Ensidia gets World 1st Arthas-25 kill......not.

Hit the link and then come back.....

Ensidia suspended for 72 Hours

As you can see from the link above, Ensidia got the world first kill on 25-man Arthas. Then, Blizzard promptly banned all accounts involved 72 hours and revoked the achievements and the loot. I may sound like a fanboy here, but in this case I do not think that Ensidia deserved the ban.

For anyone that does not know the details, apparently there was a bug in the encounter where the use of "siege damage" greatly minimized a mechanic in the encounter. Because this particular fight was NOT available on the PTR, how was anyone supposed to know that the fight was not working correctly? Even if they did notice some buggy mechanics, that's nothing out of the ordinary for a new boss fight.

The source of the "siege damage" was a rogue using Saronite Bombs. Now on MMO-Champion, you can see that the rogue did NOT use Saronite Bombs for this encounter only. It is an item that they use regularly. As a matter of fact, according to ElitistJerks, rogues have been using Saronite Bombs as part of their rotation for months.

I just wanted to put my opinion out there. Hopefully Ensidia still get the world first after their 72 hour ban (although I seriously doubt it).

Bang your head!

Short post today, got lots of things going on at work and with school. I just wanted to chime in and say that there is really nothing like banging your head against content all night to remind you of the good ole’ days.

We went in to work on Putricide on Sunday night, and blew through our 11 remaining tries. We still can’t get him to phase three, so we got some work to do. Phase two seems to be our bane at the moment. Malliable Goo kills people who are too busy DPSing or healing to get out of the way of the bouncing goo. I don’t know. You would think that people could just glance up every time DBM squawks to see where the goo is going, move, and then proceed to go about their business.

In other news, it only took us 3-4 tries to get the Blood counsel down on our second night working on them.

Oh well, we will continue to bang our heads against Putricide until we get this done.

Why all the hate?

An oldie but goodie

Rhidach and Honor’s Hammer have both blogged about this today, but I feel like I need to put in my own two cents. There has been a trend for the last 4 weeks or so where warriors are QQ’ing to no end over the perceived dominance of paladin tanks. This has perpetuated the official forums (which shouldn’t surprise anyone who lingers there), but has also found its way into much more intelligent forums (like Tankspot.com).

What we need to ask ourselves is, “Why is there such hatred from Warriors toward Paladins?” Honor’s Hammer brought up the possibility that it is because we share gear. Possible, but is that really that much different from BC? In BC, paladins who wanted to tank and who didn’t have access to tier gear largely wore warrior gear with a spellpower weapon. I know I did. Back in BC I was in a guild of RL friends and didn’t progress much (meaning I did a whole lot of Kara, and then worked on my alts). I only saw Gruul’s a couple of times. Never saw Mags. I missed all of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. I’ve never seen Black Temple (I still need to do that at some point) or Hyjal. I did complete Zul’Aman pre-nerf (with some friends from a much more progressed guild). And through all of that content that I didn’t do, I geared like a warrior, except I used a spellpower weapon. Warriors didn’t care then. Why would they care now.

My suspicion is because they are not being propped up as the “best” tank by the devs anymore. And the less skilled warrior tanks out there don’t like losing tanking spots to more skilled paladin tanks. Notice I didn’t say anything about warriors tanks losing spots to paladin tanks on the basis of their class. The skill of the player behind the keyboard is the key. I have a warrior co-tank who is also our raid leader. He doesn’t QQ about paladin OP’ness. At least not when I’m around. I hate to admit it, but probably 50% of everything I know about tanking (situational awareness, movement, etc), I learned from watching him. He is in no danger of losing his raid spot to a tank of another class.

It’s funny. When DKs were the defacto hard mode tanks, paladins didn’t cry on the forums for a nerf. It was mostly warriors doing that. I think I see where this is going now. It is my suspicion that there are a number of warrior tanks out there who have been tanking since vanilla based on the fact that they rolled a warrior. Now that the other tanking classes are basically on par with warriors, player skill is rearing its ugly head. And many longtime warrior tanks are finding themselves out of a job.

“Don’t blame the player, blame the game.” Wait…..no, absolutely blame the player. The game is fair and balanced (within a couple of % points anyway). If you warriors want to channel your rage at another tank, point it at druids. They are like improved warriors anyway (amirite?). They use the same resource system. Have similar skills and abilities. But have more effective health and do more DPS while tanking than warriors, paladins, or death knights.

Let’s be brothers of the shield and dog pile on the druids!

Communication is Key

Nerd Rage downed Rotface last night. It was glorious. But it did not come quickly or easily.

Fight mechanics are not our strongpoint as a guild. We really like to just line up, and overpower ever encounter. We have some of the best DPSers on our server, and it shows. I do feel truly blessed, as I firmly believe that our top DPSers could go play with some of the top guilds in the world should they be so inclined.

After downing Festergut on our second try on Tuesday, we took a few shots on Rotface, but all we had to show for it was 8 wipes before we called raid. So Thursday night was dedicated to Rotface. We had all seen the fight. We had all done more research and study. We were ready. We zoned in, ported up to the Plagueworks, and started pulling trash (mmmm……yummy rep). As a side note, we need to get better with the trash pull with the two big Abominations. We always end up getting all of the mobs inside the room and end up with like 6 people alive by the end of that trash pull.

Anyway, once all of the trash was cleared, we buffed up and pulled. I have the easy job. I tanked Rotface. One of our new prot paladin recruits pulled ooze duty (she’s solid BTW. She knows her stuff and is skilled). At first we were using a strat where we blow Heroism right off the bat. But doing it that way, we were hitting a brick. Time and time again, we just couldn’t seem to get him past ~20%. One of our holy paladins suggested that we save Heroism for 30%, as that is when the Mutated Infections seemed to always get out of hand. So we tried that strat, and instantly saw an improvement. We got him down to 17%. Then a wipe at 6.8% on the next pull. We were getting close. Then, during that corpse run, we had the surprise of trash respawns.

/sigh

Usually, on progression nights, if we hit the trash respawn timer, we call it. We usually take that as a sign that we have banged out heads against a wall for long enough. But it was only 10PM at that point. Our raid usually goes until 12. So we cleared trash again (mmmmm……more yummy rep). Once trashed was cleared again, we pulled again, and wiped at 16%. Now we are headed in the wrong direction. While we were running back, I re-explained the Unstable Ooze explosion mechanics. It appeared to me that the raid was running when DBM warns of the ooze explosion, which is before the “ooze projectiles” are actually fired from the big ooze, and therefore spreading the ooze explosion all over the room. So we had one of our healers call out when to move. That helped tons.

We were also having problems with DPS/Healers tunnel visioning and not running out when they got the infection, so we had another one of our healers start calling out who got the infection. These two things combined helped tremendously. On our next pull, we got him down to 8%. Then on the following pull, Rotface went down.

We banged our heads against this boss for about 15-20 attempts, but were only successful when we started properly communicating with each other. Look out Professor…Nerd Rage is coming.

Communication really is the key to success in a team environment.

The return of the Warrior

I have been playing a Paladin tank since pre-BC. Things have not always been good for the Paladin tank, but I have always enjoyed playing it and doing things that people said that we couldn't do. I also have a 70 druid that I have tanked some 5-mans with.

Having read just about everything that is available to read at Tankspot.com (and other warrior blogs), I have recently become very interested in Warrior tanking. It seemed like a completely different style of tanking than the Paladin and I have thought for a while about trying it out.

Enter Patch 3.0. I decided on patch day (after running a couple of heroics on my Paladin) to roll a warrior. Blackwulfe is his name. I am aiming at getting him to 70 before WotLK drops, but I am not sure if I will make it, as I still have a life outside of WoW and am going on vacation for a week (no WoW!) at the end of October.

So far, I have to say that I love the way the warrior class is built. It is just all around fun. I am levelling with a prot build and am tanking instances along the way. I have to say that it has been a blast, but also a real learning experience. As it stands right now, I can't wait to get to level 40 so that I can start using Sheild Slam. That just seems fun. (Originally posted on Tankspot.com 10-21-2008)

I wrote this in mid-October of 2008. How have things evolved since then? Well, I only got my warrior up to 67 by the time WotLK hit. Then I found myself being completely sucked into the gameplay of the expansion. So he sat at 67 neglected for weeks. Once I got Gathorc to 80, then I started working on my druid. Once I got my druid to 80 I started working on my priest. It seems that the warrior got lost somewhere in the mix.

So a couple of weeks ago, I logged onto my warrior for the first time since WotLK released. I got him from 67 to 72 and remembered what it was I liked about him so much. Tools.

Prot warriors seem to have a tool for every situation. As a matter of fact, I am still struggling with how to best keybind all of those tools so that I have quick access to them when I need them. A prot warrior’s mobility in combat is second to none. I use this awesome one key macro (care of Veneretio@TankingTips.com) for Charge, Intercept, and Intervene. It is my “zoom” key.

In comparison to the paladin, the prot warrior just feels so much more involved and interactive. I can do the “969” rotation with my paladin in my sleep. With my warrior, I have to stay on my toes at all times. Is revenge lit up? Has Sword and Board proc’d? Shouts? Thunderclap? It just seems like there is so much stuff going on. Like there are never enough global cooldowns to do everything you need to do. It is a challenge. And I like a challenge.

I figure that I will have my warrior up to 80 within a week or two.

Anyone on Eitrigg up for a PUG Naxx/Ulduar?

A great night, a great week

Coming off of our guild first kill of Anub’arak in 25-man Coliseum (on Tuesday), and after 3 months and 70+ attempts, Nerd Rage finally downed Yogg Saron last night. I would like to take a moment to thank the academy, and the fans…..errr, wrong speech.

Last week we suffered a heart-breaking 3% wipe on Yogg. What made it worse was that one of our best DPS’ers was not in raid because his account got hacked. We knew that had he been there, we would have downed Yogg that night.

But this night started much differently. We were actually just minutes from calling raid altogether, because an hour after start time we still didn’t have 25 people online. People were restless in vent. I know I was joking around trying to keep everyone loose (let’s just say the conversation revolved around Canadians and bacon, while being laced with plenty of healthy sexual innuendo). It just didn’t seem to bode well.

We finally get a raid put together. We pull. We pop an extra Guardian right at the beginning to help us get through Phase 1 faster. It wasn’t our cleanest phase 1, but it was good enough. Phase 2 really was a thing of beauty. We actually found ourselves with nothing to kill on occasion. We would down the crusher, kill corrupter, and stand around until the brain phase ended for more tentacles to spawn. Phase 3 started, and no one had gone insane, and all 25 were still alive. I knew right then that we had a chance. Phase 3 is among the most hectic settings I have ever tanked in. With Guardians, that will one shot a non-tank, spawning every 10 seconds or so (thankfully Hand of Reckoning has an 8 sec cooldown). All I could think about was just keeping up with the guardian spawn rate. Consecrate, hammer, taunt, shield, judge, taunt, holy shield, hammer, taunt, etc... I heard someone ask on vent what his health was at…2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 1 million. Then suddenly the mad rush ended. Two achievements popped up on my screen. It was over. We had done it!

There was a moment of silence before vent just exploded. I actually had goosebumps. Not only had we just downed Yogg, we one-shot him! What an awesome encounter. Thank you Blizzard.

We were on a high. Then we ran into a quandary. What to do with the rest of the night. We had already cleared the Coliseum on Tuesday night, so we decided to go and do three Drakes since we had never done it either. We one shot that too.

So now let the hard modes begin. We had been extending our raid locks since 3.2 hit and focusing on killing that no-eyed, old god since long before that. The guild leadership was steadfast in its position that no hard modes would even be attempted until we got Yogg down. I agreed entirely, and I have to say kudos to our raid leaders for standing strong on that position when people were crying for hard modes.

But we can worry about hard modes another night because…Last night was a great night.

The Crusaders’ Coliseum

I meant to post this blog like a month ago, but here it is anyway.

Wow….the prospect of a trashless raid instance was something that I was interested in seeing. Nobody likes killing trash, but Blizzard is correct in stating that it is one way to “Pace” an instance. Facing a raid instance with no trash at all, just feels a little strange, and definitely less EPIC.

At least to me.

Northrend Beasts

Gormok was easy-sauce (one-shot). On a side note, why is it that BigWigs can give me an alert of the debuffs on the other tanks, but DBM will not? I find myself running both BigWigs and DBM because I like features of both but neither one will do everything I want it to. Can someone in charge address this please?

The Two Jormungars was a bit tougher. It took us a few tries to beat these worms. Mostly because it took a little while to get people used to the mechanics of the different debuffs you see in that fight and how to address them. If Dreadscale is mobile, you will get paralytic poison and the only way to clear it is to get close to the person with burning bile (the Dreadscale tank). If Acidmaw is mobile, you will get Burning Bile, and you will need to go clear the person with Paralytic poison (the Acidmaw tank). It boils down to one simple phrase…If you get a debuff (regardless of which one it is), run to the tank of the mobile worm. I was on Acidmaw and our DK was on Dreadscale (why doesn’t Stoneform clear that paralytic poison again?). Despite our early troubles, on our first kill we did get the Not One, But Two Jormungars achievement.

Icehowl was tougher still. We actually didn’t down Icehowl until our second night of raiding in the coliseum, due mostly to people getting hung up on walls and whatnot when trying to avoid the charge. I don’t have much else to say about this fight, except that when Icehowl enrages, he hits REALLY hard.

Lord Jarraxus

Easy-sauce, one shot. Kill adds, heal people, kill boss. Simple.

Faction Champions

I will stand by my statement that this is actually the hardest fight in the whole instance. I am not the biggest fan of PVP, but I have done quite a bit of it. Everyone likes to say that this fight is just like PVP. I disagree. I have NEVER PVP’ed against anyone that had over 2 million health. Be that as it may, kill the healers first, using all of your possible interrupts along the way. CC is not so great in this fight (mostly because of its unreliability), but interrupts are king.

Twin Valkyries

I found this fight just engaging enough to be really fun, but not so complex as to be frustrating.

Anub’arak

The big bug is back. And this time, he’s pissed! (LAWL)

Fun fight with a pretty tight DPS requirement. Healers, for god’s sake, don’t try to keep everyone at full health in phase three. No one in the raid (other than the tanks) should ever be above 50% health once Phase three has started. The more health your raid has, the more Anub heals, and the longer it takes to kill him.

All in all, the Crusader’s Coliseum is a fun (if fast) raid instance.