Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Still

Still 11/12.

Things about Nefarion 10 man that nobody told me and I didn't find at most of the strat hubs:

  • Having a hunter turtle tank the adds with MD glyph and glyph of mend pet makes p3 much easier for picking up the adds and much less strain on the healers, while still keeping raid dps up.
  • Nature resist is superpro. If you are hitting one or two crackles in p2, try to spread out nature resist between your platforms, it really helps with crackle.
  • The mastery trinket with resist increases from the TB rep faction is great for your tanks. It's one minute CD is a great compliment to a tank's CDs for crackles and breaths.
  • Hybrids in the transition helping heal and during p2 helping heal can make or beak a pillar group.

We aim for nef+H Halfus this weekend, if everyone is able to go. Last week with 1.5 hours of solid nef attempts we were seeing p3 pretty consistently. The fight isn't super difficult, it's just got 3 phases that require pretty solid execution.

Feel free to always drop a question in about anything and I can usually help out.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Been a while

The winds of change have pulled me away from my previous place of employment, and I am now in the middle of a career change which is going to be for the better. This and my raiding schedule have kept me away from here.

In more good news, our group is 11/12 now with our first week of Nef starting this weekend (maybe, we may be missing 3 of our cores). We went 9/12 with relative ease, and then Cho and Al'Akir were slightly more difficult due to the fact that I felt our dps was overall low. I went out and found a nice DK to replace our second hunter in the core, but am keeping the hunter with us as a small bench is something that we would definitely like to continue on with. I have begun subbing people in and out depending on the fights/loot available for farm content, so that I have 12-14 geared and knowledgeable raiders ready to go. Our first week with the specific bench we had all 13 people in attempts on Al'Akir due to a DC, a family emergency, and a work emergency. He died with our 3 bench players in on the raid.

More to come in the future.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Expected changes

I play a hunter, used to play a paladin. I swapped to the hunter the moment the hunter took over the crown of "most changed class" and "class which gets adjusted every patch." This was purely coincidence and not something I enjoyed while playing the paladin, but it gave me this outlook:

I don't really care how they want to nerf us and how PTR changes might potentially effect us... Yeah- I stay up to date so I know what to expect, but I figure with each patch I'll run a few sims, check out the changes, and adjust accordingly. People who scream sky falling way too early just end up stressing about things too much. If they nerfed hunters so bad they are unplayable, well that's unfortunate but I could always hop on my DK or my priest. If they nerf a single spec to it being crappy in comparison with another- then I'll swap over to it. If they give me a new meta, I'll use it- and if they don't I wont. It amuses me at how worried people get when generally speaking Blizzard is aiming for balance in raids among classes, and so far they've done alright. They buff what sucks and nerf what is overpowered.

This all being said- I like the buffs I bring as survival with WF and such. I dislike the general playstyle of BM, but have never really given it a chance. MM was always my favorite due to it's inherent complexity, but it is the most difficult to perform as when I'm trying to track my whole raid and stay alive (Survival is hilariously easy to maintain on the fly), but I'm sure I'd fare fine with it.

So, I hope they don't break hunters, and now that we have two I suppose it would be nice to be able to have us as different specs so we can bring more interesting buff combinations, but it really isn't game breaking. The way it is panning out- it would be expected that blizzard is looking to scale back surv dps by ~5%. This seems reasonable to me.

More good fun times

So yesterday's (remember- we only raid once a week) raid finally saw our set group with 8 of our regulars, and our 2 main fill-ins. This brought great joy to me as our dps chart was competitive for top spot (I was so happy I forced our rogue into mutilate, he hates the spec like I hate BM but when he puts up over 14k next to mine on heavy movement fights and is giving me a run for #1 he understands). And our bottom spot was at worst filled with our OT doing 10k as ret-which sucks horribly as a spec right now- This meant our dps charts look like a bar graph of a steady economy, as opposed to a bar graph comparing the economies of the last 5 decades (hilarious picture btw). You can check us out at World of Logs.

This week saw two new kills- bringing the total up to 5/12. Maloriak was a pushover as soon as we controlled our green phases and stopped letting random people die to random things. And double dragons took a bit of learning, and a 4th healer. As it is a one tank fight we figured we had plenty of dps to make the enrage timer with ease and that living is a much better option than not. In our kill it was our first attempt where we had nobody get phased to the razzle dazzle, and deep breaths. This fight caused me some trouble trying to call the whole fight and be aware of all the mechanics happening as well. What really gave me the best experience to learn it was ultimately a wipe where I tanked the floor from early on and I had them burn a bres to pick up the healer over me, giving me the opportunity to swirl my camera around and focus on abilities coming up. I then got used to seeing how Valiona picks parts of the room and how to convey this to my folks. I decided on counting down, then (because our ranged are stacked up at the time on one side of the room) I call out one of the following "MID" "OUR SIDE" "OTHER SIDE" which denotes where the flames are and we scamper away quickly.

Additionally, I finally got people to realize if they stack up for blackout right as it hits- they can time it so they run in, and run out- minimizing dps loss and damage taken. Also, because a few of the blackouts occur during the 3rd and 4th transitions of dragons, I decided to forgo the world raid marker and instead just slapped a mark on the head of our healing lead- the one in charge of dispelling the debuff.

We recruited another hunter into our group, creating the biggest sharing of armor outside our tanks. This doesn't really bother me all that much though with all the valor points available for gear. This does however make me happy as now we'll be able to support full raids each week as opposed to looking for more people every time.

As we put in our time learning the new fights- and we are now having one-shots on ODS and Halfus each week with only mishaps stopping us on Magmaw (our rogue was like - "yeah, whatever I'll do spikes" and did not have any clue whatsoever greatly infuriating me as I had to explain it to him- after our 3rd wipe...), I would think that next week we'll end up being able to (as in, have the time to) down conclave and get some work in on chimaeron or atramedes.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Things keep going up and up

Originally we needed more ranged. This happened when one of our melee ret dps decided to swap over to his ele sham instead. BL+ moar ranged? Yes, please. Now our biggest issue is we haven't gotten our "starting 10" on for a single raid. In the first two weeks we had 7 of our "starting 10" and 8 in our second week. This has forced me to think about possibly recruiting another dps as I'm thinking that I'd be able to get them well over 50% playing time, and having that spot filled with a consistent person has many advantages:

1. I know how they operate. My probably biggest issue with pugs is simply that I don't know how to push them and I don't get their pushback. I can't rag on them like I do the rest of my raiders (as they rag on me).

2. I don't take risks on a pug's skill. Pugs can be horrible, and they can be decent. I have yet to fill a pug spot with someone who comes in and cleans house- but if I did, I'd be happy about it.

3. I don't have to loathe giving gear to pugs. Last week- ODS drops the hunter chest (Yay me!) but I end up losing the roll to the pug hunter we brought (He did decent enough dps, even though it was horrible dps for a surv hunter- 12k to my 16). Halfus drops the Agi+ trinket... I then realize I have to step up and just take this from him and the other pug hunter (we pulled in another by this time) as that gear will significantly increase my ability to do better which directly effects our raids right now. Gear helps, and we don't have a lot of it atm. Single upgrades to our players will help us push new content.

Anyway, we got do BH to start each week (free epix- yet not a single piece of tier for the raid yet) then move to BRD and got ODS our first week, Magmaw our second along with halfus. I fully expect us to have Double dragons this week and most likely Maloriak. Decent enough progression I think.

P.S. Conclave isn't very hard- yet for some reason our boomkin keeps getting DC'd in it, which leads to major issues as 9-manning that fight is quite difficult due to having to stack at the right times with everyone in the raid performing a location specific role (we end up always silenced from Rohash when he DC's).