Casual Healin'

Great post over on Older Gamer, which deatails all the Ulduar and later boss fights taunting requirements.

Might sounds like a funny thing to table, but as a tank and healer, I’ll print and keep this at hand so that I don’t sound like that n00b who always forgets the fights (which I am)

The last week has been interesting times.

For those of you into Discworld, you might realise what I am saying that that the last week has been filled with bad, but somewhat exciting occurrences.

Our 10 man progression has stalled at Putricide. Over three hours were spent this week, just on him. All other bosses are on farm now – well Rotface takes a few attempts but drops quick enough. Nothing new there then.

On Saturday night we guild pugged a ToGC 10 group. After Jarraxas wiped us twice, our RL and one of the tanks had a disagreement *ahem* and the tank rage quit. The tank was demoted (he was an officer) and then subsequently quit/kicked (depends on who you believe typed fastest) I swapped to tanking, and we got through four of the five bosses – we ran out of time on Anub. I am looking forward to having another go at this, and hopefully picking up a Tribute To Mad Skill… or even a Tribute To Insanity.

The ramifications of that altercation was that we were now down on one of the guilds main tanks. Me, personally, I was not going to miss him (typical DeathNoob if you ask me – all face-rolling anger, with no skill) but it means that I now need to take up tanking full time. It means that the other 10 man progression team has only one tank. It means that when one of us goes on holidays, no 25 man raiding will happen.

I am going on holidays at the end of this week.

This did not go down well when I reminded the GM and RL’s of the fact. Adding insult to injury, I am away for work for the majority of the week, and will miss raid night on Wednesday.

While our ten man group ran last night, a big fracas erupted in  guild chat, as people realised that there was effectively not enough players to be able to run the content. Typical. Grow up people – there are not enough tanks in the game. If you are a DPS queued in LFG you would know this. There is only one fix – get more. Easier said than done, of course. Within the next hour thier were two gquits (one very good, but unreliable raider, the other just a social) but its the sign of things to come if the officers can’t sort out the groups.

It also seems to be a source of contention that our group continues to run together, when others are unstable. Lots of people would see our group broken up, but I am really not sure what they would gain from that. If it does happen (not forgetting I’m afk for two weeks and really won’t be able to influence anything that goes on) then I will reconsider my options when I return. Unfortunately, I think it’s likely I’ll be again unemployed and searching for work via LFG!

Over the weekend Adept Unity merged with Betrayer.

I’m not going into the political intrigue that seems to have gone on in the background… but this has bulked our raid groups up heavily. There were 40 raiders on line at 7:30 tonight, which obviously left a few unhappy people who weren’t invite to the raid. I would have been happy to sit tonight (things to do before work tomorrow as I was away for work Friday and Saturday) but there never seems to be too many healers

More details about our new raid group composition as I understand it myself.

Well that’s interesting. Blizz has added some new mini-bosses to ICC. And the first I have encountered is the Frost Giant.

Which is a very interesting mini-boss!

The main mechanic here is a debuff called Death Plague. It lasts for 15 seconds and then kills you. That is, unless someone else is within 8 yards, then it (harmlessly) passes to them. Once you have been cleansed you can’t get the debuff again for 30 seconds, so the way to get through this fight is to have four players assigned to rotate the debuff. Once someone gets it, they move away from the raid, and one of the debuffers goes with them. Once it passes the other moves to them to get the debuff. Once cleansed, move back into the stacked players.

The debuff goes out again every so often (I haven’t exactly worked this out yet) so multiple players will end up with it. If it doesn’t get passed successfully it jumps to another player with no range limit – so you can’t allow players to die with this or it will wipe the raid.

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I will update more information here once I have a chance to look at the logs tonight and work out what is actually happening.

Finally. After nearly 3 hours of wipes, we downed Rotface. In the end it was simple, and I’m hoping we can replicate the effort next time. In our excitement we decided a photo in the room we hadn’t seen was more fun than the photo of a room we had seen. A lot.

Putricide is interesting. As the Off Tank I’m running the abomination around, however I can’t seem to eat the ooze fast enough. Will research more before we try again.

Re my last post – I am not giving up WoW all together. I do intend on cutting back the time I play – work is doing that for me anyway…

I raided on Wednesday night, and after clearing through to Festergut (again!) I found my attention had completely wandered, and I had no interest what-so-ever in continuing. Luckily we had reached the end of our allotted time, and while everyone else wanted to continue, I just wanted to sleep. Sorry bout that…

Thursday I went out to see a pre-season rugby match between my beloved Tahs and the local, much hated, Brumbies. The Tahs took home with win, in a scrappy, quite ordinary performance. Unfortunately (for yet another season) I doubt very much that we will make the Grand Final. But I digress… On my way home I realised that I would be home about in time for raid time to be ending, and that I should check in on how the 25ICC run had gone. The thought lasted mere moments, then I realised I really didn’t care.

As a guild we are having problems progressing beyond those first five bosses, the same bosses we are raiding week after week. Maybe I’m just temporarily burnt out, but unfortunately, I think it might be something bigger. So – things are going to quieten down a little here, as I have decided it’s time I cut back my WoW time and get back into training.

For those that don’t know me personally, I used to play grade rugby, but blew both knees in my last season, and since then have been unable, and unwilling, to exercise like I know I need to. Last night I shifted my brain, and decided it was time to find a new physical goal to attain. So just at the moment I’m working on SWMBO to allow me to go and buy a kayak, as I’ve decided that my knee’s may be stuffed, but I can row! My eventual goal will be to compete in the Hawksbury Classic, which even if you have no interest in spending a night and a day paddling from one place to another, deserves your support for being such a great charity event.

If I can sort my schedule out right, I will likely paddle a few nights a week (it’s light here until eight pm+ through until the end of March) until winter sets in. Whether I choose to fit that around still raiding Wednesday and Thursday nights remains to be seen. Our attendance rules seem to have gone from two to three nights a week without anyone consulting the core raiders, which means I possibly won’t be able to fit raiding into my life anyway.

Anyway, a week or two more before I make any new commitments, and hopefully during the next two weeks we can get through some more of ICC. I would dearly love to kill Arthas before I quit for a while *grin*

Really being lazy and leaving this for BigRet to analyze.

Anyone else who wants to take a look go for it.

Deathbringer Saurfang

Well my quest to find a better way to parse log files is over, almost before it begain. As soon as I ran my logs through World Of Logs (.com) last night, I knew i had been wasting my time doing it myself.

My test was an attempt on Northerend Beasts Heroic 10 Man from last night.

Loggerhead also works brilliantly, and I am not sure why I never looked for an addon to manage logging before. I would have forgotten to turn on logging about as much as I did turn it on, so this little addon is a godsend.

I don’t think I’ve previously mentioned my sinister secret. I love parsing combat logs after playing each night! Most players (in fact, even most Guild Masters) don’t know how, or just don’t do this. For me it appeals to my need for science – I can run the logs and replay the fights and work out what happened – good or bad – during that fight. This helps me to work out what to do different next time. The information here is also MUCH more useful than a simple DPS meter could ever be – as a healer topping the meters means almost nothing – it especially means nothing once you wipe.

Last night however, I was playing with recording video from WoW, and it crashed my game at one stage. When I restarted (in between Icehowl and the Worms!) things were as normal and I thrashed my way through to the end of the night. This morning when I went to grab the logs to have a look at the good, the bad and the ugly, I discovered… nothing! Crap, WoW turned off logging when it Crashed it seems. And the log it had up until that point (which only has Icehowl in it anyway) is corrupted due to the crash. Bugger.

All that lead me to see if I could find a more elegant way to grab logs. I am going to trial Loggerhead tonight, just because it has an LDB icon which should make it easy to see if logging is on or off. It also auto switches on logging in certain zones – which means I don’t have to remember, or suffer massive file sizes that I have to go through and chop up the next time I want to parse them.

I am also going to have a play with some of the websites out there like WorldofLogs.com, just to see what the results are like, compared to my own parses. I’ll link up a few of the parsed logs from some of the different offerings so I can work out what works best.

Well, almost.

We screamed through the first four bosses again this week in both 25 Thursday night, and Wednesday night in 10 man. Deathwhisper is still a problem in 25. Too many trigger happy DPS end up killing the mind-controlled players, which causes us big problems. With more practice this fight will be on farm soon too.

I’m up over 50k buffed hp in tank form, which means I’m almost ready for ICC 25 man. Not that I will manage to tank 25 it seems, as our tanks always turn up, and we rarely (if ever) have reserve healers. Over 50k was a nice psychological buff to me, to realise that tanking gear was accessible without running the hardest raids, and having farmed our way through five bosses in 10 man (with me as tank) has confirmed it.

Last night we farmed ToC25, VoA25 (just Koralon actually) and then Ony25. I picked up a trophy, piece to be replaced yet to be decided, and the 22 slot bag from Onyxia. That’s three 22 slotters from dungeon/raid content now… release another one Blizz! I have a moral dilemma about what to do with my trophy however. I was given it to upgrade a piece of my healing gear, but I feel that would be a waste of it, so I want to use it to upgrade a piece of my tanking gear. But that’s my off-spec, so I really shouldn’t. Except, for 10 man, thats my main spec, so that should make it ok. Will take it up with the officers tonight , and give it back if they are unhappy with me getting t9.5 gloves for my tank set with it.

In other news, I got Jewel Crafting to 450 last night, now just need to level Lilleeth to 76 so I can run Utgarde Pinnacle and Halls of Lightning for some of the gem design drops I want. Also need to hope that this design drops while I am getting the others… I haven’t seen it on the ah, so I am assuming its BoP, but I can’t seem to confirm that either.

I have decided that I will level my Mage (currently at 70) next, so that I can finish off engineering as well. Somewhere along the way, I have turned into the most massive profession whore. I then need to level my Blacksmith… err I mean Warrior up. Really I want to level my Priest or Shaman next, but neither has professions I don’t already have, so I can’t quite see the point. I am also considering dropping skinning on Soonti in favour of… probably alchemy. But maybe enchanting. Engineering? Hmmm… I really can’t decide at the moment – each profession has its advantages to a raiding tank/healer, and alchemy will probably win, even though its advantage is smallest, as I can currently make the most money from it, and save a bit with the mixology buff.

I am also working on recording video of our raids at the moment. Testing last night worked well, except that the program I am using (FRAPS) needs to be registered if you want to capture any more than 30 seconds of video. Obviously boss fights run a little longer than 30 seconds, so I am casting about for a new solution. I really want this in place before Wednesday nights raiding, but I haven’t found anything else I am comfortable with yet – I may just need to bite the bullet and pay for FRAPS.