Lo-Quality WoW

With Palidron’s doing their 25-man’s on Tuesday and Wednesday (US time), it looks like my raiding time is going to be restricted to the weekends for the forseeable future.  Which isn’t bad, that gives me time to goof off a little.  My main problem is that we’ve picked up some newer raiders and it’s slowed us back down again.

Not that I have a problem with the raiders themselves, they pretty much do their jobs.  My main frustration is that we’ve more or less reset our training curve with the new additions.  As I’ll get into shortly, it means it’s taking longer to get through the raids and is adding a bit of frustration to me.

So we continue on the raid from the other night.  Fortunately, we decide to skip even trying Saurfang on Heroic.  And this time, we have a third hunter again, this time an MM.  As I’ve mentioned before, for standard Saurfang, Rodman took right wing, and normally I let the third hunter have the far left, but I took that spot this time.

This was a standard fight.  No big surprises.  Rodman and myself did a lot of the add control on each side, and our dps were spread out a bit better than last time so for the most part we didn’t have to support each other from either end.  We had enough dps output that we managed to take Saurfang down without getting a single mark.

Then we went in and started on the Crimson Hall instead of the Plague.  I think it was because we’ve started doing Plague on Heroics and the raid leader didn’t want to try it with our current grouping.  Either way, the first up was the Blood Prince Council.

Now we three Hunters, we should have been able to handle the Kinetic Bombs with no problem.  Wasn’t the case.  I know at one point Rodman had died, but that still left two Hunters right?  I still found myself juggling two Kinetic Bombs.  And this time, to add to the difficulty, they would spawn practically on top of each other, which meant that sometime I would target the wrong bomb and didn’t adjust in time.

Despite this Hunter failure, we made it through.  We even managed to pick up The Orb Whisperer achievement.  I think that was through luck more than anything else. 

The Blood Queen encounter was next.  So we planned it out like normal, which I have no idea why since we immediately throw it to the wind usually.  This time it was a bit more exciting than normal since we managed to lose a few dps midway through the fight.  However, between the additional 20% damage buff and the fact that most of our higher dps people were the ones who stayed up, we still managed to kill her in time.  By only a few seconds.  But a win is a win.

Next up, we decided to take on the Dreamwalker fight.  This is where we spent most of the night.  For the most part, and considering it’s a healing fight anyway, it was a healer issue.  Dps was fine, more than fine in fact.  We were taking down the suppressors and other adds rapidly enough that we usually had a couple seconds of breathing room between adds.

But the healing output just wasn’t enough and we’d hit the soft enrage timer.  A few times in fact.  One of them, we hit it and kept going almost two minutes past it before being completely overwhelmed.  I know one time we wiped just as we got Dreamwalker to 99%!  Those are the worst, being close but not enough.

Eventually we had one of our dps switch to heals.  (We’d been two healing most of the night.)  Even then I believe we wiped once more.  I think we finally declared “last try” and naturally that’s when we got it down perfectly.  But we called it a night at that point.

The next night, we start in on the Plagueworks.  This time we started off in Heroic mode.  We went after Rotface first.  Again, because of the Vile Gas attacks, the two Hunters (back to our regular two) got to play along the edges of the room.  And for some reason, Heroic Rotface seemed a whole lot easier than normal mode.  And that’s with both of us Hunter’s constantly running around the room, trying to stay out of the flooded parts and out of the way of the off-tank.

Rotface went down, but a new stick didn’t drop.  Festergut was next and this was also a Heroic mode fight, which we weren’t able to do last time.  We realized our main issue was the Malleable Goo.  So instead of keeping our healers in tight with the melee, they spread out in among the ranged dps.  Also, most of us have been running an add-on that draws graphics on the ground, showing the targeted area for Maelleable Goo in a green circle.  So if you saw a green circle show up under you, you knew you had to get out of the way.

Or at least people should have.  In fact, I know one of a “regulars”, who has done the Putricide fight with us, had a bad habit of just standing there and getting hit by the goo.  I know he was heals for this run, but he still had to know that standing there to get hit would cause problems.  And the melee didn’t even see the green circle half the time.

Which irritated me to know end.  Everything else was done near perfectly.  Heals adjusted their patterns depending on the gas in the room, people handled the spores well, even when there were two in ranged or two in melee.  It was just the Malleable Goo hitting one or two people that would just mess everything up, usually by causing a late heal to a tank or causing dps to slow enough that we hit the enrage timer.

We finally had someone call out goo warnings on the vent channel, which is always dicey because it cause the tanks to miscommunicate.  And even then, people were slow on the draw, causing a few more wipes.  Eventually we did get Festergut down but it took way longer than it really should have.

But after that rough time, we decided on Putricide on normal.  And this time, it was the additional 20% damage that messed us up.  We ended up pushing Putricide into phase 2 just as the first unstable mutation summon happened!  That was enough to throw us off our game and we wiped.

The next couple of tries we moderated our damage better.  In fact, we still pushed into phase 2 quickly, but we had enough dots on the ooze that it died while everyone was stunned.  We still ended up wiping but we got better at that transition.  It only took us one or two more tries to get past Putricide.  In fact, phase 3 was relatively a breeze with the amount of dps being dished out.

But that was the end of another night.  The next night was Sindragosa and this is the part that drove me absolutely insane.  We wiped repeatedly over a 2-hour period.  We kept losing people earlier, usually from two reasons:  breaking ice blocks early in the air phase or getting ice blocked too far for the tanks and everyone to dps during phase 2. 

The first one especially annoyed me.  I already slip into Aspect of the Viper to lessen my damage, in addition to be close enough that I melee instead of range attack.  I also put my pet into passive or defensive mode, depending on what’s going on.  And if worst comes to worst, I STOP ATTACKING if I see the ice block is about to break.  But people couldn’t even do that!  They went to town on the ice blocks (twice when I was in the block) and sprung them early causing people to receive damage from the Frost Bomb and often killing them! 

Positioning was our next problem, in both phases with ice tombs actually.  A couple of air phases, people stood too close and we ended up with multiple ice-blocks.  Another, the two ice block targets stood too close to each other and more or less killed each other when they got hit!  In phase 2, people would constantly position themselves way too far, making it next to impossible for the tanks to get their debuffs removed or for dps to reach them to kick them back out.  That is, when dps remembered to hit the ice blocks in the first place!

It was ridiculous how bad it was.  Once, I was the target during phase 2.  I positioned myself near the head but clear of everyone and then stood still to dps and wait for the ice block to hit me.  And then a healer decides to run across my position!  I mean, literally!  When I got ice blocked, it looked like he was in the ice block with me! 

And for the most part, it wasn’t getting better.  People weren’t learning!  We eventually had to assign two people to only dps the ice blocks, and that didn’t work the first time becuase one got killed early and the other got the ice block himself!

Actually, I think it was over 2-hours when we finally killed Sindragosa.  And I think that was mostly luck since half the raid was dead when she finally went down.  It was a good thing we called it at that point, I was too pissed to deal with anything else at that point.

Which leads into last night.  We took on Lich King himself.  But we did it as “learn the fight” setup.  Which, okay, with new people I knew we need.  But when explaining things, why explain the stuff that doesn’t involve anyone new?  Like telling the Hunters to use Tranquilizing Shot on the Shambling Horrors when the two Hunters with you were there every night of the three weeks you were working on the fight the first time?

As usually, it was the defile that wiped us.  I wasn’t involved, mainly because I was usually being molested by the Val’kyr.  In fact, one time when the Val’kyr dropped me, the defile had extended far enough past the plateau that I actually got affected by it when she dropped me! 

And we were lazy about things.  In phase 1, since we had two Shamans on this run, we put one in each group and dropped Cleansing Totems.  And when the dps still ran to the Shambling Horrors when infected, the raid leader scolded us for it.  The problem to me, is that if you’re going to learn the fight, learn it properly.  Letting the dps get in position to cleanse correctly is something you want them to get into the habit of.  (And even then, people were slow in moving again.) 

We did only a half-dozen tries, usually getting to the second defile of phase 2.  But even then, little mistakes kept cropping up.  Like a tank miscounting the Raging Spirits up and moving into the Remorseless Winter aoe early and almost wiping the raid! 

Either way, I have a few days to cool down.  If we were going in tonight, I probably wouldn’t be in the right mindset for it.  Hopefully, people will have studied the fight and we won’t have so many issues when we finally go back in later this week.  In the meantime, I think I need a drink…