This weekend was a bit hectic. Ragar and I began contracting for a different guild (basically all of the people who we’d been working with before, just more raid focused) and soon after signing up, I was pulled into a 25-man Naxxramas group. The guild leader had a friend with an existing run that had two wings cleared and he thought this would be a good warm-up while they were trying to fill out the roster for guild-only runs. Good idea in theory, but there was a problem: between the raid leader’s friends, our guild, and some of our friends, we only had about 15 people.
Having to look for random people to fill out two-fifths of this run was already a bad sign. The fact that it took us about 25 minutes to get ten people from Trade didn’t help. After they filled out the raid, my feral druid friend and I looked at the roster: four tanks (me and him were the spare off-tanks), seven or eight healers, and the rest DPS. Someone asked, “Why do we need four tanks?” A valid question, we thought. The response from one of our healers: “In case two die.” There are certain things a tank doesn’t want to hear. This would be one of them. (Editor’s Note: This sounds suspiciously like my old guild’s strategy for Princess Huhuran, Operation “Let the First Tank Die”. Always hated that plan... - Rags)
Things started off fine in the Construct Quarter. Patchwerk was a breeze. Grobbulus actually gave me something to do (picked up slimes since “don’t stand in front of him” is apparently hard). Gluth took a couple tries since only one of the hunters was actually trying to kite the zombies, so the druid tank and I went to go do that instead so we could actually move on. That just left Thaddius... It was going fine at first: the two other constructs went down at the same time, all but one person made the jump, and the tank got aggro right away. Once the polarity shifts started happening though, things took a turn for the worse.
I’ll admit that there are certain aspects of dungeon raiding I take for granted that maybe I shouldn’t. I read various blogs and look for ways to improve my performance (still have a long ways to go before I’d consider myself an expert). I look for strategies before attempting a fight. I discuss tanking and other theory with my fellow raiders looking for tweaks we can make to improve efficiency. Not everyone does that, and I can accept this fact. However, there is one thing I just assumed everyone would know that I was apparently mistaken about, and it brings to mind a question: did the schools everywhere but Silvermoon decide to stop teaching people the difference between left and right? I’m asking because apparently this was a problem for us.
To help explain that last bit, allow me to do a quick run-through of how Thaddius works. When he does a Polarity Shift, everyone in the raid will get either a positive charge or a negative one (think heroic Mechanar). Prior to beginning the fight, your raid leader will assign sides of the room for charges; ours yelled out before each attempt that, looking from the doorway, the right side of the room would be for the positive charges and the left side would be negative. Once he gives you a charge, you need to quickly get to the side of Thaddius that all of the people with the same charge as you are on. Two reasons for this: 1) everyone gets a damage buff based on how many people they’re near with the same charge, and 2) if you’re near someone with the opposite charge, you both take quite a bit of damage until you move away from each other. The Chain Lightnings and melee damage on the tank are enough for the healers without adding more, and the damage buff is necessary for taking Thaddius down quick enough that he doesn’t enrage and destroy the raid.
Here’s where that left/right comment comes in. For a 10-man fight against Thaddius, and 25-mans where you don’t have to grab random people, you’ll usually just run straight through Thaddius to cut down on as much DPS downtime as possible. However if you want to play it safe, you can tell people to run around Thaddius instead of through him. That way, anyone who’s a bit slow should be far enough away from the group to avoid damage and the only people near them should be making the same charge change. It was decided to go with the cautious plan, so the raid leader said, “If you have to switch sides, go around Thaddius on your right-hand side. Not his, yours.” Sounds simple, right? There were at least five people that had trouble with that and went to the left. And not just once, but every single time until we would wipe and have to regroup for yet another attempt! My favorite line from someone in the raid: “How about we say to go counter-clockwise in case that’s easier to understand?” I’m curious as to who out there would understand that, but find “go to your right” a foreign concept.
This obviously wasn’t going to work, so the raid leader decided to go with the other plan and have everyone run straight through for polarity shifts. I assume he thought that maybe they’d move fast enough through him to avoid damage if they didn’t have to hold up their hands every time to remember which side is their right. This worked better, but we still had people getting knocked out too early which would drop our damage and cause another wipe.
This went on for a while and some of us began to notice a pattern. One of the pick-up DPS, particularly the one who was the last to hit the ready check every single attempt, seemed to be the first one on the floor every attempt. This prompted my druid friend and a priest I know to pull out the damage meters. Neat little gadgets, those damage meters. Besides the obvious stuff like damage dealt and which attacks are how much of said damage, it also checks other things like healing dealt and, pertinent in this case, friendly fire. It’s just like it sounds: this is damage you have done to your teammates. This would include damage from abilities like Baron Geddon’s Living Bomb, Loken’s Arc Lightning, and for Thaddius, damage from being near people with opposite charges. They pulled up the friendly fire meter to look for any oddities. The main tank was 2nd on the list with something like 200,000 damage; higher than preferable, but the tank is the closest one to the other charge group each time and since he can’t really move during the fight, he just has to get into position and hope everyone else transitions in a timely fashion. Third was about 20,000 below that and it went down from there. First however would be our pick-up friend with 280,000 damage, 40% more damage than the person who everyone expects to be at the top and is at the mercy of the rest of the raid.
The druid and priest brought this to the attention of the raid, hoping to get said DPS to understand that whatever he was doing was killing people in the raid and making the healers’ jobs more difficult. Instead, they got one of the other pick-ups to chime in with, “I’ve run with him before and he wouldn’t do that. Both your meters must be busted.”
There are certain things in life that can be disputed. One can argue for or against talent specs based on damage output, survivability, etc. One can argue strategy based on group make-up and possible achievements. Math, however, is not one of those disputable concepts. Numbers are not malicious and trying to single someone out for fun. They’re a reflection of the actions of the raid and entirely dependent on the raiders themselves. The fact that both of their meters agreed within a percentage point or two certainly didn’t help his “The maths are out to get us!” philosophy either.
Somehow we managed to take down Thaddius (after an enrage) and move on to the Death Knight Quarter. Nothing really notable here, other than one wipe on the Four Horsemen; they assigned ranged to the back two horsemen who proceeded to get smashed by melee attacks, so the druid and I took over and got something else to do). The raid was called at this point, so we all packed up and headed off to repair our equipment. I did end up getting my tier leggings from the run and my priest friend picked up a couple of pieces, so it wasn’t a total loss.
I do look forward to being able to go back to Naxxramas, but without hitting Trade for filler. While it was good experience seeing the differences between the 10- and 25-man versions, I’m willing to wait for more experienced people... or at least someone who can tell their right from their left.
No comments:
Post a Comment