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.

My Cluttered UI

My UI is a bit of a mess.
As you can see, I've got quite the clutter going on. A lot of people who post about their UIs talk about how they wanted a clean UI, a functional UI, a UI worthy of posting about. I had none of those ideals in mind when I built my UI. It was put together, piece by piece, like some sort of Frankenstein's Monster. It evolved as my needs evolved. And now, like any end result of evolution, has many vestigial organs that I can certainly live without.

I used the default UI until I was almost level 80. I had no idea what addons were, or how useful they could be. As I took a more and more involved role in the endgame, I picked up addons here and there as issues arised, and never really took the time to do any pruning. So here's a list of what addons I use, what purpose they serve, and what drove me to take them.

Omen: Threat Meter was required to raid by my first guild, which exploded a week before I was ready to start raiding. But hey, at least I got Omen out of it!
DBM: Same as Omen.
Bartender4: Very quickly after hitting level 80 did I come to the realization that 10 abilities just wasn't going to cut it. Now I have over 40 available, and I use almost all of them.
Pallypower: I got sick of spending 20 minutes sorting out which pally was buffing what.
Recount: I couldn't figure out why Thaddius wasn't dying, I picked this up to find out who was only pulling 2k.
Sexymap: Wanted coordinates to track down a quest obective in Icecrown.
Icehud: Got sick of looking at the corner to check on health and mana, so I got it setup right by my character.
Parrot: Gives me a feel for the pacing of the fight, and net heals without having to sift through recount.
Pitbull: As I became more experienced as a raid leader, I realized that raid frames have their uses. I have mousover macros tied into all my hand spells and cleanse on pitbull. Plus it lets me track who's dead, who's dying, and who's dangerously oom.
Tanktotals: it's hidden above recount, but it gives me a mouseover log on some of my more important survival and mitigation numbers whenever I want to check them.

There's a lot of things that I plan on eventually cleaning up with my UI. But right now, it's functional, if ugly. I've got all the information I need to make informed decisions as a raid leader, and as a tank. In some cases three times over...

Alliance Pride

Everyone's favorite gnome, Larisa, recently posted about the lack of so called "Alliance Pride". I take extreme pride in my being part of the Alliance, because while we may have pompous, boisterous, and balding leaders, at least we aren't evil. And make no mistake about it, the Horde is seriously shady. When Blizzard describes one of your capital cities as a "Sprawling Bastion of Evil", well, that about sums it up.

You can tell the ideology of a society by the examples they venerate. 90% of everything the Horde builds is named after either Ogrim Doomhammer, or Grom Hellscream. Ogrim was a brutal dictator who enjoyed torturing refugees and wound up condemning nearly the entire orcish race to death through his poor decisions in the second war. And Grom, well, despite the rose colored glasses people seem to remember him through, to say that the apple didn't fall far from the tree is an understatement. Garrosh is following exactly in dear daddy's footsteps. And let's not forget about the places named after Kargath Bladefist. What are they gonna call their next territory? Gul'danistan?

Not to mention all the flaws in the Horde races themselves.
Orcs: Have been trying to ride their one good deed to a get out of jail free card for genocide and warmongering.
Trolls: I could go on for hours about all the screwed up things the trolls have done, except that the Horde didn't get any of those cool trolls from ZA or ZG. No, they got the Darkspear Trolls, who were nearly wiped out... by murlocs. Mrglrghlrghl!
Forsaken: Death to the Living! Need I say more?
Blood Elves: You drained the light out of Mu'ru, and nearly ushered in Kil'Jaeden himself to Azeroth... and to top it all off, you all act like Valley Girls addicted to Meth, yes, even the males.
Tauren: I don't really have any beef with the Beef. Don't really get what you're doing over there.
Goblins: Great, a whole race of Gevlons... just what we need...

Lorewise, the Horde has been one of the worst things to ever happen to Azeroth. They cut down forests simply for the sake of pissing off the Night Elves. They stab the alliance in the back whenever the Alliance attempts to fight a more dangerous foe. They develop the tools for genocide, with a history to match. The Alliance might not be perfect, they might have done some rash, or arrogant things, but they've never been involved in anything half as shady as the Horde has done in the past few years on Azeroth. I have little desire to spend my time in game collecting the skulls of innocent peasants.

The Nature of Raiding in Wrath: Easy Mode

Well, I'm currently blogging from a freezing motel room as I fritter away the time between drill days. This means that there's no new news from the progression front, and I really don't need another drama post right now, so I'll talk about an issue that I've been planning on talking about for a while now. The nature of raiding in Wrath of the Lich King.

As a true Child of Wrath, I didn't experience the endgame of Vanilla, or BC, but I've done my homework on how it was brought down. In a way, this gives me a unique perspective on raiding in the age of Wrath. I'm going to start with the implementation of Normal/Hard modes of fights.

In Pre Wrath raiding, aside from a few examples, such as Hakkar, and most notably the Three Bugs in AQ40, there were no hard modes for bosses. You either killed the boss, or you got nothing. If you couldn't kill the boss, then your only recourse was to wait until Blizzard nerfed the boss down to the level where you could defeat it.

This changed with the widespread use of hard modes in Wrath. The hardcore raiding guilds that ran Sunwell had extremely difficult fights they could brag about dropping, and the casual raiders had the ability to see the content, without being confined to the Zul'Aman style kid's table raids.

However, Blizzard's gotten a lot of flak for this move. Flak which I think is due entirely to perception, rather than reality. People now complain that raid content is too easy. Yet the overwhelming majority of those people haven't actually defeated all of the hardest fights in the game. People now believe that because they can clear the instance on "Normal" mode, that there is nothing more for them to do. This is where the fallacy lies.

Consider for a moment, what the default setting of most encounters is? What happens if you walk into the Obsidian Sanctum, clear trash, and pull Sartharion? What happens if you talk to the Lore Keeper of Norgannon and proceed directly to the Flame Leviathan? What happens if you clear to Yogg and pull? The answers are, respectively, The Twilight Zone, Orbituary, and Alone in the Darkness. Those are the default settings of the encounter. That is normal mode. Less than 1% of guilds in the world have actually downed Alone in the Darkness on 25 man. How is that easy?

The answer is, it isn't. However, because of the a choice made by Blizzard to avoid alienating the casual raider, it is perceived as superfluous content. It is, after all, "Hard Mode", why bother with it if you can just do "Normal Mode?" But what if it wasn't Normal Mode and Hard Mode? What if they called Hard Mode normal mode, and Normal Mode was called easy mode? By clearing the content on easy mode, you were essentially a tourist to raiding, enjoying a watered down, safer version of what the Naxx40/Sunwell Raiders of the previous expansions were struggling through? Instead of thinking that Blizzard was nerfing the content, you would be made painfully aware of the fact that Blizzard nerfed nothing, they're simply carrying you. They're giving you the choice to nerf the encounter into oblivion yourself, rather than wait for Blizzard to do it.

People need to realize their place. A guild that can clear Ulduar on easy mode is not the same as a guild that cleared TK before 2.1. A guild that downed Yogg+1 is more like it. What this does, is that both guilds get to see the content that Blizzard put so much effort into creating, while one guild gets better loot. It grants the power of choice to the masses.

If you're one of those people who feel that raiding is too easy, and you're not currently 5/5 ToGC 25, rocking out on your Iron-Bound Proto Drake, then you should consider ignoring normal mode raiding altogether. Get kills on Heroic, or go home with nothing. That should bring you closer to the flavor of BC era raiding, if that's what you truly desire. Granted, the setup for Icecrown won't lend itself to this philosophy quite as well as Ulduar did, but it should still provide you and your guild with a challenge superior to simply farming easy mode content.

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.

the Ghost of Patches Past

With 3.3 coming next week, presumably, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the massive failures of other recent patches. Here's the top three.

3: Patch 3.0.8: For those of you who don't remember, two words, Lake Winterfail. The patch that brought Death Knights to the unwashed masses also brought a glitch which caused the entire continent of Northrend to crash for 5 minutes whenever the Battle for Lake Wintergrasp ended. When Northrend came back up, the Wintergrasp began again, meaning that Northrend was only up for about 15-20 minutes at a time. Players earned an astonishing amount of marks, being able to do WG every 20 minutes, as opposed to every 2.5 hours. Epic marks, epic honor, epic annoyance.

2: Patch 3.1: My personal favorite post patch anecdote comes from the Secrets of Ulduar patch. The Tuesday that it came out, I was part of a ten man guild expedition into the titanic facility. I took the helm of a siege engine, steam rushed down the ramp, and fell through the world. As many have done since, it's a known bug. But here's where it got interesting. I landed. In Naxx. In Grobbulus' room, to be specific. In my siege engine. What really made it priceless was the fact that it wasn't some new Naxx instance made for me... oh no, it was a Naxx in progress by a horde guild, who were getting ready to pull Grob. My tank lands right next to Grob, and pulls him before the hordies were ready. Hilarity ensues. I was so flabbergasted, that I just sat there in my tank. Then I realized the potential this situation had. I drove over and electroshocked their Grob tank, one shot, one kill. Now, the initiation of PvP combat inside of an instance must have broke something in the code, because once the horde tank died, the entire instance despawned from underneath us. We fell into oblivion, repeatedly, taking durability damage each time. I lost my siege engine after the first fall, took a screenshot, and logged off for a while. I logged on a few hours later to find myself in ghost form in Crystalsong Forest, with my corpse apparently buried far underground. I had to eat a spirit rez, and a nearly 200g repair bill from the dura loss from falling so many times, and the rez damage.

1: Patch 3.0.2: As fun as nuking horde raids with siege engines, and stacking marks of WG to the ceiling were, in terms of unmitigated fail, patch 3.0.2 took the cake. Echoes of Doom brought the scourge invasion, and for about two days, the servers were so unstable the game was practically unplayable. Servers crashed when people earned an achievement, took a point in a 51 talent, logged on... Basically, for a few weeks, while they were backtracking all the bugfixes, WoW was closed on Tuesdays.

So, when you're complaining that the ICC portal leads to Naxx, and that in order to get into ICC, you have to use the Wailing Caverns portal, or whatever way Blizzard tries to screw up 3.3, remember this, it probably won't be worse than what we've already dealt with.

The Aftermath

It's been 12 days since the exiles left. At first, I was baffled and angry. I wasn't sure why they left, and to be honest, they were a big reason why I kept Legacy going as long as it has. I actually cancelled the next payment on my subscription, deciding that either the next three weeks would bring something that would convince me to stay, or I'd dismantle Legacy and leave Azeroth. I faced a decision to on how to handle things. I could either slam the door shut behind them, or leave access to me open, and pray that I could find the answers to my questions. I talked to some of my friends for guidance, and got a mixed bag of responses, from chalking it up to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, to possibly pointing out to a misunderstanding like when our neurotic former officer holy paladin convinced our Resto Druid to quit the guild. I drew up a post the next day, laying out the facts, and my thoughts, to give myself a little more clarity, and see if possibly some members of the blogging community had any ideas on how to best handle the situation.

After a little thought, I realized that salting the earth was easy, I could do it anytime I wanted, but it is also, unfortunately often permanent. So I decided to leave their alts in the guild, and not ban them from our vent. Some of them have popped in from time to time. A couple have seemingly spent more time on the alts in Legacy than on their horde toons. I've found at that they left to go play with some of their friends who had left Legacy and Faction Transferred when going to the dark side first became an option. The Death Knight left to go form a 3s team, which is now 2k rated. The Hunter left because she wanted to raid with the DK, and the other three just kinda followed the crowd. It's nice to have them around, but it still stings. My gut instinct tells me that they're still decent people, but my heart still reminds me of the manner of their departure. The loss of trust that was created by their leaving still colors every interaction I have with them.

Even with the answers I got, there's still some nagging questions that elude me. These are the hard questions, the things that don't fit, and the questions that I fear that if I ask, would destroy whatever goodwill I have left for these people. Why, if the Hunter wanted to raid with the Death Knight, are they in different guilds? Why, if the Shaman could barely make any raids with us, did he think transferring to a guild with pretty much the same raiding schedule, and an attendance requirement would work? How long ago did they put in their applications to those guilds, and continued to assure me that I could count on them for the push to Icecrown? I don't know if I really want to know the answers.

I threw recruiting open the moment they left, and a Fury Warrior who joined us a few months ago and worked his way onto my ten man squad began tapping his resources. He gathered several of his friends, a Warlock, Mage, Rogue, Feral Druid, Resto Shaman, and Unholy Death Knight, who were looking to get back into raiding after an extended break. They were mostly Ex-Get of Fenris members who got sick of raiding when the guild transitioned to Awaken. Heavily undergeared, but extremely skilled. We can get them gear, though, that's not an issue. The losses suffered have been quickly replenished.

Last night, something interesting happened. For the last patch, Legacy was pretty much a semi casual 25 man raiding guild with a hardcore ten man team. We'd made some attempts in ToGC 25, but people lacked focus, and couldn't handle wiping. To be honest, I still had it scheduled only because not at least making the effort would pretty much lay that sham right out in the open. But last nights raid was different, after 5 wipes, people weren't whining and weren't leaving. Each attempt made incremental progress. Finally, after 15 attempts, and two and a half hours of wiping, we had a dead yeti on our hands.

After the raid time elapsed, I rebuilt my ten man team, having 3 of the 5 exiles on my ten man team left me unsure of how successful we could be, but we breezed through ToGC 10, and after an oddball wipe due to a burrower getting stuck on an unused patch of frost in phase three, allowing him to shadow strike, my new feral druid found himself earning Call of the Grand Crusade, Tribute to Skill, and Tribute to Mad Skill all in the same night.

I still don't know what my plan is going to be with the Exiles, but I do know this, I still have work to do. This morning I sent Blizzard the next payment for my subscription.