WoW - My Month of Naxx [Archive] - Quarter To Three Forums

jeffd

04-06-2009, 12:34 AM

I first stepped into Naxxramas on March 5th at the MT and leader of a raid. Tonight, thirty one days later, we dropped Kel'Thuzad. This is sort of a retrospective on my experiences in my month of raiding Naxxramas. I know clearing KT is no big deal; but I'm pretty proud of our little group.

The raid was a joint effort between the guild I'm in with 2 other friends (the Thunder Bluff Royal Navy) and a guild several of our offline friends and acquaintences are in. It was the so-called "B" group, because the other guild had been raiding Naxx for 2 months already. The raid was made up of three or four members of the "A" raid, as well as a bunch of newcomers - myself included.

The first run: 3/5/09
To say things started off rough is an understatement. The A group had spent the previous month and a half or so basically bouncing off of Grobbulus and Gluth - the theory they had was "if we can clear construct, we can do everything." I had no such illusions, my intention was to do the easy stuff first to get people geared up to take down the harder quarters. We had to PUG a few slots, and we ended up getting started probably an hour late, I'd say.

So there we are, at the entrance of spider quarter. We AOE down the little tiny guys, and then it's time for the first pull. I go in, in within ten seconds I'm dead. WTF!?!?! Wipe.

We regroup, figure maybe we missed some debuff or poison or something. After all - raiding is hard. We pull again and.... WIPE!

I wonder if you can figure out what was going wrong...

After the third wipe we figure "Man, this is hard. Let's go over to Construct Quarter - half of us have done the early pulls in there already." I start figuring burn order, there are four constructs ahead of me and I'm soliciting the opinion of folks on which ones to kill first.

"Wait, there's only supposed to be two," says one of the group's old hands.

"You are a fucking idiot!" one of my friends yells into Vent. To this day I think this is the first, last, and only time I've heard his voice in Vent - for some reason he's allergic to microphones.

Figure it out yet? "Out of the instance everyone!" I command. Once we're all out I set the difficulty away from Heroic, and we head back in.

Trash pulls were suddenly much easier! Before long we were at Anub'Rekhan. We bounced off him once - for at least one healer it was his first time in Naxx, and he underestimated the sheer DPS I'd be taking. For my part - I was really nervous about this fight. I'd been tanking for maybe a month or two total; I'd only done a handful of heroics - I studied up on that one fight more than any other fight in the game. I was convinced I'd fuck it up. I didn't though - he went down easily on the second try; and I don't think we've wiped on him since.

We were on to Faerlina! We one shotted her; honestly the fight was easy. I went down on the second enrage - again I think the healer wasn't ready for the level of incoming DPS I'd take. Our OT picked her up beautifully though; and I watched the second half of the fight from the sidelines. It was an awesome thing to see; the OT picked her up beautifully and carried the fight to its conclusion - a theme that would be repeated more than once in our Naxx runs.

At this point we were approaching midnight server time, which was when the raid was scheduled to end. Rather than push on to Maexna, we opted to go try to take down Patchwerk. Trash pulls in Construct Quarter took a while; we didn't quite make it to Patchwerk before the raid broke up for the night.

All in all I wasn't unhappy. After the Heroic SNAFU things settled down and went quite smoothly. I was no longer a raiding newb.

The A raid bounced off of Maexna that night before going to drop Patchwerk.

jeffd

04-06-2009, 12:35 AM

The second run: 3/12/09

"We're the B group," I told my raid at the beginning of the run. "The B stands for Better than A". I'd decided that we were going to beat the A group. They had better gear, and more experienced raiders - but that didn't matter. We'd fight smarter, and we'd clear more than them. And we did. I'm sure my silly pontificating about being better than A didn't mean much, but I like to think it provided just a little extra motivation.

Back into the Spider Quarter! We one shotted our way through it. We even dropped Maexna on our first try - something that, up to this point, neither raid had accomplished. But that wasn't enough - it was on to Plague Quarter. This was a first for both raids - none of us had been in there before. Noth went down like the joker he is, and it was on to Heighan. We wiped on the first attempt at the Heighan dance, and dropped him on our second try. That one was lots of fun - about halfway through his health bar we were down to the OT, a healer, and a pair of DPS. They took their sweet time at taking Heighan from about halfway to zero - but they thought of their dead friends, and did us the favor of dancing for our entertainment. Repeatedly with us cheering them on.

The Loatheb Gauntlet intimidated us, so we opted to skip it and go take down Patchwerk before calling it a night. We did so, one shotting Kel'Thuzad's morbidly obsese buddy - a first time kill for some of us.

The A-group cleared Spider a while after us - we ran ahead of them the whole night. They dropped Noth, but skipped out on Heighan before heading to Patchwerk. Just as I'd assured my group - we were better than A that night. We cleared more bosses, and we cleared them faster.

The third run: 3/19/09

"Someone's getting their T7 shoulders tonight," I assured the raid as we began. "I'm not going to say who though, that would ruin the surprise." Loatheb awaited us.

That third week was a bit rougher than the awesome run we'd had the week before. One of our healers abruptly decided he was done with WoW until December. This left us to PUG a healer, never an easy task. It was nearly 45 minutes into the scheduled run before we got started, and throughout the night we were having DPS drop in and out on us. Spider Quarter went down quickly, as it always does. Then it was on to Plague Quarter. At this point we'd had to find two replacement DPS's - finally settling on taking a third tank as a warm body (the husband of one of our regular members). We started clearing Plague Quarter - this time only one person died on the Heighan Dance. Then it was on to Loatheb - if you look through the archives, you can find my post pleading for advice on how to handle the Loatheb gauntlet. We wiped twice on Loatheb. Each time was agonizing - we knew our DPS was pretty anemic, owing to a combination of less well-geared players and two more tanks than the fight required. On the first attempt we had him down to about 47% health on Inevitable Doom #18 when we wiped - this one didn't count though; I'd forgotten the gate would shut and I locked out our Shadow Priest and the Hunter's pet. Our second attempt was the real heartbreaker - 4.4% health remaining; Inevitable Doom 21 and we went down.

Something was different about the third attempt - he was going down way faster. I don't really know what we did differently - maybe we were more on the ball about popping spores, maybe we managed our cooldowns better, something. Either way I could tell that this was the one. Loatheb went down - and just as I'd assured my raid, one of us got their T7 shoulders. In this case, it was our Retadin.

B was better than A once more - A decided not to go any further than Heighan.

The fourth run: 3/26/09-3/27/09

This was the prelude to our final clear of Naxramas. Our Thursday run was like clockwork - we got started on time and one shotted our way through both Spider and Plague Quarters. There really was nothing of note here - what can you say when you are chewing through everyone. Even the Loatheb Gauntlet went more smoothly, as we incorported some of the advice we got here on qt3 (thanks guys!)

We hit Patchwerk too that night, and it was a real demonstration of how far our group had come in reacting to adversity. The pull got messed up (by me); I was the Hateful Strike tank and wasn't in range to take the first one. It landed on the MT (the only person who had any aggro), who promptly exploded. I picked Patchwerk up, but before one of our Druids could get a battle-rez in a Hateful Strike landed on the retadin. By that point the other tank was back up. We recovered, and took Patchwerk down.

Two weeks earlier, that would have been a wipe. On that night, owing to a combination of better skill, coordination, and gear - it was just another one shot.

I was out of town on Friday, but the MT healer (who posts here and will hopefully add his thoughts and impressions) rallied the troops for another go. Raz apparently gave them a bounce while the tanks learned their trade, but they then one shotted Gothik and Four Horsemen.

A group ran two nights as well - I guess they finally realized that the B group was showing them up. But they didn't bring their A game (hah!) - apparently they bounced off of Raz a few times and gave up, opting to go drop Patchwerk instead.

Like I said, hopefully the healer who posts her can add more.

jeffd

04-06-2009, 12:36 AM

The Fall of Naxxramas: 4/2/09 - 4/5/09

The week before the raid had cleared three out of four quarters of Naxxramas. Only Construct Quarter remained - but we knew it would be our greatest challenge. The original raid group had started raiding in early January, and had bounced off of Grobbulus more times than I can count. And when they got past Grobbulus, Gluth stopped them.

Thursday night we decided to drop Plague and Military Quarters. The reason for this was twofold. First - more T7 gear. Second, we can drop Spider Quarter in our sleep, at this point - I knew that Construct Quarter would be our bane. As usual, we one shotted our way through Thursday night. I was impressed with how easily we dispatched the Military Quarter - those fights are a little funky for the tanks, and we one shotted all of them.

The A group, in the meantime, had finally found its game. They went through Construct Quarter, Spider Quarter, and Noth before the night was through. Two months of banging their head against Grobbulus paid off, as they one shotted Patchwerk, Grobbulus, and Gluth. They moved on to Spider Quarter and cleared it, and then took down Noth for good measure. They were in the lead, and had cleared the hardest wing.

We resumed Friday night at 9PM Server Time. Patchwerk went down in one shot, as usual - a textbook kill. Then it was on to Grobbulus - the first time many of us (myself included) had faced him.

It's kind of funny what a difference one month makes. I sweated Anub'Rekhan like nothing else. Grobbulus is a far more difficult fight, more demanding of everyone - tank, healers, and DPS - and yet I was confident in the raid. We'd bounce a few times, but we'd beat him.

And bounce we did! It took us five attempts to down Grobbulus. Like the first time we downed Loatheb - on the final attempt, something just clicked. It wasn't one of those fights were it's a close thing at the end - we just smacked the crap out of him. I think we had better coordination with dropping poison clouds.

It was time to face Gluth - a boss none of us in the raid had ever defeated. Gluth took us three attempts to down. As is the case for most raids - the trick was figuring out the kiting. We had a mage doing the kiting, and the first attempt ended pretty disastrously. The second attempt was, if possible, worse - tons of zombie chow got through. At that point we flipped around healing assignments, to make sure our burliest healers were on the kiters. We also had two mages trade off kiting, to allow the stacking debuff to wear off. Gluth went down, literally as he hit his enrage timer.

We wiped on the way to Thaddeus - ambushed by a shade who managed to pull a patrol, who pulled a nearby static spawn. Once we recovered, we entered Thaddeus's chamber. "We're going to see Sapphiron tonight," I PMed the leader of the A raid - a good friend of mine. "We're going to kill Kel'Thuzad," he replied. By that point the A raid had burned through plague quarter and was working its way through Military Quarter. As much as I hoped otherwise, I knew he was right. Even though the B raid had lead the way, the first Kel'Thuzad kill would go to them.

Thaddeus took us two attempts. I'm sure there's a raid out there who downed him on their first try - we're not that raid. Even the second attempt was a typical SNAFU. On a lot of fights where only one tank is required I have the OT tank the boss while I switch into Unholy presence to give a bit more DPS. This was to be one of those fights. Unfortunately, my tankadin friend took a swim. I picked him up, and we began the burn process. It was slow - we lost a few DPS, and as soon as the other tank got up to the platform he was electrocuted to death. We burned him though - a two shot. Now, only Spider Quarter lay between us and Frostwyrm Lair. It was 2 AM, server time. None of us were going to stop before taking a crack at Sapphiron.

Spider Quarter was... a cakewalk. We ripped through it, until Maexna. When we got to her - through some combination of hubris and punchiness (it was nearly 1AM on the West Coast for much of us, nearly 3AM server time where our Retadin lives) we wiped. We recovered, and downed Maexna on the second shot (in record time, according to DBM). The way to Frostwyrm Lair was open.

The A raid had bounced off of Sapphiron a few times, but they'd dropped her. At this point they were doing battle with Kel'Thuzad - wiping on him over and over again. I was exhausted - I'd been playing for six hours at this point, far longer than I typically did. All of us were tired; you could hear it in our voices in Vent and in the typos in Raid Chat. We went over the fight, and stepped into Frostwyrm Lair. Since this was a one tank fight, and I figured we'd need every ounce of DPS, I told the OT to go ahead and take her.

We one shotted her. I mean we just obliterated her - she didn't stand a chance. The A group was still bouncing off of Kel'Thuzad. We still had a chance.

We couldn't do it though. We took two shots at Kel'Thuzad that night, both ended when I was caught in a fissure. I was just too tired to pay attention to everything that was going on. During our first attempt, I recieved a triumphant message from the A group's main tank. They'd done it.

We weren't going to fail though. We'd come so far - there was absolutely no way we were not going to destroy Kel'Thuzad. I proposed we take him down on Sunday night. All but one of the raiders could make it. We lost our shadow priest, but we got our Feral Druid back - he was normally one of our top DPS, but had missed Thursday and Friday.

jeffd

04-06-2009, 12:37 AM

The End: 4/5/09

"Kel'Thuzad must be stopped. No matter the cost." So read my guild's MOTD this morning. I'm a big nerd, and nothing fires me up like quoting Optimus Prime. One month to the day after our Naxx run began, we stepped into the floating citadel. This time we went straight to Frostwyrm Lair, and into Kel'Thuzad's chamber.

"This is the end of the road, Kel'Thuzad!" I had my toon yell as the battle began. Another Transformers quote. Yeah, it's from Hot Rod - sue me; it's the one cool moment he ever had.

I know some raiders who get pissy and frustrated at wipes. I don't - wiping is how you learn. Every time we wiped on Kel'Thuzad, I asked "what happened there?" I wanted to make sure that we never lost the same way twice. EVentually we'd eliminate all the flaws in our strategy and execution. Our first attempt went quite well - though we lost one DPS quite early on in the fight. We got him down to about 10% health, which was awesome. The final moments of that fight are incredibly hectic - in this case, we'd been steadily losing DPS as the fight went on. To be honest I can't recall what dropped us - there are so many things that can break you in that fight. We got close though; closer than I'd imagined.

The second attempt was a bit of a disaster. In my opinion (based on fighting Kel'Thuzad maybe a half dozen times) the first 30 seconds or so after Kel'Thuzad goes active are key. If you can drop the final trash and get into position on him, the fight becomes rather mechanical. On this run, we didn't do that - people were out of position, frost blast chained, and the wipe happened quickly. It was just me, a couple DPS, and Kel'Thuzad sitting at about 76%. "I've got him right where I want him!" I shouted. Then I died. In this case, what had screwed us was positioning - the healers weren't able to cover one another without moving, and when the frost block hits there's just no time to move.

I screwed us on the third attempt. We lost a DPS early due to chaining frost blocks, but we were doing OK. Until I tripped over a fissure. One of the healers called OOM, I glanced away - to the healer's mana bar of all things; as if maybe I"d find out he was just joking or something. A fissure popped up, and BOOM that was that. By the time I realized what was happening, it was over.

Before the fourth attempt, I got everyone to pause in Sapphiron's lair. The big circle there is pretty close in layout to the one in Kel'Thuzad's chamber. We spent maybe five, ten minutes going over positioning. Rather than everyone find an open spot we decided that we'd just have static positions everyone would move to when Kel'Thuzad went active. I'd call break, everyone would circle up.

Something was different on that fourth run - I could feel it. We were burning him faster and harder than ever before. We lost one person early, but the feral druid smoothly battle res'd. We poured it on to him - 50%, 45% and then the adds came up. The off tank picked them up perfectly, moving into the position we'd deliberately left open for that purpose. 40%. 30%. We lost our hunter. "Tighten up!" one of the healers ordered. I was tanking my heart out the whole fight - rolling every cooldown I had, strangulating and interrupting whenever they were off cooldown to make the healer's life easier. The less healing I needed; the more healing went to the raid. 20%. 10%. He was going down fast. I glanced up at the OT's health bar, to see how he was weathering the damage from the Guardians. I knew that so long as they weren't yet angry enough to really hurt him, we were going to win.

And then - disaster.

It was a fissure - but not beneath me. It was beneath a healer, the one closest to me. He stepped away from it, but in doing so stepped closer to me. A frost block chained onto me. A second later, I was done. Kel'Thuzad was at 9.6% health. The raid was now missing the MT, one DPS, and one healer.

"Jaq, pick him up!" I shouted into Ventrillo. If Kel'Thuzad could be stopped from instantly dropping another healer, we had a chance. As he had so many times before, the OT grabbed Kel'Thuzad beautifully. I watched the numbers tick down. 9.2. 8.7. 8. 7.5. I called them out in Ventrillo, cheering every bit of damage the raid poured on. Another Frost Block landed, this time on one of the healers. The last remaining healer decided it was go time, and focused entirely on the tank. At 4 I knew we had him. I cheered every last bit of DPS, finally giving out a huge shout when he went down. On our fourth attempt of the night, our sixth total - one month to the day after first stepping foot in Naxxramas - we cleared it. I tabbed over to my music player and kicked off "The Touch" and blasted it for about ten seconds. Yes, more Transformers geekery.

Raiding has been a fun experience. I poo-pood the concept for a long time - the incessant grind, doing the same shit over and over just to get a marginal gear upgrade so you can go do some other shit over and over again, DKP nonsense... And maybe the grind will wear at me. But this past month has been amazing fun. The group has grown together - overcoming obstacles, bonding, having a good time. In my mind this has been WoW at its finest.

I think we'll be taking some time off this week - we'll probably run Naxx, but not three nights. Week after that it will be back to work. We'll gear up, start really farming it. Malygos won't last very long. By then hopefully Ulduar will have landed, and we'll be able to do it all over again.

Rasputin

04-06-2009, 01:21 AM

As the guy who was healing Jeff through all this, as well as having been around for the raid attempts previous to the A/B split, I'll give a little more from the other side.

I started running with my DPS DK, where, as Jeff said, the thought was to start in Construct to see how well we'd do. We plowed through Patchwerk fairly easily, only wiping a few times while learning the fight. Grobbulus destroyed us, though (I think he's really more of a gear check than Patchwerk in addition to the coordination aspect) and when we finally got him down Gluth annihilated us.

By that point we had enough folks with 80 toons to split into the two raids. Only a few of us went over to the B raid, and I swapped out to my resto Druid to heal Jeff's DK since we work really well together. The other healers we got from the pool were also top notch, which really helped because with the exception of our feral Druid Jeff mentioned, our DPS was lackluster, some of the lower end of the guild trough.

One thing that really helped us was some fantastic PUGged members we got. In particular was a DPS DK that we had for several weeks, until she disappeared from the server. There were a few others as well, mad props go to a Hunter who filled in while Jeff was away on the Friday run and filled us in on how to beat Gothik and the Horsemen. Meanwhile the A group had fairly disastrous luck when they had to PUG (which was less often, they typically have a full raid group before we do for various reasons, some of which I've complained about), including a spacey healer and a mage who ninja'd some loot and then left the raid.

When we ended up taking on Raz sans Jeff as a tank, I was fortunate enough to have been part of a 25 man run on my healer the previous weekend, and saw how the fight went. Raz is particularly easier on 10 man than 25, not just because you don't need shadow priests (who aren't used to tanking) but because you could actually SEE Raz because of the lack of a mob scene around him.

Our run at him went pretty smoothly, especially considering that the 25 man bounced on him (due to a lack of hit-capped spriests). The following week when Jeff was back, we lined up him and our spriest (who had been in the 25 man) to tank Raz as practice. The one majorly key thing that should be taught about that fight is that the Understudy's taunt is melee ranged! Several times our tanks were saying "I can't get him off you!" in the first run we did because they were used to having 30-40 yd range on their taunts. Once that misconception was made clear, we ripped him apart on that and subsequent runs.

I'll just skip ahead to the end, since Jeff's really gone into some length here, but he's absolutely right, that last run clicked. Some folks get a little annoyed with how Jeff can run on about planning out a fight and getting into extravagant detail, but us going into Sapph's lair to practice really made the difference, I think. Between that and having me call out clock positions on the 1st phase adds, we were a lean, mean, raiding machine.

Also, in order to not let Jeff have all the Transformer nerd fun, on the last attempt I got into Vent, and in my best Optimus voice said, "At the end of this day, ten shall stand; one shall fall." I was off by about 4 in my estimate, but the sentiment was true.

Just before Grimhoof (Jeff's DK) took that frost blast, our OT healer called out for an innervate. I hit my Vent button to let him know I'd already hit him with one a few seconds before, which involves me taking my hand off my mouse to hit CTRL on my laptop a foot or so away. I had just started talking when he got hit, which made me whip my hand back to my mouse to try to retarget onto Grim and heal him, so my Vent message no doubt sounded like, "Dar, I just hit you with one OH SHI-"

As he said, Jaq picked up Kel and I threw every HoT I had onto her to try to keep her up and running. I couldn't see the other side of the room because of the two Guardians' ever-growing bodies in my face. At about 4-5% the OT healer took a frost blast; I only knew because of the DBM warning since he was on the other side of the tanking press. I had the choice of healing him or sticking with the OT, and sacrificed my shammy buddy for the good of the raid, watching those HoT timers like a hawk and spamming Nourish like I'd gotten Mana from a government bailout.

When it was all over I didn't kick off any music. I just leaned back in my chair and sat there while others worked on rezzing the raid.

We may not have gotten Kel first, but I think we got him (and Sapphiron) best. We started out with a severe gear and experience gap, but 4 weeks later we were a well oiled machine with a solid core of good players. Even the ones who were looked at as being not that great at first really started to shine. And because we're not a hardcore, competitive, gets-really-frustrated over wiping/failure raid, we got a lot of learning done, and really bonded as a team. I could certainly go back over to the A raid with their better gear and more hardcore players, but I wouldn't leave the B squad for the world.

A full T7 set awaits!

Mike Cathcart

04-06-2009, 06:34 AM

The heroic difficulty thing reminds me of my first trip to Naxx. I spent a lot of time in MC and BWL and a few runs at AQ40 but never quite got to Naxx in original WoW. About a month before the big pre-Lich King patch that removed old Naxx from the game I got a bunch of friends together and we decided to see how much we could clear just for fun before it went away.

We had heard spider wing was the easy one so we gave that a shot but our tanks had problems kiting Anub so we figured we'd give construct a shot. We had some deaths in the first two rooms and then we got to the round room with the little slimes. The one right before Patch's room. We spent a good hour on this room.

First we tried kiting the slimes around. People said you're supposed to keep the entire raid in a group and kite them around while AoE types do AoE. We only had a few AoE types and they just got eaten by slimes. Then we tried the "distract them with one person while everyone runs past" method. It didn't work as well as expected but about 5 or so people made it through to the other side, including a Shaman who managed to raise the others.

Ok, so now five people are in Patchwerk's room and the rest (maybe 10-15 people) have run back and are on the other side of the slimes. There are a few more attempts to get people past the slime room but lots of people keep dying and we don't have a warlock to summon them. So one guy switches to his warlock--who is in Zangarmarsh and needs to meet us in Eastern Plaguelands--while we try to figure out a way to get the warlock over to the other side of the slime room. 20 minutes later I end up dying in the attempt so I run back to the instance. I say look, let me try to blow some tank cooldowns and see how far I can make it through the slime room. I run in and stick to the edge of the room.

And I run right through to Patchwerk's room without drawing aggro.

The entire time we kept having tanks hit the slimes to try and keep them off of the group, we had never considered the fact that at level 70 we just might be able to run around the outside of the room and completely ignore them.

So there we go, that's my noobiest WoW story. Grats on your Naxx run :)

Jag

04-06-2009, 07:25 AM

Grats guys. Sounds like you put alot of effort into it. It's nice to finally see your efforts pay off.

AndrewM

04-06-2009, 07:41 AM

In my first go at Gluth a few weeks ago, I was assigned the role of kiting the zombie chows. Retadins are pretty good for this in 10-man thanks to Righteous Fury (which massively increases your aggro), increased run speed, taunts and an AoE undead stun you can use when things get sticky. We finished the fight, I clicked off RF, then we proceeded to Thaddius.

Unfortunately, my buff addon decided that I really wanted to have RF up all the time, and so I ended up in the fight with the minibosses of Thaddius with RF up. I wasn't paying much attention to my threat meter, as it is a non-factor most of the time, and I ended up pulling aggro right before a tank swap, leading to a wipe. That was embarrassing.

Nellie

04-06-2009, 08:06 AM

We got our first 10 man Naxx clear on friday. I'd been roped in to taking the Druid to heal so my main still hasn't cleared Naxx :)

Up until the last couple of runs we'd been clearing out the arachnid and plague (finally adding construct) quarters on one night and doing as much as we could on the second.

This time we went in with 2 healers on the first night, cleared everything we thought we could manage and left the 4 horsemen, saph and kel until the friday night and respecced my druid from Hootkin back to Tree to cover the healing gap.

I've only done 4 horsemen once before and on the hunter so healing it was a new experience for me Saph and Kel I'd never done and it took us a fair few efforts to get Saph down pat, Kel killed me almost immediately but fortunately the rest of the group managed to down the git. Malygos then kicked our arses good and proper :D

Grats on the Clear Jeff/Rasputin, sounds like you had as much fun with it as we did.

Skipper

04-06-2009, 08:19 AM

Big congrats! Raiding accomplishments are one of the cool things about this game, despite the negativity that non-raiders usually throw at the subject. It's fun and satisfying at the same time. And Naxx is a surprisingly fun place to raid, even after you master the fights. Herding cats is no easy task. ;)

To keep things fun, our guild regularly has a good laugh doing messed up things like pulling every single group of adds at once, right before Grand Widow, or only having people on only one side when doing the Gothik fight. There are also the evil things we do to each other like blowing up someone at the frogger crossing, purposefully healing a melee dps on the Patchwerk fight, and running across to someone on the other side right after downing Thaddius.

What's fun is that even when you finish the task (beating Naxx), now you have more challenges if you choose to accept them, in the form of achievements. After raiding Naxx for quite some time I still haven't gotten the "Immortal" achievement. I can't wait either. It's the one item keeping me from a new mount!

Mike Cathcart

04-06-2009, 11:02 AM

purposefully healing a melee dps on the Patchwerk fight
There's actually nothing wrong with this as long as you have three tanks for the fight and they're not like the worst tanks ever. He'll only hit the three highest people in threat, even if some other melee has more health.

and running across to someone on the other side right after downing Thaddius.Apparently Thaddius drops loot or something. I thought the only reason we fought this guy was so we could blow each other up at the end.

After raiding Naxx for quite some time I still haven't gotten the "Immortal" achievement. I can't wait either. It's the one item keeping me from a new mount!Yeah, Undying is the only thing keeping me from the 10 man mount. Last week we lost it on Sapphiron. Turns out there is a very slight lip around the edge of the room and if you stand on it you will get hit by the bomb thing even though you are a gnome and you're standing behind an eight foot block of ice that is 3-4 times your height. Looks like this week is our last chance.

Soapyfrog

04-06-2009, 11:21 AM

Pretty exciting! Our guild is hitting Gluth now though we are also stalled on the Four Horsemen (our group composition usually is not ideal for that fight). So basically we are two bosses away from the Frostwyrm Lair. Our first run into Naxx was Feb 16th, so its taken us about 6 weeks to get this far (raiding about twice a week).

Imryll

04-06-2009, 11:36 AM

One of our 10-mans tried the Heroic thing, as well. ;-) Grats on your clear!

MarchHare

04-06-2009, 11:50 AM

Grats to you guys! That's an awesome recap! :)

Malygos can be really tricky, but there's a few things you can do to make it easier on yourselves.

The first is to get a few people together and practice the "Aces High" daily quest in Coldara. The drakes you ride in that fight have the exact same abilities as the drakes you get in phase 3 of Malygos, so it's best to become familiar with them before you attempt Maly.

The biggest thing that will determine success or failure is how quickly you complete Phase 1 (100% - 50%). You absolutely need to place the static zones on top of each other for a stacking damage boost. If Malygos eats even one Static Charge, you'll probably wipe.

There's a really, really helpful video on tankspot that shows how to position Malygos throughout the fight. At a minimum, your MT should watch it, but it also has helpful advice for players of all roles.

Maly is also a 1-tank fight -- bringing an OT is pretty much wasting a spot, and you'll miss that dps when you're trying to beat the 10-minute enrage timer. Our normal setup is 1 tank, 3 healers, and 6 dps. Better-geared groups can get away with 2 healers/7 dps, but I don't suggest that setup to start.

Good luck!

Rasputin

04-06-2009, 12:12 PM

Jag

04-06-2009, 12:22 PM

EoE is also more about execution than gear. Making sure you get the double sparks in P1 and get through P2 ok. P3 is essentially gearless since you are on drakes. Don't get me wrong, gear is essential for living and doing decent damage in P1. But P2 and P3 is about people doing the right thing.

We do undergeared alt runs through EoE just because we can do the fight blindfolded at this time (hell I did EoE 4 times on 2 80s last week). I got Black Ice for both my Druid and Hunter in back to back runs!

intruder

04-06-2009, 12:37 PM

gratz on the clear! :)

Concerning Malygos:
You need to bring the right healers for Vortex. We had originally 2 shammies + 1 pally and raid died in there. Once we had alt priest and druid at 80 the fight became manageable because you need some possibility to heal people in that swirl.

Now we go with a priest / druid + shammy and it's easy but we are over-geared now and people have mure more HP. :)

Good luck!

Rasputin

04-06-2009, 12:58 PM

Imryll

04-06-2009, 01:01 PM

The first is to get a few people together and practice the "Aces High" daily quest in Coldara. The drakes you ride in that fight have the exact same abilities as the drakes you get in phase 3 of Malygos, so it's best to become familiar with them before you attempt Maly.

/cry

I tried that quest and fell to my death in a place where I couldn't retrieve my body. At the time yet another "known issue." In any case, I've been boycotting the quest, which I'd learned to hate even before my mishap. That it's Malygos prep is bad news indeed.

Lietgardis

04-06-2009, 01:06 PM

Anaxagoras

04-06-2009, 01:13 PM

Concerning Malygos:
//...
Now we go with a priest / druid + shammy and it's easy but we are over-geared now and people have mure more HP. :)

We've had good luck having raid members put on their frost resist gear for the extra hit points. The loss in DPS/Healing seems to be more than made up for by the extra hp.

MarchHare

04-06-2009, 01:33 PM

/cry

I tried that quest and fell to my death in a place where I couldn't retrieve my body. At the time yet another "known issue." In any case, I've been boycotting the quest, which I'd learned to hate even before my mishap. That it's Malygos prep is bad news indeed.

Try it again with a buddy. It's not marked as a group quest, and it is possible to solo it, but that won't really prepare you for Malygos. Have one drake as your damage dealer and the other as the healer.

When we get to Maly P3, we have 8 dps drakes spamming 1,1,2 (repeating) and 2 healer drakes spamming 1,1,1,1,1,4 (repeating). That seems to work really well. The single-target heal (3 key) seems to be a waste of time, so we never bother with it. Having two people heal the entire raid with the AoE heal (4 key) is all you need to surive P3 as long as everyone is on the ball with activating their shield in time if they get focused.

Also, there's a known bug that prevents players from activating their shield if they had Malygos targeted during the P2-P3 transition. You can avoid this by having everyone target themselves or another player as soon as P2 ends.

Horrible Oscar

04-06-2009, 02:55 PM

So there we go, that's my noobiest WoW story. Grats on your Naxx run :)
We just had a run for Undying recently (clear 10man Naxx with nobody dying on any boss), and a druid relogged after Maexxna since he was having connection troubles. When he logged back in he found himself in Westfall with his hearthstone on cooldown, and we didn't have a warlock, so me and another ran out to summon him and promptly got stomped by an invisible shade.

Dying to trash doesn't disqualify you from Undying, luckily, so we released and summoned him on the way back in. As we run back, I throw on tank gear and go into Frost Presence in case the shade jumps us again. When we reach Maexx, I put DPS gear back on.

At about 10%, I get aggro because I'm still in Frost Presence and causing massive threat. I'm in DPS gear and Maexxna is enraged. Whoops!

Luckily, healers were on the ball and managed to keep me up until the tank taunted back. It's pretty much the most embarassing thing I've done in WoW since The Undying is an incredibly high pressure achievement (and arguably crappy design), and I wouldn't have known where to put my face if there had been an unlucky crit. Thank god we managed the achievement in the end.

Jag

04-06-2009, 03:17 PM

Our standing rule for Immortal runs are if you DC on the boss, don't log back into WoW until we give the all clear on vent. I DCd on a KT transition from P1 to P2 and sat the entire fight logged out listening on vent.

I also agree with Aces High. Make sure people that are working on Maly give that daily a bunch of tries. It will significantly help you in P3. There are also Maly mods to help with stack management if that is an issue.

MarchHare

04-06-2009, 03:22 PM

Something similar happened to us when we were going for The Undying last weekend. We had saved the spider wing for last because it's the easiest and if we were going to lose The Undying, we'd rather it be early in the raid so we could finish out the run free of stress. With no deaths yet, we had Maexxna down to about 15% when a dps DK fat-fingered a taunt ability and momentarily pulled aggro from the tank. I think my heart stopped for two seconds when I noticed Maexxna switched targets -- I thought the tank had died. Luckily the DK alertly popped all his "oh shit" survival cooldowns and the MT got aggro back after a few seconds. We successfully killed Maexxna with no deaths, keeping our Undying streak alive.

Then we had a really unlucky death on Sapphiron, a boss we haven't had any deaths on for weeks. :( Oh well, we'll get it soon.

Pogo

04-06-2009, 03:24 PM

[b]We lost a DPS early due to chaining frost blocks, but we were doing OK. Until I tripped over a fissure. One of the healers called OOM, I glanced away - to the healer's mana bar of all things; as if maybe I"d find out he was just joking or something.

I lawled.

Menzo

04-06-2009, 04:48 PM

Malygos is one of those fights that went from extremely frustrating to very very fun. Once I got a handle on how the drakes worked I started to really look forward to the fight. The different phases are all interesting and maybe I'm one of the few, but I like the drakes (mostly because I can really stack up damage and end up at the top of the meters).

TheJare

04-06-2009, 07:42 PM

I like the drakes (mostly because I can really stack up damage and end up at the top of the meters).
Heh in my first and only Malygos kill I got bursted 5 times in a row. After 4 of them I think I got so bent on getting some stacks before the fight ended, and was promptly gibbed when the 5th one came. :)

P1 and P2 are among the most intense, fun and dynamic fights I've ever done in WoW. P3 is easy if you know how to do it, but I can't enjoy it because the vehicle interface is still shitty and the fight becomes an interminable series of spamming 2 skills and 1 movement key while you wait for someone to screw up.

AaronSofaer

04-06-2009, 10:10 PM

We don't even have our people using the shield ability. DPS drakes just DPS, healing drakes heal, and nobody dies.

/shrug

If you are good at getting out of the Static explody ball thing, you're fine.

TriggerHappy

04-07-2009, 05:56 AM

Same here, Aaron. We just constantly rotate counter clockwise around him nice and slow and stay bunched up for the AE heals. Even the focus thing you're supposed to pop your shield on doesn't get any kills unless it hits the same guy twice in a row.

Imryll

04-07-2009, 06:20 AM

Try it again with a buddy. It's not marked as a group quest, and it is possible to solo it, but that won't really prepare you for Malygos. Have one drake as your damage dealer and the other as the healer.

/sigh

Sadly, my husband seems to have gotten "stuck" at level 75. He's gotten his Salty title and is currently killing a bit of wildlife for feasts (to increase his cooking skill), but I doubt that Northrend flight is in his near future. Good suggestion, though.

Thanks to Lietgardis, also, for his pro tip.

Rasputin

04-07-2009, 10:50 AM

/sigh

Sadly, my husband seems to have gotten "stuck" at level 75. He's gotten his Salty title and is currently killing a bit of wildlife for feasts (to increase his cooking skill), but I doubt that Northrend flight is in his near future. Good suggestion, though.

Thanks to Lietgardis, also, for his pro tip.

Tell him to lay off the cooking until 3.1 comes out. They're making skilling up much easier with the patch, since it's pretty much BS to do unless you have high fishing as well right now.

Imryll

04-08-2009, 08:06 AM

Husband has already maxxed his fishing skill and thanks to killing wildlife for feasts has now reached 76. Yay!!!

He's also suffering greatly at not being able to speak for himself. We applied to QT3 at the same time, but somehow Shimarenda was never approved to post. Please, Tom! Shim isn't a bad sort. Really. :)

Our raid plans its first attempt on Malygos tomorrow night, and I can't play tonight so no Aces High in advance. I'll try an get in some practice before next week though.

jeffd

04-24-2009, 12:14 AM

Boy Malygos is hard! We just took our first serious crack at him tonight - 6 or 7 wipes over 2 hours.

We made a lot of progress. The first couple of tries, we couldn't get him down by more than 20% before wiping. Then we made slow, steady progress. The first time we made it to phase 2, he had just hit his enrage timer. The next couple of times, he had maybe four minutes to go. Both times he enraged before we could hit phase 3 - but we did down everything in phase 2.

Additional updates: we have Naxx on farm now (the Grobbulus nerf helped); we downed Kel Thuzad on Sunday and I expect to down him again this Sunday. Malygos will probably take another couple of hours - the big thing we have to get much better at is being precise about where we kill the sparks. We can keep them from malygos pretty effectively; but we still have trouble getting them to stack just right.

Nellie

04-24-2009, 04:39 AM

We've struggled on Malygos too. Missed the last couple of runs, so we'll see what happens tonight. We seem to have take a step backwards in Naxx, we were "on farm" but with dual specs and player availability we're training up a couple of new tanks and healers and stuff we were breezing through is now a bit more of a challenge again despite packing close on 20k DPS in 10 man.

tim edwards

04-24-2009, 05:24 AM

This is a fun thread. About a week after Wrath of the Lich King launched, we had an idea: we should totally start a PC Gamer UK guild, and talk about it in our magazine. The last six months have been an astonishing ride. We've now got over 500 members, Naxx on farm, Malygos down, OS with one drake up. This is all in ten man - even though we've now got around 40 level 80s, getting them online at once to raid 25 man content is a hard problem.

I thought, when we began, it would be a casual-ish guild. But the readers are setting their own pace - and it's a big enough population for them to find their own niches. Funny bit: Blizzard's guild interface can only cope with 500 characters. We've got considerably more than that, spread over 400+ accounts.

André Costa

04-24-2009, 06:21 AM

RobotPants

04-24-2009, 07:38 AM

It was cool to experience the Malygos encounter, but after having killed him once I can't say I'm likely to do it again any time soon.

Rasputin

04-24-2009, 10:34 AM

JeffD: do you have a DK on your group? It's very handy to have one to handle the sparks since he can death grip them on top of another "dead" spark.

I also did the Malygos fight for the first time yesterday. I think i can understand that it's a frustating fight from a healer perspective but to me(DPS), it was a totally awesome encounter on all 3 phases. We didn't clear it though :( wiped multiple times when he was at less than 5%, once at 2.6% :|

I was running my DK for this and yeah, I was attempting to do just that. The problem became that while I was doing that, it seemed to translate in the ranged folks' minds that I was the one supposed to be killing them. It ended up just being easier to have jeffd position Malygos opposite the spark and have one ranged give a "Open fire!" order as the spark passed overhead.

Coordination was our bugbear over the first attempts; one thing I always love about raiding is that magic moment when stuff starts to "click" and massive improvements follow.

Rasputin

04-24-2009, 10:45 AM

One thing I wanted to touch on that jeffd mentioned is the Grobbulus nerf that happened in 3.1. I haven't seen any official announcement about yet, but it happened. He now drops his clouds more often and moves faster, but he doesn't do his super quick "enrage" injections at the end anymore.

We discovered this last Sunday when we were trying to clear Naxx a second time and had 2-3 of our stable of alternates for missing regulars in who hadn't done him yet. This usually equals 2-3 wipes as Grobby is a boss that you really have to experience to know how to handle him, especially in that last, hectic phase. We fire him up and something just seems off about him. Jeff remarked on it, and we keep blasting him. And blasting him. Eventually I notice that we're not getting any more injections and mouse over him to check his health. He's at about 8% and nothing's happening.

We one-shotted him without a single death. Unheard of!

Jeff and I discussed and we're of the opinion that while a Grobby retune was needed (since even if you did everything perfect in that fight, you might wipe because he randomly sprayed while turned to inject someone and created 6 slime adds) this much of one feels like a let down. Grobbulus used to feel like an accomplishment, now he's just another raid boss. Looks like Kel'Thuzad is now the hardest boss in Naxx.

RobotPants

04-24-2009, 10:56 AM

Grobbulus has never seemed even close in difficulty to KT to me. In fact, out of all the times I've done him, we've only ever wiped once due to a new shaman putting down a poison cleansing totem, causing lots of fun. I'm not trying to boast or anything, I'm just curious what made him so hard for you guys in the past because he's always been relatively easy to me.

jeffd

04-24-2009, 11:13 AM

Robot: Honestly I have no idea.

Sometimes he'd spray and we'd end up with 3-6 slimes. It seems he'd do it while injecting someone and catch the raid, even though I think he's only supposed to spray at the tank (regardless of which way he looks like he's facing).

Other times? People just put gas clouds down in bad places. Or people don't realize they have a cloud. Or (during the final stretch) healers just can't keep up with 3-4 folks with injections.

I thought Grobbulus was much harder than Kel'Thuzad, for what it's worth.

RobotPants

04-24-2009, 11:25 AM

Grobbulus is pretty much all about having the injected people go to the right place. As long as that's done, the rest is pretty straightforward.

Kel'Thuzad, on the other hand, is a long fight that doesn't allow for very many errors. It relies heavily on positioning and healers that are quick on the draw, as well as enough damage output to kill him before the tanks get splattered by the adds in phase 3. Even if you know the fight and have done it lots of times, it's still pretty simple to fail due to bad luck. The 25 man even moreso.

Of course, all of this also depends on the actual strategy you're using for these bosses. I'm not sure I've heard anyone say Grobb is harder than KT, but I suppose his strategy can vary a bit more than KT's

Rasputin

04-24-2009, 12:06 PM

I think the big difference in the fights for me is that Grobbulus didn't feel like you could recover so well from one bad thing happening because it all happened so fast, but KT if something went wrong (other than losing the tank) you could still get it done, even if it got a little hectic.

I think this boils down to Grobby being more of a chaotic fight while KT feels more scripted. Possibly this is also due to our habit of using Saph's lair to set up our positions now before we take KT so that everyone knows where they should go and we just lock into place in phase 2.

RobotPants

04-24-2009, 12:16 PM

Well, that's sort of what I'm getting at, though. The Grobbulus fight shouldn't really get to the point of being chaotic so long as the slimes are being controlled and people are dropping their poison clouds behind the boss's path and away from everyone else.

Don't take any of this as criticism, by the way. It's always interesting to me to read about which encounters are hard/easy for different groups. :)

Spect

04-24-2009, 12:22 PM

We wiped several times on Grobb early on. Now, we seem to be able to 1-shot him even when bringing in a bunch of newer raiders.

Thaddius, on the other hand, is our current nemesis. It took us 6 or 7 tires to down him the other day.

Acoustic Rob

04-24-2009, 12:41 PM

I also did Malygos for the first time last night. (Same raid as Andre.) Marksman Hunter here, so my main responsibilities were shooting stuff, keeping my threat level below the tank's, and staying alive. By the end of the night we were getting to the third phase with minimal deaths and 3+ minutes to spare.

Everybody who says Aces High! is good training for Malygos phase 3 is a dirty stinking liar. There's a *lot* more going on in that fight, and it's a lot less forgiving. Between dodging lightning balls and the fact that you can't just eat a lightning breath and survive, you can find yourself dead very very quickly.

It got a little frustrating, to be honest. We'd get through 70% of the fight in great shape, only to wipe over and over again on the last phase. I certainly didn't feel like I was improving over time, either--only once did I die and say to myself, "Yup, I shoulda seen that coming." Every other time I'd be flying around, burning down the big blue dragon, when BAM! Dead dwarf.

If the third stage were just a *little* more forgiving the whole encounter would be a lot more fun.

AndrewM

04-24-2009, 12:53 PM

If the third stage were just a *little* more forgiving the whole encounter would be a lot more fun.

I've only done it a couple of times, in 10 and 25 man, but the way we did phase three was to have everybody follow one person, so only one person has to dodge things. Everybody else just focuses on 1-1-2 or whatever the healing combo is, and keeping up enough energy to shield if they are focused. I think healers healed and everybody else DPSed. Seemed to work well enough. So you could try that. Just assign your best "don't stand in the fire" person to drag the rest of the raid with them.

Adam B

04-24-2009, 01:37 PM

Yep. Healing combo is 3-3-4. Put a mark on one of your more alert raiders and have him slowly rotate one direction (we use counterclockwise). Everybody else follows him. All the casts are instant so you can keep on slowly moving in the one direction. Since you're rotating nobody gets eaten by the AOE, and since you're clumped the healers can heal everyone with every lifeburst. It's a really simple strat that changed p3 for us from "oh my god I hate this fight so much" to "need for upgrades, greed for sidegrades".

TriggerHappy

04-24-2009, 01:41 PM

You don't need to be alert, even. The lightning balls always go towards a player. As long as the group is rotating and staying clumped up, you'll never get hit. We use three healers, since we all clump up, and the AE healing will keep someone alive through the channeled attack. It's one more healer than some groups, but not having to worry about the shield lets the DPS drakes keep their stacks up better, and we end up with faster kills.

Rasputin

04-24-2009, 04:54 PM

jeffd

04-28-2009, 10:34 PM

3 more hours of Malygos tonight. We made noticable improvement - we can consistently hit phase 3 with 2 to 2.5 minutes remaining.

I can see why folks don't like phase 3 of the fight. There's a lot going on, it's totally new/different than anything else in the game (except Aces High, and it's still a bit different than that).

That being said, from what I gather 2 minutes is plenty of time to drop Malygos in phase 3. We just need to get better about not dying - we usually lose about half the raid before he enrages. I really expect folks will get better about not getting nuked by surges, so that will help a ton. That and we have to get our movement down.

One question I have - it seems like stacks were dropping off Malygos before their timer experied. Are my mods just interfering with that? OUr suspicion is that if you get too far from Maly your stacks go away, can anyone corroborate this?

Jag

04-29-2009, 06:59 AM

One question I have - it seems like stacks were dropping off Malygos before their timer experied. Are my mods just interfering with that? OUr suspicion is that if you get too far from Maly your stacks go away, can anyone corroborate this?

Are people using a Maly mod? It makes it easy to see the stacks. There is another mod where you can see who has what stacks and see who is failing.

Our strategy in P3 was to put a Star over one person and have everyone stack on them. When the AOE damage comes, that person yells MOVE! on vent and the whole raid circles clockwise. We also use AOE healing as well.

For keeping stacks up, I would spam 1,1,2 over and over. If you hit the keys as fast as you can, you should never lose stacks, even while moving. I was able to keep between 20-30 stacks up that way.

Imryll

04-29-2009, 07:24 AM

We finally got Maly last night--with, I think, only the sacrificial warlock dying. The big issues for us were healer targetting (auto-selfcast works on the HoT, but not the AoE, so you want actively to select yourself) and /follow. Follow works if you don't change elevation but stay at the level you fall to. If you /follow [name] <enter>, making it your last command, after you fall you can input:

<enter> (to bring up the command line)
<alt> <[up arrow]> (to call up your last command)
<enter> (just don't touch x or the space bar and you're golden, following whoever is the designated leader)

This frees everyone but the leader to focus on healing or their stacks.

Gunmetal

04-30-2009, 08:57 AM

The healers don't need to target anyone other than themselves to heal. As long as people are relatively non-braindead about shielding themselves and moving as a group from the burst, you can keep everyone up with AoE heals.

In fact, I believe that if you start targeting other people to heal, you will drop combo points when you switch targets. This means your AoE heal won't be as effective

AaronSofaer

04-30-2009, 09:14 AM

I don't think I've ever used the shield in Malygos. It's not necessary if the healers are on their game and you don't get hit by the static orb thing.

TriggerHappy

04-30-2009, 10:27 AM

I don't think I've ever used the shield in Malygos. It's not necessary if the healers are on their game and you don't get hit by the static orb thing.

Ignoring the shield is a huge help for getting a good number of stacks on Maly. You don't even need much to ignore it.

Move the whole raid in a circle, close to the marked 'tank'.
3 Healers (for 10 man, not sure about 25) hitting the 5 combo point AE heal as often as possible.

That's all there is to phase 3, it's very very easy.

Adam B

04-30-2009, 10:35 AM

You mean the two-point AoE heal, Trigger ;)

jeffd

04-30-2009, 11:12 AM

Can you really eat the attack without a shield? It seemed like every time Malygos focused on me and I missed the shield I died fast.

Should the healers just spam their AOE heals as fast as possible? Or is there some timing so that an AOE heal is proccing every x seconds?

Imryll

04-30-2009, 11:27 AM

The healers don't need to target anyone other than themselves to heal.

Right. But you have to actively target yourself for the AoE. Having auto self-cast selected in your options works for the HoT, but not Life Burst. What worked for me was HoT-HoT-AoE, rinse and repeat. Healers need to manage energy and be ready to shield themselves just as DPS do. We seemed to stagger our heals well enough without active coordination.

Rasputin

04-30-2009, 11:28 AM

It may be that with 3 healers spamming the AOE heal that fast it may not matter.

04-30-2009, 11:34 AM

As a healer, here is how I used to do it:
1) As soon as I'm on my mount, select myself.
2) Build 5 combo points by using Revivify (3) http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=57090
3) Use Life Burst (4) as soon as possible to get the +50% healing buff http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=57143
4) Build 5 combo points again, pop a shield at 2-3 points if targeted
5) Wait until there is some damage to heal and use Life Burst. My Grid frames show dragon health - no use in AoE healing when everyone is healthy
6) Repeat from 4)

We used 5 people healing in 25 man.

Gunmetal

04-30-2009, 12:25 PM

Right. But you have to actively target yourself for the AoE. Having auto self-cast selected in your options works for the HoT, but not Life Burst. What worked for me was HoT-HoT-AoE, rinse and repeat. Healers need to manage energy and be ready to shield themselves just as DPS do. We seemed to stagger our heals well enough without active coordination.

Yeah, when the platform breaks, the first thing I do is select my drake. And then I press 3 and 4 until it's time to not collect any loot again. (Basically what NI said). What a terrible fight

TriggerHappy

04-30-2009, 01:28 PM

You mean the two-point AoE heal, Trigger ;)

We use the 5 point heals, don't know why. I make it a point to pop mine early if someone's getting breathed on, though.

It may be that with 3 healers spamming the AOE heal that fast it may not matter.

With 3 healers, the target of his breath should come out with about 20% health left. As long as they don't get singled out twice in a row they'll be back up to full in plenty of time.

jeffd

05-05-2009, 11:13 AM

Malygos is going down tonight! Anyone have any last bits of advice for me?

Jag

05-05-2009, 11:15 AM

Malygos is going down tonight! Anyone have any last bits of advice for me?

Don't die!

Duality

05-06-2009, 05:45 AM

The people in my guild -- girlfriend and a couple of friends we've had for years now -- finally started raiding Naxx 10 man in the last two weeks. Our groups are half-PUG, but I was surprised at how manageable Naxx is.

The first week, we got through Arachnid and half of Construct (stopped at Gluth) the first night. We hadn't tried Military at all and got stuck on Heigan in Plague.

Last weekend, we pulled in a few different people and got all three Arachnid, Construct, and Plague quarters down the first night and the rest of the instance the following night. My girlfriend wasn't so keen on having spent a total of about 13 hours doing it (I was having a bitch of a time on Heigan and for some reason was not initially getting Razuvious down), but I felt it necessary to spend that time learning and getting it down.

This weekend, we're going to try to limit our time spent in there to about 4-5 hours per night and extend it another night if need be. While we've had some great help with people explaining what works for them, we've still had to devise our own methods for particular fights (looking at your horsemen!).

What's more interesting than any of that, though, are the attitudes. In every Trade/LFG PUG we've tried to join, there have been the typical egoes and bile spewing, with a hint of loot drama to boot. But as soon as you start a group where the attitudes are in high spirits, with lots of communication and interaction, things tend to run so much more smoothly.

The only two instances of problems we've had were the first week, when a death knight said he was going to repair and never said anything -- apparently his voice comms were too quiet to be heard. We never got a response back in raid chat and he was starting to do stuff in the Argent Tournament grounds, we figured he wasn't interested in coming back. We apologized to him after we kicked him and found another, but explained that he really should have tried to respond to us, instead of expecting we heard him in Vent.

The second week, we had a hunter that had apparently rolled on some caster mail. It was one of those situations where we all commented that the loot was useless to everyone and may as well have been sharded. The hunter, at the last second, rolled without saying anything. I had assumed it was a joke roll and had it sharded, but then the person came back yelling at me that they wanted it for a Beast Mastery spec (I'm assuming to buff Mend Pet?). I apologized, but apparently that wasn't enough and the person decided to stop playing nice and, when we wiped on the four horsemen the first time, left with a "OMG this group is fail!!!".

It never fails to surprise me how many people are very understanding of the fact that we're new to the instance and not only are forgiving of it, but are actually quite helpful. The fights that I'd heard are the toughest to manage we're done in one or two shots.

05-06-2009, 05:53 AM

I had assumed it was a joke roll and had it sharded, but then the person came back yelling at me that they wanted it for a Beast Mastery spec (I'm assuming to buff Mend Pet?).

Spell power / +healing hasn't helped Mend Pet for a long time. Be glad he's gone.

Nellie

05-06-2009, 06:01 AM

but then the person came back yelling at me that they wanted it for a Beast Mastery spec (I'm assuming to buff Mend Pet?)

I've seen a few bits of caster mail that have had me wondering whether it's worth taking for the huge piles of Int/crit/gemslots over the blue stuff I had on at the time but in a PuG?

If he'd said "hey guys, I know it's caster loot but if you're just going to shard it mind if I have a play with it?" then fine, but a stealth roll just you're about to shard it seems silly to get upset about. Joys of PuGs I guess.

Otherwise I can't for the life of me think why a hunter would want caster mail regardless of his talent spec or has something changed with BM that I haven't noticed (been a tree/hootkin) last few months?

Jag

05-06-2009, 06:11 AM

There is no reason a Hunter would ever want caster mail unless they are upgrading from some random green to an epic caster item...maybe. Even then it is so easy to get decent crafted items, there is no reason for it.

I've run into these idiots from time to time, be glad he's gone.

Trelane

05-06-2009, 10:28 AM

This weekend, we're going to try to limit our time spent in there to about 4-5 hours per night and extend it another night if need be.

That's still pretty long, generally our guild of casuals stay within 3 hours. After that folks tend to become less attentive and make more mistakes anyway.

Welcome to raiding, it is probably more fun now than it ever has been. Even Ulduar isn't as intimidating as it initially seemed. We managed to clear Ulduar-10, and there were only really 2 hard fights.

jeffd

05-06-2009, 10:48 AM

We failed on Malygos last night. :(

That being said, we again showed noticable improvement. Last week when we were fighting him we'd lose most of the raid early in Phase 3. We wouldn't get Malygos down much below 45%. Last night our final three attempts were huge improvements - 34%, 18%, and then 10% on the last one. I don't know about the rest of my raid, but I finally feel as if the drake combat is clicking in my head. Judging by how we did, I think it's clicking for other folks too.

Next week we'll drop Malygos, I'm pretty sure. I also agree with rasputin, who commented that once we down him once we'll be one or two shotting him from there on out.

Our plan currently is to combine with the A raid (or what's left of it; while we've been happily farming naxx and coming up to speed on Malygos they've been dealing with DRAMAS) and run 25-man Naxx for a few weeks. Then it's on to Ulduar! Probably somewhere along the line I'll see about getting folks to try Sartharion with drakes up as well...

jeffd

05-06-2009, 10:54 AM

Duality: I agree, I think the attitude of the raid plays a huge part in setting the pace for how things go. If folks are upbeat, having fun, and not sweating mistakes things tend to go a lot more smoothly. We experienced that in our raid - we don't get pissy at wipes; we just ask "what happened?" There's no blame or anything, we just want to make sure folks recognize what can be improved to do better next time.

I don't know the full details, but apparently the A raid (mentioned in my OP) has had a bit more trouble with people's attitudes, and it's showed in the results - we're farming Kel'Thuzad weekly; they haven't dropped him since their first attempt a month or so ago.

Duality

05-06-2009, 08:53 PM

That's still pretty long, generally our guild of casuals stay within 3 hours. After that folks tend to become less attentive and make more mistakes anyway.

It does seem long, especially when you consider the length of the typical 5 man/heroic. But we're all accustomed to the 2-3 hour UBRS and BRD runs and all the wipes that entails. I'm not against spending that much time a few nights during the weekend. It still leaves time to do other stuff at night, since that's largely our only play time.

AaronSofaer

05-07-2009, 07:44 AM

Welcome to raiding, it is probably more fun now than it ever has been. Even Ulduar isn't as intimidating as it initially seemed. We managed to clear Ulduar-10, and there were only really 2 hard fights.

Very nice!

We spent a bit over two hours last week wiping on Vezax, without having really spent any time wiping on any other boss. It was a bit disheartening. But I think we'll probably kill him this week!

AndrewM

05-07-2009, 10:16 AM

On a Heroic Naxx run I did last night, four Sand-Worn Bands dropped. It was a little ridiculous. Sadly still no new shield or tank sword for me.

jeffd

05-12-2009, 11:58 PM

After nearly 4 hours tonight, Malygos finally went down. Finally!

Hilariously both pieces of loot he dropped went to some guys we brought in 15 minutes earlier to replace folks who had to leave.

Acoustic Rob

05-13-2009, 05:35 AM

Congrats!

We need to take another crack at him. We'd get to phase 3 with a good head of steam, and then everything would fall apart.

jeffd

05-13-2009, 09:38 AM

Rob: Tell people to focus on not dying in phase 3. Yes it's important to get big stacks on Malygos, but you can't get a big stack going if you're dead. The goal of phase 3, once you reach it consistently, needs to be having everyone survive to his enrage timer. Once you get that, killing Malygos seems like it just kinda happens.

Acoustic Rob

05-13-2009, 10:26 AM

Well, I was usually one of the first ones to die in phase 3, so I ain't gonna be tellin' nobody nothing.

But yeah--once we figure out how to stay alive, killing him won't be a problem. Did you do the trick where everybody /follows a designated mover, or did you rotate out of the lightning bubbles on your own?

AndrewM

05-13-2009, 10:32 AM

But yeah--once we figure out how to stay alive, killing him won't be a problem. Did you do the trick where everybody /follows a designated mover, or did you rotate out of the lightning bubbles on your own?

I've only done EoE around 4 times but we always used the follow trick. It makes it SO easy for everybody except for the one person who has to move. Just do that, plus have your designated healers spamming the AoE heal, and it seems to go smoothly.

jeffd

05-13-2009, 11:01 AM

Regarding /follow: We found that it can often pull you off target from Malygos. So everyone moves themselves.

Our system was like this: One person was nominated as the leader in phase 3 (we used rasputin, who is one of our healers). He got a star over his head. When phase 2 ended, everyone ran over to rasputin. From that point forward, your priority was staying on top of rasputin at all times. He set the pace for moving around Malygos.

The fight really boils down to a few things clicking:
1) Don't get too close to Malygos. He has a 30 yard damage aura.
2) Movement. Always move right. Stay with the group. If you don't see a huge tangle of drakes on your screen, you are out of position. Follow someone if you need to. Honestly I got good enough that I could manage my own movement - occasionally I'd be moving before rasputin because I saw an energy field thingy coming.
3) Get your shield up when Malygos focuses on you. Yeah you don't need it, but get it up anyway.
4) DPS rotation. I was using a 1-1-2 rotation, and I constantly felt pressured - I wouldn't have enough energy, and my DOT would be running out. I switched to a 1-1-1-2 or even a 1-1-1-1-2 rotation and it made life MUCH easier. I went from being barely able to stack five high to consistently being one of the top stacks on Malygos.

When you die, look up and observe. Help people with positioning - hit shift-v to bring up nameplates and coach people. It's a really frustrating fight as a raid leader, because all the stuff above has to click in everyone's head and people pick it up at different paces. I had it down last week when we ran Malygos, and did pretty well every run tonight - but other people didn't and that was frustrating. It's not like most fights where you can coach a raid member in something specific they're doing wrong; in this case it's just "get better." Which is no fun.

Acoustic Rob

05-13-2009, 11:16 AM

Thanks, Jeff. We tried the /follow trick, but I always seemed to lose the /follow accidently sometime during the fight, leaving me out on my own. Plus, it puts a big burden on the master mover--if he screws up, everybody dies.

It's not like most fights where you can coach a raid member in something specific they're doing wrong; in this case it's just "get better." Which is no fun.

Yeah, that's the frustrating part of the encounter. The first two parts are fights with interesting gimmicks, but the third phase is so out of left field. And "Aces High" is not *really* good practice for Malygos, as what kills you in the raid (lightning balls, the damage field, getting separated from the group) isn't an issue in the daily.

MarchHare

05-13-2009, 11:25 AM

And "Aces High" is not *really* good practice for Malygos, as what kills you in the raid (lightning balls, the damage field, getting separated from the group) isn't an issue in the daily.

Well, that's not really the point of the daily. Aces High doesn't exist to be a dry run of the Malygos fight, it's there so players can learn the abilities of their drakes in advance. Phase 3 would be much harder if, in addition to everything else going on, you also had to figure out which button to press to activate your shield or apply your DoT or use your AoE heal.

I've never really been a fan of the /follow trick. jeffd's method of marking someone with a star and then everyone manually stacking on that person has always worked for us.

AndrewM

05-13-2009, 12:09 PM

Thanks, Jeff. We tried the /follow trick, but I always seemed to lose the /follow accidently sometime during the fight, leaving me out on my own. Plus, it puts a big burden on the master mover--if he screws up, everybody dies.

What I did was this:
1) do the /follow command
2) rotate the camera (holding down the left mouse button I guess?) and click on Malygos to target him
3) now you are all set to go. Don't touch use the mouse again for the rest of the fight. You just have to hit the appropriate 1-5 buttons.

Putting a star on the leader is a good idea in any event, in case something gets messed up. It is a little bit of a hassle getting the follow and targeting all set up, but I think it pays off in the end. It is true that you really rely on the guy who is the leader, so it depends on how reliable people in your group are.

Acoustic Rob

05-13-2009, 01:37 PM

Well, that's not really the point of the daily. Aces High doesn't exist to be a dry run of the Malygos fight, it's there so players can learn the abilities of their drakes in advance. Phase 3 would be much harder if, in addition to everything else going on, you also had to figure out which button to press to activate your shield or apply your DoT or use your AoE heal.

Let's just say it's necessary, but not sufficient, to be good at Aces High! in order to beat Malygos. ;)

jeffd

07-05-2009, 09:55 PM

Resurrection!

so for all you Ulduar vets out there - we seem to have hit a bit of a wall. We can rip through the early bosses with no problems; but Hodir (the first Guardian) is giving us fits. Part of it is some raid issues; a couple of members don't have DPS nearly where it should be, but it's also a tough fight.

My question is - what's the recommended order for killing Guardians? Honestly we picked Hodir mostly because he gives me a weapon upgrade (I'm still rocking the Titansteel Destroyer)...

AndrewM

07-05-2009, 10:04 PM

My question is - what's the recommended order for killing Guardians? Honestly we picked Hodir mostly because he gives me a weapon upgrade (I'm still rocking the Titansteel Destroyer)...

You mean keepers? ;)

Hodir was the first one my guild tackled. What problems are you having with him? Are you hitting the enrage timer? Is the raid dying? Is the tank dying (WoWhead suggests using 2 tanks, but I've never seen anybody else recommend that)?

Random tips:

Range DPS should taking advantage of the buffs from the NPCs, like the columns of light.

Break all of the NPCs out of the ice blocks before DPSing the boss. You may have to yell at people to get them to do this.

Use raid-wide damage reduction cooldowns during Frozen Blows.

Make sure people move out of the circles of falling ice. On 10 man, this shouldn't be that hard to do.

I think the Keepers are pretty hard because they demand a lot more out of the DPS than most of the previous LK content. Lots of target switching, avoiding environmental damage, and multiple phases that are pretty different. In terms of tanking, most of it isn't that hard, in my opinion.

Freya seems to mostly be about people remembering what to do on the 3 add phases, and splitting on DPS properly on the elemental wave. We ended up assigning specific groups to specific NPCs. After we did that, we were able to kill her fairly consistently.

Thorim requires careful splitting up of the raid. We have trouble one shotting this, though we've been doing it for a while. I think tanking the arena is the hardest thing I've tanked in Ulduar, as you are dealing with constant waves of adds. Keeping everybody inside the circle in the arena (of the arena team) helped a lot.

Mimiron is just crazy, with tons of phases. Oddly, we now seem to have less trouble with this than Thorim. Once you've learned the phases, it isn't that bad. In phase 3, we found it works well to have a tank (or a DPS DK/druid in tanky mode) eat the bomb bots instead of trying to kill them. All DPS except the head tank focuses on the pummeler-type bots, unless the head is down.

Athryn

07-05-2009, 10:44 PM

In 10 man, we did Thorim first, then Freya, then Hodir, then Mimiron. On 25 man we've gotten Hodir down and are planning on hopefully downing Thorim for the first time tomorrow. Freya is still an issue for us in 25 man because of the wave with the trio that needs to be killed at the same time, that one causes a lot of coordination problems currently.

Rasputin

07-05-2009, 10:51 PM

Folks are dying a lot to getting frost nova'd then hit with ice. A lot of the time we can't get folks free in time to rescue them. I'm thinking we should start having folks bring PvP trinkets, but a lot of us don't do PvP, so they'd have to earn the trinkets first. In 10 mans, though, you lose those one or two raiders and the whole thing starts going downhill.

We have the Flash Freeze fairly well down, but when things go even slightly pear-shaped the Frozen Blows raid damage becomes our bane. What raid-wide damage reductions are out there? Or are you referring to folks all popping what they can?

Athryn

07-05-2009, 10:55 PM

Having your tank wear frost resist gear helps a lot for frozen blows, in both 10 and 25 man.

One thing to make sure is that everyone has projected textures on, if they don't, they won't see the circle that shows an icicle is going to fall.

In 25 man we had a lot of people dying to icicles and other various and sundry things, our raid leader turned on failbot after a while, not to be mean to people but just to show people where the problems were, and it helped encourage people to improve their performance. You have to have a raid that isn't full of defensive people, though.

Oh yeah for the frost novas, make sure all your priests/paladins are dispelling, even the DPSers.

Rasputin

07-05-2009, 11:10 PM

Having your tank wear frost resist gear helps a lot for frozen blows, in both 10 and 25 man.

We're all wearing a couple pieces in addition to a pally aura. Before doing that we all croaked very quickly.

One thing to make sure is that everyone has projected textures on, if they don't, they won't see the circle that shows an icicle is going to fall.

We don't really have issues with the icicles unless folks are nova'd in place.

Oh yeah for the frost novas, make sure all your priests/paladins are dispelling, even the DPSers.

Sadly, we only have two and both of them were going. We had a couple of bad novas where we got about half the raid stuck. We druids can shift out, but it's still a tough cookie to crumble.

jeffd

07-05-2009, 11:23 PM

We've hit the enrage timer once, with about 8 people up. At that point Hodir had 40% health remaining. So in broad strokes, we need to squeeze 40% more damage out of the raid over 8 minutes.

People not dying will be part of that; generally I take raid bosses in stages and stage 1 is almost always "don't die." So tonight I tried to get folks to focus on staying alive for 8 minutes - getting in starfires, or laying in singed stacks was secondary. Unfortunately that didn't go well; our normal raid healer was gone and we had to PUG a guy who was undergeared. So we didn't even get to the enrage timer on our three or four attempts tonight.

That being said - DPS is an issue as well. Two of our dedicated DPSers were pulling under 2k on the fight (and one was very low; down at about 1.2k) which is something we're going to have to work on. I'm going to have the awesome fun challenge of having to bitch people out about DPS without coming across like asshole "MORE DOTS" raid leader guy. We have a hunter who is maybe #2 or #3 in the raid gearwise, and her DPS is #4 (in front of only a warlock who's in half PVP gear).

Fun times!

07-05-2009, 11:32 PM

We have the Flash Freeze fairly well down, but when things go even slightly pear-shaped the Frozen Blows raid damage becomes our bane. What raid-wide damage reductions are out there? Or are you referring to folks all popping what they can?

For paladins:
Aura Mastery in the Holy tree to double the effect of Frost aura
Divine Sacrifice in the Prot tree to absorb 30% of the raid damage for 10 secs (bubble first)

I hope you have a paladin (preferably ret) judging light. It's like having an extra healer.
Having a priest (preferably disc) mass dispell the frost novas is handy.

Spect

07-06-2009, 05:53 AM

We have everyone wear 3 pieces of frost resist gear. It's fairly easy to make if you have crafters. That plus the paladin aura is enough to max everyone out at 417 frost resist. (which I believe translates to a max 75% reduction in damage from frost sources).

If you have DPSers that are doing much lower DPS due to jumping in place or moving around, have them stand near the NPC mage who places campfires around. You no longer need to move around. For melee, if the tank positions Hodir right, they can almost always stand in the spotlights for a nice buff which will help their dps greatly. (just watch for the runes!).

Gedd

07-06-2009, 06:34 AM

Hodir gave our 10-man group fits for a while, but we made a few adjustments that seem to help.

1) Mark the mage before starting the fight (I think it's the frozen mob on the far right) and only worry about freeing it up after flash freezes. The mage should be able to free all the other NPCs and that lets you get your DPS back on Hodir quickly.

2) Tank Hodir on the left. We tried tanking him near the chest on the right as we've seen suggested elsewhere, but we found the mage would frequently end up in the wall making it difficult to free it, and a lot of the campfires ended up in spots where they couldn't be used effectively.

3) Call out flash freezes in Vent. Invariably someone always missed a flash freeze. The little reminder has kept us from having any issues since.

Those few changes have made a huge difference the last few weeks in our runs. We went from wiping on him for an hour, to one-shotting him pretty consistently.

Thorim...we've actually consistently one-shotted him from the start. He's been the least troublesome of all the Keepers for us.

Freya...as was mentioned, the hardest part of this fight is dealing with the 3 elemental spawn. We eventually found the best way to deal with it was to have our paladin tank pick up all 3, then move away from the snaplasher once it got to 15 or so stacks. Again, Freya was another fight that we had tons of issues with until we started doing that.

I read an article a while back from some tank blog (I'm a warrior tank) that mentioned that the Freya tank can and should be doing more than just sitting there keeping Freya off the raid. Once I get Freya locked down, I help out with dpsing the trees, the conservator...anything I can do while keeping Freya in front of me.

Mimiron...probably between Freya and Thorim for us in terms of difficulty. We almost always lose someone in phase 2, but we typically run with two druids so it's not an issue. As a warrior tank, I hold on to the head in phase 3 with spell reflect and taunt, and eat the bomb bots as well.

AndrewM

07-06-2009, 07:24 AM

What raid-wide damage reductions are out there? Or are you referring to folks all popping what they can?

There's bubble-divine sacrifice as somebody mentioned (all retadins should have this), and I think priests have something, but maybe they are just using the single target Pain Suppression on the tank. We tend to have tons of priests and Paladins, and we're doing 25 man, so we have lots of cooldowns available.

Two of our dedicated DPSers were pulling under 2k on the fight (and one was very low; down at about 1.2k) which is something we're going to have to work on. I'm going to have the awesome fun challenge of having to bitch people out about DPS without coming across like asshole "MORE DOTS" raid leader guy. We have a hunter who is maybe #2 or #3 in the raid gearwise, and her DPS is #4 (in front of only a warlock who's in half PVP gear).

One thing to remember is that different classes benefit different amounts from the buffs that are present. I think that mages and warlocks can do really insane DPS on that fight, but that hunters and melee aren't helped a huge amount by the buffs.

Acoustic Rob

07-06-2009, 07:38 AM

Hunters are really helped by hanging out by the bonfires that the mage NPC sets--it removes the stacking cold DOT, so we don't have to move around as much, which means we can get our autoshots and steady shots off. Getting the mage out of her ice cube is always my first priority.

It also helps to pop misdirect whenever it comes off cooldown, to make sure the tank keeps a good threat lead, and to switch to Viper when running for the snow piles.

Can the mage be marked before the fight? That would help tremendously in finding the right icicle to target after a freeze.

AndrewM

07-06-2009, 08:17 AM

Can the mage be marked before the fight? That would help tremendously in finding the right icicle to target after a freeze.

You can, but you need to use a /target macro to select them, as you can't do it by clicking on them. I don't recall the names of the mages, though.

Acoustic Rob

07-06-2009, 09:43 AM

That makes sense--tab target doesn't work, as they aren't hostile, but a straight /target (mage name) should.

Athryn

07-06-2009, 10:04 AM

You can, but you need to use a /target macro to select them, as you can't do it by clicking on them. I don't recall the names of the mages, though.

10 man: Alliance Missy Flamecuffs Horde Veesha Blazeweaver

25 man adds: Alliance Sissy Flamecuffs Horde Amira Blazeweaver

MarchHare

07-06-2009, 10:09 AM

I manually mark the mage with a star icon as soon we free him after the pull. It seems to work pretty well.

In terms of difficulty, I'd rank the Keepers as follows (easiest to hardest):

Thorim (the challenging part is finding the correct balance of tunnel/arena groups, otherwise it's cake)
Hodir
Freya
Mimiron

Aside from Mimiron, we beat each of the Keepers on our first night of serious attempts. Mimiron took us three nights, but two of those were pre-nerf. He's much easier now, but he's still the Keeper that gives us the most trouble.

I'd say General Vezax is easier than Mimiron but harder than all the other bosses before him. We've only spent about 30 minutes with Yogg so far (made it to phase 2 once), but his difficulty seems to be at least on par with pre-nerf Mimiron, which is to be expected from the final boss of the zone (not counting Algalon).

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 11:12 AM

Athryn

07-06-2009, 11:16 AM

Screw that, I stand next to bonfires because I'm lazy, that way I don't have to move much. :P

(actually, I move into a moonbeam when it's frozen blows time.)

Aaron, you seem to have your cranky pants on today! :P

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 12:16 PM

Yes, I do! It's because of nothing, too. There's no reason I should be so cranky! Aargh! RAAGE AT CRANKINESS.

Rasputin

07-06-2009, 12:47 PM

You really have DPSers that are under 2k? On -Hodir-?

I'm .... boggling. No, really.

The beams of light grant some incredible amount of haste to anyone who stands in them. That's huge for every class, including healers.

The storm cloud buff grants 175% crit damage increase or something insane like that.

Every DPS and every healer and the tank should be standing in moonbeams the whole fight, modulo having to move for icicles and Flash Freezes. Storm clouds should be on as many people as possible.

It's not a forgiving fight. People need to do their jobs or be replaced. And I hate to say this so bluntly, but if people are having trouble on Hodir in your raid, getting out of icicles or getting in Flash Freezes, you will not kill Mimiron with them, even if you carry them through Hodir.

Yeah, it's pretty boggling, too. One is a lock who's mostly into PvP but has really good level stuff for that. We're kitting her out for PvE as best we can and have an experienced lock working with her a bit on her rotation and spec. The Hunter, as Jeff said, has really great gear and basically has no excuse but bad rotation (pretty sure she redid her spec under our suggestion a while back) for not being near the top of our DPS charts. Any suggestions or resources you guys use for helping out such DPS is appreciated.

Of course, they are both female, and we ALL know girls can't play video games well.

Mr. Crankypants, our raiders only die to icicles when they're immobilized. We've got a solid core of guys who've been with us through Naxx, so we're not about to give up on people now, with the exception of a healer who JUST WOULDN'T STAY OUT OF THE FIRE on Razorscale... but I digress.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 01:08 PM

Yeah, it's pretty boggling, too. One is a lock who's mostly into PvP but has really good level stuff for that. We're kitting her out for PvE as best we can and have an experienced lock working with her a bit on her rotation and spec. The Hunter, as Jeff said, has really great gear and basically has no excuse but bad rotation (pretty sure she redid her spec under our suggestion a while back) for not being near the top of our DPS charts. Any suggestions or resources you guys use for helping out such DPS is appreciated.

Armory pages would be nice. Different specs have wildly different rotations, gearing requirements, etc etc.

Mr. Crankypants, our raiders only die to icicles when they're immobilized. We've got a solid core of guys who've been with us through Naxx, so we're not about to give up on people now, with the exception of a healer who JUST WOULDN'T STAY OUT OF THE FIRE on Razorscale... but I digress.

Hehe, yeah, I am cranky and I don't know why, I was out of line.

Are you Alliance? If so, people should be using their Every Man For Himself and the Gnome talent whenever they can. Druids shifting out of it, Death Knights saving AMS for either Frozen Blows or when they're nova'd in an icicle fall.

Other than that, there's nothing really you can do but try to dispel as many of them as you can, grin, and bear it.

Bear in mind (lol) that outside of Frozen Blows, the only raid damage should be 1-stack ticks of Biting Cold (for like 100 damage) and people getting nova'd in icicles, which shouldn't kill them outright.

Now I'm going to ask a whole bunch of questions. None of these are intended to be insulting, they're just from my experience what the Guild I raid with has gone through.

What's your raid comp? How many Paladins do you have, and are they spec'd into Divine Guardian and the talent which improves it? What healers are you using? How many Death Knights do you have, and are they saving their AMS for Frozen Blows, or are they using it on icicles to stay in and DPS more?

Are your melee spamming jump to keep their stacks of Biting Cold off while they DPS? How is your raid at standing in moonbeams? Is the tank kiting the boss so that melee can have beams, and/or so that he can have beams as well? Bear in mind that Hodir does not get parry-hasted, but parried attacks are, of course, wasted DPS.

Are you guys busting out the iceblocks in good time? The Priest NPC will help dispel frost novas, and the moonbeams will help healers, so it's not useful only for DPSing. What order are you killing them in?

Where are you tanking the boss? Most Guilds seem to tank him near the hardmode chest on the right side, to pull NPCs over nearer the Mages, who rarely move any useful amount. Ideally, ranged should be able to get moonbeams + Cozy Fire.

That's a lot of questions. Huh.

Rasputin

07-06-2009, 01:24 PM

We're Horde.

Currently our core raiding group looks like this: Tauren DK tank, Pally Tank, Druid healer, Pally healer, Tauren Shaman healer, Tauren hunter, Belf lock, Undead Rogue, Belf Shadow Priest, Druid Cat DPS. This is a bit in flux as currently our SPriest is on vacation for a month, and the Cat is often a bit flaky. We've been using some friends that we really like to run with and are exceptional players, but we're losing them to their regular raid nights (they're part of Raid A, for those who've read the entire thread.

We're still getting our tanking concept hammered out on him, but typically our tank is kiting him around the room to try to get him near moonbeams. Melee DPS is following him. I'm not in the best position for telling you how the ranged DPS is doing on moonbeams, etc. as I'm running around like a ninny trying to dodge icicles, heal the DK tank and fire off HoTs on the rest of the raid supplementing the raid heals. Jeff might have more information on that.

When iceblocks come, we're busting out any raiders locked first (happens about twice every three raids) then the mage/priest. Normally we just bust those two out and then go back to Hodir, but last night we tried getting the others out as well. Seems like that doesn't free up enough DPS on Hodir fast enough, am I correct?

The tank is typically kiting him all over the place for beams (again Jeff would have better info on this as he's the tank in question), should he be keeping in a general area like near the box, etc.?

Hery

07-06-2009, 01:33 PM

Ten man normal mode hodir doesn't even really require people standing in moonbeams, if frost nova is screwing you try having everyone stand near fires and not worry about the moonbeams, it prevents the frost novas from happening so the only ones you have to deal with are the ones right after a flash freeze.

I can't stress this enough but just free the mages, if you get them both freed they will free everyone else very quickly, even other players. Have the tank do some mitigation cool down on frozen blows, everybody stand near fires and try to stay clumped up to facilitate spread of the storm power buff and you should have it no problem.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 01:36 PM

Generally, in my Guild, we've had the tank ranged-pull him over where to the Mage NPC is on the right side of the room and tank him there until the first beams come. It pulls the three further-away NPCs closer in, and provides the most possible buff overlay (that is, moonbeams near the cozy fires, basically).

I assume your DK tank is tanking Hodir, and the Pally is going Retribution? I don't know if he has Decursive, but that helps a lot for dispelling Novas. Regardless of what spec he is, he and the Pally healer should both be spec'd far enough into Protection to pick up Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian; use Hand of Sacrifice on the tank + Divine Sacrifice while Divine Shielded and see Frozen Blows do a lot less damage.

How are people dying? Really bad luck happens (Frost Nova + Icicle during a Frozen Blows) but if people aren't dying during Frozen Blows, then something's going wrong that can be easily fixed (by not standing in consecutive icicles, for example).

It should only take a few moments for the DPS to kill all four blocks (Mages first, after that FFA), and each NPC is critical; one more moonbeam or one more Storm Power more than makes up the lost DPS on the NPCs.

As the Druid, you should be able to focus on keeping a HoT stack rolling on the tank and other than that just raidhealing full-out. The Pally should be able to keep the tank up outside of Frozen Blows, and the hots + cooldowns you're blowing during the FBs should be enough to help your pally.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 01:39 PM

jeffd

07-06-2009, 02:12 PM

Hi!

Regarding the tanking of Hodir: I move him a fair bit, which it sounds like is not the right idea. I'd thought about maybe slowing down the movement some to make things more predictable, but we had taken our four shots last night & I didn't want to burn people out. Frozen Blows doesn't bug me much; I'm at maxed out frost resist & I usually pop Icebound Fortitude or something similar to mitigate through it.

Generally I have Hodir near moonbeams; but because we're not good at positioning they can be anywhere. It sounds like we need to keep Hodir near the toasty fires and have the NPCs come to us; which we'll try doing this week.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 03:04 PM

Think about it this way. You start off pulling him as far to the right as possible for the primary purpose of pulling the NPCs that way. Once they're at their casting range from Hodir, though, they're not coming any further, and you should be positioning Hodir so that melee can get the moonbeams, top priority, and ranged be in range from the cozy fires, second priority.

Jason Becker

07-06-2009, 03:32 PM

I agree not running Hodir around and keeping him on the right side is best. We had our fastest kill last week in 25 man with solid increase in DPS. We also just mark the 2 mages and then have it FFA after that as long as players actually are breaking out. The Officers really had to pound on players to focus on the NPC's as they all just wanted to get on boss and assume "somebody else" would take care of frozen NPC's.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 04:31 PM

You should, however, move him the minimum amount necessary to get melee a beam, just to clarify.

Anytime a ranged DPSer is over 120% threat (130% is pulling), you should taunt the boss to go back up to 100%. This will help if people are having threat problems, though if you have Frost resist gear on your DPSers they shouldn't be doing enough DPS for that.

AndrewM

07-06-2009, 05:29 PM

Anytime a ranged DPSer is over 120% threat (130% is pulling), you should taunt the boss to go back up to 100%.

Interesting. I'd assumed that the threat equalization happened only if somebody else had actually pulled. I'll have to try that out.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 05:38 PM

Interesting. I'd assumed that the threat equalization happened only if somebody else had actually pulled. I'll have to try that out.

My GM and Guild's main tank claims it works. And there's a 100g bounty on pulling aggro from him on Hodir-25 hardmode past 20 seconds into the fight... and I can't do it, even on the attempt I pulled 14k DPS on my Shaman. :( I got to 97% though!

Tankero

07-06-2009, 05:42 PM

I pulled it 8 seconds into the fight :P The tank never got my stormcloud XD

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 05:44 PM

You're on Hodir 8 seconds into the fight? Learn to bust blocks, son. :P

Anyway, by the time I bust both Mage blocks, thunderstorm to hit a few others on the move, throw a Flame Shock on Hodir, still moving, drop a new set of totems where he'll be tanked...

It's been long enough that I can grab a Stormcloud, hop in a beam, and start it crankin'. ;)

Tankero

07-06-2009, 05:54 PM

I busted out the shaman! TF->Zerked with SR up and my Greatness, Mirror and Mongoose all procced...

23k shred crits, all neat in a row...

Oh well, I tanked until the wipe after that.

Munky

07-06-2009, 06:09 PM

We've got a solid core of guys who've been with us through Naxx, so we're not about to give up on people now, with the exception of a healer who JUST WOULDN'T STAY OUT OF THE FIRE on Razorscale... but I digress.
Man, wish my guild had an attitude like that. I was there for every since scheduled raid night since I hit 80 back in December. Worked on every boss, saw every first kill. Until recently. I voluntarily sat out a few nights so some apps could get their test runs. Was there for about 90% of our attempts on Yogg - only missing the last two weeks we worked on him. We raid three nights a week. I got selected for the first two nights and passed over for the third - the Yogg sessions. I've just missed out on the first kill. Also missed a couple achievements that they finally decided to go for on those app run nights.

I've let my sub lapse.

AaronSofaer

07-06-2009, 06:41 PM

Oh, a Feral Druid in PvE. That makes sense as to why you can pull threat off any tank ever born, and do about ten quadrillion DPS. ;p

AndrewM

07-06-2009, 09:28 PM

I've let my sub lapse.

That seems like a bit of an overreaction. Not everybody can be there for every boss attempt. Then again, if you are so easily made upset by the game, perhaps it is time for a break.

Athryn

07-06-2009, 09:42 PM

I've let my sub lapse.

Well if you ever think about reactivating, my guild is recruiting again. :P

Joe M.

07-06-2009, 10:32 PM

Yeah, I would seriously recommend talking to an officer in the guild or something. Missing a boss kill and a couple achievements -- is it really worth quitting over? Have they been disrespecting you or anything of that nature? Because I know as an officer sometimes things just slip through the cracks. You're trying to find any edge you can get to overcome difficult content and sometimes you inadvertently step on some toes. It happens, and 99% of the time talking things over helps a lot.

Hery

07-07-2009, 08:12 AM

As mentioned up-thread, the one Mage in 10man Horde-side is named Veesha Blazeweaver.

Cozy Fires do not prevent novas, but they do prevent Biting Cold. You can still get icicle'd while in a Cozy Fire area.

Cozy fires do prevent the frost novas!

http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbguild/index.cgi?action=view_guide&guide_id=671

Toasty Fire: Creates a fire on the ground that prevents Biting Cold and the Freeze (frost nova) spell from Hodir. Toasty Fire will be extinguished if an Icicle falls on it! The Toasty Fire's aura has a radius of 10 yards and each mage will cast 1-2 fires per 1 minute phase.

And this is why it's not worth freeing anybody else after you free the mages.

Melt Ice: This deals 50,000 damage to an ice block over 10 seconds.

in 25 man the blocks have 100k health but there are 2 mages.

Joe M.

07-07-2009, 08:31 AM

Hery

07-07-2009, 08:44 AM

4 seconds to free one extra ice block maybe, but I doubt that the benefit you are talking about is as significant as people starting their dps rotations on Hodir 10 seconds earlier, especially getting scorch stacked on him that much faster. This isn't about lazyiness but about maximizing dps time, the net gain from spending an additional 10 seconds freeing the other npcs when they will be free in 10 seconds regardless is not as significant as the risk of scorch dropping off after each flash freeze, or the extra dps done on the boss over those 10 seconds over the course of the whole fight which is 80 seconds if it goes to enrage.

intruder

07-07-2009, 08:56 AM

Yeah, but an entire raid DPSing the blocks? Takes them all down in ~4 seconds, giving your DPS additional buffed DPS time. This reminds me of a hunter app I gkicked who insisted that he never had to avoid damage because theoretically someone could heal him through it. Lazy players. :(

Let him stand in a rocket blast at Mimiron...

In 10 man our 2nd tank in dps gear is freeing the mage + some help of ranged since only 1 tank is needed.

Joe M.

07-07-2009, 09:04 AM

Oh, you're talking about 10-man. Sorry, don't care!

edit: upon further inspection, you did note that there's "two mages" in 25-man which is where the mixup occurred. My remarks are still on point as far as that goes.

Munky

07-07-2009, 09:15 AM

That seems like a bit of an overreaction. Not everybody can be there for every boss attempt. Then again, if you are so easily made upset by the game, perhaps it is time for a break.
There's more to it, this was just the cherry on top. I've known the GM for a long, long time. I genuinely like her. Raided with her in Everquest. I just want to have fun and kill shit, I don't care what other guilds are doing. She and the rest of the guild were pretty much the same. But people change, guild politics rears it's ugly head, and this hunter don't play that game.

On a tangentially-related note: Recount is the devil.

MarchHare

07-07-2009, 10:06 AM

Recount is the devil.

Recount as an e-peen measuring stick is indeed the devil. Recount as a tool to see what other players of the same class/spec are doing differently than you and then using that as a method to improve is a godsend.

AaronSofaer

07-07-2009, 10:28 AM

Skipper

07-07-2009, 11:03 AM

Munky don't feel alone. We've gotten Yogg on 10-man more than once now but we're stumbling on him in 25-man. Still. After 5 weeks of attempts. There has been a lot of finger pointing back and forth on the last two weeks of attempts, not to mention turnout has gotten to the point we have to cancel when it's just down to Yogg. That's pretty much caused the arguments and such that have driven off our top warrior and close to our second tank as well. There is nothing worse in this game than raid breaking encounters.

I'm still trying to hold interest in WoW. I like raiding with friends but I've grown extremely tired of the other grinds. Dailies, alt-leveling, alt-gearing, etc have all fallen by the wayside. I'm assuming the upcoming patch will spur interest again but I think it might be break time for WoW soon.

Hery

07-07-2009, 11:19 AM

One storm cloud is worth ten seconds of DPS time from your entire raid. If breaking a block gets an earlier storm cloud, bam, it's worth it.

Except that stormcloud has a 1 minute cooldown so you only get one per shaman between flash freeze. So getting that storm cloud a few seconds earlier is moot since you will get it anyways. You guys are entitled to your opinion, there are many ways to beat Hodir in the 3 minutes for hard mode on Heroic difficulty the way we deal with the npcs is to only free the mages and then dps the boss.

Regardless, this group that is having trouble because they are hitting the enrage timer or all dying from environmental damge due to the frost nova. They should just free the mage then dps hodir while standing near cozy fires. That is all they have to do, they will be able to kill him by following a much simpler set of instructions than running around trying to get in moonwells and getting nova'd.

Jon Rowe

07-07-2009, 11:52 AM

Building a guild (Officer and friend of GM) from 0-60 and clearing MC was my most rewarding moment in gaming by far.
Just being a part of a guild built up through hard work, recruiting the right people and training everyone up and taking down bosses is just magic.

Taking down Majordomo and getting my Leaf for Rok Delar.. so awesome... I spent an entire night with the hunter core downing those bosses.

Fucking tough... The one in the blasted lands was bugged and not dropping his enrage. It was the longest kiting job ever at that point.

I had the most trouble with the lady in the Un'goro crater. I just took too much damage, even with pots and buffs. But I got her eventually. (I bought a better melee weapon, and switched to Melee hunter gear!)

I really miss the camaraderie of the guild. Everyone working together for a common goal, all of the hunters getting a sever wide all rhok delar all hunter WSG.

Oh, and for WoW'ers who didn't play in the good ol days, (Pre- AQ and BC) the Rhok Delar was fucking nuts for hunters. Insane crits and an even more insane crit rate. (With a good gear set) I really miss my hunter team. We had so much fun 3-huntering instances, using traps, feigns and pets to our hearts delight. We did an awesome stealth clear of DM. We figured out ways to feign death through instances to get to chests. We broke the scenery and found ways under stormwind and Ogrimmar. (Including the awesome portal into the mage tower trick under stormwind)

And then we would team up and raid MC on the weekends.

WoW is awesome.

Jag

07-07-2009, 12:55 PM

I had the most trouble with the lady in the Un'goro crater. I just took too much damage, even with pots and buffs. But I got her eventually. (I bought a better melee weapon, and switched to Melee hunter gear!)

Hunter since release date here. I thought she was the easiset, Silithus gave me the hardest time (without the lock exploit)

WoW is awesome.

Like someone said, I grew tired of the grind and unhappy of what they turned the hunter into. I quit right after we killed Yogg. WoW was awesome, but for me it was time to move on.

Gedd

07-08-2009, 07:04 AM

I thought she was the easiset, Silithus gave me the hardest time (without the lock exploit)

I definitely thought Un'goro was the easiest. Blasted Lands was pretty easy for me, but I can imagine the bug described would make him really tough. Winterspring was very hard to solo, because you had to keep the path back to the road clear of mobs, and I had him reset several times due to him getting stuck on geometry.

Silithus was definitely the most difficult, but it wasn't necessarily because of the encounter, it was the stupid Alliance (present company excluded!) who kept intentionally hitting the mob causing him to despawn while I was working on him. I finally got sick of it, woke my wife (who played a warlock) up on Saturday morning at like 6am, and one shot it. I really wanted to do it the "right" way, but I just couldn't get it done with the mob in one of the most popular areas at the time.

jeffd

08-09-2009, 11:10 PM

Arise, thread!

So, my raid is stalled pretty hard in Ulduar. We've managed to down a single keeper (Hodir) once - and that was with a significant assist from raiders from the other raid.

While our heart and pluck got us through Naxx, Ulduar requires actual skill, and that's where we're falling short. Two of our DPS are awful - they pull under 2k. One of them I consistently out DPS, and I'm the tank. In one case it's a spec issue - our warlock has a crappy raiding spec, and when I've mentioned it to her she's insisted she's not willing to change it. I haven't pressed it (I was going to press it last week, but she went through some pretty awful personal stuff so I decided to let it lie). This gal is the best geared member of the raid, which is doubly frustrating - we've given her all sorts of drops and it hasn't panned out.

Our second issue is our hunter - her DPS is awful. It's not a spec issue; it's simple rotation problems. She is consistently at the bottom of the DPS chart; often she's below me and I'm the tank!

We've (we being rasputin and myself) mentioned to the raid as a whole that they need to buckle down and get serious if we want to do more than drop the first five bosses again and again. That hasn't happened.

Oh, and complicating things - both these gals are married to our healers. So I'm limited in how big a hardass I can be; because I don't want their husbands getting up in arms and we end up losing 40% of the raid. :(

Enter the raid lockout extension. On Thursday, as usual, we cleared through Auriaya. Tonight we killed Razorscale and nothing else - we didn't even try Hodir (we were missing a few regulars and our PUGs were way undergeared).

On Thursday we are going to go after Hodir and, I predict, die again and again. And when it's all over and folks have had enough I'm going to inform them that I will keep extending that lockout timer until Hodir dies. Our issue isn't gear so there's no point in farming the early Ulduar bosses more. At which point I expect we're going to have it out.

We've got some alts coming up in our guild, newly minted 80s that we're gearing out - a priest and a lock. Worse comes to worse we lose a couple raiders and we spend a couple weeks in Naxx getting those two geared up. I don't want to go that route - but if that's how it has to be... :(

Bleh, this is the part of raiding that is no fun!

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 12:18 AM

You're not going to like the advice I'm going to give you.

It's your job to be a dick. To consider the time of eight people in the raid more important than the sensibilities of two raiders.

You cannot kill the Keepers and further in Ulduar with two DPSers pulling 2k unless your other four are superb. And if someone is unwilling to change their spec or rotation, then I would question why that person is raiding... and why you're giving that person loot. At all.

(Well, ok, you can kill Mimiron and Vezax will arbitrarily low DPS as long as your healers are amazing. But everyone still needs to play well.)

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 12:31 AM

Also, I think you can only extend raid lockouts for one week.

Gedd

08-10-2009, 06:22 AM

As far as I know, you can extend as often as you want.

It will be possible to extend an instance lock more than once and each extension will grant an additional amount of time equal to the duration of the original instance lock. In other words, you'd gain 24-hours if you chose to extend the instance lock of a heroic dungeon, whereas you'd gain 7-days by extending the lock on Ulduar.

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 10:54 AM

Huh, didn't know that. Thanks.

Anaxagoras

08-10-2009, 12:02 PM

It's your job to be a dick. To consider the time of eight people in the raid more important than the sensibilities of two raiders.
No. It's not his job to be a dick. I know, you think WoW is important, and you're all about PROGRESSION. But other people have healthier priorities.

It's his job to create & maintain a guild (assuming he's GM, which it sounds like he is) that people find enjoyable. If that means progression, then he'll have to improve the DPS, possibly by ejecting the problem DPS, or possibly by improving them somehow. Other guilds are perfectly happy to be casual, non-progression raiders. That's a decision that he & his guild will have to make.

You cannot kill the Keepers and further in Ulduar with two DPSers pulling 2k unless your other four are superb.
This part is dead on, unfortunately. You'll have to do something about your DPS jeff, if you want to progress further.

And if someone is unwilling to change their spec or rotation, then I would question why that person is raiding...
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess "to have fun".

and why you're giving that person loot. At all.
Again, I'm going to guess it has something to do with that "trying to have a good time" theme. People tend to have a good time when they get loot now & again.

(Well, ok, you can kill Mimiron and Vezax will arbitrarily low DPS as long as your healers are amazing. But everyone still needs to play well.)
Unfortunately, this part is right as well. Mimi is damn hard to kill with low DPS even when people play well... if people die quickly, it's almost impossible.

Rasputin

08-10-2009, 12:29 PM

Yeah, we're basically at an impasse until Thursday, when we can poll people, lay down what's got to happen and move from there.

Jeff is the GM of our 7-man guild, but really only because no one really cares :) We're a group of friends from real life who mostly use the guild for a chat channel and sharing crap through the vault. Our actual raid group spans members from two guilds, with another one or two guilds putting in individual members here and there.

What we're basically up against is that the other main guild was mostly created for fun with another, larger group of people who know each other outside WoW (that Jeff and I know several members of) and got into raiding because hey, what the hell. We're on an RP server, so some like doing that, others just like low-key play, and many actively resent anything that smacks of "hardcore" raiding, like wanting to get people on proven raid specs and rotations to raise DPS so we can kill more bosses.

As Jeff said, if things go south with players, we've got more coming up, and we'll limp along somehow. I myself am just tired of the low morale and inability to take any action that might help us move forward from stereotypical passive/aggressive gamers and hope they die in a fire.

Sometimes, when we fight Razorscale, I get my wish.

AndrewM

08-10-2009, 01:44 PM

Is the problem with Hodir that you are hitting the enrage timer? Are people dying? If you are all staying alive the whole time, and just can't beat the enrage timer, calculate how much DPS you need to beat it. Then you can lay out the hard cold numbers: "We need X dps total for the raid to kill him, and we are only doing Y. Unless we close this gap, we will never beat this boss."

It is hard to make those kinds of stark choices, though. I've been in a group trying to do the cheesy Sarth 3D burndown strategy, with a group that includes some alts, and we haven't gotten him down below 20% or so, and yet we just keep trying it and over again. It feels like we probably just don't have the DPS to do it, but it is hard to say that.

Hodir's enrage timer is pretty nasty at first, but the other keepers are much more demanding of the DPS in terms of requiring target switches and avoiding environmental damage. If you 'stand in the fire' on Hodir, you just get some damage to you and it can be healed through, but in Mimiron if you do the same for the rocket circles, you will just die.

Also, if you are bored of doing these same bosses over and over again, it is okay to stop raiding. Don't burn yourself out doing things that aren't fun because other people are too lazy to learn. It is fun to play with people you know, but not if you all have different goals.

Anaxagoras

08-10-2009, 02:00 PM

We're on an RP server, so some like doing that, others just like low-key play, and many actively resent anything that smacks of "hardcore" raiding, like wanting to get people on proven raid specs and rotations to raise DPS so we can kill more bosses.

I've found that if you present it as a simple "Where do you want to go?" question, without a predetermined answer in your mind, it generally goes over pretty well. To those DPS that are under 2k DPS, they need to get it up to about 3k if y'all want to progress. If they don't want to, and the guild is cool with them staying at 2k.. great. You've set a relaxed, low key, but non-progression environment. You'll keep clearing the same 5 bosses until people get geared via badge farming through heroics. And then you'll slowly progress.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure people understand what path they've chosen. And possibly leave the guild if it's not your cup of tea. =)

jeffd

08-10-2009, 02:00 PM

Last time it was the enrage timer biting us. DPS is our issue. :(

Rasputin

08-10-2009, 02:09 PM

I've found that if you present it as a simple "Where do you want to go?" question, without a predetermined answer in your mind, it generally goes over pretty well. To those DPS that are under 2k DPS, they need to get it up to about 3k if y'all want to progress. If they don't want to, and the guild is cool with them staying at 2k.. great. You've set a relaxed, low key, but non-progression environment. You'll keep clearing the same 5 bosses until people get geared via badge farming through heroics. And then you'll slowly progress.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure people understand what path they've chosen. And possibly leave the guild if it's not your cup of tea. =)

This is basically where we're headed, except that Jeff and I will be unlikely to continue farming the same bosses over and over, especially since we're sharding stuff as it is.

We've killed Hodir once, on a night when the low DPSer's couldn't make it and we pulled in some excellent folks we know from the other raid and dropped him. As Jeff said, it's our DPS (and the occasional bit of incompetent play that our healing is slow to recover from).

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 02:59 PM

No. It's not his job to be a dick. I know, you think WoW is important, and you're all about PROGRESSION. But other people have healthier priorities.

It's his job to create & maintain a guild (assuming he's GM, which it sounds like he is) that people find enjoyable. If that means progression, then he'll have to improve the DPS, possibly by ejecting the problem DPS, or possibly by improving them somehow. Other guilds are perfectly happy to be casual, non-progression raiders. That's a decision that he & his guild will have to make.

As I see it, as the leader of a raid, you have a responsibility to between nine and twenty-four other people. (Or possibly higher). If the group as a whole, the ten people, is fine with not progressing at all, then fine. But they're obviously not, otherwise he wouldn't be posting.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess "to have fun".

Again, I'm going to guess it has something to do with that "trying to have a good time" theme. People tend to have a good time when they get loot now & again.

I understand, intellectually, that some people find it fun to be carried through a raid despite being the reason the raid wipes, over and over again. Emotionally, I find that selfish and stupid, especially when the amount of effort required to do >2k DPS is so incredibly minimal.

In the end, changing your spec to something that doesn't suck isn't "hardcore", and learning how to play your class isn't "hardcore". It's about as hardcore as gemming or enchanting your gear, and takes less time than getting the mats for that off the AH.

The whole situation sounds like a no-win as long as you continue in the same track. My recommendation is as it was before: Explain to the two underperformers that they, personally, are wasting eight other peoples' time, and that's not OK. And if they want to bow out rather than spend five minutes reading, that's fine.

08-10-2009, 03:16 PM

One of them I consistently out DPS, and I'm the tank. In one case it's a spec issue - our warlock has a crappy raiding spec, and when I've mentioned it to her she's insisted she's not willing to change it.
With dualspec available this is a pretty weak excuse.

MarchHare

08-10-2009, 03:28 PM

With dualspec available this is a pretty weak excuse.

There are some people, and I don't mean this as a criticism against them, who simply don't care about playing "properly". They're having fun playing in their own (ineffective) style, and screw you for politely suggesting ways in which they could improve their dps or daring to tell them that they're doing anything wrong.

I know most of us here tend to play WoW logically and like to min-max our characters and be the best players we can be, but not everyone is like that. "It's my $15 monthly fee, so who are you to tell me how to play?" is a perfectly valid sentiment.

Ultimately, if you're in a guild with people who consistently bring the team down and cause wipes because they refuse to accept friendly and constructive criticism, you really only have two choices: accept that your group is going to fail a lot and learn to live with it, or find a different guild with players who share your same mind-set and playstyle.

Good luck!

Athryn

08-10-2009, 03:34 PM

There are some people, and I don't mean this as a criticism against them, who simply don't care about playing "properly". They're having fun playing in their own (ineffective) style, and screw you for politely suggesting ways in which they could improve their dps or daring to tell them that they're doing anything wrong.

....some people find it fun to be carried through a raid despite being the reason the raid wipes, over and over again.

I would just like to say: "QFT," and that the former are also usually the latter. I would also like to add that there are honestly some people who just don't belong in a raiding environment. I know it's a jerky thing to say, but it really is the truth.

I have started to view raiding like a weekend softball league. Would you allow someone to play if all they did was stand in the outfield and picked their nose, and when they went up to bat, struck out every time? It's the same parallel, in my opinion.

jeffd

08-10-2009, 03:48 PM

With dualspec available this is a pretty weak excuse.

Her other spec is for PVP. Her PVE spec has some crappy talents in it, and she's not specced into Ruin - which from what I gather is mandatory for raiding warlocks (sadly). When I've brought it up she's just kind of said she's not willing to give up those other talents and she'll just muddle along. I haven't yet pushed the issue (I will be on Thursday).

It sucks because I like all these folks, but they really are holding back our progression. I don't want to have to tell them "shape up or I replace you," but that's what it's going to come to. :(

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 04:04 PM

Her other spec is for PVP. Her PVE spec has some crappy talents in it, and she's not specced into Ruin - which from what I gather is mandatory for raiding warlocks (sadly). When I've brought it up she's just kind of said she's not willing to give up those other talents and she'll just muddle along. I haven't yet pushed the issue (I will be on Thursday).

It sucks because I like all these folks, but they really are holding back our progression. I don't want to have to tell them "shape up or I replace you," but that's what it's going to come to. :(

Ruin is, in fact, an absolute must for any Destruction or Demonology Warlock. If she doesn't want to spec it, she should spec Affliction or not raid.

You might get some traction by commenting that her "muddling along" causes the -raid- to wipe, not just her. If it were me, I might suggest that she could try playing a different character or a different spec entirely. We did that with a few players in my old, semi-casual Guild during TBC; we had a Mage who went over to a Shadow Priest and went from doing bad damage to giving her group a ton of mana and doing more damage than she had been doing on her Mage in the first place.

Mordrak

08-10-2009, 04:25 PM

I know most of us here tend to play WoW logically and like to min-max our characters and be the best players we can be, but not everyone is like that. "It's my $15 monthly fee, so who are you to tell me how to play?" is a perfectly valid sentiment.

See, this is why I quit raiding (and ultimately WoW). I just have a hard time maintaining my 'A' game so to speak. I was barely a passable raider for my guild but I was always on the edge of losing focus (and/or did) and often fucked up my rotation, etc. I don't know, I'm sure situational awareness and multitasking can be improved but by the time I was done with the game, it just felt like some mental switch that didn't work right in my brain. Some people just suck, I guess. I was never kicked out of a raid (probably, because I mostly raided with old real life friends), but it became a bit too stressful for me. I do miss the group accomplishment aspect of it. When everything aligns, it's probably the most fun I've had in WoW.

AaronSofaer

08-10-2009, 04:39 PM

I was barely a passable raider for my guild but I was always on the edge of losing focus (and/or did) and often fucked up my rotation, etc. I don't know, I'm sure situational awareness and multitasking can be improved but by the time I was done with the game, it just felt like some mental switch that didn't work right in my brain. Some people just suck, I guess.

Most classes can pull 3k DPS in Ulduar10/Naxx10/badge gear, properly enchanted, gemmed, and spec'd, with barely any rotation at all.

intruder

08-11-2009, 01:18 AM

Her other spec is for PVP. Her PVE spec has some crappy talents in it, and she's not specced into Ruin - which from what I gather is mandatory for raiding warlocks (sadly). When I've brought it up she's just kind of said she's not willing to give up those other talents and she'll just muddle along. I haven't yet pushed the issue (I will be on Thursday).

It sucks because I like all these folks, but they really are holding back our progression. I don't want to have to tell them "shape up or I replace you," but that's what it's going to come to. :(

What the hell is her PVE specc then and more importantly: Why does she insist to keep it if it sucks?
I mean during leveling I go with whatever specc is best for fast progress and don't care about groups / raids. But once you hit 80 and got some gear you can kill everything outside of instances besides some elites without any trouble.
With dual specc you can even solo easily as a healer with a 2nd specc for dailies these days.

And yes as others said: You have to live with it or leave them and find a more suitable guild.

Vincent_GC

08-11-2009, 05:35 AM

We just had a sit down (or whatever you call it in vent) and pulled our two worst offender dps'ers (a lock and a hunter), and essentially told them to step up our not be invited into raids. They are not our best geared dps, but they have the gear to be able to push 3k easily, and currently they can't even do that combined. We have tried for over a month to assist them. We have run them through Naxx, Ulduar, Heroic trains, OS, Vault, Maly, everything. We paired them up with guildies that we considered the best of that class in the hopes that thier experience and knowledge would rub off. Nothing.

We laid it out as smoothly as we could. The hunter ultimitely left, stating it's his 15 bucks to play as he wishes and will find other people to play with. The lock instead decided to step down and not raid unless absolutely needed.

Athryn's analogy is probobly the most accurate in regards to WoW and raiding. Anyone can pay 15 bucks a month and play WoW. Not everyone who plays WoW can be up to the task of raiding with 9/24 other people in an enviroment where coordination, skill, and gear need to mesh together so that the group succeeds.