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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Its interesting to me.  For all the years I’ve been raid leading at this point, there’s very little attention ever spent on trash mobs.  Yes… it sexier to concentrate on your boss mobs.  Yes…. you’ll spend a lot of time on boss mobs and little time on trash, but realistically, if you waste thirty minutes on trash… you’ve wasted thirty minutes.  Why not cut that time in half?  Why not eliminate it all together?

So the focus on this set of articles is to walk you through the Trash mobs currently present in Ulduar.  I’ll give you some insights on how we clear them in 10 man and try to provide tips for 25 man from my past experiences.  So without further ado, lets dig in shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

Oi…. hey! Get up!

Oh god… what do you want?  Can’t you see I’m planning a fairly lengthy rant?

Its time for your interview.  Can’t let you get out of it…. if you’re going to use the interview format on other people its only fair that I use it on you.

Look.. you realize you’re a self righteous twit don’t you?

No… That’s your job.  I’m the pompus over intellectual ass whose too self absorbed to recognize your pain. 

Oh right… you’re sure I’m the self righteous twit?  Absolutely positive?

Look.. you’re just putting this off… do I need to remind you of the day you put me in charge?!?!?!?!?  Want a repeat?

Oh yeah… I guess we’d better get on with it.  Well since you’re acting all important and in charge.. I guess you’d better do the intro then.  It seems a bit over the top if I introduce myself and write my own intro don’t you think?

Fine!!!

….

….

…

You ok there?  Need some help?  You realize this has gone on overly long already right???

No… look I’ve got this….

Ok….

….

…

…

Welcome to part four of our series on Raid Lockout.  Today we’ll be interviewing Starman from our very own Casual Raid Leader.  Starman is the raid organizer for a small casual 10 man raiding guild.  They are currently focused on progessing through Ulduar and ToC as we wait eagerly for 3.3.  Their focus is on keeping it fun while still progressing through the content.

He currently runs a blog with a small and amazingly quiet crew of readers who some day will open up in an amazing dialogue the likes of which has never been seen!!!  But till that day we’re force to put up with him as he is.  Without further ado… lets dive in and see what Starman has to say about the new Raid Lockout feature. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to part three.  In part four I’ll be weighing in on my opinion.  When I hunted people down for this particular sequence, I wanted to get a few different types of opinions.  I come from an alliance guild who’s kind of small and really we’re quite casual.   Lodur comes from another kind of  casual style guild.  Kasdingo runs a more raid focused  10 man guild, and our last interview is from a larger progression oriented guild.

I’m sure just from the name in the title of this post, most of you probably know him.  Matticus is probably destined for his own in game item at some point.  He’s well known for his contributions to the healer community at World of Matticus and the Plus Heal forums.  He’s a regular contributor over at Wow.com as well.  NostockUI is also a brain child of his.  From a personal perspective I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone in the community at large whose putting forth such effort to further the hobby.

But of course that’s not why I picked him.  Matticus is the GM of Conquest.  Its a fairly hard hitting raid guild located over on Ner’Zhul.  From an outsider’s perspective they get a lot of work done in what would be probably a typically short raid window each week.  They approach it professionally and going into this interview, I was fairly sure they hadn’t even used the feature.  But its a great perspective to see how someone from a more advanced guild views the feature.  Lets take a look shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

For those curious about my somewhat sporadic posting habits, a lot of it is directly related to what’s going on in my life.  This week I’m attending a SANS training conference.  I’m basically sitting in a classroom for 10-12 hours a day learning about security practices and some hacking techniques.  When the guy you’re sitting next to is literally sniffing packets off the Wireless all day long looking for something interesting you think twice about doing absolutely anything with your computer while in class.  Couple that with the fact that I’ve literally had a raid 10 minutes after I got home every day for the last three days and…. I just haven’t had time.

But over the weekend I was extremely fortunate.  No… I didn’t get to go Blizzcon.  I  obviously need to get enough sponsorship to just flat out pay for that trip obviously .  But I was able to trade some information with Lodur over at World of Matticus.  I decided before putting my own personal take on the raid lockout extension feature I wanted to track down some opinions from various people.

Many of you may recognize Lodur from his work as the resident Shaman poster over on World of Matticus.  Most recently he’s written about The State of Chainheal.  With out further ado, lets dive right in on what Lodur had to say. Read the rest of this entry »

Its been a bit of an up and down week in case you haven’t noticed.  On the bonus side things are going well today.  I’ve gotten to vent a bit.  I’ve got a new way of writing stuff occassionally.  Its a great medium for me to kind of express myself without having to drag specific people to the forefront.  I’m extremely happy with that.

Then.. of course there was Tuesday.  Tuesday was one of those days where we were testing something new… and…. it fell on its face when three people had to cancel on the raid in the last moment.  Which threw my plans kind of out in the weeds.  You see this was the first week we were attempting a raid lockout extension. Read the rest of this entry »

Periodically as a raid leader you have to step back and assess where you’re at.  I’m very proud of my team for pushing the way they have.  They’ve learned to do things that probably plenty of other guilds haven’t yet.  But occassionally when you’re sitting down you have find out where your stress points are.  To do that, you have to issue challenges to your raiders.  Not the type of challenges where they’re purposefully trying to do stupid things, but the types of challenges where you force them to think in ways that they aren’t used to.  To force them to find something a bit deeper and pull themselves up to the max they can be.

Walking the Line

For us initially we knew that our stress point was healers.  The amount of damage in Ulduar is SOO much more that we were forced to add a third healer in our 10 man team.  It was tangible.  It was easy to spot.  We had some of our best healers and they were constantly finding that with only two, they could barely squeek by on fights.  They had no room for error and other fights like Ignis, they just couldn’t keep up.  So we added a third healer.  For some guilds, this is the way they run every day.

For us it was a totally new configuration.  So we had to learn the new dynamic.  The good news is.. that it removed the stress point.  Healers didn’t feel like pulling their hair out.  They didn’t feel like there was no place to go and that healing just absolutely sucked.

Shifting the Stress Point

There are advantages and disadvantages for running more and less healers.  For us, if we ran three healers in Naxx, they were all bored off their asses.  Personally with two healers at times in Naxx is really really boring.  The advantage is that some of the harder fights like Four Horsemen become trivial, but the trade off is that your healers become really really complacent.  They generally don’t need to pay attention 99% of the time so they begin to just kind of… drift. 

So at times like that you can help out by shifting a healer slot to DPS.  This has the advantage of bringing a LOT more DPS to the mix.  Fights take less time.  Trash dies considerably faster.  And if you were DPS constrained before, suddenly you aren’t.  The down side is of course that you’re suddenly overflowing with DPS.  This can make the fights so easy that people begin to kind of “go through the motions” so to speak.  They begin to not pay as close attention to their rotations.  They begin to just kind of sleep walk through the instance.  Victory is assured!!!

Issuance of Challenge

Ulduar is a totally different beast.  I kind of liken it to shifting from Molten Core to Blackwing Lair, or shifting from Kara to Serpentshrine Caverns.  The transition to new content comes with a hard road where you have to find that stress point.  We started with relieving our stress on the healers to a manageable level.  We’re still making good progress, but as a raid leader it is hard for me to tell at this point if our next stress point is a DPS limitation or a tanking limitation. 

So the easiest way to determine where we’re at is issuance of a challenge.  I did this once ages ago in Kara.  Our resident warlock at the time looked at me like I was nuts.  Basically at this point I put the DPS and tanks on notice.  The challenge is for the DPS to find what I call the razor’s edge.  Their goal is to push it as hard as they can.  They shouldn’t be stupid and throwing DPS before the tank has agro, but once that tank is engaged, all bets are off.  DPS should be pushing it as far as they can.

What that means for me is that if we use the hunters as an example, they nail their misdirect, hammer the boss till they are pushing the limits of threat and then feign death.  Once they get up from their feign, they start hammering as hard as they conceivably can.  The goal isn’t to just blow right by the tank, but we need to know if the DPS CAN blow right by the tank.  So its all about finding out which group needs to augment.  In many respects it becomes a healthy competition.  The tanks sit there calmly waiting for the DPS to catch up.  Once the DPS is nipping at their heels the tanks bust their butts to up their threat.  Then the DPS chases them.  It actually can be a fun competition to see how far the tanks and DPS can push their limits.  Plus it forces them to think outside the box on how they can go above and beyond.

The summer has been oddly mild in my portion of the world.  Its been almost the pefect summer weather all summer long.  Nothing like a nice 80-85, no humidity and  a nice genetle breeze.  But from a WoW perspective we’re in those dog days of summer.  Its time to kick back… fire up some recruiting and pull out of the summer slump. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok… look.  I’m forced to admit every year that I’m getting older and older.  No… I’m not some old fogey talking about the good old days and pulling out my cane to bang on the ground…. shake it at you young wiper snappers and mourn the changes.  Its funny, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found that my memory gets less reliable. 

Its not that I can’t remember stuff, but as you get older your brain gets filled up with lots of other concerns… what are the kids doing? Do we have practiced today or tomorrow?  What was dinner tonight? What adjustments do I need to make to my 401k?  Ok when did I need to submit that form so I can get some vacation time off?  Wait… oh god they got me another project at work…. sigh… that will be another 50 hour work week….

We kind of keep filling up the spare spaces to the point that its harder and harder to keep things in memory long enough to cement them.  So as a busy father of three, I have resorted to…… Read the rest of this entry »