The Warlocks Den - WoW Warlock Discussions - Blogs - Saobuks

Mission Accomplished

Saobuks — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:38:52 GMT

Our hard work has finally paid off.

We got our drakes... and our sanity back.

The current content has been an uphill climb for Encore. T7 bored a lot of our players, so we've had to do a lot of recruiting. Mainly though, it was the attitude and lack of motivation that hampered our progress from day one. From people expecting one-shots after one-shots, to inconsistent attendance from a lot of our veteran members (including myself at times), this drake is a symbol of our hard work and perseverance despite everything we've been through.

About a month and a half ago, many of us were afraid that we'll experience another Sunwell-type failure (couldn't kill KJ pre-nerf) with 3.2 arriving without our ironbound drakes. Our GM even told us that if we fail, he's quitting the game. From an outside perspective, it sounds a little selfish, but all of us could understand his sentiments. We were raiding with poor attitudes, we started at least 30-45 minutes late every night, we were frustrated with constant disconnects and crappy computers that cost us numerous wipes every night, and many of our tenured players weren't performing as well as they should be. Our GM is perhaps the most dedicated person I've ever come across in my life. I mean, the guy works full-time, goes to school, and still finds time to raid 5 days of the week. He also deals with everyone's issues on a daily basis, whether it be on AIM, his phone, or on our forums. He felt that his time wasn't respected by the guild, which was a fair sentiment. As for myself, I was a little lonely since I was the only raiding warlock at the time. Warlock chat had never been so dead.

But then we picked up a new warlock. We started dedicating one of our raid nights to 10-mans to serve as a halftime break during the week as well as for everyone to learn each fight thoroughly. We picked up some amazing players (one of our FNGs got his drake in 2 weeks, picking up almost all of the required achievements in that period). Then we picked up another warlock. Then we became Firefighters. Then in the same week we got 1-Light. Then last night, we got Knock(x3). It truly has been an amazing month.

Alright alright, we still have to kill Algalon (even in 10-man), and there's a very realistic chance that we might not have the time to kill him pre-3.2, but I honestly won't be that disappointed if we can't kill him before the patch. The 1-hour thing will ****ing kill us in our 25-mans. We've lost so much of our raid time to DCs, restarts, blue screens, 'stuck at authenticating', 'stuck at a full blue bar', and other stupid, mostly client-side issues. As long as we kill Algalon in our 10-mans, then I think that will keep most of us happy (Herald of the Titans is an amazing title).

Regarding Freya, I'm honestly disappointed in my performance on that fight. I suck at meta/ruin. The amount of movement in that fight affects the spec more than destro. The long cast of SB, as well as its travel time, resulted in a lot of dps that never happened. During p1, my dps was embarrassingly low on conservators, which is arguably the second hardest add pack. My snaplasher dps wasn't that bad, and I didn't have to worry about aggro. My flower pack dps is normally the highest, but on our kill pull it wasn't (probably because I focus more on the tree that spawns, but my dps on it still isn't good /sigh). During p2, I could barely hit any of the roots because they died so quick. I'm not afraid to say that the spec, if played properly, can and will top meters. But I guess I just suck at it. It requires a different play-style as compared to affliction (dot timer management) and destro (short-cooldown management).

I think my poor performance, at least compared to WMO parses, can be attributed more to the fact that in most of the top parses, the lock doesn't really focus on trees/roots. Our strat holds everyone accountable for those, so if you're in range of trees/roots, you switch to them. Looking at other parses, you can tell that most guilds designate 3 specific players to take them down, which is definitely more efficient. Who cares though, we got it and that's what matters. I'll probably stick to demo spec for this fight. Not only is it fun to play (/kneel during metamorphosis is full of win), but it's always nice to learn all the different specs of your class. I'm affliction for Yogg, Demo for Freya, and Destro for everything else. I think it's a good balance... kinda.

I can't wait for our Freya video to come out. Our movie maker (one of our rogues) always plays the last 10-20 seconds of our ventrilo which always includes the celebration, which makes me remember the feeling of getting these kills. Hopefully he finishes it soon. Check out his videos at: Encore Performances.

Remember, when you hit phase 2, always keep this in mind: "The tree IS the kill".

Ironbound.. so close I can taste it

Saobuks — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:40:38 GMT

This past week was perhaps our most successful week in this current content. We were able to knock out Firefighter on Tuesday and 1 Light yesterday, which basically leaves Freya+3, which is probably the hardest out of all of the "harder" hard modes (used to be Firefighter but they made it a whole lot easier recently). Regardless, this leaves us 1 hard mode away from getting that amazing Ironbound drake. I still remember back before Ulduar when I first saw the skins for those.. it looked amazing then and is still amazing every time I see them flying around Krasus' Landing. I'll probably start doing what I used to do when we got our black drakes: alt-tab AFK in Dalaran while mounted.

This week the goal is obviously to take care of Freya with all her stupid elders up. I'm probably going to spec into Deep Demo for that fight for two reasons. One is that I haven't raided as Deep Demo ever. I've never even used Metamorphosis. I know it's cool and all, but there's really no point in raiding with a usually inferior spec whose utility is already provided by another person (we always have an elemental shaman in the raid, even in our 10man group). The second, more important reason is that it seems that deep demo is a very strong spec for this particular fight. Although it doesn't appear in the top 20 WMO parses more than 13/58, it's average rank is higher than destro. Plus, it's the only time you really see demo up there competing against other specs in hard modes.

There are plenty of reasons why deep demo is extremely viable for this fight. The first talent that you know will help you a lot is soul link. With the amount of damage the raid incurs during the various add phases, it doesn't hurt to decrease it as much as possible. Damage reduction is even increased via MD. Really though, I could care less about reducing raid damage but what makes deep demo so potent is its AoE capabilities. Metamorphosis + Immolation + Hellfire is perhaps the most devastating AoE combo (probably right?). This means a lot to successfully handling the detonating lashers. There are differing strats on how to deal with those little buggers, but hopefully we use the single target strat, which basically involves the raid AoE'ing them all down to about 25-30%, then focus fire dps'ing them one at a time, thereby controlling the influx of raid damage resulting from them exploding. It's definitely the most controlled way of doing things, and if we're able to AoE them to 25-30% fast enough, we'll have plenty of time to single target each one down.

Another reason why I plan on going meta/ruin is threat. The triple add phase always gives me trouble mainly because of threat. Obviously, we're not all that efficient at that particular phase yet as there are numerous ways to make sure dps is high on all three mobs while still being able to control them. But if I'm able to solely focus on the snaplasher without worrying about threat ever, then by all means I'll do it. I honestly suck so bad at Freya as destro, but hopefully meta/ruin will alleviate some of my issues.

The last bonus is probably the felguard. Melee pets are generally safe in this encounter, and I won't lose its dps during conservator phases since it will always be right on the tree, and the tree will always be tanked next to a mushroom. So even if I'm forced to sit outside a mushroom due to nature's fury and less than ideal mushroom spawns, I'll be able to at least contribute some dps.

I don't expect us to get her down this week, considering we'll have to repeat Firefighter, which we barely killed last week (we had about 3 seconds left before one of mimiron's parts revived). I can see us having a hard time on that. It's a fun fight though, and I have a certain bias towards it since I hold the #13 worldwide warlock dps parse on WMO (lol).

If somehow we get our drakes this week, then it would be pretty ****ing awesome to say the least.

Yogg(-3)... spec decisions and thoughts

Saobuks — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:43:58 GMT

After getting hard mode Vezax down on Thursday, we started working on hard mode Yogg, and I'm still debating on which spec to go. The obvious choice is of course affliction. The phase 3 burn makes DS channeling so effective that it's clear why 90% of the top parses are affliction. However, I'm still inclined to go deep destro due to a couple reasons.

Last night, I went affliction due to the realization that corrupters had to be controlled by the outside group in order to effectively dps the brain. So I didn't focus only on crushers, but I also kept dots on nearby corrupters. On good attempts (RNG on where corrupters spawn), I would dominate the meters on both crushers/corrupters or be at least in the top 3 on corrupters. The downside is that I strictly ignored constrictors. I only dotted them when on the fly when we move to the next crusher area. Last night, we had numerous deaths due to constrictors. I guess most of our high burst ranged just aren't aware enough to notice a tentacle spawning and grabbing someone 20 yards away (or even... less). On Sunday, I stayed deep destro and dominated the meters all night (comfortably ahead of everyone), and I was the main reason why we weren't dying to constrictors. At the end of the night, I ended up doing 600k+ damage to constrictors, while the closest person was at 200k+. So the first reason deep destro is appealing is the "sustained burst" (it's a guild term) that it can deliver and the very low ramp up time, which is perfect for those 100k health constrictors.

The second reason is that the fight is 75% dependent on your phase 2 performance. Of course, you need a good phase 1 transition so you don't fall behind on phase 2. Of course, you need high dps and awareness on phase 3 so the adds don't go out of control, you don't get spell locked, and keep your sanity up by turning around on or before the gaze CD is up. Phase 1 still wipes us here and there, but overall, we are able to do perfect transitions regardless of my spec. Phase 3.. well, you can't get to phase 3 without doing phase 2 right? On Sunday, the other warlock (who's way behind on gear) and I were deep destro, and I was consistently ahead of him and everyone else by a significant percentage on almost all the pulls and even those deep into phase 2. Last night, I went affliction while he stayed destro, and the difference between myself and #2 was a lot closer. I was still on top, but by a slimmer margin (less than a percent at times). Right now, I can't accurately tell if it's because of phase 1 dps (I'm usually in the top 2 as deep destro as compared to around 7-8 as affliction) that the margin is smaller. If it is, then maybe I should stay affliction. I'll have to go back to destro again when we get to him this week, and see if the constrictor problem is solved and my dps can still dominate.

Also, people always say "oh you can dot multiple targets you should go affliction". But keep in mind that other targets have zero debuffs and other targets sometimes are too far away, and when we focus fire corrupters, my dots don't even tick fully. Plus, haunt will only be on one target, which further lessens the difference between shadow bolt DPSC and my dot's DPSCs (it's still significantly higher of course regardless of the lack of debuffs).

Ultimately, if the rest of the ranged can do constrictor dps that I do, I wouldn't even think of going back to deep destro as my phase 3 dps will be extremely valuable. This is another case of "our best players having to do lower dps tasks/specs because those more suited to them can't pull their weight".

Good news is that we actually saw phase 3 after 2 1/2 nights of attempts. If our MT wasn't bogged down by schoolwork, we'd have made more progress (we had to bring B-team tanks that weren't familiar with the fight). Our phase 3 wipe was ****ing stupid too. Right as we hit the last phase, we were around 30% on the last crusher, but for some unknown reason, another crusher spawned right then. It was not the only reason why we would have ended up wiping anyway. I think we had 4 corrupters up which could have posed some serious problems, and I'm sure people would fail on keeping their sanity up since it was the first time we've seen phase 3 since last week's kill, but nevertheless that extra crusher just ****ed us.

When we finally went and activated the remaining watchers to end the night, I made a point to everyone that having 2 sanity at the start of phase 3 is enough to do the phase. I literally stared at him to get my sanity really low, and went through 25% of his health not getting hit by another gaze and DS channeling my way to victory. It's actually quite fun since the cooldown timer is sometimes off so you gotta compensate.

Hopefully we start this week in the same fashion as we did last week. I was actually absent for the Vezax kill, so I definitely want to see him dead (that fight is so much fun). If we can get to Yogg by Thursday, I think we'll have enough time to get this achievement by the end of the week which would be pretty awesome.

Orbituary.. and Hodir's random Fury

Saobuks — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:40:04 GMT

Tonight we were able to do Flame Leviathan with 4 towers up. At first some of us were hesitant to spend time on it since we wanted to focus on Freya with 2 elders up and Vezax hard mode. But apparently they fixed some bugs (most importantly the bike thing) and nerfed the encounter by lowering the health of Freya adds and increasing vehicle dps.

Surprisingly, it only took us 3 tries to beat it. It's either the encounter is now too easy, or the time we've put in the 10-man version of the encounter has finally paid off. I'm more inclined to attribute it to the latter. Demolishers are now able to keep their stacks up, the kiting is a lot better and more conducive to demolisher dps, and we've all learned various tricks to make the fight easier. One trick was to avoid getting shot up in the air after breaking all the turrets. All you had to do was exit flame leviathan as soon as system overload starts (bind "Exit Vehicle" somewhere or make a macro with "/script VehicleExit();"). I wish we did this a month before..

The encounter is still very buggy though. Our two wipes can be attributed to FL blinking and dropping all pyrite stacks. He did this in both attempts, and on the 2nd attempt, he dropped 4x10 pyrite stacks, and we wiped with like 60 million health left. So stupid.

On the kill attempt, something really funny happened... twice. As I was being shot up in the air for the second time, I got killed. I've never died while in the air. I quickly looked through my combat log, and saw that I got hit by Hodir's Fury. Yep, during the 1 second window (a little less realistically) while I was out of a vehicle and flying to FL, Hodir's tower decided to shock the raid. At the time, I wanted to strangle someone. Dying to complete RNG is stupid, but I guess the way to avoid this is to time your launching so that when you launch your passenger, Hodir's tower either just hit the raid or... no, **** that. It was just RNG.

One of our mages died in the same fashion as well, which is why it's hard for me to attribute our deaths to RNG. The really funny thing is that both of our bodies were floating in the air while we watched the second half of the fight. The kill attempt was really close too. Around 10 people were up by the time FL died. If we hadn't died, the kill would've been a lot cleaner.

Whatever though, we finally did this annoying achievement, and now we have access to our best in slot neck and boots.

XT dropped Grasps of Reason too, which I was unable to pick up (went to one of our mages), but it's always nice to see your best in slot dropping. If we're able to get Vezax hard mode and the trinket drops, at least that's one less person I'll have to compete against (our loot council takes into account loot history).

Hopefully this week goes according to plan...

Hard Mode Progression

Saobuks — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:54:40 GMT

Between multiple projects in real life and progression raiding through hard mode encounters, I've forgotten all about my blog. I've sorely missed re-evaluating my WoW experience from a different perspective. Well, let's do a little catching up..

Ulduar is a lot of fun. Most of the hard modes are so daunting at first, but when you finally get the kill, it's a very good feeling. Almost as good as killing Sunwell bosses... almost.

Thorim hard mode was the first hard mode Encore accomplished. It was the encounter that demoralized our guild as a whole and made some of us realize that this realy isn't Naxx anymore. Months of farming easy instances have made some of us expect even hard modes to go down within a night or two. Granted, this is true for some hard modes (Hodir and XT come to mind), but some of us were going into these encounters with the wrong mentality, leading to sandy vaginas and negative attitudes. I think we ended up spending a grand total of 4 raid nights on Thorim hard mode, and only until the 3rd raid night did we realize our strat was terribly inefficient. Due to the 10-man equivalent being a complete joke, we brought the same strategy into the 25-man version, i.e. stand in random areas and dodge everything. This resulted in 3 nights of failure, and finally when we examined other guilds' videos of the kill, we realized that this fight is all about positioning. One night of proper positioning finally granted us a kill.

Our next hard mode achievement was Hodir. Overall, a very simple strat lead to a very simple kill. We're now able to one shot this achievement every week, which is always a morale booster. This fight also made me bring my Sundial again due to haste procs being useless. Glad I kept it.

Steelbreaker was more of a ballbreaker. We went into this encounter with a better mentality and attitude, researching thoroughly on positioning and whatnot. Regardless, our strategy developed from a 3-tank strategy to a 4-tank strategy, as well as a random spread around Steelbreaker into the raid stacking right on top of him, with our tanks/hunters soaking the balls of lightning. Our dps is really tested in this fight, and so far we've only done it once (a bunch of 1% and 2% wipes). A lack of pure dps classes on the bench has really lowered our raid dps in Ulduar (we would have 2 moonkins, 2 ele shammies often). I'm the only capable raiding warlock in the guild, and it's weird since in BC, the warlock core of Encore was one of the strongest. Recruiting warlocks if you know any.

Another fight where another good warlock would be useful is XT. Our strat makes use of 2 hunters, our elemental shaman, and myself to handle the life sparks, and due to 13/58's mana efficiency, my damage on life sparks completely dominate the fight. If we brought in another destro lock, we could probably drop down to 2 warlocks and elemental shaman on the life sparks, putting another dps on the boss. Realistically, this would only make our life easier, since we were still able to get the kill with this strat. XT hard mode surprisingly only took us 1 1/2 raid nights to accomplish, which is pretty good for a guild with attendance issues.

This week, I'm pretty sure we'll work on Freya+2 and maybe get a Yogg-1 kill. It's been kind of frustrating lately because many of us are looking at other guilds' progressions and try to do too much in a single raid week. I keep telling our leadership to only focus on 1 hard mode per week (2 if we beat it). We would have weeks when we'd spend a night on FL+4T, then spend half an hour trying to do this stupid worthless achievement on Kologarn, and finally get back to work on a hard mode we were working on the previous week. I swear, some people get way too optimistic when it comes to hard modes that it's hurting us more. Our weekly schedule consists of 4 25-man raid nights and 1 raid night dedicated to 10-mans, so losing more than 1 night on hard mode progression puts unnecessary pressure to finish the instance (we still do the hard modes we've previously done).

Hard mode progression is all about picking your poison.

End of a Hectic Week

Saobuks — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:36:15 GMT

Tonight is probably the first night since I've joined that we raided on a Friday night. First time in over 2 years I've done progression raiding on a Friday. At least it was worth it I guess. We ended up downing Freya, Thorim, and Ignis. On Sunday, we plan on working on Mimiron and hopefully get to Vezax. From what I hear, Mimiron is the ****block out of the four watchers. I also hear that he's a Voltron-type of boss, so that should be pretty cool. And he's a mechagnome. Always a plus.

After the conflag nerf, I've been raiding mainly as 41/30. It's a very good spec. The felguard is extremely durable compared to the succubus. Its dps is very reliable in Ulduar where there's so much movement that melee have an innate advantage over casters. Decimation is still a tricky talent. I've mainly stuck to 2:1 weaving to make things simpler. Furthermore, 1:1 weaving requires the player to either be in max range, which is very unreliable since most of the bosses have to be moved constantly, or go right up on the boss and dps from there. This strategy actually isn't all that bad, but most of the bosses are really tall, so my incinerate still travels ~10 yards to actually hit, breaking the 1:1 weaving. Additionally, RoF is surprisingly strong. I prefer it a whole lot more than SoC since it's a lot easier to control, and the damage is spread out better. I've been able to top meters on majority of fights that have a good amount of aoe. I was also able to top meters on Thorim, but a lot of dps did die on our kill attempt.

Thank god for Saturday. Finally a day off.

Sunday should be fun. Can't wait.

Ulduar Day Two

Saobuks — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:14:47 GMT

Last night was a very busy day. I had a rough day at school, working on a database project due that night for a grand total of 10 hours (30+ hours since Sunday). I knew this was going to happen, so I let the guild know that I won't be able to raid or be late at best. We ended up finishing 2 hours before the deadline, so I was able to log in an hour before raid end.

Upon logging in, I find out that our server had been down for a while, so I didn't really miss anything besides the first few attempts at XT. So after about an hour's worth of attempts, we were dumbfounded. We were somehow hitting the enrage timer with around 15% left. We couldn't believe it. Our guild prides itself in its dps, and we've never had issues with enrage timers. Many of us knew we were missing something very important. I assumed we were doing the fight correctly since I haven't had the time to do any research on Ulduar bosses while most of the guild has (at least I thought this was the case).

I quickly alt-tabbed and went to WoWWiki to read up on XT. I quickly read the strategy section and saw this:

"All spare tank and healer DPS should be focussed on the heart during Phase 2 - the damage is reflected onto the boss at a 4x rate (1.5 mil heart health compared to 6 mil boss health on 10 man) Primary DPS should hold off attacking the adds for the first 5-15 seconds of phase 2 and focus on the heart to maximise the damage done."

Yes, we ignored the ****ing heart. Yes, we were doing a different mode of the boss. No, it wasn't the hard mode since the hard mode is to break the heart then kill XT. We were doing what we called the "retard mode". Throughout the night, all we did during phase 2 was work on the pummelers and take care of the adds coming from the corners. Our raid leader of two years felt so shitty and stupid that I actually felt kind of sorry for him. At the end of the day, it was everyone's fault for not doing proper research on the boss.

Two wipes later (people lost a ton of focus), we killed XT and learned the trash on the way to Kologarn before ending the raid. Another busy day indeed.

Patch Day Fun

Saobuks — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:35:31 GMT

It was a pretty interesting day to say the least. The long-awaited Ulduar patch finally came out, and I guess I was pretty stoked about it. For about a month and a half, I was raiding one night a week. One night to clear all 25-mans. It was horribly dull. Finally there's something to do in the game besides blowing through content mindlessly.

Surprisingly, patch day wasn't as bad as I thought it would be from a stability standpoint. I assumed two things as soon as I logged in to the game: all of my addons broken and the server going down multiple times resulting in zero playtime. Surprisingly, 99% of my addons worked perfectly after updating, so that was really nice to see. I was able to spec, glyph, and prepare myself for the raid. Of course, I had to roll without the lifetap glyph, and I think it's safe to assume that I won't be raiding with it any time soon.

Aside from that though, we couldn't start the raid until 1 1/2 hours past our raid start time due to the server crashing. But once we got going, it was a lot of fun. Until tonight, I have yet to do any of the Ulduar bosses due to schedule conflicts. PTR tests always ended when we would start our raids, so that sucked. Anyways, Flame Leviathan was a ton of fun. I was assigned to a motorcycle, and man, it was fun. The whole tar thing is pretty cool. Plus, my job on the boss when we get around to doing it with 4 towers up will probably the most interesting since it'll require a lot of coordination with the other motorcycles and siege vehicles.

Razorscale was a joke. It took us probably 3-4 wipes to figure out exactly what was going on. After Razorscale, we tried doing XT, but the trash bug forced us to work on Ignis instead. At that point, we had half an hour left until raid end, so we couldn't make a lot of progress on him. We did realize that we need to bring more than 6 healers on that fight, so hopefully tomorrow we'll have the group to kill the bitch. Plus, we lost a lot of attempts due to healers getting slag pot'd and melee'd at the same time. That bug certainly didn't help. Oh well, hopefully we'll be able to do at least 3 bosses tomorrow night.

40/31's pretty fun though. Seeing huge numbers in succession is pretty to see. Two Incinerate crits, a SF crit, and a Conflag crit had my jaw dropping. I need more playtime on it though. I need to get used to paying attention to 35% instead of 25%. I have to do better on not clipping Immolate. 883 passive haste also doesn't help (thanks Master Conjuror). Other than that though, it's a fun spec from all the big numbers, though not as fun as pre-3.1 affliction for sure.

Let's hope for bug fixes tomorrow, or else I'll start foamin'.

Quite Impressed with 3.1 Specs... so far

Saobuks — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:42:50 GMT

I've been following almost everything 3.1 related with focus on what Blizzard is doing with the warlock trees. Looking at the simcraft thread on EJ, one has to applaud everything Blizzard has done so far. The difference between the highest and lowest dps spec is ~600 dps. Take into account that there are 7 (not counting haunt/ruin+DG) different specs that are within this range. Compare this to simcraft numbers on current specs: haunt/ruin without DG is already 800 dps higher than the closest spec and 1200 dps higher than the least viable spec.

Of course a lot of people would like more changes done to our trees, myself included. I still think they should tone down conflag at its 31-point state and modify deep destro to buff it to its current PTR state. Deep demo could still use some work, and everyone is almost in agreement that demonic pact could use a self buff in addition to its raid buff.

Affliction... doesn't really need anything as long as none of the other specs receive any significant buffs. Looking at its current PTR rotation, it's nowhere near as hard or as volatile as it is now. The removal of immolate in the rotation is enough to make it a lot more manageable and player-friendly. Removing SL didn't really do anything but nerf affliction dps so whatever. I think the last thing Blizzard should do to affliction is increase the duration of SE. This should alleviate SE issues during DS range. It's either that or remove the travel time on haunt, which I think will make the spec a little boring, so I honestly would prefer like a 15s duration on SE.

Other than the few outliers (40/31 and 56/15), Blizz has done an amazing job on our trees. Amongst the 4 pure dps classes (hunter, rogue, mage, warlock), warlocks will most certainly have the largest spec variety in a raiding environment. Not only is this a lot of fun, but it will also reveal how good a player is at playing a warlock. No more excuses of not being affliction and having a DG out, no more excuses that go "the rotation is too hard", none of that bullshit. Almost every high dps spec in 3.1 has something difficult to master.

Decimation weaving is probably harder to maximize than having 90% uptimes on all your affliction dots in high movement fights and variable distances to a mob. The easiest spec I can see would probably be backdraft specs. The lack of an interesting execute and a relatively boring rotation (no MC = no CoA = ez-mode) pretty much equates to boredom.

Regardless, I can't wait for this patch to go live.

The New ZA Bear Sale

Saobuks — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:34:01 GMT

After our 25-mans tonight, our guild leader got together quite possibly our best caster-oriented 9-man group and told us about some guy wanting to buy the Sarth3D10 mount (and Nightfall title of course). Apparently, he's willing to pay us 20,000 gold for it. Wow. I guess this is the new ZA bear sale back in BC. Between the nine of us, we'll be getting over 2k gold each. Wow.

I was never a part of the ZA bear sales back in BC, mainly because I wasn't all that active when it came to doing ZA. I think I did one bear sale back then. At that point, we had two groups selling bears every week or something.

The biggest difference between that and selling a Sarth3D10 mount+title is probably the difficulty. Timed ZA runs rely a lot more on execution than your dps. You can have shitty dps, but with perfect execution and everyone playing smart, it could easily be done. I've only done Sarth3D10 once, and it's probably the second hardest achievement in the current content (Immortal of course being the hardest). Running a 2-tank comp is definitely a lot easier than a 3-tank comp, but a 2-tank comp relies a lot on extremely high dps to avoid having 2 drakes up for too long. Plus, a second set of whelps basically means a wipe.

If we can be successful at this, then I could be looking at 2k gold every week, which should make me pretty wealthy once Ulduar hits. My only gripe with all of this is that undeserving players will be running around with titles and mounts they bought with gold. On one hand, titles and mounts are probably the two things that indicate how successful a player is in this current content. Giving them away defeats the purpose of having these titles and mounts. On the other hand, Sarth3D10 really isn't all that difficult. It might be the second hardest achievement in the game right now, but it's really not saying much. I mean, if we're able to essentially 9-man it, then it's safe to say that it wasn't all that hard.

I was thinking that if people are willing to pay 20k gold for this, I wonder how much would an Immortal title cost? I can tell you right now that not too many guilds will sell this title. It's such an elusive and ridiculously stupid achievement that I'm sure players who have it would hate to see some random person with it just because he had tons of gold. Maybe it's just me, but if I start seeing Joe McBlues the Immortal running around, I'll lose the satisfaction of having something that truly separates myself from the majority.

Back to Earth

Saobuks — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:19:15 GMT

I've picked up a lot of best-in-slot pieces for the past two to three weeks, that it bothered me when NOTHING dropped last night in our 25-mans. Well, a lot of best-in-slot pieces actually dropped last night, just not caster oriented. Our guild has yet to get a Pennant Cloak, and we haven't gotten an Illustration in like a month and a half. Really though, I should not act like this. I went through 6 months of Sunwell picking up 3 pieces of T6 and a wand. I picked up 5 best-in-slot pieces in less than a month. I should be grateful.

Anyways, a lot of things happened yesterday. First, I saw that Blizzard is buffing the hell out of Lightweave Embroidery. If you've been reading my blog, you might have read that I dropped tailoring and spent 6.6k gold to powerlevel JC in 4 hours about a month ago. One might think, "oh my god!!! what a waste!!!", but actually, JC will still be number 1 or 2 when it comes to raiding professions even with the Lightweave change. Given 250 spellpower for 15s every 45s (this has been multiple times on the Warlock forums on EJ), it basically gives passive ~80 SP. Honestly, this is way too strong even if you subtract the bonus that 23 haste would give you (this gives the net gain from going tailoring). It's either they put a 1min ICD on it (similar to Scryer's Bloodgem) effectively reducing the bonus, or buff every other profession to account for this. I highly doubt they would do the latter, so I won't be surprised if they increase its ICD. Remember, all those trinket procs with 45s ICDs only last 10 seconds. The new Lightweave lasts for 15s.

So after reading up on this, I started thinking about my current professions once again. I have Enchanting and Jewelcrafting, and from a raiding standpoint, Enchanting is the weaker profession. I debated for probably less than 10 seconds whether I should drop it for tailoring when they release 3.1, but I quickly decided against it. I've been an enchanter ever since I made this character. I've spent countless hours over the years farming enchants (Crusader, all the non-instance BC enchants, and many others) that it's simply not worth dropping.

Last night, we again did all our 25-mans, failing in Immortal, having 6 or 7 people dive on Sarth2D, and finishing up with Malygos 6min. We accomplished a few dps challenges in Naxx, mainly killing Noth before his first teleport, umm.. well, I guess that was about it. We also got I think around 4-5 peple their black proto-drakes, so that's always nice. Personally, I finally achieved what I've wanted to do in a long time, and that is break 7k dps on Patchwerk. Here's the WWS (no KT since we 20-man'd it for someone's drake and our logger was subbed out).

The first thing you probably noticed was that I did 8.5k dps. "HOLY $@#$ DUDE HOW THE @#$@!!?1?one!!1?" was the first thing that came to my mind. I knew it was wrong, since even the best warlocks haven't legitimately (meaning no parse exploits) broken 8k or even come close to it. So I looked at the data, and I see "my" doomguard pulling over 2k dps with over 150 swings. Right away, I checked our destro warlock, and saw that the report showed her without a pet. Yes, she also had a doomguard (although even with a doomguard her dps was still really low, plus she wasn't using conflag/CB for some odd reason when she's spec'd deep destro) and wasn't given credit for it (same goes for Grobbulus since our DGs were still out). It's also interesting to note that her doomguard on Sapph was given to me even though I had a felhunter out.

So I went and calculated my personal dps (according to dps time, not actual fight time), and I ended up doing ~6.3k dps. If I divide the doomguard's damage by half (mine should have done more since I gave it steroids, aka Kibler's Bits) and add it to my total damage and divide the total by dps time, it comes out to be 7.4k dps. WHOAAAOAO!!!

It feels pretty ****in' good to finally accomplish this feat. Taking into account that this was a relatively slow kill (2'15" isn't anywhere near the best), I feel that I could do even more given higher raid DPS (and maybe popping a wild magic pot pre-pull).

Unfortunately, the rest of the week will be a snoozefest. With all the 25-mans down, there's really nothing to look forward to other than the random 10-mans we'll be doing, which aren't nearly as fun..

Can't Take Anything for Granted

Saobuks — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:57:42 GMT

Since tonight was the end of the week, and I haven't done Sarth10, I figured I might as well pug it. After about an hour of just sitting around and chatting on vent, I finally got an invite to a 1 drake raid. I ended up bringing two of my other guildies to the raid, and what came next reminded us to value the caliber that our guild possesses.

5 out of the 10 people in the raid have yet to do anything but 0drake Sarth10, and one of them was a warrior offtank. The dude barely understood the mechanics of the fight, such as flame walls enraging the lava spawns. His threat was horrid even with vigilance on me (his gear wasn't bad at all). My guildie had to show him the best spot to position the drake, and during the first couple attempts, he was taking flame walls. I think his best comment from tonight was along the lines of: "The drake is too big that I can't click anything behind him." There was also a shadow priest who wasn't using mind sear until I told him, and a boomkin that started jumping around spamming moonfire with the occassional wrath.

Needless to say, the pug raid was definitely lacking in many areas of the game, so it got me thinking of how I have it so well in my current guild. Tanking is perhaps the most consistent and strongest aspect of . Some say it's our DPS, but we have a few players who can't hold their own, so I'm more inclined to put our tanking in higher regard. So basically, seeing some poor tanking opened my eyes to how spoiled we've been. I have yet to pull on our Maly25 6min kills, and we hit 50% over 10 seconds before the 2nd vortex. Even in tonight's Maly10 6min, our bear tank held aggro through 12k TPS that I was generating (according to him). I have never stopped dps'ing in our Maly raids.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the more casual players in the game. Of course, I'd rather raid with players who are able to dedicate more time to the game and have the necessary skills to succeed. I'm a very patient and understanding person, but it's just a little too frustrating to go through this every week. The only raids I usually pug are Vaults 10- and 25-man. That fight is really too simple for me to appreciate what our guild is capable of, while Sarth is more likely to expose poor players. I guess it's just weird seeing failure in the simplest aspects of the game.

My guildmate was saying that tonight was necessary to "spice up our raid week". I couldn't agree more; completely shitting on content in a single night gets boring after the first week. However, if I have to pug anything but VoA every week, I might start hating life.

It's not a solution

Saobuks — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:24:06 GMT

"Nobody mortal was playing Affliction at all without third-party mods for dot timers, which should not be mandatory to play WoW." -Ghostcrawler.

For those of us who're used to the whole affliction thing should regard this as a poor excuse to nerf affliction dps. With what they've done so far, they've dropped one dot, one ****ing dot, out of the rotation (SL).

Anyone good at affliction won't even consider having SL in the rotation hard.
Anyone who's played the spec should know that Haunt is what makes the rotation hard.

They should know that a warlock playing without dot timers will never, EVER, play as well as someone who does (of course assuming equal skill, gear, etc). Dot timers aren't mandatory, but if you want to be competitive in the meters (or not embarass yourself), you will pick some up. If you want to heal as well as you can, you'll pick up more powerful and informative raid frames.

If they really wanted to help those warlocks who think the affliction "rotation" is too hard, they should remove the travel time of Haunt, maybe increase the duration of SE to 15s (keeping it up during DS range is challenging). I don't see anything wrong with a hard spec rewarding high dps, but if Blizzard does, then what the ****!

Dual Specs.. useful

Saobuks — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:38:33 GMT

I've been keeping up with all the 3.1 stuff of course, but so far there's no definitive answer to what spec would be the strongest. Latest SimCraft tests show that most of the specs are pretty close to each other, not counting a doomguard for a haunt/ruin build. This observation led me to think that having dual specs would be pretty useful from a dps standpoint.

We all know that the hour-long cooldown on summoning a doomguard basically makes it almost useless when progressing through an encounter due to all the wipes. So come 3.1, I plan to stick to the strongest spec that's relatively agreed upon (so far 41/30 according to the EJ simcraft thread), and switch to haunt/ruin whenever doomguard is up. If all the specs stay relatively in the same position in the dps heirarchy (haunt/ruin a couple hundred below the top), then at least being able to change my spec with ease and the quickness should see me do more dps on one attempt every hour.

Granted, it's not a lot, but hey, I like affliction a whole lot, but due to my min-maxing nature, it doesn't make any sense to stick with it if it can't do the most dps. If it can do the most dps once every hour, then hell, I'll switch my spec for it no problem. Not to mention that some fights might favor affliction more than a more nuke oriented spec, so having dual specs come even more handy in these situations.

Current content

Saobuks — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:14:14 GMT

I've never been a big fan of the PTR. I thought that it ruined the game to see the "final" product before it is released (I say "final" since there are always numerous patches after a major content patch goes live). I never did Sunwell before it came out, nor did I regret not participating. I can remember putting up a poll in our forums to see if there was enough interest in organizing raids in the PTR to get some experience on Sunwell content before it came out. Since we've only been farming Hyjal/BT for about 2-3 months at that point, no one really cared for it, so we didn't. But now, it's a whole different story.

Our raiding schedule as of late has been: Tuesday/Wednesday 10mans, Thursday 25mans, Sunday finish up 25mans, and finally Monday finish up 10mans. A couple weeks ago, this schedule actually occupied my time down to the very last day since we were still working on achievements and didn't blow through content.

However, this week was an exception; we ended up doing 6min Maly on Tuesday since we failed on it horribly the night (or 2 nights?) before. Due to our failure, another horde guild on the server got their black drakes before we did (they got Immortal on Tuesday). So we did 6min Maly, then two groups did Naxx10. We didn't finish Naxx10, so on Wednesday we did Naxx10 and Sarth10+3. It was actually my first Sarth10 that had any drakes up (I always just pugged it for the badges), and it didn't take us very long to do it (2-tank comps apparently are the most stable). Then on Thursday, we did Naxx25 and set up 2 groups for Sarth25. Last night, I helped out on 8man Maly10, and now I'm out of instances to do (I do Vaults on Tuesday).

It's disappointing really. There are two things that keep me in this game. One, my guild and my friends who I've been with for over a year, and two, raiding. Raiding in this current content patch can honestly be summed up in two words: watered down. We would often reminisce about the Nightbane kills that would take 20 minutes, pre-nerf Hydross, pre-nerf Kael, pre-nerf... everything. Now, my guild can realistically clear all 25man content in a single night assuming we start on time, which we never do (we always start 30-45 mins late which is more than enough time for Malygos), and the same goes for all the 10-man instances.

I was trying to think of a solution for this, and the best I can come up with is the PTR. We can all go to the PTR when everything is cleared, and have fun seeing new content and understanding all the fights. A lot of us have discussed how to approach these upcoming "hard modes", and the general consensus is to learn everything the easy way, then work on as many hard modes that we can. If we already understand how these fights work before they come out, then it should give us a nice headstart in doing all the achievements.

The only real issue is that we start our raids at 10pm CST (server time), and Blizz mentioned that bosses will be up in the PTR during prime time hours, and in our server, 10pm CST is usually when guilds finish up their raiding. Hopefully this won't be an issue.