(WoW) Naxxramas, Part 2
Hmm. Again, starting somewhere around an hour late. I wonder whether pushing the start time back an hour would work out better, of if we would just not have everyone until an hour later than THAT.
So with Heigan down last week, we were on our way to smack down the last boss of the plague wing. Simple, right?
Nope. The hallway after Heigan has a lot of respawning, slowing eyestalks and a ton of maggots. It must have taken four or five tries to get everyone through there. Even when only one person died, we had to go back because we couldn't rez them at the range and running through alone is even harder. Heh. I got through with just a priest on one attempt, then died because they were attacking the maggots instead of healing me through their attacks (mind you, I don't know if it actually would have made a difference and we probably would have had to go back anyway). We even had someone walk off a platform on the other side with no way back up. Not an auspicious beginning. Finally we got through and set up for the boss.
Loatheb
He's about very concentrated healing (as he limits healing to 3 seconds out of every 20) and some coordination for the DPS who have to kill spores to get an increased crit chance to burn through his loads of health. This was, perhaps, the single most boring fight I've done as a tank in a loooong time. On the up side, it was a good chance to practice my rotation, but there was absolutely nothing for me to do but stand there and go through it over and over. No positioning, nothing fancy to watch out for. This fight is definitely not about the tank. We got him down in the first attempt without any real difficulty I saw (though I'm still convinced our Ret paladin must have taunted at one point, because I don't see any other way he could have rocketted above me in threat) - and good thing as we didn't want to run back there.
So then it was into the military (aka death knight) wing. A premature pull kept us on our toes at the entrance, but trash didn't really seem to be a problem. At this point, I'm not regretting use of the Hammer of the Righteous glyph (which means it hits four targets instead of three).
Instructor Razuvious
Here the tanks (or potentially anyone, and priests in 25-man) take control of the Instructor's Understudies to use to tank him. Bone armor, taunt, wait, trade. I... did not excel here. I was slow on picking up where the armor buff showed and keeping track of the timers. I once tried to pull him to the back of the room, but was disoriented and actually went the wrong way. Mind control lapsed a couple times during the fight and I was slow to re-target the Understudy and get him back. All of this could be fixed with practice, but I kinda sucked this first time.
Still, it was enough. I started to get a better feel for it at the end, able to see when the other Understudy lost his shield. We got through in one shot.
Gothik the Harvester
We split into the live and dead sides, with me spearheading the latter. Things were getting hectic shortly after the first rider (and mount) spawned on our side, but while I was having to turn to catch things often enough, I wasn't seriously worried. And then I saw our healer had aggro. I looked back and tried to figure out where the four attackers had suddenly come from. As the healer when down and we were overwhelmed, I realized they were deathknights from the next room that had somehow aggro'd and run into the boss room through the gate. Ugh. The other side held out longer, but we got our first boss wipe of the night due to a glitch.
So we arranged ourselves in a different corner of the room. Still hectic, but no major problems. With that, it was easy in comparison.
There were lots of patrols leading to the final boss fight of the wing, some dangerously close together.
The Four Horsemen
We had two or three wipes on this fight, and I'm not surprised. It's heavy on the coordination and another encounter that's really hard to convey just with text/words. We had almost everyone on Vent, which helped, but still... some things you have to see.
Personally, I think I screwed up on a few taunts in the earlier fights, due to having trouble getting on the right target. Some others had trouble with the timing, or the range, or just didn't switch side for whatever reason. Once you get the first of the four down, though, things start falling into place. I want to say it was our fourth attempt we got it, but I could be a little off.
Note: We were switching our groups' sides between the two front bosses. It is also possible to keep our groups in their own corners and have the tanks taunt-trade the bosses and pull them back. I don't know enough to argue that as "better," it's just a possible variation.
With them down, we decided to press on into the construct quarter - in some circles viewed as the hardest of the four and least forgiving of lower-level gear. We were introduced to slime streams that have to be levitated over or just taken as they deal a load of damage (which I think is percentage-based rather than a fixed number, but I don't know). We cleared out a lot of abominations and the like before eyeing the first boss.
Patchwerk
Widely regarded as a "gear check," Patchwerk is a straightforward fight. You need to keep two tanks on him, at the top of the aggro list, and healed. DPS just needs to lay into him to burn him down before the 5-minute enrage timer goes off and his damage increases.
I think we would have been close to three minutes, but our druid tank ended up in cat form accidentally and, being squishier, died. Then Patchwerk proceeded to kill the remaining melee DPS (because they were then 'second on his aggro table of those in melee'). That meant less damage to him and dragged things out. We still killed him shortly after he enraged, so it wasn't too bad. It just could have been better. Again, from a tank standpoint, this was a pretty boring fight.
Hmmm... I'd have to heard feedback from our healers (we had three last night, two last weekend), but I strongly suspect we don't really need three. We probably could have had one go DPS for this fight to help make things go faster.
Then there was the infamous "Frogger" corridor. It looks so simple. We lost several people, though, getting across that. A miscalculation or enough lag and... yeah, you bite it.
Grobbulus
Standing before the next bosses room, we lost our Ret paladin and rogue due to lateness and discomfort. We tried the boss twice with eight, but it just wasn't happening. The first time, there was, perhaps, a lack of coordination in where to put the clouds from the injection. The second time... I don't know for sure, save to say there wasn't enough damage getting to the boss.
I have a screen full of monstrosity for the fight, so my "big picture" is a little hazy. Having a full team would have to help. Is ranged DPS enough to take down the slimes, or would melee have to break off, too? Careful placement of the infected is definitely a big factor or you start losing real estate because those poison clouds spread to a huge area.
Still... 5 bosses down. That's what we did last week, and is decent progress in my mind. Some people picked up some gear upgrades. Grobbulus and Thaddius are probably going to be difficult, but I think we can get them done. That leaves Sapphiron (should we work on frost resist gear?) and Kel'Thuzad himself.
So with Heigan down last week, we were on our way to smack down the last boss of the plague wing. Simple, right?
Nope. The hallway after Heigan has a lot of respawning, slowing eyestalks and a ton of maggots. It must have taken four or five tries to get everyone through there. Even when only one person died, we had to go back because we couldn't rez them at the range and running through alone is even harder. Heh. I got through with just a priest on one attempt, then died because they were attacking the maggots instead of healing me through their attacks (mind you, I don't know if it actually would have made a difference and we probably would have had to go back anyway). We even had someone walk off a platform on the other side with no way back up. Not an auspicious beginning. Finally we got through and set up for the boss.
Loatheb
He's about very concentrated healing (as he limits healing to 3 seconds out of every 20) and some coordination for the DPS who have to kill spores to get an increased crit chance to burn through his loads of health. This was, perhaps, the single most boring fight I've done as a tank in a loooong time. On the up side, it was a good chance to practice my rotation, but there was absolutely nothing for me to do but stand there and go through it over and over. No positioning, nothing fancy to watch out for. This fight is definitely not about the tank. We got him down in the first attempt without any real difficulty I saw (though I'm still convinced our Ret paladin must have taunted at one point, because I don't see any other way he could have rocketted above me in threat) - and good thing as we didn't want to run back there.
So then it was into the military (aka death knight) wing. A premature pull kept us on our toes at the entrance, but trash didn't really seem to be a problem. At this point, I'm not regretting use of the Hammer of the Righteous glyph (which means it hits four targets instead of three).
Instructor Razuvious
Here the tanks (or potentially anyone, and priests in 25-man) take control of the Instructor's Understudies to use to tank him. Bone armor, taunt, wait, trade. I... did not excel here. I was slow on picking up where the armor buff showed and keeping track of the timers. I once tried to pull him to the back of the room, but was disoriented and actually went the wrong way. Mind control lapsed a couple times during the fight and I was slow to re-target the Understudy and get him back. All of this could be fixed with practice, but I kinda sucked this first time.
Still, it was enough. I started to get a better feel for it at the end, able to see when the other Understudy lost his shield. We got through in one shot.
Gothik the Harvester
We split into the live and dead sides, with me spearheading the latter. Things were getting hectic shortly after the first rider (and mount) spawned on our side, but while I was having to turn to catch things often enough, I wasn't seriously worried. And then I saw our healer had aggro. I looked back and tried to figure out where the four attackers had suddenly come from. As the healer when down and we were overwhelmed, I realized they were deathknights from the next room that had somehow aggro'd and run into the boss room through the gate. Ugh. The other side held out longer, but we got our first boss wipe of the night due to a glitch.
So we arranged ourselves in a different corner of the room. Still hectic, but no major problems. With that, it was easy in comparison.
There were lots of patrols leading to the final boss fight of the wing, some dangerously close together.
The Four Horsemen
We had two or three wipes on this fight, and I'm not surprised. It's heavy on the coordination and another encounter that's really hard to convey just with text/words. We had almost everyone on Vent, which helped, but still... some things you have to see.
Personally, I think I screwed up on a few taunts in the earlier fights, due to having trouble getting on the right target. Some others had trouble with the timing, or the range, or just didn't switch side for whatever reason. Once you get the first of the four down, though, things start falling into place. I want to say it was our fourth attempt we got it, but I could be a little off.
Note: We were switching our groups' sides between the two front bosses. It is also possible to keep our groups in their own corners and have the tanks taunt-trade the bosses and pull them back. I don't know enough to argue that as "better," it's just a possible variation.
With them down, we decided to press on into the construct quarter - in some circles viewed as the hardest of the four and least forgiving of lower-level gear. We were introduced to slime streams that have to be levitated over or just taken as they deal a load of damage (which I think is percentage-based rather than a fixed number, but I don't know). We cleared out a lot of abominations and the like before eyeing the first boss.
Patchwerk
Widely regarded as a "gear check," Patchwerk is a straightforward fight. You need to keep two tanks on him, at the top of the aggro list, and healed. DPS just needs to lay into him to burn him down before the 5-minute enrage timer goes off and his damage increases.
I think we would have been close to three minutes, but our druid tank ended up in cat form accidentally and, being squishier, died. Then Patchwerk proceeded to kill the remaining melee DPS (because they were then 'second on his aggro table of those in melee'). That meant less damage to him and dragged things out. We still killed him shortly after he enraged, so it wasn't too bad. It just could have been better. Again, from a tank standpoint, this was a pretty boring fight.
Hmmm... I'd have to heard feedback from our healers (we had three last night, two last weekend), but I strongly suspect we don't really need three. We probably could have had one go DPS for this fight to help make things go faster.
Then there was the infamous "Frogger" corridor. It looks so simple. We lost several people, though, getting across that. A miscalculation or enough lag and... yeah, you bite it.
Grobbulus
Standing before the next bosses room, we lost our Ret paladin and rogue due to lateness and discomfort. We tried the boss twice with eight, but it just wasn't happening. The first time, there was, perhaps, a lack of coordination in where to put the clouds from the injection. The second time... I don't know for sure, save to say there wasn't enough damage getting to the boss.
I have a screen full of monstrosity for the fight, so my "big picture" is a little hazy. Having a full team would have to help. Is ranged DPS enough to take down the slimes, or would melee have to break off, too? Careful placement of the infected is definitely a big factor or you start losing real estate because those poison clouds spread to a huge area.
Still... 5 bosses down. That's what we did last week, and is decent progress in my mind. Some people picked up some gear upgrades. Grobbulus and Thaddius are probably going to be difficult, but I think we can get them done. That leaves Sapphiron (should we work on frost resist gear?) and Kel'Thuzad himself.
So my take on these - Eyestalks - I think everyone running at once and starting the run when the stalks go down is key. I don't know how the Ret pally died on the last run but (not to be overly critical, but...) he should have bubbled. Loatheb I know that there's no way I can heal and call out mushrooms. I know I was missing healing windows because I was looking for the damn mushrooms, so I was glad to have 2 other healers. I suppose it worked out OK, but to be more efficient we needed to get more people grouped around a mushroom and I lost complete count on who should be going and getting their buff. Instructor Razuvious Yeah, no crystals in 25 man, you have to use priests. I thought this went fine overall... again, having 3 healers meant more leeway for mistakes. I mean, you can nitpick the mistakes if you want but nobody died even so that's at least A- work in my book. I can definitely tell when the bone shield is down because the apprentice's health drops FAST and it's a frantic spamming of heals to get it back up. I have had to be responsible for both at the same time, healing as a Pally, so I was glad to only need to heal one. Being that they're not party members I was not used to having them in my healing mod - though later I did see them in Healbot... Not sure I'd want to rely on that though. Gothik the Harvester I suppose in retrospect I should have battle-rez'd you, but I wasn't quite sure if we were going to wipe it or not. Then once things got going I had no idea where anyone was and was too preoccupied with just keeping who I could alive. The Four Horsemen I'm not sure if people really started 'getting' that fight until about the 3rd time. And I know I whine about this but regarding the Thane's meteor, I really don't understand the argument of 'well if I stack up it gimps my dps', because being dead REALLY gimps your dps. And if you're standing off I am going to try my damnedest to heal you but you're probably going to die anyway until I do this fight enough times to figure out how to heal through it effectively. That and it's frustrating to see someone do something and realize that you'll probably going to lose them. I'm just not that cynical of a healer - I want to save everyone, even the ones who make bad decisions. Patchwerk Well all of these fights, even the 4 Horsemen, can be done with 2 healers. (4 Horsemen sucks with 2 healers). But having 3 healers, as I said before, allows for many more mistakes. Me having time to battle rez Elly probably depended somewhat on having 2 other healers there to keep you up while I did it. Then again, if I was the DPS, I probably would have been dead from Hateful Strikes, same for Tiik. Still, the fact we downed him with 2 dps gone is pretty good thumbs up for us. :)
ReplyDeleteGrobbulus My raid-leader coworker said he puts ranged on the slimes and keeps melee dps on the boss at all times to help get him down quickly. We definitely were taking too long to get him down and that led to issues. And I also suspect people were not running far enough away to drop their poison/disease. We need to keep running to where the tank just was. It does no good to run to an area with a big, about to dissipate, cloud and drop your new cloud there. You want to run where there's little clouds and drop it there. Overlapping the clouds as much as possible is a good thing. :) Overall I had fun! I think the lowlight of the night for me was being encouraged to 'go out and do something' rather than sitting by Naxx waiting. Well - I didn't consider my explanations for why I was sitting there to be 'whining', but apparently it came across as such because the statement was 'well go find something you like to do rather than whining about it'. I was perfectly content to hang out while waiting. Doing the raid was the only thing I wanted to do. There's maybe some good gear that drops in there, but the majority of it is not better than what I have. There are easier ways to get 5 EoC that don't involve repair bills. :) Oh and finally - I wish people weren't so damn tentative about rolling 'Need' on gear. I mean, if it's an upgrade, Need it! I guess it's just confusion on who else is/isn't rolling. In that case, I would rather see the loot rules set to master looter and have one person call out 'Main spec roll'. If nobody wants it, then 'Off spec roll'. If still nobody then I can give it to someone who can DE. That way you don't have someone rolling 'Greed' because it's offspec against the disenchanter who's rolled 'Greed' to take the gear as a last resort. Oh and I'm in total agreement with you about the start time. If people are getting off of work at 7:30 PT or so, why set the start time at 7?
ReplyDeleteI can nitpick errors in the Razuvious fight because I see them and they're mine. ;) I know I could do better. On Gothik... I'm not sure how much rezzing me would have helped. Another solid tank might have been enough to mitigate damage and get him down, but maybe not. Hard to say. I'm not convinced it would have changed things enough to say you "should" have done that. Frankly, I'm surprised things went as well as they did that first attempt with one group down. From now on, the dead side team shall ever avoid that corner, though. ;) My suggestion on Patchwerk is a general one for the future. In this specific case, if we'd had a healer switch from healing to melee DPS, it only would have been worse - probably a wipe. Barring random tank squishiness, though, I'm still inclined to think the fight would be "cleaner" making that switch as long as the remaining healers can handle the two tanks okay. Just a theory at this point.
ReplyDeleteMost of what I've seen on Grobbulus (I think I can cite WoWWiki and Tankspot videos) agrees - offtank and ranged handles slimes, melee concentrates on the boss. Of course, when we got there, we didn't have any melee DPS left. And with the clouds - yeah, get them out of areas that are clearing or ahead of the group. The writeup I saw suggested between the tank (kiting along the slime grate) and the outer wall, the video had the tank pulling the boss farther along (and closer to the wall) to leave space between his clouds for infected people. Overall, I think coordination and simple unfamiliarity are our weak points - hardly surprising for a guild just getting into raiding. The fights we seem to have the most trouble with are the more technical ones that involve specific positioning and movement (Heigan, Four Horsemen, and Grobbulus - though I'm still iffy to count him when we were down two people). That's the stuff that still need to be learned in general, and I'm enjoying learning it. It makes me feel like I am sharing in the education and growth of the guild as a whole. I don't think there's a single piece of tank gear in there I would want, and there's easier emblems as you say. But the accomplishing new things together? That's priceless. I... sort of feel we should have a master looter for these runs. It's more work for someone, but I think that would be better. I have a personal tendency to judge drops a little more than most, I think. Unless it's a main-spec upgrade for me, I'll pass as long as someone else in the group can benefit from it. I weigh my off-spec gear above disenchanting, but below just about anything else. Part of that, I think, is because I'm usually well-positioned to gear myself (I may not have earned the most emblems in the guild, but I'm probably in the top three - stuff like that), and part is because I'm pretty darn sure I'm going to be serving as tank in any "progression" content. ... On the other hand, I was a little offended when I found myself rolling for Mariel's Sorrow (healery mace in ToC) against someone who'd told me he was specing Ret PVP/Ret PVE. So... eh. But I still think when we get a group of ten who aren't all "in synch" as some of us are, a master looter might be the best way to go.
ReplyDelete