Zul’Aman – my new favorite playground

Bad news and good news…

The bad news is that our third straight 25-man raid fell short due to low attendance. The beginning of the school year and the end of the summer are killing our raids. We keep hoping it is temporary. The people who were not online were all regular attendees who gave us no indication that they were cutting down their play time or leaving. Maybe it was just because of the holiday weekend 😦

The good news is that we put together a good 10-man ZA team from the raiders who were online. Keep in mind that this was only our third time ever in ZA.

We really wanted to try a timed run to see how hard they were. We new the Nalorakk fight best, so did that first. We got to him and one-shotted him with 2 minutes left on the timer. Woot! Feeling good about ourselves, we decided to brave the gauntlet and try the Eagle boss, Akil’zon. We had several deaths in the gauntlet but no wipes, and we made good progress through it. We got to Akil’zon and one-shotted him too with about 30 seconds remaining on the timer.

Two timed chests on our third time in ZA… I can’t express how excited we were. The Pauldrons of Stone Resolve dropped as an off-spec item for our pally, and the Staff of Dark Mending went to our holy priest. (if Rage had dropped, I might have considered trying a fist weapons build since I have the Big Bad Wolf’s Paw sitting in my bank… maybe next time!) The loot was almost irrelevant, though, compared to our sense of accomplishment.

We took a break at this point to decide where to go. We elected to try the lynx boss, Halazzi. We had seen him once before, but didn’t get close to killing him on that try. This time, we cleared to him and went in without getting fully buffed since we expected a few learning attempts. Not so! One-shotted! Easily, in fact.

He dropped The Savage’s Choker. That’s a dps neck piece, and I rolled on it, but a druid beat me. He offered to pass the item to me but I didn’t take him up on it, because I wasn’t 100% sure that this was an upgrade over the Shattered Sun Pendant of Might. Haste and AP are hard to compare. How much haste do you have to stack before it becomes worth the loss of AP? I’ll have to think on that so that I know for the next time it drops.

Before the end of the evening, I switched out to my paladin so that we could kill Jan’alai, the dragonhawk boss. We are now 4/6 in ZA. More importantly, our guild is actually getting gear upgrades from that instance, rather than just badge farming from Kara. I’m hoping we make ZA a regular part of our raiding, and get some shots at Malacrass soon.

Jan’alai, meet my… hammer?

Our Magtheridon raid fell through this weekend due to poor attendance. As we disbanded and went on our separate ways, we grabbed together a good group to do ZA.

I had only been in ZA once, and I am always trying to get my guild to run there. People seem to prefer Kara and its 22 badges over the limited reward opportunities in ZA, though. This was a nice opportunity.

We tried to do the timed race to the bear boss. We reached him with 5 minutes on the timer, but a missed taunt by a tank sent us to a wipe and we missed the chance. Still, we got him down easily enough once the taunts were done right. That’s a very easy fight for a rogue, as the boss is standing still while the tanks taunt him to turn one way or another. All I have to do is stand behind him, go dps crazy, and not pull aggro.

Onward to the next boss, and through the “gauntlet”. Someone in the raid comments that the gauntlet is a lot easier with a tankadin to pick up all of the birds and keep them off the casters.

Crap. I have the only level 70 tankadin in the guild. He is not geared for ZA, though. He has exactly two pieces of Kara loot, the engineering goggles, the SSO shield, and the rest are quest blues and crafted stuff. Also consider that 99.9% of my playing time is on my rogue, so I am not experienced as a tank.

Despite my better judgment (paladin pun there) they convince me to switch from the rogue to the tankadin. I suspect they just wanted someone new to top the damage meters. 🙂

So we run through the gauntlet. I survived and did my job. I was going to switch back to my rogue for the boss fight, but they convinced me to stay on the pally to try and get the Amani Punisher. They even let me try tanking it once, but my gear was just not up to it. We killed him on the next try, but the weapon did not drop (although I got a nice mail piece for the healing set I may never use).

I went to switch back to my rogue, and then someone says that a prot pally is vital for the third boss, Jan’alai. So I don’t go back to the rogue.  I am on my paladin being generally useless through all the pulls leading up to the boss. (not that prot pallies are useless – we had a lot of CC so we didn’t need 2 tanks, and my dps is less than that of a SV hunter’s pet, so I felt useless in that situation)  FInally we get to the dragonhawk boss.

We had never tried Jan’alai before. We tried about 6 -8 times that evening, getting him down to 30% or so each time. At that point in the chaos of the boss enraging, the leftover dragonhawks flying around, and the fire bombs, someone important would always die. We got him as low as 4% once.  I got the hang of avoiding fire bombs while tanking a pack of birds and trying to keep that debuff from stacking too high.  I’d hate to have been the healer assigned to me.

Undaunted, we went back in on Sunday. We had to replace two people, so we had some learning attempts for the fresh faces. After a few tries, we were able to clear all of the dragonhawks before he enraged, and we did manage to kill him.

This was a very fun fight. The mechanics are interesting and its different than the usual boss fights. It is vastly easier with a prot paladin in the group. Since I have the only one in my guild, I doubt I’ll have a chance to bring my rogue in on that fight anytime soon.

I hate that big ugly slug

There is something about Magtheridon that brings out the inner noob in my entire guild.  We have no trouble with Gruul’s Lair anymore, but still bang our head on Magtheridon.

This week it was the hunter’s turn to noob out.  We brought a couple of brand-new 70’s to the raid (not by choice, but due to low raid attendance) including two new hunters.  Because we had a pally tank with us we asked the hunters to misdirect a couple of the channelers to the paladin on the opening pull.

We had five attempts on Mag, and four of them were over almost before they started.  Out of those four bad wipes, three of them were due to hunters missing their MD, or MD to the wrong person.  Its was discouraging.  Our raid leader was especially upset because he is an awesome hunter who was forced to play on a warrior alt so we would have enough tanks.

On our one good attempt we had Mag to 17%.  We lost a couple of healers at 30% when he brought the ceiling down, and the remaining healers just couldn’t keep the main tank up indefinitely.

On that fight, I am embarrassed to admit to my fellow rogues that I was out-dpsed by a fire mage.  He’s new to our guild and he has some good gear, but that’s no excuse.  Maybe I was getting complacent.  Now I have a challenge.   🙂

One-Night Clear of Kara

Our guild did its first ever one-night Kara clear. This is somewhat of a milestone for us in raiding. More importantly, I think it will help us speed up runs in the future.

We set this up as a guild event. Unlike our usual Kara runs which are filled on a first-come-first-served basis, we hand-picked our team in advance and arranged a start time. That was a little touchy, since we didn’t want to insult the ones who were not invited. In our guild most people know who the “top” players are but there are a couple who really think that they belong in that group even though they do not.

Realistically, we were overgeared for the run. Even with that, most of the drops were taken for off-spec sets and minor upgrades or side-grades.

The run took 4 hours and 43 minutes. That’s nothing great, but we can easily knock some time off that when we get better at Nightbane, who took us three tries. (On a side note – we always need to bring in a pally for that fight. Without a plate-wearing paladin we can’t seem to keep the skeletons off the healers)

I think that this was important for us to do as a guild for a number of reasons…

1. We pushed our limits on chain pulling. One of the biggest time drains in a run is when healers and casters call out “Wait! I need mana!” between pulls, even though they still have over 50% of their mana pool. Before we even started the run we told the casters that during trash clears we would be pulling as long as everyone was over 50%. This did not cause any problems.
2. We showed that you don’t need to be overcautious – particularly with healing. Usually we go into Kara with three healers. In order to move faster this time we brought only two and added an extra dps. We had done this before, but not at the same time as chain pulling, and never on tough bosses like Nightbane and Prince. Despite some initial misgivings by a couple of raiders, healing was never an issue.
3. The speed of the run all depends on the tank. Usually the main tank role is just given to the player with the best gear. It is more important that the tank be able to pull decisively and get a lot of front-loaded threat. That gets the dps going quickly and everything flows from there.
4. Druids… I love feral druids. Kara needs two tanks sometimes, and only one tank at other times. A feral druid can be a good tank when needed, and then switch to good dps when able. Paladins and warriors can’t do both roles as effectively without a respec. PLUS the feral druid gives a nice crit % buff. A feral druid makes the run go much faster.

The chain pulling was especially nice for me as a rogue. When fights go on one after another it allows me to keep my SnD going from one mob to the next. That means there is less time used up in building my initial combo points. With SnD already up from the previous kill my dps is high right from the start on the next mob. During the trash pulls before Attumen and later leading up to Maiden I maintained nearly 900 dps. My overall dps for the run was my personal highest ever, I think, and that is without pally buffs or any expensive consumables.

So now we feel more comfortable claiming that we have Kara “on farm.” In the future, this experience will certainly help us do all runs more efficiently.

Hi Magtheridon. Nice to meet you.

No posts lately because I haven’t done much. Ran Kara, blah blah. No new gear. Not gonna talk about WotLK stuff since its all going to change.

Our 25-man raid this week went to Magtheridon’s Lair. This was the first time in there for all but three of the raiders, so it was a learning experience.

I watched videos of the way this encounter used to be. I have never seen a fight that has been so severely nerfed as this one. Usually when raiders brag about how 1337 they are because they killed a boss before he was nerfed, I just ignore it as e-peening. In this case, though, it might be legit. Based on what I saw, the fight used to be total chaos, but now its fairly straightforward.

In our first attempts we had a couple of wipes getting the hang of coordinating our five tanks and controlling the elementals. Once we got that fixed, we were able to get all five channelers down before the first blast wave and get the cubes clicked appropriately. Our problem was keeping the main tank up through Magtheridon’s attacks.

We started with three healers on him – two priests and a druid, I think. The tank died. We added a fourth healer for our next tried and he still died. I don’t think we got Mag below 75%. The warrior tank was very well geared – T4/T5 and badge gear with 20k health. I can only surmise that the problem was with the healers.

I have never played a healer, so I have no real insight into the cause of this. I don’t think that the WWS report is particularly helpful here either. Does Magtheridon hit harder than Gruul? We have no trouble healing through the Gruul fight, but maybe this is a new level of damage that our healers are not accustomed to.

I think next week we’re going to try SSC next just to finish off our tour of early 25-man raids. We can clear some trash, get some drops, maybe get a shot at Lurker Below. I do look forward to getting back into Mag’s Lair. He doesn’t seem that hard, once the healers get it figured out.

A Tale of Two Raids

Flashback to a short time after the Burning Crusade was released.  My guild had a lot of people at levels 62-65.  On a whim, we decided to go into Zul’Gurub.  Most of us had never been in there at all.  We were a little high level for the place, but still completely inexperienced at raiding.  Someone invited an acquaintance who knew all of the fights, and he went with us to lead us through.

We killed Venoxis, and were feeling good about it.  Then he led us to Bloodlord Mandokir.  Well, that fight was a problem.  We wiped on it several times.  After that, the guest raid leader announced that we were terrible and we should just stay in old world content until we learned to play.  And with that he quit and hearthed.

That left a bitter taste in my mouth.  We had made no secret of the fact that we were inexperienced, so I don’t know what his expectations were going into the place.  I’m generally an even-tempered gamer, but I laid into the guy in whispers until he put me on /ignore.

Flash forward to July, 2008.  Our guild alliance decides that, just for a change of pace, we would try going into Tempest Keep and give Void Reaver a shot.  Keep in mind that only about half of our raid even has any T4 gear, so we knew we were in for an uphill battle.

When raid time came we were a few people short.  One of the raiders from our partner guild contacted a friend of his from a very progressed guild.  His friend, a prot pally, joined the raid and took over leadership.  This guy was totally geared out – T5/T6 level gear with 19k health.

My first impulse was that this would be a recurrence of the ZG debacle from a year ago.  Knowing how inexperienced and undergeared we were, I anticipated this guy would quickly get fed up with us and leave.

But that didn’t happen.  He was patient.  He gave clear instructions.  He explained every fight without any hint of impatience.  When we wiped on the first pull he calmly went over what went wrong and got us quickly back in place to try again.

It took us two hours to clear to Void Reaver, but we did get to him.  We had four tries on him before the room started to respawn, and the best we did was getting him to 54%.  But we had a GREAT time doing it.  We got to see content that we had never seen before.  Someone got a Nether Vortex.  We also had two epic drops from trash – Bands of the Celestial Archer and Fire-Cord of the Magus.

I usually avoid using character names in this blog, but I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Talingon on the Sen’jin realm.  He was a great guide and teacher, and I hope to get the opportunity to run with him again.

P.S. – we also had two out-of-guild rogues invited to fill out the raid, and both outgeared me.  I destroyed them in dps.  Go me!  e-peen!

To run, or not to run?

It was a holiday weekend. That means, of course, that raids everywhere came up short as people went to visit family, had barbecues, etc…

So did you run or not run?

Our regularly scheduled Friday night Gruul came up short of the 25 we need. We decided to go ahead anyway with a… less than ideal group. We pulled in a few who had never done the raid, and even a couple who still hadn’t done Kara more than once or twice. The results? Predictable.

We did manage to get HKM down after six or seven tries, but we didn’t have the DPS for Gruul. A lot of wipes, high repair bills… all for two Badges and three pieces of loot. Worth it?

I still had fun. I am new enough to 25-man raiding that this is still a novelty to me. But some others were very frustrated.

Some in the raid think we should never even have tried that night. I think that getting everyone more practice and experience in the fight was a good thing, even if it didn’t go well. I am not easily frustrated, and I have fun trying to do my personal best even if the raid is not successful.

Also, I am sure that the three players who got T4 pieces from HKM felt that it was worth it. That brings up a much bigger issue – altruism.

altriusm (n) – the principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others

We had 25 people, all of whom ended up with 20g+ repair bills and who used a significant amount of consumables in our attempts. The benefits were that three people got loot, everyone got two badges, and several new people got to learn a bit about the fights. From a guild perspective, that’s not a bad thing – more gear and more experience means that we have more flexibility in personnel in later raids. But many people would claim that it was a waste of time. Is that selfish? Should it be OK for a run to be a little frustrating if it improves the guild as a whole?  What is the cutoff for that?  Would three wipes have been OK, but seven was not?

I’m just thinking out loud here.  There is no answer for this.  Everyone has different personal feeling on this.  In my raid group, I am at one extreme – I feel that any raid is a good raid even if there are wipes and it is not a brilliant success.  One person in our raid group is one the complete opposite extreme – he doesn’t want to raid unless every single person is not only well-geared but even overgeared and that we are assured of success.  There is a happy medium, and every guild needs to find that.

Gruul’s a Punk

We did, in fact, one-shot Gruul this week.

That’s not anything to brag about I guess, since we are very late getting to the 25-man raiding party. It was only our second week of raiding, though, so I’m still proud of our group.  I found Gruul to be much easier than the Maulgar fight.

We took five tries to get Maulgar. That initial pull is a tricky dance. We even had four hunters for misdirects, but something always went awry. What really stinks is that the loot was bugged. Our mage died before Krosh went down. Without a mage tank, he immediately assumed that we would wipe, so he released to do his corpse run. Surprise, surprise, our ranged dps finished off Krosh, and we were able to complete the encounter. Unfortuntely, the mage was also our Master Looter. Since he was outside of the instance when the death occurred, he couldn’t assign loot. We have a petition in to the GM, and we hope to get this resolved. I won my first piece of T4 gear from that fight, so I hope the GM is merciful and lets me have it.

Gruul went down on the first attempt. That is a very straightforward dps race, so our wipes last week were all the experience we needed to figure out spacing and avoid Shatters.

For now we plan to continue doing Gruul each week to get gear. If we can get that run to the point where we have no wipes, then I think we will try Magtheridon.

On a side note, I’m learning this DKP thing. I did spend my DKP on the Netherblade Shoulderpads, which is not really an upgrade from my Bladed Shoulderpads of the Merciless. In fact, they are only going to sit in my bank for now. Once I get another T4 piece, though, then the two-piece bonus is very valuable. However, it means that there are now three rogues and three hunters with more DKP than me, so I’m not going to be getting the Dragonspine Trophy anytime soon.