A Look at a Heroic Putricide Strategy

Kurn / / guide, icecrown citadel, raiding

Good news, everyone! I’ve decided to take a minute here and talk about how my guild does Heroic Professor Putricide on 25-man. Seems that there are a lot of people out there struggling with the fight and not a lot of information out there, so I thought I’d drop in my two cents.

Please bear in mind that I really don’t know a lot of the details as to how the DPS works on this fight, but I do know how healing works pretty darn well.

Our raid composition is rarely exactly the same, but our tanks almost always are. We have a warrior tank who is the MT. We have another warrior tank who is in the abomination. We have a bear tank who plays kitty for us until Phase 3.

For raid buffs, we find it essential to drop Nature Resistance Totem and have Prayer of Shadow Protection up, in addition to the regular raid buffs. In lieu of NR Totem, Aspect of the Wild may be used, but this is a serious DPS/healing check, so you don’t really want to gimp your DPS by forcing a hunter out of Aspect of the Dragonhawk.

For paladin auras, we prefer Improved Devotion Aura, if only for the extra armor (and the bonus healing if there’s no tree in the raid), Concentration Aura to help reduce or eliminate spell pushback and either Retribution Aura or Shadow Resistance Aura, though it doesn’t stack with Prayer of Shadow Protection. (A holy paladin can use Aura Mastery + Shadow Resistance Aura to boost everyone’s Shadow Resistance for a short time.)

Phase 1:

Healing: We typically run with six healers. Two holy paladins, one disc priest, one resto shaman and the remaining are a mix of either 2 resto druids or 1 resto/1 holy priest or even 1 resto shammy/1 holy priest. It really depends on who’s around, but we do our best to have at least two holy paladins, the disc and a shammy.

Paladins: Beacon MT, heal raid, focusing on Unbound Plague and Gaseous Bloat targets, helping out on Volatile Ooze Adhesive targets if possible.

1 Resto Shammy: Raid healing + Volatile Ooze Adhesive targets.

Disc Priest: Raid healing by virtue of shielding folks and tossing out Renews, Prayers of Mending and the odd Prayer of Healing. Spot heals with Penance and Flash Heal as well.

Other healers: Focused really on the raid and these are the people who will do the most moving. They’re the ones who stand on the Volatile Ooze Adhesive person, but the pallies and shammy generally won’t, since the melee and 3-4 healers is enough to absorb the damage.

We also find that a minimum of one resto druid with Revitalize is excellent for regenerating the abomination’s energy. If possible, two resto druids with this talent really helps out because it means the slime puddles really don’t have to stay up for long at all in order to regen the abom’s energy. In the comments, ambient reminds us all that Rapture works like Revitalize does. The important thing is having two of these effects on the abomination as often as possible. :) More energy = more slows on adds. Thanks for the reminder, ambient!

DPSing: Uh… moar pew pew? ;) No, seriously, the DPS really just focus on the boss, always prioritizing the adds when they come out. We WILL try to stop DPS at 84% if we’re due for another add. We have discovered, the hard way, that even one extra add up during any transition phase is a bad, bad thing.

Tanking/positioning: The tank is usually moving Putricide around, away from Unbound Plague targets, towards Volatile Ooze Adhesive targets. It’s a very mobile encounter and while we used to stand on various sides based on which add was coming out back on normal mode, we don’t tend to do this any longer and definitely not on heroic mode.

Once the adds are down and we’re not due another one for a bit, we will push Putricide to 80% and start the first transition phase.

Transition Phase 1:

Healing: We maintain the same assignments as during phase 1, with the paladins healing the Gaseous Bloats and a resto shammy on the Volatile Ooze Adhesives. Unbound Plague should fall off someone just as the transition is beginning, so we don’t have to worry about that again until Phase 2.

DPSing: What can be said but kill the add that you can attack? Something that helps us immeasurably, though, is a good Gaseous Bloat kiter. They’ll run the ooze away from the raid, initially, and then come running back towards the group, so that the DPS can get a good start on the Ooze and then can ruin the Gas. Go go focused fire!

Phase 2:

I hate Malleable Goo. :P

Healing: Nothing’s changed, everyone’s still doing what they’ve been doing up ’till now.

Tanking: Same thing, MT is on Putricide, OT is in the abomination and the other OT is playing kitty.

DPSing: Again, the same.

In reality, Phase 2 is so similar to Phase 1 that it’s hard to believe that the addition of Malleable Goo is such a problem. But it IS a problem. I believe that Putricide launches THREE Goos (I’m usually too busy to count!) and the only way to really avoid them is to watch for them. DXE, AVR, DBM, BigWigs, none of them will show you all the targets. Trust me, I’ve tried.

So what I do is move my big central warning text from the middle of my screen off to the side and watch my Malleable Goo timer as best I can. When the warning noise (from DXE, I believe) goes off, I stop whatever I’m doing and look up at Putricide and run like the dickens.

This does not mean that I don’t get hit, now and then, because I do. :P But it’s a lot less often now that I’ve trained myself to watch for it. Plus I still have DBM yelling at me if it’s targetting me specifically.

So, same as the end of Phase 1, we hold off DPS at around 38% or so until we’ve killed all the adds and then we push Putricide into transition.

Transition Phase 2:

Same as the first transition phase, with two exceptions:

1) We hit heroism.

2) We also try to pull out summonable pets for the Volatile Ooze Adhesive explosion, to help absorb the damage. We’re talking Army of the Dead, Ghost Wolves, Shadowfiends, hunter pets, warlock pets and shammy elementals. These pets are really key to absorbing damage and helping to finish off the transition adds so we can get on to Putricide ASAP in P3. Adds MUST go down before DPS switches to Putricide.

This is one reason why going into a transition with any kind of extra add up is recipe for disaster. It prevents you from getting back to the boss in a timely fashion.

Phase 3:

Okay, time to switch things up!

Tanking: OT pops out of the abom. OT pops out of kitty into bear form. MT tanks until he has two stacks of Mutated Plague, then Bear Tank taunts and holds the boss for two stacks. Then other OT taunts and holds the boss for two stacks.

Subsequent taunts are quick, just for one stack each, so it goes like this:

Tank 1: 2 stacks

Tank 2: 2 stacks

Tank 3: 2 stacks

Tank 1: 1 additional stack, for 3 stacks

Tank 2: 1 additional stack, for 3 stacks

Tank 3: 1 additional stack, for 3 stacks

Tank 1: 1 additional stack, for 4 stacks

Tank 2: 1 additional stack, for 4 stacks

Tank 3: 1 additional stack, for 4 stacks

If Putricide isn’t dead by now, chances are, the entire raid is.

The important thing for the tanks to do, apart from knowing when to taunt, is to NOT change direction abruptly. Keep moving him slowly, keeping him out of slime puddles and away from the orange vials and such, but you really don’t want to be going one way and then have another tank taunt and go back the way you just came.

Healing: Healers, I hope you’re ready for some insane freaking damage here. It’s just STUPID.

Paladins: Don’t worry about beacon yet. It should still be on your MT, but I encourage you to keep spamming Holy Light directly on your first tank. You MUST be aware of the tank rotation! As soon as you see that the first tank has two stacks (or whatever you stack to), you need to switch targets immediately. With any luck, your beacon is still up on the MT (although I wouldn’t waste the mana to refresh it) and you can pre-emptively heal the second tank a bit.

After everyone has two stacks is an ideal time to do three things:

1) Find a better place to stand. You want to stand somewhere far enough away from the tanks that you won’t have to move again for the encounter, barring environmental crap, but close enough that they’re still in range. You want to be near the area where they will be kiting the boss towards. But don’t just run over immediately when people have two stacks…

2) This is a great time for one paladin to hit Divine Shield/Divine Sacrifice. The 20% damage reduction for six seconds is enough of a buffer, usually, for you to run to a new place to be before you resume casting and the Divine Shield aspect allows you to run through slime if you need to in order to get to your new location. Any other paladins should chain DS/DS at this point, so when one finishes, the next begins.

3) As soon as you’ve done your DS/DS and moved to a better location, beacon YOURSELF and heal the active tank. This is pretty much the only way you’re going to be able to stay alive on the encounter because you’re taking 18k+ damage every time Mutated Plague ticks on the three tanks when it’s getting to 3 stacks. It’s actually really easy to keep up one tank (and yourself, via beacon) just by spamming the crap out of Holy Light and using all your cooldowns available to you — wings, Divine Illumination, Lay on Hands, anything you’ve got.

Priests: Derevka suggests chaining Divine Hymns at the end of P3, so probably at about the time the first stack of 3 appears and the raid damage gets significantly harder. Chaining them will allow subsequent Divine Hymns to benefit from the buff of the initial heal, with disc priests going first, then holy priests for maximum output. Thanks for the tip! :)

Raid healers: You are probably going to die unless your DPS is seriously on top of things. I honestly recommend priests use the occasional Binding Heal. Don’t worry about the paladins because they’ve beaconed themselves. Don’t worry about the tanks. Worry about yourselves and the DPS.

DPSing: Apart from killing the boss, your biggest responsibility is containing the Unbound Plague. I really haven’t spoken a lot about the plague, because it’s easy enough to hand off/avoid in the first two phases with just a little practice, but since everyone is basically bunched up for Phase 3, this is where it’s YOUR responsibility to get it the hell out of the raid. You do not want this ticking on your tanks or healers and you especially do not want anyone to have the plague ticking on them after they’ve already had the plague. Plague Sickness is bad, okay? The loss of your DPS (if you’re melee) or the slowdown of your DPS (if you’re ranged and have to move) is really minor compared to the havoc that the Unbound Plague can cause in melee range. So if you get it, RUN IT OUT. If you die with it, it’s not the end of the world, because at least you won’t spread the plague. But try to hand it off after about 10 seconds.

And that is, more or less, how my guild does Professor Putricide on 25-man heroic mode.

Comments or questions are welcome. :)

Kurn's Q&A #19

Kurn / / alchemy, dungeons, healing, icecrown citadel, lfg, paladins, q&a, raiding

Welcome, welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Q&A! This is the time of the week when I look at my website stats from the previous week and see how I can better help those search for information by expounding on 10 search terms that led people to my site. I love Tuesdays.

1) “katrana prestor”

Ahhhhh, Lady Katrana Prestor, also known as Lady Onyxia! Katrana Prestor used to be an NPC in Stormwind Keep. There was Bolvar Fordragon, Anduin Wrynn and Katrana Prestor in the throne room in the keep.

At level 50, you could start an immense quest chain that begins in Burning Steppes called Dragonkin Menace. It would take you through Burning Steppes, over through Blackrock Depths, to Lakeshire, to Stormwind, back to Morgan’s Vigil, all over the damn place. Eventually, you would rescue Marshall Reginald Windsor, whom everyone from pre-BC probably loathes as much as I do, and meet up with him at the Stormwind gates.

There would be this truly awesome event that would take place — you’d escort Windsor up to the keep and accuse Lady Katrana Prestor of being Onyxia in disguise and she’d transform RIGHT FREAKING THERE and get the guards in the keep to turn into their draconic forms. Bolvar would LAY THE SMACK DOWN, but not before Windsor is mortally wounded. (I used to /cheer.)

Here’s the script.

Onyxia would vanish, presumably to go to her lair, and you would be tasked with restoring a medallion. You’d have to go to freaking Winterspring, to the top of a damn mountain, to talk to a blue dragon (Haleh, who appears in high/blood elf from) who’ll tell you to go to Upper Blackrock Spire and kill General Drakkisath and get the Blood of the Black Dragon Champion. (This eventually became party loot, but for a LONG time, there were only 1-3 of these that dropped at a time.)

Then you go back to Haleh and she would give you your Drakefire Amulet, which you had to have with you to enter Onyxia’s Lair.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of Lady Katrana Prestor as she was in the game before they removed the Onyxia attunement questline. More info here on Lady Katrana Prestor from WoWWiki.

Edit: Best video EVER. The Craft of War: Blind.

2) does divine shield drop lady deathwhispers

Drop Lady Deathwhisper’s what?

Curse of Torpor: Probably
Frostbolt: Yeah.
Mind Control: Well, you can’t pop it if you’re MCed, I don’t think, but if she makes the mistake of popping it for you, you will probably get released from the mind control.

3) dxe bossmods malleable goo putricide hard

Yeah, my DXE only shows me the location of one, not all three, Malleable Goos. Sorry. :(

4) elixir master not proccing 2010

I’m an elixir master. It procs. My proc rate usually sucks, but it procs enough to let me know I haven’t lost the ability to proc entirely.

5) fastest way to get emblem of triumph one night

Queue up as a healer or a tank and do dungeons all night long. Or, do Naxxramas.

6) hard mode professor putricide 25m strat

Funny you should mention that. I just wrote up a post detailing how my guild does heroic Putricide on 25m.

7) holidays grace for dps or healer

I understand your confusion in this day and age of spellpower instead of damage/healing and healing. Holiday’s Grace has mp5 which means it’s for healers. DPS have enough tricks up their sleeves to regen mana, whereas healers have a couple things, typically with long cooldowns, such as Mana Tide Totem, Shadowfiend and Innervate. mp5 is the only thing that will aid in mana regen for healers, so you’ll find it on lots of healer gear.

Rule of thumb: +hit = DPS caster, +mp5 = healer

That doesn’t mean all healers want a lot of mp5 or all casters want a lot of hit, mind you.

8) how to respond when someone asks for raid achievements

If you have them, link them. If not, you may be out of luck if you’re not really geared. You can always say “this is my alt, I know the fight from my main” if that’s the case, or just tell them you know the fight and just haven’t done it on that toon, even if you’ve never done it. The key here, of course, is doing research so you’re not That Tool that everyone else is carrying.

9) why cant i que for icc

First of all, it’s “queue”. Second of all, ICC is not a dungeon. You cannot queue for a raid group. You can sit in the raid browser for it, but I’m assuming that this is what you cannot do.

If you cannot select ICC as a raid to sit in the raid browser for, this means that Blizzard’s estimation of your gear is such that you won’t be able to adequately perform with that gear in ICC. Go get some gear.

10) on a holy palatin, what foods, enhants, and gems to improve mana regeration

… please, please don’t have been a native English speaker.

The more mana you have, the more mana you’ll regenerate. Divine Plea is based on our maximum mana, as are Replenishment and Mana Tide Totem. For mana regen food, you can either go with 40 crit strike food or 20 mp5 food. For everything else, it’s intellect. Make sure you’re also using the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond.

Big Crits

Kurn / / raiding, ramblings

So I read Derevka’s post about Big Crits last night and was instantly hooked. I mean, instantly.

I highly recommend you go read Derevka’s post, but basically, Big Crits is a web series about a real end-game raiding guild in World of Warcraft. There are four episodes so far and I adore it.

It’s awesome for so many reasons, but the primary reason is that it isn’t just about focusing on the game and progression and the encounters. With the inclusion of talking heads (you know, when someone faces the camera and speaks their mind, like they do on The Office or Survivor or The Apprentice), they’re not just showing a guild downing a boss. They’re having their actual guild members talk about their actual raid experiences and it’s all woven really well together.

Who wouldn’t love that? I LOVE talking about my raid experiences (as this blog proves) and I love hearing about cool happenings for others. Plus, the talking head segments are comprised of actual video of the people, not the toons.

I majored in Sociology, so I’ve always been absolutely fascinated by the social interaction in WoW. Don’t get me wrong — I still can’t stand stupid people and I would very much like to wipe them off the face of the planet. But how guilds who raid together gel (or not) and deal with various in-game issues is just awesome to me.

The biggest challenges of being a guild master aren’t really the in-game encounters, although I will admit that getting 15 people to know their Bloodboil rotation sucked, just as getting 25 people not to die from air bursts or fire on Archimonde sucked.

But that wasn’t the big challenge. For me, the toughest thing was knowing when to be a hardass and knowing when to be more understanding. (And also, when to stop talking or typing, because I am the most long-winded person in the world.)

A classic problem any guild faces is the following:

A long-time member who is basically universally adored by all guildies for being so awesome in so many ways is, in fact, one of the worst players we’ve ever seen. He has consistently died on whatever progression fight we’re currently on and his death has had repercussions that lead to a wipe. Say that, I don’t know, four of seven wipes on this one fight can be traced back to a chain of events that began with his death.

What do you do? Do you swap him out for someone on standby? Do you bitch him out and tell him to shape up? Do you warn him at all that if he doesn’t do better, he’s on standby? Honestly, how do you deal with that?

Then, assuming you chose the more diplomatic method of getting his class/role lead to talk to him and apologize while swapping him out, then what? Is he going to leave the guild? Stop raiding? Is he going to be disappointed and sulky? What about the morale of the guild and raid team? If the guy they adore is wiping them (but perhaps they’re not aware of that?) and gets swapped out, are THEY going to be sulky because he got sat out?

Here’s a second scenario that has happened to every single guild:

You are in dire, I mean, DIRE need of a specific class/role, to the point that if the one person who does fill that role isn’t there, you can’t do a whole lot.

So you go recruiting for that particular class to fill that particular role. Granted, it’s much easier in Wrath to swap any kind of DPS for any other kind of DPS, so let’s imagine that what we want is either a moonkin or a retribution paladin because we don’t have Improved Moonkin Form or Swift Retribution in the raid on a regular basis. We have a prot paladin, so we have various blessings and we have Heart of the Crusader. We have an elemental shaman who is occasionally not around, but we generally have Elemental Oath and Totem of Wrath.

But we don’t have that pesky 3% haste buff and everyone is getting pissy about it, plus we don’t have backup for that ever-important 5% spell crit, so if the elemental shaman is out, we’re screwed. So ideally, we want a moonkin, but would take a ret pally.

So we go out recruiting for both.

After three weeks of searching and four nights in that period where casters were without their crit buff and still no one had that 3% haste buff, we finally get an app from a moonkin.

He looks awesome.

He is appropriately geared, gemmed, enchanted, specced and glyphed. He’s moonkin and resto, but also has a tank set. He wasn’t significantly behind you in content, just a boss or two.

He’s perfect.

So you accept his app, he transfers, gets a ginvite and then you realize, right smack-dab in the middle of the first raid… this guy is a jerk. I mean, really, no question about it, he’s pretty much That Guy that you want to punch in the face. Maybe he’s told a dead baby joke in raid, maybe he yelled profanity at someone who wiped the raid or maybe he’s just overly superior about his skill and is boasting constantly.

Of course, he’s topping damage, CCing appropriately, helping out on decursing, innervating and tossing battle rezzes as needed. In short, he is a freaking excellent player. He’s pretty much the opposite of our first example.

Within a week, you’ve heard about 12 people complaining about this guy, but you’ve killed two new bosses, largely because of him. His role lead has tried, without success, to rein him in a little bit, but he’s still mouthing off in raid, if not in Vent, and it seems like he just doesn’t understand that his comments aren’t appropriate.

So what do you do, as the guild master or member of the officer team? Do you decline his application and remove him from the guild? Do you warn him that the previous action is a possibility if he doesn’t stop being such a jerk? Do you try to appease your guild members individually and asking them to be patient? Do you hold on to the jerk until you get another moonkin or ret pally app? Perhaps more importantly, is being a jerk who helps the raid to excel such a horrible thing after all?

These are the real challenges in running a guild. It’s all about taking actions for the betterment of the guild as a whole while simultaneously trying to achieve goals as a raiding group.

I really think Big Crits is going to bring up these kinds of issues. They’re common problems, but everyone has a different opinion on how to deal with them. This is what is going to make this web series fascinating to me; how others deal with problems I’ve dealt with within this incredibly rich game world.

So go watch Big Crits from Week 1 (they’re up to 4 now)! Let me (and, more importantly, the guildies themselves) know how you liked it. :)

Soon…

Kurn / / dungeons, guide

Soon, I shall have a post with two video guides in it.

1) Strat Live, minus Cannonmaster Willy

2) How to get the Key to the City from Strat UD without having it to begin with (ie: from Strat Live)

Freaking video files are huge. WTB larger hard drive, PST.

Hell, a non-fail computer would be nice. ;)

Redesign Done

Kurn / / blogging

Okay, so the redesign is more or less done! I currently have no links to other blogs posted, but that’s more a function of the fact that my links section was woefully outdated, so I’ll take some time and fix that up and get them up soon.

The polls should work, but the poll archive link will not go away no matter what I try to do. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there was actually an archive to link to.

As to the small google ad over there, I’m already blocking uncool sites, but over the next week or so, please do copy the URL (don’t click on the ad! Right-click, copy link address!) and use this form to help me block more evil advertisers. That is available up at the “Bad Ads” link in the top right and the link directly below the ad itself. You shouldn’t see too many questionable ads of other sorts, though, since I was able to filter them at a category level. Sadly, gold-selling ads, etc, fall under “video games”, and it doesn’t make sense to block that category on a site that is, you know, dedicated to a video game. ;)

Anyways, if you see anything else that’s broken or looks icky, please do let me know!

ETA: Some display issues in Chrome that I may or may not work on at some point. Also, the ads are now starting to show spiritual healing ads. Ahahahaha.

ETA Again: Fixed the Chrome issue. It was displaying the page’s title as text on the page, offsetting the entire header. I moved the wowhead script below the title tag in the code, et voila.

Wow. Just… wow.

Kurn / / facepalm, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I’m exhausted. I spent over two hours writing up all the fail I witnessed from the holy pally app during last night’s ICC 25 raid, which I then sent to the healing lead and the raid leader.

He was in for five fights, all heroic: Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship (I was swapped out for that), Saurfang and Blood Prince Council.

Some choice bits of information I’ll share with you:

1) He never used Sacred Shield. At all. Oh, wait. He spammed it… on Lady Deathwhisper. Like, not on that encounter. On the mob. Which means that he was mind-controlled when “he” used it. NO other use of it at all.

2) He cast Holy Light 158 times total on four logged bosses. In comparison, on those same bosses, I cast it 619 times. He cast Flash of Light 625 times to my 125. He is gemmed straight-up int, specced the way a HL pally would be, glyphed the way a HL pally would be.

3) He consistently ignored healing chat/assignments, would screw up his beacon and judgements.

4) Speaking of judgements, he judged 12 times on those four bosses. Bearing in mind we wiped twice on Saurfang before getting him, that’s 12 judgements in 6 boss encounters…

5) Did I mention that he missed beaconing me on Saurfang? He beaconed my direct-heal target instead and healed the tanks instead of Mark 4 like he was supposed to. Props to my RL friend the resto druid and some quick-thinking priests for keeping my ass up, given that I was Mark 2.

6) Speaking of beacon, he ignored 4 requests to beacon the DK tank on Blood Prince Council, instead deciding to beacon the warrior tank.

7) Speaking of Council, guess who was almost always in range of me during Empowered Shock Vortex AND who got 6-8 Shadow Prison stacks on five occasions during the fight? That’s right, the pally app.

8) Speaking of crowding people, he also crowded two healers and a moonkin on Saurfang and ate extra boiling blood because of it. Thank you, dipshit, for increasing Saurfang’s blood power.

9) Speaking of Saurfang again, he let a tank die through not healing him when he was supposed to be, then let HIMSELF die with the fourth Mark by … not healing himself like he was supposed to be!

10) He wanted to be in for Gunship so he could get Althor’s Abacus, which is a trinket that has 0 int, 0 haste, 0 mp5 and 0 crit. Way to be.

11) He wouldn’t STFU about loot. He actually asked, in raid chat, after a regular Conqueror’s token had been awarded to a priest, if he could have it instead. And when I got the Rot-Resistant Breastplate and Holiday’s Grace, asked me what my gearscore was now. OMG, stfu, you stupid dumbshit app who is giving ALL PALADINS a bad name.

I’ve recommended his app be closed ASAP. I would rather be the only holy paladin than have to deal with this fucktard. If it were just one thing or the other, I could attribute it to nerves or anxiety. But some core issues with how he plays the class, some basic awareness issues and an unhealthy fixation on loot makes him NOT what we’re looking for.

Potential Downtime and Redesign

Kurn / / blogging

Since I’m not sure exactly what percentage of my readers actually visit the site (averaging about 100 visits a day) and what percentage read from an RSS reader (no idea what this number would be like), I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that my blog site here has become extremely cluttered. It’s not unlike my real-life spaces, to be honest! I guess I carry my clutter everywhere with me. ;)

My front page has my twitter feed, random polls I put up from time to time, achievement feeds, category links, links to other blogs, armory links, all kinds of stuff. It’s feeling a little much and it certainly could be organized better. So, at some point in the next week or so, expect the layout to change significantly. Expect me to break something at some point. Expect the blog to be inaccessible sometime. I’m not sure anything will break, nor am I sure it’ll be inaccessible, but whenever I’m confident that I won’t break something, I do. :P

I’m also planning on putting in some code for some Google text ads, primarily to help defray hosting costs, but also because I’m interested in building up the site a bit more and if I’m going to put in more energy than I currently do, I’d kind of like to see if I can get any returns on it. I rather suspect that advertising on a personal kind of blog is kind of frowned upon in the blogging community, because I don’t see a lot of it. That said, I thought I’d throw in some very simple advertisements while doing the redesign and if my traffic drops substantially because of it, I’ll remove it. My overall goal is to share information about World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives (but obviously the Holy Paladin perspective tends to be the main one these days) and to share my raiding experiences. That does include random daily frustrations, annoyances and the like, but also the awesomeness of progression. When we get LK heroic down on 25-man, I’ll be posting about it, that’s for sure. I plan to write about Ruby Sanctum. I plan to write about Cataclysm.

I plan to write about a lot of things and for quite some time, so if advertisements will prevent a significant amount of people from coming here and reading all the stuff I’ve written or plan to write, I’ll drop them from the site.

In the month of April, I had 4532 pageviews from 2729 visits, for an average of 1.66 pages per visit. Average time on site was 2m22s. So we’ll see if any of that drops for June or so, eh?

Anyways, thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you’ll be reading for quite some time. :)

Kurn's Q&A #18

Kurn / / addons, icecrown citadel, paladins, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Welcome to Kurn’s Q&A! This week seems to be focused on heroic Putricide and the Unbound Plague. And no wonder people are searching for information on those. The heroic Professor Putricide encounter is one of the more difficult ones I’ve encountered this expansion, primarily because you need to heal a lot of damage, do a lot of damage and avoid a lot of damage. It kind of sucks that way, but I think you really feel good about yourself when you get ‘er done.

1) “unbound plague third phase?”

Oh yes. Indeed. It’ll spawn somewhere in phase 3, probably about 30 seconds in or so. And it’s NASTY, trying to pass that off, while dodging goo, slime puddles and OH, doing damage to the boss or healing the LIVING CRAP OUT OF THE RAID.

2) “parry haste” “heroic saurfang”

Nope! Check out this site for a confirmed list of who has parry haste enabled or disabled.

What you’re probably witnessing and thinking is a parry haste is his Frenzy. He’ll Frenzy at about 25%.

3) “avr in 3.3.5”

Gone! Or, at least, broken. Say bye to pretty pictures on the ground and amazing radiuses like those for Unbound Plague!

4) “can you pass unbound plague while bubbled?”

I know you can GET Unbound Plague while bubbled. So when it comes to passing it, I would presume so.

5) “does divinity work on judge of light”

Not the way you think it does. Check out my experiment here.

6) “how to see unbound plague without avre”

With great difficulty? ;)

No, seriously, there’s an animation for it. It’s a black, swirling cloud that you can see pretty clearly in this TankSpot video.

Note that this probably requires you to turn up your particle density. I play with my particle density all the way down and don’t see this at *all*.

7) “ignoring unbound plague”

You don’t exactly want to ignore it, because it will kill you if you do. After about 10 seconds, pass it off to someone. Do not take it back, due to the fact that you’ll have a debuff on you that will cause more damage if you get the plague again. In a 25-man scenario, though, it’s easy to go through several attempts without ever picking up the plague. There are just a lot of other targets available. It’s probably the one heroic mode that might actually be easier on 25-man than on 10-man, although 10-man still gives you plenty of room to maneuver. Maybe we’ll call it even.

8) “seal of light vs. seal of wisdom and icc 3.3.3”

Seal of Wisdom if you use Holy Light primarily and Seal of Light for Valithria Dreamwalker/if you’re a FoL paladin. Along with their respective glyphs, of course!

9) “tightening waistband vs lonely noble holy”

Given the 10-man regular version of Tightening Waistband, the 10-man heroic version of Tightening Waistband and the Belt of the Lonely Noble, the choice is clear: 10m-heroic TW has more haste. If you’re more of a FoL paladin already at 676 haste, go for the Belt of the Lonely Noble for the extra crit and loss of mp5. Of course, Belt of the Lonely Noble is BOE and is a solid piece anyways.

10) “will bubble remove emerald vigor”

This is actually a wonderful question. Emerald Vigor and Twisted Nightmares are technically *debuffs*. I don’t tend to bubble during the Dreamwalker encounter, though. I think I might have done so once and I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if I lost my stacks. So I’ll say no, it won’t. But take that with a grain of salt.

Oof.

Kurn / / achievements, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

Thank God Tuesday is our day off. I am totally burnt.

We spent half of Thursday and all of Sunday and some of Monday wiping to heroic Putricide, whom we’d gotten down precisely once thus far. He finally went down again tonight, which was nice, but boy, talk about a herculean effort.

We spent some time with heroic Sindragosa, which is nightmarish as always. Finally, we decided to stop wiping and just do it on normal so we could get to the Lich King with plenty of time to do our last achievement for Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25). (Incidentally, I got a GM to confirm that Neck-Deep in Vile (25) is required for this achievement! Good thing we got it done last week.)

That last achievement was Been Waiting a Long Time for This. I don’t even actually know how we did this, but I do know that I was totally out of mana moving into the first transition phase. I learned early on as we were learning (and wiping regularly on) Lich King that meleeing Raging Spirits during transition phases isn’t the safest way to regen my mana, but, by golly, that’s what I did tonight.

The reason I was out of mana was because of what Necrotic Plague does. See that little bit right there? “The Lich King’s power will increase”? Yeah. See, he normally hits my MT for about 25k before absorbs, blocks and the like.

As we went through the achievement, he was hitting him for 43835 towards the end. No freaking wonder I was oom!

Anyways, we let the plague stack to 30, pushed for the transition and went about our merry way killing him, without quite knowing if we’d done it right or if it had bugged out, since you only get the achievement once he dies.

BOOYA, got it. :) It’s my first-ever “Glory of the something” drake and, might I add, it’s freaking cool looking. Makes me wish I were a gatherer on the pally so I could fly around looking awesome.

That said, it’s been a long raiding week. I increasingly want to wring the necks of half my guildies, particularly the dipshit DK who keeps bitching that he’s not getting kings for some reason and actually spammed the raid with like 10 lines of him saying “kings on dks!!!!” while on heroic Putricide… when he’s the only death knight in the freaking raid. The best part? He HAD kings, albeit the 10m version (someone’s addon was screwy, I guess), so it’s not like he didn’t HAVE the buff.

He released after falling off the side tonight on LK and so didn’t get his achievement, drake or any loot.

I laughed out loud when I realized he wouldn’t get it and really enjoy the prospect that Mr. Asshat won’t be flying a drake for at least another week.

Yeah, I’m mean. I know. But it still made me laugh. :D