No raid for me last night, I had RL plans. Tzuké took the initiative to set up a meet and great for the M5. M5 stands for the Magnificent 5. That’s how we called ourselves when we finally got a 5 man party in TBC. “We” was Distefano, Beric (Tzuké), Nelek, Cheet and Jacopo. I think you allready know a part of the history and since only the people who were part of it read this blog, I won’t explain every gamehour in detail.

The M5 vs Ramparts heroic and the M5 vs The Botanica heroic were publications both Tzuké and me wrote in order to send it by email to the other party members. The goal was to inform ourselves better to avoid a whole night of wiping. And oh my, did we wipe a lot. I think the first boss in the Botanica (The one that does a tranquility ability and you need to run out of sight and take down the adds) has killed us more than all the Naxxramas bosses together. It took us more than a week to figure out how we needed to kill the b*tch. By accident we figured out that you could just walk past the first boss without needing to kill her, doh!

M5 started to change during the years that past. We met Gufflet while I decided to make a paladin to tank stuff in TBC heroics. Gufflet was a warlock, also know later on as Whiteacre, Zydraliam, Munado, Visch, Diffendo, Chaotix, Supergnome and probably some other names aswell.

Cheet took a break from the game and in came Masiv for tanking and Gufflet was our mean killing dps machine. Ah, those were the days. Spend numerous hours on one boss and during the next day, try to find every tiny bit of information about the boss. We laughed about the pdf files and the powerpoint presentations with boss strategies. I also made an Excel sheet were every toon had an overview of all the upgrades that were “easily” collected in the northrend dungeons. The final boss in Oculus was another bookmark in the history of M5. From there on, it went all uphill and we raided Naxx, Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader. We have became the guys that raid Black Temple and all others were still trying to level in Terrokar forrest.

So, M5 is still M5 but others have joined us: Beregond and Frédérique and Cheet returned with Mollotov after we asked his girlfriend if he could come out and play.

Yesterday Tzuké, Nelek, Beregond, myself and Jacopo had all meet up for a night of bowling. Jacopo had travelled through Strangelthorn Vale to get to us. He got stuck in a traffic jam and asked for a summon. So we threw some balls, Masiv claimed the dps meters and we talked about WoW, what else? It was our once in the year night out and I still thank my female companion to free me from the chain last night. This is the combatlog from last night:

You’ll probably notice that we started off strong, but as the night advanced, our overall dps decreased. Tzuké got drunk by drinking to much chocolate milk (the cold version, hot chocolate is for wooz) and we got probably blinded by Nelek’s bald head that reflected the discolights. Also pay attention at the names. The guy behind the desk didn’t really get it and he did his best not to laugh. (He better not laugh, I was in tanking specc!)

So, after bowling we found ourself an obscure pub and talked about our history in warcraft games. I promised not to post any pictures because we don’t want to risk that Estme will grab a plain to Belgium when she sees Tzuké…

Ah well, forget that:

As you all know, Masiv is a dwarf so I was trying to jump up and down to get above the table but the picture got taken to late…

This calls out for a follow up but this time we will try to pick a date when (as Tzuké said):

• Mollotov isn’t buying a house
• Frédérique isn’t going after Jacopo’s sister
• Munado isn’t sick
• Nelek doesn’t have to go play soccer
• And Masiv has got his right arm in plaster so Tzuké can beat me…

Hi folks,

Just a quickie to apologise for the lack of posts yesterday and today. I’ve been horrendously busy with that thing we call RL, and within WoW (4 hour PuGs to Black Temple, just don’t ask) so rather than post this weekend I’ve used my post-writing time to write up some of next week’s content instead, including our second weekly puzzle. How exciting!

See you tomorrow,

Vel.

Or greetings, traveler! Dorky as that may perhaps be.

Welcome to my blog. Perhaps a little explanation is in order. I’m a fairly regular girl from the UK, but one thing that makes me stand out amongst my friends is my love of gaming. My friends don’t game, and they don’t understand why I do.  I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for two and a half years now, from the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. I made a character on my server the first day I picked up the game, a Sin’dorei priest named Farfalla, and since then I’ve barely put her down, going from utter newbie who couldn’t even make her character turn around and run, to a hardcore raider as a holy priest in the Sunwell pre-3.0, flirted with RP on another server, and then to a casual raider, first as shadow and then holy again, in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

I haven’t only become a (fairly) skilled priest during my time in this game. I’ve made some really good friends, friendships that endure outside of Azeroth, and had some really good times. I’ve laughed with friends in Vent, screamed until my throat was hoarse the first time we downed Illidan as a guild, endured the agonising 1% wipes on Kalecgos and Brutallus, banged my head against the wall until I survived in PvP, felt the strange, disorienting feeling of having guilds full of friends fall apart. I’ve farmed countless minipets and mounts, way before the Achievement system was implemented and even more obsessively after. I even met my boyfriend in Azeroth, and we’ve now been living together for a year. I’ve changed as a person, for the better,  in all kinds of ways, some of which would have happened anyway as I went from an adolescent to an adult, and some of which happened as a result of my experiences in WoW.

I’ve done some really stupid stuff too. I’ve got too deep into the game and messed up my university course because of it. I’ve been that emo dramaqueen girl that you all know on your server, the one who logs onto the game for attention. I’ve cared about what happens in-game to the extent that what happened outside of it became far less important, and hurt my family and friends in the process. All of these stupid things I’ve done have also helped me grow.

So what is the reason for this blog? Partly I’d like my friends and family to see what it is I enjoy about gaming. But another reason is that today, Blizzard announced their third expansion to the game. Titled World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, it’s going to change the game world as we know it, ripping apart the continents of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and changing the face of Azeroth permanently. And while I’m giddily excited about this prospect, it also occured to me that the places where some of my best in-game memories were formed are going to disappear forever. I want to record those places and memories, before they disappear.

So, here we are. 80 levels to develop my character to full strength, so 80 posts to chronicle Farfalla’s journey in-game.

For the Horde! Anar’alah!

~Farfalla

I’ve been lazily levelling my treecow (resto druid) from 70 to 80 and I hopped into a Mount Hyjal pick up group earlier this week. Then one thing led to another and look what I found?

This is interesting because it marks one of the first experiments that Blizzard made with time-limited achievements.

The Hand of A’dal is the title that you used to be able to get for completing the long quest chain required to enter The Black Temple in The Burning Crusade. It required solo quests, 5 man group quests, and some tough raid bosses before you finally got to the prize. (Note: It is true that A’dal does not actually have hands, that’s why he needs your character to do the five-finger related work for him, and that sounds kind of ruder than I had intended )

The title was obsoleted before the end of TBC, so that anyone completing the quest chain after that would not receive it. I think this happened before they also removed the old reward for the Zul’Aman speed run. In any case, it was the first time (IIRC) that players were prevented from going back to old content and getting the same rewards that people did when it was cutting edge.

So here’s the question. I had no vials on my alt before the title was obsoleted. I hadn’t killed Kael’thas or Vashj by the end of  TBC. So how did I get that title on 13th June ‘09? It amuses me to keep the title visible because no one knows how hardcore I’m not.

J’ai reçu mes 3 Illidan Stormrage. On a un Master Hero à la maison, oulala!

Wir schrieben das Jahr 2007. Der Jahreswechsel war vollzogen und in der Nacht vom 15. auf den 16. Januar erschien “The Burning Crusade”, das erste Addon für World of Warcraft.  Ich war mit meiner Klasse als Jäger unzufrieden und entschied mich schon Ende 2006 dazu mit TBC auf die Krieger-Klasse zu rerollen. Es war aber zum großteil einfach der Hang zu etwas mehr Verantwortung, welcher mich veranlasste diesen Schritt zu unternehmen. Und ich sollte noch ziemlich viel Verantwortung tragen…

Mit dem Start des Addons hatte sich unsere Mitgliederzahl bei “Addicted” stark reduziert, nicht nur weil einige zu den “Jade Falcons” gingen, sondern auch weil viele WoW den Rücken kehrten. Das Spiel bot für sie nichts neues mehr und so verließen uns viele liebgewonnene Freunde. Das sollte uns aber nicht daran hindern, da weiterzumachen, wo wir mit Naxxramas aufhörten. Jedoch verlief das bezwingen der Bosse sehr schleppend am Anfang. Jeder der die erste Version von Gruul noch in Erinnerung hat, wird wissen wovon ich spreche. Im Gegensatz zu dem letzten Addon “Wrath of the Lich King” hatten wir hier Bosse vor uns, die so dermaßen hart waren, das wir gar nicht wussten, wie uns geschah. Ende Februar 2007 gelang es uns dann aber auch diesen Boss aus den Weg zu räumen um in der Serpentshrine Cavern, Lady Vash’s Unterschlupf, vor neue Probleme gestellt zu werden.

Es war diese Zeit in der die übrigen Offiziere von “Addicted” auf mich zu kamen und fragten, ob ich nicht Lust darauf hätte ebenfalls einen der Offiziersposten zu belegen, denn unser damaliger Gildenleiter, Alkaya, hatte leider durch sein Studium bedingt nicht soviel Zeit. Ich nahm die Aufgabe erfreut an und es dauerte nicht einmal zwei Tage bis ich dann offiziell als Raidleiter bekannt gegeben wurde. Eine wahnsinnig wichtige Erfahrung für mich, denn ich leitete zum ersten Mal eine so große Gruppe. Aber es sollte nicht das letzte mal bleiben, dass ich vermehrt Verantwortung übernahm.

Ich erinnere mich hier zu gerne an den Respawntimer der Trashmobs, der mit 45 Minuten doch _sehr_ eng bemessen war. Ebenso boten auch die Bosse eine bisher unbekannte Herausforderung. Von März bis Mai sollte dies nun unsere Baustelle sein, an der wir uns die Zähne ausbeißen sollten. Private Schwimmstunden und das Kuscheln mit hungrigen Fischen für kleine Gnom Magier inbegriffen. Durch die ganzen Abgänge verlor sich auch unser Niveau irgendwo im deutschen Mittelfeld und alte Bekannte wie “For the Horde” und “Irae AoD” sollten wieder die erste Geige spielen, nachdem beispielsweise FtH in Naxxramas beim Endspurt die Puste ausging und sie nie über die Four Horsemen wegkamen. Sie gaben aber nicht auf und konzentrierten sich auf TBC, dass sie auch erfolgreich bestritten.

Bis zum Patch 2.1. Ende Mai 2007 waren wir soweit mit “Serpentshrine Cavern” und “The Eye” durch, nur die Endbosse standen uns noch im Weg und verhinderten den Einzug in den “Black Temple” und “Mount Hyjal”. “Lady Vashj” und “Kael’thas Sunstrider” waren unsere Gegner, jedoch sollte Vashj nach zwei Abenden nach 2.1. schnell uns ihre Phiole überlassen, die nötig war für eine Quest um “Mount Hyjal” betreten zu können. Allerdings sollte uns “Prince Kael’thas” viel länger aufhalten als wir dachten. Fast einen Monat dauerte es bis wir ihn bezwingen konnten, aber rückblickend betrachtet war es ein sehr guter Kampf, der in seiner ursprünglichen Fassung nach Patch 2.1. eine große Herausforderung für jede Gilde war. Das taktische Aufgebot, dass man für “Lady Vashj” und “Kael’thas” aufbringen musste, war schon erstaunlich. Damals zumindest.

Zeitgleich sollte die bekannte Gilde “Nihilum” für Schlagzeilen, durch ihre Rekordzeit in der sie den “Black Temple” leer räumten, sorgen. Die meisten Gilden konnten nur zuschauen, weil sie selbst nicht so viel raideten in der Zeit. Innerhalb einer Woche war “Nihilum” mit jeglichem Content den 2.1. bot fertig und durften daraufhin fast ein ganzes Jahr auf Nachschub warten. Eine lange Zeit, in der nicht wenige Gilden zerbrachen.

Aber zurück zu “Addicted”. Wir hatten mittlerweile eine kleine Rivalität zu den “Jade Falcons” und trieben uns immer weiter an. Auch wenn wir bei den meisten Bossen die Nase vorne hatten, so muss man neidlos anerkennen, dass die “Falcons” den wichtigsten Gegner vor uns bezwangen: “Illidan Stormrage”. Das wir uns zuvor “Archimonde”s Ableben auf unser Kerbholz schnitzen konnten war dagegen von geringer Bedeutung, denn “Illidan” war einfach _der_ Gegner schlechthin ab Patch 2.1.. Zwischenzeitlich gab es Mitte Juli nochmal ein ziemlich heftiges Tief im Raidgeschehen und es sollte fast gar nichts funktionieren. Anfang August ging es dann wieder bergauf und gipfelte dann Anfang September darin, dass “Illidan” vor uns am Boden lag.

Diese Lethargie ging aber nicht spurlos an mir vorbei und im August begangen die Planungen für ein neues Projekt, dem ich mich in WoW widmen wollte. Die Vorbereitungen liefen gut, aber im Prinzip war es eine Totgeburt. “Mental Madness” sollte der Spaß heißen, aber die Gilde hatte aufgrund der von ausgehenden, beschissenen, Aufnahmepolitik und der noch schlechteren Bewerbungen keine richtige Chance. Zumindest sah es Anfangs so aus. Auf dieses Thema werde ich im nächsten Artikel noch genauer eingehen.

Abschließend möchte ich sagen, dass ich die Zeit bei “Addicted” großartig fand. Wir hatten soviel Spaß und im Endeffekt habe ich das alles aufgrund von Erfolgsgeilheit weggeworfen. Heute betrachte ich den Entschluss mit einem weinenden und einem lachenden Auge, denn es tut mir bis heute Leid, dass ich die Gilde verlassen habe. Andererseits begab ich mich damit auf einen Pfad, der mich vieles lehrte und durch den ich ebenfalls viele neue, freundliche Leute kennengelernt habe.

Falls jemand von “Addicted” diesen Artikel jemals lesen sollte: Haltet die Ohren steif, lasst euch nicht beirren. Ihr seid einfach eine tolle Gilde und gebt niemals auf, ganz gleich wie schwer die Zeiten sind.

This long ass annoying attunement chain is no longer required to enter the relevant dungeon.

Sure, if I were an old player who spent the immense amount of time and energy required to unlock that dungeon, I’d be pissed now that players can just pop right into it.

But I’m not, so I’m happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I doubt I’ll ever get into this place anyway – but I’m still glad I could (without spending months) if I wanted to!

[edit: Yes I know it's a joke ]

Hello readers! Today I wanted to look back at all I have done and all I have seen within WoW and I realize that……IT’S A LOT!! Three years and some months worth of playing WoW I have played every class, every race, and been to every land.  But there are a few things that I never got to do…I will not include Northrend things because they are in the works.

Molten Core – Yeah I know…wtf?!?

Upper Black Rock Spire – I am not Leeeeroy Jenkins….yet….

Black Temple – sigh….Illidan lives in my book

The Eye – I killed Keal’ Thas in Magister’s Terrace but he is still in The Eye lol….wierd.

Magtheridons Lair – Big ol’ meany is all caged and throwing a hissy. I called him and told him I don’t care about him anymore….

Gruul’s Lair – The king lives….for now…

Original Naxxramas – but I have gone into current Naxx so I’m good…

Mount Hyjal – Archemonde is plundering the past and I will eventually get him…

I am sure there are more, but my mind is a slate of blankness…

Look back into your own past and see what you have done and what you have missed. My plans are to go back and go into those places so I do not miss out on them. They are a big shaded area of my map of killage. Leave comments or questions and I will get back to ya. I now have a shiny new email account for Blogger which you can reach me at Blogger80elite@yahoo.com  Just so we are clear the number is 80 as in 79, 80, 81….cause it kind of looks like a 8/o like Oprah o….JUST letting yas know….

Just a quick post until i can get stuck into something proper later today.

One of the things that irritates me more than anything, anything else in the world as a tank and as a player is people who have just hit 80 spamming for heroics or worse yet, raids. As a tank you NEED to put in hours of work in normal instances and doing questlines. If you don’t hit that defense cap, and if you’re geared in dps gear or quest greens, you’ll probably die in your average group. As a healer you NEED to put in hours of work in normal instances, because if you can’t pump out the healing or you go oom the tank will die. And as a dps, you NEED to put in at least a little bit of work, because if you try to kill something which takes you forever, there’s more chance of either the tank or healer having problems.

As a tank who put those hours of effort in, when I saw a newly 80 deathknight for example yesterday, begging people in the guild to take her on runs and complaining why she couldn’t find a group, that really boiled my blood. If nothing else it’s disrespectful to the other people in the group – why is their time any less valuable than yours that they can spend their day making up for your lack of effort? There are no shortage of upgrades you can get through crafted gear, normal instances or questlines, so put the effort in.

Worse than people expecting to be carried through heroics are people wanting to be carried through raids. I remember all too well the ‘alt runs’ of kara we used to run – t6 tanks were there, the odd t6 healer was there, and the rest of the players had their last upgrade in Zangarmarsh at level 63. Those runs ended up in frustration for everyone involved, and generally weren’t pleasant. By contrast, the alt runs we did when people put some effort in, knew their class and had semi-decent gear were fast and painless. It may not be so much of an issue with the faceroll that is Naxxramas at the moment, but the key thing to take away from this is that you being there without putting effort in, makes everything harder and devalues the time of other people.

If I may digress, this leads to my thinking that keys for raids and heroics weren’t an entirely bad thing. In the Burning Crusade, if you saw a player looking for a group for a particular instance, you KNEW they put the work in. If they wanted to go to kara they had to do a multi-part key quest through half the game’s dungeons, if they wanted to do heroic they needed to spend at least a little time in the normal version to get revered rep. Blizzard removing keys and attunements has encouraged people to be lazy, and has promoted the worst version of the casual player – the one that doesn’t give a fuck and expects to have other people make up for their lack of effort. I’m not saying we need attunements like the ones for BT or Hyjal where you had to kill the final bosses in SSC and TK, but something to at least encourage people to get out and play. The other issue is that leaving content wide open to everyone (bar Malygos) has taken somewhat away from the natural progression of the game and left players without finite goals to work towards, but that’s an issue for another post.

So what do you guys think? Am I being too cantankerous about this, and does anyone not mind carrying a guildie through content to help them out? Or does this issue boil your blood like it does mine?

Today I had a player ask me how we measure the performance of our raiders in our guild. Do we use something like a wowheroes score to evaluate their gear, or expect that they have a certain number of epic pieces, or take anyone because we know they’re a good player?

The answer to this question is none of the above.

Performance measurement should not be something based on gear, or dedication to the guild – it is exactly what it means, measuring the performance of a player. Gear is only relevant to a point – it has an impact on the upper limit of the dps/healing you can put out, but I’d say most players are only putting out… 75% of what their gear allows them to generally. I’ve been on kara runs with alts in blues and greens and did EXTREMELY fast clears, because those players knew their classes and had the motivation to succeed. Equally I’ve been on kara runs with full epicced mains in BT gear where no one was motivated or could be bothered trying, and spent the night wiping. Dedication to a guild likewise, while still something to look for has nothing to do with performance. You can have a player who has had 100% raid attendance over 2 years, but can’t put out 2000dps in full Naxx-25 epics.

The only thing that matters as far as performance goes to a raiding guild is how you perform in a raiding environment on the night. You need to be putting out dps, putting out threat, keeping people alive. You need to move out of fires, not get hit by lava waves, not run in front of your tank. These things are ultimately fundamental to whether you progress and kill a boss, or whether you leave empty handed and dejected at the end of the night.

Measuring Performance

Measuring performance is important to a guild, both because it is an effective tool for identifying problems in your raid and because it gives your players something to work for. It is an ongoing process – you should never be at the point where ‘that’s good enough’. Push your players, support them and give them a goal, and 9 times out of 10 you’ll find they rise admirably to meet the challenge. Changing performance goals with your gear level and competency over the course of time is essential to keeping relevant. As an example, our guild initially went into Naxxramas with a 2k dps expection. After clearing and farming gear for several weeks, we revised the performance target to 3k dps. Currently, 2 months into WotLK, we expect 3.5k dps as an absolute minimum, and in fact saw our first three people over the 5k dps line on Patchwerk this week.

There are two essential components of ‘raiding performance’. There are the numbers, the raw dps or healing throughput you can put out. Then there are the other, more fuzzy things – knowing the strat, following it, listening to instructions, moving when you’re supposed to. Thankfully we have several tools to help the guild leadership determine these things.

The numbers

Measuring the numbers is by far the easiest component of performance measurement. You should be able to see at a glance which of your dps are under the tanks, and which are doing double the damage of everybody else. Looking at combatlog parses – such as the ones offered by the excellent WWS stats tool (www.wowwebstats.com) – is the most effective way to analyse the raw performance of your raid.

Every large business has Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance targets they expect their employees to work towards. While you’re not paying the members of your raid in money, everyone there is giving their time and bases their enjoyment on clearing content – that is, after all, why you join a raiding guild. Set up some KPIs for your raid, even something as simple as ‘do 2000dps on Patchwerk’ or ‘don’t die to the eruptions on Heigan’. Make them quantitative so you can measure against a benchmark, and offer help and support to people in meeting your targets. It’s important not to set them so high as to be unobtainable, or so low that they barely require any effort to reach whatsoever.

Measure on fights like Patchwerk, where literally all there is to do is to pump out the biggest numbers you can. Measure on high movement fights like Grobbulus. Measure on fights where players have to take advantage of game mechanics to pump out the big numbers, like on Thaddius. These fights can tell you surprisingly a lot about a player or your raid. High numbers on Patchwerk but low numbers on Grobbulus – your dpsers have a problem with movement. Low numbers on Thaddius but high elsewhere? Maybe they don’t understand the strat. As a guild leader you have a responsibility to monitor these things to identify problems, and ensure they improve so your raid can do.

The fuzzy stuff.

This can be a bit harder to quantify. To be perfectly honest, it’s the fuzzy stuff that makes an excellent player. Good players can learn a rotation and pump out good dps. Excellent players though, they’re the ones that never die to an environmental hazard, the players who are always aware, learn quickly, do the research. Unfortunately you can’t measure how aware a player is as a number like a dps report. Monitoring this essentially comes down to you, the leader, being aware and noticing what’s happening around you. Eventually you will know the players who have mastered the fuzzy stuff, and the ones who still have a bit to go, and this allows you to target your efforts and work with the players who need some help to get there.

The key thing to take away from this post is that as a guild leader you need to be constantly monitoring and analysing. You need to know what the gear level of your raid is like, which ones are good at moving around, which ones have trouble grasping strategies. Something as simple as knowing which of your tanks are good at multi-mob tanking and which are stronger and single target threat can drastically increase your chances of success.

The TLDR version

- Performance monitoring is an essential part of guild leadership

- Measure both the raw numbers, and the ‘fuzzy stuff’ like raid movement

- Never be happy with what you’ve got – set targets, and when those are met set more.

- Work with your players to correct issues as they arise.

A note on a personal instance of performance monitoring going right

While we were working through Black Temple we had a player who couldn’t do the ghost phase on Gorefiend, no matter how hard she tried. Week after week she would miss ghosts, and the attempt would end in a wipe or with someone else having to kill them. She knew there was a problem, and it was a serious one, and we discussed with her ways to get better. Instead of gquitting and giving up on raiding though, she worked. She played a simulation game on our guild website to get used to the keybindings, over and over again until it was perfect. She practiced, and practiced, and worked and worked at it until eventually she got it. She never got benched because of her problem, even when it caused wipes, and months down the track it has paid off. She’s now the healer in the raid making a tenth of the mistakes she used to with movement and awareness, she’s noticing when decursing needs to be done, and on fights like Heigan which she would have struggled with, she now smashes with minimal fuss. Working with her to fix an issue in game has resulted in a good player with fantastic guild loyalty, and is a great example of why simply /gkicking isn’t a good solution to a player having performance issues.

]]> http://velinath.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/cd-downs-illidan-again-as-well-as-a-16-sunwell-run/ Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:21:39 +0000 velinath http://velinath.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/cd-downs-illidan-again-as-well-as-a-16-sunwell-run/

This post will be edited with screenshots!

Cloudy Day is finally a Sunwell guild. Trash was easy–the book for Hardened Khorium Bars dropped, I rolled a 96, but Nino rolled 100 =(

Kalecgos on the other hand was crazy. After two sloppy wipes, we downed him (also a sloppy attempt, compounded by me not having a mic and therefore not being able to call portals on me. Oh well); he dropped the LEET tanking sword as well as 3 non-mage bracer tokens. Regardless, the down was awesome, and the fight is certainly unique. Here’s a quick run-through for those who don’t know it:

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There’s Kalecgos sleeping. Awwww….

The whole raid needs to run in at once lest some people be locked out. Portals will spawn at various locations, groups associated with those locations need to click them to be transported into some kind of nether world where you have to kill a demon.

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Here’s a portal that will teleport you…

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…here. You have to kill the demon before you kill Kalecgos, which is hard because you have tanks cycling in and out of the portals (and therefore tanking the 2 mobs at different times), and you have less DPS on teh demon both because you have less bodies down there and because Kalecgos gives the raid cool buffs that allow you to do more DPS on him.

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Now that the demon’s dead, DPS Kalecgos. He’ll enrage, and he will hurt. I believe our successful attempt left no tanks standing.

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Collect your phat lewtz. ^_^

I also spent all my badges on epic gems, and auctioned those gems as well as half of my bank. I now have 38 free bag slots for the grind to 80, and made about 1500g yesterday. Well on my way to an epic flyer now!

(edit 9 months later) lol, forgot all teh screenshots. And this is an epically abbreviated strategy.

Well! Today was pretty unexpected; The guild had said that they wanted to do a Black Temple run and me being me, I thought they we’re joking… Soon found out they weren’t. So Gwyn and I head to Black Temple, I think we were both a little surprised at downing three bosses… Well done Apollyon!

To say it was our first run, although there were a few mistakes, which are bound to happen on a first run; I think it went pretty smooth. Few screen shots below showing our victory over Supremus, High Warlord Naj’entus and Shade of Akama, unfortunately I didn’t get any of the loot… silly Moonkin!

Also while digging through my screen shots I found a few that made me laugh; ones of when there was no hassle, no raiding…

What can I say? We were new!

Never offer to boost you’re friends; especially when they decide that the humans in the funky looking tabards would be fun to play with!

Well, we raided till AFTER midnight tonight, unfortunately only got Illidan to 10%. Still had fun–but for some reason we had issues with parasites this time despite having 3 mages. In my defense I would argue that it wasn’t my fault! I was FN+BW’ing every time it came up and there were Sahdowfiends nearby.

Even so, we ahd some good attempts, one-shotted most bosses, and then Galistul decided to be way too generous on Akama loot, and by doing so, allowed me to replace my Kara bracers! I’m now running with the bracers off Akama, meaning that I will probably go ahead and enchant them before WOTLK.

Speaking of WOTLK, who’s excited?! I know I am! Planning to keep my fire spec for leveling, just cause I’m so used to it at this point. I do plan to roll through 71-80 very quickly as I have a lot of free time to grind on my hands, and plan to take full advantage of it.

One thing I do hope to do before WOTLK comes out is take a look at Sunwell, hopefully tomorrow after we down Illidan. It looks fun (but difficult!) and I wouldn’t mind some of the gear from there.

I’ve been working on my Fishing lately–picked up about 6 different fishing Achievements as well as getting my skill up to about 230. =) I want to have my skill Outlands-ready by the time the expansion hits.

And the envelope gets a little bigger…

Who: Kamaakazy of Ner’zhul (70)
Pet: Warfare (70 Gorilla)
Group: Full Raid

Comments: Lemmings did a BT today and we took good ole Warfare along for some tanking. He main tanked Na’jentus with no problems at all. He tanked phase 2 of Supremus, which wasn’t intentional, but it was a nice surprise all the same. Apparently during phase 2, while Supremus usually has no aggro table, he will still attack pets that are in melee. This has often been a real pain in the past because you had to pull pets off of him or have them die. This time though, healers just healed him and we easily finished phase 2 with no kiting. For Shade of Akama he tanked the shield bearers that run to the center.

We let a warrior tank Gorefiend for the simple pleasure of the DPS race. We didn’t try having Warfare tank RoS either, though I think he could with little trouble. I doubt the boss burns energy like it does rage, so he’d probably take less damage than a warrior in the tricky phases. Warfare also did not tank blood boil. This would be very very tricky and I really have no desire to test it out. We tried to have Warfare tank Mother Shaz but he seemed to be taking the full Saber Lash instead of splitting it with the other tanks. After a couple tries the healers seemed to have it under control and we were doing okay, but Failsbane (my favorite warlock) pulled aggro and wiped us. After that we moved on with real tanks.

When we got to council I tanked the priest. I tanked her where she was standing, and that was bad. I would have moved her, but people weren’t much paying attention and her interupters started hitting her when the fight started. I had to establish aggro instead of moving her. Next time I’ll just yell louder. We also gave a shot at tanking Illidan, and phase one was a breeze. When we got back to phase 2, people pulled aggro before Illidan even reached Warfare and caused another wipe. We let a warrior tank him after that, but next time I’ll just have Warfare tank Illidan where he lands in phase 3 and have all of the raid standing off to the side.

For all of this, there was only one other hunter in the raid and he wasn’t misdirecting quite so religiously as I was. Threat was mostly a non issue, but only because the fights were too short.

Other Hunters who have completed this feat:
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Tja, nachdem am Mittwoch MH bis Archi gecleart wurde (er aber am Mi. & Do. nicht umfallen wollte), clearten wir draufhin am So. BT bis vor Illidan. Ergo stand am darauffolgenden Tag dann Archi & Illidan auf dem Programm. Archi fiel im First Try diesmal, bei Illidan hatten wir ziemlich mit den Flammenadds zu kämpfen, aber er ging trotzdem down. Den Healstab von Archi krallte sich Hasse und das Tankschild von Illi ging an Dia (der sich wie ein Schnitzel gefreut hat, da er BC nur wegen diesem Schild gespielt hat). Ich selbst ging mit meinem DKP bei Archimonde quasi “All in” und heimste mir den T6 Heal-Kopf ein.

  As my work schedule pretty well stops me from doing any raiding outside of Saturday and Sunday nights, I haven’t been able to join in the fun lately. Sunday, though, I was able to go to Black Temple! I’ve been to Tempest Keep twice, and Serpentshrine Cavern a few times – but this was far and away the highest tier of raiding that I’d ever experienced personally. I elected to bring Manchego, my healing Shaman for the run. Right now, she and Ribeye are pretty well a toss-up for strength. Manchego has a higher healing throughput than Rib does, but Ribeye is far better for endurance fights. Basically, it’s a choice between a lot of mid grade healing, or a lesser amount of stronger heals. Given the subject matter (and the possible drops, admittedly), I felt Manchego was a better choice.

  The guild had already downed Najentus earlier in the week, so I didn’t get to see him. Our instance started with Supremus trash. I’ll admit, I was largely underwhelmed. There were a lot of melee deaths among Rogues and enhancement Shamans as we pulled packs, but really nothing too impressive. The trash pulls felt more or less along the lines of  SSC strength, pre-nerf. I did have some trouble when the warstomping demons hit, as the stun time caused a few concerns due to the inability to get heals off for a few seconds. For the most part, though, it was smooth sailing.

  Supremus had apparently been a sticking point on the earlier run, volcanoes in particular. We tried him a couple of times before finally nailing him on our 3rd or 4th try (I forget how many, honestly). I know that once, we lost the fight because tanks got out of range on a phase shift and didn’t get adequate healing to them. I may have cost us another by inadvertently shifting my healing focus off one of the tanks right after a shift; though I wasn’t designated as his main healer for the fight, I still wasn’t contributing like I should have been at that crucial moment and (though I kept it to myself) felt somewhat to blame. There was one try that wound up with myself and a Hunter as the last 2 standing, and Supremus at ~450,000 health. I just did a /growl, fired off a Lightning Bolt, and ate my part of the wipe there, not much else to do. I had done a good job of not running into volcanoes until the successful fight, when I was paying too much attention to the blue stuff in his run around phase and ran right over top of the damn thing. Ringside seats to the rest of the fight, and a healthy dose of ineptitude and helplessness! All in all, I think that (besides the obvious volcanoes), the secret to the fight lies with putting your Big Bad Wolf / Little Red Riding Hood skills to the test and running away from the big lug. If the raid can keep enough people alive to sustain DPS on him, he’s done in under 5 minutes. Dropped plate tank shoulders and elemental Shaman bracers, which I was happy to see Ness win.

  We cleared to Shade of Akama next. Some of the pulls were dicey along the way, but once we made our way to the actual room the pulls got fairly easy. Nailing the fight down took a few tries though. It shouldn’t; Akama is a fight where the big boss is tanked for you by an NPC. The trick is getting used to the adds that pour in from the sides, and this is what took us a few tries. Once we figured it out, we downed him without a single death. From observation, here’s the basics that I noticed that make this into an easy fight:

•   Adds will come from the sides in one of four flavors: Defenders, Spiritualists, Elementalists and Rogues. Defenders should be tanked and need not be killed as they don’t hit hard. Rogues should be sheeped and dealt with third. Elementalists do high AOE damage and are priority targets, with the healing Spiritualists second.
•   The adds have an annoying tendency to slip past the tank before aggro can be established. Having 2-3 hunters on each of the 2 doors will not only provide the fire support hat you need to down the adds, but make Misdirects available to return mobs to the tank. We observed that mobs which slipped by the tank beelined to Akama, and upon hitting him would focus their attention elsewhere. Thus, there is some time to Misdirect them and this shoud be relatively easy with the new cooldown mechanics.
•   Also annoying about the adds is the AOE. If your greeting parties at the doors clump up too much, you are vulnerable to this. Simply place the tank at the door and support personnel (all melee DPS should be on Channelers) fan out in a semi circle behind him, which will greatly ease the healing load and keep your groups solvent.
•   Poison Cleansing Totems are a huge boon. The Rogues will poison their targets with a high-powered Deadly Poison DOT that is difficult to stay on top of as they tend to reapply it every swing. Having these around to passively cleanse saves global cooldowns and makes for one less thing to worry about. Place one near each tank. I realize that this takes the place of the Mana Spring Totem; due to the brief duration of the fight, however, I don’t see a need for Mana Spring. If mana is even remotely tight, simply drop Mana Tide the moment that Shade of Akama unbanishes and all aggro goes to Akama himself as the cleansing totem will not be required any more at this point.

  It took us about 4 or 5 tries to get this down. Our first try was miserable, we’d anticipated 3 entry points and deployed accordingly. After determining that is was only two, we ran into problems with aggro and the tanks. AOEs, plus continuing issues with establishing aggro, were responsible for the third wipe. On attempt number four (or maybe five; the successful one, it’s all a blur) we hit on the right combos to do this, and the right execution. I’m not a raid leader; we have a few of them who are very good. However, the primary one was in the melee group attacking channelers, and thus not privy to the goings on near the spawn points. The other was tanking at one of the spawn points, and as such had his hands kind of full. From my vantage point, though, I was able to see and discern a few things that might not have been readily observable by them – the three things that I mentioned previously in this post – and I think that implementing them was the difference. It all still comes down to execution, so I’m not going to take credit from the other 24 people present for that… but for one shining moment, I felt like I had contributed a great deal to the solution. Maybe this makes up for my craptastic healing / volcano death on that Supremus wipe I’d mentioned earlier…. >.>

  Unfortunately, time ran out on our raid before we could get a crack at Teron Gorefiend. I think that he’s going to be a doable boss, so it would have been nice to try to learn the mechanics. Perhaps next weekend!

Ahmahgod, I wins you, silly Council mage.

Did I do that? Oopsie!

Yes, mage tanking is a thing of beauty. So much so, in fact, that I had to post 2 separate screenshots of my leetness in action. =P

I was really nervous about this particular boss; due to this week there being only one other mage in raid, and she not being geared enough to do the mage-tanking, the duty fell to me and my 11001 health (Pre-fight. I don’t know why I have less in the screenshots). It is the mage’s job on this boss to lead the charge into the mobs, and doing so was nerve-wracking especially since I watched our mage tank die on the opening pull a couple times the week before.

Turned out I had nothing to worry about–not only did I get the first spellsteal perfectly, the misdirects (including one on me) went off very quickly and we ended up with an easy pick-up to start the fight.

Tanking this guy turned out to be really easy, as you can probably see by my threat chart on the right-hand side of my UI. It was just a matter of staying alive by keeping the Dampen Magic on me. I did need to move around a bit however as I got slapped with a Blizzard early on and decided that I didn’t want to be in that; in addition, the stairs did cause some LOS issues. Something to look out for for any mages that are trying to tank this–you need to be at a decent range, yet in LOS of both your healer and the mage boss. But yeah, I had leet heals on me, and some mad threat generation. Things looked great as well with my 2/8 T6 set bonus to Evocate, so I was able to sustain mana all fight long. Was really a lot of fun.

As far as strategy for the rest of the fight: Stay out of all AoEs, have 3 shamans/warriors interrupting the priest’s Circle of Healing (and the damaging spell if possible), and DPS the paladin. Just keep hopping around and make sure you keep DPSing. All mobs share the same health pool, so if you *need* to, melee can switch to DPSing the priest while the paladin is immune to melee (I believe this will happen, if I am not mistaken!). Something to look into, perhaps, although it shouldn’t matter; with the nerf you should be well ahead of the enrage timer anyway. We one-shot Council despite having issues last year.

As for my new gear, I got some cool stuff off the trash right before Mother Shahraz…my new [Shroud of the Final Stand] is a huge upgrade from the old badge cloak I was using. It’s a beautiful thing, but I still need Subtlety on it! Other than that…we were fighting Mother, wiped once, and came back and rocked serious face. I Ice Blocked to survive the explosions–my poor group could not do the same, but the shadow priest and I survived out of us 5, anyway. I ended up rolling 2nd highest on the T6 shoulders; luckily there were 2 tokens, so I am now at 3/8 T6, with all epic gems. The only thing I’m concerned about anymore is my PvP wand and my Kara bracers (which are surprisingly good–I think they beat out the badge bracers for sure, and they beat out some stuff from 25-man raids).

We at least got 8 bosses down tonight, but we couldn’t do more than wipe on Illidan. Still, not bad for a 4-hour raid, say I.

I’ll go ahead and close with one of my best screenshots–too bad I didn’t turn off my FPS counter.

Are YOU prepared?

Seriously I am sooooo tired of Black Temple. We’ve down two bosses in Sunwell in one effort. Yeah, they’re nerfed now, but hey we’ve got the gear. So whatever. Not like some kara nub group is going to come in and do the same.

The guild is pushing for more content cleared. That’s lovely, but why didn’t you push this hard for the past 3 months. You knew WOTLK was coming!

So we have two weeks and they want to push to Kil’jaden. x.x We can probably do it because we’re two-shot learning the bosses, but c’mon I’m tired of this shit. Its gear I will replace at 76-ish. Which hopefully will only take me two weeks to get to. Why am I working my ass off for this shit to have some douchebag spriest outbid me?

Twats.

So, gestern besiegten wir im First Try Illidan, was nach dem Nerf nicht weiter schwer war. Jetzt heißt es vorwärts schaun, denn wir hoffen auch noch in Sunwell den einen oder anderen Boss mitnehmen zu können. Anbei noch der obligatorische Killscreen:

So last night we killed Gorefiend, Bloodboil, and Reliquary…

But who gives a fuck? Why are we even still raiding at this point? It’s too damn easy. I was on the phone the entire time, not paying attention to anything. I didn’t even know the strats. Ridiculous. All I wanted was to hit these bosses for REAL and now we’re faking our way through. I’m not very happy with our cruise mentality right now…I’d so much rather just farm at this point. I really feel this is a waste of time. Didn’t even take teamwork this time around, we just spanked them.

I’m so depressed. =( I can’t wait til we start leveling and raiding all over again and I can start from the beginning this time instead of coming into raiding so damn late.

Illidown. Granted it was post-nerf, but still quite the accomplishment. Next on our hitlist is Kael, I believe–I’m hoping for an Archimonde down too. =) We rocked some SERIOUS face tonight despite a rocky start facing off against the Illidari Council (had some issues, a few wipes) but we pulled things together, and 3-shotted (IIRC) Illidan.

Chya. We did it.We were not prepared!

We also hit A’lar and VR in TK tonight after BT…obviously a cakewalk.Personally, I’m very happy with the way the raid went! I actually ended up with my T6 legs off of Council, putting me at 2/5 T5 and 1/8 T6 now.The fights themselves are awesome all the way through BT, especially the ones near the end. Council, although hard (like HKM ish stylistically, except a lot more difficult, and the bosses share the same health pool), is a great fight, and all sorts of fun to DPS, except when the paladin throws up Chromatic Resistance Aura (250 to all resistances). Really it’s a blast! However, Illidari Council ended up basically being essentially a warm-up for the big guy himself.

We were not prepared!

Yeah. It wasn’t great the first couple attempts. Had some trouble with the shadowfiends–”buttworms” as Nino called them–partly due to both of our mages dying in the phase where we had to group up in teh center. (Phase 2, I believe.) Although we both got back up, it was still difficult to get things done on recovery. As you can see in the screenshot we had only me up for mages at the time, and much of our raid was down from spreading shadowfiends. Was a lot of responsibility for a mage, but it was pretty easy. Easier than keeping the constructs down in the Gorefiend fight, I think. All this took was Frost Nova + Blast Wave. =)

The rest of the fight is a blast, too.

*SPOILERS*

When Maiev comes out while the raid’s trapped and there’s that mid-fight cutscene…yeah, that is absolutely sweet. This was seriously some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever seen. His death however was somewhat lackluster. Rather unfortunate. At least things went really awesomely well on that last attempt. We had very few deaths compared to previous attempts. =)

*END SPOILERS*

Skull of Gul’dan dropped. I wish I woulda gotten it. It’s a beautiful thing.

No Warglaives, sadly, cause we had some warriors who could have used ‘em. Even so, a great fight.

11/50/0 is a great spec, but I’m having a lot of trouble getting my spell hit up. I was at 176 or something with my T5, but my T6 brought me down to 150-ish–and that’s WITH spell damage food. I’m considering respeccing to 0/50/11 for IV and Elemental Precision; I just can’t find the gear to get up to 215 hit rating right now, or whatever I will be needing–I have no hit rating gear after being Arcane for so long. (I liked only needing 76!) Although I am considering going Arcane for the expansion, right now Fire’s the best I can do for DPS, as Arcane’s DPS got nerfed with both our current mana pool and the lack of duration on the AB debuff.

The Achievements system is pretty fun. I’m working on some of the quest achievements right now. I think that Loremaster title would be pretty sweet. Gotta go back and kill a bunch of low-level bosses cause achievements weren’t totally retroactive though. =(

Update on Neo Imperela: As I’ve heard from a guild member, Mymichelle has delivered a “slap in the face” to the remaining NI members by essentially giving the Vent server to her Alliance guild. She’s also changed her usual Vent name back to her Alliance toon from what I hear. Bye, Neo Imperela. I’m pretty sure this is the true death-knell of the guild.