Quoth the Crab: The Choice Doesn't Matter

One of the important philosophies of game design is that interesting choices are fun. The word 'interesting' is key. Choosing between a talent that grants 10% damage and one that grants 5% damage, all else being equal, isn't interesting.

This is a quote from Ghostcrawler on the merits of the new talent tree in Mist of Pandaria. However, I'm not here to talk about talents, or Mists of Pandaria, or even anything Ghostcrawler works on. I'm here to talk about the Power of the Aspects buff in Dragon Soul, which will soon be ratcheted up to 10%.

With the impending increase, it's uncorked a mass of discussion on the matter, and once again, WoW Insider draws the lines, on both sides. Dan Desmond wrote an editorial on the effects that these sort of nerfs have on the raiders in the instance.

Well, it seems I was wrong, for in the very next tier of content Blizzard released, we saw progressive nerfs to these difficult fights. Personally, I prefer to keep these encounters the way they are, at least until a new tier is released. Something just feels wrong to see the hardest fights available made easier through a series of hotfixes. Even with respect to my own guild's progression, having sweeping nerfs hit Firelands just as my guild was putting in some really good attempts on Ragnaros felt like Blizzard moved the finish line, taking what would have been a very gratifying kill and turning it into an accidental one-shot that contained none of the catharsis we had felt during previous boss kills.

In response, Adam Holisky wrote an editorial on the merits of the nerf for all guilds, and in the end, he fell back on that same flawed defense that so many others have leaned upon.

Because there's an easy answer if everything I said in this editorial rings false to you.

Just turn the nerf off.

Now, there's a lot of flawed thinking in Adam's editorial, and I'll get around to those flaws in other posts. What I want to talk about now is the supposed "Choice" that raiders have to turn off the Power of the Aspects. Ghostcrawler said that a choice that had one option that was obviously more beneficial than the other isn't interesting, it isn't compelling, and ultimately, it isn't a choice at all. This is the situation that the non raiders who fall back on this line don't understand, there is no choice to turn off the debuff. Any guild that has already cleared all the content has no reason to do so, and any guild that hasn't cleared the content gains no benefit from doing do. Raiding guilds live on three things, interesting content, recruiting, and consensus within the group. While the nerfs may or may not undermine how interesting the content is for your raid group, it can only have a negative impact on the other two aspects.

Consensus: One of the primary arguments that people make against these kind of nerfs is that they wanted to see what the content's really like, not to be given their kill as charity by the developers who take pity on them. The dissenters claim that they can simply turn off the nerf, and everything will be the same as it was before. This is not true. Raiding is a team activity. You need nine or twenty-four other players to go along with you in order to raid with any serious degree of success. While you might get enough satisfaction to justify turning off the debuff, you need consensus within the group. The odds of everyone in the group agreeing with you is slim, and even one person in the group who would rather raid with the debuff will put the group in a very awkward position. You're asking them to sacrifice their personal progression, not for an achievement, not for loot, not for a mount, but for something even more trivial, for your pride. If they give in, then they feel resentful at your imposition, and if you give in, then you feel disappointed with the instance. Ultimately, the very fact that a choice had to be made alters the dynamic of the raiding experience, even if you choose to turn off the buff.

Recruiting: Just as dangerous as the volatility of forcing the issue into a group dynamic is the impact that the buff has on recruiting. If you're in a raiding guild, your guild is recruiting. There's an almost constant rate of attrition that takes its toll on a raid's roster. Kids, school, work, burnout, and new games are all among the factors that might drive a player to set aside raiding. If the group wants to continue raiding, they need to replace those people. One of the primary things that players look for in a guild that they choose to raid with is progression within the current instance. All else being equal, a prospective raider will tend to sign on with a guild that's further progressed. With no way to differentiate themselves from guilds that do use the debuff, a guild that decides to pursue raiding without the buff deliberately hamstrings themselves on the recruiting front. To make matters worse, any guild can claim to have gotten their kills without the debuff, because there's no way to prove it one way or another.

There is no choice here, it's akin to being given the choice between a raisin bagel or a kick in the crotch. These nerfs aren't about tuning, they're about longevity. Just like ICC with the Strength of Wrynn, we're going to be stuck in Dragon Soul for another six months. There is no tier of gear after this to help the flagging guilds. So they give us the Power of the Aspects, and jokingly tell us that we have a choice, while they cite the exact opposite logic to justify their decisions in other aspects of the game. If Blizzard had made it an actual choice, they would have given an incentive to raid without the Power of the Aspects. A title, or a mount, or even just a simple achievement for clearing Dragon Soul without using the Power of the Aspects would make it an actual choice, not this mockery that we're faced with at the moment.

Cross Realm Raiding is a Go!

Saz, of World of Saz, has been kind enough to set up an enjin site for all the twitteratti and Bloggers who want to take advantage of the new cross realm raiding feature introduced in the recent patch.

You can find it here. I'm going to try and squeeze in a few raids if at all possible, and I'd love to see it flourish.

Fail of Deathwing

Yeah, my guild hates Madness of Deathwing. I've never seen so much vitriol reserved for an encounter we downed in five attempts the first time we tried it. For an encounter on normal mode, this amount of hate is truly unprecedented. Personally, I'm kind of ambivalent towards it, but the fact that I've had to drag raiders kicking and screaming to finish the encounter has prompted me to take a hard look at what exactly creates such antipathy towards this particular encounter.

1: "It's a trash fight!"

Personally, I don't subscribe to this idea, that just because you're not crossing swords with your foe directly makes the encounter dull. I firmly believe that the finest end of tier boss this game has produced was Yogg-Saron, a fight which consisted of me doing nothing but tanking minions and tentacles. At the same time, having a static boss that can't change position does severely limit the perception of freedom in an encounter, and I can understand that idea.

2: "It's so looooooooong..."

Yeah, fifteen minute fights can be a pain in the ass. They can also be amazingly epic. Kil'jaeden, Yogg-Saron, Lich King, Nefarian in both incarnations, were all amazing encounters that took a long time to kill, even when they were on farm. It sucks when you wipe late in an attempt and you have to start all over, and it's a bit of a kick in the crotch when you look at the clock and realize that despite whipping your raid for quick turnover between wipes, you've spent an hour and only gotten four attempts in. I don't think that this is something that makes a fight bad in and of itself, but it really exacerbates other factors, such as...

3: "Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, wipe"

I understand what Blizzard was trying to accomplish here. They wanted to make a dynamic encounter that evoked shades of Yogg-Saron with the four godlike beings assisting you at varying levels. This is what they wound up with: a fight where nothing matters until ten minutes into the fight. The encounter is completely trivial until the final platform. A lot of the mechanics are solid, CD coordination checks, positioning checks, AoE strength checks, and single target coordination checks. They're all good, but for most of the fight, they're completely trivial. It amounts to the Kael'thas or Tirion RP before the fights in BC and Wrath, it's cool the first time, but God it gets old fast, and I can't even go get a drink during this stuff.

4: "Thrall Hates Me."

This is the one that really irks me. Blizzard dropped the ball on the coding for the wind tunnels on this encounter, and often enough to be a noticeable problem, Thrall will just drop players while making the transition to Kalecgos' platform, which also tends to be the one that groups go to last. While it's bad when this happens to a DPS, when it happens to a healer or tank, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a wipe. You can't battle rez them, you can't prevent it, you can only lament the ten minutes of your life you'll never get back. It's happened to me with two different guilds, and at least seven different players. I'm not the only one who's seen this problem. Honestly, Blizz, what were you thinking here? Besides, Green Jesus is supposed to be the Aspect of Earth. Just have him make a goddamn bridge. A nice solid bridge of stone that if a player falls off, its their own damn fault. On an entertaining side note, if you open a ticket citing this glitch as an example of Horde Favoritism, a GM will answer it in three minutes flat.

While Spine of Deathwing doesn't have near as much hate as Madness on normal mode, it still suffers from the same flaw of repetition.

So, how would I have fixed this problem, making Deathwing into a fight worthy of the end of an expansion?

1: Combine both encounters into a single fight.

No break to loot in between Spine and Madness. You pry the armor plate loose, Thrall takes his shot, everyone lands at the Maelstrom, DW erupts out, and you go right back to carving him up. Recovery time is for wimps, tempo is everything. This also sows the seeds for a badass RP moment. The finest RP moments in raids are always the mid fight ones, not the ones that get handed to you just for pulling. I think part of it is because when they occur midfight, they have a built in tempo that prevents them from taking too long, and I think that having them occur mid fight keeps you from focusing too hard on them. It's like a Monet painting. It looks beautiful from a distance, but the closer you examine it, the more it looks like just a few colored blobs. For me, the coolest moment in the game is the phase two transition on Yogg-Saron, where Sara goes into a brief monologue, her voice warps into Yogg's, and Yogg emerges from the ooze laughing maniacally. Kil'Jaeden's eruption from the Sunwell is up there too. I think Deathwing clawing his way out of the Maelstrom could rival that if they didn't give us the nonchalant period of bitching over which trinket dropped before hand.

2: Scale back the repetition, scale up the individual mechanics.

Instead of three plates on Spine and four islands on Madness, I'd go one plate on the spine, leading into one island on Madness, which automatically breaks into phase two when you've cleared the Limb Tentacle. Increase the health on the Burning Tendon, so you force the group to pop two amalgams to proceed to the next phase, and once the tendons goes, Thrall blasts Deathwing, and you leap off right before he hits the Maelstrom. Token "Nothing could survive that..." from Green Jesus right before Deathwing rears up out of the Maelstrom and strikes down all four aspects, forcing the team to break his grip upon the island, and the Aspects. Increase the health on the Tentacle to force most groups to go through 3-4 impales, rather than 1-2, and it would make the tank swaps more interesting, as the tentacle will probable still be up when the Bloods come out. Extend the duration on Cataclysm by 50% to compensate for the decreased uptime and the lack of the spellweave buff when dropping blistering tendrils. Phase two remains pretty much unchanged, aside from the fact that it's now actually phase three.

I think that these changes would aleviate a lot of the major complaints about Deathwing. It would shorten the duration of the fight, although not dramatically. It would decrease the repetition, and it would completely remove the RNG Aspect of Derp deaths that infuriate people.

Lets Talk Numbers: Raid Kills, Difficulty, and Proper Interpretation.

Ok, this has been something that I've been noticing in the recent storm of blog posts and comments about the Dragon Soul nerfs. It's been mostly happening in comments, but some of the more prominent bloggers have fallen into this trap as well. They don't know how to look at the raw data we've been given by sites like Wowprogress and MMO-champion, and turn that data into a usable analysis. From Matt Rossi:

Even if you just consider the 800,000 players who finished Firelands, only a quarter of them are done with normal Dragon Soul. This means when players make comments like "Dragon Soul is easier than Firelands," they're not at all supported by the statistics. As many people had completed Firelands pre-nerf as have now completed Dragon Soul. Pre-nerf Firelands was, statistically speaking, on par with and not harder than Dragon Soul is right now.

That's not only incorrect from an analytic perspective, it's also factually incorrect. Wowprogress shows us that there were 19,500 Deathwing normal kills by January 19th, the date that the article was published. That was 52 days after the instance was opened up on November 29th. On August 18th, 52 days after Firelands was released, there had still only been 9,500 Ragnaros kills. 10,000 more guilds have killed Deathwing than killed Ragnaros in the same time span, a 105% increase. This is an indication of Dragon Soul being significantly easier than Firelands was, not "on par", as Mr. Rossi claims.

I've spoken before about how raid groups will settle onto their appropriate place on the curve of raid kills. There's essentially three factors that decide if you're going to down a boss. There's skill, gear, and commitment. Skill is the combined ability of the members of your raid to know how to play their class and role, and their ability to learn and adapt to the mechanics of the encounter. Gear is just that, the quality of the gear that your raid has. This provides a buffer, stronger tanks are less likely to die, bigger healing throughput keeps the raid up, and more damage output shortens encounters. More gear means an easier encounter, which means less skill is required. Then there is commitment. All other things being equal, a guild that raids five days a week will progress further than a guild that raids five hours a week like Legacy. Skill x Gear x Commitment = the timeline upon which a group can expect to down bosses, assuming the difficulty is equivalent.

Many people measure the objective difficulty of encounters via commitment required to down the boss, either in number of pulls, or number of weeks spent learning a particular encounter. The reason for this is that within a raid group, skill and gear tend to be equivalent at equivalent points of progression in different tiers. A guild in 346 gear working on Halfus will take about the same amount of time as a guild in 359 gear working on Shannox. It's a rare occasion where Mr. McEatstheFloor suddenly becomes an amazing player. These things rarely change.

A guild that requires three months of farming gear in order to raise their SkillxGearxCommitment quotient high enough to down the final boss in the instance does not magically become skilled enough to clear the next instance on the first day, or in the first week, or in the first month. If you were not in the first 10K Ragnaros kills in T12, then you shouldn't expect to be done with normal mode Dragon Soul yet. However, 10k players beyond reasonable expectation have already cleared the instance. We can use this to establish just how much easier Dragon Soul is than Firelands, and through that assessment, we can build reasonable expectations for when a raid group that cleared Firelands should expect to be able to down Deathwing.

The 19,500th Ragnaros kill didn't occur until September 26th, 91 days after release. There's a 39 day disparity between hitting that benchmark in Dragon Soul, and hitting it in Firelands. You can either make the assumption that the lack of difficulty simply frontloaded guilds, that the guilds that downed Rag in the first month downed him the first week, and then things settled. You can also look at it as a compressed schedule, where every day spent in Firelands is equal to 60% of a day in Dragon Soul. It's more likely a combination of the two. However, this shows that it's reasonable to expect your group to reach a milestone in DS about three to five weeks earlier than it took them to hit that level in Firelands. It is not reasonable to expect kills to be rolling in three to five months sooner.

Nerfs Again: Blizzard Recognizes the Dangers of the Skill Gap.

I've talked before about how dangerous having a profound skill gap in between bosses is harmful to the game. Blizzard has taken note of this, and has decied to implement a stacking debuff that reduces the health and damage of everything in Dragon Soul by 5% per stack, akin to the Strength of Wrynn buff in Icecrown Citadel. This debuff, called "Power of the Aspects", will apparently scale beyond the 30% that the ICC buff capped out at. When asked about the reasoning as to why they're nerfing normal and heroic modes, Bashiok spoke up:

Believe it or not there are actually guilds and raiding groups that are attempting to progress through Normal and Heroic raids, but are hitting a wall, and have been hitting a wall. We have actually statistical date we base our changes on, we know exactly how many people are clearing these raids each week, we know exactly how many people are able to down just a few bosses, and how many were only able to down a few bosses every week for weeks on end and then stopped raiding altogether.

The issue we're constantly trying to combat is the one where people feel like they're just out of options. One way this is an issue is the content is too easy, they blasted through it, have everything they could possibly want, and have nothing else to do. Ideally that's a small subset of very hardcore players. For everyone else it's a feeling of just being stuck with no possible way to progress. Very few players are willing to suit up, buff up, do all the necessary requirements to raid, jump in, and then do no better than they did last week for hours and hours, only to return next week and do the same.

This is the skill gap that I warned of. This is dangerous, especially in the year long wait that we're going to have to endure in this short tier. Running out of options this early is fatal. It's good to see Blizzard recognize this. However, in his later comments, and in the actions that Blizzard has decided to take in combating this problem, show that they don't really understand the problem and how it relates to the player base.

The first issue is the timing. From Bashiok:

We feel the content has been out for quite a while now, that most people who have progressed and downed Deathwing on Heroic have done so, they've had sufficient time to celebrate in their accomplishments, and these very small progressive alterations will only help guilds that are already doing well in the raid get over some hurdles they may be facing.

Bashiok, let's make this clear: The content will have barely been out for two months when you roll this nerf out. That's 1/3 of the normal six month life span of a raiding tier. Not only that, but one of those months was December. For those guilds that aren't commited enough to raid through Christmas and New Years, the content has only effectively been out for six weeks. Six weeks is not "quite a while".

Furthermore: "Most people who have progressed and downed Deathwing on Heroic have done so", huh? Most people with blonde hair have blonde hair. Obvious statement is obvious. This isn't about the Paragons and Vodkas of the world. This is about the other guilds. The guilds that would progress if given more than six weeks to down all current content that Blizzard also inexplicably expects to last us another eight months. Six weeks is not enough time for any guild with a reasonable amount of skill and who raid on a reasonable schedule to be hitting their limits. The insinuation here is that if you aren't in the 67 guilds that have cleared all content in the first two months of raiding, then you're toiling hopelessly and Blizzard needs to save you from your own incompetence. Not only is this insulting to the guilds who choose not to raid five+ days a week, it's also irreparably damaging. All kills from February onward will be tainted.

The second issue is the implementation. This is not the proper way to go about correcting the skill gap in content. Skill gaps exist because the content was not properly tuned. Each raiding tier should have equivilent difficulty when attempted at the appropriate level and gear. In properly tuned tiers, guilds will see similar progression on a similar timeline. A guild that cleared all heroic content in the first month should be able to clear all heroic content in the first month. A guild that takes six months to clear half the heroics should expect to clear half the heroics in about six months. A guild that struggles to clear normal mode in that six months should expect to take close to six months to clear all the normal content.

There should be a smooth distribution of difficulty across all the encounters. A guild that can clear one encounter should not find the next encounter hopelessly out of reach. Likewise, a guild that finds the previous encounter trivial should be able to clear the next encounter. The skill gap is created when there's significant jumps in difficulty. This is more likely to occur in stunted tiers like the seven boss Firelands and the eight boss Dragon Soul because fewer divisions means greater stratification between encounters if the end state remains the same as better developed tiers such as the 13 boss T11, 12 boss T10, and the 14 boss T8.

By implementing blanket nerfs, the gaps remain. All you've done is artificially lowered the end state. You've done nothing to remove the gap itself, which is the problem. You address the symptoms, but you allow the underlying cause to continue to fester, and that introduces new problems down the road. This is the equivalent of giving a person with an infected wound a shot of morphine and sending him home. He might feel better, but it's going to wear off, and he'll be in even more pain, and possibly have long term damage because of the short sighted approach to repair.

Blizzard, if you want to avoid running into these situations every tier, you have to bite the bullet, and actually balance the instance. Don't just throw some derpy blanket cut on the instance and call it good. Heroic Spine of Deathwing is an extremely poorly designed encounter. Forcing players to rely on short term burst on the only target that is beneficial to damage renders multiple classes completely useless. The solution to fixing Heroic Spine of Deathwing is not to nerf normal Ultraxion, it's to fix Heroic Spine of Deathwing. All that's happening with these blanket nerfs is that Blizzard is trading the long term health of the game in exchange for a little pain relief right now.

Patch 4.3: Dragon Soul - First Impressions

So, Legacy took their first look at the new raid that we're presumably going to be spending the majority of our playing time in for the next eight to twelve months. I've got many thoughts on the instance. Blizzard did a lot of things here, some of them they did well, some things they did poorly, and some things seem to be ugly, but they work.

Let's start with the criticisms:

The big elephant in the room is the tuning. I can't speak for heroic modes yet, which is where my focus tends to go, but normal mode seems to be drastically undertuned. We walking in on our first night and one shot Morchak, one shot Yor'sahj, three shot Zon'ozz, one shot Hagara, three shot Ultraxion, and took three pulls on Blackhorn before running out of time. Seven wipes on the first six bosses. We wiped more than that on normal Halfus, normal Magmaw, and normal Shannox each. The instance feels like its on a level with the post nerf cataclysm raid instances in terms of difficulty, and closer to Raid Finder difficulty than it is to the pre nerf instances. I don't think this is a great move.

I fear that this will produce one of two scenarios when the transition to heroic comes up for most guilds in the coming months. Either heroic difficulty is akin to heroic difficulty in post nerf firelands, where it's six joke bosses and one brick wall, or its going to be like ToC, where 85% of guilds cleared the instance on normal, and less than 25% of guilds could take the next step in logical progression and defeat heroic Beasts of Northrend. Neither of these scenarios produce healthy tiers of raiding. T12 and T9 are pretty much universally reviled.

On lighter criticisms, the trash before Ultraxion is annoying, and the cinematic before Spine of Deathwing causes some annoyances, if someone cancels the cinematic early, the fight starts, which can be a problem if your tank, or all your healers are still watching Blizz recreate Point Break.

But all is not fail and anguish! Blizzard did some things well here:

I think that the instance itself is very well designed. I enjoy the multiple stages that it employs, and travel throughout the instance is quick and easy. Going across diferent thematic zones is very engaging, going from the war in Dragonblight, to the Eye of Eternity, to the Skies of Northrend, to the Maelstrom keeps the instance from falling prey to the orange on orange on brown malaise of Firelands.

Aside from the endless drake waves before Ultraxion, which I think is a decent concept, it's just twice as long as it needs to be, the trash in Dragon Soul is well done. It doesn't have the endless fields of trash we saw in Firelands. The trash is engaging, often informative about the boss it guards, and not excessively painful to two heal. I always thought it odd when the trash was routinely harder to heal than the bosses were.

All in all, I don't feel this instance is Blizzard's best work, and I think it would be a mistake to leave us here for an extended duration, it is a refreshing change of pace from Firelands.

SSDD

So, we're five months late on this particular bandwagon, but so what? It's an engaging fight, and it gives a cool title. With 6/7 heroic being a joke, and heroic rag being a monster, we decided to work on the fights in appropriate order of their difficulty. Which meant that we're back in T11 heroics looking for a challenge because the T12 heroics are too easy now. Good work on the tuning there, Blizz.

Anyways, it took us about a dozen pulls to get Heroic Nefarian down. The majority of them were wipes in phase two to various stuff. The first one was finding out that the cast time for blast nova is a lot quicker on heroic. We had one where someone only jumped nine yards out with explosive cinders. We had one where two DPS got behind on their prototype so when the first one died, they couldn't kill theirs before Nefarian killed them. We had four wipes where the melee DPS on a pillar got targeted with explosive cinders twice in a row, and we didn't have backup interrupters to deal with that because of our raid comp. While dealing with all those issues, we got into phase three a few times. The first time we got into phase three, two healers got MCed, and thought it would be a good idea to wait out the crackle because the raid was topped off. We lost the Nefarian tank to a crackle, melee, breath combo before the healers could catch back up. We had another wipe where the Nefarian tank didn't turn Nefarian at the right time, and my healer got breathed on.

Which brings us to the kill. As some of you may notice, there's some amazing parallels between the circumstances of this kill, and our first normal Nefarian kill. Unlike that fight, where the requirements of the fight simply taxed us to the limit, I have to take full responsibility for the near wipe here. In phase three, the bulk of the responsibility is on the off tank, if you kite correctly, then phase three is infinitely sustainable, but an offtank who fails at the kite will wipe the raid. The pattern of shadowblaze sparks hasn't been nerfed, like it was in normal so, so it very quickly devolves into a 5 second per spark frenzy of near constant movement and CD rotations. If you move too early, you'll use too much terrain in the kite and you'll run out of room before the old fire despawns. If you move to late you'll let the adds refill their energy and make life hell for your healer. This is something that I'm very good at. There's lots of little tricks to doing this well, not the least of which is learning how to leverage the Holy Wrath stun to give your healer some breathing room without leaving the adds in a position where they can be hit by fire. This was were I screwed up.

With Nefarian at about 14% health, we had things going swimmingly. I had reset the adds at every possible opportunity, and with them at 10 energy, I was perfectly positioned to do it again. The healers constantly chatter about weather or not they need to shift responsibilities, and our Holy Paladin asked the Shaman healing me if he needed to push over. The Shaman replied that everything was going fine and the adds were going to reset. I was pretty proud of myself because the shaman healing me was operating with his off spec, so if I was making it easy for him, than I was doing a great job. Then it happened. I accidently hit Holy Wrath instead of judgement. One misclick in an otherwise superb attempt. As soon as I hit it, I knew I had just screwed the raid. The adds were stunned just long enough for the shadowflame spark to land on them right before they would have reset. Their energy refilled, and they came right after me. I immediately called out in vent for additional healing as the last crackle went out. I survived the crackle, but the holy paladin had to prioritize the nefarian tank at that point, and as the stacks on the constructs mounted, the damage because unhealable for my shaman. I died with Nefarian at about 6% health, and things played out much as they did with our normal kill. Frost Rings and Earth Elementals held the adds at bay while the DPS finished the boss off, to my profound relief.

It really illustrates how much pressure is put on certain players within the raid on encounters. One misclick killed me, and damn near killed the raid. If I had pressed it 2 seconds earlier or later, pretty much one GCD, I would have been fine. This is something that's been around for a while. Magtheridon Cube clickers, Vashj Core chuckers, Kael'thas shield tanks, dispellers on Mu'ru, it's part of life as a raider, even on the somewhat less than bleeding edge.

Stat Inflation: The Consequences of the "Squish" and How to Avoid It

Ghostcrawler just released another blog post. This time it was concerned with stat inflation on gear. The stats on gear have been growing exponentially, players are now doing 15X the DPS they were doing at the end of BC. Item levels have virtually exploded, and Ghostcrawler was kind enough to provide us with a graph displaying the problem.



Ghostcrawler has proposed two solutions to this problem. The first would be pretty much hacking a couple zeros off everything. I'll call this the "Metric Solution", instead of 20,000 DPS, you're doing 20 kilodeeps. This is pretty much already being done by players, hell, we make it even shorter, it's just 20k DPS in the vernacular of the player.

The second solution proposed is a "squish" of item levels. Essentially readjusting every item in the game to work within a truncated scale, and adjusting every mob in the game based on the now reduced power of the player. The crab even blessed us with a graph showing how that ideal might look.

Personally, I find the fact that on the squish scale Sunwell items would be worse than Naxx40 gear, to be a hilarious example of why the proposed squish is a bad idea.

A lot of people blame the advent of Hard Modes in Wrath to be a major cause of the inflation. But that's not true. The problem has been a design flaw that's been Incorporated into the game since at least the leveling of Wrath. This is not a problem created by the Raiders, it is a problem created by the levelers. Progress between tiers in an expansion has been pretty even. That's not to say that it's been perfect, it could be tuned slightly better, but the overwhelming problem is in the jumps across the leveling between expansions. Molten Core T1 was ilevel 66, BWL T2 was 76, Naxx40 T3 was 92. That's an average of 13 ilevels between upgrades, and 26 ilevels across 3 tiers. T4 was ilevel 120, T5 was 133, T6 was 146 with some Sunwell peices reaching 154. Once again, 13 ilevels between upgrades with an 8 ilevel jump to Sunwell, which could be argued acted as a precursor to the idea of Hard Modes. This amounted to a 34 ilevel jump. Enter Wrath, and 25 man T7 was 213, T8 was 226, T9 25 normal was 245, T10 normal was 264. The gap between the first two tiers was again the standard 13 ilevels, the last two tiers took 19 point jumps, which was a tier and a half, and that could be attributed by the advent of hard modes proper. Going to the max of 284 for HLK25 gear, and 25 man raiders were looking at a gear span of 71 ilevels across 4 tiers. Come Cataclysm, the entry level raids were dropping 359 gear, and Deathwing Heroic looks to be dropping 404 gear, a 45 ilevel span across three tiers.

Combining the ilevel spans hit at the endgame, and you get 176 ilevels dedicated to the endgame which is the overwhelming majority of the time spent in the game. Less than half of the item levels in the game are dedicated to the content that players spend close to 90% of their game time playing.

The flaws in this line of thinking becomes apparent when you look at the ilevel distribution in Cataclysm gear. Players wearing HICC gear went from ilevel 277 in ICC to ilevel 359 in Normal T11. That's a 82 ilevel jump. That's a bigger jump than a player going from Naxx 10 to ICC 25H. Here's the rub though, people spent the better part of two years going from T7 to T10. They spent the better part of 3 days going from ICC 25H to T11 normals. Think about that for a moment. Blizzard took the statistical equivalent of the ENTIRE WRATH RAIDING PROGRESSION into the cataclysm leveling content. This creates several problems, not the least of which is stat inflation. Another design flaw apparent in the first graph is the launch point of Cataclysm. It picks up right where ICC heroic raiding left off. This creates several problems. People get upset about "Green becoming the new Purple", which has been a complaint since the inception of BC. Stat inflation becomes much more pronounced. The third is that the quality of the leveling experience for players who weren't raiding heavily at the end of the expansion drops off because they face a massive gulf in between the gear they were able to attain while leveling in the previous expansion, and the gear that the new expansion presumes you have. A friend of mine actually wrote a fairly prescient article for WoW insider detailing his struggles to level his rogue into Cataclysm content due to it not having the high levels of gear that his shaman main had.

This is what Blizzard needs to do to address the problem. They need to accept that high end raid gear will last until the level cap of the next expansion. The player who possesses 277 gear going into Cataclysm didn't care what kind of clown suit the designers had thrown together for levelers. They wanted to get into raiding, and quickly. Raiders took their T3 into Kara, they took their T6 into Naxx, but their T10 didn't make it out of Deepholme. I don't know what possessed the devs to break with the tried and true formula, but, like many things in Cataclysm, they took a gamble and they lost. What they need to do is to focus on keeping future expansions clean. Level 90 heroics shouldn't offer anything more than 6 ilevels higher than Heroic Deathwing gear, and T14 normals shouldn't be more than 20 ilevels higher. MoP quest rewards should begin in the vicinity of 333, and push up to the high 390s. That way players who are leveling characters clean through will find an undiminished leveling experience going from one expansion to the other, and Raiders find an undiminished experience going from one raid teir to the next. By following a strict formula for ilevel expansion across tiers and across expansions, they prevent the issues that have arisen from letting things get away from them. What Blizzard really needs, more than anything else, is self restraint.

Through My Interface: Day 7

Today's topic is "Screenshot of the Year". Saz posted an esoteric shot of multiple Ancients in Darkshore. I don't think I have anything that really stands on it's own as an artistic piece, what I do have is a screenshot that frames a story quite well.

Legacy raids with a quiet desperation at times. We've made a history forged in enrage timers and dead tanks. I used to have a screenshot from our first Algalon kill that shows that if you kill him after his enrage, even his loot chest turns red. But in the last year, nothing shows our typical progression mindset like Nefarian. We had been working on Nefarian in earnest for about two and a half raid nights, probably close to seven hours of progression.

One of the things about learning Nef is that it's a classic end tier fight in terms of learning. You wipe, wipe, wipe in phase one. Tanks learn their positioning, your DPS learns how to handle the constructs, the healers learn how to adjust to the tail lash, and eventually you get that down, and you get to enter phase two. After a few wipes where you get the pleasure of figuring out who can't find water collision in their settings, you actually get to see phase two, and your healers cry tears of blood, and everyone curses the latency of the melee DPS responsible for interrupts. Eventually you cut your way into phase three, and here comes the fun part, the add tank (read: Me) becomes almost solely responsible for a groups success or failure. The spotlight can be a harsh mistress, and every time that you fail to drop the stacks of the ravenous pack of constructs, the disappointment in the air becomes every bit as palpable as the excitement people feel about being this close to a kill.

Eventually things start to click, and you start to get closer and closer to the prize. 25%, 15%, 8% past the last crackle, and then you wipe in phase two again. But the attempt after that, the 20% crackle kills my healer, panic ensues. We don't have time for another pull, and it's the last day of the lockout. Some want to farm another week of gear, others want to get it over with, but everyone dreads another night grinding away with Nefarian's mocking laughter echoing in our ears. We'd spent our entire raid week working on him, and the very notion of coming away from that week with nothing is humiliating. With no healer on the add tank, and no chance for a reset before the next crackle, The CD I was saving to keep me alive through the next crackle gets blown just to keep me alive to get there. As a placid voice from DBM counts down to the next crackle, I know that the voice is marking the moments to my death with infuriating calm. 3... 2...1... I throw up my raid wall, one last gift to my raid, the last full measure of protection I can give them. The crackle rips the life from my paladin and sets the constructs I had been occupying upon my raid.

Never have I been prouder of my raid than in those final moments. Everyone gave everything they could. Earth Elementals came out, traps, rings of frost. Our Holy Paladin, knowing the stakes, taunted four of the constructs and led them away from the raid while the resto shaman burned through his mana like the world was ending.

9%. The Earth Elementals are killed, and ring of frost ends.

8%. The holy paladin's game of keep away ends poorly for him.

7%. The resto shaman gets mauled.

6%. The Feral Druid tanking Nef takes a breath/melee combo and is put to rest.

5%. burn, Burn, BURN!

4%. Our hunter's deterrence wears off, and with a flash of the dragon's claws, he's sent to the ground.

3%. The ret paladin bubble taunts Nef to buy a few more seconds, once the fixate wears off the dragon turns his baleful breath upon the mage, before turning back to the now vulnerable paladin.

2%. Snicker-snack goes the dragon's sharp claws. Two little raiders left.

1%. Our professional hunter flies across the room on wings of flame. He always said that engineering would save the raid one day. As Nefarian gives chase, our Enhance Shaman tears into his flanks with unrelenting desperation, marching through fires and flames, heedless of his own health. Nefarian catches up to the hunter, who throws up his deterrence. Nefarian rages against the hunter's defenses, waiting for a gap to open. 3... 2...

0%. The dragon gives up the ghost with the two remaining raiders left at under 20% health. There's exultation in vent, there's happiness, of course. Underneath it all, though, is relief, and a measure of disbelief. Did we just pull it out again? Why, yes. Yes, we did.

The Cake is a Lie, The Dance is a Cake.

Therefore, the dance is a lie. One of the complaints that's been going around the blogosphere of Azeroth the past few weeks has been the notion of the difficulty in the firelands tier being due to this new breed of "Dance" style bosses. Bosses which mercilessly rewarded a step out of line, a strike out of rhythm, with a dirt nap, and dire consequences for your raid. One of the foremost proponents of the Dance Theory has been Gevlon, of the Greedy Goblin. In a post he made a week ago, he railed against the Dance as "Inaccessible" and not "Friendly to Casuals". He brings up Shannox as an example.

I've yet to see a player who finishes Shannox alive in the first few times he sees it. I've yet to see a new tank who doesn't do atrocious movement on Shannox wiping the raid. And it's just damn Shannox, the first boss available in Firelands.

This is what got me looking at the complaints with a much more critical eye. When someone mentions tanks, it attracts my gaze like Frodo donning The One Ring invites the gaze of the dark lord of Mordor. A new tank making a mistake that wipes the raid? Ummmm... that's "new"? Pretty much every raid encounter in the game, if the tank makes a catastrophic mistake, it's a wipe. Can't stance dance on Nightbane? You're dead. Didn't Shield Block Shear? You're a corpse. Missed the CD on Plasma Blast? Taste the floor! Didn't manage orbs on Blood Council? The floor is a dish best served cold. Can't drop your stack on Shannox! At least the floor is warm there. Sometimes you can pull of a miraculous deterrence while a battlerez gets the tank back into the fight. But most of the time you're going to be listening to the shrill voices of your mages trying to convince everyone to die before their invisibility gets broken. If the tank fucks up, it's a wipe. This is not new. This is not Sparta. This is raiding!

Having deconstructed that aspect of his anecdote, I looked at the others. Gevlon has yet to see a player finish Shannox without dying on their first several pulls of the boss. Really? A non tank in that fight has only two ways that they can get themselves killed on that fight. They stood in a trap, which takes 5 seconds to arm, and DBM howls like a banshee when one gets dropped within 10 yards of you. The other way is that they someone wandered off to Buttfuck (It's pronounced byoot-fick), Egypt and got hit with face rage. These are not mechanical problems. They are not anything that is new to raiding. There are two things that cause these errors. You either have a bad player, one who lacks situational awareness to avoid placing themselves in that situation. The other possibility is you have a bad raid leader. One who does not properly explain their strategy in a clear and concise manner. On normal mode for a DPS player, Shannox boils down to: Kill Mob A, Kill Mob B, Kill Mob C, don't stand in the fire. We're talking about a veritable two step in terms of raiding complexity. I shudder at the thought of what happens when his raid attempts Cuban Salsa.

The claim is that every encounter in firelands requires some sort of esoteric ballroom skill. Two Step on Shannox, a stately waltz on Rhyolith, Meringue on Baleroc, Charleston on Beth'tilac, Swing on Alysrazor, the Majordomo Mambo, and the Ragnaros Tango. Without a complete mastery of all these disparate techniques, which have never been required in the game before, you will wipe, and wipe, and wipe, until your second left foot gets loose and your raid gets funky.

This is not the case. Lets look at the primary mechanics on each encounter.

Shannox: Traps. They arm in five seconds, and either do a good amount of damage or freeze you and force your raid to break you out. Mimiron mines, initially armed immediately, one shot clothies, and blended in with the floor. Hodir Flash Freeze, stand on the snow within a 4 second warning, or be frozen and force your raid to break you out.

Beth'Tilac: Split the raid between topside and bottomside. Happened in Kalecgos and Yogg. Jump through a small opening to change position, or die. It was worse on Yogg, make it to the portal, or get mind control, and actively harm your raid, and force them to kill you. No battlerez, only lunacy. Algalon did it too, only the other side was filled with untanked monsters that wanted to eat you. Admitidly, that could happen on Beth too. Meteors. Every void zone ever.

Rhyolith: Designate DPS to judiciously split DPS between multiple targets so as to ensure that raid damage is manageable. That's the Algalon star wrangler's job description.

Alysrazor: Tank DPS matters! Tank DPS always matters, tell your tanks to stop being lazy motherfuckers. Flying! Chasing small spell effects in a 3D environment, good old Valithria! Tornadoes! Spell effects that travel in predictable concentric circles, phase one yogg.

Baleroc: Soaking a debuff that does more damage the longer you have it? Wrack, Burn, that plague on putricide.

Majordomo: Soaking orbs, see Baleroc shards. Countdown debuff that blows up everyone near you? All the way back to molten core, Baron Geddon's Living Bomb. Forcing phase changes through player movement? That's actually a new one, but it boils down to stacking and spreading, which is a staple of many boss encounters. The difficulty of the mechanic actually falls solely on the head of the raid leader, determining when the switches need to be made.

Rag: Magma traps. Knocked up and need to mitigate fall damage? Conclave of the Wind brown platform ultimate. Adds need to be stopped before reaching a certain point? Jegoda Shadowseeker, too bad everyone skips her. Ground catches on fire? Every boss has fire on the ground. Wave of fire emanating from a central point? Kilnara's black wave of fail. Adds that need to be AoE'd down. Freya lashers, Maloriak Aberrations. Adds that need to be kited and explode if they catch you? Mimiron Bomb Bots.

Aside from the very cool phase transition mechanics on Majordomo, there really
aren't any new mechanics on any of the fights in firelands. The "Dance" is something that has been around since the beginning of raiding. Sometimes counter intuitive mechanics have been included. Who remembers the Shade of Aran chant? It's before my time, but I've heard it before. "I will not move when the flame wreath is cast or the raid blows up." This shit is older than BC. Hell, the term "Dance" was first applied to Heigan the Unclean in Naxx40, and he was considered one of the easiest bosses in the instance. Level 60 bosses required dancing skills. Why is this tier suddenly different?

Failure to dance is caused by two things. Chronic failure is indicative of a bad player. One who lacks the situational awareness to note the a portal to the gaping maw of hell is opening under his feet, and he should probably move elsewhere. However, the persistent failure of every new player in a raid is indicative of a poor raid leader. If you cannot articulate the strategy that you want to implement, then obviously the raid will struggle to realize your ill defined vision.

There are three steps to making a clean entry into a raid. The individual must do a little research on the encounter. Go to Learn2raid.com and watch the video for the encounter, or even just read the dungeon journal that Blizz has kindly handed to every player. The raid leader must then come up with a viable strategy, and clearly communicate everyone's roles and responsibilities. It is then back on the individuals to execute the raid leader's instructions. These have been the steps that every raider has taken as they entered raiding.

I took those steps, and chronicled them on my first organized raid outside of
Vault of Archavon. Without ever having raided anything beyond the original earth watcher, I went and watched the videos on all 13 bosses in Naxxramas, my raid leader did a good job of explaining what he needed me to do (except he initially told me not to taunt on Gluth, but nobody's perfect.), and I executed what he needed me to do. Did we one shot every boss? No, but we one shot most of them, and we didn't wipe more than twice on any of them. The kicker, over half the raid got the achievement for clearing naxx when we downed KT. It can be done. I know, because I did it. I saw a raid leader lead a raid that he had never cleared before, and do it flawlessly. Did we catch lightning in a bottle? Perhaps. But there's no reason why a pug shouldn't be able to jump into a run that has a boss on farm and not screw up if we could tank a mostly fresh raid and do a full clear.

Difficulty, the Skill Gap, Blanket Nerfs, and the Exodus of Players.

About a week ago, Blizzard unleashed a one week warning that the Firelands was going to be hit with a nerf akin to the 20% nerf that rendered all T11 normal content completely trivial. This has erupted into a bit of a fireball in the blogging world. People are drawing lines on all sides. Some are saying that nothing should be nerfed, some are saying that everything should be nerfed, some are saying that heroics should be left alone but normals nerfed. It's kind of a mess.

Personally, I'm looking at the long game here. Consistency should be Blizzards watchword. For the most part since T8, Blizzard has done a good job of putting out content that has been fairly even in terms of difficulty. Difficulty at the bottom of the instance, and difficulty at the top has been fairly consistent; the major tuning factor is one of throughput. Going from Flame Leviathan in 213 gear, to Beasts of Northrend in 226 gear, to Lord Marrowgar in 245 gear, to Halfus Wyrmbreaker in 346 gear, to Shannox in 359 gear isn't a serious step up in difficulty anywhere along the line. Likewise, Yogg+0 in 239 gear, H Anub in 258 gear, HLK in 277 gear, Sinestra in 372 gear, and H Rag in 392 gear, despite more stratification than the opening bosses, doesn't include any ridiculous outliers in terms of difficulty. Content is not getting more difficulty, nor is is getting easier. They're remaining fairly constant. This is a good thing, because it gives people realistic impressions of the progression that they can expect across tiers.

In the same vein as consistency is avoiding creating major skill gaps. Encounters that exist as progression bottlenecks by being significantly more difficult than any of the encounters previous hurt the morale of a group. Going from clearing a new boss each week to be stuck on a single encounter for over a month is a recipe for destroying a raid group. This is one of the reasons why Blackwing Lair was a terribly designed instance. Going from Molten Core where the majority of the bosses were simpler than any five man boss in Cataclysm to Razorgore and Vaelestraz, who were as difficult as Ragnaros, was a huge skill gap. Further exacerbating the issue was that Razorgore and Vael weren't only the first two bosses in BWL, they were the first two encounters. There wasn't even trash you could farm. Because of this, even after the release of BWL, groups that couldn't down Rag had nowhere to go. Vaelestraz got the reputation as the game's first "Guild Breaker" boss. this is the hazard of encounters like Lady Vashj, Kael'thas, Bruttalus, Mu'ru, and Heroic Beasts of Northrend. These bosses all represented significant skill gaps, and raid groups died trying to surmount these obstacles.

Blizzard has also experimented recently with blanket nerfs. Rather than targeted adjustments to bring a specific encounters to the degree of difficulty they intend and letting groups progress at their own rate, blizzard has simply chopped the whole instance down a peg. This began with an adjustment during patch 3.0.2 to all BC raid content, which was justified in that changes to mechanics, specifically group dancing, and multiple potions, made a significant dent in a group's throughput. Perhaps they went a little overboard, but the intent was to counterbalance nerfs to all players. The first true blanket nerf came in ICC with the Strength of Wrynn buff. Starting at 5%, and eventually cranking it's way to 30%, it was built as a means to keep guilds interested in ICC during the longest year in raiding history. The next blanket nerf came when 4.2 dropped, and Blizzard emasculated T11 normal content. Now blizzard has announced it's intentions to conduct another blanket nerf, this time on all T12 content, before the next patch is even on the PTR.

These blanket nerfs give short term progression to groups. However, that progression comes at a cost to the long term health of the game. As I said earlier, consistency should be Blizzard's goal. These blanket nerfs destroy that consistency. Even worse, in destroying that consistency, they create nightmarish skill gaps in between tiers. By the time the 30% buff rolled around in ICC, any competent group could roll into ICC, and push fairly deep into heroics. When T11 rolled around, these same groups expected to make similar process in T11, only to find that without the 30% buff, they're languishing in normal mode for months. This wasn't consistent with the progress they came to expect in T10 content. This frustrated them, and the fireworks flew. Guilds across servers exploded as T11 held a cruel mirror up to their actual ability. Many of these guilds were decent groups that in previous tiers had cleared the instance on normal and pushed into the easier heroics while content was current. However, the time spent in ICC warped their expectations, and destroyed their enjoyment of the game. Because of this, the game hemorrhaged subscriptions a few few months into T11. Blizzard didn't learn from this design failure, and is planning to repeat it again with T12 content.

Inevitably, not everyone will be able to clear raid content when it's current. It takes both skill and commitment, to one degree or another. A less skilled guild that raids for 6 nights a week might progress further than a skilled group that raids, 2 nights a week. But that's because their commitment is much greater. However, the distribution of skill in this game varies heavily, and anyone who spends any sort of time running random pugs in LFD will notice that there are people at level 85 who do DPS that's low by Burning Crusade standards. It's impossible to create content that's capable of being cleared by people that bad, that remains marginally challenging to the current group of raiders. A realistic appraisal of your groups skill and commitment is vital in creating realistic expectations, and realistic expectations are vital for the long term enjoyment of the game. If it took you four months to down nefarian, you should expect a commensurate amount of time to down Rag.

Perhaps Blizzard thinks that the new "Derp" mode, as some of my guildies are taking to calling the new LFR tool scheduled for 4.3, will offset the skill gap. That guilds that made it to 7/7 normal in firelands and 1/7 heroic would be satisfied with being 7/7 derp mode and 5/7 normal. I doubt this is true. Getting inferior gear and no achievements will simply leave them feeling inferior, and still thinking that they're a group that should be raiding in heroic mode. Inconsistency will wound this game.

Through My Interface: Day 4

Today's the Greatest Accomplishment. It's more of a meta topic, than an RP topic. As always, my accomplishments in game are defined by raiding.



Downing Firefighter was the first brutal welcome to raiding moment. It became the moment that calcified my group into progression raiders, rather than people who give up after the first 200 wipes. To this day I still hear Mimiron screaming "Medic" when I see someone die on my raid frames.

We Hate Rogue Loot.

In a guild with no rogues, there are only 391 Agility Daggers...

And cloth, for the mages to fight over. Still a dissapointing lack of tanking gear for me in firelands.

Dropping heroic Shannox only took about 4 pulls today, as opposed to the hour and a half of brutal wipes on Wednesday. Part of that was because we had an actual plan today, we weren't just trying to wing it. That's entirely my fault, as raid leader I should have been far more analytical than I was. Part of it stems from missing every progression fight in normal mode Firelands with the exception of Rag due to my military training. Having pretty much the whole instance spoon fed to me probably set me back weeks in terms of my knowledge and acumen in the instance. It's a mistake that I will rectify for future encounters.

Blood and Glory in the Crimson Halls.

Well, the new wing of ICC, the Crimson Halls opened up on Tuesday. As Legacy is wont to do, I mustered up my ten man team and ventured forth. We bored our way through the first seven bosses, including a one shot of Puticide which was executed to perfection. Nothing of any real interest to me dropped, although I won a pair of shoulders for my retribution set.

With our previous conquests behind us, we strode confidently into the Crimson Halls. After AoEing down the trash, we moved into the central hall, and prepared to face down the bosses. The Blood Queen's long winded speech prompted me to remark, in jest, that it was Kael'thas all over again. Our feral druid, who was in Get of Fenris during BC, and was intimately familiar with the pain of pre nerf Kael'thas remarked that this was nothing like Kael'thas.

"NAXXANAR WAS MERELY A SETBACK!"

My druid friend was swiftly laughing his ass off in vent and admitted that, yes, it was just like Kael.

And just like Kael did, the Blood Princes kicked our tails out through our teeth. We didn't have a pull that broke the two minute mark. We started out trying to have the Professional Hunter tank Keleseth. But he wound up getting nuked into the ground in record time. So we broke out the feral druid's pvp resto set, so the Hunter could have a dedicated healer. That didn't work. So we had the fury warrior switch to prot and try to tank Keleseth. It turns out that Keleseth hits really hard. Like 24k melee hits hard. So, as the optimally geared EH tank, I switched off Valanar and onto Keleseth.

At this point we managed to sustain the pull for longer than 30 seconds. I was getting trucked, but by popping a cooldown when Keleseth became empowered, I managed to survive, and we managed to find new and interesting ways to die. We found out about kinetic bombs the hard way. After assigning the Hunter to manage them, we found out that up to three of them could spawn at a time, also the hard way. When we had the Mage and Hunter managing bombs, with only the Shaman and Death Knight still actually DPSing, we found out that while a cooldown would keep me alive through the empowered shadow lances, it left me high and dry when Taldaram threw an empowered flame orb that hits me for 60k.

At that point I made the decision that there was no chance in hell that Blizzard intended for us to run with 3 tanks, 3 healers, two controls, and only two DPS. We still really didn't have a very good picture of what the fight actually looked like, so I decided to call it for the night. Truly humbled for the first time in ICC.

The next day, we marched through ICC 25. One shot every boss from Marrowgar to Rotface. Then we diverted through the Crimson Halls, and ran into a similar issue on the 25 man princes. Our Warlock was getting obliterated. However, one thing that the 25 man forced us to do was confront our positioning issues. We refined the spacing of the mobs, and began to use all of the space available to us. With the information we gathered in the 25 man, we began to put together the picture. Information is ammunition, and my ten man was now armed to the teeth.

We rode back in, cleared trash again, and threw down with the KTs three. Our hunter grabbed his PvP gear, and with a couple of stamina trinkets was sitting at over 40k health when we pulled. This prevented the instagib factor while he tanked Keleseth. He spent the initial phase spamming killshot to build threat, and collecting orbs. We determined that the initial invocation shift took place when the health pool dropped to 85%, so we kept DPS slow enough to allow him to collect three orbs before the shift. The Mage was tasked with juggling kinetic bombs. I found out something very useful while tanking Valanar. The kinetic bombs can get bounced back by my AoE. Avenger's Shield, HotR, and even Consecrate all kept them from hitting the ground, so in order to streamline positioning, when Valanar was not empowered, I took responsibility for a bomb that spawns on the dais. When Valanar was empowered, I tanked him essentially right where he began the fight. The Co Tank tanked Taldaram off to the right. Whenever Taldaram launched an empowered flame sphere, with my handling the bomb on the dais, this allowed the melee to run with it as the target kited it, so we stripped the stacks off. If it targeted me, I just popped a cooldown to eat it.

After several attempts, we got our coordination timed right, and finally downed them. It was getting late, so I put up a vote as to weather we wanted to go on to blood queen, or take here the next night. The vote was 6/4 in favor of waiting, but the Hunter needed another 2k rep to hit exalted, so we all agreed to kill the trash.

Once we cleared to her, we mulled over the strat, and concluded that it was a gear check more than anything. We decided to pull her, once and only once, to see just what we were in for. After all, she was right there. So we pulled her, and she bit our fury warrior, who promptly began to pull 18k DPS. Fifty seconds later, he stopped attacking. Ten seconds later, he started attacking again, although he was attacking me. Well, it seems like we'd have the DPS. If only we could figure out how to bite someone.

We found out that he, like most of our raid, uses Bartender4. So we began trouble shooting. We reworked his vehicle bar, his pet bar, and his stance bar. I thought about similar mechanics, and the best comparison I could come up with was Eadric the Pure in ToC five. I never remembered a vehicle bar coming up, and my pet bar was disabled. I thought about how the hammer just popped up on my first bar. As I was describing it on vent, our warrior commented, "Oh, I don't use the first bar, I use 2, 3, and 4," Well, that's... odd, but whatever. So we had him activate his first bar, and lo and behold, he could bite with the best of them.

So, Protip: Make sure your raiders have Bar 1 active for Blood Queen.

After that we wiped a few times to stupid things, mostly involving the shadowflame. People didn't see the shadowflame when they got it. People died after being feared into the shadowflame. People got the shadowflame and the blood link. I forgot to turn on Righteous Fury and the Blood Mirror jumped to a melee DPS... those sort of things.

Just before midnight, we got a nearly perfect pull. We didn't lose anybody, and our DPS was cracking down hard. Then we hit the four minute mark. The four minute mark, on ten man, is where you begin to run out of people to bite, and thus, people begin to go insane. Also, the raid damage from the Shroud of Sorrows jumps up to a painful 6,750 damage every two seconds. We had her at 10%, and all of a sudden she fears the raid, and flies off. Well, shit. With people in vent reporting less than 5 seconds before they go insane, we decided to throw our precise formations for avoiding splash damage out the window. We opted for the less organized plan of the Co-Tank, who cried out in vent "Throw things at her!" And so we did. Wand bolts, Hammers, Heroic Weapons, Lightning bolts, and Arrows. The sky was darkened with them. Right before people began to go insane, the Blood Queen let out a shriek, and died. And thankfully, unlike Sapphiron, gravity brought her corpse, and more importantly, our loot, back down to us.

I'm really proud of the work that my group has done. Along with the server first Putricide kill, Guildox is reporting our Blood Queen kill as another server first. Wowprogress has us listed as the best ten man team on the server for two tiers running now. Later this week, we plan to go back to Ulduar to down Yogg with no keepers, in order to solidify the number one ten man slot for the expansion thus far on guildox. While the guild's 25 man runs haven't had the same impetus as my ten man, they have become much more focused, and are a far cry from the clusterfucks that saw us ranked in the mid 40s on the server. With a week to go before the next wing opens, we are ready.

Terrible New Everyone!

Rotface 25 is dead. Took 3 attempts last night. We found that the secret to killing him efficiently was to abuse the Rotface tank (me), magnificently.

We ran in to the issue that rotface would begin to cast slime spray when everyone scattered for volatile ooze explosion. Because of the long range on the spray, and the fact that I had taken Rotface to the side, this lead to upwards of 50% of the raid finding themselves in the blast radius. After two wipes to this, I got kinda frustrated. So as the next ooze explosion went off, I just popped Divine Protection and stood there. And took no damage. Every ooze missed me.

I wasn't so lucky the second explosion, and when I reached for my cooldown, I realized that I had traded in my 4 piece t9, and it was on cooldown. So I quickly took stock of options, and hit the only defensive cooldown I had up. My Corroded Skeleton Key. This time I was not so lucky, I took about 7 slimes to the crown, and barely walked away, thanks to some pretty amazing heals.

The third explosion was much less harrowing, as Divine Protection was available again. At that point, we had entered the 6 second infection "oh shit" zone. At that point somehow a second big ooze spawned, and took out the Co-Tank. The Professional Hunter and Shameless Boomkin immediately started attempting to kite them as we blew hero and tried to outrun the fact that the bottom was falling out beneath our feet. With about 5 people down, Rotface hit the ground. There was no tanking loot to be had, but we did get the blood out to our Charter Ret Pally, who made the first Shadow's Edge in the guild.

We proceeded to go and attempt Professor Putricide. We lost one attempt to the Co-Tank, using a completely stock ui for this fight, not having bars spawn for the abom. We lost two attempts to glitched oozes trying to target the Co-Tank in the abom, and thus burning all their snare time trying to pick a target. The most annoying however, was the attempt we lost to our resto shaman who DCed while autorunning up the hall. Grrrrr...

Anyways, in the six non fucked attempts we got in, we got him into phase three twice, with our best attempt hitting the hard enrage at 28%. I feel confident that we'll down him next week.

Sorry Rhidach, but... GREAT NEWS EVERYBODY!

I took a vacation, along the way, I met up with several guild members and former guild members while in the Orange County area, this caused my raid schedule to be a little eclectic. However, the raiding the past week has been awesome.

I flew out on Friday, and hung out with some friends and family in the bay area. Then on Monday, I flew to LA, and was greeted by the shaman officer in my guild who was kind enough to not only put a roof over my head for the night, but also let me ride along on his Internet connection for the raid that night.

Monday is the night we clean up progression objectives. Because we had already facerolled all of ICC 25 on Wednesday, we were cleaning up progression objectives that had escaped our grasp back when the content was relevant. On Monday, we cleaned up Yogg-Saron, probably the source of the most bitching and gquits in our guild's history. We had about half of the raid that had never seen Yogg on any difficulty. We two shotted it, and the one wipe was due to a hunter not having his particle effects turned up, and hitting about all the clouds within 20 seconds of pulling.

It felt good to finally drop something that had been bedeviling the guild for so long. Although part of me was disappointed it was so easy. We probably could have done it a long time ago.

We rolled through some ToGC 25 to finish up the raid period, we downed Jaraxxus right before we ran out of time, and he dropped a nice pair of 258 tanking pants. Because I've missed out on most of our marrowgar kills due to various issues, the other tanks all had the 264 tanking pants already, so I got it uncontested.

Then we put together a slapdash ToGC 10 group. Decked out in oddball items like Nexus War Champion Beads and Black Spire Sabatons, we decided to go for Dedicated Insanity. It was kinda an oddball thing to attempt, considering some of the hoops we had to go through, like having our fury warrior respec arms because he only had one weapon that met the criteria, having our feral druid who goes resto for CC on faction champs do so without gear in like 4 slots because his resto set is his relentless gladiator set. Somehow, we made it to Anub'arak without any wipes. Because we didn't want to deal with trying a new comp, we went ahead and did what we always do, we two healing it. With a resto shaman and a disc priest. I can't imagine what that must have felt like for them. We got him into phase three cleanly, but also with a couple adds up, which meant that the OT was going to be on a pair that won't be killed pretty early in the fight. The healing was intense. We wound up losing our feral druid pretty early on as the healers triaged, and the DPS took us through 4 freezing slashes, which is a nightmare for me, because all I can do is take everything on the chin during those. However, we managed to pull it off. We are now the only ten people on the server who have the Argent Defender title. I think I'm gonna keep wearing Starcaller for a while, but it's nice to have options.

On Tuesday, the Shaman and I went to go visit the Prodigal Resto Druid, and by extension, the rest of the exiles. As such we missed the ten man ICC 10. They two shotted Festergut, and then proceeded to painfully claw their way past Rotface. Having our Professional Hunter tanking on his DK, and our Utility Man stepping in on his undergeared hunter made things more difficult than they needed to be, and for that I feel kinda bad. But the food at Marie Callender's was so good. Anyways, they opted to not attempt Putricide until a better raid group showed up.

I missed most of Wednesday's raid due to travelling back home. They facerolled their way through the first four bosses, but then wiped for about two hours on Festergut. Meanwhile, I was cramming my 6'8" frame into a middle seat in coach on a 737, in between two fat guys who snored. Then I was waiting for my backpack to get unloaded off the plane, which apparently requires a crew of 12 to find. Then I got to play dodge the drunk homeless guy on the Link Light Rail. Then I had to suffer through the aural torture of bad guitar guy on the ferry. Then I had to drive home behind mister "I drive 10 miles under the speed limit in no passing zones!"

I arrived online about an hour before the end of raid time. They were struggling on Festergut, and asked me to step in the place of the lowest DPS so that Super Priest could come on his priest, and not his prot pally. I came in, and we wiped about two more times. Exhausted from my trip, and having traumatic flashbacks to Thaddius 25, and I just kinda snapped in vent. Angy Dammer was in full force. But something miraculous happened. Suddenly, it seemed as if every DPSer seemed to find an extra thousand DPS in them. Not having to rotate 5 cooldowns to have a tank survive the 3 inhale blitz probably helped too. Festergut went down, and we took a few exploratory pulls on Rotface, only fitting in three pulls, each with a different set of trash respawning in between them, we managed to get him down to about 18%. I'm confident we'll be able to down him on Monday. I apologized for my mass transit induced bloodlust, and formed up the ten man group. This time with the Professional Hunter on his hunter.

We walked into Putricide's lab with full Algalon protocols in effect. We were hermetically sealed within a vent channel that only I know the password to, stocked with full flasks and fish feasts. All non essential chat channels were left, and we went to work.

Putricide was unbelievably bugged on the PTR. It wasn't so bad on live, but we still lost 3 attempts to bugs. We had one attempt where the mutated abomination registered as a mount, and as such didn't have an independent action bar, we lost a couple of attempts to Putricide only spawning one slime pool at a time, which meant that the abom couldn't get enough ooze power to actually do anything of value. We lost one attempt to our resto shaman accidentally dropping a cleansing totem, which meant that every time that our abom came near the totem, the abom was cleansed off of him. It took some hard looking at the parses to figure that one out. Finally, we managed to get a clean pull, that pushed him into phase three. Phase three got a little weird, and I fucked up the tank taunting, so we wound up with much more raid damage than we needed to. We cut it to the razor's edge, with the bottom falling out at about one percent, when everyone else in the raid was killed off by the AoE, and the slime pools were everywhere. Only my co-tank and I were still alive, and we managed to burn the last 120k off of him for the kill.

Some crappy leather dropped, but so did the Unidentifiable Organ. I beat out the co-tank on the roll, and it's definitely going to replace the Heart of Iron on my Marrowgar/Festergut set.

During 3.2, after we had downed Algalon and Tribute to Insanity and just before the Exiles left, the Professional Hunter had a chat with me. He said he wanted our group to compete for server firsts in 3.3, which even on ten man had previously been the realm of guilds like Awaken, Crisis, and CSM. Well, we aren't competing for server firsts, we're taking them.

Rage and Grace

Well, raiding comprises a lot of ups and downs. Doubly so if you're a raid leader. The past week has had a lot of them.

I missed out on the guild's first run into ICC 25. They one shotted Lord Marrowgar, but then proceeded to spend nearly 2 hours wiping to Lady Deathwhisper. Mainly due to trouble getting the adds under control in phase one. Which would have been my job, had I been there. Which made me feel pretty miserable. Making me feel even worse was that my latency dropped down to a manageable 800ms immediately afterwards. Touche, Murphy.

Once my connection had stabilized, I gathered up my ten man, and rolled into ToGC10. There, our superhuman Disc/Holy priest suddenly contracted my connection issues. Ever see a Resto Shaman try to solo heal Heroic Jaraxxus? It's not pretty. So the priest stepped out, and I grabbed one of our other priests, who, while being a skilled and effective healer, had never done ToGC 10 before. ToGC is still tuned tight enough that you can carry a DPSer, but not a tank or Healer, especially since we two heal the whole thing, save faction champs. So there was basically a training wipe for each fight as the new priest adjusted to the unhealthy demands we placed on the old priest. We still picked up Mad Skill for the new priest, who adapted as quickly as I could ask him to, however, it was a little disappointing not to get insanity.

We had a lull until our monday raid, which would polish off ICC 25, during which, my mic broke. Have you ever tried to coordinate first attempts on a new boss without a microphone? Not fun. With all the spam from people's addons and DBM in particular, raid warnings just don't have the same attention grabbing qualities as the giant voice roaring into your ear.

To make matters worse, for some reason, my combat log stopped working. That meant that all my addons which depended on the combat log gave me nothing. Nothing on parrot, half of DBM didn't work, and most frustrating, recount didn't work. I use recount for analysis purposes. I can quickly find out who has been targeting the proper targets, who got hit by the wrong attacks, and most importantly, why someone died. I had none of that. I was essentially flying blind, relying on my officers for information. It was quite disconcerting.

All of this leads up to the raid on Monday. We walk in, and smoothly one shot the gunship battle. It was even more epic on 25 man than it was on ten man. I took the role of the jump tank this time, and spent the fight crossing blades with THE High Overlord Saurfang. A privilege I have not had, save the one time my guild blew up Warsong Hold for the sole purpose of killing Garrosh Hellscream. Jet packs are fun. I mean really fun. Despite being an extremely easy encounter, this is probably one of my favorites in the game. I also picked up a sexy pair of tanking shoulders. They do however, make me look like one of those oddball warrior tanks. Hopefully I can pick up a nice set of tier 10 shoulders soon, seeing as the pally T10 looks pretty good this tier.

Which brings us to the younger Saurfang. Deathbringer got a little crazy. It took us five tries to get him down. And even then, the rate of accumulation of blood power was unacceptable. I'm not exactly sure of what exactly was going wrong because all my tools for analysis depend on the combat log, but do know at one point I panned my camera around and saw our demo lock tanking two blood beasts in illidan-form. /facepalm. Angry Dammer boiled to the surface, but angry raid warnings don't really carry the satisfaction of being able to actually talk to someone. I think they got the message though, as the next attempt, we dropped Deathbringer, and collected purples. Double vanquisher dropped, and we moved on.

One of my goals, now that the guild has begun properly raiding 25 mans, is to clean up the old progression objectives that we failed to down when the content was current. So we started with Sartharion with three drakes. OS3D was a fight that we attempted many times in T7, and it kicked our ass. It didn't help that our tanking corps at the time consisted of three prot paladins, who were utterly gimped prior to patch 3.2, but well, we just weren't that good back then. This time, we came in a rolled it. It was satisfying. The group walked off with new titles, and I walked off with a new flying mount that I won't use, despite the amount of DKP I dropped on it. It's very pretty, but my rusted proto drake flies circles around it. I'm planning on the Ulduar Hard Modes next. Maybe not Firefighter, that was hellish on 10 man.

Next up was Tuesday's ten man night. With my combat log repaired, we dove into Icecrown, and aside from still puzzling out the traps on the pre marrowgar trash, we were textbook in there. Every boss was smoothly one shot. Deathbringer Saurfang didn't get a single Mark out. It was beautiful. I picked up a mace from Marrowgar that I'll probably only use in a farm set, and even then, that's assuming that I don't get a 245 DPS weapon out of ToGC 10 by then. Crusader's Glory just has way too much survivability tied into it for me to surrender it for some more hit and DPS.

Right before the Deathbringer pull, we were inspired by our fellow alliance raiders. Crisis, the top alliance guild spammed the server with their realm first Tribute to Insanity 25 man. Congratulations guys. Sorry Wrathy, I'm sure you'll get Insanity this week too.

We then proceeded to ToGC 10, where the exact opposite happened. Things got sloppy. Ranged DPS got murdered on beasts by standing in the path of the kited worm. DPS didn't switch to the last volcano on Jaraxxus, leading to a kill with only 4 members of the raid left standing. Control was almost non existant on Faction Champions. I wound up having to replace the DK assigned to kite the warrior in order to get them down. That was a bit of a wake up call, and the group rallied to one shot twins and Anub to salvage Mad Skill. I got a trophy that bought me a nice new chest piece for my ret set.

The ups and downs of raiding were ever present. Combined with whatever electromagnetic field of fail I've been projecting lately, it made raiding quite the game of chutes and ladders. But that's part of what makes things so much fun.

Patch 3.3: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Well, we're now in the age of 3.3, and the launch wasn't as buggy as the patches I've mentioned previously. There was the usual 3 hours of being unable to connect to the server, and there's the matter of the floor of the airship at the end of the Halls of Reflection frying people's connections, and the return of "Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched", and the flaws in the new LFG... well, it wasn't perfect, but it really wasn't THAT bad. All of my addons held up, contrary to the predictions of the Yogscast boys.

The new five mans are actually very well put together, and quite fun. I ran it with some guild members, and we cleared all of them, sharded almost everything, and picked up a couple of achievements. Then we got DCed at the end, and a few of us, myself included got locked into a loading screen for the better part of an hour. Thankfully, I was prepared for such an occurrence, and had purchased Dragon Age Origins.

After a few hours, we managed to haul ourselves online, and bludgeon our way into Icecrown for my exploratory 10 man run. I thoroughly enoyed exploring the new content. The fights were more difficult than ToC, but not as difficult as ToGC, and it was no where near as buggy as Ulduar's release. Alas, I did not get the opportunity to crash the Skybreaker into some poor horde guild's ToC run.

We rolled through Lord Marrowgar after deciding to three heal it. We switched back to two healers for Lady Deathwhisper, and after two wipes sorting out the proper kill order for the adds, we knocked her down. We rolled around slaughtering horde and scourge before the gunship battle while we waited for our DCed feral druid to log back on. Then came the real fun on the boat. It was kind of late, and I was somewhat disoriented, and instead of grabbing a rocket shirt, I talked to the other NPC. Yeah, the one who starts the fight. Fortunately, everyone was on board, although not everyone had their shirts. Thus began a frantic scramble to figure out who was supposed to go where and do what, and explain to them their roles as the horde began to pour out onto our vessel. Forget pulling blind, salvaging blind surprise pulls are the most exciting thing in raiding. We had another surprise pull on Deathbringer Saurfang. We didn't see him, and we weren't sure what to do, so we talked to Muradin Bronzebeard, and out rolls Saurfang Junior. After Saurfang's disparaging racist comments, we found ourselves in combat, without a comprehensive plan, again. Unfortunately, this time, as I was barking out orders frantically in vent, my mic decided to stop working. The melee DPS didn't realize to stop AoE when the beasts spawned, and we wound up tanking the first two sets that came out. This provided Saurfang with a healthy Blood Power boost, and wound up wiping us. We returned again, with a working microphone, and a plan, and destroyed Saurfang in short order.

Lore ensued, with High Overlord Saurfang showing his paternal side, and reminding me of why he's one of, well... one horde NPCs who get any serious amount of respect from me from a lore perspective. Meanwhile, while Jaina cried about how great King Wyrnn is, we quietly stood the side.

"That's great, where's our epics?"

Then King Wrynn began to make battle plans, and dispatched peasants who promptly went and began building something.

"Are they building our purples?"

Alas, no, they did build a reagent vendor and repairman though, which was nice. We began to search frantically for our loot, until our healer lets out a holler on vent.

"I found it! It's over here!"

The Deathbringer's Cache is shoved in a corner, behind a pillar, and is painted gunmetal gray, just like the walls around it. GG Blizz.

Only one piece of tanking loot dropped, the mace from Lord Marrowgar, which I passed to the other tank, because I didn't think the loss of stam and armor made up for the gain in hit and DPS. Other than that, our feral druid made out like a bandit, and so did our holy/shadow priest.

All in all, I'm quite proud of how the ten man team acquitted themselves. It feels good to have built something that works.

However, here comes the pain. I logged on today, and stumbled through a random H Gundrak with 17k latency in order to pick up my two frost emblems. I was basically tanking the instance through memory and anticipation, with updates on where everything was standing every 15 seconds or so. It worked fine until the room after Sladran, where the warlock got too big for his britches, and decided to pull two packs for me. Normally, I pride myself on my ability to salvage DPS from their own stupidity, but watching this group crash and burn in slide show format was frustrating. So I let the trash kill everyone else before I AoEed it down, as I rezzed the rest of the party, I warned them to not pull for me. The rest of the instance was pretty much forgettable, if a little disjointed.

With my two frost emblems in hand, I logged off, and prayed that the latency issues would solve themselves by raid time. This was not the case. I logged on to a red bar in the 16k range. I started assembling the raid, and dashed towards the raid instance, hanging my last hopes that it would stabilize when I entered the raid instance. My latency did drop, all the way down to 13.7k ms. I'm used to handling things in the 600-800 ms, and I've muddled through raids with as high as 1.3k, but this was ten times worse than the worst I've ever handled. I can't raid with that level of lag. So I told the our utility player to log off his Hunter, and onto his Paladin, and gave him my spot in the raid. I handed raid lead off to one of my officers, and stepped out of the instance, out of WoW, and out of Vent.

As enjoyable as it was crushing ICC 10 with my handpicked crew on Tuesday, it was just as painful to miss out on my guild's first push into ICC 25. They're in there right now, hopefully dominating the scourge. Good luck, guys.

Lord Jaraxxus

Hot on the heels of Monday's kill of the Heroic Beasts, we returned to ToGC 25 on Wednesday. We quickly mopped the beasts back up, after teaching the new group of ranged DPS the proper positioning for phase two. After the beasts went down, we moved onto Lord Jaraxxus. Lord Jaraxxus is a pushover on normal mode, however, it's a whole different story on heroic. While not as difficult as the beasts, the biggest thing that a raid must fight against Jaraxxus is their own perception that Jaraxxus is a wimp. Things that were of somewhat menial importance, such as legion flames, fel infernos, and incinerate flesh went from slight nuisances to raid destroyers.

We wiped a few times to people being careless with legion flames and not switching onto the portals quick enough. I wound up letting Angry Dammer surface a little bit. Not much, but enough to get their attention. With the raid's focus gathered, we began identifying problems and setting up a general strat for how we'd handle the fight. We focused on minimizing tank movement, to ensure a consistent portal spawn point. We then assigned our three raid healers to specific points of the star to ensure that the legion flame victims wouldn't run out of healer range. Then we made sure the DPS were pre staged to DPS down portals and volcanoes as quick as possible. We began to make progress, and it culminated on our tenth attempt, as we began to put all the pieces together.

The attempt was running very cleanly, we never got more than one Mistress or 3 Infernals before the spawn point was closed. Nether Power was getting dispelled briskly, and people were quick with Fel Infernos and Legion Flames. But with Jaraxxus at 23%, and the 3rd nether portal having just been closed, the proverbial shit hit the fan. The healer for the add tank got hit by a fel lightning, then immediately got lit up by the mistress' pile driver. At the same time, Jaraxxus buffed nether power, pulling the attention of the priests, who comprised two of the three raid healers. On top of this, the interrupters hadn't pushed back into range of Jaraxxus, allowing Jaraxxus to get a nether enhanced Fel Fireball off, whacking off about 85% of my health, and locking my healer onto me. All of this lead to the add tank going down, cutting the mistress free, and leaving no one to cover the infernals that would soon be sprouting into our raid.

As I taunted the mistress onto me, I made the call. Full burn on Jaraxxus. All DPS snapped onto Jaraxxus, and the cleave and AoE damage quickly reduced the Mistress to a distant memory. The volcano spawned, and began spewing infernals out as Jaraxxus was pushed deeper and deeper into execute range. Our boomkin shifted to bear, popped barkskin, and did his best to keep the infernals from running amok, as the healers went into overdrive to try and keep everyone up. Tick by tick, Jaraxxus' health inched towards our victory, and with cries of glee echoing through vent, he crumpled to the ground.

Those cries of happiness were replaced by gasps of horror. The last thing Jaraxxus did before his death was cast incinerate flesh on our shadow priest. The entire raid had completely come to a standstill once Jaraxxus was done, and that included our healers. The poor shadow priest erupts into a burning inferno, scorching the 19 members of the raid that managed to outlast the eredar lord. Oh, the humanity! When the napalm deathstorm boiled over, 12 of the 19 raiders got waxed. The 7 who survived had all popped cooldowns, ranging from my Divine Shield, to Iceblock, to Anti-Magic Shell. Not sure how the warlock managed to survive it... shady...

No sexy tanking loot has dropped in any of our ToGC 25 kills yet, and with Icecrown looming, our focus will be shifting elsewhere, but I'm still glad to prove that unlike previous tiers, we're capable of making an impact on the 25 man level.