Dragon Slaying

This image comes from one of my first nights retro-raiding. We took down Molten Core, UBRS, BWL, and Onyxia. Taking out Nefarian we got his head and of course Ony dropped hers. This would have been the rare image classic WoW.

Matched set.

Me and Keyran (a guildie) were both on our way to Onyxia. We went this way, because the goblins hate us- guess why.

End-game: Part II

So I did some more raid-tanking this evening.

This is the fourth night of raiding The Oasis Contingent has done. For a long time we were struggling to get one night in a week.

This week alone we have completed the following raid achievements.

Flame Leviathan: First boss in Ulduar, very easy, and about the 20th time or so the guild has downed him.

Ignis the Flame Master: An optional boss in Ulduar. Fairly tricky- The hardest of the first four bosses in Ulduar. About fifth or sixth guild down, three of those during May of last year (before the raiders split off from us).

Northern Beasts: First boss in ToC. TOC has downed them about six or seven times.

Lord Jarraxus: Second boss in ToC. TOC has downed him another four or five times.

Faction Champions: Third boss in ToC. TOC has downed them twice.

Twin Val'kyr: Fourth boss in ToC. TOC has downed them twice.

Anub'arak: Final boss in ToC. This week was guild first.

Onyxia: First, Final boss in Onyxia's lair (go figure). We downed her a couple times at 60, and about four or so times since then.

Icecrown Citadel Trash: The ICC trash, we was actually very fun.

Archavon, Koralon, Toravon: the t7, t9 and t10 bosses in VoA. Lots of achievements going around for all of them. Toravon is the equivalent of a 'easy' ICC raid boss.

I'd like to say more, but I'm tired and lazy and it will make good fodder for another post.

I got my paper back.

So, as you can tell by the title, I got my paper back. This is the paper I posted a while ago: An Essay on Attention in Video Games. Yeah, that thing.

So it seems that my professor agrees with me about the findings and found the piece pretty solid overall. In case you don't want to read that whole thing, the point was that people who play video games develop attentional resources quick and to a further extent than non-video game players.

WoW was actually the source of the idea for me, because, when I'm raiding, there are many things that I have to attend to. Primarily, is my threat. I don't have to attend on just one target, but in some situations up to forty. Although the Onyxia whelps aren't that dangerous. Anyways, I have to pay attention to my health, the targets health, positioning, mana, the healers mana, the number of healers up and where they are, as well as all of the cool downs on all of my abilities.

If I was raid leading I would also have to pay attention to where everyone else is and who is still alive. Additionally I would have to coordinate special abilities, AoD, Heroism etc....

Healers have to keep track of everyone's health, and often they are tasked to watch the debuffs as well. They are additionally concerned with their mana, and their position relative to the DPS, tanks and the other healers.

What this brings me to is that simplifying these tasks is beneficial to our immediate gameplay, but does make us a 'weaker' person. I will admit that I am one of those 'weaker' types. I use addons to simplify everything. I have DBM and Omen to help me with positioning and threat and I use IceHUD and SpartanUI to centralize the important information about me and my target. I additionally use grid to keep track of the raids current composition and overall wellbeing.

The next time you consider downloading an addon, consider the above, and consider if you want to be a mutant, superior to the majority of the rest of your race.

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.