Comments on: Monday Musings: Exhausted Edition

By: Ilunâ

Ilunâ — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:24:00 +0000

Not to buldge in and give unnescessary advice (I don’t even know if you didn’t kill the boss by now).
What really improved our trys on council was one simple thing.
IF THERE IS A BLUE CIRCLE SPAWNING ON THE GODDAMNED GROUND MOVE YOUR FAT LAZY ASS TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM.
When you got that down the fun-part starts, enjoy your first few 0,X % wipes due to people grilling 3 camps saying “but I was out of range!”. When our Guild Master pulled out the minus-dkp-stick it helped aswell…sad as it is.

By: Zinn

Zinn — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:14:27 +0000

I completely agree with you. I always felt like the most fun fights are the ones where my skills could make up for someones elses failure, and vice versa. Nothing makes people more sad and frustrated than when everything they’ve fought for get completely wasted just because someone wasn’t paying attention for a teeny second. Even if you’d allow every person to do one such minor mistake each raid, it means 25 wipes on 25 man. We are human and I think we should be allowed to do minor mistakes and have to work around them. Right now fights are designed to be best played by robots, not human beings who can react and adapt.

By: Imalinata

Imalinata — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:05:13 +0000

We had melee split into two groups so that there were fewer of them together to get chained when the lightning goes out. I think that’s the same reason why we put the two healers in with them. We don’t have any healers in the center of the room; we left that to the ranged dps and their assigned spots. The aside from the two in melee and the one running in front of the boss, the other three are spread around the room.

Oh man, that sucks that you guys had to do a soft reset. I hate the trash before that boss.

By: Windsoar

Windsoar — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:12:53 +0000

I feel your pain on having that “stuck” moment. We’re working on Nef. right now. We got into phase 3 on our first hour of attempts, and last night spent most of the night in phase 1 & 2. I was ready to start blowing up people’s computers.

Fortunately (and hopefully) either way, you’ll be cleaning up Firelands soon giving you a much deserved break from a totally frustrating fight! And if for some reason your force of will doesn’t make people shape up, there’s still time to kill him.

Best of luck Beru! <3

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:38:50 +0000

We don’t have healers with the melee, but that might not be a bad idea. Healers are always in range of the melee, but I’ve not given them a dedicated healer – rather put the raid healers in the middle of the room where they should be able to reach the melee 100% of the time.

We had a 2% wipe just a few pulls in last night, and really stressed focusing P2 mechanics during the phase. We didn’t lose anyone to orbs or lightning rod and things were going very well and people were doing amazing with not getting hit by the orb or chaining people – and then the damn door bugged out as we were running back and we couldn’t get in and had to soft reset the zone. We went and killed H Al’Akir and then came back, recleared the trash and spent another hour or so on the encounter, only to not see phase 3 again. And I am ashamed to say that in the last 30 minutes of the raid I ate 3 frost orbs. For the first time since we started the encounter. Although one of them I got screwed on and asked for a grip.

What does spliting the melee group in two do?

By: Imalinata

Imalinata — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 02:03:44 +0000

Yeah, I thought you did, but couldn’t remember and after swyping most of that there wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going to look it up and lose it all. No internet access through my work machine is just miserable; swype is better than nothing, but just can’t compare to a real keyboard.

Don’t you hate it when you get close and then everyone gets cocky so the rest of the attempts go to hell?

Do you have your melee group split into two for p3? We ended up doing that with me & our other druid in each melee group healing as we ran around with another healer and dps out in front of the boss running with us as well. The pools don’t show through the stairs though if you’re up on the stairs when you’re running around the room. It shouldn’t be too much of an issue, but if the pools get a little big, then people need to know that they can’t see the edges there. I definitely found that out through experience. : /

We also ran into issues with our dps not being more aware of the boss percentages. We had a few attempts that night where we died at like 1% or 2% and it was always on a pull where we had a shitty push from one phase into another. Another time we had an aggro pull at the start of p3 since another tank takes over then.

If you’ve got people staying out from lightning rod, then that should take care of that once they’re used to it (personal cds definitely help there to and BoPs also keep people from taking damage (at least from one of the auras, I don’t remember if it’s one or both though)). What are the issues you guys are running into with the frost orbs? Does everyone have runspeed to boots or in their meta and are the priests using body and soul on the person who’s being chased? We had to remind people not to try to run in tight circles and to call out early if they saw they were going to need help so that the priests could lifegrip them closer to the fire. We had iffy results when people would kite the orb through the fire patch as it was spawning – sometimes it would work, other times it wouldn’t; far better to have people kite it through after the fire spawned (and don’t get hit by the fire ball as it lands and explodes.

By: aboutthestory

aboutthestory — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 01:35:28 +0000

I have been wanting to start reading WoW books for a while, but I don’t know much about the lore (and don’t want to spoil it by just reading wikis) so I was hoping you would have a recommendation for which books to start with

<3 Maenfalyn
aboutthestory.wordpress.com <- my book blog

By: Stubborn

Stubborn — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:33:59 +0000

Between you and I (and everyone else here), it may honestly be time to take a break from raid leading. I’ve been in the exact same position as you many times, and every time I stuck through and ended up burned out on the guild, on raiding, or on WoW for months. I’ve been a lot meaner to people during raids than basically anywhere else in life (barring perhaps the guy in the DMV who told me my watermarked official college transcript was not acceptable proof of my birth date but a high school transcript would be. I’m in my 30s. I’ve moved three times since I graduated high school. I DON’T HAVE A HIGH SCHOOL TRANSCRIPT LYING AROUND. I’m sure a fake, dot-matrix printout of an kind would have sufficed. I was lucky the police weren’t called).

Anyway, one of my memorable moments was me telling a raider who had YET AGAIN failed the Thaddeus jump that they’d made my heart shrink three sizes. It was around Christmas, so it was relevant in a Grinchy way, and typing it here it doesn’t seem so bad, but it was mean when I said it. I still regret it (or at least part of me does. Part of me knows that moron deserved it).

The point is that if it’s not fun anymore you need to take a break or that feeling’s going to infect the rest of the game. I know that giving in seems like failure, but the guild would be better with you still playing than not, I’m sure, and the path of bitter resentment (which is probably what you’re just starting to feel about guildies/raiding/WoW) is a long, dark one.

Whatever you decide, good luck, mate.

By: Syl

Syl — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:13:02 +0000

Toothache ouch, I feel with you! =/
I can’t comment on the encounter I’m afraid, but I just meant to say sometime that I really enjoy your more introspect musings on the both bright and darker sides of being a raid leader, your openness about issues or dilemmas and how you frequently question yourself. it’s very refreshing in my opinion and very honest (without coming across as a forceful attempt to win sympathy points)! I wish you the very best of luck with your current challenges.

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:40:53 +0000

We raid 25s.

We actually had a 5-6% wipe on Thursday night. I honestly thought we’d go in last night and have it in the bag, only to not see phase 3 once for the duration of the evening (17 pulls). We’ve told people if they have lightning rod, they need to stay out regardless and if they die it’s better than chaining and killing a chunk of the raid.

We’ve got phase 3 positions all worked out, and if we could just push into phase 3 another half dozen times (if that) we’d have this done – hell it might even only take once. If our melee hadn’t of frozen themselves to death in the first seconds of phase 3, we probably would have had our kill in that one pull. I’m just not sure what to tell folks other than everything they’ve been told. And from a leadership standpoint, it’s frustrating to know there is nothing I can do other than hope my players do their job.