From "Summer Slowdown" to "We've Run Out of Heroics For The Day"

When I said the team needed more exciting things going on so I could blog about them, at no point did I consider the possibility that one could swing too far in the other direction. Namely, we've had plenty of work lately, but none of us have had any time to write any of it up. Ever since the Argent Coliseum opened up, we've pretty much had work lined up from when we punch in to well after we should've punched out for the day. We're all tired, but it's a good tired as opposed to the normal falling asleep in Dalaran while waiting for a group to show up.

About the time the Coliseum opened, I also found a new guild for Grunzford and Mordigg. So far they both seem to have nothing but good things to say about the new guild, and they certainly aren't wanting for people to do things. To put things in perspective as to how many heroics and raids Grunz has run in the last week, he's managed to pick up every piece of Emblem of Conquest gear except for the pants (he had tier 7.5 already) and still have enough left over to turn into Emblems of Valor for his shoulders. Mordigg made out about as many emblems as Grunz, but unfortunately he did them all before the switch to Conquest. That'll buy a lot of epic gems though, so it's not a total loss.

Speaking of the death knight, he's been a bit annoyed at the hits his survivability seems to have taken lately. Nothing too bad for what he's been doing, but the health and armor loss has been noticeable. In addition, he also mentioned a spec swap for his multi-target tanking build. Blood's still fine for single-target tanking, but the change to Unholy Blight eliminated the main reason to have that for a trash tanking build. I believe he found some Frost build last night, but it still needs a field test or two.

Grunz seemed to make out fairly well with the changes, and in the last few days, he's seen fights that even Solannis hadn't tanked:

While Grunz has seen most of our field time, Sol and I haven't been entirely left out of the fun. For the most part, we've been doing the new 5-man dungeon - Sol for the trinket, me for damn near all of the tanking stuff since I've got Naxx-10 and heroic gear. The new instance is fun, though I do have one question. The warrior champion they've got in there, Marshal Jacob Alerius, is already a bit weird since he's an Arms warrior using a shield, but I'll ignore that as normal PvP weirdness. What I want to know is: what day of warrior school did I sleep through when they taught that backflip throw garbage he does? It's certainly not in any of my talent trees, so what do I need to do to learn this trick? He won't talk regardless of how many times I Shield Slam his face, so I'm open to suggestions.

Summer Slowdown, BlizzCon, and Podcast Question

Gotta love the summer slump - makes it a pain for me to line up work for the guys, which in turn makes for slow blogging. Most of what I've been able to find has all been one-shot jobs a friend of mine has found. Some of those go quite smoothly and everyone gets what they want out of the run. Others end like... well, like Medeleth's last run. I think he still holds a grudge over that one. Unfortunately from the looks of the guild roster most evenings and the way some of them talk about being bored or disillusioned with the whole war against the Scourge, I don't see an end to our PuG adventures in the near future.

The obvious solution to this would be to look for a new guild to contract one or more of the guys out to (or me even - I could use a break from doing paperwork for the rest of the guys). It would give us a new source of work for at least one member of the team and we'd have an inside line for any jobs that come up that require the services of someone else on the team. The downside though would be that whoever got transferred have to leave behind the guild members that still show up and we're friends with; there's nothing physically preventing them from staying in touch, but anyone who's ever changed guilds knows that it's never quite the same as having that green text going back and forth.

If push comes to shove and I end up having to find new homes for some of the team, I do have a couple of leads. In the meantime though, doing the occasional PuG should keep the team in fighting shape, barring any more spectacular failures like Med's last adventure. Well, that and it should keep them from complaining to me about being bored (can't be bored when something is trying to kill you).

In other news, we received our confirmations for BlizzCon today, so everything is ready for the trip now. I'll be bringing a camera and a camcorder with me, so hopefully between the two of those, there'll be something worth posting. I'll also try posting some on Twitter while the show's going on, but any pictures I put up there will be restricted to the iPhone's camera and that really only works on things within Charge range.

Lastly I've got an idea for something for the blog, but right now it's just an idea. I was reading Rilgon's blog today and he posted a proof of concept podcast where he covered hunters and the various things affecting them at the moment. Awesome show by the way, so I recommend any hunters or those interested in hunters take a listen (it's about a half-hour, so it'll give you something to listen to while doing your dailies). Regardless, while listening to his podcast, I started thinking about how it sounded like a lot of fun and maybe I should try my hand at it. Med could round up whatever program I need to record this, we've got a fairly decent microphone that I picked up to discuss raiding strategy (read: yell at people in void zones, make fun of people not in Ventrilo), so all that leaves is the actual content.

There lies the question: what to talk about? Certainly can't talk about hunters like Rilgon. For one he's got that covered, but more importantly our hunter can't even come up with decent pet names, let alone figure out what raiding hunters should be doing. That leaves talking about tanking or posting audio versions of the arguments/discussions we've used in the other posts. Tanking would probably be best, but I'm open to suggestions. While we figure out what to talk about, I'll work with Med to try and figure out how to actually record something. Once we've managed to make something presentable, I'll post it here... well, once I figure out how in the Nether I'm supposed to post audio here.

Medeleth vs. Naxx: Not All Guild PuGs Are Equal

Ragar: Not much to report from the last few weeks. Guild's still on a bit of a hiatus for the summer, so most of us have been enjoying the time off. We have had a few jobs here and there through a buddy of mine - mostly Naxxramas runs, but with the occasional Vault of Archavon or Obsidian Sanctum trip. Admittedly not the most exciting work in the world, but it's still practice for those guys and they got some upgrades.

Medeleth: Not all of us got upgrades...

Ragar: Look, I said I was sorry.

Medeleth: You sent me off to die!

Ragar: Hey now, I didn't line up that job. My shaman friend found that group and asked for a DPS. If I recall, you said something like "I suppose I could take a break from my research to support the masses. They shall stand in awe and wonder at the sight of fel magic and engineering prowess when wielded by a true genius." What happened to all that bravado, Mr. "Creation and destruction are my playthings"?

Medeleth: That "bravado" as you call it was trampled under the boot of Instructor Razuvious as the group proceeded to fail and call retreat three times before calling the raid.

Ragar: Wait, you couldn't kill Razuvious? How in the Nether is that even possible?

Medeleth: Combination of bad Mind Control timing, failure to swap threat between understudies so Bone Barrier was always up, and lack of healing on the understudies. Basically the one tanking Razuvious would either die or the Mind Control would break, then he would immediately run over to myself and one of the mages and express his dissatisfaction at our setting him ablaze.

Ragar: Well you didn't get locked into the run, so that's a plus. Besides, it couldn't have taken that long if you couldn't kill one boss.

Medeleth: We were in there for over an hour. It just took them that long to get ready between pulls. To properly illustrate just how slow these people were, your shaman friend had enough time after a wipe to fly over, use his Ebonweave and Spellweave cooldowns, fly back, then get a drink before they finally remembered they were in a damn dungeon.

Ragar: Well, I think you've beat most of my bad pickup group stories with that one.

Medeleth: Ah, but I'm not finished yet. This was not a true pickup group in the strictest sense of the word. This was a guild run with something like 60-70% of this 25-man group from that guild. These were people who had worked with each other on a regular basis and had apparently set foot into Ulduar. The raid leader even tried using that as encouragement. He said at one point, "C'mon guys, we've taken down Ignis with five people up before. We can do this!" Maybe it's just me, but instead of being motivated by that, all I hear is that either half of his 10-man group or 80% of his 25-man group got themselves killed.

Ragar: Realism does tend to cut into the motivational power of a battle speech. So I take it you don't want any more jobs from them?

Medeleth: If I end up in a group with those people again, I can and will find a way to make you suffer. It may be the next day, it may be a year down the road, but I will have my revenge.

Grunzford vs. Ulduar: The First Few Bosses

Ragar: Sorry for the delay between posts. Bit of a hectic schedule, compounded by an exploding hard drive on one of our Macs.

Medeleth: Which wouldn't have been as big of an issue if you'd been backing up like I'd told you to do.

Ragar: Yeah, yeah, I know. No big deal though - all of the important stuff is backed up, so all it really did was do the spring cleaning I never got around to doing. Anyway, let's get the quick summary out of the way. Solannis, Mordigg, and I are pretty much doing dailies for the moment. The mage and the hunter are both slowly making their way through Northrend. The priest shows up just long enough to disenchant things, then disappears again. Right now most of our field time has been going to Grunzford.

In the past few weeks, he got to tank a 25-man Naxxramas instead of pretending to be kitty DPS and he's had the opportunity to off-tank a couple of 10-man Ulduar runs for our guild. How was your first experience as a raid tank, Grunz?

Grunzford: Far preferable to being DPS. I've got nothing against being a cat, but for doing damage, it just never clicked as well with me as being a boomkin did. Funny thing was I got to off-tank one of those Ulduar-10 runs before Naxx though.

Ragar: Oh? How did that go?

Grunzford: Pretty smoothly, though I did have a bit of hassle from one of the random people the guild had in the run. They were pushing for me to convince you, Sol, or Mordigg to come in instead of me.

Ragar: Was he concerned about your gear or something? You were an off-tank. The stuff the off-tank fights doesn't hit that hard and anything that does would take us down just as fast.

Grunzford: If it were just a concern about my equipment, I might've understood. However, I begin to question their motivations when their gear concern comes moments after saying, "Aw man, we've got two druids. There's competition now." If you're trying to make sure you don't have to roll against people for loot, at least try to hide it. That's just insulting.

Regardless, all of the fights we did went just fine. Razorscale and Ignis went down quickly. They'd already done Deconstructor that run, but I did get to tank Iron Council before we called it. This was the only fight I went down on the whole night.

Ragar: Fusion Punch?

Grunzford: Yeah, the first attempt I ate two ticks of the DoT after one of them. The next attempt had faster dispels, so we got them down that time. I didn't feel too bad about falling to the DoT though, since I'm pretty sure that would have taken any of you three down as well.

After that run wrapped up, I also had that Naxx-25 run with a couple of tanking upgrades and we've also got a 10-man group planning on working on the harder versions of the Ulduar fights in the next week or two.

Ragar: Looks like other than your helm, the rest of your gear's up to the task of doing hard modes, so that should be fine. There is the question of your second spec though, since some of those fights only require one tank.

Grunzford: Yeah, there lies a problem. Right now my second spec is resto, but I don't think we want me healing.

Ragar: Ah, feel inexperienced at healing?

Grunzford: Well, that and the 1100 spellpower. Pretty sure the combination of those two is not a recipe for success.

Ragar: Yeah, that's not so much gonna work. Guess it's time to start grabbing offspec gear.

Grunzford: You mean like all of that DPS gear and healing gear you and Sol keep passing on?

Ragar: Bite me, smartass.

10-Man Raids, Adventures in Powerleveling, and the Druid's First Trip to Naxx

This past week, the guild Solannis and I are in decided to put the 25-man runs on hiatus. Basically the recruits coming in weren't outpacing the people getting burned out from Ulduar, so we weren't making much headway. Well, that and they were apparently tired of repeatedly wiping to the adds on Freya because "don't kill the damn water spirit" is apparently a difficult concept. I think some of it's also just the time of year honestly, but regardless that does put us in the situation of being back to 10-man raiding only and that's just fine with me and Sol.

Now don't get me wrong: Sol, Grunzford, Med, myself, and the rest of the team do enjoy raiding in both 10- and 25-man forms. Tanking or DPSing (maybe one day healing) dragons, giants, and other assorted beings with treasure we want for ourselves is what we do best. I even enjoyed 40-man raiding, despite the general headaches I got from some of those runs, which brings me to my point. Finding nine other people you like can be somewhat difficult, but it's doable. Finding 24 other people you like is another matter altogether.

There's also the matter of raid coordination. In a 10-man run, Sol or I can reasonably know each person in the group and what to expect from them and, in the case of a second tank, we can usually do things like tank switches and cooldown usage with a quick call or sometimes without saying anything. In a 25-man run though, half the time we don't really know much about our fellow raiders other than "he's usually around 4k DPS" or "he'll die to the first void zone". It's also just quieter in 10-man runs, so the tanks don't have to shout over someone for tank switches and other pertinent "I will die if the healers don't hear this" situations. Sol says that last one's particularly annoying for Kologarn.

Alright, so with the 25-man raiding out of the way for the week, that left us with time for some low-level work. Our resident mage Malador made it to 65 today, so he's made a fair bit of progress since my post. He has been complaining though about feeling restricted in leveling to Frost. Something about Ice Barrier and the other trees not being time efficient. We've also taken to subcontracting our services to others to help their leveling progress. Well, not so much subcontracting as it is dragging a buddy of mine through dungeons to help him catch up. If nothing else, it's given Grunzford something to do and apparently it's quite efficient as a druid. To hear him describe it, all he does is bounce around and Swipe at things so they chase him, then Swipe everything down in a giant group and Improved Leader of the Pack keeps him topped off. It's so efficient really that Sol, Mordigg, and I never need to do it again, so we'll just add that to his list of duties. Purely out of business sense though - I would never do something like that out of spite, perish the thought...

Chain-running younger adventurers through dungeons isn't all Grunzford's been up to though. Yesterday he got to go on his first trip to Naxxramas. Unfortunately for him though, it was as a cat, so he didn't get any raid tanking experience. Still better than nothing though and he got a few upgrades to show for it. He says he wasn't real happy with his performance compared to some of the other people - it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great (I think he said 9th or 10th overall for damage). Looking at his talents though, I think part of it comes from being built to be a bear instead of a cat and missing a couple of key talents, but most of it is probably lack of practice being a cat outside of doing dailies. I know that if I were asked to do damage instead of tank, I'd probably do just as badly if not worse and I'm pretty sure Sol keeps his two-handed maces skill around 370 just to get out of having to play retadin for some fights.

Team Update: 6/4

It's been a fairly slow week for us, so nothing major to report. I think Sol's 25-man team only made it as far as Thorim attempts last week, so no progress there. This week's already behind since Tuesday's raid got canceled - bad combination of people with other commitments and some raider turnover. It's unfortunate, but you get periods like this in raiding guilds.

For me, it's been mostly tournament dailies. I did try to get into the Ulduar run this week before they called it, but apparently when they say to the contractors like us to send our mains for the job, there's fine print that says "everyone but Ragar". Bah, like I need their repair bills anyway.

Our new bear tank Grunzford has had a fair bit of action this last week. No raids, but a fair number of heroic runs. Only one piece dropped from any of the runs that he cared for, but it's still Emblems of Heroism towards other gear. It also gave him a bit more practice at tanking, so he'll be a bit better prepared for when I line him up with a Naxxramas job at some point.

Speaking of Naxxramas, our resident shadow priest, Matheion, paid that place a visit this past weekend. Some friends of mine from the guild were going with a pick-up group and said they needed a shadow priest, so I sent him along for the practice. To hear him describe it, it wasn't the worst PuG in the world, but they certainly tried for the title. Sounded like your typical PuG screw-ups to me: assigning people to kite on Gluth who aren't built for it and not giving them enough healing, half the raid dying to the dance on Heigan, only one person cleansing curses on Noth, etc. They ended up not finishing the run, but if nothing else he got some Emblems of Valor and a new pair of pants out of the run.

Most of the last week though has been dedicated to our team's mage. Right now he's 43 and slowly making his way towards Outland. Our team's hunter, Lokaja, asked if he could be next, but after buying epic flight training for the priest and the druid within a few weeks of each other, the team bank needs a breather and that means it's the lowbie's time to shine. Besides, I saw him trying to quest a little the other day and I think he and that wolf of his need a bit more training dummy time before they start questing again. I don't know hunter rotations all that well, but I'm pretty sure he's doing it wrong.

We've got a full house (of tanks)

A couple days ago our resident druid Grunzford finally hit 80. The last couple of days have been us trying to set him up with whatever crafted and AH gear we could acquire for him. Not the easiest task since apparently the only leather anyone sells these days has spell power on it, but we managed to pick him up enough gear for a starter tanking set.

He did get the opportunity to tank his first heroic yesterday though. A buddy of mine was looking for a quick heroic run and I volunteered the druid. In retrospect, it may have been a bit much to have his first real tanking experience be in Utgarde Pinnacle, but hey - no wipe, no foul. Besides that's how I learned how to tank in 40-mans ("You guys gonna take it easy on me?" "Hell no, get to work.")

It's a little too early to go making any concrete judgments from that small of a sample of experience, but from what he was telling me, it sounded pretty similar to warrior tanking in that it was a priority list. Mangle's sorta their version of our Shield Slam with Maul being the bear Heroic Strike, so it's "hit Mangle when it's up and use Maul when rage allows". After that it's keeping a stack of five Lacerates up (used only as often as necessary to keep the stack up), Feral Faerie Fire when it's up, and Swipe as their filler strike like Devastate is for us.

There are some slight differences, like how our filler strike is what keeps our five-stack up for us instead being a "use every 13.5 seconds" ability, but the main difference is that they don't have proc-related conditions for their priority list. For warriors, we're always watching out for a Sword and Board proc or for Revenge to come up, but bears appear to stick with their basic priority list. They technically have a proc in the form of Omen of Clarity, but that's just a free hit of any kind rather than a specific ability. Since they've got something to press every cooldown and they all take about the same amount of rage, it essentially just becomes a free Maul in the end.

I'm hoping that in the near future, I'll be able to line him up with some more heroic work or perhaps a raid or two to get some better info on how their abilities work. Most of the raid work that comes our way tends to have "send Solannis" in the notes, but we'll see. If I can find work for the lock, then I can find work for a tank.