Try spinning

Real life descended on us in an apocalyptic series of ‘net failures and assorted issues last night. Progress was made even in the face of such adversity… we did establish that we’re probably going to need either a convoluted nest team system or to monitor our wing buffs much better. Most of our DPS have some experience on the nests now, and that can only pay off. Tanks are coming up with Special Tricks™ to deal with the swipes. Everyone’s getting comfortable with the flow of the fight. Even with continuous mishaps, every pull we make goes to below 50%. We’ll get it.

It’s been a fairly good week, all told. I got vaguely disturbing shoulders off Tortos and bought myself a chestpiece, plus an LFR tier helm in which to slot my shiny new legendary meta. All of which puts me in contention for “best in guild” spot for overall gear. Can’t wait for 5.3, if only for the return of item upgrades.

See, there’s a little bit of an issue with DPS valour gear from the ToT vendors, and that issue is +Hit. There’s a simply obscene amount of hit floating around, to the point where I’m grossly overcapped on two characters and very slightly overcapped on my main. Oh, and no haste anywhere to be found.

I’m gemming for haste + stam in the overwhelming number of blue slots in the ToT gear, mildly jumpy at the thought of someone inspecting me and calling out my maxed mining and stam gems. Gonna hafta start hidin’ on the roof of the shrine, keepin’ a sharp eye in case the Gem Police show up to shame me into sharding dem purples. “You didn’t earn those, nub” they’ll say, their  Ray-Bans reflecting the abject shame on my face. “Y’all got carried! Get disenchantin’, and be happy we don’t just drop yo’ prettyboy ass in Goldshire”.

“What do you say, Garrosh?”
“You brought the Warchief in on this?”
“Oh no, Jack, we named the monkey Garrosh.”

Ahem. Honestly, though, there’s nothing much left at the valour vendors that won’t waste a ton of budget on pointless anti-avoidance. Being able to upgrade the pieces that aren’t slathered in it will be a welcome relief.

Meanwhile it’s a new week, a new lockout, and that treadmill ain’t gonna spin itself.

Gaining momentum

Always thought that was a rockfall, but no – it’s the boss

Goat is down.

Admittedly we used Special Tricks™ – our method for gathering up the bats was “suicidal Holy paladin switches Righteous Fury on just before bats spawn, heals like a mofo and prays the actual tank can steal aggro before said pala becomes a pink smear”. Go ahead and try this one at home, folks, it’s hi-larious.

Trick to getting the bats down in time turned out to be just kicking a turtle at them every now and then. Even so, we had a few moments where I’m not entirely sure how the healers kept the add tank up through Quake Stomp.

Still – we managed four(!) bosses on our first raid night of the week, leaving us sunday and tuesday for Megaera. Plenty of time! Which we didn’t actually need.

Not pictured: an overambitious multisnake

Megaera took a grand total of four pulls before she rolled over and… well, straight-up disappeared. Word to the wise if you’re planning on getting a screenshot for your kill: the corpse is already fading as her death animation plays. Which pretty much leaves a picture of a big box unless you’re a lot quicker on the draw than I was. Half expecting a “Forgotten Depths was merely a setback!” style not-really-dead-ism.

The actual fights was… a lot like LFR, actually, but with more damage and actual incentives for not standing in the green explodey stuff. For instance, it’ll one-shot you. We even used the good ol’ LFR tactic – green/red/repeat ad nauseam/win. Having three paladins meant three devotion auras, and with the sheer amount of magical damage in the fight – especially toward the end – that helps a lot. Three-healing made Rampage less dangerous than Acid Rain explosions, and Devo was probably used more often to deal with those than for the heavy healing phases.

That left us with most of the evening to spend on Ji-kun. We weren’t particularly well-prepared.

If you look up in the corner you can see someone still alive! THIS IS WHAT WINNING LOOKS LIKE.

That’s one prog boss per raid night so far this week, and we’ve got tuesday night to go before the reset. Current plans on what to do with the nests seem a bit sketchy – started out with us bouncing back to the platform between nests, but that results in running out of wing charges. Another plot was to have two nest groups so as to stagger people with the Feed buff on the boss, but it seems a little overcomplicated. The derp was strong with me, though. Maybe it just looked worse than it is.

We’ll come up with something, no doubt. Just wing it?

Godsdammit

The beast in question.

Last night I decided to try – once again – to get my rogue through PoS. Because the last 4 times I tried resulted in groups on Lei Shen.

Zone in and, hey, guess what… group’s in the Consorts’ room, half the raid having left before going for Lei Shen. Or even the trash. That’s five times I’ve tried to get into an instance whose first two bosses drop the weapons I so badly want, and five times I’ve not even gotten to see the first two encounters. In previous runs I’d stayed and tried to down it. This time I just left immediately and ate the Deserter debuff.

Why? Dead simple. Last time I tried sticking around it ended up being 5 wipes in a row on a long-ass fight, complete with waits for replacement party members each time. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was close on two miserable hours wasted on this piece of shit lazy fucking transcription of a boss. Having been through the 5-wipe story already on Dry earlier in the week with a mostly co-ordinated group, I was min for the same again. This boss is not worth the time investment.

What exactly is keeping Blizzard from reworking this miserable steaming pile of fail? I’d make two broad changes, and I guarantee that 90% of groups wouldn’t fall apart:

• Gut bouncing bolts. Keep the mechanic where they summon adds when they hit unless someone’s under them, but kill their ability to bounce and summon more adds. One bolt, one add, that’s it.
• Alternately, spawn all of the bouncing bolts in one quadrant only.
• Slap an upper limit of 5 targets on Diffusion Chain.

The aim is pretty clear. What screws people over – what should have been pointed out by some mentally prolapsed design drone’s five-year-old daughter – is that the intermission spread mechanic requires too much co-ordination and preparation from random PuGs. So, set it up so that we can stack in one quadrant without being reamed hard by adds and Diffusion. Ta-da! Problem fucking solved. You’re welcome.

Or we could just stick with 2 hour boss fights and people constantly leaving the instance. Wouldn’t be my call.

Well, I guess that’s settled

After a couple of nights characterised by waiting for people to be ready to raid, we managed to get all the way through to Tortos again. So we’ve got all of tuesday to work on him and his bats. Um, yay?

Tried a couple of new things on Horridon, and they worked out pretty well – having a boomkin and shaman combo works out magnificently, since Symbiosis means you get two Solar Beams for the price of one on the second door, and we had our fresh paladin tank handling the adds exclusively while the death knight took care of the boss. Avenger’s Shield: interrupting all the things since 2008. With our surplus of paladins we could always just HoP puncture stacks off the boss tank.

Council went smoothly, with us making the damage requirement despite not being crazy enough to solo-tank it. Loot happened. And lo, didst a choir of angels descend from on high.

“Where’s dat wascawwy twicewatops?”

For anyone not understanding the flowery prose, that’s my paladin wielding Zerat, Malakk’s Soulburning Greatsword. Thunderforged edition.

This is one of the few weapons so far this xpac that looks better in its normal incarnation than in raid finder. Plus the colour scheme fits neatly with my existing transmog, which is always nice. And then there’s the fact that it is an ilvl 528 weapon OMG you guys. I’m going to have to perform to justify having been awarded the thing, and there’s so much hit on melee gear at the moment that I’m having a hard time making the most of its itemisation, but WORDS WORDS WORDS the master wants MURDER

Seriously, I can hardly wait to go hit something with this thing. It also means the out-of-place whining from my last post is moot, since my best character now has an almost distressingly phat weapon.

I said whadup

And now, a couple of touching, personal moments from the raid. Because it’s all about the touchy feelies. We’ll start with Giac, no longer bringing shame upon our fine guild with his half-transmog. Now he can bring shame upon us while looking entirely fabulous!

“I like the way it makes my nosehairs stand on end”

Next: does your shaman have a Chain Lightning addiction? Is he winding up for that delicious multi-target release even while waiting for a pull, explaining tactics, eating or mounted? Call 0-800-BUFF-NAO for help! Always remember: you and your gigantic pile of smouldering corpses are not alone.

(This is a pretty persistent graphical glitch that seems to show up constantly for shammies. At least it makes them look pretty badass. Perma-casting for the win.)

And now to prepare for the Entortening.

Sweeping through

Death to all who oppose us

Council down, and only a week after our first Horridown. Let’s get some detail up in here.

Part 1: in which we present the team

From left to right, we have:

• Ellaelyra, apparently having bounced away from her elemental
• Sidhe, hers behaving for once
• Esirpus, just glad he no longer has to watch energy meters
• Giac, wearing half a transmog, which is just weak
• Idie, eyeing the stairs with trepidation
• Raijin, who seems quite happy with the thunderforged fist that dropped
• Yours truly, reconsidering that tabard for ranged shots
• Madrox, not to be confused with his former death knight incarnation, despite both being tanks
• Delta, presiding over the traditional “What’d he drop?!” ceremony
• AODPriest, who despite being an Angel Of Death spent the fight healing

That’s two mages, two priests, three paladins and miscellaneous filler. Ideal comp we ain’t, but it works out, probably because of how damn pretty we all are. Well, except Giac.

Part 2: in which we discuss the fight

From the first pull, this fight already felt much better than Horridon. Everything’s up on the table. The issue with add fights is that each add is just another thing that can go wrong in its own special way, and is literally trying to do so at every moment. Horridon feels hopeless because every time you get a handle on one set of issues, a whole new set shows up. We didn’t exactly one-shot the council, but every time we wiped it felt like we were getting closer, like our tactical adjustments were making a difference. Progress felt like progress.

Our first night on the fight was a few pulls after a messy Horridon kill. Last night we approached it with a new tactic: stack ‘em all up and cleave them down. If this sounds less than tactical, rest assured that you’re probably entirely correct. Still, it works.

In 10 man, the healing add actually heals for less than its own HP. That makes switching to it and burning it a complete waste of time, and also removes any incentive not to stack all three of the tankable bosses together for cleave damage. Stacking has another advantage if you have a paladin tank: Avenger’s Shield can interrupt Sul and Mar’li in one shot. This significantly reduces damage over the course of the fight.

As the one and only melee, I was assigned to stay on Sul from the beginning and burn/interrupt him until his inevitable messy death. The other DPS also focussed Sul until the empowering add hit a predetermined energy state; 50 for Malakk and Mar’li, 30 for Kazra’jin, since he’s annoying to stay on and using cooldowns is a good way to reflect oneself to death.

The fight effectively has three enrage timers. First there’s the usual one, which is actually pretty generous. Next there’s the empowered energy count per boss, which can be fudged without too much difficulty. And then there’s the one that matters, which is Sul’s turn at being empowered. Make no mistake – allowing him to empower is an enrage. There is nothing in the fight more damaging than Sandstorm, the adds that he summons are tough and will kill people without much effort, the sand-patches that the adds leave behind when they die do a truckload of damage, and to complicate matters, one of the tanks is usually stuck taking a Frigid Assault at the same time the adds show up.

So yeah. The very first attempt where we downed Sul was also our kill. It took a couple of tries to refine, and we did end up with two of the three healers in atonement spec hammering at Sul as well. Once he’s down, though, the rest are just a formality.

Part 3: in which we consider the future

Yeah, having some second thoughts about this…

So we’re 3/12 now, and facing off against the might of Tortos, who is most assuredly a goat. As that video points out, melee DPS aren’t great on this fight. We tried one or two pulls just to have a look, and for my paladin the outlook is pretty dismal.

I can’t effectively DPS the turtles, can’t kick, and the only AoE slow that I have is also my primary DPS talent, which doesn’t maintain the snare outside its stationary area of effect. I could maybe go with Burden of Guilt, which I used for a while as a PvP talent. Most of my usual utility is useless here.  Perhaps Hand of Sacrifice isn’t, but warriors get the same ability as a talent and we have two other paladins now.

As for specific challenges that we’ve encountered: the turtles spin fast. Despite having two frost mages, we’re still seemingly coming up short on slows. Our ‘lock has no idea what the AoE snare that fatboss mentioned even is. Further, the bats will happily take a tank to the cleaners in the short stun just after Quake Stomp, so we’re going to need an antidote for that. Blinding Light doesn’t appear to work on them at all.

We’ve only had three pulls on the fight, though. We’ll adapt and overcome.

Part 4: in which Leit whines about gear, because he is bad at this game

By halfway through part 3, anyone with a semi-intact cognitive center was probably already going “oh, he’s thinking about changing mains again“. Well, yeah. Altoholic, right here. I hope you’re very pleased by your impressive deductive skills.

Thing is… I finished out t14 without a single normal drop equipped. The couple of drops I did get were tanking gear that no-one else could use. Even LFR refused to give me any slack. Things looked up for a minute on the release of the third segment of LFR ToT, where I suddenly got two whole useful drops in a single week, but before and since it’s been just as barren.

Paladin’s been gearing decently from valour. Started out with a decent nest-egg that’s paid off well, and not having to grind a hundred different reps in order to actually spend my currency means I’m actually motivated to go out and earn it in the first place. Thing is, though, gearing from valour means I only get an upgrade every couple of weeks. Without an edge from raid drops, alts can catch up pretty damn quickly, especially if they’re the tiniest bit luckier than Dry. If the alt in question can bid on gear that isn’t also desirable to other players in the raid, that helps as well.

That last item in particular points to my rogue, who brings decent mobilty, damage equivalent to my better-geared paladin, AoE slows and cast time reduction, a misdirect, good personal survivability and no real raid utility beyond Smokebomb. Unfortunately the rogue’s gearing has sort of fallen by the wayside as I’ve been reconnecting with my warrior, and his only foray into gearing this week resulted in ragequitting after ending up in multiple PoS runs with only Lei Shen up.

Meanwhile, said warrior brings a mean amount of raid utility. The only class that can bring the raid cooldown of Skull Banner, she’s got a raid damage reduction banner as well, an AoE taunt banner if I’m feeling suicidal, excessive amounts of mobility, a raidwide health cooldown, talents for AoE stuns, interrupts, spell reflects, slows and snares, a talented Hand of Sacrifice equivalent, and exceedingly good AoE damage. Where she falls short is in personal survivability and the fact that she’s still rolling on the same plate and strength weapons that everyone else wants. At least she isn’t on the same token as literally 60% of the raid, for one day when that matters.

There are two things that have been keeping me on my pally for the moment: momentum and utility. Now that we’ve got a paladin tank again the second is less important, and I can bring plenty to the table with another class. Dry is still the best geared of my characters, and the one whose ins and out I know best, so he’s still got momentum on his side. But how long before the same frustration as t14 rears its head?

Iiiiidentification matrix mismatch

Character re-customisations. Some people won’t touch ‘em… it basically takes the character you’ve built up and turns it into someone you don’t know anymore. Others, like my brother, will change names and races as the idea hits them. I’ve generally been in the former camp, preferring to start a new character from scratch.

Have you met my enormous spike?

A little while back I mentioned playing my warrior but not really knowing why. She’s been pretty much neglected since forever, and I had no real idea what I was doing with her. Since then I’ve worked out the Arms and Single Minded Fury playstyles, picked up a Sha axe and a pair of PvP 1-handers, and I can acquit myself at least well enough to pass muster in LFR. Bizarrely, the Arms playstyle that prefer does about the same damage as my somewhat undergeared SMF – got two sets of gear, and SMF is actually almost full PvP gear. I can use my raid cooldowns sensibly, rush across the battlefield like that blasted mosquito that just won’t let you get to sleep, and solo the rares on the Isle of Thunder.

This is all completely beside the point.

Vensters is a she, or at least as close as an unliving atrocity can get. That doesn’t stop me from identifying much more strongly with her than my other characters. She’s slim, moves a little oddly, tiny compared to everyone else. She holds herself a little apprehensively, looks out at the world with an expression that’s accepting but careful. She has agility without much in the way of grace, and seems barely connected to the world at the best of times, hefting her frankly enormous weapons with visible effort. She’s even got a severe case of coder’s hunch.

I end up referring to her as “he” more often than not.

This is starting to get on my nerves. I’m unsure whether I should recustomise as a male undead – males are nearly bestial, stalking rather than running, expressing relentless brutality in their attacks rather than the disconnected violence of the females. Which is not to say that Vensters doesn’t look predatory and dangerous in her combat crouch – quite the opposite – but it’s the impersonal danger of a steel trap rather than the psychotic threat of a slavering rottweiler.

On the plus side, forsaken males also aren’t grimacing, musclebound hulks; merely grimacing. Their faces are pretty much awful, but their /dance is BiS. There are a lot more shoulder options that don’t look cramped, but I’m probably going to have to find a helmet. I don’t know.

Starting a new character is just too much of a mission at the moment – the thought of levelling through pandaria again conjures lights behind my eyes, and I can see my ancestors when I think of redoing all of the work I’ve put in to gear her. No, this is not something that can happen. But if I change her will I still connect with her in the same way?

These are Pvp dailies. Elite dinosaurs is cheating.

What the actual fuck

And here I was thinking it only stacked to 30%

Usually I won’t go into a newly released wing of LFR until at least the weekend. By that point tactics have sort of filtered down and you’ll see a few alts of folks who’ve done it before.

Last night I went to Pinnacle of Storms. A wednesday night, the same night that it was released*. It was… disastrous.

The group wasn’t particularly good to start with – healing was unremarkable apart from one or two outliers carrying the group, and the tanks had no idea what the tactics were. That last point? It’s pretty damn important in PoS**.

So we had one or two wipes on the starter bosses, but that’s all well and good for the first week. The problem is Lei Shen. Lei Shen has so many mechanics going on that I literally cannot fucking remember them right now. Lei Shen requires bullshit like standing in particular types of bad, clustering on people with certain debuffs, and most egregiously, splitting up into even groups around the platform for phase 2.

That split phase? It requires co-ordination. You need a healer on every corner, or else you’re going to end up with people dying of static and/or when they try and stand in the bouncing bullshit that summons adds. Which is blue, on a blue floor, with blue lightning crackling all over the damn place, and pretty blue lights goddamn everywhere.

LFR was insituted specifically for people who aren’t in co-ordinated groups! It’s like a missionary worker refusing to help locals because they’re heathens. This is a complete disconnect with the core of your mission here, buddy.

Anyway… that’s not to mention the adds that sometimes showed up for no apparent reason in P1 and started AoEing the group. Just another example of a mechanic that comes out of nowhere. As far as I can tell, the boss has three different “don’t stand in this” raid-killers, one of which leaves a voidzone that is literally invisible with low particle effects, but always seems to be in melee range. Adds show up from nowhere for no sensible reason. Tanks die just fucking because.

Mostly, though, the fight is ridiculously chaotic. There are a bunch of fireworks all going off around the player in the same timeframe, and the majority that your average folks need to react to are entirely counter-intuitive.

Dropping the damage of the boss’ abilities and calling it a day is not good enough. This is at its core a normal difficulty fight. I’ve seen responses to the difficulty that state “go watch a normal diff kill video, you’ll know what to do”. I shouldn’t need to. This is LFR. Why should we need a normal mode guide – from an external source – for a supposedly casual encounter difficulty? Why the hell can the abilities the boss uses not be coherent and self-explanatory?

This fight isn’t going to get much better. If you luck out and get a good group that knows the tactics and can muster the co-ordination to respond to them appropriately, you’re golden. If you get an average LFR group… well, good luck. My group last night wiped 8 times and got him down on the 9th try. One of our wipes didn’t even give us any determination, for some reason. That’s a 35% buff that we were sitting on. I’ve already heard campfire tales of 9 and 10 stacks.

If you’re going to rely on Determination to overpower the tactics – as seems to be Blizzard’s intent – you’re going to be facing a mean repair bill. In the meantime… welcome to Madness of Deathwing V2.

And a failbag to top it off. Screw this guy.

 

* for the americans playing along, EU get their updates one day later

** ermehgerd, it already has the perfect acronym