Category: Uncategorised

Nice and simple, we wallop down FL (worth trying for the second tower up or another attempt on one tower to make sure we’re nice and clean on that?) and then into XT.  Suggestion for this week we see if we can hit the dps check for hard mode and see how things go.

Marrowgar (2-shot), Lady Deathwhisper (1-shot) & the boat (2-shot)

Marrowgar, we need to remember we have to cluster in melee due to our general weakness in the ranged department, keep everyone including the healers nice and close to melee so they can wallop on spikes without having to go for a jog first.

Lady Deathwhisper, I admit to being impressed, I was expecting more wipes on her before we got it nailed but everyone worked perfectly and the adds all fell over in order, target switching worked well and the big adds chased me all over the room before falling over.

The boat, bit of practice as it was the first time most of the raid had seen it (need to get the PotC theme running over vent next time for the pull).  Things to remember:

• The mage doesn’t need tanking
• dps can go to town on it without any fear.
• Saurfang needs picking up before the dps land and pulling to the edge closest to the home boat.  This puts the tank within range of the healers.
• Once the mage drops the dps leg it.
• Once the dps are clear the tank runs away.
• Don’t leave pets or totems behind.
• While the mage isn’t active melee help out with the adds on the home boat
• Mage has priority over the adds
• Cannons aim at the axe throwers
• Loot! (once the boat has docked, we’ve had it bug before)

Team Pirate continues to rock ICC10.

So, following discussions on vent we need to ponder the best collective raid time.  Currently Sunday afternoon is seen as the least worst for a number of us but there are some where it’s not ideal.  So.. ideas, comments and the like please.  There is no need for a single raid slot either, we can have a number of possible slots and where necessary shuffle from week to week depending on what suits the various members of the group.

So, I’ll start, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings are off the shopping list for myself (clashing with EO raid times), this doesn’t exclude them but does make ‘wolf making an appearance significantly less likely.

Let the discussion start!

So assuming Team Pirate is online in sufficient numbers he’s dead (again), with any luck we’ll pull together sufficient to be able to have a pop at Death Whisper.

To that end I’m pondering tweaking the raid setup for DW a little, assuming the normal group are around…

Tank

• Paladin (T) [Confirmed]
• Bear (A) [Confirmed]

Heal

• Paladin (K) [Confirmed]
• Tree (U) [Confirmed]

Melee DPS

• Deathgnome (M) [Confirmed]
• Deathgnome (M) [Confirmed]
• Kitty (S) [Tentative]
• Rogue (S)[Unknown]

Ranged DPS

• Hunter (S) [Tentative]
• Warlock (K) [Unknown]
• SPriest (C) [Confirmed]

(yes I count 11 as well, so it depends on who’s around for the attempts and who’s signed off)

So, a bit of shuffling to increase the magical dps and bringing the Tree out of semi-retirement doing what he’s good at.

Thank you from Team Pirate, nice drops and a one shot kill, on an eight man run (yes we did use the buff).

Now to get enough people online for the Sunday run to have a decent shot at DeathWhisper.

We came, we saw, we had our faces shown the rather poor carpeting.

So, what do we have in here.

Phase 1:

• Burn down the mana shield, this is a priority task, good sustained dps is needed here
• Shadow bolt (deathwhisper)
• Curse of torpor (needs dispelling as quickly as possible)
• Green death and decay on the floor (deathwhisper)
• Cult Fanatics – Must be turned, these cleave, only the tank should be in front of them
• Cult Adherents – Caster
• Reanimated fanatics – melee immune
• Reanimated adherents – magic immune
• Empowered adherent – Gains uninterruptable cast
• Mutated Fanatics (these are the big ones), they must be kited and nuked down above all other adds.
• Make sure there is at least one tank free to pick up the adds as they spawn

Priority order on adds:

1. Mutated fanatics (big ones being kited)
2. Empowered adherent
3. Reanimateds
4. Cult fanatics (easily killed)
5. Cult adherents

Phase 2:

• Try and transition while there are no adds up
• Tanks kite her to the floor area (makes dealing with the kiting easier, removes LoS issues for the healers)
• Run away from ghosts
• Tanks need to agree how many stacks they’re swapping on to keep the debuff under control
• Nuke nuke nuke

Random thoughts

• Depending on the mix next time we may shuffle the healing around again to put the priest into the field as dps, this appears to work better than the moonkin.
• Target switching and macros for the tanks so they can quickly mark up the current priority.
• Focused fire on adds to burn them down as quickly as possible
• Faster add nuking allows the tanks to get over to pick up the adds quicker
• Tanks not to feel like they’re slacking if they’re spending time getting into position even while adds are up as long as they’re under control 🙂

Also known as the mating call of the “lesser spotted dps”, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) this sub-species of DPS hasn’t learnt yet that while potentially attracting other DPS mates it is the equivalent of nails on the blackboard to all tanks so far catalogued by science.

Trust your tank, when he’s ready he’ll pull and if he’s suitably geared he’ll merrily chain pull the instance to the limits of the healer, trust that the tank is going to be pulling the packs in a controlled manner.  Yes we love the way you spam your AoE attacks, but they don’t actually cut down the damage the packs are doing right until they all drop at once, so it’s not quicker to pull the entire room at once and will probably annoy the healer (also not a good thing).

Pulling the final boss with pets and Army of Aggro is a bad thing, dear dead things your army is the awesome but there are times when it should be sat reading a book and that for you is “most of the time”, particularly on dragons and bosses which do a directional aoe attack (Invgar, Anub etc etc).

So, please follow the tank, nuke the things he’s hitting and ignore everything else, trust us they’ll be served up for your dps meters soon.

In which your humble RL learns more about what rogues can do and when to flip the makeup of the group around.  A couple of wipes and a kill, not bad and some lessons learnt on how to deal with her when we have a non-optimal group.

• Rogues can rock at the AoE damage thing, stick them on the whelp packs
• Therefore.. AoE ranged isn’t as needed
• Ranged can therefore focus on big and ugly who’s floating above the raid
• The healer lurking on the edge of the area up beyond the left cave can see the whelps spawning (name plates ftw) and give early warning.
• Put the raid healer up with the melee camp and have the tank healer follow the ranged camp as they nuke Onyx during phase 2

Boss dies, loot gets shared out, some goes to the guild for general gearing purposes, all is good.  Boss gets skinned and we leave the place nice and tidy.

Just thinking ahead…

http://reawaken.guildomatic.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=1329

As mentioned before, we came, we saw, he killed us but not before we had him down to 57%.  For a nine-man team of non-hardcore raiders I think that was pretty bloody good.

Of those in the group, three have raided him and got kills in 10 & 25, six have never seen him in the flesh and of those one had seen him via tankspot.  So given that most of the group were working on descriptions of the fight I think this was pretty excellent.

So, things to focus on, things to remember, what’s missing

• Tanks, some more mitigation on our bear (I think we’re going shopping)
• Tanks, make sure we’re calling which way we’re moving during the spank phase
• Melee, a little more time to get him positioned, and potentially moved, particuarly when he’s against a wall, that was a pain to handle.
• Melee, dodge those coldflames
• Ranged, we need the pewpew mage, between Oxana and Keone the spikes are dead in no time, which means the melee don’t need to spend time running which means more boss time.
• Spikes, kill them, kill them quickly
• Heals, not much I don’t think, lots of healing, and make sure there is cover when one healer is spiked.
• Heals, do we need additional healing to smooth things out?

Marrowgar is an execution fight, more about making sure we deal with the problems he throws at us and staying alive than raw damage on the boss (there are plenty of pure DPS checks inside ICC but we’re not anywhere close to those at the moment).  The motto in this fight is “stay alive”.

Enrage timer

In 10-man normal he has a 10 minute enrage timer, the rough numbers from Sunday indicate we’re popping 24k raid dps (just short of 5 minutes to nuke him down), so with an additional ranged and experience we’re going to be completely safe on the timer.

Loot!

So everyone can line up their shopping list…

http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=36612#normal-10-drops

Primordial Saronite

I was wrong when I stated there was no Saronite on Marrowgar, he drops one.  The current plan (had a discussion with our glorious leader), the plan  is to flog the saronite for the best price we can get and use the proceeds to give a payout to the team to cover raiding costs.  Now if that’s not an incentive to get him down I dammed if I know what is.