See those skeletons all over the ground? Yeah.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Big Crits. They’re so happy that they’re now 8/12 Heroic ICC.

Ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Well the first eight or nine Heroic modes in (25 man) Icecrown Citadel go down pretty easy. I’m sure the Big Crits guild will get Lady Deathwhisper next without too much trouble. But then they’re probably going to hit their heads against the wall also known as: Heroic Professor Putricide.

Having suffered about 2-3 months of wiping on Heroic Putricide we earned our first Heroic kill just this week. Compare that to the time it took us to get the nine heroic modes before that: less than 1 month. The ICC buff was at 15% when we killed Lady Deathwhisper and it was 25% on our first Heroic Professor Putricide kill.

I’m not sure that I’m qualified to offer tips and tricks for other Shadow Priests out there attempting this fight. But surely I’ve devoted such a large amount of game time to dying on this fight and I can share some hard-earned wisdom. 

Stuff for Shadow Priests

Dispersion and Unbound Plague

Unlike the regular version of the Professor Putricide encounter, in which you should use the Tear Gas mass stun as a chance to Disperse and regain your mana during the phase transition, in Heroic mode you should save Dispersion for:

(a) an opportunity when you can’t really DPS anyway but need mana. This includes when you are the target of the red Gas Cloud (when you are the target of Gaseous Bloat) and will be running/kiting the cloud around the room, or, if you get hit and smacked with the Malleable Goo debuff.

But ideally you should use Dispersion for:

(b) extending the time you can hold Unbound Plague. Everyone in your raid should download and run the mod called Plagued. It does a simple little announce countdown that helps you monitor when the ticks of Unbound Plague are going to get too painful and you need to pass it off. Most guides/guilds recommend that you hold it for 10 seconds, 10 ticks. The Plagued mod counts down from 10 to 1 to notify the players around you. When the timer reaches 2 or 1 seconds to go, use Dispersion. Dispersion will numb the pain for the next 6 seconds. Just make sure you pass it off to someone else before Dispersion wears off because that 16th tick really, really hurts.

Your Shadowfiend and the Green Ooze

Talented, your Shadowfiend will be down on a 3 minute cooldown. And you should summon him twice – during the Phase 1->2 transition and the Phase 2->3 transition. Get him to attack the Green Ooze and he will help absorb the knockback damage. I like to wait until the first knockback before summoning my fiend, it’s usually players running to the second or third knockback point that having an extra friendly around to spread the damage really makes a difference.

Just be careful of this one little thing: if you’re currently using a macro (it’s often tied to Mind Flay) to get your fiend to use its Shadowcrawl ability, and you have the Gas Variable (thus, are attacking the Gas Cloud and not the Green Ooze) you need to make sure you don’t accidentally command your fiend to switch and appear right on the Gas Variable. Might be worth ditching the macro for this fight – after all, it’s not so much about the damage your pet deals, it’s about the damage it can absorb.

Professor Putricide: he’s right behind you!

Just because there’s a Gas Cloud or Green Ooze hanging around it doesn’t mean that you should let Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain drop off Professor Putricide. On a good attempt I can keep my DoT uptime fairly high, but on an unlucky attempt Professor Putricide will often be out of my range, or my Variable target will need all the DPS we can get (when you have a bunch of healers and tanks all with the Gas Variable you’re going to really need to focus fire if you’re one of the few DPS with the Gas Variable).

In Heroic mode Professor Putricide tends to spend a lot of his time hanging around his table – and he always heads there while you’re busy with the transition phases. Now, it could be different depending on what positioning strategy you’re using, but for me Professor Putricide was inevitably behind me when it was time to refresh my DoTs. This is quite annoying because I tend to rely on enemy nameplates to keep my targets in view/range and tab targetting to select them. And there are many occasions during the fight in which I can’t see the Professor’s nameplate.

Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Devouring Plague can all be cast with your back to Professor Putricide. Rely on a Focus frame or your DoT monitoring addon of choice instead of nameplates. And you can go a step further and create a macro for targetting Professor Putricide when he’s behind you:

/tar Professor Putricide

Simple! Actually because I’m so hesitant to spin my view around between my Variable target and the Professor I tend to let Shadow Word: Pain expire and just reapply it when it suits me (usually when I’m flying through the air from a knockback!) instead of trying to face the Professor to refresh SW:P with Mind Flay. This isn’t great for mana conservation, or for extending a boosted Shadow Word: Pain indefinitely, but it’s better than nothing.

2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace and Divine Hymn

I love Vampiric Embrace so I always talent into 2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace. The first time we got the Professor into the final phase I was the last to die – a steady stream of damage will keep you alive long after the damage aura has killed your teammates.

As we started refining our Phase 3 approach I got put on a Divine Hymn rotation (the other Shadow Priest in the guild would chant her hymn around the 12-15% mark and then I would follow her, and then our healing Priests would follow me). I really disliked this approach – reciting my Divine Hymn was usually the closest I came to death. In our kill neither of us Shadow Priests used Divine Hymn, although I think maybe one of our Holy Priests may have used hers.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the last DPS standing, too!

Improving your DPS

Absolutely the most effective way I was able to improve my DPS during this encounter was to keep all my DoTs running on both the Professor and whatever Gas Cloud/Green Ooze was up (or my Variable target during transition).

From there it’s a case of minimizing your movement. You need to be very careful not to get caught out by Malleable Goo and I would recommend being overly cautious while you’re wiping/practicing – move even when you’re fairly sure that you’re in the clear. You cannot afford to be hit. However, once you’re fairly confident that you aren’t being hit, try not to move unless you actually need to.

Unfortunately the stuff that will mess up your damage are all pretty important:

• being a good, thoughtful, Unbound Plague carrier
• intentionally stacking to absorb Green Ooze damage
• kiting the Gas Cloud if you are targetted
• moving away from the Gas Cloud before it retargets
• moving away from path of Malleable Goo

I would also argue that, as ranged DPS, getting the Gas Cloud variable is a pretty big DPS loss. In our strategy we had our ranged DPS continue to stack and absorb the Green Ooze damage even when they couldn’t DPS the Green Ooze themselves because they were debuffed with the Gas Variable. This mean that, if the Gas Cloud was kited out of our range, we couldn’t really DPS the Gas Cloud. As a Shadow Priest, you can still contribute by keeping your DoTs on the Professor.

By the way, a more experienced player told me that you should be aiming for 9k DPS from each of your raiders. On a lucky attempt (Green Ooze Variable, not targetted personally by the Gas Cloud, only carried the Plague once or twice) I could reach over 10k DPS. I saw a bit of a DPS drop once we hit Phase 3. On your average attempt I was still hovering around 9k DPS. If I got hit by Malleable Goo? 8k.

And every single attempt I had my ass kicked by our Hunters.

General Stuff for Ranged DPS and Healers

Zoom In

I think a lot of players, especially us ranged DPS, like to zoom their camera out to maximum distance so that we can see everything. In Professor Putricide having your camera a maximum distance can make it harder, not easier.

Ideally, you want your camera zoomed in close enough so that you can read the character names of the players standing nearby, but far enough away that you can judge which three directions Professor Putricide has thrown his three Malleable Goo.

I can’t stress how important it is to be able to see who’s standing nearby. We have 3 – yes, three! – Moonkin in our raids at the moment and 2 Hunters with that trinket that turns them into an ugly looking Gnoll. Our 2 Mages are fairly easy to identify because one is a Human and one is a Gnome. I’m also not the only Shadow Priest in the group.

We used vent to coordinate the spread of Unbound Plague. And the responsibility lay with the person currently handing Plague: when they were ready, they would run to pass it to the next carrier. But within the first few seconds of catching the Plague they had to call out on Vent who they intended to pass it to. And if your name was called, you would do your best to make catching the Plague safe – moving away from the rest of the raid (if you were a bit close to others) and then staying completely still while you identified who was trying to pass it to you.

Communication: Be Clear

When I would hear:”I’m passing the Plague to Cass”, my thought process immediately switched from juggling cast bars, DoTs and targets to:

Who said that? then Where are they standing?

Where am I standing? Do I still have an infected debuff from the last time I took the Plague? If so, can I afford to take it again? Are there people standing too close to me? Am I in the green ooze knockback area? Am I close to the Gas Cloud spawn point?

Professor Putricide casts Malleable Goo!

Oh crap. Is there a goo coming towards me? Of course there is. How can I avoid it and still be close to the plague carrier? Should I take the plague early?

It’s pretty easy to see how dealing with the Plague can take your mind off dealing damage. Now imagine that the person called out “I’m passing the plague to Cass” and I get half way through that distracting thought process only to realise that they’re actually standing 20 yards away and the other Shadow Priest in the guild is right next to them… they just got the name/person wrong.

Or, when you get the Plague and are unable to easily see if the Moonkin standing next to you is actually Player A, B or C. If you call out “I’m passing the Plague to… er that Moonkin nearby… wait! don’t move away” you distract three of your damage dealers all at the same time.

Pivoting for Malleable Goo

One of our newer healers was really struggling to avoid Malleable Goo and he was very upfront about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the timers or wasn’t trying to look and move out of the direction of the goo. He was. He was just having problems accurately determining the path of the goo flying through the air.

After a couple hours he pinpointed the problem: his camera was zoomed out so far that the ceilings and walls of the laboratory kept interfering, forcing him to pivot his camera view (when Malleable Goo was cast) to strange angles to see the room.

Try it – zoom in for Professor Putricide!

I feel like dancing! Yeah!

On Tuesday (maintenance!) and Friday nights I attend a dance aerobics class called BodyJam. If you’ve never heard about it before, it’s the brainchild of this guy from New Zealand. Every few months they release a new dance routine. Instructors around the world learn it, and turn around and teach it in their classes. We all learn and dance the same routine to the same music.

So Tuesday nights and Friday nights I tend not to think much about gaming. Well, that was until the latest routine was released and I found myself surrounded by 40 odd people awkwardly performing the male Human World of Warcraft dance.

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Of course, in BodyJam they call this piece of choreography their “Disco Block” and with dance moves like the “Travola” I think it’s safe to say that they were inspired by the same film that the Blizzard animators based their /dance emote on. Regardless, watching the guys in my class all doing the point/hip thrust in unison was gold. Pure gold.

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That small piece of choreography was the reason I first drew parallels between my dance class and World of Warcraft. Now consider this:

My best friend and I both attend the Friday night class. Our instructor is very vocal, and likes to take little pauses in the class to explain particularly tricky dance moves before they occur in the routine. She’s not a great dancer.

The instructor who takes the Tuesday night class is a brilliant dancer. He doesn’t say much and he rarely talks through the choreography at all. He leads by example. And the participants in the Tuesday night class just seem to be better dancers.

My friend can’t make the Tuesday night class, but it’s the class of the two that I prefer. If you don’t see the raiding correlation already think of it like this: lengthy, pre-pull fight explanations vs important, succinct directions mid-combat. I know which I prefer.

You see the thing is, even though all the instructors teach the same routine, the end result when you watch them dance can be hugely different. Dancers have their own style, and since this is far from professional dancing, there’s nothing to stop them from approaching the dance moves the way they want – with subtle emphasis on different poses, relaxing into some moves and putting energy into others.

Both my friend and I pick up the choreography pretty quickly. But I think I imitate my Tuesday night instructor’s style a hell of a lot more than I do my Friday night instructor. Sometimes the way my Friday night instructor explains choreography is really helpful, and sometimes the way my Tuesday night instructor explains the choreography makes more sense to me.

I know that I’m better at BodyJam because I am learning from two very different teachers. But the Tuesday night class teaches me more, because the skill of my peers is higher: I can look around the class and think “I like the way she kind of leans into that bit, maybe I’ll try that next repetition”.

It’s no different in raiding. You can learn so much by watching raiders around you, if you are in a skilled group. If you look around mid encounter, your most skilled DPSer is probably keeping their movement down to the absolute minimum. What are they doing to position themselves in advance so that they end up at the right place at the right time?

If there’s another player of the same class/spec as you watch and see how and when they use their mana-regenerating abilities. I know, for example, that the other Shadow Priest in my guild prefers a different timing/sequence on when they like to use Shadowfiend and Dispersion during the Lich King encounter. Try things their way. See which you prefer.

Last Tuesday, a tiny Colombian girl showed up as our BodyJam instructor while our regular teacher was off sick. Not 10 minutes into the class she decided that it was time to ramp up the difficulty. She started teaching flourishes, adding minute changes – additional kicks or arm movements where previously there might have been a simple step. Then she kept pushing us to try them. Then she scolded us for not working hard enough.

Yes, there are hard modes in BodyJam. And tough raid leaders!

It occurred to me that BodyJam has already mastered what Blizzard are trying to do with their Normal/Hard modes. Your typical dance routine is taught as:

• learn move A
• learn move B
• repeat A + B a few times in sequence
• learn move C
• repeat A + B + C a few times in sequence
• learn move D
• and so forth

In a typical dance routine if you struggle to get the hang of, say Move C, then it doesn’t matter how many additional steps are tacked on, you’ll always get hung up when you reach Move C and feel forever out-of-time or behind the choreography from that point onwards.

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BodyJam is taught very strangely in comparison. You never pause the music, and the routine – which might be made up of say 10 moves each with a count of 4-8 beats – is hardly ever taught in A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H etc sequence. Instead you might learn Move D + a few beats to march on the spot + Move F, repeat that a million times, and then learn Moves A + Move B + Move C and then revisit Move D and Move F and they’ll sneakily turn those few beats pause in between into Move E.

The learning curve is just perfect. Simply perfect. Of course, they probably spend countless hours user testing to get it just right. But it pays off.

The video above is the equivalent of learning Move A + Move B + Move C together. See how some of it is taught at half speed for many repetitions as participants learn the technique? And some nuances aren’t necessary to explain at all (chest pumps and the like), they’re low priority, and you can pick them up on your own.

So when you learn a brand new routine, you might finish the hour long class feeling as though you followed along all the way. After a few classes you realise that you executed every single move, no matter how small. And after a few more classes you start to add style and perfect each move and smooth them altogether.

Then your instructor brings out the “Advanced” options.

The strange thing is, once you’ve done the routine with all the additional advanced flourishes, you realise this was what the routine was always meant to be. The normal difficulty, the one you first learned, actually had a whole bunch of resting beats and simple marches and side steps just waiting to be replaced by elaborate hand/arm or feet movement.

It’s not until you complete the Advanced routine that you even notice all the pauses and mental breaks built into the Basic routine. The timing and positioning of both the Advanced and Basic routines are identical, there’s just a hell of a lot more going on in the Advanced version.

This is what I think Hard mode vs Normal mode in World of Warcraft raiding is meant to be. It’s not until you do Rotface on Hard that you realise that the room is designed to be flooded with slime from the wall. You realise that Ranged DPS were always intended to, well, stand at range instead of stacking with the melee (a typical strategy for normal mode) and puddle jump, dodge slime spray and cope with vile gas without passing it to others.

It seems silly that the transitions in Normal Professor Putricide are, well, a brain rest moment. In Hard mode you don’t get a break, instead you have to carefully kill both a green ooze and a gas cloud at the same time.

If I took the Lich King encounter on Normal mode – a seriously complex fight with many many phases – and decided that was the equivalent of a BodyJam Advanced routine, how would I simplify it for a more Basic routine? Remember: the object is to keep the timing and positioning the same.

First off, you could remove the spawn of Raging Spirits during the transition phase. You wouldn’t remove the transition phase entirely because it’s important to teach people that they need to move to the “safe” outer reaches of the platform while the Lich King casts Neverending Winter.

You could further simplify the first phase by removing the Necrotic Plague ability. Instead, perhaps the Shambling Horrors would slowly die of their own accord during Neverending Winter. This would still teach the raid to position in a triangular shape, with a tank for both the Lich King and the Shambling Horrors.

You could simplify the second phase considerably by putting Defile and Summon Val’kyr on a joined timer so that they never occur at the same time. Defile would be cast, then 30 seconds later Summon Val’kyr would be cast, then 30 seconds later Defile and so forth.

The best Hard mode encounters, in my opinion, are those that make you feel as though this is how the encounter was meant to play out. My least favourite Hard mode encounters are when the damage health and boss health are simply boosted: like Blood Queen Lana’thel.

7pm. Everyone's here. So what are we waiting for?

I don’t actually know what Raid Leading is. If I had to I think I would define it as:

Raid Leading: The silence that preceeds a ready check. When nothing is said on vent or in guild or raid chat.

Well, nothing is said that is related to the actual raid or game. I usually like to fill this silence with daydreams and commentary on my dinner, or even more likely, my plans for desert. But I’m pretty sure that in that silence your Raid Leader is frantically organizing players to change into their off spec, assigning tanks and checking that the healing team are prepared.

Others have defined Raid Leading as: more than just doing a quick boss strategy explanation. This definition seems to me to be extremely misleading. Yes, explaining the strategy is an important part of leading a PuG raid, or a very casual guild that has as many new raiders as regulars, but in a guild raid there really isn’t any need to go over the strategy or fight tactics at all.

I would imagine, although PuG raids aren’t my forte, that Raid Leading a PuG raid would mostly consist of filling the raid spots, choosing and explaining strategies for each boss, and dealing with disconnects and replacements. And maybe dealing with loot.

Presumably in a GDKP run Raid Leading is a similar job. With the collection and distribution of gold added in.

But in a guild run, I think a Raid Leader seems to have a slightly different job. They choose who is tanking, DPSing, healing for each encounter, who tanks what, perhaps even who heals whom. They set the pace of the run: deciding when breaks are taken, when players should be subbed in or out, when it’s time to try something hard, or relax and do something easy. They must identify, on wipes, what was at the root of the problem and solve it.

If they cover encounter strategy or tactics at all, it’s usually only to draw attention to something in the strategy that the raid isn’t executing properly.

Of course, having done none of them (PuG raiding leading, GDKP raid leading or guild raid leading) the job description of Raid Leader seems quite mysterious to me. It’s something that remains just out of the scope of my knowledge.

I’m not sure what the winning formula is for a Raid Leader. But I do agree, as I’ve read in countless blogs, forum topics and comments, that it’s best not to expect your Guild Master to also take on the job of Raid Leader. The success of the guild and the success of the raid can be intertwined, but the actual role description for each is completely separate.

Furthermore, I’m convinced that the best Raid Leaders are players who, Raid Leading aside, have the easiest job in the encounter.

Raid Leading, mid-combat, must require you to really play your own character with just half your brain. The other half, surely, is busy orchestrating the 24 people around you.

In the Burning Crusade our Raid Leaders (in our guild) were, depending on the night, a Hunter and Warlock. This is in the days when Hunters could bind their entire rotation onto their mouse scroll up or down function and when Warlocks spammed Shadow Bolt. And, damn it, they were proud of it. Hunters and Warlocks may not be as simple to play as they once were, but I still believe that ranged DPS make excellent Raid Leaders simply because they have the best view during combat. It makes troubleshooting after a wipe quite a bit easier, and improvisation mid-combat more informed.

In my experience tanks often take on the role of Raid Leader but I believe that this is because they are expected to lead parties from an early age, so to speak, not necessarily because they have the best view. I think some tanks would argue that they can devote their attention to Raid Leading mid-combat simply because, as the tank, most of the time they exist outside of the fight mechanics. Instead of running out of fire, poison and/or void zones often they get to stand still and mash buttons.

In Vitare, our Raid Leader is a tank. And (I think I must have mentioned this like 50 times on the blog – sorry!) he’s been away overseas on and off for the better part of six months. This means that, honestly, for the last six months, we’ve really mashed together our own way of doing things. While no single person currently holds the title of Raid Leader, I think about 5 or 6 people (and, no, not necessarily the officers) have sliced up the role description of Raid Leader and taken on small pieces of responsibility.

At points in time we’ve tried to appoint an “official” raid leader, and some plucky raider will step up to take the title. But, well, they tend to burn out really fast. Not having our own permanent Raid Leader has probably cost us at least three amazing raiders who have all quit the game or guild.

So after we lost our last Acting Raid Leader during last week’s raid lockout, apparently over a particularly nasty disagreement in Group 1, one of the Officers put it out there: we need a new volunteer. What really surprised me was that about three raiders put my name forth, not for an Officer position (something that I have simply refused to do for quite some time), but for the Raid Leader position. This was quite the most flattering comment I’ve received in game, and also the most confounding.

I don’t even know what Raid Leading is. Let alone how to do it!

In hindsight, I think I know why my name may have been put forth. When I finished university and started my first full time job I was surprised to learn, a year in at my performance review, that my manager wanted to pay to send me away to a course called the Young Manager’s Program. I, on the other hand, was campaigning quite hard to do an expensive ASP.net course. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in pursing a career in management (I’m not now, either) even though clearly my boss thought I was perfect material for management.

After a time I changed positions, changed departments and somehow ended up as the Acting Manager of Marketing for a month when my new boss got married and went away on his honeymoon. I found this particularly disturbing. I had no knowledge, education or background in Marketing at all. Unfortunately, I learned the truth about middle management during this month. Most of the time your day is veered off course by employees and their petty complaints. Not surprisingly, my experience as an Officer in a World of Warcraft guild was pretty much the same: an endless stream of personal complaints from guild members that really had no relevance to anyone else but the parties involved.

My workmates and boss at work all thought I had done a pretty great job as Acting Manager of Marketing. But what it taught me was that I can and will lead, when necessary, but I don’t enjoy it or derive any personal satisfaction from it.

You know how I said above that, in the absence of a full time Raid Leader, the guild seemed to just soak up those responsibilities as a collective? Well I think I soaked up one of those responsibilities. I now no longer play my Shadow Priest with 100% of my functional brain, instead I play my Shadow Priest with about 30% of my brain and use the other 70% to become a live, spoken, Boss Encounters Add on.

Most likely it started way back when we were learning how to defeat the Blood Princes on normal mode. I tended to stand at the 11 yard mark sandwiched between our Discipline Priest and one of our Holy Priests. And us Priests, we like to stick together. Add to that my empathy for healer tunnel vision (I see green bars) and the fact that I really do very little in Blood Princes, that I ended up watching their backs more than my own.

“Flame orb, run Nys!”

This progressed into calling out other random things. I was always the one who marked up the Blazing Skeletons and announced their position over vent during Dreamwalker. And these days I think I must talk more than anyone else mid-combat while I call out all kinds of random things – usually the things that have tripped us up as a guild in previous attempts: from Lady Deathwhisper’s Ghosts to Rotface’s Slime Spray and Festergut’s Pungent Blight.

See:

2) I’m Helpful

This person is always ready to help. In fact, they will always try to help, whether or not the help is actually needed. Has sort of a soothing, neutral voice so that they can be understood on Ventrilo easier, but people wonder if they actually used to sound like that before they started calling out Snobolds in the first place. Most likely a Ret Paladin or a Hunter, I’m Helpful will be the person who calls out everything needing to be called out, whether it is wandering plague on Arthas, Snobolds on a character, the fact Steelbreaker just died, or that someone is standing in a fire.

This person is probably immensely helpful since even though everyone has DBM installed, no one is actually paying any attention to it, and this droning, sonorous voice is probably their wake up call. Deep inside, if people don’t hear this voice, they will be surprised when things actually happen.

As long as I’m not healing (a job that takes significantly more than just 30% of my brain) I’m quite happy to call out these things, tell people when to run away, to even scold players for standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time. I find it very easy to do: I simply hit my push-to-talk key and say exactly what what’s going through my own head. There’s almost nothing that I announce on Vent that I’m not reminding myself about mentally anyway.

But it’s not because I desire to take on the responsibility. I do it because I think it needs to be done. And as soon as someone else starts chanting “ghosts” over me on Vent I’m quite happy to check that off my to-do list and focus on other things.

Cassandri as Raid Leader? I don’t think I could do it. Raid Leading, whatever it is, is so much more than just calling out cues over vent mid-combat.

But knowing that people in my guild think I could do it makes me wonder if I should push myself a bit harder, expand my boundaries. Perhaps I should revisit my level 17 Paladin and queue as a Tank. Never-mind that I get lost in Ragefire Chasm and that I have never tanked or led a 5 man before.

It's funny how a Dwarf with a legendary makes everyone feel better

It’s been an interesting couple of raid weeks for me.

On Wednesday night, “farm” night, we suffered through one of the worse raids I’ve ever been in since joining the guild over a year ago. We wiped on Marrowgar’s trash three time. We nearly wiped on Marrowgar too. I was healing (extra stressful) and I just couldn’t keep people alive. I couldn’t keep myself alive either – I was dead on a bone spike with 30% still left on the boss. I think everyone was relieved that we didnt technically wipe: a tank and healer survived at the very end. But that set the scene for the night.

I expected Deathwhisper to be a struggle. The last two weeks we’ve regressed and had to drop her back down to Normal mode. I blame the ghosts in Sunken Temple and Naxxramas’s Military Wing for establishing a dangerous precedent for dealing with ghosts. It seems, even with someone (usually me) screaming “ghosts!” every few seconds people still believe that the ghosts might just disappear if they ignore them. On Wednesday we got Deathwhisper Heroic after a few warm-up attempts. Things were looking up.

Saurfang gave us a few more difficulties but eventually we executed our Blood Beast DPS and healing assignments perfectly, with some help from a Rogue, and killed Saurfang.

We went on to spend the rest of the night wiping on Heroic Blood Prince Council.

For several weeks now attendance has been abysmal. I think lots of people are just giving up til Cataclysm. Lathere went casual some time ago and hasn’t logged into the game since (sorry, I know she intended to post that herself). Some of our new recruits have just stopped logging in altogether. Other raiders have gone casual, had their account hacked, gone on holidays etc. It’s incredibly rare for us to fill the 25 raid slots.

Not our Priests, I should add. The five of us are still going strong! Clearly we’re the backbone of the Vitare raids. /wink

The last two weeks have been extra interesting because our Raid Leader has been away on holidays. And at the moment we really only have one other Officer and he hasn’t been able to make each raid night. When the cat’s away… the mice will play.

Even though it felt surprisingly liberating (and quiet, I should add) to play without an established leader, it still surprised me how little we, as a group, knew about some stuff. How many healers do we do this with? Um we need Blood Beast assignments? Can’t everyone just remember whatever their assignment was from last week?

Our successes have been huge. Last week, with only 20 players on Thursday we almost got Rotface’s achievement and we did manage to kill Blood Prince Council on Heroic. Yes, with just 20 players. On the same night one of our players finished his Shadowmourne quest. This was a surprisingly special moment for the entire group.

Our failures have also been disturbingly huge. Festergut and Marrowgar, two of the easiest hard modes, have proved to be extremely difficult for us. Why? I have no idea.

We’re trialling two new main spec tanks (Druid and Death Knight), 1 Restoration Druid, 1 Holy Paladin (yet another one disappeared mysteriously during their trial), 1 Rogue, 1 Hunter and 1 Elemental Shaman. As soon as we can find a Warlock, Mage and main spec Restoration Shaman we’ll be trialling some new caster DPS and a new healer too.

Back to Wednesday night. Hours of wiping on Heroic Blood Prince Council. With 25 people in the raid. Suddenly there are flaws in our strategy – problems that we’ve never had to worry about before. We had three healer deaths when they took an Empowered Flame Orb to the face. And if they moved to run away their healing target (usually one of the tanks) would die. We missed Kinetic Bombs. We had Hunter pets moving away from the Bombs just as they came down to ground level.

I remember looking at the people (well characters) around me. It was pretty much the exact same group that had managed to kill the Council with 20 players the week before. These were our regulars, our core raiders. How had everything gone so wrong?

I logged off for the night completely miserable. Resigned to struggle through each raid night until the end of the expansion.

Then last night, Thursday, the day of the week that we’re most likely to have to cancel our raid everything just clicked into place. We had a full raid. We even had three or four people on standby. Unheard of! We blitzed through Blood Prince Council, doing the exact same thing we’ve always done, it just seemed to work again. We lost our first bite in Blood Queen but came back and killed her the very next attempt. Rotface and Festergut keeled over as intended. Dreamwalker was easy, even Sindragosa (only on normal mode, I should add) was easy peasy.

Then, oh my, we even had an hour or so left over to work on a progression fight!

I logged off on a high. And not just because bosses were falling over – it certainly wasn’t a night where no mistakes were made – we made heaps. We still needed one wipe or so before we could kill a boss. But I was so happy because all those new recruits: the DK tank, Feral tank, Ele Shaman, Hunter and Rogue were amazing. If anyone was making mistakes, it wasn’t the new guys, oh no.

This week the new Hunter and Rogue paired up to handle a Blood Beast on their own for Saurfang. And did an excellent job. That same Hunter got the very first Blood Queen bite and smoothly ran around finding and biting people.

Our new DK tank was awesome – his threat on the Shadow-y dude in Blood Prince Council was easily as good as any tank we currently have in the guild. And it’s this boss that I’m most likely to be threat-capped on.

The new Elemental Shaman is my Blood Fiend killing partner and saved me from death with a very nicely timed Thunderstorm.

So we go into the second half of this raid week, Monday night, with time to work on Heroic Professor Putricide, a bunch of promising new raiders, and some extra orange pixels. I know that raiding has its cycles, but I feel like we’ve just been on a roller coaster.

Suzushiiro (Holy Priest) in the opening credits of Big Crits

Are you watching Big Crits too? (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)

Big Crits is a newly formed 25 man World of Warcraft raiding guild. And everything that happens in the guild raids is recorded and edited back for us to watch as online episodes: an inside look into the running of a raiding guild.

I thought the show would be like watching a cross between an instructional how-to video with the occasional argument recorded over vent thrown in. Deep down I didn’t really think that a guild under that kind of pressure and exposure would be able to function as a hardcore raiding guild and be successful. Is the priority the show or the raiding?

Excellent raiding, in my experience, is rarely accompanied by guild drama. And wouldn’t the guild drama be the part that makes the show interesting?

To make a long story short, watching the very first episode answered a lot of those doubts. And it’s fascinating to watch. I love the raiders. I love the web-cam style confessions. I’m already attached to the main cast (not everyone in the raid group has their own “talking head” moment to talk directly to the camera and their audience).

I really respect what these guys are doing. Nothing captures what it’s like to be part of a raiding guild as well as this series does. The chatter on vent that kicks immediately after the opening credits make me feel right at home – it sounds and feels like every pre-raid chatter I’ve ever heard. And is, of course, totally forgettable. There’s the subtle, awkward conversations that we’ve all heard before:

I mean this in the nicest way possible. But… Whornnie could you do more threat?
– Episode 3

I’m tempted to send a link to this series to some of my friends – the friends of mine who theoretically understand that I play World of Warcraft, but don’t really understand what that entails.

I went out for dinner with a bunch of people I’d never met. Strangely enough it came out in conversation that one of the guys at the table was taking his new girlfriend to his mate’s place the next day. And the boys were planning to play Dungeons and Dragons. What really disappointed me (and my expectations were very, very low) was this response:

“Oh my god. Don’t you have to dress up like a wizard or something?”

It’s one thing to vilify a game for being geeky or nerdy, but there’s no need to turn it into something it’s not. If you’re into Dungeons and Dragons of course you’re into cosplay. And in turn you must be into roleplaying. And World of Warcraft is the same again, right?

What I’m trying to say is that so many people have a black mark next to the words “World of Warcraft”. And yet they have absolutely no idea what it is, and what it isn’t. And still they go around, convinced, that they have it all figured out.

Anyway, back to Big Crits.

Even if I wanted to apply, talk to my web cam and be part of the show, I can’t. Not just because they’re Horde (really, what were you thinking Stoneybaby?). Not just because they raid my time 10am Saturday and Sunday (believe it or not, I can’t play WoW all weekend). I can’t apply because they have a Shadow Priest already. And he’s pretty damn smart:

… it’s not just people geeking out in front of their computers. There’s more to it. I think people are afraid of what they don’t understand.
– Furioso, Shadow Priest

Smart guy, huh?

Big Crit’s Discipline Priest, another one of the main cast members with her name in the titles, is Jadeice. Jadeice seems to be struggling a little bit. She’s well spoken and I have this feeling that she comes from a guild in which she was one of the core members of the team – someone who everyone could count on. We actually don’t know much about her yet, she’s only had a few talking moments.

Unfortunately Jadeice was that person. The member of the raid who just couldn’t seem to pick up Sindragosa’s Frost Tomb mechanic and, instead of getting away from the raid and standing in the clear upon impact, managed to wipe the raid by entombing everyone around her (See Episode 2, 6.30 minute mark and then Episode 3, 7 minute mark). In Vitare that person is Citadel (but we forgive him because you can’t really expect much from a Ret Pally, right?). I’ll bet there’s a special person who has that label in your guild too.

Jadeice was swapped out. And they got their first Sindragosa kill as a guild. Ouch.

I mean, I know it probably wasn’t just me… but… they one shot it. I don’t know.
– Jadeice, Discipline Priest

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you are the only person in the team who can’t seem to cope. I’m still convinced I’m the absolute worst person in my guild at dealing with the Lich King’s Defile. I offer to sit out that fight pretty much every week.

But my favourite cast member by far is their Holy Priest, Suzushiiro. This guy makes me laugh absolutely every time. He’s determined to top healing meters and just gets that little bit crazy when he covets loot. He’s always hilarious. Here’s Suzushiiro’s explanation of Sindragosa:

…if they cast too many spells they blow themselves the fuck up. As someone who likes to whore healing meters it’s kind of annoying.

She’s not going to fucking touch me with it in Phase 1 but in Phase 2, when she starts really doling out the damage, and I’ve got to really push that shit out and more importantly, when Prayer of Healing becomes really good so I can really pull ahead of everyone else on the healing meters … then she’s gonna start fucking me with Unchained Magic.

– Suzushiiro, Holy Priest

And I’m not going to spoil it, but 6 minutes into Episode One I almost spit my drink onto my keyboard.

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What really worries me about Big Crit is that it follows some of the tricks you see in reality TV. Part of the fun in watching Survivor is hearing the individual competitors confess to the camera – in total privacy – then turn around and behave completely differently in front of their team mates. The show doesn’t go to air until all the decisions and votes have been cast so by that stage what they’ve confessed to the camera and to the audience can’t really get them into trouble.

But in Big Crits… eventually the raiders are going to have to eat their words as episodes go to air. Things that they say to the camera, after raid, might upset their guild members weeks later.

I can’t help but worry that the raiders will find themselves self-censoring, or not being 100% truthful simply because they don’t want to upset anyone. Stoneybaby is taking a different approach, complaining when his officers and raiders do something that he doesn’t like, but then confronting them about it before the episode goes to air. Even so, it’s a hard line to toe.

I have lots of other “favourite” moments from the first five episodes. What are yours?

ps. If you’ve yet to start watching you can subscribe to episodes feed and watch them in your feed reader or watch them on their website.

How NOT to Professor Putricide (10 man)

In Vitare we don’t seem to fall prey to loot drama. I remember that there was a little dissent over a gun in Ulduar, and whether Warriors should be allowed to outbid Hunter trial raiders.

But we most definitely do fall prey to 10 man drama. Are you in a 25 man guild? How many times have 10 mans been the source of your guild drama? I’ll bet a hell of a lot of the time.

It doesn’t really surprise me anymore. Splitting your 25 man group into two teams (and lets not forget the 5 people who are completely left out) and pitting them against the same content, often side by side at the same time, is bound to cause conflict.

Vitare has one fairly steady 10 man group. Not two, just one.That’s because:

1. A percentage of the guild don’t have extra nights/time to give to 10 man raiding
2. A percentage of the guild just don’t enjoy 10 mans as much
3. The left over 15 players (not already in a 10 man) aren’t a very good class/role makeup suitable for a second 10 man raid

I’m okay with there being only one 10 man group. I believe that the raiders who are the most determined to do 10 mans are already in this group.

Four nights is enough raiding for me. I don’t enjoy repeating content in 10 mans. And of the left over 15 guild raiders 3 of them are Priests. That’s a lot of Priests for a 10 man. There are a couple, maybe five, raiders who want to complete 10 man Icecrown Citadel every week, even though they’re not in the 10 man group. Those players usually PuG 10 man ICC.

Occasionally (usually at the start of a Patch when Emblems are important) the 15 left overs will try and group together to complete the occasional 10 man run. When we do, it’s usually pretty enjoyable and it’s nice to bond and build a bit of camaraderie with your guildies. But the group makeup is terrible. I’ve written about it before in posts, but we learned the hard way that you just can’t really complete some hard modes without a certain class or with an imbalanced ranged to melee ratio.

Because these runs are infrequent it’s not uncommon to depend on someone to bring an alt or play an offspec in order to meet the 2 tank, 3 healers and 5 DPS (preferably a nice mix of ranged/melee) format. But this further weakens the skill and success of the group.

To completely change the topic, I think I also need to tell you a bit about my Wrath of the Lich King Wish List: the incomplete achievements/encounters that I want to do before Cataclysm is released:

1. Earn an Ironbound Protodrake
   Completing the last few Ulduar hard modes has been number one on my list since… well… since Ulduar was released. Unfortunately they just keep releasing new raid content which really messes this up.
2. Kill Anub’arak in Trial of the Grand Crusader
   I don’t want to leave it at 4/5 ToGC. So close yet so far!
3. Earn the Champion of Ulduar title
   This one would be nice, but I’d be quite happy to go without. Can be completed on 10 man over multiple lockouts but requires people to stay alive.
4. Earn an Bloodbathed Frostwyrm
   This requires me to complete all the Heroic mode fights as well as a bunch of achievements in Icecrown Citadel on 10 or 25 man. Don’t think our 25 man group will take the time to do the non-heroic achievements… not when then 10 man team is working on it already.

And that’s pretty much it. The first two items on my Wish List are 25 man raiding achievements requiring, you guessed it, 25 people.

When Trial of the Crusader was first released, when it was gated and not taking up much raid time, there was still a lot of interest in completing the Ulduar hard modes for the mount. On one occasion we even went back and wiped on Razorscale to get Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare. On that same ID we pushed through and finally got I Choose You, Steelbreaker. Then we started ToGC and had no more time for Ulduar.

We never went back.

We were stuck at 4/5 ToGC when Icecrown Citadel came out. And nobody wanted to wipe in ToGC anymore – certainly not on Anub’arak (does anyone love this fight?!). But after our first Lich King kill we had a couple hours left of raiding for the week and went back to give Anubarak another go. We wiped. And it was painful.

We never went back.

Now I’ve given you all that history, let me tell you about Monday night. We finished ICC earlier than expected with a couple hours still left in our raiding schedule at the end of weekly lockout. We knew that we were going to kill the Lich King earlier than anticipated – our first attempt brought us straight into phase 3, but we had a few too many DPS dead to keep up. The night was still early.

Some players, like me, were pretty excited. A chance to raid something other than ICC 25!

I started throwing out ideas in Raid and Guild chat, even before we came back from our first wipe: “Ulduar here we come!”

Some other raiders were getting excited too. I heard someone say the words “Rusted Protodrake”, another player suggested “TOGC for BiS trinkets” and someone else chimed in “ooooh maybe we can finish our 10 man”. We killed the Lich King and ran around Dalaran waiting to hear what our next destination would be.

An officer suggested that we do a quick clear of the 4 farm bosses in ToGC, joining up with a PuG group that was forming on the server at same time. It was put to vote. Just over half the raid said yes, several did not vote and perhaps 4 or 5 said no.

We then voted on Ulduar hardmodes. Same response: about half the raid said yes, several did not vote and perhaps 4 or 5 said no.

There were a few more “comon let’s finish our 10 man” suggestions from the players who are in the core 10 man group. I could feel my chance at ever achieving my wish list items slipping away – when would we next get the chance to revisit old content during our raid schedule?

“Naxx 25 Immortal run?” I elaborated over vent: “God I just want a change of scenery – anything but Icecrown Citadel”. My Naxx 25 suggestion was also put to vote, although I never intended that we actually run it, I was just mad keen to do a 25 man raid other than Icecrown Citadel.

Most of the vote came back no or unanswered. A surprising five or six were keen. The same four or five people who voted no to all the previous votes voted no yet again.

Eventually the vote turn to “Who wants to do ICC 10?”. The same four or five people who had nixed every suggestion thus far finally voted yes. A few people who aren’t in the regular guild 10 man also said yes, which I thought was a bit strange. Did they think they were going to be invited to the 10 man ICC run – which was a continuation? I don’t think so.

By now the 25 man raid group was in shambles. It was announced over Vent that we would be disbanding to do ICC 10. And then it got interesting. Drama. Everyone had an opinion on the decision and let loose. There were arguments over Vent, arguments in guild chat, arguments in raid chat and, I’m sure, arguments over whisper and in Officer chat.

To sum up, the arguments were like so:

PRO splitting down to a 10 man
——————————————-

1. Never enough time on Friday night (the scheduled 10 man night) to complete it
2. 10 man progression kills are for the guild
3. 10 man heroic loot helps the guild in 25 mans
4. 10 man progression helps us learn those encounters for 25 man
5. The 10 man group is close to earning their Bloodbathed Frostwryms
6. There’s no loot worth having in ToGC
7. You can pug ToC/ToGC
8. Mounts are a waste of time
9. Ulduar hardmodes are a waste of time

CONS to splitting down to a 10 man
——————————————

1. Only 10 people (at most 20) can participate
2. Not the right classes/roles left over to form a second 10 man
3. 10 man progression has no meaning in a 25 man progression guild
4. 10 man progression loot is equivalent to our regular raid gear and worse than our 277 raid gear
5. 10 man progression kills only teach the 10 players involved
6. What makes the ICC mount more important than the Ulduar mount?
7. A small number of raiders (healers most especially) still need loot from ToGC loot – even with ICC loot factored in
8. You can pug ToGC but you can’t ensure loot stays within the guild
9. Completing Ulduar hardmodes and ToGC hardmodes still give us ranking points

The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is that almost everyone took a side. I discovered so much more about the people that I raid with in 15 minutes of arguing than I have raiding with them for months. I lost respect for some players. I gained respect for others. I revised my mental list of who I could approach for help, and who I shouldn’t ever bother to ask – unless there’s something in it for them.

I learned who had their head in the clouds: the people who thought there were two 10 man groups and also the players who thought that we could even form a second group considering that we only had 2 main spec tanks online.

I discovered who can actually argue intelligently. I discovered who was quick to realise that they had walked into a political mine field and inadvertently said the wrong thing… and who was slow. I discovered who was particularly hot tempered (to be honest, I really was just confirming something I already knew).

I also discovered, without a doubt, that I could kiss any hope of completing my top two wish list items for Wrath of the Lich King goodbye.

Raiding is selfish. The best way to get people to do what you want is to lure them in by promising them the chance at something that will benefit them as individuals. Most of the time that’s loot. Occasionally you can try and find large groups of people who want a particular achievement or mount, but that’s much harder.

But raiding in a guild is a long term selfish proposition. One night you might do something that has no personal benefit to you (which is why I even bother to show up on our Lich King nights) because eventually you know that other people will still show up when you need something in the future.

There is no item in ToGC that I need. I hate Trial of the Crusader. I hate the instance. But I would have gone and completed ToGC if our healers say there are BiS trinkets for them in there. The last time we went I remember how thrilled one of our new Mages was when got a new weapon and cloak – infinitely superior to what he had. Why deny another player, a guild mate, someone I might even call a friend, that thrill?

I don’t believe that the players who refused to do anything except ICC 10 are loot whores – which is what they were called by others. However, I do think that they were weighing their own wants and desires much more highly than those of others. They waved off the notion that others might need loot in ToGC. I think they waved it away in order to make their conscience clearer, their argument stronger.

I’m not a member of the core 10 man ICC group. And I just can’t fathom how their successes really benefit me. The best gear for us comes from ICC 25 hard modes. Perhaps there is some BiS items from ICC 10. But those items will only ever go to the players in that 10 man. Yes, I do believe that the 10 man group is getting a bit more practice at difficult encounters but the 10 man group isn’t leagues ahead of our 25 man progression – actually they’re exactly the same right now.

And, most importantly, on the rare occasion that the 10 man group had more knowledge than the rest of us this just made our 25 man wiping more upsetting and frustrating. The 10 man players were irritated that we couldn’t do something so simple, and the rest of us were left feeling stupid for being unable to do something that was, as we were told, simple.

So what did I end up doing on Monday night? Well I didn’t log off in a rage (I was too disappointed). A few of us banded together out of boredom, called in some favors, called a healer and begged them to log in, had a few people swap to alts and eventually ended up with a 10 man raid. We ran ICC 10 to fill in time. We completed it. We had a good time, and our alt tank got some gear, but I’d be happy to never do it again.

Perhaps I should try and find some individual achievement worth having and stick that on my Wish List. Right now Cassandri the Insane seems more achievable than anything on my Wish List.

If I only count on myself, then it just might happen.

From Naxxramas to Icecrown Citadel

Things are getting quiet in the World of Warcraft. Guild chat is quieter, forum conversations are rarer. Bloggers, Lathere and I included, are posting less frequently.

This is the perfect time, at the end of one expansion, to reflect upon that expansion and perhaps even start thinking about the next. One of the questions I found myself considering was:

If you had a fresh group of level 80s ready to raid now, what path of progression would you take them on in order to clear every single Wrath of the Lich King boss?

Someone new to raiding in World of Warcraft might assume that the answer is straightforward: clear all the Tier 7 bosses, then clear all the Tier 8 bosses and so forth. But how many guilds remained in Ulduar when Trial of the Crusader was released trying to finish off those last few bosses? They couldn’t know that the new bosses would be easier.

So this is my list. The easiest to the most difficult bosses to kill.

I’m not comparing purely the encounter difficulty because I’m not disregarding gear requirements. I would consider that a super easy boss to kill in Icecrown Citadel is more difficult than completing a more complicated fight in Naxxramas because you need good enough gear to make it easy.

I am ignoring instance sequence: imagine that all the bosses are accessible just by zoning in. I’m also ignoring hard mode options just to try and keep the list short. Maybe that’s a list for another day.

Coloured by loot rewards so you can see which bosses are significantly easier/harder than their contemporaries:

• Tier 7 (Naxxramas and equivalent): Poison slime green
• Tier 8 (Ulduar and equivalent): Titan gold
• Tier 9 (Trial of the Crusader and equivalent): This place has never been cleaned orange-brown
• Tier 10 (Icecrown Citadel and equivalent): Frosty blue

The 52 Bosses of Wrath of the Lich King

Starting with the easiest…

1 Noth the Plaguebringer Naxxramas Plague Quarter

Want to make life more interesting for DPS? Give us multiple targets and make us think about what we should be attacking. Noth just disappears when it’s time to switch targets. No thinking required.

2 Grand Widow Faerlina Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

You know something has gone wrong when it’s easier to ignore the fight strategy and zerg the boss with some good healers and a couple of Cleansing Totems. Free achievements for all!

3 Archavon the Stone Watcher Vault of Archavon

Assuming your entire raid doesn’t stand in his dirt cloud Archavon is super easy to defeat. And you’re not even expected to have decent PVE gear when you kill him either.

4 Anub’Rekhan Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

The Spider wing is usually the first one approached by new guilds and PuGs but Anub’Rekhan requires more knowledge and planning to defeat than the bosses above.

5 Maexxna Naxxramas Arachnid Quarter

The last boss in the Spider wing had only one difficult bit: that 5 second gap when all the healers are wrapped up tight and can’t heal, while the tank took a beating during the final enrage. Turns out that tanks make good sacrifices.

6 Lotheb Naxxramas Plague Quarter

The last boss in the Plague wing was defeated by two players on 25 man mode not long after Wrath of the Lich King was released. This fight was all about when to heal and when to wait. Oh yeah. And stealing spores!

7 Sartharion Obsidian Sanctum

Remember, I’m not factoring in hard modes in this list. Sartharion + 0 Drakes was really, really, really easy. Especially on 25 man setting.

8 Gluth Naxxramas Construct Quarter

My least favourite boss of all time. Listening to Hunters argue about how they shouldn’t be expected to kite gets old really fast.

9 Patchwerk Naxxramas Construct Quarter

Surprised that I didn’t put Patchwerk up as the #1 easiest boss? That’s because I healed this wearing blues on a Restoration Shaman before they doubled the Mp5 quota on gear. It was hard.

10 Heigan the Unclean Naxxramas Plague Quarter

The safety dance man himself! Easy once you have the timing down and practice, difficult for first timers.

11 Flame Leviathan Ulduar

I know that vehicles scale with gear but I’m pretty sure driving in the near vicinity of Flame Leviathan is enough to kill him. Facerolled by PuGs every week since the day Ulduar was released. I think this boss/golf caddy deserves to be considered easier than Instructor Raz (a raid weekly that PuGs sometimes fail).

12 Grobbulous Naxxramas Construct Quarter

I really like the flower shapes you can make when you drop Mutating Injection in just the right spot. Like a daisy chain. Very pretty.

13 Instructor Razuvious Naxxramas Military Quarter

If I had compiled this list before the advent of the Raid Weekly Quest I would have placed Instructor Razuvious higher up the list as a much easier fight. Unfortunately PuGs really mangle this encounter which makes me think it’s difficult without experience.

14 Gothik the Harvester Naxxramas Military Quarter

One of my personal pet peeves: bosses that are un-attackable for 15 or more seconds. Just enough time for me to start up my DPS rotation; just enough time for all my DoTs and stacks of Shadow Weaving to expire. I did enjoy watching the Warlocks drain all Gothik’s mana while he stood there on his balcony and did nothing. Very amusing.

15 Thaddius Naxxramas Construct Quarter

Did you earn the achievement Shocking!? Yeah, me neither. Friendly fire FTL.

16 Sapphiron Naxxramas Frost Wing

Cool – a dragon!

17 The Four Horsemen Naxxramas Military Quarter

A complicated scenario requiring a hell of a lot of raid coordination to defeat it. I loved this fight, even when I was confused. One of the best in the entire expansion, if anything in New Naxxramas (flown in from EPL) can qualify for that title.

18 Kel’Thuzad Naxxramas Frost Wing

As the last boss in Naxxramas, Kel’Thuzad was actually suitably difficult compared to the bosses that came before. Shame that the fight was drawn out so long by a totally pointless adds phase at the start.

19 Malygos The Eye of Eternity

I think the idea was that raiders would be well versed in dragon riding by completing Aces High! every day. Shame, I really love this fight even though it’s impossible to find groups for it. Double stacks of a damage buff? Oh yes please!

20 Kologarn Ulduar

I feel like a fraud putting this boss in so early: I still don’t really understand what happens when you kill each of his arms and when you’re meant to do it. Stay out of his eye beam lasers and win without trying.

21 Razorscale Ulduar

Not much to say about Razorscale except it’s a fairly enjoyable fight – typical fare in Ulduar. Kill some adds, stay out of fire and kill the giant dragon when he lands.

22 The Assembly of Iron Ulduar

Kill the biggest dude and then kill the next biggest dude and then kill the little dude. Obviously the biggest dude in the room is the greatest threat right? Cliched perhaps, but in this case it’s definitely true.

23 XT-002 Deconstructor Ulduar

Before he was a vanity pet, XT-002 was a robot that behaved like a spoiled little boy. This fight was pretty fun – unless you were responsible for running around the room taking out bomb bots. Make sure you check out his remix.

24 Ignis the Furnace Master Ulduar

I think Ignis was intended to be quite a challenge: with tanks assigned to kite adds from flame into water and then a damage dealer chiming in at just the right moment to kill them. However in my guild, and in most PuGs, he felt a lot more like a tank’n’spank with an avoidable spell interrupt. /yawn.

25 Koralon the Flame Watcher Vault of Archavon

Don’t stand in fire. That is all. Oh yeah, don’t take too long either – you could argue this guy is a bit of a DPS check. That said he was created for people wearing PVP gear so I wouldn’t get too concerned. I’d like to say that Koralon is the easiest Tier 9 boss, but he’s up against a real face-roll contender.

26 Emalon the Storm Watcher Vault of Archavon

Remember how I said target switching was difficult for DPS? Now add in a time limit, DPS quota and the possibility of switching to the complete wrong add and you’ll see some raid wipes. I’ve seen PuGs kill Koralon for Tier 9 drops and then wipe on Emalon for Tier 8 gear.

27 Auriaya Ulduar

Crazy, crazy cat lady indeed.

28 Thorim Ulduar

The easiest of the four Keepers in Ulduar – the goal being to beat the crap out of each Keeper to turn them into your friend. All four Keepers (Thorim, Hodir, Freya and Mimiron) are a step up in difficulty from the bosses that precede them in Ulduar. And being part of the Thorim gauntlet team was hell fun.

29 Hodir Ulduar

A friend tried to explain the fight to me from their experience on the PTR “these giant ice storms come in and you have to get the fuck out of the way, because they moment the ice drops and forms a snow pile you have run on top of it. If you stand under the ice, you die. If you are too far away to reach a snow pile, you die. If you don’t get on the snow pile, you die.” Hodir lets DPS really enjoy themselves – bring me that Storm Cloud and no, I’m not leaving this Toasty Fire.

30 Freya Ulduar

I don’t really remember much about Freya. Only that there was at least one or two accidental pulls while a raid member herbed the hell out of her little garden zone instead of helping the rest of the raid.

31 General Vezax Ulduar

You don’t know how much you take mana regeneration for granted until it is taken away from you. This fight also featured the first evil green and black pools of death that really were beneficial to stand in. Just don’t stand in them too long.

32 Lord Jaraxxus Trial of the Crusader

Spread out and enjoy the soundtrack. Easiest boss in Trial of the Crusader for sure. Let the death of Wilfred Fizzlebang be a lesson to all Gnome Warlocks: do as you’re told.

33 Onyxia Onyxia’s Lair

It’s possible to wipe on Onyxia. As long as someone is tanking the whelps and you have a couple Tremor Totems I think you’ll be fine. AoE it up!

34 Northrend Beasts Trial of the Crusader

A 3 in 1 combination meat deal. Poison is bad. Fire is bad. But Poison + Fire is good?

35 Twin Val’kyr Trial of the Crusader

What can I say about the Twins? Hmmm a fight where individual raid members need to watch their own debuffs and react accordingly. The people who die during Twin Val’kyr are probably the same people who stopped you from earning Shocking! when you fought Thaddius.

36 Faction Champions Trial of the Crusader

The fake PVP encounter. It might be fake, but I think it still exposes those members of your raid group who wouldn’t last 5 minutes in an actual battleground too. No, you can’t tank the Rogue.

37 Anub’arak Trial of the Crusader

Yep, the last boss in Trial of the Crusader was easier to deal with than a couple of Ulduar bosses (below). The burrow phase was kind of scary and exhilarating as those spikes chased you down faster and faster: shink shink shink shi- sh- dead.

38 Mimiron Ulduar

A complicated fight. Lots of fire, rockets and stuff-to-avoid. Mimiron is actually a tiny, crazy little gnome dude. With a small stature inferiority complex. So to “kill” Mimiron you actually have to kill the giant robot body that he has built for himself. First you kill all the pieces, then you kill them all again, at the exact same time. Props to Blizzard for giving us casters another opportunity to range tank!

39 Gunship Battle Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

You know a fight is pretty easy when PuGs on your server swap to heroic mode just for this one fight. And it’s still pretty easy.

40 Yogg-Saron Ulduar

The final boss in Ulduar. And man, he was a tough one. I think Kae’s illustrated guide at Dreambound sums it up quite well. A lot of guilds couldn’t quite finish this guy off before Trial of the Crusader was released.

41 Lord Morrowgar Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Turn off your sound for this one, Morrowgar’s jokes are terrible. There’s lots and lots of blue fire to avoid in this fight. Which would be impressive if not for one thing: you can just stand right inside Morrowgar’s hit box and ignore it completely. The trash to Morrowgar is harder to kill than Morrowgar himself.

42 Festergut Icecrown Citadel Plagueworks

Festergut is responsible for the most boring strategy videos released in Wrath of the Lich King. Just combine Patchwerk with Loaethb’s spores and you get a DPS race requiring a small amount of healing skill.

43 Toravon the Ice Watcher Vault of Archavon

A fight that favours melee. As long as you have some casters willing to dedicate their time in service to killing Frozen Orbs you’ll win. If you wipe, those same casters will be blamed. This was actually quite hard when Toravon was first introduced to VoA. But we all know what happens to bosses when they get too hard, don’t we? They get nerfed.

44 Lady Deathwhisper Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Definitely more bark than bite (she does talk a lot). Her friends are much more difficult to get rid of and at any given time damage dealers can only kill half the adds running around: only casters can kill Fanatics and only melee/hunters can kill Adherents.

45 Deathbringer Saurfang Icecrown Citadel The Lower Spire

Saurfang has to be the most misleading fight in Icecrown Citadel: new players would be forgiven for thinking that it’s a fight set to test their healers’ ability, more experienced players would call it a DPS race and the truth is it’s actually both of those things combined with some well coordinated Blood Beast control/killing.

46 Rotface Icecrown Citadel The Plagueworks

Yet another boss that favours melee. Now us casters just pretend that we are melee. In Cataclysm I expect to see my mana bar start out empty and fill with combo points/rage as I DPS. It will always be blue though. It’s the colour of the resource system that counts, don’t you know?

47 Valithria Dreamwalker Icecrown Citadel The Frostwing Halls

Dreamwalker was billed as The Healing Boss of Icecrown Citadel: the boss that’s meant to make healing more fun! It’s true, that first night we all ran around in circles while the healers debated who should take the portals and whether Unending Breath was superior to Crusader Aura and basically called the shots. Now we just force all our Paladins to switch to Holy, all our hybrid casters to dump their mana bar with offspec heals, and zerg it. I still run around in circles doing nothing convinced that – just as long as our Holy Paladins don’t lose their “stacks” – we’d still succeed.

48 Blood Prince Council Icecrown Citadel The Crimson Hall

If you play with Deadly Boss Mods or a similar mod that tells you where to go using a big floating arrow be prepared to get confused. You’ll can be alternatively told to run away from a Shock Vortex and run towards an Conjured Flame orb – and you can bet that the orb is heading right into the vortex. But if you stand in a corner and /dance for several minutes (like I ususally do) nobody yells at you over Vent.

49 Blood Queen Lana’thel Icecrown Citadel The Crimson Hall

At one time in the distant past I thought Blood Queen was all about spreading the vampiric DPS love by biting fellow players. Now I know the real secret to success is learning where the other 24 players in your raid like to stand at any given moment of the fight. And the strategic use of Fear Ward and Every Man for Himself. Go go Human Priests!

50 Professor Putricide Icecrown Citadel The Plagueworks

This is a truly difficult fight and props to players who have defeated it: especially those who did so when you only had 10 attempts per week. Like a pendulum you’ll go from killing a slime on one side of the room to killing a red slime – “gas cloud” whatever – on the other side of the room. If you get a good spot you won’t even have to move til the very end.

51 Sindragosa Icecrown Citadel The Frostwing Halls

Sindragosa says it herself: “Suffer mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!”. Unchained Magic is quite likely the single boss ability in Icecrown that will have your healers threatening to rage quit. Healers secretly love the Lich King’s Defile simply because anything is better than getting Unchained Magic 3 to 5 times in a row.

52 The Lich King Icecrown Citadel Frozen Throne

The boss of the expansion and he lives up to his reputation. I believe he is the most difficult boss on the list. His signature moves: Defile, Harvest Soul, Remorseless Winter and Necrotic Plague are pretty horrifying. If you’re struggling to move beyond 11/12 ICC start praying that it’s the players with low latency that are targeted by Defile. Or simply replace all your DPS with Mages and Warlocks and hax your way to victory.

***

Would you rank them differently? Does your guild have old bosses that were never completed or killed when the new raid instance was released? Which bosses?

Changing Raid Sizes, from Classic through to Wrath of the Lich King... and into Cataclysm

A few days ago we got to look into the crystal ball and see the future of raiding in World of Warcraft. Developers released this announcement which outlines how they intend raids and progression to work in Cataclysm. Most of the changes left me feeling pensive about Cataclysm – I can’t help but feel that all the things I love about raiding are slipping further out of my grasp.

I was happy to hear that they intend to release a lot of raid content out of the box and include more than one, mid-size, raid instance in the first raiding tier. Finally! Perhaps this time they might get the raid length/time commitment right.

I loved running Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in the same lockout week. Naxxaramas with a quick jaunt off to kill Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum always felt more like a diversion and hassle than a proper change of scenery. And Naxxramas just went on forever. Especially in a PuG group.

One raid ID per guild, per week

Keeva over at Tree Bark Jacket has the unique experience of having run a 25 man guild, and then having run a 10 man guild only to return to 25s, all during Wrath of the Lich King:

Some people are upset about “missing out” – ie if you choose to do 25s, you’ll “miss out” on 10s. You’re not missing out on something that doesn’t exist anymore (a second lockout). We never had parallel 10 and 25 raids in TBC. There were 10man raids, and there were 25s. We didn’t have the same instance for both sizes.

I think at first, it seemed like a good idea to be able to choose; it seemed like it would give people the choice to be a 10 or a 25man raider.

It’s true. Wrath of the Lich King gave us the ability to choose the format – 10 or 25 man. And by choosing one, you weren’t locked out of running the other format.

Unlike many 25 man raiders I never felt obliged to run both raid formats at the same time. I think the experience you gain by wiping on new bosses in both formats does help you learn, and defeat, encounters a bit faster. But I’m concerned that the method they are choosing will force raiding guilds to have one raid ID per raid zone per week. Sounds good at first, and it may slow down progression a bit which is good news for Blizzard, the content lasts longer, and good news for us as players, more anticipation and more thrill when you get that first kill.

But I think it could backfire. I think it could backfire because they’re giving 25 man guilds the opportunity to scale down to the 10 man format mid-week.  I can’t help but wonder what will happen if only 20 players arrive for the raid on the second raid night for the week – a common occurrence in many raiding guilds when players only turn up for “farm night” and mysteriously disappear when it’s time to wipe on progression content. In the proposed Cataclysm raiding model the guild has the option to switch down to 10 man mode on that exact same raid ID. So who get picked as the lucky 10 to raid that night when the numbers are low and who gets benched? That’s potentially 10-12 upset people, all saved to that raid ID but unable to raid for the night.

Furthermore, if the guild is struggling to recruit, or going through a poor attendance phase, with 22-24 players turning up night after night I can’t see many officers willing to keep going. They can pick and choose the best 10 players and turn it into a strong 10 man raiding guild.

Losing the “epic” experience

But giving us the choice steals some of the realism from the story environment. For me it cheapens the experience – loses some of that omg feeling you’re meant to get when you first see a boss.

Beru refers to it the “grandness” of 25 man raiding. Once when you’ve experienced the pure chaos of fighting Yogg-Saron with 24 other people -  brain linked, feared to hell and back, and screaming at each other when someone steals their portal – coming back the next night with a team of 9 and succeeding seems just a little bit sad.

I’m always a little disappointed. It makes the boss less impressive in my eyes and takes away some of the satisfaction and sense of achievement.

Being able to switch your guild’s Raid ID from a 10 man one night to a 25 man the next night isn’t going to “fix” the experience. It may help with raider burnout. But it’s not going to make us believe that our enemy is all powerful, and near-impossible to defeat. And that’s how I want to approach every new boss I come across in World of Warcraft.

1 vs 25 means that the boss you’re facing is 25 times more deadly than you are as an individual. How can the Lich King triumph over the entire Argent Crusade but be defeated by 10 people? 25 mans make the bosses feel more powerful, the encounter more overwhelming and ultimately more satisfying when you triumph.

The convenience of 10 mans

I do believe that handing out the same rewards, in terms of gear, will be the death of 25 man raiding. Why? The raid weekly quest. When was the last time you got 25 people together to do the raid weekly quest? Never. You always grab 10 people to do it, why not? It’s easier to organise and the loot isn’t a deciding factor.

Coordinating 25 people to all show up is one thing. Coordinating 25 people to all do the right thing at the right time, produce amazing DPS, heal and tank perfectly and run out of fire, run together for brain links/pacts is harder. It’s just plain harder.

Even though I really, really enjoy 25 mans I know that most of my team, and even myself to a certain extent, are motivated by gear. And I can’t see myself being able to convince 24 other skilled players to raid with me without the lure of loot.

The truth is, some guilds will not survive this. Sure, the more solid and well established guilds will likely continue on about their way, but for guilds that are already struggling for numbers and/or progress it’s likely the signature on their death sentence. I mean…why continue to struggle to field 25 people when you can more easily have 10? — Beru

I couldn’t agree more. I think of how many nights we struggle to get just one or two more players to round out our 25 man team. It’s almost become a joke that Vitare can only down bosses when we have 24 players in the raid – almost all our ICC progression kills seemed to be with 24 players.

I can only hope that if any 25 man raiding guilds survive in Cataclysm, it will be because the 25 people in the team truly enjoy the 25 man raiding experience like I do. And, fingers crossed, those 25 players will be as skilled as the team I currently play with.

I just hope that brand new World of Warcraft players will get the chance to experience 25 man raiding before they are drawn into a steady 10 man team. I want new players to get the chance to experience both raiding formats. I want to show new raiders the madness and awe-inspiring sight of a perfectly coordinated 25 man raiding team and the tight-knit 10 man team. Before they make up their minds and join a raiding guild.

We talk about making raiding accessible, but I think it’s important to make 25 man raiding accessible too. Is the only time I’m going to be part of a mob when we raid Crossroads? When we compete for PVP zones like Wintergrasp?

How did the default raid size shift to double that of your regular dungeon run – 2 x 5 players – away from a 40 man army?

Encounter Difficulty

Guess what people? 10 mans aren’t easy. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the reason 25 man raiding guilds snipe all the 10 man raiding achievements and realm firsts is because they have higher gear scores.

Last year Lathere and I completed A Tribute to Insanity while wearing 10 man gear. I can promise you, the reason we got that achievement without wiping had very, very little to do with our gear. We got that achievement because our 10 man team was good at working together. Most importantly, our 10 man team had an excellent group makeup, with a fantastic variation of all the classes, providing all the buffs you could want – including Heroism.

A part of why we were able to get the 10 man realm first is because we were running the instance in both 25 man and 10 man. A lot of what we’d learned about Anub’arak came from completing the encounter on 25 man, I’ll give you that. But we’d only cleared Anub’arak perhaps three or four times when we completed the 0 wipe achievement – that’s not that many attempts or wipes.

I don’t think 10 man raid teams are inferior. 10 man raiding is difficult. But from my experience most 25 man teams are run more strictly and raiders are held to higher standards than the pure 10 man guilds I’ve seen in action.

A 25 man raid has it’s own balance but because the number of spaces is bigger, you can actually get away with overlaps in the raid composition. Our current 25 man team is far from perfect: we have 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Moonkin, 3 Restoration Druids, 1 Shaman and no Feral Druid. We juggle where we can to get all the buffs – one of our Warlocks will usually volunteer to be the caster buff bot for the evening because we don’t have an Elemental Shaman.

My 10 man guild group has changed quite a lot from what it was last year in Trial of the Grand Crusader. Last week we we attempted Deathbringer Saurfang Heroic with 2 Prot Warriors, 1 DPS Warrior, 1 Rogue, 1 Enhance Shaman, 1 Warlock, 1 Shadow Priest (me), 2 Restoration Druids and 1 Discipline Priest. Certainly not an even mix of the classes!

We couldn’t get it. Oh we did very, very well considering. The Warlock and I both had our own fiends to kill and we juggled threat with our tanks, kiting them back and forth until they died. If we got hit once – if a tank’s taunt missed, or the Warlock’s Demonic Circle expired – we wiped. We tried all kinds of things and to the best of our ability, came up with a bit of a stun rotation to bring them down to nearly half health before they got out of melee distance. It wasn’t an ideal strategy, but it was all we had, and we pretty much perfected it. On our best attempt I think we got him down to perhaps 10% or 15%. We had a lot of blood power accumulating and several Marks of the Fallen Champion.

I spent the entire time wishing for a Death Knight’s Death Grip or a Hunter and their Distracting Shot and slowing traps. Or I would have happily traded in my Shadow Priest’s slow and steady DPS for a bit of Mage burst DPS. I know that our healers were crying out, wishing they could heal both tanks at once.

A well meaning guild member came on Vent to ask us how we were going. When we tried to explain how we were managing the adds they sounded bewildered “oh in our 10 man kill last week we just used Hand of Freedom and Blessing of Protection on the ranged DPS”. Yeah thanks for reminding us that we don’t have a Paladin either.

However, I’ve read a lot of comments on various blogs and the general consensus seems to be that 25 man aren’t difficult to play, they’re only difficult to organise. I disagree.

25 mans are difficult because 1 person in a 25 man can ruin things for the other 24 people. It’s harder to get 25 people working together, focused, playing perfectly as one cohesive whole. Even excellent players have off nights, or trouble with certain boss encounters. If 5 players are making mistakes in any given attempt it just means that killing the boss as a team is more difficult and challenging. You have to consider the group as a whole, as one entity.

25 mans are difficult because you don’t have as much room to maneuver. Positioning in 25 mans is often very strict because standing a couple yards away from the ideal spot can get both yourself and your friends killed. 10 mans are much more forgiving.

25 mans are difficult because you often have to share duties – you might have 4 people in charge of keeping Kinetic Bombs in the air and you need to coordinate and check with those other players throughout the fight – not stepping on toes, but coming forward and taking control if they’re struggling.

25 mans are difficult because it’s nearly impossible to improvise over Vent. Conversation between 25 people would be a nightmare. It’s nearly impossible to ask questions like “which Empowered Fanatic should we kill first?” in a 25 man raid. You usually just end up guessing, because you’d be talking over someone else coordinating a battle resurrection, or calling out a phase change. Yet in a 10 man I’d be much more likely to ask, or request that the priority target is marked. Improvisation can wrangle a successful kill out of what looks like a wipe in 10 man, improvisation hardly ever works in a 25 man.

Raid Composition Min/Maxing meet 10 Mans

I think we’re going to see a min/max attitude applied to 10 mans. I don’t believe in “Bring the Player, not the Class”. Yes, you want 10 equally skilled raiders in your team, but beyond that only through variety can you bring all the buffs and utility stuff to your group. That doesn’t change, no matter how much they like to share the buffs around between classes.

I think we’re going to see very specific recruiting as serious 10 man raiders build their raid teams with progression in mind: “Recruiting 1 Survival/MM Hunter for serious 10 man progression raiding”. I think we’re going to see every class – pure DPS too – really use their dual specialisation in order to approach each new boss fight with the strongest team they can muster.

I think variety is the key. I don’t believe that you’ll be able to waltz into a Cataclysm 10 man raid with the kind of group make up that we had for our 10 man – heavy on just a couple of the classes – and expect to defeat all the bosses. I think progression teams will be more likely to keep people in the wings to swap in and out per fight.

10 mans are made even harder if you’re trying to accommodate friends, letting them play whatever class/spec they desire, instead of playing with a group composition that really works well.

Incentives for 25 Man Teams

At the moment Blizzard are planning to entice raiders to run 25 mans instead of 10 man by offering up more Emblems and Gold to compensate them for the effort to coordinate the damn thing. Not going to work.

Unless the Emblem system changes dramatically you only need Emblems at the start of a raiding tier when new items are released. Even if you only earn Emblems of Frost by running a 10 man each week… well you’re going to get all the items you want sooner or later anyway. Being ahead of the curve by a week or two doesn’t really mean much to me. But I don’t like gear from Emblems anyway – I have no sentimentality or attachment to the item itself.

Gold is an even worse incentive. I can’t think of anyone in my guild who cuts corners (skipping Flasks, refusing to buy epic gems or the most expensive enchants) or worries about running out of gold. We even ask, as part of the recruitment process, if an applicant has a healthy gold balance and most applicants scoff at the question – they have more than enough gold to keep raiding.

What is a good incentive? I don’t know. I think the player to loot ratio needs to be higher. If 10 mans offer 1 piece of loot per 5 players for each boss kill, 25 mans need to offer about 1 piece of loot per 4 players. Perhaps even if only 1 Tier Token dropped in a 10 man and 3 dropped in a 25 man raid, that alone would be enough.

I think the only real incentive is to make sure that 25 mans are just a bit easier than 10 mans.

Read that again. I think 25 man boss kills should be easier for your average player. I think we’re going to lose so many players to 10 mans in Cataclysm – out of convenience, not because they prefer the experience – that the quality of players applying for 25 man guilds will be lower and I think the pool of applicants will be much smaller. Give us a chance: make the encounter more forgiving, just a bit easier, on 25 man setting. Tune it assuming only 20-23 players will be present.

The Dream

What I’d like to see is multiple raids – some only for 10 people, some only for 25 people, different content filling the same tier gear.

I’d like the content to dictate how many players you need to defeat the boss in question. Cataclysm Nasty Boss #1 should requite 25 people, Cataclysm Nasty Bosses #2-#5 should require 10 people – but all bosses 1-5 should drop the same item level gear. Why can’t there by a 25 man that drops Tier 11 that’s totally different content to a 10 man instance that drops the same Tier 11? Hell, let them drop the exact same Tier Tokens.

I want to see less flexibility – I don’t want to be able to change the raid size mid-week. I want to walk up to Deathwing and need the best 10, 20, 25, 40 … whatever… players I know to defeat him.

I hope that they give guilds flexibility by offering multiple raid lockouts per week by offering multiple raid instances per tier. I think that they’re trying to do this and I applaud them. Yes, this takes more time and effort to produce, but I’m not adverse to revisiting an existing zone in a later patch to take on a new “wing”.

For example, imagine that Ulduar – the zone in the north of Storm Peaks, not the raid instance – comprised of 3 raid instances. Halls of Stone (10 man, Tier 7) would contain 6 bosses and be released with Wrath of the Lich King, Ulduar (25 man, Tier 8 ) would contain 13 bosses and be released sometime later then perhaps we’d skip a whole patch cycle and eventually return for Halls of Lightning (10 man, Tier 10) to kill just 4 bosses. Remember that at each Tier level they would be other raids – a 25 man Tier 7, a 10 man Tier 8 and a 25 man Tier 10.

And, finally, I hope they bring back a 40 man world boss! Let’s not lose the Massively in MMORPG.

Enjoying the mana returns from 3/3 Meditation (inside a Sindragosa Frost Tomb)

Natarumah at Twisted Faith recently theorised that there might be a point at which a heavily hasted Shadow Priest would “gain” more mana during combat by talenting into Focused Mind instead of Meditation. He’s absolutely right to ask the question.

Meditation works off our least favourite DPS boosting stat: Spirit. Furthermore even at high Spirit amounts it returns mana in the form of mana per 5 seconds (Mp5) which returns a constant stream of mana back to us for the length of the fight regardless of how many spells we output in that space of time. As we cast more and more spells during a set period, for example a standard 5 minute boss encounter, Mp5 becomes less valuable and insufficient to replenish (for lack of a better word) our resources as we spend mana more quickly.

Focused Mind, on the other hand, is a straight up, spell for spell, discount.

The trouble is this: we’ve been led to believe that 3/3 Meditation is mandatory in any Priest’s raiding build. And that Focused Mind is unnecessary because we shouldn’t lack for mana as Shadow Priests. Is that really still the case? Which is better in Icecrown Citadel, in practice?

A Case Study – Me

At the start of Icecrown Citadel I was talented for 3/3 Mediation and 1/3 Focused Mind – freeing up 2 points for Improved Vampiric Embrace. Months later and my talent build hasn’t changed. I started ICC with about 750 Haste. I gemmed for it, chose lower ilvl trinkets for it.

Now I’m at 935 Haste. I don’t gem for it, I don’t actively seek out Haste items. Yet even I have noticed a change in how I approach and manage my mana bar between then and now. That is to say – I didn’t bother managing it at all at the start of ICC. Shadowfiend was a DPS boost on a 3 minute cooldown and Dispersion was my 90% immunity, get-out-of-jail-free card. Now I actively use Shadowfiend to refill my mana bar as early in the fight as I can and try and bring him out a second time before the fight ends. If there’s even a tiny five second window in which I need to run across the room, run out of fire or stop casting for some other reason I reach for Dispersion.

Maybe it’s time to change our thinking. Is Meditation really so great? In my mind there’s only one way to know for sure. In this post I’ve gone through my latest World of Logs parses and extracted data from three fights in which:

1. I’m pretty confident that I played it (cast x,y,z) the same way I have been for weeks
2. I didn’t die
3. We didn’t wipe and followed a pretty standard strategy/approach

The three fights I’ve chosen – Festergut, Professor Putricide and Sindragosa – have been selected to represent how a Shadow Priest might cast in three very different fights – Single Target, Multi Target and AoE – respectively. I’ve tried to liven things up by colour coding a lot of the spell specific stuff. Hopefully it will also make the tables easier to understand. I’ve also dragged out the methodology and assumptions and stuck them way at the bottom as totally optional reading.

The Three Encounters

Assumed that SW:P was cast twice: once with 5/5 Shadow Weaving and once with max debuffs from other players.

There is no easy way to see how many times SW:P was applied. So I went in and counted each one in World of Logs for the duration of the fight. Shadow Word: Pain was cast 7 times on Prof Putricide and 10 times on Gas Clouds and Volatile Oozes. Therefore Shadow Word: Pain was cast 17 times.

Counting the Shadow Word: Pain casts individually shows that I cast it 8 times on Sindragosa and 11 times on Ice/Frost Tombs. Therefore Shadow Word: Pain was cast 19 times. I should also point out that I didn’t cast any AoE during the first of the 3 air phases, presumably because I was in a Frost Tomb myself. I think that’s pretty normal, but if you get lucky and don’t get Frost Tombed during any of the air phases your Mind Sear count would be higher.

Spell Costs (in Mana) with and without Focused Mind

Talenting into Focused Mind only reduces the cost of our “Mind” spells. It’s a direct discount on the cost to cast Mind Sear, Mind Blast and Mind Flay by up to 15%. No other spells are affected. Base mana of a level 80 Priest is 3863 mana. Final values are rounded up/down to closest whole number.

If you apply those costs to the number of each spell cast in the three fights (Festergut, Putricide and Sindragosa) you end up with these final mana costs:

• In Festergut talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 6536 mana
• In Professor Putricide talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 9336 mana
• In Sindragosa talenting into Focused Mind would gain you 10466 mana

Lets Consider Meditation

I have 238 Spirit. But just in case I’m not normal – which is quite possible – I’m going to calculate off the BiS (non heroic) 25 man gear set from Shadowpriest.com which ends up with 250 Spirit (base spirit + 70 from gear). When calculating Mediation I think it’s important to factor in the 80 Spirit we get by buffing ourselves with Prayer of Spirit. This boosts the BiS Shadow Priest gear set up to 330 Spirit; 210 mana per 5 seconds (mp5) while not casting.

Three points in Meditation that gives us half of our mana regeneration from Spirit out of combat (210 mp5) back to us during combat: 105 mp5. The amount of actual mana returned depends on the duration of the fight. In the three examples:

• In Festergut talenting into Mediation would gain you 5040 mana
• In Professor Putricide talenting into Mediation would gain you 10710 mana
• In Sindragosa talenting into Mediation would gain you 11760 mana

Mediation vs Focused Mind in Conclusion

Now we get to the most important bit – which talent actually returns the most mana fight for fight?

Focused Mind or Meditation return nearly identical results in practice at this level of gear: heavily hasted (thus casting more spells) with very little spirit items equipped. There’s simply not much difference between the performance of either talent.

Meditation seems to win out on longer fights, with or without Mind Sear.

Perhaps Meditation will always perform well even when we avoid equipping items with Spirit simply because Priests start out with a nice base amount of Spirit and we will always be able to boost that quite significantly by self buffing Prayer of Spirit.

Focused Mind only reduces the cost of our least expensive commonly used spells: Mind Flay and Mind Blast. Single target fights aren’t the fights that really drain our mana pool – saving mana here isn’t really a concern.

The fights that really drain our mana quickly are fights that give us multiple targets to DoT up. Our DoTs are our most expensive spells. If Focused Mind applied to our DoTs (Vampiric Touch, Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain) instead of our direct damage casts I would definitely recommend choosing Focused Mind over Meditation. It would make for a much more interesting talent choice too: something that you would really only benefit from in fights where you are running several DoTs over multiple targets. But that’s when Shadow Priests really need some mana returned back to us.

Focused Mind might have performed better in Festergut because, not only is it a short fight, there is very little downtime during Festergut and no phase changes like there is in Professor Putricide and Sindragosa. Phase change downtime is an ideal chance to reap the benefits of mana returned through Mp5. Remember, Focused Mind isn’t going to save you mana unless you’re casting one of those three “Mind” spells. It might be worth mentioning that about one tenth of the Festergut fight will see me under the effects of Heroism – during which I cast pretty much nothing but Mind Flay – a situation in which Focused Mind would really shine.

But I have 4 talent points?!

Considering how similar the actual returns from Focused Mind and Meditation are in the three fights that I’ve analysed I would normal advise Shadow Priests to choose whichever talent is less difficult to reach in the talent tiers, or whichever talent has less prerequisites. Fortunately neither Focused Mind or Meditation are really out of our way in the talent tiers and furthermore, most Shadow Priests have more than 3 talents hanging around that could be dropped into mana regenerating talents.

I really like Improved Vampiric Embrace. That leaves me with 1 point in Focused Mind and 3 points in Meditation. Have you also got 4 points spread amongst the two? Is 3/3 Mediation and 1/3 Focused Mind the best option? Or is there a significantly better combination?

• 3/3 Mediation = 105 Mp5
• 2/3 Mediation = 69 Mp5
• 1/3 Mediation = 36 Mp5

The winning combination for each fight is highlighted below:

Point for point the talents perform equally well. There is no clear winning combination.

Throw your final points into either talent and I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference. I do think it’s fair to say that 3/3 Meditation is no longer mandatory. I wouldn’t refuse a Shadow Priest raiding applicant if they talented for 3/3 Focused Mind instead of 3/3 Meditation.

Notes

Some notes on how I got to the actual results are below. If you trust me – feel free to skip the small print!

How I Counted the Casts using World of Logs Data

Channeled Spells: Mind Flay and Mind Sear I assumed that each counted Mind Flay and Mind Sear (both channeled spells) hits and crits – displayed as Direct Damage in World of Logs – are actually recording 1 tick of the channeled spell.

Mind Flay ticks 3 times in 1 channeled cast. So in the Festergut table 122 hits with Mind Flay + 118 crits with Mind Flay = 240 ticks of Mind Flay. 240 divided by 3 is 80 so it is assumed that I cast the spell Mind Flay 80 times, not 240 times.

Mind Sear ticks 5 times – once per second – in one 5 second channeled cast. So in the Sindragosa table 56 hits with Mind Sear + 53 crits with Mind Sear = 109 ticks of Mind Sear. 109 divided by 5 is 21.8 so it is assumed that I cast the spell 22 times, not 109 times. I should also point out that I only cast Mind Sear during the second and third air phase and not at all during the first. I was one of the trapped players in the first air phase. If I had not been trapped I would have cast more than 40 Mind Sears during the fight which might have led to a different conclusion.

Devouring Plague and Improved Devouring Plague Improved Devouring Plague is an effect that occurs when Devouring Plague is cast and instantly deals some damage. It is a side effect of casting the spell Devouring Plague, not a spell you can cast with a mana cost associated. However, as this effect occurs just once at the start of each cast of Devouring Plague I used the Improved Devouring Plague count to count how many times Devouring Plague was cast.

Vampiric Touch Vampiric Touch is a damage over time spell. It deals damage every 3 seconds over 15 seconds per cast – 5 ticks for 1 cast. The number of hits and crits are added together and then divided by 5. Remainders are rounded up in case the spell has been reapplied too early or it did not tick out when combat ended.

Shadow Word: Pain In both the Festergut and Sindragosa examples Shadow Word: Pain was counted manually from the World of Logs timeline showing damage done by this spell. As Shadow Word: Pain can be refreshed indefinitely there is no clear cut method to calculate when it was cast based on the amount of times it ticked or dealt damage.

The Tedious Spells Cast x Spell Cost Calculations

This is the full table that I used to multiply all the spell costs by the number of times each spell was cast.

25 Raider Types: I'm Helpful, The Stratmonger, Teehee and the list goes on...

A guild member posted a link to an article on MMO Champion: 25 People in Your Raid. Perhaps you’ve read it? It got me thinking. Am I just like one of these raiding personality types? Do my guildies think of me as a Teehee? Ms Prepared?

It didn’t take long for me to spot which type I know I am, but I also think I do a pretty good job at hiding (or dulling) the sharp edges of my personality while raiding. Perhaps the people I raid with have been fooled into thinking that I’m a kind, patient and forgiving sort.

I’m Helpful

Most likely a Ret Paladin or a Hunter, I’m Helpful will be the person who calls out everything needing to be called out, whether it is wandering plague on Arthas, Snobolds on a character, the fact Steelbreaker just died, or that someone is standing in a fire. This person is probably immensely helpful since even though everyone has DBM installed, no one is actually paying any attention to it.

I’m not I’m Helpful. I don’t have the endless patience and enthusiasm required to remain upbeat for a 3 hour stint. And why should I call out when we’re about to enter Phase 2? If my mods can tell me that, you can watch your own. I do genuinely like having a Helpful person in our raids though. The moment you finally kill <insert crazy difficult boss>, the boss that you’ve wiped on for months, you’ll hear Helpful declaring proudly on vent “See, I knew we could do it!”. I love that.

McTalksaLot

No matter what happens in the raid, McTalksaLot has a comment for it, a comment that is neither witty nor makes people laugh, but simply a meandering, petty, spiteful or moronic comment. Does good damage or healing, but has no idea when to stop queuing the microphone to talk, and so simply keeps rambling even when important things are trying to be done or said.

I’m not McTalksALot. At least not in game and certainly not in 25 mans! Chit chat is annoying and 99% of the time it’s totally pointless and meaningless.

Teehee

Most likely a girl in the 18-24 range, Teehee injects random cutesy comments into Vent in the middle of important things or strategy discussions. “Like, I remember this time where we were in MC right, and they pulled all the corehounds at once hehehehe!!”

I hope nobody would say I was a Teehee – the description reminds me of the start of all those bad band camp stories in American Pie “This one time at band camp…” and you know the story is going to be bad. The few times that I’ve tried to entertain my guildies with a personal WoW anecodote over Vent the punch line has really fallen flat. Silence. I suck at telling stories, apparently.

The Hybrid

Hybrid is the poor fellow you ask to do 2 or 3 different roles in the same instance. Either has a druid, paladin or shaman, or has multiple characters that are geared for the content, Hybrid is usually a very good player that doesn’t really remember what character they play any more. Doesn’t mind doing either role, just gets confused sometimes while trying to lightning bolt with Holy light, or wondering why they can’t demonic circle on their mage.

I’m certainly not the jack of all trades Hybrid. I suck at playing my alts, and I suck at healing.

The Stratmonger

He’s read every bosskiller strategy, watched every tankspot video, and has every movie on Warcraftmovies memorized, recorded, and on an external hard drive ready for immediate use. Stratmonger is prepared to take over. “Well, I remember in this one video, where they moved Putricide over near the red Slime and had the abomination on it..” He will inject a thread of doubt into your strategy even if you wiped because 4 dps blew up in a goo.

I’m not a Stratmonger either. In fact I much prefer to just go in “blind” and experience the encounter for the first time without any prior knowledge. Strategy guides bombard you with lengthy descriptions of every single goddamn ability. Even the ones that are only really relevant for the tank, healers and melee DPS. Strategy videos look too easy – it’s nearly impossible to understand what you’re watching.

I also think it’s just more fun to work things out for yourself.

I’m secretly a Patton.

Will continually be yelling in /rw to “WAKE THE FUCK UP” or “C’mon guys, it’s been six minutes since we said to take a 5 minute break”, Patton will be in charge of keeping everyone awake and interested.

A totally thankless job, since people will meander back to their computers at their own speed anyways and roll call is meaningless anyways, Patton will nonetheless walk down the line, /poking people and trying to keep them from going away to go to the washroom. Really have to pee? Your dog wants out? Forget it.

Patton will come to your house and duct tape you to your computer chair so you don’t do any of that meaningless crap. Now drink another flask, and lets do another hour of Anub attempts, maggot.

I’m the first person to roll my eyes when someone fails at:

• standing in fire running out
• biting finding and clicking one name on your raid frames
• malleable goo running out
• pact of the darkfallen running in
• swarming shadows running out
• face/body pulling standing still
• talking to NPCs standing still
• and the list goes on

I always think the minus DKP penalty enforced by officers is too lenient. It should be -1000 DKP, not -100 DKP.

I think people should be punished if they can’t manage to maintain a 1 hour Flask buff for 3 hours straight. Especially considering that about 3 people will say “check flasks” before each attempt.

I think people talk too much on Vent. I think they type too much in Raid chat.

I think people who decide, after everyone is buffed and ready-checked, that they “need a drink, brb” should be /slapped. Time wasters.

I think most people are lazy. “Let’s go do VOA and try Sindragosa another night!” We’re not going to miraculously 1 shot Sindragosa anyway, so why not learn some of the fight now. VOA can be pugged. Sindragosa can not. This kind of thinking is why we never got Heroic Anub’arak. It was too hard. Too much wiping. People got lazy.

Fortunately for me, in pretty much every single guild I’ve been in there has already been another, more vocal, more impatient, more exacting and more demanding Patton than I. They call people out for failing before you’ve had a chance to release after a wipe. They call them lazy, the cry out for -DKP.

Yep, they come across like a total bastard. Which means I get to keep my – mostly untarnished – reputation of being a nice person. (Love you, Drag!)

If I could tape those people (who conveniently stopped showing up to H Anub nights) into their chairs for 3 hours of uninterrupted wiping, would I? Damn right I would.

See most people listen to that Onyxia -50 DKP Minus sound recording and think “that Asian guy is such a loser!”. Not me. I listen to it and think:

Crushem gets -50 DKP? Is that all? -500 already!

***

ps. Oh yes, I know I totally wrecked my own “nice” reputation by writing this. Oh well, it’s a relief to just put it out there.

pps. I was actually quite disturbed by this image of myself. I’m not like this in nearly any other setting – not socially, not even when I do heroics or PuGs. This is my work mode that comes out when I’m raiding.