Mend Pet

This week was our first real week of 3.1 raiding, and it was quite the mixed bag of emotions for me.

On Tuesday we pulled together 25 people and headed in to Ulduar.  We managed to get Flame Leviathan down last week after a few messy starts, so this week the plan was to try it with one tower up.  I got to try out the Chopper this week!  It was fun.  So far I’ve tried everything but driving the Siege Engine… and I don’t know what I like the best!  They’re all pretty fun.

We got Leviathan down really quickly… but it turns out no one actually turned hard mode on, and we didn’t get the achievement.  Oh well!  We’ll try next time.  I did manage to pick up Gloves of the Fiery Behemoth – FINALLY netting me the Epic Achievement!  I had to respec and regem to allow for the loss of hit… but it’s completely worth it.

We hammered away at Razorscale most of the remainder of the night.  We had a couple of good attempts, but the best we did was getting her to about 57% at which point she enraged.  From what I can see, we have two major problems right now:  People are dying in crap, which should NOT be happening.  The solution to that is simple – just don’t do it.  The second issue is that our DPS is not up to par.  We are carrying far too many people.

We’ve got some people who are trying out DPSing for the first time.  Personally, I think Ulduar is not a good place to learn a new role.  Spend some time in a few Heroics first, or at least with a test dummy… but Ulduar isn’t Naxx – we can’t carry 5 DPS doing less than 2k, it’s just not going to get us anywhere.  These people either need to practice, get better gear, or get replaced if we want to make any progress.

XT’s trash?  Ridiculous!  I’ve been told it’s been nerfed since, but we really weren’t expecting it to be so hard, and it kicked our butts thoroughly on Tuesday night.  I got to do some trapping, but it’s difficult to trap a mob that pounces and stuns you!

Wednesday night we went in with another strategy for trash:  we kited them back to Razorscales room and ran around in circles taking them down.  It was messy, but it got the job done.

We didn’t have a full 25 at any point on Wednesday.  That was not a good start to things.  We still haven’t solidified a strategy for Razorscale, and we haven’t gotten her down.  We made some halfhearted attempts at XT, but again, no really solid strategy.

In the end, we split into two 10-man groups.  My group ended up taking down Flame Leviathan, and the other got Orbital Bombardment and a couple of XT’s achievements.

To be honest, I think we should be doing 10-mans regularly.  And I know the gear isn’t AMAZING, but we wouldn’t be doing it for the gear.  What we need is focus and practice.  I’m sure the people who were in the other 10-man and got XT down have a better feel for the fight now, and I wish I could have been there.  If we could all get a chance to try it without the chaos of 25 people running around, I think we’d do a LOT better stepping into 25-man.

But this has been discussed and the leaders have stated that we are a 25-man guild, not a 10-man guild (although I’m sure they didn’t mind getting those achievements and boss kills).

We spent Thursday night in 10-mans again.  I had so much fun, and I learned a lot… in fact, I wrote about it all yesterday.

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!

I was going to save this for Saturday’s post… but I just couldn’t do it.

10-man Ulduar is so much fun!

Last night, I remembered what made me start raiding.  It was fun, once upon a time.

We had some trouble getting 25 people together and motivated this week.  We still seem to be nowhere near getting Razorscale down with our group.  It’s been stressful, drama-filled and depressing trying to push on, and I’ve even been tempted to say “Screw this!” and retire myself from raiding.  That’s how much I am disenchanted by the guild and our raid group right now.

Wednesday night we ran out of people and decided to switch to 2 10-man groups instead.  We all headed in to take out Flame Leviathan – our group didn’t have a proper composition, so that’s as far as we went.  The other group managed to get Razor and XT down as well, and even picked up a few achievements!

Thursday we didn’t have enough people, so we decided to continue on with our 10-mans.  It took a little scrambling to get 2 semi-properly composed groups, but we managed.  We headed in and our group banged away at Razorscale making very clear progress, getting her down after about 5 tries.

Mistakes were made, but the nice thing about 10-mans is that it’s easier to see where the problems are and improve them.  I forgot to go over after the first harpoon was ready a couple of times, but I learned, and I improved and then we achieved our goal.

We also took down XT and even had a visit with Kolgarn.

10-mans are more focused, and each person is more responsible for their actions.  This is a good way to learn how to do real raids again.  We can all find our weaknesses and improve on them and see real results from it.  This is the learning experience we need before we can even think of getting further in Heroic.

I learned and enjoyed myself exponentially more last night that I have since the day Ulduar game out.  We were taking down new bosses, learning new strategies, and were ACTUALLY PROGRESSING.

We weren’t spending 3 nights making the same mistakes and dying the same way on Razorscale like we do on 25.

The leadership has said we are a 25-man guild, so we’ll continue at 25-man raiding.  But to be honest, I think it’s silly.  I think everyone got more out of the 10-mans than they did when Razorscale just continually wiped the floor with us.

The gear in 10-man Ulduar may not be better, but for the level of skill we are at right now, the experience most certainly is.

If we end up doing 25-mans next week… I think I might cry, because now that I’ve remembered what fun and education I can get from raiding, it’ll make it just that much harder to go back to wiping repeatedly on Razorscale.

My apologies for being missing the last few days!  I completely didn’t bother with my posts for the weekend.  I’ve got a French exam this afternoon so I’ve been studying, and even though I didn’t leave my apartment all weekend, I’ve also managed to find myself ill once again.  Here’s hoping it’s just a cold!  Spent most of the afternoon sleeping yesterday, and I feel like quite the mess today.

But here’s what I’ve been up to:

Managed to squeeze in some play time this weekend, and got my paladin up to level 45.  I’m happily going along feeling extremely overpowered, just like a good ret paladin should!  Judgement of the Wise?  Awesome.  Exorcism on every mob?  Sweet.  I’m having way too much fun getting 700 white damage crits with my Darkmoon Executioner with Crusader.

Also worked on Alouette.  She’s up to halfway through 71 already!  I’ve taken way more screenshots when leveling her than when I leveled through Northrend the first time… of course, I didn’t have the capability to have my graphics set to maximum my first time through, so I’m noticing a lot more pretty things.  I’ve decided I want to get her to 80 before working on Ferguson, so I have a second 80 to play around with when I’m bored.  Because like I mentioned before, BGs at level 70 are not fun!

Finally mastered the Grand Melee daily quest for the tournament, and picked up Lance a Lot.  The amount of rep these quests are giving is amazing!  I’ll be exalted with the Darkspear Trolls in no time!  After I do my dailies today, I’ll be moving up to the rank of Champion and be able to start earning real rewards.

After two nights battling the Loading Screen boss, Unemployed finally managed to get into Ulduar-25 on Thursday night.  It was so much fun!  I got to both drive and ride in a Salvaged Demolisher, partnered up with a good friend in the guild.  We had a few false starts in there, I think some people were just too excited – we started the whole event early, and accidentally pulled the boss a couple of times – but no one really cared because it was just so much fun riding around doing something different for a change!

One thing I didn’t like was trying to shoot down the blue power boost thingies during the boss fight.  You can only target the little propeller – and by the time I could get one targeted it would always end up outside my shooting range.  I’ll probably get the hang of it though!

Once we got that guy down, we decided to try Razorscale.  We didn’t really have much of a plan, since that night was more of an exploration night than anything else, but we still had some pretty good attempts.  We tried to develop different strategies as far as the adds went, and I got to practice using Silencing Shot.  We never managed to get him to phase 2, but I think we’ll get it pretty quickly next time.

And the Unemployed Top Chef Cooking Contest has ended!  I haven’t really written about it yet.. but later this week I’m going to post the recipes and rules up for anyone who is intested in it.  I got second place!  Woohoo!

Tuesday night can be pretty much summed up by this achievement:

Patch was our first fight of the evening and we got him down without much effort – with 16 seconds to spare!  It was a good sign, and the rest of the night went equally fast.

In fact, for once we managed to get all four wings cleared in one raid night – we went over our scheduled time by about 10 minutes, but 3 hours is pretty good, I’d say!

I finally picked up Grim Toll.  After much self debate, I decided to trade in my Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood for Grim Toll, and replace the +16 hit gem in my belt buckle to a +32 AP gem.  it’s a bit of a shuffle around, not a huge DPS increase… but it gives me more room to mess around with my hit.  I’m 9 points over now, so it’s not so bad.  And now I’m just a glove slot away from Epic!

Wednesday we didn’t have a very full roster, so we decided to hit up the last 2 bosses in Naxx and finish getting…

We had 2 volunteers sit out, since we actually had 22 people present.

We got our full 22 back together and took out Malygos in 1 shot afterwards!  It was a good couple of days.

Thursday wasn’t so good.  We had only 22 again, but all we had left for the week was Sarth.  Clearly not enough people to bother any 3D attempts… we decided to just do 2 drakes.  It was decided that the tanks needed to be switched up – our add tank and Sarth tank switched places.  I don’t know what the problem was, but we wiped several times.

Personally, I was a bit confused about why we were switching the tanks around in the first place.  We’ve spent the last few months with the same people doing the same roles and getting good at it.  I was told it was because they need to learn to do it.  Alright, I understand if we lose someone, they’ll need to learn to do it.  But that isn’t the case yet!  Why wouldn’t we play to our strengths while we still can?  Then in the event of a major change… we can force ourselves into an evening of wipes.  It just felt very… masochistic.  We didn’t even have a full 25 people to start with.  It just didn’t make sense to me.

We eventually switched back to our normal set up, brought in an extra DPS and switched one DPS for an additional healer.

Afterward we went and had our hand at TK: The Eye again, see if we could pick up another mount.  No luck!  But we did use more of a strategy this time than we did last, which made it less hectic and more interesting!

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!

Disclaimer: This post was accurate as of patch 3.0.9.

WoW Web Stats has a handy feature that lets you filter through the events in the combat log.  I’ve used it for many things, such as checking out another player and making sure they’re using their cooldowns, but where it’s proved quite useful is for checking deaths/hits in Sarth +3 drakes.  I’ve got a couple useful ones I thought I’d share.

To use these filters, open up your WWS and go to “Browse Log File”.  Enter the following codes into the text box to filter through the results.  You can then still select each individual encounter/attempt from the drop down list.

1. First is simple:  It just lists all player deaths.  The important thing to look for are deaths before the tank.  Deaths after a tank drops are usually “wipe it up” deaths, and those obviously have to happen.  Players dying before the tanks means something is going wrong, usually.
   event=unit_died and target.flag=player
2. Next is fissures.  This lists all damage taken from each fissure by players.spell="void blast" and target.flag=player
3. Flame Walls.  It’s true that some people can survive them, rogues can cloak out of it, healers can heal through it… but one of the most important parts of this fight is minimizing all damage to players who don’t have to be taking damage (i.e. everyone other than the tanks!)  This displays all hits to players from Flame Wall damage.spell="flame tsunami" and event=spell_damage and target.flag=player
4. This one will check who has been hit by Lava Blazes and Whelps.  If there are a lot of names here that aren’t your tank, or it appears the same add is hitting one non-tank person for a long period of time, you may need to work on your add tanking.(source="lava blaze" or source="sartharion twilight whelp") and event=swing_damage and target.flag=player

These are all the really useful troubleshooting ones I have been able to think of.  With the help of Tigerfeet, we were able to turn this into a useful table listing how many times each player died to what and how many times they died before the tank.

If you’ve got any useful filters or you need help coming up with one, let me know!