Category: raiding

Patch 4.2 – PTR Build 14107

Kurn / / paladins, patch 4.2, raiding

Another day, another batch of 4.2 news, courtesy of MMO-Champion.

*    Denounce has been redesigned. It still reduces the mana cost of Exorcism. However, it no longer has a chance on Holy Shock of making Exorcism free and instant. Instead, it has a 50/100% chance to prevent the Exorcism target from causing critical effects for the next 6 seconds. This effect can be dispelled.
*    Holy Shock mana cost has been decreased to 7% of base mana, down from 8%.
*    Speed of Light now reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 40 sec, up from 30 sec.

First up, Denounce. A talent that doesn’t have a lot of use in PVE, but I still pick it up for Chimaeron P2 and for soloing purposes. This now makes it firmly a PVP talent, as I see it.

Next, Holy Shock. Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light are all going UP in cost, but Holy Shock goes down a percent. Given the 2pc T12 set bonus for holy paladins, this is pretty sweet. Having a 40% chance for your Holy Shock to cost 234 mana instead of 1640 is a very nice bonus. I think, anyways.

And finally, Speed of Light’s change means that we can use Holy Radiance every 20 seconds. I don’t think anyone’s mana pool could sustain such use, but hey. It’ll be nice that it’s basically always up.

So far: increased mana cost on our three casted spells, slight decrease in mana cost on Holy Shock, Denounce being changed for PVP and the ability to use Holy Radiance every 20 seconds.

Druids got a new mastery. I wonder if we’ll get one eventually. I don’t even need it now, but it sure would be nice to have a new one for 4.3 or 4.4 or something during this expansion. I don’t want to go a whole expansion hating our mastery.

Perseverence

Kurn / / achievements, apotheosis, blackwing descent, raiding, ramblings

It’s said that insanity is defined by doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Raiding can be kind of insane.

You rely on 10 or 25 people to do their jobs perfectly each and every time. In the beginning of raid content, even the slightest error can mean a wipe. As you gain gear and experience and familiarity with the content, slight errors happen with very little issue. Even huge mistakes can be forgiven, later on. But as you’re learning it and just after you’ve gotten that sweet, sweet first kill, execution is everything.

Last night, on our 65th overall attempt on Heroic Maloriak, we got him down.

65 times we went up against this guy. 64 times, we wiped, usually in hideous combinations of Dark Sludge, Scorching Blast, Frost Orbs and Flame Jets. Oh, and Arcane Storms during green phases. Ow.

This incarnation of Apotheosis is very different from the Burning Crusade version. We were learning, all the way throughout BC about how to lead a guild, how to lead/organize raids and how not to be douchecanoes.

We’re a lot more experienced now, after getting through BC together and the start of Wrath together before going our separate ways and seeing what else was out there for us. I know I learned a lot about my personal desires and personal limits when it comes to this game, as well as how NOT to run a raid group. I picked up a lot of tips on how to be more businesslike about running raids and guilds.

The biggest difference between now and then, though, is the attitude the people bring with them to a raid night. In Burning Crusade, it was like “aw, man, we’ve wiped on this guy for an hour. BLAH, I don’t want to do this anymore,” but obviously, progression means wiping and learning. This version of Apotheosis is very, very into killing bosses and new challenges. I rather suspect that if I were to poll them, 90%+ of the raiders would prefer trying a brand new boss fight than farming old content.

I like a good farm night just like anyone else, but once the fight is done successfully, it’s time for me to turn my attention away from it and move forward to the next. Or at least, that’s what I’m supposed to do. In Burning Crusade, I was constantly re-organizing old fights, re-explaining, just for repeat kills, at least in SSC and TK. (It got better in Hyjal and BT.) Shockingly, I CAN turn my attention to future challenges with Cataclysm’s Apotheosis. We have (knock on wood, lest I jinx us) never not done a repeat kill successfully the next time. Some are messier than others, some are super clean, but the second kill is always better than the first.

Getting the first kill is always such a relief, for me. It means that the effort we’ve invested in the fight together has paid off. It means those wipes were all worth it.

Currently being 3/13 on 25-man, in a guild comprised of my long-time WoW friends, is totally worth it all to me.

Yes. Even worth this. ;)

So we’ll keep trucking along. Don’t know that we’ll go 13/13, don’t know that we’ll get heroic Nef or Cho down before 4.2 arrives. But this group really doesn’t have much quit in them, I’ll tell you that. They make me proud to be their guild master.

Heroic Chimaeron x2 and other fun stuff.

Kurn / / apotheosis, baby paladin adventures, blackwing descent, classic instances, raiding, ramblings

So we’ve been working on knocking out some of these initial heroic modes.

We got Heroic Chimaeron on Thursday, April 28th.

We did that during patch week, with people dropping offline like FLIES, man. So I was thrilled to get him down after just a couple of nights of work. 35 wipes all-told, then a kill on try 36. Woot!

Since, on the night that we killed him, we had 16 wipes before the kill, I was not expecting an easy second kill. Particularly given the comp we had.

This Tuesday’s signups were absolutely abysmal. We had 20 confirmed, 3 who hadn’t accepted or declined, 2 declined and then something like 7 “tentatives”.

I got a hold of the three who didn’t sign up for Tuesday and confirmed they would all be there. I got a confirmation from a tentative and decided NOT to cancel the raid ahead of time. It was a risk — I knew I might have to call the raid or split into two groups of 10 and I seriously hate both of those ideas.

Lo and behold, we had 26 on at start.

We went to BH, knocked that out and headed to BWD. I hadn’t done any raid rosters and I didn’t even make a raid PLAN because of all the different variables in who was going to be there. So we did Magmaw and ODS and swapped out a healer who was lagging and disconnecting (who had been DPSing for us on those bosses) for Fog, to come in as ret. So we did normal Atramedes and did it pretty damn cleanly. Two deaths total and we finally got to use heroism at the END of the fight instead of the start. Atramedes is my guild’s worst fight, I think, but we’re seeing improvement.

So then we’re looking at heroic Chimaeron. I had swapped the healer who was lagging crazily, remember, so we had 7 healers instead of the 8 that we got it with last week. However, last week, one of the healers was one of the people dropping offline frequently, so we basically did it with 7.5 healers as it was.

I figured “what the hell” and decided we’d give it a shot with the 7 healers.

We lost one of the tanks very early, but popped him back up ASAP. Then we lost a rogue and basically just ignored that. I figured that if we had any battle rezzes left towards the end (remember, we have a maximum of three on 25-man) we could pop him back up.

Then, with, oh, five seconds to go before Massacre, I have three people in my group with Low Health. Including me. I’d given the healers specific instructions, since we didn’t have a dedicated “floater” healer, to watch for 2 or more Low Health people in any given group as we approach a Massacre and to start from the right (or bottom) of the frames to help out that group’s healer.

I’m the bottom-most person in my group with Low Health, so I start healing the shadow priest — get her out of danger. Then I heal the disc priest in my group, who’s a tank healer and is more important than I am for the moment. And through it all, I’m praying someone, ANYONE, sees that I have Low Health. I probably should have ASKED for a heal over Mumble, but I didn’t.

Dead me!

(Part of me thinks my healers thought it would be funny to let me die like that, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pre-planned. Mostly sure.) (I think.)

So I blow a battle rez on me by asking for a Raise Ally and am basically tapped out of mana for the next while, but everything ends up being fine but unfortunately, the shadow priest in my group died because I was running back to my spot and didn’t even see she had low health. ><

Two battle rezzes down, did I want to blow our last one NOW? I held off.

We got to the fourth feud and after that Massacre, I got our feral druid to pop up the shadow priest. We pushed, got another Massacre/Feud, which was very poorly timed and we got to P2 when most people were at about half-health. Eesh.

And then, Chimaeron/Mocking Shadows killed a total of six people before falling over.

I was sort of like “what the eff just happened?”. We one-shotted Heroic Chimaeron with one less healer than we generally have for this fight and had a minimum of issues.

“Well, I’ll take it!” I muttered to myself.

So by 10:23pm, after one hour and 23 mintues, we had done BH, Magmaw, ODS, Atramedes and H. Chimaeron.

We took our break and reconvened afterwards and decided to go play with Heroic Maloriak for the rest of the night.

We’re doing a LOT better with the dark phases! Not so good with the green phases. I’m going to have to go digging through the logs, but I’m pretty pleased to see us living through red phases, blue phases and dark phases compared to our work on him in mid-April. Basically, if we got a red phase first, we were screwed, because the sludges were still up for about 15ish seconds. Last night, they were mostly still up when we transitioned but only for a couple seconds, enough time to finish them off and get into position for the Scorching Blast. Amazing what a couple of weeks’ worth of gear will do, eh?

So it’s Heroic Maloriak on the menu for the next raid night and some more work next week, if need be.

Then… Magmaw? Atramedes? Should be interesting, at any rate.

I’m really pleased with the group and the progress we’re making, though. The repeat kills are HUGE and totally make my night when we manage a relatively easy repeat kill. That was something we were really bad at doing back in Burning Crusade. One week, we did 5/6 SSC in a single night and never did that again, I don’t think.

“Fun” stuff includes the targetting reticule bug. Being a paladin in raids, I don’t really have this issue.

Except last night, I did.

We’re there before Magmaw and I drop a feast.

Except my Raid Buff Status didn’t give out a raid warning.

“That’s weird,” I thought. And then I realized I couldn’t click my feast.

“Anyone see the feast?” I asked.

“What feast?”
“No…”
“There’s a feast?”
“I missed the feast?”

And the like.

“RETICULES!” my holy priest cried.

“Holy shit,” I responded. “Is THIS what you’re dealing with?!”

“YES!” came the replies.

“Wow. That is shitty.”

So here’s a screenshot of what LOOKS like two feasts, but the one on the right is NOT clickable and is ONLY visible to me. (Mostly to prove to my guild that no, I was not hallucinating.)

And in lowbie paladin adventures…

My lowbie paladin has caught up to my lowbie mage. Both are level 52.

I don’t know if I’m horrified or really pleased about this.

I do know that the XP is just insane with all the heirlooms and the guild XP bonus. It’s absolutely out of this world. I was level 50 for 45 minutes, I think it was.

Me, Fog, Maj and Entropia (another guildie) ran a bunch of dungeons today. Zul’Farrak, a ton of BRD (detention block) and a few Sunken Temples.

I have to say that I’m glad they redid ST so it doesn’t suck so bad, but I’m sad they covered up the hole in the center of that room. :(

BRD is glorious and delightful as always. I can’t wait to do the REST of the instance and not just the detention block. (Majik hates it, but he’ll tank for me anyways.)

I’m almost looking forward to Outlands stuff, though. I’m eagerly awaiting LBRS and UBRS runs, too. I think the Outlands anticipation is just because I’ll be THAT much closer to WotLK stuff, which I can practically do blindfolded after two years of running those dungeons.

My lowbie pally is a dwarf, but as soon as I hit 80, I’m going to race change to a human for the rep bonuses to the reps I’m actually going to need.

I feel like I’m on my shaman as a dwarf, anyways, especially with the heirloom shaman shoulders.

SPEAKING of which, wtf. I have Plate Specialization at 50, but there’s no heirloom plate healer helm? Ugh. I’m just going to stick with the mail, I guess, and be a scrub for quite some time, yet. Bonus experience trumps any and all stats.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. How about you fine folks?

Catching Up

Kurn / / raiding, ramblings

Oddly, I have posted almost every day so far this month and I have said remarkably little about what’s going on for me.

I’ve been dogsitting. For 10 days now. Gah. My parents should have landed and my brother should be picking them up at the airport by now, so I get to go home tomorrow after Easter dinner. YAY!

The backlight on my laptop died. The screen works, but it looks like you’re reading stuff from behind six pairs of sunglasses. So I went out and bought an external screen, which is what I was planning to do already, since my shiny new computer will be arriving in a week or so. I also bought external speakers and a new desk lamp — and then today, I bought a new desk chair that’s being delivered on Wednesday.

In-game, I finally, finally got Shackles of the End of Days off Cho’gall on our 9th kill of him.

Yes, I also got Superior. The plate healing bracers never dropped for me in regular Grim Batol or heroic GB or heroic Deadmines. Painful.

This week… well. I guess we’ll see what next week brings with it, but this week was pretty underwhelming in terms of attendance. So much so that we cancelled Thursday (along with Sunday, for Easter), leaving us with one, count ’em, one raid night, on Tuesday.

Boy, did we take advantage of that.

Off it was to Bastion to kill heroic Halfus. Done!

Off to Blackwing Descent to clear it, with pulls on heroic Chimaeron for a little bit. Done!

In three hours, we killed 7 bosses, including a one-shot of Nefarian, which was pretty effing sweet.

For some, seven bosses might not be impressive. For us, that’s pretty significant. At least it shows us we can do that sort of thing every week if we really want to.

So we’ll see where we end up in terms of attendance next week. If it’s still super craptastic, we’ll have to open up some more recruitment spots. As it is, I eventually heard from my AWOL moonkin and we’ll have to replace him due to RL stuff, I think. Pretty sad, because he was a great player for us.

I haven’t done much this week in WoW, to be honest. I think it’s a good thing we cancelled Thursday — I think some of us could really use the break. I haven’t missed a raid since we started raiding on January 4th, for example, so it’ll be nice to log in on Tuesday (assuming the servers are up, if it’s patch day!) and really WANT to raid and kick some ass.

Anyhow, that’s it for now. Must pass out. :)

Day 14 – This Upsets You

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, facepalm, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

All righty, here’s my last planned post for today, thanks for reading “Contentpalooza 2011”! ;)

Day 14 – This Upsets You

Oh, Lordy. This is almost too much to consider. A better question would be “this doesn’t upset you”. ;)

Actually, truth be told, in-game, not a lot flat-out upsets me. I know, I know. You’re shocked. What it is that really upsets me is the people. I’ll get into that in a minute, but here’s some in-game stuff that upsets me.

– Loot and randomness. Being able to kill Gandling in Scholomance 27 times and see the Beaststalker’s Cap twice (and losing the roll once), or being able to kill General Drakkisath SIXTY TIMES before seeing a Beaststalker Tunic is ridiculous. Even in Wrath, this held true. 24 kills of heroic Saurfang and 0, count that, 0 drops of the Heroic Belt of the Blood Nova. (Not that I’d wear it now, being that it’s mail, but anyways.) 13 Halion kills, 0 drops of the Foreshadow Steps.

And this continues today. 8 Cho’gall kills (that’s, you know, 2 full months) and 0 drops of Shackles of the End of Days. And I’m doing this on 25, so I’m getting 5 drops off Cho’gall each time (plus 3 tier tokens). That is 40 possible drops and we have had 0 bracers drop.

I’m not asking for things to drop every single time you kill a boss. Not even every 5 times. I’m not even asking for non-useless gear not to drop (ie: healing plate with no paladins in the group). I’m just asking for better odds than 2/27, 1/60, 0/13 and 0/8.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 5/10 (Moderate)

– Raid Lockout Screwups. As detailed in my last post, this new raid lock system screwed us up last night, made us lose an hour or more of our raid time and has made us change our plans for the week. This isn’t limited to the new system, though, there were several “aw crap” moments with the old lock system as well. Still, at this point, I’d much prefer the old one. (For me. I know the new one makes a lot more sense for a lot of people, particularly those who aren’t guilded or those not doing their raiding in a guild setting.)

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 7/10 (High)

Everything else, game-wise, I can generally take. Getting stunlocked by a rogue or three, fine. Login errors? Fine, computers aren’t perfect.

The rest of the things that piss me off are things people do. True, some of them are made possible by game mechanics, but ultimately, it’s people in this game who piss me off.

– Racist/Homophobic/Prejudicial Language. Fastest way to piss me off is to throw a bunch of disparaging epithets into a sentence. People are people, dammit, and I don’t care what colour their skin is, who they love, who they worship (if they do) or any of that crap. They’re people. Even bad players are people. The fact that Trade Chat is typically filled with these various slurs means I spend a lot of time reporting spam on various people and, in the case of some really bad ones, I’ll open a ticket and explain precisely why the person’s language is upsetting.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 8/10 (High)

– Not doing your job in a group. This goes for 5-mans, raids, everything. It drives me nuts to join a pug and realize that, out of the five people in the group, myself and maybe one other person are doing their role-related jobs adequately. It also drives me nuts if someone just cannot master a mechanic in raid content. I am not the fastest learner. I have a learning curve and, given my crappy-ass computer, it can be steep. But I learn, I adapt OR, in the case of Teron Gorefiend, I SIT MYSELF. My computer at the time didn’t allow me to be quick enough to get all my constructs — I’d lag on the transition and no matter how fast I hit my buttons, I’d only get a couple of my constructs trapped. This was okay if I wasn’t the first person targetted, but if I WAS, it was a wipe. So I sat myself out of the fight as often as possible. The very first Gorefiend kill we had, I was in on my hunter. I would feign death prior to his casts that would give you the debuff and so I was never targetted by his stupid ability. And I did pretty darn well in terms of DPS, too! But I did what I could to adapt to all the various mechanics and that was the one thing in all of Burning Crusade I just couldn’t adapt to.

It’s not a hard game, when you look at it. Don’t stand in bad stuff. DPS this when you’re supposed to, DPS this other thing when you’re supposed to. Heal who’s taking damage. Keep bad guys away from your raid.

That SO many people fail at these basics — I’m not even talking about things like interrupts or DPS classes dispelling things or any of that — makes me sooooo angry.

Don’t even get me started on people who fail at CCing or tanks who taunt to pull.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9/10 (Very High)

– Failing Like Faily McFailerson. What makes me angrier than the above is when I fail at something. I am not perfect, I get caught by Blistering Cold on Sindragosa sometimes, I eat Fireball Barrage on Halfus sometimes. I make mistakes. What upsets me is when I CONSTANTLY fail at something. Take, for example, our Al’Akir work from the other week. Had no idea that you could delay the Wind Burst by taking Electrocute so that when the Wind Burst/Squall Line combo coincides at the MT’s location, it’s NOT freaking impossible. I ate Squall Line a zillion times that night before I wrote that post after the raid. And if it hadn’t been for Selyndia pointing out that Electrocute delays the Wind Burst, it never would have clicked and I would have ended up sitting myself on that fight.

What makes it different from Gorefiend? Gorefiend was a technical problem. My computer wasn’t phasing me quickly enough to allow me to complete the mechanics required for the fight. It sucked, but at least I knew I had done my best. With Al’Akir, it wasn’t a technical thing. I just could not figure out how to be right up in front for Wind Burst and simultaneously halfway out on the platform to eat the gap for Squall Line. It was so frustrating that I felt like a total failure. It upsets me greatly to fail constantly at the same mechanic without issues stemming from my computer. :P

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9.5/10 (Very High)

– Not being prepared. This relates to the above. Back in BC, there we stood, crafting last minute Shadow Resist gear for Mother Shahraz. And a rogue tells me she doesn’t have her Medallion of Karabor, that comes from the attunement quest. There’s more to the story (scroll down a long ways to get to the BC/Mother bit) but basically, I gave all the mats I was holding to one of the officers, made him raid leader and said to the raid that I was going afk for a few.

Right there in the middle of the raid.

I got up and punched the living crap out of my couch. I yelled into a pillow. I was SO angry that, even after all of that, I removed the rogue from the raid and instructed her to go back to Shattrath.

After months (MONTHS!!!) of posts and checking in with people about their attunement needs, their resist needs, we are finally at the fight we have been preparing for and this one dumbshit rogue is like “uh, I didn’t do the heroics” and had confused the attunement questline with the Champion of the Naaru questline. Despite the fact that I had taken two hours (TWO HOURS) one day to detail the ENTIRE questline on our forums and constantly reminded people to finish that up and let us know if they needed Al’ar or Rage or whatever.

I lost it. Dar calls it “the night Kurn drank the RED haterade”. I don’t think I’d ever lost my shit to that extent because of something someone did in-game before and I know I haven’t lost it to that extent since. I was SO angry.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 14.72/10 (RED HATERADE TIME)

There are other things — I hate when people leave my guild, I hate missing progression fights, I hate losing valuable members of the guild due to circumstances that are unavoidable. But I think the above really sums up what really upsets me when I play this game.

Earlier Today: People That You Admire
Tomorrow: Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it

Apotheosis vs. Raid "ID" Lockouts

Kurn / / apotheosis, bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, facepalm, raiding, ramblings

Welcome to the second of three posts today, part of what I’m jokingly calling “Contentpalooza 2011”. In this post, I’ll talk about how Apotheosis broke our raid IDs last night and what happened to fix it.

Picture it: Azeroth, 2011. A band of 28 people wanted to raid and wanted to kill things. On the agenda, normal Maloriak (after spending about 3-4 hours on him on heroic on Sunday and Tuesday), normal Atramedes, attempts at heroic Chimaeron and then normal Nefarian.

I had 8 healers signed up, much to my joy, which meant I had more options for H Chim. But I also knew that we didn’t need 8 healers for the first two fights.

Being a healer, I decided to sit myself out of those first two fights. I hadn’t sat myself out of anything except Baradin Hold for at least a couple of weeks. This had the happy coincidence (honest, I didn’t plan it out this way!) of allowing me to watch just about the whole NHL playoff game between my beloved Montreal Canadiens and our hated rivals, the Boston Bruins. (The Habs, or the Canadiens, beat Boston 2-0 just as my guild was finishing off Atramedes.)

So with Maloriak and Atramedes dead, I made some swaps. I swapped out three DPS for two healers and another DPS. The healers were myself, our resto druid and the DPS I brought in was a rogue.

We zoned in together and clicked “accept” when warned that if we downed any bosses, we would be saved to this version of the instance where Magmaw, Omnotron, Maloriak and Atramedes were dead. We ran around the right side of the area in Blackwing Descent and got to Atramedes’ area and helped with the trash clearing to Chimaeron.

So there we stood at Chimaeron. I switched to my Chim healing spec and was talking on Mumble and such and our tank officer, Dayden, who had been raid leader to this point, made me the raid leader. While inside this instance, I switched the difficulty from 25 Player to 25 Player Heroic.

The druid, the rogue and myself found ourselves back at the start of the instance — on heroic.

The other 22 people were still in the normal mode of the instance, with an error message of sorts.

This is about the time when we started trying every variation of Dayden or myself as raid leader with 25/25H difficulty combinations we could think of. Bottom line, Dayden and myself could not exist in the same heroic instance together.

The officers were pissed. The raiders were getting cranky. I, of course, opened a ticket. I have probably opened about six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-three tickets in the five years that I’ve played this game. :P It’s what I do. Don’t judge me.

We headed to BoT and right before pulling trash, a GM wants to talk to me! Yaaaaaay, I got to stand in the back and do nothing to do with Halfus trash because I was trying to explain to the GM what the eff the problem was.

At that point, he wanted me to give him all the raid IDs and names of people. The trouble is, there no longer ARE raid ID numbers visible to us. It just tells you what bosses you’ve killed and which are available. And if someone from that group of 22 linked their raid ID, we were told we were eligible to join that raid.

So they get me to get Dayden to log off his toon so they can log on as him and look at the raid info available.

My guildies are nuts. Below, all instances of “Daydyn” are actually the GM, logged on to his toon. The rest are raiders who were in Bastion of Twilight at the time.

So I’m witnessing all this in chat, and whisper the GM to apologize for my “idiot” guildies who are harrassing him…

Naturally, I felt a compulsion to apologize.

He then asked us what we wanted to do — were we going to continue in BoT or BWD?

You’d think that would be the end of it, right?

Hilarious, no? Quite an interesting exchange. And throughout all this, the poor GM is sitting there on Dayden’s toon, being /cheered at, /hugged, /licked, etc:

Whew.

So after something like an hour, total, of messing with ID stuff and trying to get it resolved, we finally got to pull heroic Halfus. Now, we were doing this without Fog, one of our main spec tanks. The first few pulls were pretty bleak, but we swapped a couple of things around and somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then we went on to clear regular V&T and… yeah. The night was salvaged and we had an interesting time with a couple of GMs, but GOOD GOD, what kind of buggy shit is that lockout crap? I miss the old lockout system when something like this happens. I’ve never pugged a ton of stuff in terms of raids, so the flexible lockout thing is just irritating to be. I don’t need flexibility, dangit! ;)

Anyways. That was the raid night and we’ll see if we’re all propely saved or whatever for Sunday’s H Chimaeron/etc attempts. (H Chim probably for a bit, then normal Chim, Nef, over to BoT for Council and Cho. I think.)

Defender of a Shattered World

Kurn / / achievements, apotheosis, guild, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

It’s almost 7am as I start to write this. Apotheosis killed Al’Akir almost 8 hours ago. I went to sleep and woke up at about 6:30 just because I couldn’t stop thinking “Holy crap, we killed Al’Akir!”. Most of my guildies in the raid, myself included, got the Defender of a Shattered World title. Apotheosis is now 12/12 on normal modes to go with our pretty, shiny, 1/13 heroic modes.

That is one hell of a fight. And I don’t mean it in a good way, either. Hands down, my least-favourite fight in Tier 11 content. That said, I do feel pretty smug after having beaten this guy. :)

It was on our 59th attempt that we killed him, although, to be fair, 16 of those attempts were in February. Our work on Al’Akir really feels like it started in the last couple of weeks.

This brings us to 12/12 normal modes, as I’ve mentioned. I know, it’s just like clearing T7 and getting Champion of the Frozen Wastes, right? But it’s doing it at the proper, that’s to say “intended”, gear level. We’ve done it in 346 and 359 gear, not in T12 or T13 or T14. We’ve cleared the normal modes of entry-level raiding in this expansion with a group of people who largely didn’t know one another six months ago.

And then, there’s me. I just posted a long-winded, sappy post on my guild forums about how I basically love everyone, but something I didn’t say there (but will obviously get back to the guildies — and that’s okay) is that I’m relieved. I am SO relieved. I almost can’t even put it into words.

So many people who joined the guild did so because of me. I’m the one who started asking around if people wanted to come back to Apotheosis for Cataclysm. I’m the one who was talking excitedly about her old guild on her blog and, for some unknown reason, got a lot of responses and applications because of it. Really, if Apotheosis didn’t make it out of T11, it was almost certainly going to be my fault. I would have let down my old crew, I would have let down the people I’d drawn in, I would have let down the people who had, collectively, paid hundreds of dollars to transfer. And, of course, its success has very little to do with me — it’s a lot more to do with everyone I’ve assembled here. I would take all the blame if things hadn’t worked out, but the credit for it working out goes to the ladies and gentlemen of Apotheosis.

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that Apotheosis is through T11 normals. The pressure is off me. I’ve put together a team and the team is performing. The guild has a personality, it has a life of its own, now. If things go to hell now, chances are, it wasn’t my bad. ;)

It’s still intimidating, though. While I’m not terribly concerned about everything falling apart, this is the most progressed I’ve been in my own guild, ever.

In Burning Crusade, we cleared Black Temple, but only ever pulled Kalecgos in Sunwell Plateau three times before calling it an expansion. We also only formed on June 1st, 2008 and the expansion had come out back in January, so we were constantly working our way through content that had already been nerfed and used the 3.0 patch to steamroll our way past Reliquary of Souls, Mother Shahraz up to the Council and Illidan himself. (Much less steamrolling when we hit the Illidari Council.)

In Wrath, Apotheosis didn’t even kill Thaddius on 25-man. Attendance was awful, people were unhappy, progression was bad due to attendance and recruitment was bad due to progression. We had the potential to kick some ass, but it just didn’t pan out.

So now, my guild is the #2 25-man raiding guild on Eldre’Thalas. Overall, we’re still something like #11, if you take all the 10-man guilds into consideration, but… well, I don’t. It’s not that I don’t take 10s seriously (really!), but I really think 10 and 25-man raiding are very different beasts and so I don’t think of us as the #11 guild on ET. I see our 10-man guilds on the server as doing their thing and the 25s are doing our thing.

And, to my utter shock and delight, Apotheosis is doing WELL at “our thing”! We finished at #9 guild progressed guild in Burning Crusade, #6 Alliance guild, and that was with a 5 month delay on anything guild-related. We farmed Karazhan for three months before we got Maulgar and Gruul down. And even with that, we finished pretty well.

This time, we had our shit together. This time, we had a team ready to go. This time, we are SO much smarter than we were in Burning Crusade. (Seriously, who puts a moonkin in the tank group, back when the 5% crit buff they brought was party-wide only?) And this time, we don’t have the progression or attendance issues we had in Wrath.

Rank doesn’t mean a lot to me, truly, whether it’s server rank or US/world rank, but it’s always nice to see where you fit in. GuildOx says we’re the 706th ranked 25-man guild on US servers. So we’re not vodka or Premonition or Midwinter or Edge. We’re still here, we’re still kicking and we’ve cleared 12/12 normal modes, ready to add to our heroic Halfus kill with more heroic kills.

So freaking relieved. And so freaking proud of my peeps.

Day 04 – Your Best WoW Memory

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, apotheosis, blogging, raiding, ramblings

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

Day 04 – Your Best WoW Memory

There is no way I can narrow it down to just one memory or one moment of elation or one moment of pride or one moment of accomplishment. I’ve been playing for over five years, fairly regularly, fairly steadily. That’s a lot of time and that’s a lot of memories accumulated.

What I’ll do here is narrow it down to two memories from each expansion. That still doesn’t seem “right”, but it’ll have to do.

Vanilla WoW Memory #1: The one that tops the list here is everything I went through to get my Rhok’delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers. My guild at the time wasn’t clearing MC. We hadn’t even actually killed Onyxia, as a guild. So one day, there I am in Trade, and someone is SELLING the Ancient Petrified Leaf. They had killed Majordomo and looked in his chest and there was a leaf that no one could use. So they sent someone out to Ironforge and they started spamming Trade.

500 gold later, I was being summoned to Molten Core and I looted my leaf. I’d already gotten the Mature Black Sinew from Onyxia from a pug as I was the only hunter there who hadn’t gotten it yet. So I was well on my way and could start killing some demons.

I found Nelson the Nice and Simone pretty easy, but it was Franklin the Friendly (the first one I engaged — repeatedly) who kicked my ass all over Burning Steppes, much to the amusement of my guildies who would camp out and watch my miserable attempts. To this day, he is still my nemesis. Artorius also gave me a bit of trouble. Had Majik not been there on his priest to rez me (the demon and I killed each other at the same time), the demon probably would have despawned.

All those things together make up one of the best memories in WoW for me.

Vanilla WoW Memory #2: The Tier 0.5 questline. Yep, 45-minute Baron run and all (thank you very much, we once did it in 39 minutes with my cat, Whisper, “tanking”, plus Crypt healing, Majik, Tia, Tan and myself DPSing!), this is still a favourite memory of mine. It was three years AFTER I’d done everything for the questline that I finally got the Beaststalker Tunic from General Drakkisath in Upper Blackrock Spire and got my full Beastmaster’s Armor set. The five of us basically did this questline without a tank. The only time we needed an actual tank to help us out was the extra boss in Ras Frostwhisper’s room in Scholomance and the last boss, Lord Valthalak (aka, Lord Whatshisnuts) in Upper Blackrock Spire. The rest of it was easily done on our own or with the five of us. It was during this time that Majik lagged out on Vent and we actually thought he was high on some really potent drug.

I don’t think I had laughed that hard in my life, up until that night in Dire Maul, and probably not since then, either. It was one of the best times in this game for me.

Burning Crusade Memory #1: Killing Vashj. We have a copy of the kill video over on YouTube. This was the best kill of any boss probably ever, for me. I knew every detail of the fight, micromanaged it and after a LOT of time on this, we got her down, thanks in part to my 15k crit Lay on Hands when Dayden was the last tank left. Woot!

Burning Crusade Memory #2: Probably getting Kael down and getting my Hand of A’dal title. Killing Illidan was awesome, but it was post-3.0 so it wasn’t quite the same as getting Hand of A’dal, which is the title I still prefer to wear.

Wrath of the Lich King Memory #1: My different guilds in Wrath, all of them. Even the one with the crazy, abusive raid leader. Resurgence of Bronzebeard, the Proudmoore one and Choice of Skywall. After being in my own guild for two years, I was nervous and scared and not remotely confident about my abilities and value as a player. But Resurgence and Choice welcomed me with open arms. My Proudmoore guild, though less warm-and-fuzzy, allowed me to raid with my RL Friend the Resto Druid for several months and got me my ICC 25-man drake and, for the first (and last) time, allowed my friend and I to earn a title together — Astral Walker. So I’m indebted to all three of the guilds I spent time in during Wrath.

Wrath of the Lich King Memory #2: Killing the Lich King with Apotheosis on 10-man with Kurn and on 25-man with, well, 24 other members of Apotheosis. (Although this 10-man LK kill was pretty epic as well.) This happened at the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, after the 4.0 drop, I believe, and honestly, seeing this team of people working together to successfully defeat the Lich King was great. When you take into consideration that a lot of them hadn’t ever seen the fight, it really makes me proud.

Cataclysm Memory #1: Just one memory so far for Cata — the fact that, three months into raiding, my guild is still alive and kicking. We’re still doing 25s. We’ve still never had to cancel a raid (although we moved the raid from Superbowl Sunday to the Monday). We’ve never had to drop into 10-mans. We’ve gone 11/12 normal modes and 1/13 heroic modes all on 25-man. We’ve lost a lot of people who originally threw their hats in, but we’ve recovered and gained some valuable members as well. Despite the stress and frustration and aggravation I’ve experienced so far, the best part about this expansion, for me, is that I’m raiding with people I know and love and, if I don’t love them, I at least respect them. We’re quite an interesting crew. And I love that we’re still together, conquering content, one boss at a time.

Looking over my answers, boss kills are generally my big moments of “YES!!!” in this game, followed closely by guild-related things. Amazing how much my favourite memories really rely on other people. I’m glad I’ve got a group of folks I really can rely on.

Yesterday – Your First Day Playing WoW
Tomorrow – Favourite item(s) in game

Al'Akir – 36, Apotheosis – 0

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

(No, no clever April Fool’s trick or gag.)

In February, on a night I desperately wanted to sit myself out due to a migraine (but ultimately couldn’t, due to lack of healers that night), we went in, killed Conclave for the first time and then pulled Al’Akir 16 times. All wipes. Some were comical in nature. Most were frustrating.

On March 31st, we went back to Throne, killed Conclave for the second time and then pulled Al’Akir 20 times. All wipes. Some were comical in nature. Most were frustrating.

Yeah, I see the trend, too.

We got him down to 27% on our best attempt. The trouble is that our best attempt was, oh, before the midpoint of our raid.

Picture it, if you will.

I’ve spread everyone out on the platform. 7 groups of 3 people and 1 group of 4. This is due to the lightning that bounces around.

So there’s me and Majik and Dayden standing there and Dayden runs in and pulls.

Time and time again, the damn Squall Line hits us riiiiiiiiiight when Wind Burst just comes off of cooldown. It’s so ridiculously dumb when the following combination happens:

– There is ice on the back of the platform.
– The gap is in the middle of the Squall Line.
– Wind Burst is casting OMG NOW, so you HAVE to move forward.
– The resulting Wind Burst throws you to the back of the platform, where the ice is and even when you USE Blessing (goddammit) Hand of Freedom, you can’t get there in time, not even with Holy Radiance/Speed of Light.

That EXACT scenario happened to me at least three times and possibly a fourth over 20 wipes. I also ate a few Squalls and Wind Bursts while trying desperately to avoid the other mechanic.

So, being relatively new to the fight, we tried moving me to a place that would require less combinations like that. I was feeling like ass. Was it really always just me getting screwed over by this Wind Burst/Squall Line combo? Or was it really bad luck? Or what? I mean, Dayden and Majik were having trouble, too.

So I switched myself with Walks, because there’s a point where you just have to start throwing things at the wall to see if they’ll stick.

Walks got blown off the platform!

Sorry, buddy, you know I think you’re awesome, but I about cheered. This terrible combination is NOT just my fault. That was a pretty huge weight off my shoulders and I stopped feeling like I was a horrible failure, even though I am not the best on mobility fights. At least I wasn’t a liability to the raid. That combo was giving everyone problems.

So I shifted everyone one pattern over to the right, as we faced him. Just to see what would happen. Football joked in officer chat that “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if it was in the same place and it’s all dependant on where the MT is standing?” and then a raider said the same comment two minutes later in raid chat.

So what happened? That’s right. The same damn thing. The spawning of everything happens in direct relation to where the main tank is and is PURPOSELY DESIGNED, as far as I can tell, to ENSURE that the MT will have to juggle Wind Burst and Squall Line within a second or two of each other.

(Five minutes with the joker who designed this. Five minutes and a sturdy hockey stick.)

So we went back to our usual positions and we had Fog, the OT, grab aggro first. Once the squalls had spawned, Dayden taunted and THAT seemed to change how things were spawning. And, for some reason, we had the two Squall Lines intersect without one of them despawning.

On our last attempt of the night, we tried that again, Fog pulling first, then Dayden taunting off, and while a lot of people had to re-adjust to the way things were spawning for them, which was completely different than how it had spawned for the entire night, we saw that the colliding Squall Lines was a fluke of Lady RNG, since it didn’t happen again.

So Al’Akir lives to torment us another day. From what I can tell in a bunch of videos I’ve watched since the raid ended, the tank (the one who pulled) and others with him just deke the Squall Line BEFORE the Wind Burst comes up. I think it’s just something we’ll likely have to deal with (someone will need to deal with it at any rate) and then burn the crap out of him so that we get through P1 really fast.

On the bright side, we’re probably just going to kill Nef on Sunday real quick (haha, hopefully, anyways) and then come back to Throne and… wait, that’s not a bright side. Ah, well!

It was educational, if nothing else. :)

(Okay, not five minutes. Three minutes? How’s that? Three minutes and a wiffle bat!)

Progression Rocks

Kurn / / bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, guild, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

So last week was a bit rocky, with someone leaving the guild and with us having trouble with Nefarian. It was the first reset we actually left Nefarian up since downing him and it felt pretty terrible.

We decided that we’d extend BWD into this week so that we can spend some time actually progressing, because, frankly, it’s been a while.

This is what I’d planned out.

Tuesday – Heroic Halfus all night.

Thursday – Finish up Nef from last week, get Conclave and work on Al’Akir.

Sunday – Blast through Bastion on normal, work on Al’Akir.

Once again, my guild never stops astounding me and almost always seems to prove to me that I shouldn’t underestimate them.

What happened on Tuesday?

Heroic Halfus down in 6 pulls, Bastion of Twilight cleared.

And here’s our kill video, too!

 

 

So, the new players we’ve pulled in (two healing priests, an elemental shaman, a fire mage and a prot warrior) seem to be acclimating well and we got Heroic Halfus after 10 rather educational pulls back on March 8th. We decided to use our feral druid who’s usually a kitty and made him be a bear for us for most of that fight, so we could better handle the Malevolent Strikes debuff, plus we blew heroism at the start when all the drakes were pulled together. As a healer, this was a godsend. Well, it was once I realized how quickly I’d go OOM after casting so quickly. ;)

So, with Heroic Halfus down and with Bastion cleared (Cho’gall, once again, mocks me and Walks in his death — does ANYONE have those damn Shackles of the End of Days??), we’re left re-thinking what to do.

I think we’ll probably go do Conclave and Al’Akir on Thursday. While a lot of people don’t like the fight and a lot of people feel it’s worthless in general, it’s a new boss and would bring us to 12/12 on the regular modes. It’s worth it for that, if nothing else.

Depending on how Thursday goes, Sunday could be Nefarian OR, if we get Al’Akir down… we could play with a heroic BWD boss. Typically, I know Chimaeron, Maloriak and Atramedes are the “easy” ones. Chim… I’m gonna need to think about that one for a bit. Atramedes on NORMAL isn’t “easy” for our guild. But Maloriak? Hmmm. Maloriak… That’s an idea. :) So we’ll see how Thursday and Al’Akir go and let that determine our Sunday for us, basically.

It’s entirely possible that in one reset, we’ll go from 11/12 to 12/12 and 1/13. Definitely an exciting time.

(And we’re recruiting, so go check us out!)