Showing posts with label icc10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label icc10. Show all posts

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

Stuff Happened

Welp, Arthas is dead. Sure, it took a 20% buff and a couple of weeks of flailing at him, but the important thing is that we smacked him about 'til he fell over. The wuss.

He dropped a very nice kitty staff, and a terribly itemised mace that I almost rolled on because it looked gorgeous despite the icky crit/mp5. Really, Blizzard? I know you're honour-bound to drop gear that makes me wince in ten man raids, but the final boss is allowed to have non-sucky stuff. Honest.

The fight is quite fun, although I've yet to heal it all the way through. I quite enjoy elemental, and we have an absurd excess of great healers, so I should probably be working on my offset gear with more zeal. Meh, back to the sanity tap for frost badgers I suppose. I will rise about DPS mediocrity eventually!

After that we went and roflstomped TotGC and just barely scraped a Tribute to Mad Skill. I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with doing these older raids with my main, though. I don't feel we particularly deserved the victory (three healers? What?), and the rewards are pointless - excepting those who still like to keep T9 set bonuses, they were genuinely happy to pick up some trophies. I value achievements and titles very little, so all that remains is the challenge (greatly diminished by lolgear) and the fun of doing stuff with a great raid group (unchanged, but equally available doing other content). I feel I should start bringing alts to these things, who may get upgrades (I like gear) and will be approaching the fights from a different class perspective. The problem then is simply ensuring I'm not the under-performing warm body making everyone else's life a little more miserable.

Next week: ICC hard modes! That will be fun.

Monday, 18 January 2010

Hodgepodge

Icecrown

Eight attempts remaining on Putricide. I'm hoping that enough people log to use those attempts up before the reset. I want that kilt, damnit!

On the subject of loot, there's an aweful lot of haste/MP5 mail in there. As in, far too much. The haste is nice, and as a Solace still eludes me the MP5 isn't worthless, but I'd really rather have some haste/crit options. I'm not really assembling a personal BiS list just yet, but trying to look ahead and pick out where I want offset gear and how I should prioritise tier acquisition. I'm thinking that I'll pick up the two-piece bonus with the chest, a direct upgrade from T9.232. That will break my T9 set bonus, making it a little less painful to pick up the horribly itemised T10 gloves (cheap!) and then the headpiece, which is a slight upgrade from the Gunship helm, to complete the four-piece. If the Rippling Flesh Kilt still eludes me by then, the crafted mail legs are very nice and the boots aren't half-bad either. The emblem trinket is a nice upgrade from Sif's Remembrance, and the mail/cloth emblem gloves will be good for fights where 4T10 isn't useful.

Yep, I do think that given our usual raiding lineup and healing assignments, 4T10 will be worth wearing the crappy gloves. Three pieces are nicely itemised anyway, so it won't be that much of a hardship.

And to whinge a little: why are none of the items with fun procs available in the ten man version? I really appreciate that with the addition of hard modes I can pick up 264 gear from my preferred raiding environment, and I really like that the ten man trinkets are not completely awful this time (TotC, I'm looking at you). But I'd quite like an Althor's Abacus, or a Trauma, and I'm unlikely to ever get them due to the weird ongoing 10/25 loot dichotomy. It seems like it'd be interesting to allow the normal twenty-five man versions (item level 264) to drop in ten-man heroic fights, at least for the stuff that isn't represented in ten-man normal (funky trinkets and weapons with procs, at this point). Or, y'know, make some ten-man items with the same kind of fun principles. Larger guilds end up roflstomping the smaller raids anyway for emblems, achievements and the odd bit of well-itemised gear, so I can't see much of a flaw in spreading the goodies a bit.



Tanking

Levelling with the LFG tool is proving very interesting. Close to level 55 now, with only a few spates of questing/profession training interspersing dungeon runs. So far, it's not gone too badly. Had an... interesting experience with the Sunken Temple, where we did the lower area first (ever tried communicating the order of statues to click on to an almost silent pug? The ret just kept following me, everyone else stood where asked but seemed incapable of clicking the statues... sigh. Thankfully the healer was (a) from my realm and (b) entirely competant, so we just did the lighting up ourselves). By the time we'd done all this, killed the ugly troll dude, run back upstairs, killed the six guys keeping the barrier up and cleared the dragonkin from the central chamber it was getting a bit late, so we I rushed a bit when we got to the Prophet. Pulled one group of the trash, killed, waited for ghosts to dissipate. Emboldened by several large pulls earlier in the instance, I grabbed two groups this time... but didn't move them very much, in a tragic error of judgement. Melee DPS charge in, start their face-beating, and promptly get feared.

Crap. I'd forgotten about that. Crapcrapcrap.

Both make fear-inspired beelines to two separate trash groups, who I rush forward to collect in full panic-mode. I'm now tanking an ungodly number of the things in the middle of the room, the healer is in full manic heal-spam, everyone's desperately using every cooldown they have...

Then the DPS get feared again, and one runs straight to the boss. By this time the entire room is aggro'd, a large number not on me, and the bosses joining in just hasten the inevitable. Not my finest tanking moment, although everyone (who spoke at all) had the good grace to gently poke fun rather than get nasty. On the way back trash started to respawn literally as I was running through it so we called the run without killing the Prophet or Eranikus. Eh, well.

Point. I had a point here, what was it... aha! Yes, I remember now.

The classic instances are in many cases brutal. At best they can just deal harshly with those that do not approach with caution (see above, or Princess in Maraudon...), but at worst they're downright evil. Zul'Farrak with the mobs who polymorph the tank, for example, with subsequent complete chaos as they drop threat. Horrible. Eranikus with his absurd sleep ability. And I'd almost forgotten the joys of ubiquitous mobs that flee on low health, leading to hilarious results in BRD. Silences, stuns and disarms feel common and awfully long in duration for their frequency.

Of course, an awful lot of this can be negated by choice of tank (hello druids!) or with snappy dispels from an appropriate class, and smart DPS is always a plus. But when you're pugging your way up the levels those are the exception rather than the rule, and watching your party get nommed by things while you, as tank, are CC'd is... unpleasant.

Thing is, it's often a lot of fun. It encourages good play when people work together, and at least strongly impresses the limits of your own class when they don't. All good stuff, for a levelling tank. I seem to recall TBC dungeons continuing to be somewhat evil (MgT anyone?), but throughout WotLK there are far fewer situations where a tank gets CCd. In fact, I'm so used to seeing lines such as "... and the boss will never use this ability on his current aggro target" that I was starting to think of the alternative as unfair.

For shame.

Monday, 11 January 2010

Assorted Stuffs

So, we cleared the trash (Princess and Stinky were the highpoints) and spent a while wiping on Rotface, and then slightly less time wiping on Festergut.

The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.

The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.

As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.


So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.

Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.

My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.

My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.

Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.

Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.

Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.

And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.

Tuesday, 5 January 2010

Lady Deathwhisper, how I loathe thee

The other day I ended up taking my enhancement shaman into ICC10 for a little brisk exercise. A previous week's PUG had gone pretty well, her moderate gear and a great deal more playtime recently (both mostly thanks to the new Dungeon Finder tool) were enough to put her near or at the top of recount most of the time. Satisfying. We didn't get Saurfang down, but for an alt/pugged run it went well and I was more or less happy with my performance. Plus I got new bracers from the gunship and a bunch of Frost emblems. Everything is better with loot.

This week... well, Marrowgar was the big cuddly kitten as usual (once we'd gotten past the ambush by no less than three Giant Skeletal Ninja during a trash pull). Cheap bastard didn't drop the cloak, but such is life. And then... more than two hours of wiping on Deathwhisper. And I was doing appallingly badly. We didn't even get to the second phase, and my DPS rarely crested 2k (2k! That'd be absolutely terrible even in a 5-man group for this gear level, let alone with a decent complement of raid buffs).

What went wrong? Well, there were plenty of failures really. I think the worst I saw outside of my little sphere of pew-pew was the resto druid (guildy, also the only person dealing with Curse of Torpor despite a resto shaman and mage hanging around in the group) getting locked out of dispel curse. Yeah, it's happened to me when healing on my main too - you go to remove the vicious little debuff on some random person, and just as you're cliquing them to happiness it also gets applied to you. The aforementioned other people with a curse curse removal ability let him sit there, unable to cast any heals nor remove the curse himself, for what I know feels like at least three hours when healing. In actuality, probably the fifteen seconds it took for him to be able to cleanse himself. Too damn long anyway, the other healers were behind at this point and it all went south from there.

And with me, personally, it was a litany of fail. Bad luck sometimes, stupidity at others. I was of course on add duty, managing the gamut from running up to one of the adds the tank was near but hadn't aggro'd and wailing on them until they turned and blew me up, bouncing spells off a reflective shield into my own low-health face, ankhing right into an AoE spell from the empowered adds, zooming around the back of a cleaving add and starting to DPS just in time for the tank to spin it around and kite it through me to get oneshot by said cleave... unhelpful of the tank, but I could and should have moved... it was horrible. Horrible!

Also, I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or not, but the Lady's bright green Death and Decay is barely visible when she pops it on the raised areas where the adds spawn. I just ran in a straight line until my poor moocow stopped being green in such cases, probably taking the longest possible route through the stuff and without fail in completely the opposite direction to that the tank was dragging the adds.

Then there were the undead chaps. For those who haven't had the joy of playing with these, periodically the adds get, err, resurrected with a few new abilities. Most importantly, the caster adds now gain 99% physical damage reduction, whilst the cleaving, cow-killing melee adds have a similar near immunity to spells. As some may appreciate, this isn't much fun for a DPS spec that is primarily physical, but deals a very large chunk of damage in the form of spells.

I tried a few things. Swapping flame shock out of my shock rotation to avoid reflecting the DoT onto my face for some poor sap to dispel/heal through, and maybe improve my terrible DPS on those adds that got burned down before the flame shock DoT would run its course anyway. Dropping puppies early enough that shaman-sprint would be up in time to get on the boss between spawns. Shamanistic Rage whenever I get caught in Death and Decay or tanking the bloody Adherents. Leaving a fire elemental to help mop up physically immune adds whilst chasing the deformed fanatics. Ugh. There was more I could have done - or not done, in the case of bouncing lightning bolts and shocks off of the reflective shields - but muscle memory had largely taken over and was hammering my high priority abilities and frankly I was getting annoyed. Annoyed at myself, annoyed at the tank, annoyed at people not helping the poor tree decurse, annoyed at the rogue managing to die about the same time as me every single time... horrible.

So, yes. I don't actually like ICC much (the instance itself is beautiful, and some trash is fun. The boss fights alternate 'meh' and 'irritating' so far.) but this was the first time since Faction Champs where an encounter was making me reconsider my subscription. It's annoying to heal, but in comparison to that DPS experience... /shudder.

OK, enough ranting. Next time I go there as enhancement, I'll be better prepared. I will be a veritable monkey when it comes to clinging to the back of cleaving mobs, I will trawl the interwebs for any enhancement-specific strategies, tricks, or consoling sob stories, and I will damn well petition to be on Deathwhisper's mana shield throughout the misery of that first phase.