So onto my least favourite Raid Boss. Thaddius has two basic phases to the fight. Thad is all about left and right, or negative and positive.
The fight starts with a pair of adds on platforms. These have to be fought simultaneously, and downed at the same time, or the other will enrage and severely damage if not kill the tank. The quirk to this fight is the adds will through the tanks from one side to the other, so the healers need to stay alert to heal which ever tank is coming to them.
After they are downed, jump down from the platform to Thadd’s level. Be careful, you can easily miss and you then will take about 30 seconds to rejoin the fight as you have to go back to the start of the room and around again. You will also take damage down to 35%, and healers don’t want to be worrying about healing you up because you couldn’t jump! Engage Thad with everyone stacked together on one side or the other, but not in front or behind. Everyone must be on the same side. Thadd will then cause the players polarity to change. Some players will become positively charged, the rest negative. If you stay on the negative side when you are positive, you explode, taking others with you.
And that’s exactly why I hate this fight. You have roughly three seconds from warning to dead. So everyone has to move fast. This fight is nigh on impossible without deadly boss mods, so I really recommend that! Everyone also has to remember to pass him on the right side as you can’t mix negative and positive – so in our case we say always move anti-clockwise to ensure no problems.
You also need to down him before his enrage timer comes up, so keep the DPS up and hit him as hard as you can. There is a benefit to the polarity, which is that stacking everyone together provides a buff for DPS – so make sure all the +’s are on top of each other, and all the -’s do the same.
We managed to wipe three times before finally downing Thad… and I don’t know if I ever want to go back to do this fight again. (I know I will, as we do Naxx most weeks… but its tempting not to)
I did pickup more epic lewtz this week, so having to grind back to Thadd was worth it… for me at least, although my EPGP is now below 2, so I won’t be winning any rolls
After Thadd was down we called it a night, and I headed off with a group of guildys to have another crack at Ulduar 10. Tomorrow we are scheduled to clear Constructs, then Military again. As I have already written of my experiences previously I won’t bore you again, but the Four Horsemen details will come in the next post… as will Sapphiron.
Last night I got a pst asking if I could come raiding. It wasn’t my plan to do much of anything for the night – I was going to spend time on the couch with the hugs’n'kisses. But when I discovered the plan was to take on Ulduar I shelved any plans I had and decided to go for the ride.
I haven’t previously set foot in Ulduar at all. So I was very excited to see what it looked like. I behaved like a n00b for ten minutes while ogling the entrance area, then calmed down enough to find out what we had to do. The first boss in Ulduar is Flame Leviathan. There is a fairly long trash sequence before the boss, but that suited me, as I needed time to get used to the tank. Yes, FL is a vehicle based battle, and for those of you thinking of (should I say shuddering!) The Occulous, put it from your mind. The vehicles here work well, and each fight is repeatable, and quite fun. The vehicles also scale with your gear, so make sure you get your best geared individuals into the drivers seats. Make sure your tanks go in the siege engines, and dps in the other vehicles. Also if your healers are dual spec, change to DPS spec if you have them and get into the passenger seat on the siege canons. So there is no need for healers here…
FL is relatively straightforward. Take down the towers before you get to him, unless you want to try his hard modes – one of which we did last night. We left one tower up and proceeded to wail on the big guy till he died. At least… I did! There might be more strategy if you are driving a vehicle, but i just mashed buttons till he died *grin* Somewhat unluckily for me, he dropped nothing I was interested in (Save for my first Emblem of Conquest – Huzzah!) So… no healing strategy for this fight then! We grabbed the achievements Shutout and Orbital Bombardment which is a great first attempt if you ask me! Next week, two towers! Shutout means not causing FL to go into system shutdown. Simple to acheieve, as long a you can weather the storm this causes. Basically don’t ever shutdown two turrets at a time and this one is yours. Orbital Bombardment is leaving one tower up. Which again is not particularly hard.
After a small amount of trash we reached Razorscale‘s Aerie. We waltzed through this fight, and I didn’t really pickup what was going on for the DPS’ers, save having to repair and operate harpoon guns. Razorscale has two phases – First phase is two parts - in the air and on the ground. During the ground phase, healers need to kick back, conserve mana and through heals only when necessary. During the air phase, lots of adds are around, and Razorscale will drop fireballs and devouring flames, which means healers need to keep up the heals… lots of rejuvenation please! Once she gets down to 50% health, Razorscale will land and not take to the air again. Tanks need to keep her facing away from the group, and healers keep all your HoT’s on the tank as the flame breath hurts – its a one-shot for most clothies!
I noticed the tanks continually changed around during the fight, but couldn’t work out why, until I noticed the debuff that Razorscale drops on them. Fused Armor slows tanks down, 20% per hit, and will stack five times leaving a tank motionless. Change tanks every time it stacks twice to avoid this.
Razorscale hit the deck, again with no deaths. This could be a quick and easy night! On to XT-002 Deconstructor, which I must say, is one of the cutest fights yet! XT-002 reminded me a lot of Johnny-5, with some Poltergeist thrown in… Actually he reminded me a lot of GIR, but that’s a bit cultish for most people to relate too… if only XT-002 said “I miss my bee’s!”
Again a two phase fight, and minus the gravity and light bombs is a relatively easy, if mana intensive, fight to heal. XT-002 has a ten minute enrage timer, and this is the hard limit on getting him down – stray over this time and he will one-shot any tank, no matter how well healed.
Phase one is tank-and-spank. When any player (except the tank on XT-002) gets a light or gravity bomb on them, they need to get more than ten yards from another player – anyone within ten yards also takes damage.
Every minute, XT-002 does “Tympanic Tantrum” which does about 80% damage to every raider – get HoT’s up as quickly as possible on everyone or deaths will occur if bombs have recently gone off. This can be avoided by getting him to enter Phase two before the minute is up, but our groups DPS wasn’t high enough to achieve that.
Phase two occurs at 75%, 50% and again at 25%. For reasons (from a lore and story perspective) I do not understand, XT-002 takes a 20 second nap during this phase, and his heart is exposed. DPS the heart down during this phase, as the boss takes double damage, and no one takes damage from him – even healers should get in and bash him! Adds are spawned during this phase, so the off-tank needs to pick them up and keep them busy while DPS hits the boss hard.
The fight enters phase 2 when the boss is at 75%, when it takes a 20-second “nap,” during which it exposes its heart and summons adds. After that, Phase 1 continues until at 50% (and 25% again) a Phase 2 takes place.
Again no loot (3 from 3 bosses with nothing for me ) but the rest of the raid was gearing up nicely!
Nerf Gravity Bombs was the achievement we picked up here – this is largely based around you healers picking up everyone before they drop… so don’t let the raid down!
For reasons I am not really sure of, We skipped Ignis and moved to another area – possibly because we aren’t yet geared enough for Ignis…
Last boss of the night for me was Kologarn. This is an interesting fight as it is a boss with two arms… that have to be tanked and attacked as separately! The right arm (which is on the left of the players) needs to be taken down first, as it grabs players and squeezes them to death. Healers watch who gets picked up and heal them fast and hard, especially if its your tank. Kologarn also shoots laser beams, and players need to run out of his sight to make this end. Don’t drag those beams across other players on your way out though, as that will hurt them too. All in all a reasonably easy fight to heal – just keep the Tanks topped off constantly, and the DPS healed if they get picked up or lasered! This is a loooong fight, so try to conserve mana, and make sure you have every ability you can to regain mana ready to use. It’s quite likely that using innovate early int he fight is a good idea, as its cooldown will be up and ready to use again before the end of the fight.
Somewhat cutely, Kologarn dies and forms the bridge to the next part of the instance. Again no loot though! Not a good night for me – Not a single piece of caster gear dropped.
We had a few goes at the next boss – Auriaya, but wiped… and at that I needed to go get some sleep, as my boss was visiting the office today, and I really didn’t want to be functioning on just a few hours sleep!
More to come when I get back to Ulduar – The next few nights will be Naxx25 with the guild, but hopefully we will make it back on Sunday or Monday night.
I got back to leveling another alt over the weekend, and it reminded me of just how much I enjoy the process. Well some of the process anyway.
I leveled my lock to 60, and of course headed for Outlands at 58. Hellfire Peninsula is the only place to start, and I remembered (as I have with the four toons before this!) how much I hate Hellfire. Hellfire is gank central. In the few hours it took to get from 58-60 I must have been killed 20 times. Mostly by lvl 80′s. I whinge a bit about the kind of person who thinks ganking is fun – and I’d love to see a psychologist study what kind of person does it. My feeling is the same kind who kicks down sand castles and other bullying type behaviors, but who aren’t physically capable of intimidating others in real life. The friend I was leveling with called in some guild help, and a few ally 80′s turned up to clear out the rot. Which they did, quickly and easily. Which also gives me the second aspect of gankers – unable to beat anybody at their own level, so they go after those they know they can beat.
Anyhoo! We beat a line for Zangermarsh as soon as we dinged 60 (ignoring riding training due to the impending changes in 3.2) and started questing there. Any I suddenly realised that the majority of the weekend had disappeared, and I had managed to put five levels on in that time, and missed a scheduled raid.. whoops! Every time previous that I have gotten close to 80 I start thinking about how much I hate the grind. That leveling is boring and I only do it for the end game. But… that’s just not true. I still haven’t set foot in Ulduar, and I am unlikely too before 3.2 comes out. So I spend all that time to level to 80, and then… I start another toon! I currently have two 80′s, both partially geared in 200-213 gear. I intend to finish them both off, and I do want to do Ulduar, and sooner rather than later, the coliseum. My biggest problem is that I prefer five man to any other type of content. This means that come the end game, I am limited to five man in heroics only, which means PUG’s. Which you will remember from previous posts, I don’t particularly like. I am looking forward to 3.2 mostly for the new five man content. Soonti’s guild is already talking about scheduled 5 man’s and 10 man’s of coliseum. This, for me at least, is nirvana.
But all of this is off topic. The reason for the slant here is to illustrate just why I prefer alts. If you are the kind of person who is likely to be called ADHD by your friends, then alt0holism is a likely problem for you. My excuse is the presence to run 5 mans, which means that until the new 5 man content arrives I’ll do other things.
And I do enjoy leveling my lock!
PS. Thanks to a lvl 80 friend my lock ran through BRD on the weekend. It was great to get some experience of the place at a lvl appropriate – even if our tank was a cat not a bear. I recently started a priest, and I have decided to do every 5 man in the game, at the right level. He is 23 now, so I’ve done Dead Mines and Stockades. RageFire Chasm is out of the question as it is far too hard to get to, and I missed Wailing Caverns before I decided to do this, and getting a group for WC is nigh on impossible. I should do ShadowFang Keep next, but again, nearly impossible to get a group, and its so far to go! So Blackfathom Deeps is next on the list I guess… although another run at stockades will be needed as I missed a couple of quests the first time.
Having raced through Arachnids, we headed into Constructs, and very nearly wiped after a rogue pulled trash *sigh* Luckily I was still healing and saved the day! Well, I helped to save the day at least *grin*
Constructs is one of my favourite areas in any instance – playing frogger is a great way to weed out n00bs in your raid! It is a long run of trash to the first boss, with some good chances to wipe by the incautious. When you move through the rooms, make sure you stay off the gratings in the middle of the second room (or just stay off them everywhere!) as lots of adds are spawned if anyone stands on the grates.
Once you get through all the trash (jump the rivers of slime/acid to avoid taking to much damage please!) clear the room all the way up to Patchwerk. If you don’t, he will aggro the mobs, which is pretty much a guaranteed wipe, and isn’t a hard mode like OS3D so don’t think its going to reward you in anyway. Patchwerk is a reasonably straight forward fight – his single special ability that is a hassle for healers is hateful strike. You need three tanks, all with over 30k hp to be able to do this fight. Those three need to stay top of the aggro tree as the ability means Patchwerk will lash out at either the second or third highest aggro holder with this ability. On a well geared tank it will hit for about 20k. On a clothy or rogue – it’s a one-shot. So DPS, don’t pass the tanks on aggro, or the healers can’t help you. Make sure you down Patchwerk before the six minute mark, as at this point he berzerks, and deals 1000% damage. Again finish before six minutes or there is nothing you can do but wipe.
Despite an accidental pull by our tank, and dropping a few DPS as Patchwerk ran wild, we recovered and finished off with a few seconds to spare before berzerk.
My first loot of the night came from Patchwerk – a big upgrade to my neck item – Thunderstorm Amulet – for sure a better item for DPS than healing, but still a massive upgrade from what I had for both. Actually my first upgrade of the night came from a trash drop from just before Patchwerk, but due to a ninja/master looter/screw up problem I had to wait to get the item transferred. Boots of the Escaped Captive are not a huge upgrade, but an upgrade is an upgrade.
After Patchwerk is the game of frogger to which I alluded earlier. There are three lines of oozes crawling across the passage, and touching any of them is insta-death. Make sure healers go through and wait after each line of them so that they can rez the tards who can’t make it. If five of your raid don’t fail at this, you are doing well. Don’t forget, to get the undying achievement, you cannot die here!
a small amount of trash later, and its time for the second boss – Grobbulus. Grob is an easy fight for healers, a long as everyone else does the right things. Oh, and stay out of the clouds, they hurt! Basically your tank needs to move Grob around the walls, facing away from the raid. When Grob creates a poison cloud, move him out of it. When a player is hit with mutating injection they need to move away from everyone else until the proc occurs and a poison cloud is created underneath them. Nothing hard about healing this fight, as long as everyone does the right things.
Grob was kind enough to drop Shroud of Luminosity which no one else wanted, so I grabbed it. My EPGP is looking quite poor at the moment, but my gear is looking great!
Next in Construct is Gluth. Gluth can be hard, but the easy way to do him is to tank him from the entrance tunnel. By doing this the adds don’t spawn, and make this a very easy fight. While Gluth dropped the 7.5 token for Breastplate of the Lost Vanquisher I didn’t have anywhere near enough EPGP to bid successfully… and he also dropped Vest of Vitality which was a very nice upgrade anyway, and good for my heals set. Make sure a healer hangs with the master loot while doing your rolls, as the pipe that leads to Gluth has an environmental dps effect, so keep them healed!
Lastly in Constructs is Thaddius. This is one of my least favourite fights in any raid as it requires a large amount of coordination of all members. We very nearly downed Thad on our first attempt, but wiped with less than 100k health to go. Thad then bugged out and we couldn’t reattempt the fight, so I can’t give a good rundown of this fight just yet! Sunday night we will reattempt him.
Will Soonti manage to avoid the acid rivers on the way to Patchwerk? Will she overcome her arachnophobia and dare to enter the arachnid quarter! All this, and more in tonight exciting episode!
Ok, so I’m just a tad excitable at the moment! Finally finishing all of Naxx25 is something I have been hanging out for for some time now, and I am somewhat surprised that the toon I will achieve it on will be my Drood – a DPS drood no less! Well, a DPS drood that is spending most of her time healing at least. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Even with getting through Arachnid and Construct quarters, I still need to down the Four Horsemen and Saphiron before getting Heroic:_The_Fall_of_Naxxramas and I really need to get around to doing it all on 10 man on Soonti. But, I can only do one raid at a time.
So tonight’s exciting episode starts with Spiders. The Arachnid quarter is definitely the easiest in Naxx, and as such most guilds will clear it first, probably a few times before starting on other content. Some fights are harder than others for healing, but mostly its fairly easy.
First boss in Arachnid is Anub’Rekhan. Anub has two adds that start the fight with him. Its quite possible to do this fight with two tanks, and as little as three healers, but three tanks will make it easier, if a little slower. Healers should stay close together, as there is no real need to spread out Anub and his adds, so keep it all close. This way if a healer drops, the others can pickup their healing without too many drama’s. The off-tanks need to get the adds down fast, as a DoT is applied, which stacks the longer they stay up. So all DPS on one add, then the other is the best strategy here.Once both adds are down burn Anub down. melee DPS should stay spread out as much as possible from each other to avoid multiple impales from Anub, but other than that its straight tank and spank from here on – with two exceptions. The off-tanks need to pick up the scarab adds that come in, so make sure your OT’s have DBM as that will give you a warning. The main-tank needs to remain alert for locust storm – move Anub from one side of the room to the other to cause the storm to finish. Healers shouldn’t need to move if they get positioned right in the centre to begin with, but watch your range anyway, just in case.
Next up is Faerlina. Faerlina is a good fight to have HoT’s on your MT constantly, as when Faerlina frenzies, she hits for 20+k damage! on our tanks that means 2/3rd of thier health gone in one shot. Also healers need to stay alert for poison – it doesnt do a huge amount of damage, but enough that a big hit in frenzy + poison will = wipe. Grab the adds and move them away from everyone as they can cast AOE silence, which stops heals, and caster DPS completely. So move em as far away as you can. One healer is going to need to keep that tank alive – if you get silenced call another over to help and move back to the main healers group. Also don’t use a Protadin on them, as many of a Paladins abilities are affected by silence too. It’s unlikely that this will cause enough aggro dip for a healer to get aggro, but it’s better not to take the chance. Don’t assign any DPS to the adds – unless you can burn them down within the first 30 seconds of the fight its better to take them down at the end. If you have priests in the group, mind control the worshipers (leave the followers alone they don’t do anything) to be able to stop Faerlina from frenzying (Widows Embrace capability). If you can manage to stop her frenzying then its a very easy fight to heal. We chose not to do this, so that we could go after the achievement – Momma Said Knock You Out
Which we got. Two bosses down, zero wipes. Things are going just fine.
Finally in Arachnid is Maexxna. This is a fairly easy tank and spank. The Tank needs to turn Maexxna away from the raid and all other raiders need to stay behind her. Dispel Poison whenever she uses Necrotic Poisonas it is a wipe waiting to happen if left up on the tank – it reduces 90% of all healing while it is active. Also make sure an off-tank is ready to pickup the adds that get spawned, and that all healers call out when they get wrapped (not when everyone gets wrapped) so that the DPS and OT can clear them quickly. This fight should only take three minutes or so to complete – probably the easiest heroic raid boss there is.
Three from Three down, time to head to the next quarter – Constructs!
Continuing on from last nights efforts, tonight was time to take down Kel’Thazud.
I missed the Four Horsemen and Sapphiron, so guides on those will come next week, when we do it all again.
Again I was asked to heal instead of DPS, and after thwe first wipe I think I should have gone and grabbed my Healadin instead of trying to do it on my Tree. But I persisted (only because I have better healing gear on Prinz than on Soonti… but anyway!)
KT is a three phase fight. First phase is quite easy, as long as everyone gets into the green circle within a few seconds. Very little healing required if the ranged DPS do their job. Which ours did.
Next phase is pretty easy too for healers, as long as you have enough DPS that can do interrupts to KT. Otherwise, people will get dead . Frost Bolts hits everyone in the raid doing around 10k damage. Easy enough to heal through, as there usually aren’t any burst damage attacks happening through this phase. Worse is Frost Blast which hits up to three targets for 104% damage, which happens over 4 seconds. So you need to get a HoT up on them quickly to ensure they don’t die. The simplest way to get through this fight as a tree is to keep at least one HoT up on the tanks at all times. It’s easy enough to heal up the raid when they get hit, as there is no massive urgency to heal them all within a few seconds. Throughout this phase void zones also appear. Easy to avoid as they are big and red, but stay in them for 5 seconds and death awaits.
During the third phase KT calls in three adds, which make things harder. You need to keep HoT’s up to all tanks during this phase, and the tanks need to be on the ball in picking up the adds, or its wipe time. raid damage during this phase can be fatal – so again keep the heals up as much as possible. If you can do all that (and the other 24 raiders can too!) then a kill waits. KT is one of the longest fights, at about 12 minutes with the group I went with last night, so mana conservation can come into play – you should be still full at the end of phase one (three minutes) and about half used at nine minutes (end of phase 2) with an innervate to go, so it shouldn’t be too hard to make it through if you are careful. For a paladin, it will be relatively easy, as you will get enough time to pop divine plea after KT ice blocks, you heal the targets, and let it run for ten seconds or so before having to heal again.
There are a few things I haven’t mentioned in my notes here, such as mana detonation and some of the other abilities – I really didn’t find they affected us. Other guides say to stay spread out as much as possible, which we did, so you should too – but don’t get too bent out of shape about it!
All in All, KT is not a terribly gear dependant fight. Our raid was a mix of well geared (about 10 raiders in average ilvl 213 gear) with the rest in mostly heroic blues and few 200 or 213 purples. As a casual raider, this is an easy raid to get into and finish, as long as there are some in the group that can prop up the rest a little. In this I found it easier to do 25 man than the 10 man fight, even tough 10 man is the “easy mode”
and for those who want a video… I stole this one (just like yesterday! seeing a trend!)
“What’s this! This post is clearly not about Healadin’s” I hear you cry.
Well spotted! In an effort to learn fights I can’t get to on my under-geared Healadin, I took my Boomkin/Tree for a run with her new raiding guild. (yeah I know about how that contradicts my bitch last post about raiding guilds, but this one is different – so far at least!) We picked up from Plague Quarter (they had cleared the first two the previous night) and cleared our way through without too many problems. I managed to screw up on Heigen and not run back to the platform when I should, but the raid rolled through without me. I thought I would throw up some notes, as much as anything so that I can remember the fights. I must say, Loatheb was fun, and I cant wait to heal that on Prinz, as it will be easier than drood healing! Notes below to explain why if you haven’t ever run Loatheb.
Plague Wing -
The First boss you will encounter in the Plague Quarter is Noth the Plague Bringer. Noth is pretty much spank and tank through phase one, expect that he puts big curses on that need to be dispelled. Assign Mages to this if you can spare them, otherwise Druids can do the job. If the curses aren’t dispelled, then they turn into Wrath of the Plaguebringer after 10 seconds. If all 10 players that get cursed get to wrath stage, then its time for a wipe. Phase two will see Noth teleport away and waves of skellingtons will attack the raid. These are easy enough to take down, but bring a few reasonable off tanks and assign them a healer for this phase to ensure everyone knows what to do. We ran this last night with 1 tank on Noth, and 2 on adds, with a healer assigned to each, and 1 raid healer, which seemed to work well. Phase one and two take three minutes to complete (about two minutes for phase one, one for phase two) and it will took us two cycles to get him down.
If a video is more your style, then I stole this one earlier
Noth dropped no loot I was interested in… *sigh* but all in all this is an easy boss fight.
We then moved on to the second boss – Heigan the Unclean. Heigan is again relatively easy as a healer, as long as you remember to be where you need to be through each phase. During Phase one Heigan will cast Decrepit Fever which can be removed with cleanse, but Druids can’t do anything about them – so make sure you have at least one priest, pally or shaman healer! Which shouldn’t be hard, as otherwise you would have five druid healers! For the duration of Phase one, all ranged DPS and healers need to stay on the platform. During Phase two the raid needs to regroup and follow the tank around, as Heigan turns the platform into a fatal location, and the rest of the room is safe for only certain periods. Being able to cast most heals while moving is a big plus for druids over paladins, so I think this fight might be more difficult with a healadin. I will update this when I have tried it on Prinzi. Each site I read for information about this fight talks about dancing… and I can see why you would think of this fight… the tank really does have to waltz the boss around! There is even an achievement! Heroic: The Safety Dance
The final encounter in the Plague Quarter is Loatheb. There is a gauntlet section between the two encounters, which last night seemed to cause a lot of problems… after losing three raiders in the gauntlet, we decided to press on with Laotheb anyway, and take him down with only 20 of us. It turns out this was the right decision – Loatheb is a pretty easy fight, as long as your healers are on the ball
Loatheb is straight spank and tank, but for the healers its a bit tougher – for 17 out of every 20 seconds you cant heal. At all. So for the three seconds you can, you need to be able to stack up the largest amount of burst healing you can. Not an ideal fight or a druid, but not too bad – I simply kept up lifebloom to proc during the window, and keep Regrowth up so you can swiftmend it, and cast nourish or healing touch
With Loatheb down we headed for Military Quarter. The first boss here is Instructor Razuvious. Another fairly easy fight, and fun if you are a priest I guess, as you can mind control his adds and beat the boss down with them. Nothing special about this fight as a healer – using healbot or similar addon is highly recommended, so you can heal the mind controlled add easily. A note to DPS too – please stay BEHIND Razuvious at all times. He doesn’t a DOT which can only be applied if he can see you.
Second encounter is Gothik the Harvester. Gothik is an interesting fight – the raid is split in two, and must fight live and undead mobs until Gothik himself appears. Another reasonably tank and spank fight, and while we passed this on the first go, we lost about half the raid, so better technique is required.
Lastly in Military is the Four Horsemen. We had a couple of attempts, but unfortunately it had gotten to late for me to continue, so I signed off and hope to see them another night.
So there it is! a simple guide to five bosses in Naxx25. More to come as I work my way through all the bosses.
So my title this week is a little dramatic. I actually had a good laugh about what happened, but for some, it could be a moment of “why do I play this game”
I finally got to 80 on my Druid recently. Having reached this milestone, I geared up in as much 200 gear as I could get my hands on from heroics and crafting or purchasing, and thought “I need a new guild, I want to raid through the end-game content!” I really don’t know why I thought this, because I’ve never decided to do such a thing before, but never the less, I set out to see what I could find.
I found a few guilds who were looking for boomkins. Good start. Raiding schedules not too many nights (ideally only 2 nights a week would be good for me, I do still have a bit of a life outside WoW)
Seems to be staffed by adults, who are civil to each other. hmmm… I seem to have narrowed down my possible selections to one.
So I carefully worded a response to the application. I knew as I was doing it it was a bit pointless as the guild was mostly through Ulduar 25 and I was only barely starting Naxx10. But what did I have to lose in applying.
Fairly quickly a response from the guild recruiter appeared, a politely worded thanks, but no thanks, please reapply when you get geared up a bit more.
Then I got a message in game suggesting that another guild might be interested. Yes they were looking for both Boomkins and Trees, and they run multiple raid groups so I could fit in somewhere. With reservations, I went to thierwebsite to apply, and had further reservations as I read the responses to a few other applications.
For whatever reason I applied anyway, again knowing that I was unlikely to get accepted, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Well, I must say, I’m glad I did apply. Because I found our just how juvenile the supposed best guild on Thaurissan is. Far from the polite response I got in my first attempt, I got a number of responses, ranging from merely smart-alec to down right nasty. Including one suggesting I had an order problem because the nick I used to register on their forum was not the same as my toon name. i mean WTF?
I put back a “learn to be polite you bunch of wankers” response, which I knew was hardly going to elicit an apology from them, and I haven’t checked back since. I reported back to the person who suggested I apply that they should have a look at the thread, and they came back apologizing profusely. Hardly their fault, but a lesson to us both.
The lessons learned so far -
1. Hard-Core raiding guilds are not for me.
That’s it
oh.. I guess I should actually say why… All these guilds are staffed by large amounts of people with nothing in their lives other than WoW. I ca’nt raid 5 nights a week. I won’t raid until 1 or 2am every day (I get up by 6 most days to walk my dogs) A subset of this phenomena is two types of people with whom I am not able to get along. One is the 14 year old. Quite a lot of them are, in fact, quite a lot older than this, but the attitude they exude through the smart-ass, witty and down right rude comments tell you just how old their minds are. Quite a lot of the time the behaviour falls into the second category I don’t get on with – the elitist. These ones will simply tell you about why they are better than you. It doesn’t actually have to be true, but they will believe it no matter what – any small difference is enough to ensure the belief in themselves. Usually this type are DPS’er (what do I mean usually!) and will always crow about the fact that they top DPS meters.
But enough whinging. I decided to get on with playing in my way, with my social guild, and just enjoy it. and if I can find a raiding guild who is happy with an under-geared player, who only can turn up two nights a week, and needs to be in bed early because he is a granpa… then please send me a message
Last night I had one of those moments when I realised WoW isn’t always fun. Its been a while since the last one, but I got to say it brought me down to see how nasty other players can be.
I had been asked to tank Heroic Nexus for a PUG. I am geared OK as a tank, but I don’t do it a lot, so it can take me a little time to do all the right things to make it work. We hit the first boss and a wipe followed as I couldn’t hold aggro… I’m still not sure why, but the next run at the boss cleared him fine. Just before boss two a pat was pulled and we wiped again. I berated the hunter for not using Misdirect, and suddenly I am getting whispers from a player not in the raid berating me for blaming others. Then the hunter leaves the group and starts sending me whispers complaining that its not the DPS’ers fault if I cant aggro and that my attitude is wrong.
Now… I warned everyone going in that I am not a full time tank. No one said anything. When we wiped I asked for a few things to happen, and people adapted to make that happen. When I lose aggro on a patrol I didn’t pull… well yes I can see that you might get angry at the Tank.
But don’t.
Tank’s are the lynch-pin of a 5man. Yes you need a healer, and they need to be good. Yes you need DPS that can do their thing. And yes, the Tank needs to be geared, and know how to play their role. But berating them because you think they aren’t doing the right things, just doesn’t help you. DPS is EASY compared to tanking and healing. Healing is mostly easier than tanking (expect for in some tank and spank but hard healing fights) so whatever you want to do, don’t start insulting the tank because they aren’t doing the job. Ask if there is something wrong, offer constructive criticism perhaps, but don’t insult them and harp on because you feel the need to prove a point. If you yourself don’t tank, then you don’t have a point to prove – you don’t know how hard it is to tank, you can’t offer any constructive criticism.
I’d also like to say, that if you didn’t do the right things to drop aggro, then no matter how bad the tanking may be, you are just as bad. If you don’t use misdirect and Feign Death as a hunter when necessary to lose threat, then exactly what do you think the tank is going to think when you insult him for your death?
All of this followed a fail PUG in Naxx10 the night before. Which just happened to be a fail PUG mostly made up of guildy’s from the same guild as the player who was berating me the following night. That guild is now on my black list. I won’t PUG for them in future. It just isn’t worth the chance of the aggro that will follow (if you can pardon the pun) even if there are good and pleasant players, I won’t know…
It’s important to remember that everyone plays the game for fun, and insulting someone for their poor performance (real or imagined, it doesn’t matter) won’t win you any friends.
And, yeah my tanking wasn’t the best. I don’t know what was happening… I checked logs and I really can’t work it out. But that still doesn’t mean I need to cop shite from you.
on a slightly lighter note, if this is the way you talk in a raid, then please, don’t ask me to join your PUG… although listening to you might make me laugh later
With 3.2 coming fast, it is interesting to see just how many changes are going to affect Healadins. By my reckoning Holy Paladins will be the most affected class, as changes to some of our talents and spells will alter our play style fairly heavily. If you haven’t healed with your pally yet, or are ready to roll again, then 3.2 might give you good reason to consider going holy…
Perhaps (like me) you have a drood healer already and find being a tree a bit boring. Drood healing is astonishingly easy to do through until you hit heroics. Drood HoTs make things quite easy to manage, once you know your class, and work out how to heal. Paladin healing on the other hand, can be MUCH harder to master, as you don’t have a instant cast HoT. In fact, a Paladin as no HoT at all. Instant cast Holy Shock is about as good as an instant cast healing spell gets, except that it has a six second cool down, and thus cant be spammed constantly. I would take Rejuvenation over Holy Shock for most of the game. But come 3.2 and reaching level 80, Holy Shock gets Holy Mending. This is an amazing HoT or Paladins. Well, at least, if nothing else gets nerfed, then it is. This HoT means that a spell that (for me) crits for ~5K now heals for the same amount over the following 12 seconds. That’s a massive boost to this spell, and helps Paladins to be more effective MT healers. But because it isn’t available until 80, it won’t help anyone running normal content. That is quite disappointing IMHO as where the Healadin needs buffing is from 50-80, and while I welcome the buff at 80, I think it would be better available earlier – perhaps as an integrated part of Holy Shock.
The mechanics of Holy Mending are very interesting, as you need to have Sacred Shield up on the target to get the effect. This means that is likely that only the tank will get this benefit. Unconfirmed reports from the PTR indicate that any paladin’s Sacred Shield will not proc the Holy Mending effect – it must be the casters Sacred Shield.
The big upside to Paladin healing is Beacon of Light which allows all heals cast on any target within the party (well within 30 yards at least) to be also cast on the target of your beacon. This talent allows us to get through the later 5man content without completely tearing our hair out. As this is a 51 point talent you cannot possibly get it before level 60, and in many builds (see my build page when I get around to writing it, or TalentChic if you cant wait that long, and can work out the order for yourself ) you won’t get it until 65. Come 3.2, Beacon of Light gets even better. As a newly mined Healadin I didn’t use BoL much, its quite expensive mana wise, and only lasts 60 seconds, so it can be hard to justify. Now running Heroics, I find myself almost constantly using it. It wasn’t until I hit about 75, however, that I discovered that not all heals are actually transferred. Its only the healing done, not including overhealing, that gets transferred. This caused a wipe or two until I worked it out, and at the time I almost thought I had found a bug.
After more reading I discovered that this was the intended way for BoL to work. But not when 3.2 arrives. After 3.2, BoL transfers ALL healing done, including overhealing. This means there should not be any reason to ever heal the Tank directly. Not only… but also! BoL now works at 60 yards raidus, and that radius is of the Beaconed target, so you can be up to 90 yards away and have it still work! For fights where the tank, heals or everyone gets thrown around, this is brilliant. Cast a heal on ANY target and it gets to the tank (well within those restrictions of course!)
The only restriction on transferred healing, is that the HoT associated with Holy Shock doesn’t get transferred. But that is not a huge loss, and I would predict that this is merely a technical reason – for whatever reason the healing portion of Holy Shock doesn’t transfer, so Blizz have decided to leave it that way to avoid a bug…
Those two changes mean its time to roll Holy. Beg, borrow and steal to get your hands on 1k so you can dual spec, and then start collecting gear, as Healadins are going to be in big demand when 3.2 drops…
PS – My prediction for 3.2 going live is 28/07/09. I have no idea why, probably just wishful thinking…
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