The ultimate Boss fight

Matticus, of World of Matticus, PlusHeal, nostockui and wow.com fame, shared his dream from the other night with his followers on twitter. It led to much hilarity. I was quite amused that every time my twitter warcraft feed updated, there were yet more phases/scary things added to it. Here I’ll share the gradual progression of this epic encounter, and hopefully you’ll get a chuckle at least out of it.

The best part is the representation of it in image form at the end.

@matticus Dreamed of the hardest boss fight. Defile. Doomfire. Has 2 fire elementals that must be tanked in a tangent. Must pass cores. And 360°cleave

@tinkerpriest add in disease spreading and passing polarities

@Technophobia And you have to sit through a 10-minute RP intro and not AFK.

@MoodyDK And top it off with a Safety Dance.

@tinkerpriest add mind control, taunt immunity, and lava walls on heroic

@GamerGaz you forgot the crosshealing adds

@tinkerpriest And Leeching Swarm.

@tinkerpriest ….now it needs to grip 3 people for 110% of hp over 10sec, can’t heal targets directly.

@_Rades Also inbetween phases you have to dance across a floor that spews acid in horrible yet oddly predictable patterns.

@Thiefd Air Phase please?

@Technophobia 5min hard enrage, IMO.

@borskzj What about resist stacking?

@matticus Said boss must also include healing, dps, and tanking beams that must be blocked. Also drops random infernals. Has to be tanked by a mage.

@matticus I think thats what, 8 phases?

@Jezriya phase 9 is all the even numbered phases at once. phase 10 is all the odd ones.

@Kenichan How bout a knockback which throws off the top aggroer where 2nd & 3rd tank has to pickup?

@Loupyn must pass cores to remove stacking debuff on raid member, only 3 per fight and desolves if held >30s or <15s ?

@tinkerpriest 9 minute berserk timer, rebuffs on raid heal boss, stacking debuff (uncleanseable) on tanks that blows them up when it reaches 12.

@krizzlybear hardmode is activated when you heal an imprisoned NPC to 100%.

@pikestaff do we have a positive and a negative side yet?

@krizzlybear the trick is you have to pair up each + with an -, instead of stacking all the similar signs together.

@MoodyDK Four sides. Up, down, charm, strange.

@tinkerpriest achievement: claw cracker: burn each pincer within 10 sec of the other without losing anyone to Pinched.

@_Rades But each time you pair up, it has to be with a different person than the last time.

@tinkerpriest different race, get 45 sec debuff similar to argent tourney ones.

@pikestaff also, two words: Flame Wreath

@tinkerpriest do not move when flame wreath is cast or the raid blows up…

@Eforextinction Also, if it kills a player, it gains a new ability depending on the class of the player.

@_Rades Also the outside of the room is lined with eggs that will hatch & spawn whelps.

@tinkerpriest even better, the boss randomly decides 5 of these to use each lockout.

@krizhek so do we have a phase with cubes to click before he cast a instadeath spell?

@blackbell don’t forget void zones!

@pikestaff boss quote when he kills a player: “to the GROUND, baby!”

@tinkerpriest leeching debuff on any player more than 10 yds out, gas debuff that spreads to players within 7 yds.

@Technophobia And it should be called The Ultimate Raid Boss Of Ultimate Destiny.

@_Rades Rumored to drop the server-unique Pony mount but this has never been confirmed.

@MoodyDK Vehicle phases?

@matticus On phase 11, boss deathgrips everyone to middle, then casts arcane explosion. Flame Wreath. Blizzard. And Thorim like Lightning charge

@tinkerpriest final phase drops 3 legendary crackers and allows ranged to drop molten liquids to slow/snare.

@_Rades The molten only slows the crab adds (cradds?) though, as we know the big Crab is immune to flaming.

@Mcconniff MATT!!! Wake up you’re killing us!!!!!

@chanze and must have rays spitting venom covering the floor and the air phase from KT, and Annihilation

@MoodyDK I hope when GC puts this in he credits us. Then again, maybe I don’t.

@matticus the only bad thing about the encounter is that it will be solo’d by a rogue in 6 months

Achievement/Title for beating this boss?

Crab Slayer and The Deadliest Catch.

Filed under: awesome, blog, Blogroll, epic, general, progression, raid, raiding, warcraft, azeroth, boss, ghostcrawler, raid, twitter, twitteroth, warcraft

Killing time, not dragons (yet)

UPDATE: As of today, Saturday, July 17th, Hootsuite now offers an OptOut button on your Insight tab. I still would like to know how my real name got tied with my username, but I guess I’ll just have to recheck everything I can. This is good. I love my Hootsuite. Makes twitter fun and easy no matter where I am. Can’t wait to try to Mobile Apps. Now if only they had bit.ly integration… then again I do love my bit.ly sidebar.

I’ve recently become a devoted hootsuite.com user for my twitter needs. It has a way to add “team members” to a twitter account (Guild twitter account, and team members=PR/Morale/News Officers?) and I’m wondering if anyone has tried that out for their Guild yet. How’s it working? Maybe I’ve missed a review of this elsewhere?

My hesitation about it arises from something called the Insight tab.

I have yet to get an answer from @hootsuite_help on what the Insight tab is, how it gets it’s information, and how I can control what is shown there.

WTF where'd these connections come from?

In warcraft news: I’ve developed a serious case of alt-itis lately. My paladin was successfully transferred to Ner’zhul to join @Asros and @cavaliersguild. I started levelling a sexy draenai warrior there, and I ran through every single Draenai-zone quest there. Tabard of The Hand is damn sexy. (I’m kinda wishing I had made it male instead of female. Boo). I’m leveling that with my buddy @xparanormalityx who has accompanied me on at least 3 levelling adventures so far (all the way to 80, too, though he tends to level 3 in the time it takes me to level 1). I’ve also rolled a yummy troll hunter. I really wanted to see all the quests for trolls as they are now before Cataclysm hits.

It’s interesting but uncomfortable to have to regrow the guild/raidteam cohesion in a new area. Especially when really NONE of us has any cohesion together yet. Much different from adding one new person, we just added ten. While we knocked out TOC10 not horribly, it wasn’t necessarily pretty.

Now I’m left to wonder how to turn a ragtag group of strangers that know the instances, aren’t necessarily used to the same strategies (even on trash.. Bad trash pulls = ouch), know their roles, into a cohesive team. I’m pretty sure the only way to do that will be through repetitive practice. Joy.

Also, check out RaidWarning’s Shaman Roundtable: Totem Recall.

Filed under: alts, raid, raiding

Being bad

Check this out, guys!

Hell week is over! Finally

So indeed we accomplished something. Sadly it took us 3 continued raidIDs to do it. And now they want us on Lich King. I was dpsing on my priest, sadly, because I have to say I am not doing so hot with her. I’m much better on the shaman nowadays. After pugging before this with my priest and other people on my server, seeing 5k dps on that fight made me cry. And explained the difficulty level we faced.

Basically I don’t think we’re ready for Lich King. And I don’t want to spend 5 weeks wiping to get that through the raid’s head.

Now I feel horribly guilty about this. I am the one that hates on guildies that bail on farming raids for gear for new people. But it’s quite different to farm something then it is to wipe endlessly. I hate to say that, but it is. In my opinion at least. We need to be capable of killing Sindragosa the night we see here before we waste time wiping on Lich King.

Filed under: guild, raid, raiding

Oh, lookee!

Blogs you should check out this week: Blessing of Kings covers a Paladin tanking spec, and I give it my approval. I still prefer Divinity in my prot tree, and see Pursuit of Justice as laughingly silly, so never get it. But that’s just me. Seal of Command is GOOD. I loves it. Especially on big pulls. UK, UP, CoS. Yum.

Falling Leaves and Wings covers Quartz Procs, a module for my favorite addon (after grid). Delicious!

Bossypally covered low level ret tanking, too! YAY!

There’s a ton more. But this blog is full of links so you can easily find the great ones. Or follow me on google reader to see what I thought should be shared with the world.

Amazingly, this week’s weekly raid assignment was in the Halls of Ulduar instead of Jaraxxus for the billionth time. Oh the fun I’ve had so far, slogging through Loot Reaver (or whatever his name is in this expansion). The fun began on my holy paladin. There are 2 ways to start Flame Leviathan, kids, and one is the fast easy way and one is the NOT FAST OR EASY way. It became painfully obvious when the big mechano-thing busted through his doors to kick us out of the Halls of Ulduar that someone had spoken to the Lore Keeper of Norgannon, because pillars of light, adds of flowers, fire and brimstone started spawning, and we all died. Enter the facepalm!

So, we then had to go back and kill all the other junk that normally we could have skipped if our raid members had simply spoken to Brann Bronzebeard instead.

Lesson: NEVER SPEAK TO LOREKEEPER unless told to do so.

If you are raiding ICC10, your gear should make achievements in Ulduar silly easy. Especially the Flame Leviathan ones. (Or I could just think nothing compares to the complexity of dancing around Rotface or trying to kill Putricide, but that shows what I’m focused on right now.)

This is an easy achievement. Motorcycles get the oil down in front of him. This means have a basic idea of where people are going to kite (we used to try to kite diagonally across the room). And, this means you do NOT throw people on top of him to kill his towers, instead the people in the mid-sized vehicles throw pyrite on him and never stop, refilling as well. Super duper easy.

Moving on, I also realized that since all I pretty much do on the paladin is tank heroics on a daily basis for her frosts, she is now my source for primordial saronite. My tailoring priest is positively drooling at getting her hands on them.

This week my priest’s 10man raiding guild Annihilation finally killed Rotface. We three healed it with a disc&holy priest combo, and a holy paly. (Does that count as 4 healers, with that awesome beacon spell? I think it does.) Now we start working on Putricide and hope we can get Rotface dead again next week. We had 4 hunters in the raid and one ret paladin. So… yeah. But it worked!

Filed under: icecrown, raiding, rotface, ulduar

Stacking the Deck

What do you do to stack your group/raid’s deck? I guess this could mean classes, but really I’m wondering what you do when you put the groups together.

Me, I don’t start invites until I have the tanks and heals covered, minimum. There’s no point in getting people’s hopes up without those key roles, and the impatience factor can seriously hurt anything happening without them!

For tens, I keep tanks and heals in the same group if there is a healing priest present. If there’s no priest, but there is a healing shaman, and I build the tank/shaman group around those that will be in range of the totem. Onyxia this is pretty classic. Tanks, melee and shaman is told to always be in range of that tank with their totems.

On to the dps. DPS is so hit dependent, I build my groups around Heroic Presence. It is so good to be playing in the Alliance faction with that handy little feature! After duking it out with a past raid-leading-team that tried to put my draenai healer into a group that made little sense with her totem applications, whenever possible I put melee draenai with melee dps, and ranged draenai with ranged dps. This is because totems and heroic presence are range dependent. Sticking like ranged toons together, based on the necessities of the fight, is the optimal way to group them up.

I’ve been lucky that in my 25man raiding career we usually had a plethora of shamans. 2 enhancement and 2 resto, most nights. This means we had 2 resto split between the healer group and caster group (yay mana tide totem usage, not to mention the other buffs being shared) and the enhancements were put into the tank group1 and a melee group. This left a tad bit of quibble room on the last group, but the benefits for the rest with added healing, hit coverage, fear protection, extra dps, all seemed worth it.

It doesn’t always work out that way tho. Sometimes groups have to be built on their assignments. Onyxia is another great example because half the raid at least is focusing on running about and killing the big dragon, while others are killing adds. Grouping those teams together where possible makes good usage, too! Let’s face it, it’s not on every fight that we can all be grouped up together and hope everyone gets coverage with everything. Group-limited effects really spoil that, too.

What I’ve never really wrapped my mind around before is raids that have both sanctuary and kings up… /boggle

What do you do to build groups/raids? What did I forget?

Filed under: raiding

Healing with new toons

Yesterday after running my daily random heroic on my horde paladin, I was killing time doing stuff and saw a group desperate for one more healer for ICC10. It sort of killed me. When does healing experience and raiding experience makes up for a lack of actual hands-on-practice? I’m sure this is a quandary many altitis sufferers deal with.

She’d have been third healer, but a tank healer. She’s undergeared and still has blue boots. (Guess I have to get the ulduar pattern crafted). She only had 2200 bonus healing and 31% crit (totally unbuffed). I felt weak, basically, and weak + unsure at my healing skills = not a good place to be healing for a pug you’d like to make a good impression with. Since she’s my only horde 80 I don’t want to ruin my server reputation should anyone figure out who my Alliance mains are.

My goal is to heal on this paladin. That was why I made her, to flesh out with the 4th healing class my stable of healers, and learn the mechanics well enough that I felt confident giving directions to other holy paladins. I have 99% confidence in my ability to lead priests (even holy, which I have never played), druids, and shamans. But near to zero with paladins.

Sadly, since hitting 80 and the mad rush to gear up and get my rep and my emblems, I’ve tanked 99% of all things. Healing only happens when a guild tank offers or is seeking a guild heroic binge. That’s it. I’ve healed exactly one daily random, and every single day I queue up as tank/heals. Sadness. So really I have no clue what I could do given an unknown tank factor, let alone unknown co-heals factors.

This lack irritates me, but given real life situation, my wow time may be put on hiatus depending on how strong the internet wireless junk is at my new place. So I guess we’ll see what happens this coming week and weekend!

Filed under: healing, paladins, raiding

Healing ICC thoughts

I’ve managed to heal through ten man ICC up through Saurfang on my discipline priest, my resto druid and my resto shaman. I also heal 25 man ICC on the druid. It’s been… interesting. And a school of hard knocks. Here’s what has been going through my mind when facing this huge payload of damage I have to help heal.

My main is the druid, and I’ve done far more 25s with her than 10s, I’ve also simply been in there more with her. I have affiliations with other guilds on the server and have pugged the priest and shaman into their tens when they were short healers or doing alt runs. But the most pain has been felt on my druid.

Why?

Because with a good raid, the trash is EASY sauce heal-wise. At least with my co-healers. Most nights we run 2 holy palys, 1 disc priest, 1 or 2 resto shamans, and me. Yeah that’s a lot of friggin heals. And they’re all awesome at their job. So me and my measly little hots are brushed aside pretty easily. And, I try to hurricane or Faerie Fire or roots but with heavy melee and aoe damage, basically I stand there and look pretty. (Good thing my druid is damn fine!)

Last night I was talking in our guild healing chat channel. And I said “honestly, at this point, I pretty much view my job as putting up healing buffers to keep people alive until the palys or the shamans or even the priest let loose a heal bomb. I know the heal bombs are there and I know it’s going to come. I just gotta keep people alive til then.” A very forgettable job. My heal numbers look like crap. My overheal is insane. The numbers don’t bother me since I know and accept my role. But I know my RaidLeaders don’t really get it. How’d I go from uber heals in TOC to nada in ICC? Well we went from 5 to 7 healers. And 1 shaman to 2 most nights. My hots are overwritten so fast, it’s only on fights that are freaking crazy to heal (Marrowgar and Deathwhisper) that I might actually put up a good show numbers wise. I mean, I’m still doing my job. I’m healing to my best. But it’s hard to show that until everyone in the raid is nearly dead and my hots helped keep them alive. Luckily, one of the uber paladins that heals our raids saw my chatting and loosely agreed with me, then later on in our 2healed 10 man he complimented me because we healed that to death and rocked it. The best compliment is when he says “I like not having to stress about the healing situation.” Yay?!

In TOC I loved my crit, even at a lowly 22%. I didn’t even have the (4) T9 that let Rejuv crit, but in TOC it was WG that went a little crazy. My healing strategy was Rejuv and Nourish heavy with WG every time it was on cooldown. But now that I’m in ICC with more healers that heal like mack trucks, I’ve switched to Rejuv and Regrowth, and pulled Swiftmend out of the cobwebs. I mean, it was on my bar, but I barely had to use it. In ICC despite the Chill of the Throne damage is intense and fast heals are king, I think. Well fast heals and bubbles! And my heals… are not fast, unless I nourish spam, which makes me just another healer like the rest in my healing crew. I want to heal my best, but I want to really bring something useful to the raid, and I think my methodology now is good, given the other awesome healers I raid with.

Marrowgar and Deathwhisper are where I really love my glyph of Rejuvenation. Whatever it’s proper name, it boosts heals when targets are below 50%. That thing has saved lives on Marrowgar, I know it. GCD annoys the piss out of me in ICC. Did I mention I’m not haste capped yet? Not by a long shot. And the one upgrade I’ve gotten to drop in ICC10 (last night) has crit on it. #%!@! I actually traded out equal ilevel bracers from TOC and lost 2 sockets just for some haste. This is making me sad. But I refuse to gem purely for haste and I love my socket bonuses. So I’m up a creek without a paddle, basically, until I can get more upgrades.

I learned on Deathwhisper that I simply HAD to change my hot keys for ICC. Which is tough as I try to make my cleanses across all my toons on the same hotkey. My aoe heals on the same hotkey. My bigger heals on the same hotkey. Because of this hot mentality I’m focusing on with the druid, I really had to shift away from that. And I have to bring in my decurse for this Witch. It’s aggravating and pushing me to set up clique and get it working. And it was Marrowgar that made me reconfig my Disc Priest’s buttons.

On my druid, this is where I’m at with my hot buttons.

I really feel I should probably switch Nourish and Swiftmend, but then I use Swiftmend when I intended to nourish and I get confused, mostly because of my keybind setup across all 4 of my healers. I may have to macro Swiftmend to my Rejuv or Regrowth buttons with a modifier. I don’t use many macros at all so this is a big undertaking for me. But like I said, ICC is pushing me to become a better healer. Clique may be needed to transform my cleansing life on all my toons.

As for my Discipline Priest had her share of keybind shakeups to get through ICC. I’ve only been in ten man a few times with her, but the first was extremely rough for a number of reasons and really bushed me to get the most out of my healing there. I learned from that escapade and next time in made some changes.

After the experience in ICC, and leading to a successful 2 heal 10man clear through Saurfang with my resto tree buddy (@xparanormalityx) I used this setup instead.

I have to say, healing ICC with the priest was HELLA FUN. On my druid I feel weak and too slow, and shaman is.. awesome in an epeen sorta way. But I felt my most versatile and best on the priest. Even as a tank healer, two healing it with my druid buddy made me intensely happy to heal again. Maybe it was just that that ten man had a certain ambiance that made everything fun and good. Not sure, but it was great.

The shaman? She’s OP. Walked into a 25man ICC pug and chain heal stomped holy priests that overgeared her, though I was fighting with a druid for pure numbers. The drops that druid got made me cry inside for my main, but the shaman got a suuuuuper shield so I was happy. She’s not the first to get tier 10, as the druid got her gloves for some sexy haste, but she’s undoubtedly the sexiest of my toons, even if the most underplayed. Life in my bank guild is quiet.

Filed under: druid, healing, icecrown, priest, raiding, shaman

Time to cheer

Filed under: achievement, raiding

A new plan

I finally took the plunge and put my druid into a progression based raiding guild. I feel guilty on multiple levels. I was first asked to tank with my druid for these guys almost six months ago, during a rough time with her first guild, the one she raided with in TBC, and I was working on my shaman and had almost totally given up on doing anything with the druid. I should have joined them then. But, I didn’t. So we move on.

I’m healing with the druid, and I had what I thought was the best assignment for my first night raiding with them. Simple raid heals. It was great. But their raids are full of 2 disc priests, a holy priest, and some holy shamans. Needless to say my hots are too slow to tick! So I showed myself pretty shabby on the numbers when I wasn’t dying due to unfamiliarity with the fights.

Vezax wasn’t that surprising. I had done my homework. But everything I heard/read was that 3 stacks was pretty decent to have the green goo, get some mana back, etc. But nothing was happening. Then when I hit 5 stacks I hit a lag spike for some unknown reason and my jump out of the goo was slow and next thing I know I’m dead. Soooo frustrating. I’m not the type that’s gonna jump in right away with my excuses. Lag spikes are random and I’m not sure what caused the problem there. It pisses me off as much as it makes me feel guilty for failing my job to stay alive. So, I feel like slime.

I think I’m really an anticipatory healer. I like to know the kind of damage that should be coming in because I’m really good at meeting those needs. But sudden spikes of unexpected damage tend to show me at a disadvantage. So with a new guild I’m struggling to learn how these tanks take damage. And their strategies are a bit different from the other guilds I’ve managed to run this content with on my other toons.

So, just, ugh. I need to learn more on how to maximize druid raid heals. And I really need that idol. As much as I love getting mana back from Lifebloom the GCD vs the healing it spits out seems not a good balance, and I much prefer Rejuvenation. /headdesk

Filed under: druid, healing, raiding

Hit Bitch

Damn you, Blizzard, for creating party-only buffs!

If you don’t play a shaman, or a select few other classes (maybe?), or try to compose a raid, you may not be aware that Blizzard did NOT make all buffs raid wide. But it is true.

Healing Stream totem, for a glyphed shaman, can pack a pretty heavy punch of healing when used appropriately (18-25%). So at times I have to nag my raid leaders to move me around in the raid, or at the very least remind them that my totem, which I am dropping, will only serve those in my party. If they’re ranged and/or not taking much damage that may be a lot of wasted healing opportunity.

Mana Tide totem is party only, and can be extremely helpful for mana users, I especially like to keep healers in the party for that one. Sometimes they are spread out pretty far but if I am going to drop it I run to the one with the lowest mana or the inability to regen it (sorry druids with an available innervate lose out!).

Tremor totem. Ah the reason shamans are loved against the Cat Lady!

But then there is heroic presence. Oh how I loathe heroic presence (as a healer; I freaking love it as enhancement). For some reason draenai are on a shortage in my raids. And I hate asking my raid leaders to balance more_healing vs hit_capping_dps, but since my focus in a raid is healing, that’s where I’m going to put my support.

I’ve always viewed getting hit capped as a standard part of dps raiding. On my shaman and shadowpriest (my only dps toons) I’ve set up my outfits to account for both situations to the best of my ability. I understand hit rating is a pain to get sometimes, and that keeping hit capped can severely limit gear choices and dps capabilities. But when healing is my goal, I’m going to fight to make sure my skills, every one of them, is used to the best it can be.

So, I don’t like being dps’ hit bitch. And having the same conversations over it every week in raids kinda drives me nuts.

Filed under: raiding