The Burrow

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.

Once again due to real life we were nine-manning content, and one of those has a broken collar bone (thus proving that retadins can faceroll :))

TotC10 (Beasts and Jaraxxus) – Beasts gave us a little trouble, it was Ari’s first time tanking the worms and they do need a bit of special handling, they’re the hardest part of the fight on normal mode.  Dusted ourselves down a few times, dead beasts, happy skinners.  Jaraxxus got better when ‘wolf went on the adds, Paladin AoE threat is a win on that fight pulling the adds under some form of control.

VoA – By the gods (all worship Yogg!) we have Wintergrasp, so as the bulk of the raid had never seen the bosses we dive into it before we get kicked out.  All three early bosses nuked, no problems and pretty much no gear thanks to the way the RNG was playing with us.  Oh thank you very much Blizz.  We need to go back in to wallop the new guy, I’ve only looked at him once and to be honest I don’t remember much of the encounter.  Emalon I think was the hardest for the team to work out, particularly when I failed to call the charged add (oops), but he died, we didn’t and we’ve learnt another execution fight.

ICC – The trash up to the final pack died without any problems, we then managed to pull pretty much all of the big adds one after the other causing one wipe and a few iffy moments (but the rep is nice).  Marrowgar, two attempts at nine-manning him.  We really did miss the additional ranged dps our resident dps nutter brings to the raid, which made getting the spikes down harder than it should have been.  More in a followup post

Korenwolf finally got his first ICC25 outing last night, unfortunately this means he’s left the AB guild for the raiding one, though Unferth will make the trip back to AB soon.  Generally a good run, we one shotted everything through to Putri, the tanking legs dropped (got better already) and the shoulders from the boat (upgrades ftw, 1 DKP).

Things which need fixing, exorcism on the ret bar needs moving from it’s current keybinding which it shares with taunt on the tank side.  This can cause problems when I’m dpsing in prot.  Similarly Hammer of Wrath needs moving away from the taunt.  Simply put taunt needs to be somewhere I can easily use it without there being a chance of whacking it by accident when hitting something else.

• Ret gear needs bringing up by enchanting and gemming.
• Need to work out why I wasn’t getting alerts on P3 of Putri for the stacks or a better method of monitoring for stacks on the other tanks.
• PowerAuras – needs setting up again so I have a clear visual clue on the key defensive spells
• Enchant the new gloves (stam or armour, that’s the question)

Namtar, now despite what some people thought on seeing her name it is not “ratman” spelt backwards, Namtar is named after the god of death from Mesopotamian mythology.  So let’s get that sorted out right now.

Namtar == deathgnome, bringer of death and decay

Namtar == Stupid reversal of a name

So, now that’s cleared up what is she?  The where I go to smash things around without the pressure of being a tank, I get to wallop and let someone else take on rounding them up and giving me a kill order.  What came as a shock last night wasn’t the dps she’s pumping out (peaked at over 3k in Heroic DTK) but the gear she’s wearing, the chest drop from Novos was an upgrade….  So, time to get her running more heroics for badges, she can pump out so much more I’m sure when some of the lower bits are swapped out and I actually get round to gemming and enchanting her gear

Priority order:

• Gem (she’s a JC, so this is trivial)
• Enchant (talk to swmbo)
• Replacement kit (get running heroics rather than tanking with the ICC25 paladin in 5-man content)

So, another week of raiding is done. I missed out on Wednesday (most of the farm content) due to being ganked by RL, it happens. RL > WoW, always. Anyway Fri was largely a washout, Princes down but no attempts on Putri as we were bodies short. Saturday was better but was a 200g wipe night.

The team was sub-optimal, but we had multiple 1-4% wipes.  So where can things be better?

• Healing
  Trees and Priests rock but they’re not really designed as heavy tank healers, so 4xTree and 2xPriest is possibly not an ideal setup for the group.
• Green mutations (Phase 1)
  Ranged need to be further back from the green one when is spawns, melee need to be camped right on top of the spawn point.  If it’s going to reach the ranged target we need to have as many as possible stacking on that player.
• Green mutations (Phase 2)
  Spread, spread, spread.  Please ranged camp spread out.  The issue here is Malleable Goo (aka ‘flubber’), we’re seeing regularly enough to be a problem a double whammy of the green ooze target getting walloped by flubber which was targeted on a player in close proximity.  So stay spread, stay back until it looks like the green will reach the target then get into close range for the explosion.
• Gas clouds
  The kite path is the key here and don’t get caught, the raid damage is usually enough to take out 3-4 players in one hit with others possibly following as other damage lands before the healers can catch up.
• Flubber (phase 2)
  Dodge it, please dodge it.  If only because getting hit is usually death and if not the casting debuff is a pain and hurts HPS & DPS
• Phase 3
  Avoid the bottle bombs, avoid the flubber, blow cooldowns, pop potions, hit trinkets, nuke and heal for all your worth.  Damage avoidance appears to be the key we’re missing at the moment.

Putri, if we can get that close with a non-optimal raid… you’re going down boyo.

This is flubber, take a good look, know your enemy

Very similar in many ways to Malleable goo as thrown by our current best friend, Mr P. Cide of Icecrown Citadel.  Flubber is green, bouncy and annoying (particularly in the presence of music and Robin Williams), Malleable Goo has the same properties, this is why our Mr Cide is throwing it at us.  Did you think he likes the damm green bouncy rubbish?

Flubber and Malleable goo both cause special effects to happen, one results in an actor bouncing off the walls the other results in a raid inspecting the floor tiles.

Both are undesirable.

So remember, if Putricide or Robin Williams offer you something green and bouncy, run away, very very fast.