The Burrow

Last night was the first time the new machine (Ragnaros) to enter a 25 man raid, as ever the non-raid addons were turned off but the graphics quality was kept just short of ultra.

5-man : 60fps
10-man : 60fps
25-man : 30fps

Next test, Wintergrasp

Only looking at the 10-man list.

• Naxx – Mostly cleared
• OS – Eight manned it
• EoE – Should have a look if only to get the achievement ticked off
• Ulduar – Cleared up to and including Crazy Cat lady
• Ulduar hardmodes – When we get bored 🙂
• Onyxia – Reckon we should have a look at her
• Trial – Once Ulduar is cleared?
• Trial heroic –
• Icecrown –
• Icecrown heroic –

A new machine makes. Until now I thought the new ICC stuff was pretty, damm fine graphics and all that. This was on the original machine, with all the graphics settings cranked right back to that I could achieve 10fps while raiding….

The new machine.. errr… wow… almost everything up to the max and I was still capped at 60fps in a guild 10-man run in Ulduar.

Forge of Souls… oh my gods it’s pretty….

Back in ICC tonight (with any luck)

The Buccaneers came, we saw and we kicked arse.

Anub’rekan went down first, one shot before the first swarm, thank you very much that’s five frosties.

Then.. Ulduar… Flame Leviathan, Ignis and Razorscale went down without a problem. The council gave us some fun but I think out of the 10 only three of us had seen the fight before and from experience on the raiding tree dialing in the mana usage on the healing is a critical part of the balancing act.

Kolagarn, hello Mr Loot bot, no you didn’t drop the trinket for the priest.

Crazy Cat Lady, thank you for dying, particularly after the god awful pull I did (kitties mashed me as I was out of line of sight), the bear stayed up long enough for a battle res to land on me and get RF running… then… I remember hitting, taunting and generally running around until she fell over.

Korenwolf finally managed to replace the shield from Culling, about time.

Bloody good effort for the Buccaneers, next on the agenda is the four watchers. They’ll be fun…

A week of highs, lows and missed raids. Wednesday was good progress, we mashed through the first four bosses without any problems, this little tree spent his time waving branches and running around like a loon. As is normal for trees. We got our first look at the "heal the dragon" boss, it’s an interesting fight which depends on the dragon healers getting into the portals, getting a green orb quickly and making sure that they get an orb within the last few seconds of the dream.

To misquote a (in)famous raid leader "many orb stacks, handle it!"

Friday was a washout thanks to work being hell and feeling rough.

Saturday raiding happened, the Council got nuked (though messy), and Putri mashed our faces some more, still felt like hell.

Missed the Sunday ICC10 raid thanks to spending most of the day either in bed or lying on the couch listening to B5.

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.

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.

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.

Put up for random information

Naxx 10 log parse

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)