5 Tank raiding

It has been a while so here’s a little catch up. We’ve downed Malygos 3 times now. The fight doesn’t seem too hard for our guild. I really suck at it because the stars in the background make my head spin and I get disoriented. So I was just the OT on the fight. I was pretty useless on a drake too. Ah well, I guess it is ok to get carried by the guild just once. Maly was kind enough to drop the Legplates of Sovereignty for me. I got the quest reward necklace too. It is nice to drop the “Explorer” title for “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” title.

I’ve been spending a lot of WoW time on my Holy Priest lately. I got him all  the way through 10 man Naxx last week and he’s run all but 3 heroics. He’s getting really well geared with a Beimba score of around 470. Tankette just hit 502.

On to the main topic. Last night we had a fresh Naxx heroic run. As usual we had too many tanks wanting to go but this time we just took them all instead of making some sit and finding more DPS. So we rolled into Spider wing sporting 2 Prot Warriors, 2 Prot Pallies and a DK Tank . . . and we slaughtered everything in record time and had a blast doing it. I equiped my best threat gear so I was at 51 expertise, 225 hit and somewhere around 1250 BV and 4000 AP with all the buffs. I wasn’t worried about avoidance for any of the bosses because I knew that if I died during a boss fight there were plenty of tanks ready and able to jump right in and take over. It was so much fun to see my threat climb on Omen on the boss fights and leave the mages behind for a change.

On recent Naxx runs we had been trying to spread the MT duties around. Last night the raid leader had me MT most of the bosses we came too and cut out the time thinking about who’s turn it was. Some fights he had other tanks MT, like Grobbulus because one of the Pally tanks has that fight down to a science. And then I admit I still suck at the Heigan fight. My vertigo is just too bad to handle the MT job on that fight. So the other Prot Warrior handles that fight.

Surprisingly our DPS was still strong even with 5 tanks. We set a couple new time records on boss fights. Most of all, we took what is rapidly getting to be a boring run and made it fun again by speeding up the pace. We disenchant a lot of the loot in the first 4 wings but many of us, like me with Last Laugh, need loot from KT or Sapphiron. So we took what is becoming drudgery of the first 4 wings and flew through it in 1 night. 13 bosses in slightly more than 3 hours and only 1 wipe (Thaddius, at 300K health – a couple missed the jump, somebody had an emergency afk). I’m sure that’s no world record but it was the best out guild has ever done, and we did it with 5 tanks.

PS We’ve dropped Sartharion with one drake up two times now. We keep trying it on off nights. If we can get a solid 25 raid we shouldn’t have any trouble doing 2 drakes. Probably get 3 drakes before Ulduar.

Maly

We had our first night of attempts on Malygos last night and it went pretty well. I decided to play my priest and do some healing and let the other tanks have at it. The fight isn’t very easy on my vertigo any way with all the stars spinning around in the back ground and the vortex and all so I really didn’t mind letting the other tanks run.

Enough had been in the ten mans to where the first phase was fairly easy. It took 3 or 4 attempts before we got it down. I was healing the other healers and throwing Guardian Spirit on the MT after the first vortex as well as throwing him some heals as I could. I made a few quick macros and my job went pretty well.

Phase 2 was where everything fell apart. It was like we didn’t expect to get past phase 1, lol, so we had to wipe a few times on phase 2 before we even had a decent plan. Even after we got it planned out I kept getting nuked by the Scions on the discs. Part of it was running, keeping myself healed, healing one of the tanks, staying in the bubble and trying to throw a few heals on other random heals on other people was a lot to do. I was wishing I was running my tank at that point. But the Scions just seemed to be tracking me down and nuking me. The raid leader said they had a random aggro table but if so I was just unlucky. One of their arcane blasts hit me for 18K.

Needless to say, I didn’t care much for phase 2 and I only lived through it once. We really only had 3 good runs that had several people get into phase 3. The one I made it through we had about 15 people. I didn’t have a clue where the rest of the people went once we got on drakes and I found myself face to face with Maly and dead in a few seconds.

Our best attempt we got Maly to about 35% before we were all dead. Not really close since even if we had lived we wouldn’t have beat the enrage timer. But it was a fun night of attempts. I’m not sure if we will get him with just one more night of attempts or not. I guess it depends on how many guildies go run 10 mans to learn the fight. In a way it is kind of refreshing to have a fight that we don’t concur in one night. It brought back memories of all the painful butt whuppings Leo gave us in SSC. We can laugh at those nights now.

Naxx farm, on to EoE

Been working a lot of OT but still finding some time to raid here and there. We lost several raiders over the last week or two. They were good players and good people. On the one hand I will miss them. On the other, we are still having to rotate people because we have more than 25 people showing up to raids. It is a good thing for the strength of the guild but it means you don’t always get to raid when you are available. I can’t complain. I was the progression MT for months in TBC and for all of Heroic Naxx. It is time to give the other tanks some boss time.

Speaking of Naxx, we are mowing through the place faster and faster. Last week we easily cleared the assigned wings in the 3 nights and had time left over each night. Almost all bosses were one-shots. This week we plan to clear Naxx in 2 nights and then focus on EoE.

My son has been messing around on my priest alt that I had moved to a separate account. He leveled him from 77 to 80, ran some heroics, raided Naxx, etc. The toon has pretty good gear with a Beimba of 430 or so. Anyway, my son is bored of WoW and is playing some Cartoon Network MMO so I started messing around with the priest again last night. All the key bindings were screwy and none of my addons were configured. After about an hour I had him somewhat playable. I still hadn’t healed so much as a 5 man on him since level 70 but at least I could move him around and cast a few spells. And since the raid was full of tanks, yep, my priest was headed for Naxx. Wheeee!

Luckily I didn’t really need to do much. We had plenty of healers and plenty of dps. I was on party heals along with a couple other people. I tried to keep the kamikaze mages alive on the trash pulls, which is pretty much impossible since they just want to die. I managed to stay alive in most of the boss fights and throw some heals, throw a few dps spells and generally just try to get used to my alt again. It was fun in a low pressure kind of way. Then we got to Faerlina. I have never mind controlled before so it was good to give that a try. Of course I screwed it up. The mind control broke before the boss even enraged and then I ended up dead. Ah well, at least we didn’t wipe.

I got a chance to try MC again on Razuvious. It didn’t go any better on the first try. I got screwed up because my targeting key wasn’t keybound where it was supposed to be. It was our only wipe of the night and I got it perfect on the second try. Since I was one of only two priests in the raid, that was the only fight where I was truly needed all night, lol. The rest of the Military wing was one-shot. The Plague wing was easy too. I even danced pretty well for Heigan. It is much easier when you aren’t trying to tank. I did die towards the end when I got behind trying to throw renews on people. On Loatheb I could never figure out the timing on the heals. Luckily we had so many healers mine didn’t really matter. I threw some CoHs when I saw other heals hitting and threw out some gimp dps the rest of the time.

All in all it was a fun raid night. Very different from tanking. 3 wings cleared in 3 hours without rushing at all. Thursday we plan to clear the Construct wing as well as Sapph and KT. The we are going all out on EoE with 2 10 mans Fri/Sat and 25 man on Sun.

RL Sucks

RL bosses are far worse than WoW bosses. My company decided to do a massive lay off. I survived the first round of cuts, then a week later was told I had 90 days. Now the people that rely on me are fighting to keep my position. So I’m shifting into workaholic mode to try to keep my spot on the corporate ladder that I’ve fought so many years to earn. I guess thats more important than MT position in my guild (had to think about it for a day or two). I may still raid on Sundays but that may be about it. And that means I won’t have much to blog about either. Oh well, it has been fun. Thanks for reading. I won’t totally abandon the blog, I just won’t post very often.

It’s about Freeking Time!!

I asked the mage if he wanted a chance to get his 20g from yesterday back and he said yes. A couple dps and a healer chimed in that they wanted in on the run that I had begun calling my “Daily Dose of Disappointment”, aka Utgarde Pinnacle.

The endless wipes on Skadi are a long gone memory. We owned Pinnacle from start to finish and the run went quickly. Of course I’ve run it so many times I know every pull and we are geared to the hilt. And then finally, FINALLY, F I N A L L Y ! ! !, the sword drops. At long last I have the Red Sword of Courage!!! Woot! I was more than happy to give the mage his 20g on the bet.

From there we went and did another timed run of Strat. One of the dps that has been helping with all the Pinnacle runs got the bronze drake. He was stoked.

Then we went into heroic Naxx. We wiped a couple times on Sapph. I kept getting dropped as MT. I finally switched out the frost resist gear for my best avoidance gear and the fight went much better and we dropped him. It was only our second time to drop him. The raid leader got the key to the Eye this time since I got it the first time.

On to KT. Our first attempt was messy. KT did a MC early in phase 2 and that killed a few people. He also did an aggro dump at the same time and he killed a few people that didn’t stop their dps and let me pick him up first. We got him to 25% but there weren’t enough healers left to keep me and the OT alive. The second attempt was close to perfect as we only lost one person the whole fight. I thought for sure the Last Laugh would drop again since I just got the Red Sword but it didn’t. Some caster sword with 500 SP dropped that the mages were all gaga over, lol. It was good to get our 2nd full clear of heroic Naxx! Gratz GBU!

We still had some raid time left so we did a quick Obsidian Sanctuary. I let the other two tanks do all the MT duties. It was the first time I had OT duty on the adds for the boss fight. It was wierd to never even see the boss’ health or know how the fight was going since I was continuously fighting the little fire adds. The MT must have done fine since we one-shotted the boss with no raid deaths. We only had 21 people in the raid and 3 or 4 we brand new raiders. EZ sauce. I picked up the T7.5 gloves. Now that I have a decent tanking weapon I can start working on my T7.5 gear / more avoidance gear. Funny though, the T7.5 gloves have a lot of expertise so they aren’t exactly avoidance.

Dang, what a great night!

25 for the Dance

Last night we were back in heroic Naxx. First up was where we left off Thursday night: the Heigan dance. I did the MT job and I can’t say I did a flawless job of it. A couple times I got disoriented but others managed to get me back on track. The people that died did so on phase 2 and that was no fault of mine. The bottom line was Heigan was one-shotted. Yay!

Loetheb has always been a one-shot except the time 20 people got locked out by the door boss. Last night was no exception.

We still had Thaddius in the Construct wing so we headed over there. When will people stop getting killed by frogger? Never, I guess. We had 2 really good attempts on Thaddius but he enraged at about 5%. We only had a couple people down. On the 3rd attempt we only had one person down and we dropped him, just barely before the timer. Having 4 tanks was a problem I guess.

Sapphiron kicked our butts over and over. Melee died quick deaths. People couldn’t stay out of the blizzards. And when everything seemed to go ok, I was getting killed between 20% to 15%. I don’t think there’s any enrage there so I don’t know what was up. Maybe the healers were having mana issues? Not sure. The two other tanks couldn’t taunt in time so we wiped. We’ve only dropped Sapph once before so it’s not like he’s on farm.

We will hopefully be back in Naxx tonight for Sapph and KT. I’m high on EPGP among the tanks so I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Last Laugh drops again.

On a RL note, things aren’t going well at work and I may be looking at scenarios that involve a lot of overtime and thus less raid time. Our guild is going to start rotating MTs anyway. So it looks like my time of raiding 7 nights a week have come to an end. Probably less to blog about too.

One of those nights

Sloppy. That’s the word for last night’s raid.

I missed the first night of heroic Naxx earlier this week when I wasn’t feeling well. They apparently got quite a few bosses down. So last night we started with Grobbulus. I normally stay on the adds and let one of our pally tanks do the MT but those two guys weren’t in the raid so I got MT duty. I think I did my part ok but we had several times where we got more than one add because the melee dps got ahead of the boss. And we had some injection clouds dropped in the middle of the room. Luckily our DPS was in high gear and he went down fast.

Gluth was almost a very easy one shot. He was being burned down so fast we were laughing. Then a DK accidentally hit army of the dead. That pulled Gluth off of me and out into the room. Every time I got him back, one of the zombies would taunt him back and he’d eat another add. He went from 10% to 60% and we wiped. The DK appologized profusely. We killed Gluth easily on the second attempt.

Our only kill of Thaddius on heroic was last week. We seemed to have forgotten everything we learned. I couldn’t make the jump. The priests would put levitate on everyone BUT me. Once on the platform people wouldn’t move fast enough when their charge changed. We wiped 4 times. Just when we thought we were going to have a much better attempt the server choked and half the raid disconnected, including me and the other tank. We gave up on Thaddius for the night.

We decided to hit the Plague wing since that was the only other wing still uncleared. All the trash pulls were near disasters. Some of that was my fault as I was tired and making mistakes. Some of it was people AFK. Some of it was DPS on the wrong targets. We one-shotted Noth but we turned an easy fight into a struggle. The two OT’s had trouble holding the adds. The DPS wouldn’t pause hitting the boss on the aggro dumps. We ended up with 6 people dead when the boss dropped. Sloppy.

Then it was dance time. Again, we had only defeated the boss once previously on heroic, not counting all the times we used the exploit safe spot before the patch. I MT’ed the first few attempts. I did fine staying out of the acid splashes but sometimes I got too close to the platform. On the last two attempts the Druid tank gave it a shot and he didn’t do any better. But the main problem was most of our healers couldn’t dance and then they couldn’t dispell the disease. Our best attempt was 25% when we finally gave up.

Sloppy. I’m not sure we are going to get the full clear of heroic Naxx this week. We have 5 bosses left and only one scheduled night. Maybe we’ll squeeze in an extra night like we did last week.

I finally survived the dance

I really didn’t mind being a “cheat” and using the exploit spot on Heigan. Blizz got rid of the safe spot with the last patch though so I had no choice but to learn to dance.

The first phase is actually pretty forgiving while tanking the boss. I found 4 darker stones that line up that each are pretty much in the different 4 zones. And if I screw up a little the healers can get me through it. The second phase is less forgiving. One of our pally healers has the dance down perfect so I just stayed right on top of him. It took us 3 attempts to get the boss down but that was because others failed in the dance and not me.

So our 10 man was kind of thrown together last night. Besides Heigan we cleared the Plague wing, Military wing, Spider wing and downed Patchwerk. No tanking sword. 😦

I moved my priest alt to a new account several weeks back so my son could play him. He didn’t play last night but another guildie ran my priest since we were short on healers and he ended up getting 3 pieces of gear. The toon is almost to 400 on Beimba.

And other stuff

Beyond heroic Naxx, I’ve been busy in WoW.

I hate fishing. But I am now level 400 in fishing and have a big supply of fish feasts to supply our raids with buff food.

I started doing Kalu’ak dailies. I want the epic fishing pole for grins. I want to beat a horde to death with a fishing pole. Just a strange urge. I killed one in 3 seconds last night over a rich saronite node in Wintergrasp. I was LMAO. I get owned enough times by Hordies so its all fair.

I’m exalted with everything that you can get exalted with by using a tabbard except Ebon Blade. Almost to Reverred with them.

I spent some time doing 10 man Naxx when I wasn’t wrangling everyone into heroic naxx. We did the construct wing first because a mage wanted some piece of gear, which he got. Then we did the military wing so I could get the Slayer of the Lifeless, which of course did NOT drop. Then we went to the plague wing. We used to use the exploit safe spot on Heigan to avoid the dance. Since the patch fixed the exploit we all must dance. I think I figured it out after 10 tries. 2 of our healers never did. End of raid.

Monday night we did Obsidian. We had too many people signed up so even the raid leaders volunteered to sit out. I was made raid leader. I delegated stuff and just marched through the place in 30 min. I made the guy that never shuts up in charge of calling out everything during the boss fight since he’d do it anyway, lol. We didn’t bother trying to leave a drake up since people wanted to go finish their 10 man Naxx runs.

Tuesday night we were back to heroic Naxx. We had 37 people signed up for a 25 man raid. I had taken some medication that made me too tired to raid anyway so I dropped. Others ended up rolling to see who got a slot. I hear there are some pissed off guildies that have been in the guild a long time didn’t get to go while new people did. I am glad I missed the drama. I hear only 2 wings got cleared. And, of course, Broken Promise dropped for the first time.

We now have 62 people in the guild that are level 80. Only a few aren’t geared or are alts. The GM supposedly has a new plan on who is going to get into the 25 mans. I hope it is a good one.

The Last Laugh goes to . . .

Late Friday night I convinced everyone to scrap the 10 man Naxx runs and get back into heroic Naxx. Some grumbled about going to do more wipes instead of having their easy runs but we got it going finally.

Thaddius was all we had left in the Construct wing and the other three wings were cleared. We had some wipes on Thaddius on Thursday so we already had some practice. It took 3 more tries on Friday night and he was down. All 4 wings clear! Yay!

We went on to Sapphiron but it was late. We gave him 4 tries but never got below 80%.

10 mans were on the schedule for Saturday night. Again, I was able to convince everyone to scrap the 2 10 mans and go heroic. It was late by the time we got it going. We gave Sapphiron about 8 tries but we never made any real progress. I think our best attempt might have been 60%.

Sunday night is the actual night we schedule 25 mans so we were back in heroic Naxx again the next night. This time it wasn’t so late and we weren’t so tired. It took 4 more tries but Sapphiron dropped! It was unanimous that the key to the Eye of Eternity went to me since I almost never miss a raid.

We still had time to make some attempts on KT. I must have had 6 people whisper me that KT was going to drop the Last Laugh for me. Yep, I’m still using the blue quality weapon, the Infantry Assault Blade. I’ve lost count of how many runs I’ve made of Pinnacle and still no sword. I am the only tank in our guild to not have an epic weapon. Pretty sad since I am the MT.

Anyway, we got KT to 30% on the first attempt. 20% on the second attempt. KT fell on the 3rd attempt! Heroic Naxx cleared! Gratz to GBU on our guild first! I think we were the 12th on our server to do it.

And guess what dropped? Yep, Last Laugh. And then one of the Pally OT’s, who already had the Red Sword of Courage, beat me on EPGP. He had a ratio of 1.47 and I had a ratio of 1.45. Others tried to talk him out of it but he just ignored them. He had the points and the weapon was his.