Mmm, Tastes Like Crow!

A real man can admit when he's been wrong.

...
...
*cough*

So, anyway, last week's ToC10 group hit a rather nasty snag with the Horde Faction Champions encounter, and it was beginning to look like this week would be a repeat failure. The fairly random nature of the enemies' target-selection and immunity to crowd control caused us to repeatedly succumb to the general chaos before we could bring even one healer down. Gradually, though, through several tactical iterations, we hit upon a successful combination of DPS allocation and kill order to finally take them down - at least with this particular team matchup. Still, I think our throw-everything-at-their-best-healer-first method should be pretty generally applicable.

Next, new encounter! I have to admit, even though the Twin Valkyr aren't exactly hard (assuming one isn't dyslexic), they are fun, which the Faction Champions are decidedly not. In fact, we were having such a good time, that it came as something of a punch to the gut when our entire raid was unceremoniously disconnected when we were seconds away from one-shotting the encounter. Garrosh is behind this, I know it.

Anyway, it was a good night overall. Even if I'm somewhat happier with the level of difficulty presented by ToC's later bosses, I'm still ambivalent about the design of the raid in general. While foregoing trash can make for a fairly quick run, the gladiatorial arena schtick still comes across as a lazy way to implement raid content.

That's all until next week, when the floor unexpectedly collaps- aaaaiiiiieeee....

The Bleeding Edge

Or, I Cut Myself Raiding.

As is obvious, I haven't been writing much lately. This isn't really for lack of raiding progress, so much as lack of anything very interesting to talk about. Although we have yet to beat Yogg (here's hoping for this weekend), we've easily taken down the two Trial of the Crusader bosses introduced thus far.

Too easily. Really, after Ulduar, ToC just feels like a design cop-out and ramping down in difficulty. Hell, it barely feels like a raid. I'm holding out hope that the remaining encounters will be somewhat more interesting, but at this point I'm much more interested in pursuing Ulduar hard-modes and ultimately Algalon.

Rock Lobster - Down!

With Vezax having smugly rebuffed our attempts to crack open his carapace and eat him with butter during last week's regularly-scheduled raiding, last night we initialized the Emergency Last-minute Boss Owning (ELBOW) protocol, and took on the last two regular-difficulty bosses in Ulduar.

It took a handful of attempts, but everything finally came together, and Vezax fell over. That left only Yogg-Saron and his crazy girlfriend.

Our best attempts saw us make it to the beginning of phase two, where we were overwhelmed by an excess of Guardians of Yogg-Saron. We had some trouble with people hitting clouds, and Guardians blowing up before they could be herded to Sara. We finally called it a night after... a lot of tries... but, we killed a new boss and saw a new encounter, which makes it a good night in my book.

Because Unlike People, Animals Are Never Jerks

I've been meaning to mention this for a while, and I'm sure if you're reading this then you're already aware of it, but Brajana of the blog Mend Pet, who is obviously more organized than I will ever be, has put together a donation drive for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Now, I've had a number of pets in my lifetime - two dogs, a cat, countless goldfish - and I've also worked in retail. It has been my experience that animals are more considerate, understanding, and simply pleasant to be around than most people. The least we can do is try to provide them with a decent standard of living.

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 >_>

Theorycraft From the Comfort of Your Browser

My guild-leader and fellow hunter has just brought to our attention something that should be of interest to the hunter community: Shandara's Hunter DPS Spreadsheet is now available for use in-browser, no Excel necessary!

D-emblem-ocratization

I've been putting off commenting on any Patch 3.2 changes, in anticipation of further revisions rendering anything I might say obsolete, but I feel I can at least throw in my two cents on a topic that's been the focus of much angst among raiders: the consolidation of pre-Triumph emblems, allowing players to purchase up to tier 8.5 gear by potentially running nothing more advanced than heroic 5-man dungeons.

The argument against this is that it devalues the accomplishments of raiders who successfully progressed through Ulduar, by giving the same gear to people running hNexus every day. Now, I would have agreed with this point if the change were implemented before a new tier of content was opened. But the fact is, is hasn't been - on the day that Conquest gear is available to the unwashed masses, all of the serious raiders are going to be diving into Triumph-tier gear.

And I'm cool with that. Progress through the current endgame content has always been the metric by which the relative hardness of a player's core is measured, and that isn't changing. So, my fellow elitist jerks, catch you in the Coliseum.