Sucky Wiping

Sucky wiping is sucky.

Sucky wiping is when you're wiping on something repeatedly. And there is no excuse for it.

When I wipe on Valithria, I get mad. Generally this is because there is other stuff out there that I know I can kill. I know that I can kill Festergut and Rotface and Putricide and Blood Princes and Blood Queen.

This isn't a new challenge. Its just something we're not prepared for.

And I don't like it.

We've done the fight enough that everyone should know the kill order by heart.

Everyone should be able to pick out the silhouettes.

Everyone should not have a problem with the fight. But apparently there is a problem.

And it distresses me.

But I digress. I'll have happier news tomorrow.

And then on Friday I'll have time to look at stuff.

Another Wipe

Oooooh! Magic Whirly of Whirly!

Awesomeness and Bad Planning

Last night we only got down the first four bosses in ICC. Tonight we cleared Plaguewerks and Crimson Halls. Now we're really awesome because last week (first Wing Boss kills of those two) took us three days. Admittedly we also got Valithria, but thats one boss. In two days, we downed nine of the ten that we have won before.

On to the bad planning part. Some of us (myself included) after having cleared up to Sindragosa really wanted to see if we could get to her. Plus, we had downed the Valkyr, so there was no trash. That was the bad idea. It was a good idea in concept. We had the same healers as we did on Monday, and equal or better dps for the most part- these were some of our best raiders.

Then we spent an hour wiping on the encounter. This wasn't the fun kind of wiping because either we were wiping from stuff that we couldn't prevent (Curse you RNG gods!) or from stuff we couldn't determine (Curse you unkown stuff!).

After an hour of raiding, we hadn't killed a thing. I mean sure, we had killed lots of adds on Valithria, but we hadn't gotten credit for it. Which made me (amongst others) upset at the encounter.

From there we smartened up and one shot each of our farm bosses and two shot the wing bosses.

So it was ok.

Sindragosa

So, according to the tankspot video, Sindragosa is tanked vertically on her platform and all dps are off to one side. When she goes into the air phase, everyone scatters and hides behind whoever got freezed. When you get yanked in, you all run back to your position.

On phase three, they had a specific spot near her front leg where people could go if they were going to get frozen and kept her in the same position.

With the Nemeton, they had her tanked horizontally, parallel to the stairs. Everyone was on the stair side of her and wailed on her as best they could.

When she took to the air, the two marked militants ran to predesignated, easy to remember locations. Then, everyone just pivoted around those points.

On the yank in, they had their hunter pop Aspect of the Pack, because A) it doesn't matter if the tank gets a movement speed reduction and B) if you do get hit while you're trying to escape, you got hit by what you were running away from so you're in a world of hurt.

As a Warlock, I found it immensely helpful to use my teleport as that got me quickly out of range of her as well as reorienting me immediately towards the dragon's flank.

As a side note, when you get Unchained Magic, you get a stack of Instability for each of your casts, getting above four stacks starts to be bad for your health. It lasts for only a few seconds so you can stop casting when you get to four. However, it has a DBM timer for you so you can see when the Instability is going to fall off. If you have 2 seconds left, and a spell has a three second cast, it is OK to cast. Also, they either do not register, or DBM doesn't register them as hits until they connect with the boss. This means if you're casting something with a low cast time, you may get five stacks before you realize it. This is OK as long as you stop casting.

A work around for Unchained magic is that wanding is not a spell, so when you have your stacks, if you want to be risky and try casting, you can, or you can actually use that stat stick you carry around with you.

Finally, in phase three, rather than keeping the two tanks together, they had them at opposite ends of the dragon.

Once you were marked for freezing, you would run towards the current front leg. There you would be frozen and everyone would try to break the block. The tank at the other end would taunt and she would be facing away from the raid.

I don't know what advantage this gave over having the two tanks next to each other (it ended up not working- no down). But it seemed to be an interesting strategy. However, I would like to try the first two phases their style, as that worked very well. Phase three, though, I think, should be done the Tankspot way.

Counter-Wiping

I get to talk about wiping again!

I'm excited!

Anyways, today again, TOC ventured into ICC and wiped repeatedly. However, we also did the amazing and did some counter-wiping. For those of you who don't know, it is the process of taking a wet (or damp) rag and swiping it swiftly over a ledge.

It can also mean downing the boss.

Thanks to some helpful hints, I managed to kite the big Oozes on Rotface (our previous stumbling block) and we won epic loots. I don't know what dropped. I think my healer was I happy, so that made me happy.

We then tried Professor Putricide several times and failed. We got to Phase two each time (the first attempt only barely). I found that as the only melee (other than the OT in the abom). I got to just sit there and wail on the boss. When he dropped slime on me, I would move slightly. I didn't have to worry about the vials because he drops them behind him so I wasn't taking damage.

We did give up on him (it was alright tho). And we moved to the Blood Council.

That fight is an interesting one. First off, I love it because Valanar says "Naxxanar was merely a setback." Which I guess is becoming a WoW theme. Anyways, whilst tanking my boss who had 1hp off to the side, I didn't get to do anything. I did occasionally throw my shield at a Disco Ball to toss it back up, but for the most part I stood there. Even when it became the point where he could take damage, I could have probably stopped all but auto-attacking because of the vast amounts of threat I had. We got a lovely achievement for having no one take more than 23k in a single spell hit due to a visiting mage who has a spec and gear set specifically designed to tank Keleseth. (thank bud).

And I hit Exalted with the Ashen Verdict. I got my new ring, my new title and I missed out on the "first kill" SS.

More Wiping

So, this week my guild extended our raid lockouts so that we could 'delve deeper into ICC'.

It didn't go so well. Our first night we wiped on Precious, then wiped on Rotface several times.
Following that, we lost three people to power outages.

We switched sides, got some new blood and took down the Valk mini-boss- so we got saved.
Proceeding from there we wiped on Valithria several times as well.

Our second night, today, we managed to kill precious, wiped on Rotface four or five times, and then went over to save our dragon.

We wiped there six or more times.

This was a lot of wiping.

The moral of the story is that we had fun. On Valithria, when you start the encounters, she calls out something along the lines of: "Heroes, lend me your aid! I... I cannot hold them off much longer! You must heal my wounds!"


We laughed at her, we had visited her five times already so this is our revised message: "Failures, wipe on this fight again! I... I cannot contain my laughter much longer! You must bash your heads against a wall for an hour!"


Yeah, we had fun. Then we came up with methods to allow the guardians to let us through and just walk her out.


We were TSA, Homeland Security, Health Inspectors, Cops (with a warrant for her arrest) and Messangers from the LK.

The Mammoth

Right before we downed Deathbringer Saurfang I got on my mammoth and popped my Iron Boot Flask. I feel special.

A return to Wiping

So we were wiping tonight again. Last time my guild was wiping was a few months ago.

Tonight, rather than being in ToC, TOC was in ICC.

Last night we 1 shot Marrowgar, 4 shot Lady Deathwhisper (but the second and third didn't count). and 1 shot the Gunship Battle. We even had time in our limited schedule to wipe on Saurfang 3 times.

Tonight when we came in we two-shot Saurfang and went into lands unknown.

Two of us had seen the precious fight (me and a warlock) and I had seen the Valthira fight. This was the sum of our knowledge. We way over-pulled in front of the Plague district (or w/e it is called). And came back and only lost three or four people. We wiped on our first Precious try and then managed to get her the second time. However, by the end both tanks were dead, so two healers and two dps ran around like headless chickens.

They insisted that they were 'kiting' the zombies, but it was quite amusing to those already dead. When we fought Stinky, well, things went south (again). The OT died, so I wasn't able to have someone taunt off so I couldn't recieve much healing. Then I died and the dps managed to take him down, with two locks and a holy pally left standing.

Then we wiped a couple times on Festergut. Someone who had done a little presearch read off the WoWhead strategy guide. It actually went fairly well- on our second attempt we got him down to 38% but then had to call it a night.

All in all, another wonderful night of wiping.

My bubble of happiness

I'm not referring to Divine Protection, Divine Shield, Divine Intervention or Hand of Protection.

Nor am I referring to Sacred shield or Power Word: Shield.

What I am referring to is my comfort zone. Right now my comfort zone is tanking on DK, Druid and Pally or DPSing on a Demo lock or Paladin. Anything else and I'm hopelessly confused and discomforted. However, with a little training, I can fix those comfort issues.

However, there are things in life that I cannot change. While my guild has been running ICC, I've been regularly paired with a certain bear tank and we have learned to understand each other's strategies, the pulls and the boss fights in conjunction. This week we had another bear who really wanted to tank. Since we are a casual guild, we let him. He had never tanked in a raid before (on any toon), was new to tanking, and had only been to ICC once before.

It took a while for him to grasp some concepts that I understand very well (mainly because I've been tanking at 80 for a year now). And there were certain pulls where I wouldn't have needed to say a word to my regular CT (co-tank) but I had to explain the whole strategy- beginning, middle and end.

Additionally, I have seen several players in my guild wear what one of them called their 'Frankenstein Suit'. They have been paladins and they have worn a mish-mash of gear. They wore SP plate, tanking plate and DPS plate. Their non-armor pieces were tanking, caster, and both agi and str based dps pieces. This frightens me and is way outside my zone of comfort. But I can learn to work with them and hope that if it all goes to shit, they can take over one of the other two rolls they are semi-geared for.

Well... that didn't work

I was going to write about my wonderful new mount today, the Red Proto-Drake that one receives for completing Glory of the Hero. But that didn't work out. As you can see, I did not get the achievement. So tonights post is going to cover not quite making it.

Last night I was invited to a Battle for Mt. Hyjal raid. None of us knew what the hell we were doing- I mean, absolutely no clue at all. During the boss fights I was going AFK to read the strategies, because, well, we didn't know what the hell to do.

It was a wonderful experience, I mean- damn, the place looked nice and we didn't wipe at all (until the end) but it was confusing as hell. We were ten manning it, most of us were 80 (a 70 lock and a 78 hunter) so we were way overgeared but only four of us were in the vent they had set up. Additionally, none of us knew each other (except the two guys running it) from before so when someone called something out we didn't know who was talking.

We downed three bosses and wiped on the fourth at about 1:30 in the morning so we stopped then and agreed to eventually go back and finish the place.

Today, in my H-Gundrak run, we attempted the Moorabi fight five times. Each time he managed to pop into Mammoth, but the last time he was at about 3% and the dots we had on him killed him. It was saddening, but I'll try again tomorrow and the next day until I get it.

Wiping

I wiped on ToC 10 tonight. Five times we died on the Northern Beasts. And it was one of the most fun experiences I have ever had while raiding.

I've been in raids before where we have wiped repeatedly, Naxx, Maly, Sarth and Uld, but I didn't have much fun with those. There we were dying for stupid reasons, someone standing in the fire, someone popping AoD.

When I went into ICC for the first time (10-man, I was tanking) it was absolutely thrilling, but after killing the trash and wiping to Lord Marrowgar three or four times, I, like the rest of the pug, got bored and left.

I think part of it was that ToC is a challenge for us. It requires a skill level and gear level just about where we average out. Another thing is the lack of trash, the quick pace of the fights, and the need to be aware of several events.

The fight we were wiping on, the first one, Northern Beasts, is a three part fight where the two tanks taunt off each other because of a stacking bleed. Not difficult, but requires some attention. In many ways it was similar to Gluth.

The second part also requires two tanks, there are two different mobs. One needs to be kited, because, similar to Grobbulus, he farts out toxic clouds. The other is stationary, but on occasion, the two worms burrow and switch roles, requiring some concentration on the part of the tanks.

The final part was fun, especially because at that point the OT, one of the healers, and four DPS had died, so we had a resto druid, resto shaman, frost mage and myself, prot paladin. We could have gone on forever, until the enrage timer blew after a total of fifteen minutes of fighting.

Another part that kept me interested was a specific piece of loot that I knew these guys dropped and would have been a huge upgrade (232 Raid Epic vs. 200 Heroic Blue). Anyways, after our five wipes (hour and a half) we decided to go try our hand at Onyxia.

Me and the other tank pulled the trash outside her room to quickly and we wiped on those. Then we one shot Onyxia, with only one person still dead at the end (of course, we had three druids with Battle Rezes up, a shaman with reincarnation, a warlock who threw out a soul stone, and myself with Ardent Defender). It was the first time since before 3.2.2 that I had killed Ony, of course, back then I could solo her easily and did so regularly.