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It’s been a long time coming but we finally have cleared “Share the love” in TeamTinCan. A bit on the messy side but we got him down with everyone impaled.

One more achievement on the way to the red drake.

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20090916

Yoggie +3, I am expecting a rather large repair bill tonight.

1. Rhino skin

   Get one, make sure there are no flaws in it and slap on some of that armour the leather manglers make.

   Part of the problem is morons, you’re going to have to deal with them when pugging, I have mental filters which I throw into effect when I encounter one and I’ll generally ignore certain type of comments because to be frank life is too damm short to get into a battle of wits with someone who is unarmed. Â An example for the pile, it’s a tincan run + 1, we’ve pugged in the tank because I need the badges on unferth. Â One of the whispers I get is “let’s drop the dps after this run and go and so some others”. Â This is one person who hits the “doiknowyou” files as a moron, his tanking wasn’t that epic and I know the dps and given that (from memory it included the mage and DK) none of the dps was too shabby he was being a moron.

2. The pug doesn’t have to love you

   This is particularly true when it’s a completely random pug, or you’re joining a guild run. Focus on filling the role you’ve been invited to handle.

3. Trust your toon

   One of the issues which I’ve had to learn to get over is a bit of a hangover from the original TinCan runs where we were undergeared and having serious problems.

   No pull was attempted unless everything was topped up.

   For a more normal party setup this isn’t needed, trust that you can handle a trash pull on 30% mana, drop and drink at every opportunity, pop whatever cooldowns are needed to keep rolling. Â Don’t worry if the tank pulls before you’ve finished drinking, just get on with keeping them alive when it seems prudent (this includes continuing to drink while the pull is happening)

4. Life at “the speed of PUG”
   
   Generally people pug for two reasons.
   1. Need a quick run for farming badges
   2. Can’t get a guild run going
5. Keep on rolling

   If it’s a good group, and everyone is happy to keep going just roll with it if you have the time. Â It’s quicker than trying to find a new party and with the added advantage of knowing what the tank’s pulling style is.

6. Did I mention Rhino skin?

   PUGs are to a large degree a means to an end, the target being badges with the minimum of time spent. Â Making sure the daily dungeon is mashed into submission and practice.

“Chaos Theory” & “Split Personality”

Split Personality is the simpler to deal with but will require dps control and monitoring of relative health of all three adds (name plates will help here). Blow down all three of the adds within 5 seconds of each other on both splits.

Chaos Theory is more difficult to describe but I think is easier to achieve. Firstly we need to clear the lower area of all trash as we’re likely to be kiting him around a fair bit (how long depends on boss dps). This is going to be hard on the healer.

It’s a dps race and a positioning job.

The boss is pulled and maximum dps is loaded onto him, ignore all rifts, this is where things get interesting with the number of adds we’re going to be dealing with. I would reckon we ignore the adds (other than keeping the healer clear) until he shields. Probably stacking the healer on the tank / melee is going to make life a little easier for picking them up.

When he shields everyone backs off, the tank keeps “close” to the boss, probably the top of the ramp, and everyone else (including melee) pulls back to at least 15 yards from the tank. The lighting from the rifts is a chain effect, so if the tank is taking them and melee is within 15 yards of the tank they’ll get clobbered as well.

The tank will attempt to collect the adds but will not run back to the healer to clear them, that’s a job for the dps. When he unshields (45 seconds) he’s tanked in the new position, with dps focusing on the boss.

This process repeats with the party working back down the ramps to the base level and then around the area until he’s dead.

Easy.

I sense the need to get some of the Red proto achievements nailed down, so assuming we can pull enough together tonight I propose getting the remaining nexus ones down as best we can. Particularly the big floaty boss who’s name I can’t remember at the moment as I know the strat on that one.

Wednesday ad-hoc raiding went well, one shotting everything in 10-man TotC, no heroic mode stuff attempted. Which given the activities of the previous 30 minutes (moving dead ducks) was probably a good thing. VoA10 & VoA25 fell to the imba leetness of the group and all that stuff. Though at the end of the flame watcher there were a rather large number of corpses lying around.

Unferth has a stack of the new emblems ready to roll, I think I’m going to hold off to see if I pick any more up from the weekend before deciding on pretties to buy.

The DPS gear is holding up pretty well, I need to talk to the dps chicken lead just to check what direction I should be gemming, however from the feel of things I need to move from SPR into Crit, SP and haste.

So after the weekly “locks have expired let’s kill the 10-man of choice” raid and VoA runs on the tree it decided that running the newly minted priest through a heroic would be cool.

There was some mis-communication.

So we’re piling into UK heroic, with only four of us, one of the four is a newly minted in crafted gear, with minimal experience of healing on a priest, the other three are in a mix of pre-raid and a smattering of Naxx10/25 gear.

Apart from the comedy wipe in the dragon pens it felt “easy”. The damage taken wasn’t excessive, the prince went down without any problems (stack on the tank ftw), Pinky and the Brain didn’t give any hassle and Ingvar felt positively easy.

There was less of the “insane tank charging in” and “we’re team tin can there’s no reason to run” mentality about the run but even so, I was expecting Ingvar to give us some grief.

So… four-man nexus

So some thoughts in detail on TotGC25,

1) Ouch
2) Owwww.. I have a big owwieeee

and more seriously

It’s brutal, ok EO isn’t a top flight global force but we’re not slackers either. U25 on normal is pretty much a roll through at the moment (Ignis is messy and Yoggie is still a challenge to get right but we die there because we’re not being clean / organised enough), but by the Elder gods we’ve not killed TotGC is a kick in the knotwood.

1. The timers on this fight are going to be challenge (yay!).
   We’ve only seen the first two mini-bosses of the first fight, the second set spawns either when the first one goes down or at 2m30 from the start of the fighting.
2. The mana usage is brutal (Druids, you have a maximum of two innervates per fight)
3. The healing is tight, stomp is a big aoe thing, there’s fire bombs flying around (don’t stand in these for more than one tick or you’ll be a spectator) and Impale is something else.
4. The impale and the tick damage it does kills a tank in 0.4s… human reaction time is .35s + network latency… dear gods.

Bloody hell that hurt.

So for a single flask timer on Saturday we had a go at TotC25 heroic. So there we are smashing our face into the first boss on the beasts. 2m30 into the fight we suddenly get the worms entering the fray.

Nope, they’ve not pulled any punches here, reading through since gives the enrage timer for the whole first fight as 8m30 or so.

Ouch. We will be working on this for a while and Unferth needs to do the daily heroic every day to get kit upgrades.