Current raiding team

Core:

Tanks (2): Paladin, DK
Healers (2): Disc/Renew, Holy Pally
Ranged DPS (3): Hunter, Mage (arc/FFB), Lock (destro/demo)
Melee DPS (1): Best rogue on server

Additional ICC capable members:

Healers (3): Holy Priest, Holy Paladin, Resto shaman
Ranged DPS (2): Ele (resto) shaman, Destro lock
Melee DPS (0):
Tanks (0):

Alts of core that are ICC ready:

Fury warrior (belongs to me/disc priest)
Prot warrior (belongs to rogue)
Mage (belongs to Pally tank)

I list this here for my own interest as much as anything and to track our recruiting success over next couple of weeks. WTB skilled melee dps pls. At the moment the only way to do a full guild run would be to have me on fury warrior and bring in the spare healers. My fellow officers are heavily opposed to me not running the healing tho.

I guess melee dps + some druids are our going to be our focus. Once we have those in we’ll jump a long way to having an ICC25 ready.

Our core is skilled and capable, we are so close to taking a huge leap forward in progression I can almost smell it. We’re behind on the 2nd wing but only 2 people away from catching up and clearing 3rd before the 4th opens.

Festergut down

Thursday we yet again had to pug melee as the one excellent rogue we had was on his tank to cover an absence. Getting thru the 1st wing took longer than usual, as we had our awesome-in-ToC hopeless-in-ICC enhancement shaman in, and a pugged resto shaman.

I grind my teeth and accept that we can’t just wipe on Marrowgar until we finally get Boned (we totally should have done this the 2nd week in – but it’s a difficult call to make when everyone wants to hurry up and gear and we have pugs in). 1st bone spike takes 12 seconds and its another horrendous fail. Fortunately I d/c and we wipe.

Fortunately, because this time everyone does stack on the boss’ ass and the Boned achievement flashes up as Marrowgar drops. Perhaps they thought the d/c was deliberate and I’d keep doing it until they performed properly. When I mention going for Full House on Deathwhisper there are 9 “oh god no”s so we leave that for another day.

Resto shaman insta-dies, enhancement shaman commits suicide again, no interrupt on the 1st frostbolt after transition and we’re dead. Whispers in /o “what the fuck – why is this so hard tonight.”

Resto shaman gets kicked and we bring in a guild lock who wasn’t on at start of raid. At this point we’re abandoning Rotface and effectively abandoning Festergut. I wanted to try 2 healing it to give the dps some room, but our tank is undergeared for Inhale(3) and keeping him up will be next to impossible.

DW goes down messily, Gunship messily, Saurfang on 2nd attempt. We’re praying for the shield to drop off gunship for our warrior tank but it doesn’t.

Festergut goes badly as predicted but people are starting to get better at collapsing and the movement. (Which isn’t hard – as I bitterly state in /o chat if the movement here is wiping us we won’t get Rotface down). A huge part of the problem is our trainee lock who doesn’t collapse properly and seems very slow to learn every new encounter while doing fine on trash/old ones. The enhance shammy is equally bad tho. At one point he got a spore, ran out 10 feet into open space in the opposite direction to the melee and stood there – like it was bile or something.

High points: Boned and our mage showing that he’s turning into a hardened skilled raider from the casual solo player he was a few months ago.

Low points: WTB non-retarded pugs.

Friday

Our DK-tank (who is proving a valuable recent addition) comes back from holiday and joins us so the warrior switches to his rogue. I’m not sure I love them missing the easy frost and possible gear from 1st wing, but I’m excited that they’re both willing to do it. I’ve scheduled a bonus-run (normal raids are Thursday and Monday) to get Fester down. Our mage couldn’t make it so our trainee lock is back and now a guild member (he got 3 pieces from the 1st wing and was crazy excited on wednesday as well when we invited him to a toc10 alt run and got thru it in under 50 minutes.)

Aside:

On seeing the lock in guild, our dk tank writes us a 3 page letter about how bad this guy is at raiding and detailing all his problems. 1st – this is the right way to handle such things – not in gchat, but simply in a well thought-out reasoned letter. We’re excited that the dk can spot all this. Our quality-scrub ratio on recruiting seems remarkably high.

I explain that we have two types of recruits now. The people who will be with us when we kill us Arthas on hardmode. And filler (who show at least some potential) to cover absences, help us form more inguild runs as we build a 2nd ICC10 and a 25 man team etc. The dk is in the 1st camp. The lock in the 2nd. He agrees it makes sense and we move on.

Onto Fester. I’ve dropped shadow and taken the new in-vogue Renew spec as my 2nd because a pally healer recruit we had impressed me in ToC10 and our raid heals have been sucking balls lately. If you can’t get someone else to collapse properly at range do it yourself seemed a good idea.

On a personal note – yeeps! It’s going to be a while before I’m as good at this spec as I am at my normal disc tank-healing spec.

Progression goes well tho. We hit the enrage once and people’s heads come up, knowing we can do it if we don’t lose people to Blight. Our lock’s collapse success rate goes up to 90%, everyone’s dps ratchets up, the melee start looking at /ranged to check everyone (including tanks) is getting innoculated.

Festergut is dead. Woooot.

Monday will now be Rotface and (hopefully) a couple of attempts at putricide.

Festergut (10)

Damage types: Physical, Shadow (aoe pulse), Nature (tanks only)

Encounter type:  Low movement, Healing intensive, DPS Check.

Main Abilities:

Vile gas:  Random target, but won’t affect melee if you have at least 3 people at range at all times. 15k damage over 6 seconds (target also incapcitated for duration).  Maintain minimum 8 yards distance between ranged players so only one is affected by Vile Gas at a time.

Gastric Bloat:  10k nature damage to target (tank).  Grants 10% damage increase per stack, lasts 100 seconds. But you explode at 10 stacks wiping the raid.  This is bad.

Gaseous Blight – Constant pulsing aoe, 4500/2 seconds to start, 3k after 1 Inhale Blight, 2k after 2 Inhales, 1500 after 3 Inhales. With each Inhale Festergut’s damage output is increased by 30%.

Pungent Blight – cast on what would be the 4th Inhale Blight.  Exhales the gas back to full dealing 50k damage to all players and we return to the 4500 damage pulse.  Festergut’s melee damage also returns to normal levels.

Gas Spore: 2 random targets, After 12 seconds there is a 2k damage aoe which gives 1 stack of innoculation (25% resistance to Pungent Blight).  Innoculation stacks to 3.

Core Mechanics:

Surviving Pungent Blight via Innoculation:

To survive Pungent Blight you need to ensure that you get Innoculated every time the Gas Spores appear.

There needs to be a ranged spore and a melee spore so if both spores appear in melee a player will have run out to the ranged, equally if both appear in the ranged group one infected player has to run to the melee.  For this reason having 4 people in the ranged group instead of 3 is sensible.

Managing Gastric Bloat:

The key to beating the enrage timer seems to lie in handling the tank transition.  Having a tank doing 80-90% increased damage is extremely helpful but his threat will be high and if he pulls back off the new tank it’s a wipe.

So on the taunt:

- Previous tank turns off threat gaining abilities (switching from defensive stance to a dps stance, turning off Righteous Fury, etc)

- Previous tank gets Hand of Salvation if available

- Misdirect/Trick on new tank helpful.

The 2nd tank will be on 9 stacks when the buff wears off the 1st tank so the 1st tank needs to taunt back immediately upon the buff expiring.

Encounter by role:

Tanks:

Will need to use defensive cooldowns during the 3rd Inhale when damage to the tank is at its peak.  Watch Omen during transition to dps phase to pump out as much damage as you can without pulling back off the new tank.

Healers:

As a team your focus switches from the raid to the tank with each Inhale and then back to the raid after Pungent Blight.  Coordinate cooldowns on tanks after 3rd Inhale.  Be aware that the 2nd tank is taunting the boss around the 3rd Inhale so will be coming into immediate heavy damage.

Ranged dps:

use /ranged dbm function to maintain 8 yard distance from each other during most of encounter.  Collapse on Gas Spores then return to original position.

Melee dps:

The easiest job in this encounter.  Use /ranged to make sure that the tanks are WITHIN 8 yards of you when you have the spore.  If you have the spore it’s your responsibility to make sure the tank gets innoculated.

How we’re going to tackle the encounter:

Assuming we run 3 ranged dps then we move the 3rd (raid) healer to the ranged group to make 4 people at range and 6 in melee – this will eliminate any chance of Vile Gas hitting melee and wiping us.

Ranged spread in a tight semi-circle 10 yards apart from each other: DPS1 DPS2, DPS3, HEAL, collapsing to DPS 2s position on every spore (DPS2 being the top dps lacking in instants). Returning to original positions after spore explodes.

The 12 seconds it takes spores to explode should be plenty of time to work out on vent who has to run if both spores appear in the same camp but as a general rule have “X” run. If “X” is DPS2, a tank or a melee group healer then skull runs. If both melee group healers get it then the more mobile one should run.

Healing:
If we run disc/pally/xxxx healing as we typically do the Pally will have the more static role, beaconing the current tank and healing raid (responsible for Vile Gas traget), while disc switches from raid healing during Inhale(0) to raid/tank Inhale(1), to Tank Inhale(2). Raid healer switches to tank also on Inhale(3)

If dps is lacking the raid healer can become a 4th ranged dps.

Pungent Blight is a critical moment and healthstones should probably be swallowed after the 1st one to ensure we don’t lose anyone there.

As Tank 1 gets an average 60% damage increase from bloat and Tank 2 only an average 45% increase Tank 1 should be whoever does the most dps normally.

Heroic Beasts Down/2nd ICC wing stops us dead

(My computer developed a strange bug where all my browsers stopped working or crashed my system so it’s catch up on posts time)

Monday 4th Jan:

Yay!  Our small guild struggled badly in TotGC, largely due to always needing 2-3 pugs.  We were becoming the classic “working on TotGC” guild – where “working on” meant playing pattycake with Gormok for a couple of minutes before wiping over and over when the worms came out for a threesome.  So we stopped working on heroic coliseum for a while and worked on recruiting instead, but a couple of new additions (a dk tank and arguably the best rogue on the server) had us wanting  to head back in fr te monday night raid after we cleared ICC10 on Thursday.

Beasts was almost a 2 shot.  I got targeted by Icehowl, swivelled to my left, ran out, power infused the mage, everyone spread out for the breath.  It was looking good.  I get targetted again.  Sweet!  Now I know there’s no chance of some tard getting hit and wiping us so close to glory.  I swivel left, unfreeze and fucking pop to the right a few feet before I start running in my intended direction.  Icehowl just clips me and I’m a stain on the wall as we wipe.   I still don’t really know what the fuck happened.  I suppose if you’re turned around when you  get thrown back you start off in that direction as you unfreeze?  If so then oops – that one got by me when researching fights and on normal you have time to bend down and tie shoelaces before running so it’s never come up before.

After that I make sure to note where I’m facing when I get thrown (I’m usually busy throwing bubbles on the squishies) and plan my escape route accordingly.

Icehowl dies on the 5th attempt and our rogue gets a nice upgrade.Icehowl dies on the 5th attempt and our rogue gets a nice upgrade.Visions of Heroic Anub pass through my mind but I mentally stop myself – after all we still have to down FC and I know that was a major stumbling block for many heroic guilds.

Of course we then spend the next 3 hrs wiping on Jaraxxus without ever really coming close.  It’s tempting to blame a breakdown in DPS switching midway through fight but that’s not really fair as there were errors from pretty much everyone and most of the attempts were disgustingly sloppy all around.

Thursday 7th Jan.  I budgeted 90 mins for 1st wing, 90 mins for Fester and Rotface and an hour to get a couple of Putricide attempts in.  On reflection this may have been over optimistic.  Or as my GL said afterwards “What the fuck made you think we’d get these fuckers down?

We came in only slightly over budget on 1st wing, 100 minutes (including teaching each encounter to the fucktards who don’t understand what “research fights before raid” in the invitation notes means).  Only wipe was to DW on a horribly mistimed phase transition.  However we once again failed to get the “Boned” achievement on LM.  Not having this is starting to get really irritating, but with a new wing we didn’t want to wipe it and start again.  Saurfang was so messy he died with only the rogue left standing

But we were through, a new wing full of adventure awaited us and our ‘lock had won the loot lottery (we still had 2 pugs (tho ones we know and were lining up to poach) in run so it was /roll rather than LC.) including the Spyglass he’d been coveting since the loot tables were released.

So onwards to glory!

Or in our case, multiple deaths as everyone who went through portal on autorun suicided on the jets of death.

Overconfidence on trash wiped us once.  Stinky and Precious notched a kill apiece also.  /cry.   With this many deaths I knew tempers would start to fray a little and our group isn’t the most cheery in the face of adversity anyway

Coordination and good positioning/movement come a lot harder to most of the group than maximising their individual dps.  I knew this.  I knew that we’d wiped a few times already.  I knew the members who had researched the fights ahead of time and prepared were just as pissed at the people who hadn’t as I was.   So I’m not sure what the fuck I was thinking when I said “We’ll do Rotface first it seems like a simpler encounter.”

After continual wiping and never getting close I realised we had a much better chance at Festergut so we left Rotface to play with himself while we attempted Fester with the last 50 mins of the raid.  We didn’t get him down, but came close and had we gone straight there Fester would be dead already and not waiting for us on Monday.  Oops again.After continual wiping and never getting close I realised we had a much better chance at Festergut so we left Rotface to play with himself while we attempted Fester with the last 50 mins of the raid.  We didn’t get him down, but came close and had we gone straight there Fester would be dead already and not waiting for us on Monday.  Oops again.Back to the point about people being ill-prepared.  This is probably even worse than being late to the raid.  Instead of wasting 10 mins of 9 other people’s time you’re potentially wasting the entire night for them.  FFS, we have an ER doctor who is oncall so much he only had 7 hrs sleep in the 48 hrs before Thursday’s raid. Yet he was ontime, in the raid and prepared – albeit slightly cranky.  If he can prepare then you can spend 10 minutes watching a video and checking out the boss abilities for each fight.  Asshole.

“Why do I have to study to play a video game. LOL”

You don’t.  You’re more than welcome to fuck off and find like-minded fellows to raid with and then spend your raid nights sat in Naxx wiping on Thaddius (despite wearing i245 badge farmed gear).  But you don’t want that do you?  You want to be carried through content by people willing to put in the time and effort to succeed.  So the politest thing I can say to you is go fuck your mother with a goat.

Be on time.  Know the fights.  Bring enough flasks for the entire raid window.   Bring reagents.  Be repaired before we pull.  Have your gear gemmed and enchanted properly.  It’s Really Not Fucking Hard.

And if you can’t show simple courtesy to your fellow raiders in these respects what am I going to do about it?   Well probably not a lot immediately.  We’re small and replacing people can be hard.  But everything is noted and in a few weeks when you once again get no loot and are wondering why not – perhaps the penny will drop.

Turning up late

I had planned to write a diatribe against the type of cockweasel who consistently shows up late to scheduled raids after accepting.  Who logs on a couple of minutes after pull time, so he doesn’t have to wait for anyone else.  Who prioritizes 5 minutes of his own time over a collective 2 hrs of the rest of the raid’s time.  I was going to write it when in the right mood sometime in the next week.  Theres no need for me to do it now tho as Zubon of Kill Ten Rats just did.  In a much more reasonable way than I would have.

This is an issue that pushes my bloodrage button.  Your officers  put a lot of work into forming your raids.  The members that turn up on time value their time as much as you do.  The raid window is limited – starting late means the planned content may not be completed.  Everyone starts off irritated and mistakes are made.

If you accept a raid invite and aren’t on at the appointed sign-on time without a real life emergency/very good reason you are disrespecting your entire raid. You’re telling them that your time is worth more than all of theirs put together.

In short you’re an ignorant faeces-slurper who needs to grow the fuck up and Stop. Fucking. Doing. It.  Or we’ll track you down and castrate you so you don’t pollute the world with more of your ilk.

“Ben”

Although it happened in the last couple days of 2009  this is the incident that started me blogging again so I thought I’d recount it.

We’re a small guild anyway at the moment (at least when it comes to ICC geared players) and the holidays hit our ability to form raids in-guild, so into our quick ICC run came a 2nd tank (who we’ll call “Ben”) and 3 melee pugs.  Only the kitty had ever got past Marrowgar, but still – shouldn’t be a problem for us.  They were all geared adequately so candidates for recruiting if they performed well.  We’ll just use /roll for this run in spots where a pug is rolling.  (In-guild loot competition is still strongly encouraged to be worked out amongst themselves although we won’t be using an official LC for this run.)

Ben wiped us once on trash with a 3 trap spring despite the rogue warning him (and it was he that had insisted on not disarming them because he wanted the rep).  It was messier than I anticipated with everyone running in the same direction away from Marrowgar’s Whirlwind.  Not overly helpful.

But we down him and the 2h sword drops.  Our MT immediately whispers in OChat that he wants it (it’s cute that he still has delusions we’ll let him ret one day – tank4lyfe), and things look brighter when I see the Ret pally is wearing Quel’delar.  No mainspec roll, so we go to off and the MT rolls fairly well, Ret pally (Ben’s friend) now rolls.  Ben outrolls them both and Ret says “oops” didn’t mean to roll.  Ummmm.  Yeah.  Cos none of us have ever seen some ignorant fuckwits looking to cheat with double rolls.  However “LM must die” was the weekly raid quest so finding a replacement would have been a royal pain in the cock.  It also could have simply been a mistake.

Onto Lady Deathwhisper, We explain the fight to him, but Ben fails at picking up his spawns in a timely manner and keeps trying to tank the deformed fanatics, so taxing our 2 man healing team again unnecessarily.  We 1 shot tho.  It’s funny how a fight can seem so tough when you first do it and then so simple once it’s down.  We wiped for a couple of hours on DW the 1st time we did it but since doing the 25 man version the 10 man version feels like a joke.

Tank chest drops – our guy wins the roll, “Ben” immediately starts bemoaning his luck and offers to buy it from our MT.  He laughs it off and we move in, while explaining Gunship to him.  We give him the easy stay on our boat job.  1st pack goes everywhere wipes our hunter, and his ret friend stays on the enemy boat.  8 manning early.  Nice.  Luckily gunship is a trivial encounter  but again we ‘re forced to work hard to cover them.  Sense a recurring theme?  It’s not so bad just by itself, they’re new to the place and they’re not incompetent beyond a point we can cover.  It’s irritating because instead of being grateful we’re carrying him through the content, he’s giving off a distinct “I’m so awesome” vibe the reek of which coils off him like $2 aftershave.

This is where the loot drama blows up.  Shield drops and our MT has been wanting a shield upgrade forever.  He even  farmed HoR for the i219 shield because it got too embarassing still carting around his heroic shield after ToC RNG was very mean to him.  MT wins the roll and Ben explodes about how cos our guy won the Chest he should get the Shield.  ”Fuck off” didn’t look like an answer because getting a 2nd tank in just for Saurfang on a “LM must die” week seemed as much fun as trying to find a Catholic Nun to give you a quick blowjob.  While we’re trading whispers and OChat looking for a solution and hovering between a rephrased polite version of “fuck off” and him trading the 2h sword from LM for the Chestpiece from DW, our MT jumps the gun a little and announces he gave Ben the chest.  Ugh.  Nice of him.  But ugh.

Onto Saurfang where Ben makes our life hard by constantly aoeing on the platform and dragging the beasts onto him.  I don’t shout at him over vent partly cos I never want to interact with this human turd again and partly cos I want to see if my healing buddy and I can handle things despite the unnecessary marks (I’m hoping the next wing will be a lot tougher).  Saurfang dies, we go our separate ways and that’s that right?  Just another unpleasant pug story.

Not quite.  There is some talk of having Ben join the guild despite what happened, because he has 7 80s and a guy like that can be useful while you’re building a raiding team.  He can be taught the fights, we 1 shotted anyway, and his cockishness might be a one-off.  I’m not keen but I get the point about him being potentially useful.

Just as I’m heading to bed someone in trade says ICC is too hard.  Ben links the two pieces he took from our raid and proceeds to make the following two comments. “I’m so leet.” and “ICC is easy, you just have to be with people who listen when you explain.”

Well drown me in gasoline and throw a fucking match at me.  Whooooomph.

Prologue

I’ve been gaming a while. As today marks a new decade you could say I’ve been actively gaming in each of the last 4 decades, but that would be disingenuous as I was a young’un in the 80s and have since taken huge swathes of time off gaming to pursue other things.  Today,  gaming takes up a large portion of my free time.  It’s something I unapologetically enjoy and maximizing the pleasure from this time is important to me.

This blog will be largely centred on my role as officer in a small WoW raiding guild (although I may spotlight other games I’m playing or that interest me). There will be loot posts – especially where an interesting Loot Council decision was made. There will be posts about specs/gearing – especially in relation to my disc priest main. There will be balanced reviews of ingame trends/changes and there will be frothing at the mouth rants.

In regards to that last point if you’re an easily offended cumguzzling fuckwad – the type of player who turns up to my raid 30 minutes late with no apologies and no flask, who afks randomly and then bitches when anyone else wastes his precious time you probably should leave now – a large portion of this blog will be vilifying you.

If you just don’t like naughty words then stick around and play it by ear. They will be present, but more like a spice and not the base for the entire meal.

Disclaimer: Gaming is a dynamic pastime.  The focus of this blog may alter somewhat suddenly one day or it may simply drift slowly to a new focus.

In words you’ll all understand: “Your gaming experience may change while online.”

For now the remit is online gaming with a focus on WoW and emphases on raiding, priests, officer responsibilities/drama and loot council.