The Nature of Raiding in Wrath: Limited Attempts

Earlier I wrote a post about one of the fundamental changes that occured in Wrath of the Lich King. I spoke about how the Easy Mode/Hard Mode dichotomy in raiding was a good, if misunderstood, thing, because it promoted both choice, and accessability. Both of which are good for the game, even if the forum goers don't think so. However, today I'm going to talk about another change that Blizzard made, one which I feel was not a good idea.

Limited attempts was not something Blizzard really looked at prior to Wrath of the Lich King. One could argue that 45 minute Baron runs and Amani War Bear runs were precursors to the concept, but in both cases the entirety of the instance is available, and the only thing you lose out on is an upgraded loot table. The first instance of lost content occured in the 5 man heroic, the Culling of Stratholme, which was initially seen as a spiritual succesor to the 45 minute Baron run. The primary difference being that if you didn't beat the timer, the optional boss despawned, and could not be attempted that lock out. Due to the one day lock out, and relative ease of the requirements, pretty much everyone overlooked the ramifications of having content that would despawn of it's own accord.

The next patch brought Ulduar, and with it, Algalon the Observer. A boss which, while unforgiving, is not really all that difficult. Touted as "The Raid Destroyer", what made killing Algalon such a rarity, was that a raid only had one hour to work on him per lock out, before he despawned in a blaze of glory. And trust me, Algalon's spawn/despawn is one of the more impressive ones out there. Algalon came with a sexy title, a realm first spam, and the best loot in the game. He was also killed two weeks after he was unlocked. Which means he was killed less than two hours after he was unlocked. The true difficulty in downing Algalon, aside from getting past Firefighter, was getting one hour of continuous and quick pull time. No ninja afks, no poorly timed disconnects, or any other of the oddball things that delay the usual raid could be accepted, because any time spent waiting for your healer to reconnect was time that could never be regained. This became the cause of a lot of frustration with some otherwise well liked members of guilds.

But one boss which was explicitly cited as the "Omega WEAPON" of WoW was one thing. Blizzard took it a step further the next patch, by placing limited attempts upon the entirety of ToGC. 50 attempts to get through all of the hard mode version of the instance. If you used those up, you were condemned to the darkness of facerolling easy mode for the rest of the week. This created an almost fundamental shift in the mindset of many progression guilds. With each accidental DC or lag spike potentially burning up one of those precious attempts in vain, some guild took drastic steps. Many changed their raid times to off peak hours, benched players with questionable internet connections, and in the most extreme case, Ensidia actually transferred servers to a lower population server to avoid excessive server lag.

That was merely the Hard Mode bosses though. However, with Icecrown Citadel, Blizzard has extended this concept even into the Easy Mode version of the instance. The version that's supposed to be easily accessible to the common player is now demanded that players be able to adapt to the patterns of certain bosses within 5 attempts, or go home for the week.

The problem comes with the subversion of the gains made through the implementation of the Easy Mode/Hard Mode Dichotomy. While those changes engendered choice and accessibility, the restrictions of limited attempts remove them. A guild that might decide to put it's nose to the grindstone to down Proffessor Putricide might find itself sitting out quickly after losing attempts to poor connections, server instability, or even a bugged encounter. Their resolve to put in the effort to down the boss has been stripped away from them because Blizzard has decided to place limitations on just how much effort one is able to put into their raiding. When your raid once faced the choice to put in one more attempt, or throw in the towel, that choice will already be made for you, which is never good for the game.

Blizzard has slowly backslid towards the old BC model of raiding, in a rather perverse model. Instead of tuning the fights to the intended difficulty, they're simply going to wait for raiders to get enough extra attempts and buffs to down the fights in their "Self-Basting" raid instance, which, to me at least, smacks of lazy design strategy. Ulduar has proven to be, thus far, the zenith of raid design. Hopefully, Blizzard can get back to the ideals that made that instance so great.

Merry Christmas!

The posting will resume shortly after the holidays have concluded.

Gearing with Badges in Icecrown

A lot of people have been taking a hard look at how their going to utilize their badges for upgrades. Some have decided to go straight for the tier gear, others love those offspec pieces, still other are considering buying primordial saronite for crafted gear.

I, personally, am of the philosophy that you build your gear set plans around the fights you are going to be fighting, not the fights you have on farm. Avoidance, and things like 4 piece T10 will be magical for Gunship Battle and Deathbringer, but until I decide to go for the meta achievements, those fights are on farm, and I don't mind making my healers and DPSers work a little harder if it means having an inside track on the future fights.

I've toyed around on the PTR, and have seen what lies ahead. Festergut is going to be akin to Anub'arak phase 3 or Sapphiron, heavy physical damage with a constant magic DoT with periods of burst damage. Rotface is somewhat akin to Grobbulus, only the nature damage going out to the kiting tank is much more severe, and the potential for heavy nature damage with middling physical damage on the Rotface tank. Professor Putricide has more nature damage going everywhere, including to the tank.

In the Crimson Halls, the Blood Prince Council is throwing around heavy shadow and fire damage. Blood-Queen Lana'thael stacks bleeds on the tank, has a raid wide shadow damage aura that increases as the fight goes on.

The Frostwing halls has a lot of AoE fire damage from adds on Valithria Dreamwalker, and Sindragosa is Sapphiron 2.0, with even more frost damage.

There are no Gormak/Patchwerk/Ignis style fights where the tank gets punched in the face with little magic damage. The relative value of avoidance in terms of damage reduction is going to plummet, which means that we need to adapt to that.

So, let's look at what our options are to prepare ourselves for these encounters with our Emblems of Frost.

I've already made my first emblem purchase, taking the Corroded Skeleton Key to replace my brewfest trinket. I've had terrible luck on tanking trinkets. I've never seen the Royal Seal of King Llane drop, never seen the General's Heart, never seen Satrina's Impeding Scarab, and only saw the Furnace Stone drop once and lost it. You know what's dropped at least six times? Fervor of the Frostborn, which is terrible. I can live with the Heart of Iron and the Skeleton Key, however.

Beyond that, my philosophy is to take the most effective upgrades first, and when dealing with items of equal superiority, I take the cheaper one first. There are high stam, high armor pieces available at the chest, gloves, belt, and cloak slots. The other options are the 251 tier pieces. One of the things that needs to be taken into account is, as Wrathy pointed out, that some of the EH pieces have little defense on them. We've all seen the vid of Ciderhelm getting one shot crit by XT-002, so we all know what's at stake with the defense cap.

I currently 831 defense rating from my gear. That's not terrible, as defense does yield more avoidance, but due to diminishing returns, those itemization points could be better spent elsewhere. What this means is that I've got 168 defense rating between me and the cap.

My next step will be to replace my Pride of the Eredar with the Sentinel's Winter Cloak for 50 badges. I lose 2 defense rating in the change, but gain 571 armor and 10 stamina. The additional yellow socket allows me some flexibility, possibly grabbing more defense if needed to make up for losses elsewhere, or otherwise becoming another 30 stam.

After that, some options branch open. I'm currently planning on taking the Gauntlets of the Kraken to replace my T9.45 gloves. This transition will actually be a net gain of 10 defense rating, along with 763 armor and 18 stamina, with an extra gem slot.

Next on the agenda will be swapping in the Verdigris Chain Belt in the place of the Girdle of the Nether Champion. In the process, I will gain another 14 defense rating, 752 armor, 18 stamina, and an extra socket.

Then I plan on buying the Cataclysmic Chestguard to replace my T9.45 chest, netting me 37 more defense rating, 1,344 armor, 27 stamina, and another socket.

During the transition this far, I'll have gained 59 defense rating, 3,430 armor, 73 stamina, and 4 gem sockets. This comes at the cost of about 6% avoidance.

This is where the road becomes somewhat hazy. These purchases will require 265 badges. Assuming that new wings get released at a two week clip after the holidays, and that Legacy can clear all bosses each week, we're projecting about six weeks into the future. Now, I have two roads left to explore with my badges, crafted gear, and tier gear. Seeing as I already have 264 off set pieces for my head and shoulder slots, the 251 tier doesn't really interest me. I won't be investing in T10 until I win a mark of sanctification to jump to the 264 tier.

The crafted gear, however, is ilevel 264, and extremely well itemized. However, it costs 8 Primordial Saronite per piece. At 23 badges for a single PS, these become extremely expensive, either through gold on the AH, or through badges. Hopefully once I've reached this point, the AH price will have come down to something more reasonable.

Taking the Boots of Kingly Upheaval over the Dawnbreaker Greaves will be costly in several ways. In exchange for gaining, 18 stamina, 115 armor, 1.1% avoidance, and an extra socket, I'll be sacrificing 53 defense rating. Just changing my boots alone wipes out nearly the entirety of the defense gains from all the previous badge purchases.

However, the pants are the real prize for me. Equipping the Pillars of Might in the place of my T9.45 pants gains me 27 stamina, 1,336 armor, 2.25% avoidance, an extra gem socket, and the right not to look like the Belle of the Ball. But it comes at a 90 defense rating hit.

So getting the crafted gear will offset about half of the avoidance loss of the badge gear, while converting my excess defense rating to armor, stamina, and sockets. This ends up leaving me with a lean 747 defense.

Finally, the T10 comes into play. I have two slots currently occupied by dropped 264 gear. Taking up the T10 helm will net me 1% more avoidance and 4 more stamina, at the cost of 23 defense rating. The T10 shoulders will net me the 2pc bonus, and a little more base stam, at the cost of a gem slot. I'm not too sure about this upgrade, I'm leaning more towards keeping my current shoulders.

If I take all of these upgrades, I'll gain 4,881 armor, 122 stamina, and six gem sockets. This will come at the expense of about 2% avoidance, which the armor gain will more than offset. After assembling that set, I'll probably grab the rest of the T10 to build an avoidance heavy set for some of the achievements, and possibly gunship/deathbringer heroic.

My general plans are subject to change, if I get lucky with a drop, or a hotfix comes down on some of these items, but I think that the overall design of this gear set will carry me through the later bosses of easy mode in style, and give me a good footing to work with when hard mode begins to demand more specialized gear sets.

The Year in Review

This was something I found at Taha's blog. Seemed like a little introspection would be good right now.

What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

Pretty much everything. I started playing WoW in October of 08. So, let's see here...


Hit 80.
Got an alt to 80.
Started Raiding.
Led a raid.
OTed a raid.
MTed a raid.
DPSed a raid.
Earned a title.
Joined a raiding guild.
Led a raiding guild.
Got epic flying.
Got a 310 mount.
Got my professions to max level.

Those are just the notable ones.

What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Ulduar was amazing. Best instance Blizzard ever made. From the first encounter to the last, Ulduar was never boring. Often frustrating, but never boring.

What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

I'd like to get Legacy firmly entrenched as a respectable guild on Destromath.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Leading my ten man crew to Starcaller titles and Rusted Proto Drakes.

What was your biggest failure?

Not convincing some of my friends to stick with us.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Patch 3.2 making Paladins an acceptable choice for a progression main tank. I got sick of watching the DKs and Druids get all the glory.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

I wish I had pushed the 25 man group harder, earlier. Not getting 3D down in 3.0, No hard modes and no yogg in 3.1, and only breaking into ToGC 25 in the last two weeks of 3.2 kind of smacks of wasted potential.

What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

I've really got 4 blogs that I really enjoy reading equally. Righteous Defense, Pwnwear.com, Avenging Wrathy, and Altadin. I read many others, but those four are kind of the backbone of my blogroll.

Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009

Jump in. Figure out what your goal is, and then make it happen. If you want to raid, then RAID. If you want to be the best player on the field in any given AV, then start queueing. If you wait for the stars to align just right, then you'll miss out.

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.

A Brief Aside

You can expect a raging, ranting, raiding post tomorrow, but tonight, I'd just like to cover a topic that's been kind of bothering me for the past week.

Other servers of the Rampage battlegroup, know this: Destromath Alliance rolls need on Frozen Orbs. We do so because all characters who have 450 professions get equal utility out of them. We do so because it's easier than fighting over who actually gets that extra half ounce of use out of them. We do so because it prevents drama. We will not stop. Eventually you will adapt. Thank you for your time.

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.