Category: Uncategorised

Ensidia vs Arthas

I guess given the amount of noise out there that I could add to the cpu cycles being burnt on this subject. So Ensidia killed Arthas using a bug in the encounter on 25 man, certain items which do siege damage were causing the platform to rebuild. This is how they got their kill and Blizz have decided that they exploited the encounter, banhammer, loss of achievement flag and lots of QQ from Ensidia, most of which comes across as bitchy whining.

Ensidia do have form, Blizz have decided in the past not to wallop them one for admiting they exploited encounters, this was a mistake by Blizz. Blizz own the universe as far as Warcraft is concerned and you can be sure that they looked at the logs from all the Ensidia attempts, and I personally suspect that they monitored the use of the engineering bombs and have made their decision based on that information.

Given that Ensidia tout themselves as the world leading WoW raiding guild and that they are a group all raiders look up to (yeah… right), then they know they need to be whiter than white, they know they are being monitored. Hell I would think it would hurt their professional pride to get the kill using what they know is a bug. Surely they want to get the kill cleanly, or are they really just a bunch of players after the kill regardless of the cost and method?

So Ensidia, I find it hard to believe you didn’t notice the platform reforming, and that you didn’t think that dropping damage on it resulted in more platform not less wasn’t a problem.

You got caught, you got punished, someone else got the clean world first. Now suck it up and act like the professionals you claim you are.

How much is this worth…

It’s a question often heard on trade or other channels, what can I sell this for, what’s it worth. There is no firm answer, worth is a relative thing, it depends on the realm, the time of day, the day of the week. Some items sell for more at the weekend, some are better mid-week. It also depends on where the game is on the patch cycle. Buff mats (gems, enchanting, food) always go for more in the first few weeks of new raiding content for example as all those pushing through need to get their new drops brought up to spec.

The ultimate answer is "Something is worth only what you can persuade someone else to pay for it", there is no intrinsic worth to anything in the virtual or real worlds that is not linked to someone else’s perception of what it is worth to them or what they believe they can sell it to someone else for.

Musings on raids, gearing and the dance

Some interesting experiences and thoughts on comments made over the weekend. The AB guild did what is becoming regular weekend event and spent a few hours kicking some raid content. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as getting 10 players online all at the same time is “interesting” at times as we’re a small social guild.

However the new weekly raid quest is a good incentive.

So this week Anub in Naxx needed a kicking, nice and clean, we almost got him down before the first locust swarm and finished him off before it finished. No problems, easy, we can zerg this stuff. This is only partly true. So we moved on to see the big dragon where we were painfully reminded that tanks need time to get threat so smacking the dragon before this is done is a bad thing. We lost dps on the pull and to a nice, but unfortunately timed crit while he was dropping the frost bomb (mage got insta squished on the land).

However through some frantic running around, lots of popped cooldowns, combat res and dps mashing for all they were worth we got him down. Not the cleanest of kills, not the ideal method but a good reminder that for raid content gearing is only part of the story, there are some parts of the encounter which cannot easily be zerged.

Bosses in Naxx can kill dps with a single swipe. If you catch a crit then you’re going to be watching from the floor, tanks get to survive that but only at the cost of lower dps. Dodging the frost bomb is still essential, the damage is very painful, so run and hide, there’s no shame to it. Threat is an issue.

KT went partly the same way, though this was largely due to the raid build. At this point our mage had to bail or get an earful from his raid leader, so we 9-manned KT, with one ranged dps. So that’s two healers, one ranged and six melee. Anyone who’s seen KT will know this is sub-optimal, particularly when most of the raid have never seen the boss before. Frost thingies locked out melee a couple of times (makes the tank’s job “interesting”), purple zones of evil caught dps thanks to lag and so on.

However, and again this is the biggie. The boss died on the first shot. By my count five of the raid had never seen KT before, and of the rest most of us have actually seen him less than a handful of times.

So the Naxx scorecard : AB – 3; Bosses – Nil

Were the kills flawless, no. Is AB an uber raiding guild, no. Did overgearing help, hell yes, did the players pull things back and learn the fights on the fly and get a kill. Hell yes.

Coming soon… musings on tanking, threat and 40-man level 60 raids done at level 80.

Terminology (raiding)

Stack on ***** : Everyone in the raid, or the subset called, stands directly on top of the designated player. Typically the tank.

Misdirect pull : The hunter makes the boss pull after placing a misdirect onto the tank, often to help with initial aggro and positioning of the boss.

Wipe night : New content requires learning the boss, unfortunatly there’s nothing like spending a night learning the dance to properly drive home when to stand and when to run.

(more as I remember them / think of them)

On tanking….

Tanking, it’s the new black.  Mostly because of the massive tank shortage across all realms which results in the following timings for the new LFG system

Tank : 2 seconds (if that long)
Healer: 2 seconds – 1 minute
DPS: 10-20 minutes.

That’s a hell of an imbalance, part of the problem is the dps.  Sorry guys but it’s true.  Zoning in as a tank to be met with “tank! gogogogogoooooo” is not a nice way to encourage your tank to roll through the instance for you.  He’s there to have fun and get emblems as well, he also needs to get a feel for what the group is capable of.  There’s no point pulling like a ferret on crack if the healer can’t keep up with the damage or the DPS can’t actually push out enough to keep up with the chainpulling of the mobs.  The tank might not be happy with this specific instance yet, so chainpulling will result in wipes and general grumpiness all round.

DPS charging ahead and pulling mobs to “speed things up” is not cool, getting aggro after someone else pulled, it’s hard, it’s a pain and it’s not fun.  Don’t do it.  Holding off for a GCD or two isn’t going to kill you and posting recount meters, just leave it alone we all know you measure your sexual ability by the size of your e-peen but trust me, girls aren’t impressed.  They, like most good players, want a clean run more than they want an epic fast one.  Speed and size aren’t always a good combination.

So, what’s the key?  Epic gear?  Strict adherence to your rotation?  Buff food?

No.

Situational awareness: Have it, in large quantities.  Learn how to move the camera without altering your fighting position to obtain the wide view.  This gives you that wider field of vision to spot the patrol, grab the breaking mob.

Know what’s going to happen, what’s happening.  Pull the static pack back from where the patrol is going to bump into them, or actively pull the second pack before the DPS get in on the action so they’re under your control not running around having their own party with the DPS.  Spot that damm caster and hit him with something (taunt / stun / strangulate / a bunny) to get his attention off the healer.  Mark things up on the fly (FastMark is your friend)

Threat: Be the most frightening toon in the group, make sure that you’re building primary threat on the current kill target, don’t be afraid to tab through building threat elsewhere as required, use the threat lead to your advantage, you’ll only loose it if it’s either too small or some stupid DPS decides to taunt (in which case they get to eat the floor).

Soak it: Your secondary role after collecting aggro is to soak the damage, ideally everything which has been pulled is hitting you (enjoy the pain).  The more mitigation and health you can stack the better, it increases your surviability and eases the mana burn on the healer.  Lower burn on the healer means the fights can last longer allowing for weaker dps or weaker healing.

Trash: Don’t underestimate the damage trash can do, it’s not the damage a single mob can pull, it’s the damage 10 of them can land at once.  (Tincan motto: “We don’t wipe on bosses, we wipe on trash”)

Crit Immune: This is the biggie, taking a crit from a boss can be the difference between a kill and a wipe, for bears this is achieved by talenting in feral, for warriors, DKs and Paladins it’s defence rating (535 for 5-man and 540 for raids at level 80).  Don’t run a heroic without being immune unless you have a healer who likes a challenge 🙂

ICC25 update

Wednesday night is raiding night since some shuffling happened a few months ago, it’s been working out better than Sunday raids.  Last night was particularly good.

Marrowgar, one shot
Deathwhisper, two shot
Boat, one shot (still the best encounter by far on the ‘fun’ scale)
Deathbringer, four attempts I think.

With enough time left to get in the weekly raid (Razorscale) and still finish early enough to get in a guild daily random run done (Hall of Stone..) with one of the guild who’s only recently started playing regularly again.

I promised some thoughts on healing the Deathbringer on normal.  It’s not a trivial fight but now we have a strat it’s coming together.  We’re using the “let people die” approach, the logic behind this is that the more marks which are up the greater the rate of gaining blood on the boss resulting in a shorter time between new marks.  At 30% he hits a frenzy which increases the damage rate.  Typically trying to keep all marked players up resulted in having 6-8 marks during frenzy, which is brutal to heal through and trying to get a decent triage failed.  Normally seeing two go down together (10% health back on the boss), and from there it’s all downhill.

Now the first two marks are left to die, unless it’s someone we cannot afford to lose (the current swapped tank for example).  Providing dps are on the ball nuking the blood beasts this results in 1-2 marks on hitting frenzy and I think 4-5 marks by the time we can get the kill.  On the kill I think we actually lost two after the frenzy but managed to pull it back.

One problem which caused the first few wipes was our healing make up (tree heavy), which resulted in the first two marks taking a long time to go down due to the size of the ticks the HoTs were delivering.  So the toon marked for death must clear all healing buffs and the healers need to be on the ball and ideally avoid AoE heals (Wild Growth for example) until the mark is dead.

Towards the end of the fight the healing (from a tree perspective) turns into “make sure there’s a hot up and nourish the hell out of the marks” with the occasional WG for the rest of the raid as necessary.