Grunzford vs. Firelands, Round 2: Hard Mode Unlocked

Killshots aren't quite as satisfying when there's no body to dance around

Second night seeing Ragnaros and we got a guild first kill. Not too shabby, I'd say.


Yep, well done. You do realize that means you're starting Heroic modes next week, right?

...I'm about to lose a lot of repair money, huh?


You have no idea.

What Do You Mean I'm Going to Firelands Tonight?

So you finally got some raiding action, huh Grunz? I would've figured you'd have at least another week or two of gearing up.

Yeah, so did I. Your paladin friend and I have been running heroics for the last week or so, but I figured we wouldn't be seeing the inside of Firelands just yet. Imagine my surprise when I get home Wednesday and instead of heading off to do my dailies, I'm getting dragged inside of a raid I've never seen before to offtank. Apparently their normal offtank was sick that night.


Surprise raid, huh? Guessing you weren't quite up to speed on all of the boss mechanics beforehand, huh?

Up to speed? I knew absolutely nothing about that place going in other than "Ragnaros lives here" and "fire is hot". Those were the extent of my knowledge of Firelands.


Gotta love trial by fire.

Couldn't make it a whole post without a terrible pun, could you?


Nope. Back to the raid though. How'd it go, what with you being completely unprepared?

Surprisingly well actually. We one-shot everything up to Ragnaros and I picked up a few new pieces of gear. I did drop once on Shannox and once on Baleroc, but nothing we couldn't recover from. We weren't quite able to take down Ragnaros though, but we got him to about 10 million or so. Fun fight by the way - little hectic, but the fun fight's usually are.


You mean like Sindragosa?

Not funny. That's annoying, not hectic. There's a difference.


True enough. Sounds like the raid went pretty well considering you went in blind. Did they just have you read up on each fight before the pull?

My training was your friend, the main tank, gave me about 30-60 seconds of explanation right before the pull. It got a little more detailed for Ragnaros, but honestly that's the only one that really requires some preparation. The others are pretty easy to offtank from what I could tell.


Good to hear that the first raid went well for you.

Yeah, it was a good first raid after all that downtime. Group seemed like a nice bunch, so we should get along while you've got me on this assignment. Any idea how long this'll be?


Honestly? I couldn't say. We've still got no date for the Tyria trip and that other scouting mission I was looking at isn't for another couple months. Good news for you though is that with the recent news, you should have work for the foreseeable future. Might even have a new recruit to share the workload over there once I can find a suitable one.

Well, it's better than sitting around the office waiting for work with the rest of the team or packing for the move.

Grunzford, Carrier of Lowbies to 85

So how's Alliance life treating you, Grunz?

First of all, you and the other guys are all jerks.


Duly noted. Seriously though, what've they had you doing over there? I know he specifically requested a tank, but that's the only detail I was given.

No tanking so far, but that would be due to my gear being somewhat, oh what's the word? Ah yes, garbage.


Yeah, we didn't get the chance to set you up with much Horde-side work other than some normal dungeons. So they've been running you through stuff then?

Not yet, but that's due to the main project I've been working on. I have fixed some holes with auction house piece. I'm also doing these Molten Front dailies I was told about that are supposed to eventually let me pick up some decent epic pieces, but from what I can tell I've still got a long ways to go before I start seeing any purple from those. Those Hyjal people want a whole lot of those Marks of the World Tree before they think my gold's good enough.


Fair enough. So what's this main project you've been working on that's important enough to postpone Operation Make Gear Suck Less?

Well your Alliance buddy apparently also recruited a rookie about the same time as he brought me over. Since it didn't make a whole lot of sense to run me through 5-mans just to have to repeat everything once he hit 85, we decided to wait until he caught up.


Makes sense to me, though I don't really understand how that's a project.

Who do you think carried him to 85?


Ah, gotcha.

On the plus side, made a decent chunk of change once he got to the higher-end zones and I could do the same quests. I wasn't able to do all of the quests with him since the neutral factions seemed to recognize me even though I'm a Worgen now, but I still made a few thousand out of it. Enough to pay for those heirlooms you asked me to buy. Have you already told Mordigg you're making him work over there later as a jewelcrafter?


Where's the fun in that?

We Assign Tank Jobs In A Very Diplomatic Manner

Okay guys, we've got a job request from an old friend of ours.  Apparently he's started running some raids with the Alliance and he wants to hire a tank. I know everyone's excited about Tyria and leaving Azeroth behind, but since we don't have a concrete move date, I can't really tell him no. That means that someone gets to take a trip and do some Alliance work until we're ready to go.

So who wants to volunt- Not it!

Not it!

Not it!

Not... damnit!

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.

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.