure lasts a minute, not 8 seconds. Your global cooldowns should not be used in order to judge more often than is necessary to either:

a) Keep your judgement up (which is ~20 seconds)

b) Keep Judgements of the Pure up (which is 1 minute)

I’m lucky in that I’m rarely a paladin who must judge. We have a prot paladin and a ret paladin, both of whom are regular raiders, and I’m not always the only holy paladin in a raid, so JoL and JoW are both generally up and I don’t absolutely need to judge, most of the time, unless I want to keep Judgements of the Pure up.

You may not be as fortunate as I am, but there’s still very little excuse to lower that Judgement cooldown for any PVE reason whatsoever.

But, you may argue, what if we always have a ret paladin with improved might?

So what if you do? What if he or she is out of town for a week? Do you think your melee or raid leaders will be okay with crappy might? Is your raid really going to rely on Battle Shout? Hah!

So Improved Might wins over Improved Judgements and don’t get me started on Heart of the Crusader. That’s win, too, even if you have an elemental shaman. They can die, you know, and there goes 3% crit, unless you keep up Heart of the Crusader when you judge.  Or maybe they’re out of range, like on Thorim. I judge Light in the tunnel on every mob for the additional healing (which won’t interfere with anyone else’s judgements, as I’m the only paladin in there) and for the crit buff, and I’m especially careful to do it when we don’t have an elemental shaman in the tunnel with us. It helps us get through the tunnel faster and who knows when that ten seconds we shaved off will be the time we need to get to Thorim before Sif leaves?

So, TL;DR version:

– Improved Judgements for PVE holy paladins = bad

– Improved Might for PVE holy paladins = good if you’re going for Conviction or anything else deep into the ret tree

– Heart of the Crusader for PVE holy paladins = good, just like Improved Might

Oh, for the love of Pete…

Kurn / / facepalm, healers, priests, ramblings

Problem 1: I am awake at 7:17am and have not gone to bed yet.

Solution 1: In lieu of sleep, since I can’t sleep, I should be productive.

Problem 2: Being productive means trying to organize the healers in my guild a little more. The group is working okay, but some individuals need a nudge in the right direction, so I need to communicate this to them.

Solution 2: Write notes to the healers who need a nudge.

Problem 3: How to nudge/shove people without sounding like an overbearing, condescending bitch? Hm.

And that’s where I am right now. A disc priest app has two WRONG, just plain WRONG, glyphs and some odd talent choices and is casting Greater Heal a lot more than Flash Heal.

Problem 4: How to keep from tearing my hair out at some of the issues some of the healers are experiencing…

Yep, stumped on this one, too.

Siiiiiiiigh.

… /facepalm

Kurn / / facepalm, raiding, ramblings, ulduar

I have family in town, so I missed our Tuesday raid for family time at the parents’ house and then down at the Jazz Festival. WoW popped into my head twice. The first time when I realized my mother expected me and the cousins to stay for dinner instead of eating downtown (and I thought “I can’t believe I could be raiding instead of this…”) and the second time was at the Jazz Fest and I thought “It’s a gorgeous night, I’m kind of glad I’m not raiding right now.”

Guarantee you that the raid was very unhappy with me for not being there because the tanks kept getting killed. On Razorscale, we lost a tank. On Kologarn, we lost tanks. It’s like… what the hell is wrong with the healers? I go away for a few hours and come back to see things like this:

[18:39:06.734] Unknown Shockwave ProtPallyTank 9023 (A: 1808)
[18:39:07.125] TrialDiscPriest Prayer of Mending ProtPallyTank +3615
[18:39:08.640] Kologarn hits ProtPallyTank 19916 (A: 1808, B: 1797)
[18:39:10.671] ProtPallyTank Improved Leader of the Pack ProtPallyTank +1879
[18:39:11.078] Kologarn hits ProtPallyTank 20874 (O: 94, B: 1797)
[18:39:11.484] ProtPallyTank dies

So… in a span of about 5 seconds, the prot pally takes 50k damage and gets one heal from the trial disc priest’s POM and one heal from improved leader of the pack.

No Lifebloom from the resto druid in the raid. No Holy Shock from either of the two holy paladins in the raid. No Earthshield from the one resto shammy in the raid. No Penance from the one disc priest in the raid. No shields, no heals, no nothing.

Worse, the holy paladins didn’t judge. At all. Neither of them had Judgements of the Pure in their buffs gained. I’m sorry, ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO HASTE?! What the hell!?

Filled with rage and I’m not even halfway through the logs from last night.

… sigh.

Kurn / / facepalm, paladins, raiding, ramblings, ulduar

So I went through my parses from last night’s raid and was just randomly looking at something and then got it in my head to examine the pallies in more depth than I have in a while. The holy paladins, that is.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I look and see what they’re doing wrong? Because I’m a moron, that’s why.

Anonymous report link:

http://wowwebstats.com/tpqaqvbd2ukbc?ab=54153

See that? I’m Virgo. (Which is funny, ’cause I’m really a Taurus and Taurus is our prot pally, but anyways.) The other two listed there are the other holy paladins.

Granted, Leo was only there for Mimiron and Vezax, I believe, whereas Gemini was there for the whole raid, but do you see what I see? Like, do you see the abysmal uptime for them both for Judgements of the Pure?

I … … don’t have words. 15% haste is… what, a BAD thing? Are they ALLERGIC to haste? Granted I don’t keep it up all the time on Vezax when mana is a sacred, treasured resource and judging costs 197 mana, but I still use it SOMETIMES. And it’s still useful on, you know, THORIM and FREYA and MIMIRON and ARCHAVON and EMALON.

Honestly.

The other really, really, REALLY sad thing? No one freaking uses Sacred Shield.

Sadly, the “this person cast Sacred Shield” stats aren’t available in WWS, but my World Of Logs parse says:

Virgo (me) – 235 casts

Taurus (prot pally) – 191 casts

Leo (holy) – 12 casts

Gemini (holy) – 25 casts

Aries (ret) – 22 casts

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

So… yeah. I don’t know why I look at the parses. I really don’t. I’m not perfect, 235 casts on 4 hours is kind of poor, but HOLY CRAP, man. 12?! 25?! 25 casts over FOUR HOURS?! I hate people.

Random thoughts…

Kurn / / facepalm, general, raiding, ramblings

There are far too many kinds of raiders.

1) Those who don’t want to do any work and get dragged through content for phat lewtz.

2) Those who don’t even care about loot and only want to get through content for the sake of having gone through it.

3) Those who like farm nights because it means they can be gracious and give their spot up to someone while they sit on standby.

4) Those who hate farm nights because they get bored easily and it’s hard to maintain concentration and yet they have to go because the guild is low on their spec/class/etc.

5) Those who like progression nights because it means working on something NEW!

6) Those who like progression nights because it means the possibility of NEW LOOT!

7) Those who hate progression nights because they’re cheap morons who can’t figure out how to make gold in this game.

8) Those who hate progression nights because they think they’ll put in all this effort and then won’t be on for the kill which will, of course, not be tonight.

All of this is rattling around inside my head.

Is it a GOOD thing that I’m rarely on standby? Sure, because I like content, I’m getting emblems of conquest, chances on loot, DKP…

But it’s also a bad thing, because raid time is split between the other pallies, it’s a bad thing because I’d LIKE to get a night off, now and again…

Tonight, well, last night was Tuesday and we had like, 34 people online. Wednesday, we won’t have that many. Thursday, we’ll have less. It confuses me. Then again, I never did understand loot whores or people who didn’t *want* to progress.

Anyways.

A-posting we will go…

Kurn / / facepalm, general, hunters, paladins, raiding, ramblings, ulduar, world events

Haven’t written much here about raiding of late. Or much of anything barring the 3.2 holy paladin changes that will KILL ME. But this isn’t a post about 3.2. It’s a post about recent achievements, recent happenings and the fact that I miss being remotely knowledgeable about hunters.

The big thing… Yogg died on June 18th.

heroic-secrets

Continue reading “A-posting we will go…”

Gutted.

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, general, paladins, ramblings

I am absolutely gutted by some of the paladin changes coming up for 3.2. Like, just ruined.

  • Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
  • Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.

30%?! THIRTY PERCENT?! Are you KIDDING me?! I was playing a paladin when Illumination was at 100%. I was there when they nerfed it to 50% and then reconsidered and buffed it back to 60%. I am STILL bitter about THAT nerf and that was two years ago! And now they’re halving THAT number?!

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.

Honestly, I know a lot of people complain about stuff like this, but this is proof that no one at Blizzard plays a holy paladin in Ulduar. If they did, this wouldn’t happen.

I feel like we, the players, are being punished because Blizzard itemized us TOO WELL in tier 7, which is why we’re looking at T8 and going “hah, as IF,” and all kinds of plate Mp5 gear is getting DEed. The answer, Blizzard, is NOT to nerf the living shit out of the class. The answer is to ITEMIZE BETTER for T9. Give up T8 as not remotely worth our time and have Tier 9 be *awesome* for us so we WILL give up Tier 7.

5% less intellect, half the mana regen I normally get… do you REALLY think that’s the way to get me to let go of my T7 4-piece bonus? NO. 5% off the cost of Holy Light? I’m going to cling to that even MORE tightly now.

Oh my God, the sheer rage and disappointment is just… wow.

… in good news, Yogg to 5% last night.

But OH MY GOD, Illumination to 30%?!?!?!

Must breathe and later compose a forum post to post on the cesspool that is any official Blizzard forum, in the hopes that this madness can be stopped.

Bet you $10 that they revert it to 45% or so and everyone takes it as a victory, too. Everyone except me, that is. Fuckers.