It Never Gets Any Easier

The guild's raiding has, indeed, progressed beyond Saurfang in the weeks following my last post. In the interim, one group - once - has managed to take down Festergut. Full stop.

It is somewhat analogous to an unholy amalgamation of Patchwerk and Loatheb, except the spores in this fight, rather than boosting your DPS, boost your immunity to the incoming massive raid damage. The DPS is up to you, and boy howdy, do you need a lot of it! Festergut has a five-minute enrage timer, and 9.4 million health in his 10-player iteration. That means, assuming two tanks and two healers, a minimum of 5k DPS from everyone else, or you lose.

Yeah, we lost.

That brings us to tonight's attempt at ToGC. We were feeling cocky - ok, I was feeling cocky - I mean, we've cleared ToC dozens of times, and now we've even got a few pieces of gear from the next tier of content! What could go wrong?

...let's just say they don't call him Gormok the Impaler for nothing. Those poor, poor tanks.

From Hell's Heart, I Stab at Thee!

Yes, at long last, I've gotten my very own Yogg kill. Even after clearing the next tier of raiding content, and knocking out a number of Ulduar hard-mode encounters, finally beating He Who Haunts Orthodontists' Nightmares was still a supremely satisfying experience.

The night began with our guild's first attempt at the Assembly of Iron's hardest mode, killing Steelbreaker last. After learning and mastering the frantic shield-tranqing and add-killing of medium-mode over the past couple of weeks, the general impression was that taking down Steelbreaker last is, well... pretty easy. Yes, he has a 100% chance of killing whoever tanks him, but realistically, with fair DPS, he will go down soon after the first tank explodes.


We then made our way through Mimiron (within seconds of a death-free victory) and a repeat of Hodir and Vezax hard modes, and moved on to the endgame. This fight really comes down to execution on the part of the brain-room team; as long as everyone on the surface can stay alive and sane, getting to phase three well before the enrage is entirely a matter of pounding on Yogg's brain, and after a couple of false starts last night's group performed admirably.

Upon seeing phase three for the first time, my first impression was, "gee, there are a lot of Immortal Guardians!" This was followed quickly by, "gee, there are a lot of dead raiders!" But, with fewer missed portals during phase two the next time, and better damage allocation between Guardians and Yogg himself, our victory was secured.

We're Coming For You, Giant Constellation Man!

Last night's raid was a thing of beauty. Now that we'd got a handle on Yogg, it was agreed that there was no time like the present to begin pushing through the requisite hard-mode boss fights to unlock Algalon, as well as those needed for Glory of the Ulduar Raider along the way. So, with some trepidation as we were lacking a couple of key raid buffs, we undertook the initial task of retrieving the Archivum Data Disk from the Assembly of Iron. It took a few tries, but once we saw how Molgeim's adds behaved, we realized they could be AoE'd down before they had a chance to do much damage. Step one...

...complete!

Next up was Hodir. Since this hard-mode simply requires defeating the boss under a certain time limit, it is much like its normal counterpart - only moreso. Stacking all of the available buffs is non-optional. It is also necessary for the raid leader to know when to call for a wipe, to avoid accidentally killing Hodir after the timer has expired. Again, after a handful of tries...


...bam! We were rolling now.

Despite our newly-inflated confidence, we weren't quite intoxicated enough to push the Big Red Button, so after dispatching Mimiron the old-fashioned way, we decided to spend the last half hour of the raid on Vezax and the Saronite Animus. Without saronite puddles to stand in, mana efficiency becomes even more important for healers, which also means that not getting hit by life leech and shadow crash is even more important for the rest of the ranged. We gave it several attempts, the clock ticking ever closer to midnight, until, on what would have been our last attempt:


Victory!
/dance on a big dead lobster

So, yeah.

You Are Going to DPS Very, Very Slowly...

Some might call me a masochist, but sometimes it feels like a victory just isn't worth claiming unless it's been preceded by hours of futile, mind-numbing failure.

That's what we encountered in Onyxia redux Tuesday night. We had enough interest to put together two 10-man raids, each led by someone who was at least familiar with the encounter at level 60. And, truth be told, our strategy seemed sound: phase 1, burn the dragon while standing well away from her huge ass; phase 2, group up around two tanks to AOE the whelps, dodge Taco Breath, and kill the Guards from range to avoid their Blast Nova; phase 3, burn the dragon while positioning ourselves so as to avoid being feared into the pits-of-many-whelps. E-Z.

Only, not. We spent three hours regularly dieing at the phase 2 -> 3 transition. From my perspective, it seemed that we were losing too many people to Blast Novas and Deep Breaths. This led to an overabundance of adds due to lack of DPS, or, when a healer or tank was the victim, well, we know what happens then. Eventually, we just had to give up.

The odd thing is, when we gave it another shot last night, with many of the same people from Tuesday and a basically identical strategy, we took her down in one try. The only difference I could detect was perhaps a marginal increase in DPS over night one, as the Guards seemed to be dispatched slightly more cleanly than before.

Anyway, after banging our heads against a wall all night, victory was that much more glorious once we found the door. Now, mount farming!

Rock Lobster!

Last week's raiding saw our first serious attempt on General Vezax. We ultimately weren't successful, but we did learn a few things; we all agreed that the fight isn't hard, but simply a matter of getting used to the correct positioning and movement patterns.

First of all, avoiding players afflicted by Mark of the Faceless is the number one responsibility of all ranged players. It heals Vezax for a huge amount per second, and, as with most boss fights, victory is a matter of ending the fight before your accumulated mistakes reach critical mass.

This brings us to the matter of bursting the Saronite Vapors. After a couple of attempts in which we had assigned a single ranged DPS (read: me) to Vapor duty, it became clear that this inevitably led to crossing paths with Marked people who were trying to avoid the rest of the raid. Simply having whoever happened to be nearest to a spawned Vapor take care of it was much more effective.

Finally, regarding Shadow Crash, move farther away from the impending impact point than you think you need to - 10 yards can be an unexpectedly broad area >_>

Being Frozen Blows

Or, "Raid Composition Matters".

Last night we spent two hours wiping on Hodir, getting him down to 14% on our best attempt. Seeing as last week's group succeeded in taking him down, the task at hand is to isolate the factors which caused our difficulty.

1. There were a couple of people who had never seen the fight before, and were unclear as to how the Flash Freeze/snowdrift mechanic worked. However, this was soon explained and became less of an issue. Last week's group had at least one newbie as well.

2. Ok, the elephant in the room - the types of healers we had. The Hodir fight is a ludicrous piling-on of raid damage; between frozen blows and biting cold, toasty fires notwithstanding, everyone is taking damage all the time. Now, last week's group was ideally staffed to handle this: they had a priest for various AOE heals and a big ol' stamina buff, and a shaman for, well, what shamans do. Last night, on the other hand, we had a druid and two paladins. That means very little multi-unit healing, and two healers who have to stand still to do anything.

That being the case, I applaud our group, and especially our healers, for getting as far as we did. But I must also resign myself to the fact that beyond filling a role, sometimes class still matters. At least until everyone so outgears the encounter that it doesn't anymore.