Casual Raid Leader

I’m a fairly disorganized type of personality.  Its just the way I am.  It hasn’t changed much in the last 30 some years of my life.  If you saw my bedroom as a kid, It was always fairly full of piles.  Like most typical males, I knew exactly what was in each of those piles though.  I always got myself in trouble when I actually cleaned up…. because then I could never remember where I put anything.

In many respects that hasn’t changed much.  I’m a bit older, I have less crap… so the floor is generally cleaner.  Though my kids seem to suffer from my organizational abilities… which is a bit frustrating… but hey.

However… there is one area that I do function well in organizing thoughts.. and that’s developing raid strategies.  No… I’m not revolutionary.  I’m not on the bleeding edge developing strategies that nobody has ever ever seen.  I’m talking about adapting strategy to the group your running with.

Professor P… and Palatable Placement Process

Professor Putricide as a whole kind of stymied us for a little bit.  Not because I viewed him as particularly hard, but because we got to him right during when we had some people getting married and forming raids was a bit difficult when 4 of your core raiders are out and two of them are healers.

We started with what I’d call the “traditional” strategy of starting on the orange wall and then once the green slime was down everyone runs toward the green wall.. and back and forth.  Just a few minor problems.

1. The setup is stupidly easy, but… that works for the pull, after that everyone is running different paths through the room leading to…..
2. Slime puddles being spread all over the room.  It makes it extremely hard to get them all if you get a bad spread.  Which means you can actually get screwed in the fight because of it.
3. People aren’t good at moving back from the green wall to the orange wall.  You’re first instinct is to stop and DPS when you’re in range of the boss.  Meaning the melee ran all the way across the room and the ranged stopped about half way.  Leading to… the green slime almost inevitably picking that ranged dps standing in the middle of the room where its impossible for anyone to get to them before they get smushed and dead.

This kind of left me in a quandry.  I like the simplicity, but what I determined was that the strategy left us with two major gaping problems.

• There was too little time on DPS.
• There was just too much movement involved.  Too much time running of course meant… less time on DPS.

But inspiration… lands in the most unusual ways some days.

“A Friend of Mine Was Telling Me…..”

So our second tank mentions casually in raid that a friend of his told him they did the entire fight by just moving along the green wall.  My first reaction was….”That’s insane… that’s actually closer to the green slime.  I’m kind of failing to see how that’s helpful as we’ll get blasted around MORE often.”

However… I let it percolate in my brain and then it hit me….. The room is roughly a diamond.  (Yes… I’m going old school ASCII rather than doing something like Microsoft Paint…)

…………________……………..
………../…………….\…………..
………./………………\………
………/………………..\…
……../………………….\
……..\…..O…….G……/
……….\………………./
…………\……………/
………….._______/

What occured to me… is that the distance from side wall to side wall was roughly the same as the distance from where the slimes appear and the front of the room.  We could tank him up by the table at the front of the room and just deal with the slimes there.  For people hit with the green slime, we stand right up front and don’t move.  For people hit with the orange slime, they have a couple of seconds they can stand still while it closes on them, then they can kite it up the green wall.

Benefits:

• We aren’t running all over kindom come.
• The slime puddles are pretty tightly controlled.  So its easier for the abomination driver to deal with them.
• The only time people have to move is for the orange slime.
• The abomination only has to run about two steps out to spit on the slime.
• When phase 3 transitions, you’re all pretty well grouped up.  You can just start kiting him down the Orange wall and blast him into oblivion. 

Well… lets test that theory!!!!

Cleansing Totems SUCK!

The funny thing about the fight… cleansing totems actually affect the giant abomination effect.  It doesn’t appear as a disease on my debuffs, but sure as heck… cleansing totem clears it.  The first two times we tested our theory on tanking him by his experiment bench, we thought there was some effect by the bench that prevented you from doing exactly what we were attempting. 

We moved slightly up the green wall to try it again.  Again, the abomination just disappeared after a few seconds.  I’d grab a new one and boom… suddenly gone.  Ok it MUST be something by the bench… yeah … yeah that’s it.  We’ll go back to the old strategy.  We’ll tank him further back and just go straight across again.. 

BOOM… same effect.  Ok at this point I was pretty frustrated.  I mean I’ve driven the abomination before and this has NEVER happened… what the hell!?!?!?!?!

Suddenly the shaman looks up sheepishly… “Um… sorry… I forgot to change my totems from the Rotface fight… I still had a cleansing totem down…”

Whoops…. That kind of sucked.  Oh well… we learned something important.

Abomination driving 101

One thing I’ve learned is that as simple as it sounds, driving an abomination is not an easy task if you don’t stay on target.  Being the abomination driver is about focus.  You have to priotize your tasks and do them well or you make everybody else’s job that much harder.

First rule:  Thou shalt ONLY drive the abomination…
Second Rule:  Thou shalt NOT call out things to the raid… if you’re watching the raid.. you aren’t doing what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.
Third Rule:  If there’s an ooze (or gas cloud UP) Thou Shalt Spit at it first!!! Above all else.
Fourth Rule:  If there’s a slime puddle up…. thou shalt drink it.. and drink it quickly… spam the drink button as if you’re life depended on it…(it does…)
Fifth Rule:  IF the ooze/cloud has spit on it… AND there aren’t any slime puddles up, give it a good whack with a mutated slash. (or two… or three) 
Sixth Rule:  If there aren’t any slimes you have to deal with… AND there aren’t any slime puddles up… Always keep mutated slashes on Professor Putricide when possible.  It helps the DPS overall.

Some people may be able to ignore number 2.  I find personally, I can’t call things out for people AND drive the abomination.  That tends to lead to me falling behind on sucking up the slime puddles.  Which causes even bigger problems.  Getting behind on slime puddles means you’re highly likely to be overwhelmed and never able to catch up.  As soon as you see three slime puddles on the floor at one time, you’re pretty much fighting a losing battle.

The new LFG system has left us with some cool ideas.  This particular post is based off of an idea we were tossing around in guild.  The idea is to challenge your group, specifically your tanks and healers will be put to the test.  What’s the 15 minute challenge?  Turn the page and lets see shall we? (more…)

So I’ve been pondering a bit about what makes the new five mans hard and yet interesting.  I noticed with TOC, that about a week after running it, plenty of people had already converted it from… OMG… this is NEW to… yeah… we’re gonna run it, but only because it has gear we need… and its quick…

But what is it that has made the newer instances like Pit of Saron so interesting?  Why do they seem like they are a hell of a lot more fun? (more…)

Its funny how we kind of find ourselves in a rut.  I think in an MMO, its kind of a natural thing.  You end up stuck… you’ve done most if not all of everything in the game and then.. things slow down… they crawl to a halt and you find yourself just filling in the spaces….

I’m sorry if you disagree, but Blizzard in my opinion has proved why they deserve the king of the hill for MMOs.  With the release of 3.3, they’ve redefined what it is to play WoW… again. (more…)

Well… we did it.  It was a lot shorter road than I thought it would be, but in the end… we downed all of Naxx tonight.  I have to hand it to my raid crew.  They came, they saw… the kicked some serious butt.  Granted we had some adversity in there, but that’s what raiding is about… (more…)

Loot for me is an ends to a means… or rather… I need loot to get from point A to point B.  My goal.. has as always been to see the story.  To experience the quests and the epic stories that Blizzard laid down.  So for me.. Loot is necessary, but I care more about the story.  I also in the case of raiding need 9-24 other people to get loot and participate with me.  Its a balancing game really. (more…)

A'lar Down, Sky's in The Middle

Sorry PTD…. You’ve had your firsts…  This one’s mine!!!! (more…)

First of all, the beauty of being a tank is that generally speaking someone… somewhere needs a tank. Watch general chat close enough and someone is going to spam “LF1M for X instance, need Tank.” Its just the nature of the beast lately. I’m not sure why, but tanks are in short supply. Even in the beta they are in short supply.

This last weekend I was able to sneak into the Nexus for my first peak at a WotLK instance. Now let me list my qualifications here so people are aware of my background.

1. Full T4 set of gear.
2. Currently I need NO tanking gear from any T4 instance.
3. Tanked, Hydross adds and A’lar in T5 content.
4. DPS’d in SSC, TK and Mt. Hyjal

I’m not the most experienced in tanking the higher level content per se, but, I’ve got an extensive background in tanking. I come at it from a druid’s perspective, so I’m used to tanking lots of mobs and getting my rage from that and thus hitting the mobs harder and more often.

Lets break this down by the important parts.

Architecture

Beautiful. The architecture reminds me a druidic base with a very frosty frozen core. Snow falls and drifts around. The floors are iridescent and glow. There are frozen trees, and lots of nice little touches. One section includes a wide open area with lots of glow effects and spinning vortexes. Its all very well done. The zone feels cohesive and flows very nicely from one area to another.

Trash Mobs

For a KZ or beyond equipped tank, the trash is a joke. Hell we had clothies pulling mobs and not dieing. The mobs don’t hit particularly hard, but threat is a huge issue. Something right now is all messed up in the mechanics of druid tanks. The threat generation wasn’t there. Granted we didn’t have Omen to watch, but wow… what a nightmare keeping mobs corralled. Luckily like I said, the mobs weren’t dangerous to the group so it wasn’t a big deal if one or two got away from me.

Boss Fights
I realize that this is the intro instance for WotLK, but wow… the bosses just seemed kind of meh… Its still early in the beta, but the first bosses in Ramparts were always a bit challenging. There were lots of strategies to use and the end boss just felt difficult at level. I’m way overgeared, but still… they all felt like very standard tank and spanks. Don’t get me wrong. Some of them were interesting. One summoned huge crystals that spiked upward. One summoned rifts that you need to destroy. Another basically pulled the Black Stalkers’ trick on speed.. (imagine the entire raid being constantly thrown through the air at a high rate of speed.)