Responsible Raiding

/RANT

I've talked to you before about how tanking is all about controlling each pull, well this goes double for those leading a group or raid. I doesn't however stop at knowing exactly what should happen and what you should do. Oh no if your leading the group whatever the size it's important that you make sure the everyone knows what should be going on.

I was prompted to write this post after being in a couple of 10 man raids where those who were supposedly in charge of the raid did not do this. It is essential that everyone know their role.

Did I stress that enough? Lets try again with bold writing this time.

You have to make sure that everyone knows what the hell is going on and what they are supposed to do! If your not prepared to do this then for the love of god don't wonder around with the little raid leader crown like your doing something.

Yes I know I may be stressing the point a little too much but it's something that I feel strongly about, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't organize a raid if your not going to lead it. Organize it then pass leadership onto someone else and make sure they know they are supposed to be leading. This happens in 5 man group all the time. I lost count of the times I've been invited as the last spot in a party to tank it then had leader passed to me. This also goes the other way, I have on many occasions tanked an instance while not being the leader because I was not 100% comfortable with the instance or I thought that someone else would do a better job. I mean there's not point in me wondering around marking things and asking the party to do stuff if I don't know what the hell I'm doing or if there is someone else in the group who could do it better.

Even when leading a group I will always ask if everyone is familiar with each boss and some of the more difficult pulls. If there are multiple ways to do a pull or a boss I will ask the group which way the want to do it and then give a very brief recap so that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing. I mean OMG I just wasted 30-40 seconds going over a boss fight, however will we make up the lost time ... oh thats right we make it up by not wiping and having to run back and rebuff (damn I think my brain just had a sarcastic fit there).

It's not a lot I expect from whoever is leading the group. It's simple little things, going over the raid markings and kill order, healing assignments if necessary, special CC duties. Also if you ask someone to do something get an acknowledgment from them. Don't just say it and expect them to do it without confirming it. Did they fully understand what you want them to do?, were they afk for a short bit?, did their doorbell just ring?, did they simply miss the chat or didn't hear you? Waiting for a simple "Ok", "np" or "sure" eliminates all the factors.

So in conclusion to my rant I would like to say that if you don't do the above mentioned things don't go around pretending to lead the group, cuz your just not doing it.

/RANT OFF

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior Ranting off.

I Lead a Raid o.O

First off, it's not relevent to the title but has to be mentioned ... SoL got our first kill in Black Temple, Yeah Baby! and for the first time ever I broke 1000 dps on a single target boss fight, YEAH BABY!!!

And just look at all those funky costumes, the guild is really coming along in this regards.

Anyway on to the title topic.

This Thursday a cooperative Magtheridon run was organized between SoL and my old guild, who were having problems getting enough people together for a 25 man raid. The project was proposed and organized by Lady B, who while gathering the people together dropped this bombshell on me. Her reasoning was since she had organized the raid she sure as hell wasn't going to lead it and decided to stick me with the job :(

Having gotten the raid of the ground Lady B decided her work was done and took a back seat for the rest of the night. She promptly handed over the job of organizing the groups to Kitty the new GM of my old guild who did a decent job of it, I didn't do this as I was still finishing a speed heroic Underbog run.

My speed run finished I get a summon and start organizing healing and tanking assignments. I've had the benefit of watching and learning from some very competent raid leader over the past while so I just did my best to emulate them.

The trash on the led up to maggy when smoothly, right up until the point when while dealing with the patrol we somehow managed to pull another group of adds. Being the 4th tank and generally unnecessary I was in a good position and managed to puck them up with a quick thunderclap, the dps stuck to the kill order and the tanks came and picked mobs off me. Due to everyone keeping their heads we managed to avoid a wipe.

Next came big n' ugly himself. Most of us knew that this would be no walk over since the majority of the raid had never been here before, and we only had two warlocks. I started giving a brief explanation of the fight and picking the people to be cube clickers. I picked people be their reliability rather than any other reason. I also didn't pick tanks to be clickers because I wasn't sure what our dps was like and could not guarantee that all the adds would be down before the first blast waves were cast.

The first couple of attempts went as I expected with the raid dieing to blast waves and everyone learned their role in the encounter. What surprised me was how well we did on the channelers,the warlocks did the best that could be expected of them on the infernals as there were only two and the tanks picked up the slack often tanking their channeler and up to two infernals for a short time before the warlocks could get to them.

Then everything clicked, with the clickers anyway. i guess all my shouting of "Clickers to your positions" and "CLICK, CLICK, CLICK" payed off and on our 3rd attempt we got him down to 27%. Only 27% because people had to learn about the falling debris and getting rockshotted.

Then the most entertaining event of the night happened. Our fury warrior had to go to work so we picked up a friend of lady B's a hunter to fill his spot for our last attempt. he was in the neighborhood so he got an invite and made his way down ... and wiped the raid.

Thats right he gets pugged into a 25 man raid is there for all of 3 seconds and wipes it.

How you ask?

He had been doing some PvP and had forgotten to take his pet off aggressive. So upon entering maggy's chamber his pet promptly lays into the first channeler it sees starting the encounter with the raid half buffed and nobody ready or in position. The entire raid started roaring their heads off with laughter. made all the more funny because scant minutes before we had been jokingly bad mouthing the "huntards" and explaining why all blame, no matter the situation should be appropriated to them. Truly it was a classic moment that I will remember for a long time to come.

Anyway we recover from our wipe and set into our final, final attempt. we only get maggy to about 50% this time due to one of the clickers dieing at an untimely moment. In the end almost everyone had a great time, and I want to give my heart felt thanks to those who did not need maggy for their title or gear but still came along anyway.

... oh and next time get some other poor sucker to be the RL.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I's Been Doin Some PvP

First off I should talk about why I've been doing a lot of PvP lately. It's because I wanted a sword. In this case the Merciless Gladiators Greatsword to replace my axe.

For a long time I've been told that the best weapon for arms dps is a two hander sword, but I'm one of those strange people that just cant take something at face value. Oh no, I'm one of those annoying people that wants to know why something is better before I change. Also is a seeming downgrade in weapon really going to increase my dps?

So I sat down and did a little comparison of the bonus for using axes and the bonus for using swords.

Axes: 5/5 In Poleaxe Specialization gives you a bonus 5% critical strike chance. With 2/2 Impale this is the same as saying it gives you a 5% chance to do an additional 120% damage and with my meta gem this is increased to 123%. Pretty cool eh?

But lets take a look at swords.

Swords: 5/5 in Sword Specialization gives you a 5% chance to make an extra attack. This is the same as saying it has a 5% chance to do 100% extra damage.

But thats not all, these bonus attacks also has a 30% chance (my unbuffed crit) of doing an extra 123% damage. You do the math and you'll find that this already puts swords ahead of axes.

But yet again thats not all, this added bonus actually scales with raid buffs. In a raid my crit is ~5% higher meaning these bonus attacks have an increased chance of doing 223% damage instead of 100% damage. Pretty spiffy right?

But whats this? Theres more?

Darn tootin' theres more. This ability procs off any attack you make, this includes Pummel and Hamstring. These low damage attack also benefit from axes ... but seeing Pummel crit just makes me sad (Oh yay I just hit an 80 damage crit /cry), but with swords you just made at the very least another 100% weapon damage.

This is really cool because there are times you will be asked to interrupt spells and if you play a raiding arms warrior you will know that there is that spare rotation where both Mortal Strike and Whirlwind are on cooldown. Normally you would use this to refresh your Battle, Commanding or Demoralizing Shout. But what if these still have plenty of time on them? Throw in a hamstring for good measure, it costs bugger all rage and your doing nothing better with that time so why not chance an extra attack.

I don't know if it procs off intercept, but it would be really really cool if it did :)

There is just one problem with using swords that I'm having big problems getting used to.

Image.

Before I was all like "STUNTY SMASH!!1!1!eleven".

Now I'm all like "STUNTY ..... slice ??? o.O".

I'm telling you it's just not the same and I don't know if I'll ever recover.


Anyway back to PvP.

It all started a while back when a warrior on my server Khir found out about my blog and has been pestering me into being a better warrior ever since. In fact just today he found the one + attack power gem on my gear that I had somehow forgotten to replace with + strength.

Anyway a while back he found out that I suck at PvP, and very kindly took me into a few battle grounds to show me the right way to do it and later on he led a few premades for my guild (who for the most part only PvP when necessary). Ever since then every time I go into a battle ground I'm starting to enjoy it more and more (mage's still scare the pant off me though). Infact I started enjoying it so much that when I had my think about swords and decided I really wanted one I went out and ground twice as much honor as I ever have in one day.


I'm telling you my brain nearly exploded. And do people you ignore on other servers stay in your ignore list? If so mine must be damn near full ... again.

The thing is I'm starting to enjoy PvP so much I might even start taking arena seriously.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Lots of Stuff.

First I want to start with an apology for my lack of posting. It just seems that every time I sit down to write a new post it all comes out as gibberish .... I mean more so than usual. The past week has contained a few firsts for me.

The first first, if that makes any sense at all, was a full clear of Zul'Aman. Before this I had only ever killed 3 bosses in ZA and wiped on the fourth. This meant that for most of the raid I was winging it. I barely know the trash up to the fourth boss and nothing about anything after that, and to make matters worse every time we got to a boss, it was always "Ok Stunty is going to tank the boss" and every time I heard that phrase I got this "what the hell is going on" feeling.

In the end we got a full clear with only two wipes, one being on the third boss, meaning we only got two of the timed chests, and once on the last boss. Here is a quick pis of the group standing victorious over the corpse of Zul'Jin.


The second first was SoL going 3/5 in Mount Hyjal. On the trash waves before Kaz'rogal I was running around like mad picking up loose mobs and chasing down Gargoyles and generally having a great time. Then came the big guy himself. For this I just switched into my dps gear and had at him. Near the end of the fight everything started going to pot, caster were blowing up while standing too close to other caster and blowing them up too, the main tank went down, and it looked like a wipe as he went around one shotting almost everyone.

But whats this? Thrall is still in the fight and at almost 100% health, a couple of our druids have gone into cat mode and are hiding at the back somewhere, and Kaz'rogal is at 8%....

Go Thrall GO!!

Thrall and his NPC buddies manage to kill the big bugger for us. At one point it looked bad but Kaz managed to kite himself over to some of the Tauren NPC's and our victory was assured.


So then it was decided to make Thrall an honorary member of SoL, and we threw a bit of a party for him.


The third first was the very next day (yesterday) when SoL went 4/5 in Mount Hyjal. I think the trash waves for this fight have rekindled my flagging love of tanking. It's pure unadulterated seat of your pant tanking. Running after infernals and gargoyles and tanking 2,3,4 mobs at a time, you just grab anything nearby and get it to hit you instead of anything else. Fun fun fun.

As for Azgalor himself, this is one of the only bosses I've found where it's actually fun to be an off tank. He casts that doom spell on people and they come running over to you and die leaving a Doom Guard in their place that you have to tank we ended the fight with each of the three off tanks tanking two doom guards each. What makes it interesting is the fact that the off tanks can get the mark of doom themselves. This meant that at one point I was tanking my Doom Guard, the two doom guards K was tanking and a fourth that spawned when K died, not that easy picking them all up :)

Fortunately K got a Battle Rez and took a couple off me. In the end everything went well and another demon bit the dust, and the first 3 T6 glove entered the guild. One was taken by the happy Boomkin you see below.


In conclusion I will try to post more often over the next week, if for no other reason that to avoid writing such a long post.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

SoL 2/5 In Mount Hyjal.

So this wednesday we stepped into our rotation on T6 content. From now on It will be one week Tier 5 and one week Tier 6, and for the first time ever I stepped into Mount Hyjal as melee dps ... and I loved it.

Mount Hyjal is like a dps warrior dream some true. The trash is mainly pally tanked and the bosses rarely do anything to make you stop hitting them. On the trash I achieved over 1000 dps, a personal record for me on Rage Winterchill I only achieved 850 dps due to him constantly casting Death and Decay right under himself and getting frostbolted for a second time 12 seconds ... 12 seconds, before my trinket cooldown was up and dieing. I'm telling you this guy hates me. On Anetheron I pulled off 960 dps, another personal record for me on single target dps. Now if only I could get a damn Enhancement Shaman and a decent Sword.

Anyway it took us two attempts but the second boss in MH finally bit the dust.

As you can see the Boomkin was late to the party.

After we celebrated for a while someone went and talked to lady Jaina, and she gave some speech about having bought time and pulling back. she then started casting a mass teleport spell, and this being our first time getting this far we all thought "oh cool I wonder where she's taking us" so we all gathered up near her.


As it turns out she just teleported the npc's and left us standing there like fools. Then the trash came.


With cries of "Flee", "Run for it!!", and "F### this I'm porting to shatt" we scattered, eventually the undead cornered me high up in the hills and rather than let them have the satisfaction of killing me I jumped to my death with a cry of "You''ll never take me aliiiiiiiiveeeeeeee!!!". If anyone out there can tell me the correct way to deal with this part of the fight I would be most appreciative. Although the comedy factor of our first time doing it was something I will remember for a long time.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Our first taste of Kael.

Tonight we went and had our first attemp at Kael'thas in the Eye. This is a fight I had been waiting and waiting for. When I first hit level 70 and spent a bit of time learning about the raids that could be done and the bosses that we could face, this was the guy I set my eye's on. I never dreamed of getting any further than him ... In fact I never even expected to see him before the expansion.

You can have your Illidan and your Sunwell. This is the guy I dreamed of facing and I fear that it may be my last real goal before the expansion. Thats not to say that the guild won't progress further, and thats not to say that I won't enjoy raiding anymore, but it may be the last fight I get truly and utterly excited about.

Here he is

I learned that the latest patch had nerfed the health of the advisor's and I feared that this would make the fight far too easy and spoil my epic fight. These fears was soon proved to be groundless as time and again we wiped going into phase 3. Those damn weapons of his just won't die fast enough. With each and every wipe we got better and better, but then we had respawns on the trash and we called it for the night.

I went away from the raid feeling great, not because we had an easy night, but because we had a hard night of learning a new and difficult boss. It was great and I can't wait for more.

Oh, and as for my incompetent warrior moment. When tanking Lord Sanguinar in phase 3, do not what ever you do, mix up your stance dance (for Berserker Rage) and Shield block key bindings. This can result in you taking two 6k crushing blows and ending up face down on the ground. It happened to me so I know :)

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

Who re you People?

First off,

10,000 hits ?!?!? Who are you people and why do you read this drivel.


Secondly,

Sorry for my late silence on the blog but I have spent my time finally getting my little gnome warlock to level 70 and sorting out some RL problems.

Thirdly,

A little pic from after last nights raid where 5 of us went and farmed the hat. When Em heard about it he nearly had a fit as he collects in game pets.

We Wiped On Gruul

Last night we had an epic raid, with everyone bringing their A-game. It started off with us aiming to kill Karathress and Morogrim in SSC, and we did in 1 hour and 20 minutes. And I didn't die.

What should we do now?

Ok lets go kill Rage Winterchill in Mount Hyjal. Apparently he had been buffed, but it didn't really seem that way as we tore through the trash and then him. Although I must say I was a bit peeved at him. A while ago I finally got my Medallion of the Alliance to replace my Insignia of the Alliance just for this fight, and what does he do? For the first time ever he shoots me more than once with his frostbolt thingy ... Three times all in the space of my trinkets new and improves 2 min cooldown ... the bastard *shakes fist*. Fortunately I was still in my prot gear so I had a huge stack of health to soak up the damage and I didn't die.

Ok we just one shot him, now what do we do?

Lets go test out the trash in Black Temple. This was where the real fun of the night began, thats not to say that we weren't having fun before. In fact we had a new guild member along with us and he commented that he had never heard so many people laughing in any raid he's ever been on.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time running around like headless chickens with shouts of "What the hell does this mob do?", "Which way are we going again?" and "I'm dead!". I was starting to get a little worried though since we were nearly at High Warlord Whatshisface and I had yet to die that night, it would be breaking a long standing tradition if we were to have a 25 man raid and I was to survive the entire night.

Then it happened, just two pulls away from the boss ... a wipe!! And Stunty goes down!!!

But it did not end there, we killed the group that did this, and on the very next pull I was to die again ... this was embarrassing since I was a tank and I was the only one to die on that pull :(

Then we got our first real look at High warlord Whatshisface.


And this is us after engaging him.

I'm somewhere in the pile in the center of the pic. I think we did alright considering 90% of us knew nothing about the fight and when we popped the first bubble half of the raid exploded. That little episode brings me nicely on to the next part of my post.

Before we start getting overconfident I would like to take us back a day to sunday where, like the title say, we wiped on gruul. And here's the screenie to prove it :)


Ok so we had a lot of people new to the fight along with us and this was the result of Half the raid exploding on the first shatter, I was quite in awe of the damage that could be wreaked on a raid .... by itself /Epic Fail

We downed him on the second try and I was pleased to see that nobody died in the first few shatters, although i almost killed our MT when I Intercepted at Gruul to get away from a bunch of people only to realize that the MT had feral charged at him also, resulting in us slooooowly trying to run away from each other, and fortunately we made it far enough away for a wipe not to happen,

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.



Oh and in a show of solidarity (even though I'm not a druid) against BRKWWA .... *Clears throat* "FOSHIZZEL"

A Long Rambling Post On Arms

First off I did my first ever Karazhan one shot today, and killed Netherspite for the very first time ever. Thats right I've killed Maggy, Gruul, 6/6 in SSC, 3/4 in TK, and one boss in MH... but never killed Netherspite until today. What was amazing in my mind was that we did the entire run with the exception of Netherspite with only one tank.


And while I only managed to achieve second place on the Damage Done, just take a look at the list I did top .... can you tell what it is?


Thats right I topped the death list. It's a running joke in raids that I die the most, and while this is not always true it's close enough as makes no difference. It was during this run that I stopped to ask myself why this is. Well some of it is just plain bad luck and there's nothing I can do about that, but as for the rest ...

The fist answer that came to mind was in fact another question. What does an arms warrior bring to the raid?

So I started to list things off in my mind. The most obvious is that they bring the Blood Frenzy buff increasing physical damage for the entire raid by 4%. The other obvious one was good melee dps. Yet another was the shout buffs. But none of these helped me reach a conclusive answer. So what else does an Arms Warrior bring to the raid?

The answer lies in the question. He's a warrior, and warriors have plate, which is admittedly a very minor advantage in end game, but they also have a large stack of health to go with it, and this is not a minor advantage, it's a bloody great big advantage if you know how to use it.

Yes yes, I know that a dps warrior will almost exclusively be in Berserker Stance and will consequently be taking 10% extra damage, but stop to think for a second, look at the mage, the priest, the shaman and the rogue. They, at the same gearing level as my dps gear, will be running around with ~7k health unbuffed, where as I am running around with 9.5-10k unbuffed. thats a damn slight more than a 10% increase. Don't get me wrong I can and have been one shotted by raid bosses and understand that if anything seriously sets it's eyes on me instead of a tank I'm a goner, but that doesn't mean there is no damage to be taken elsewhere.

Ok, so you have more health than the average dps, how does this explain you dieing so often?

This is because I use my health bar as a weapon and a resource.

Use your health bar as a weapon? Than make no sense Stunty.

Ok let me try and explain. If your a regular reader of my blog, you will have by now seen some screen shots of my UI. I have it all arranged by order of importance and set it out so it's easy to read. I have incoming damage scrolling up at the left of my character, incoming heals scrolling down to the left, and Out going damage floating around at the top of the screen since it's the least important. I have large unit frames for both myself and my target just above my action bars, compact but easy to read raid frames to the top left, and Buffs and Debuffs to the top right.

Why did I go to all this trouble with my UI when blizzard provides you with a workable and functional one? It's because I wanted more information readily available in an easy to process format. This allows me to look at the amount of incoming damage, incoming heals, state of the raid, and then make an informed decision as to whether or not I should allow myself to take more damage to increase my dps time. I can instantly tell if I'm going to be putting too much pressure on the healers, or if the damage I will take will kill me and how much damage I will do in return for this health pay off. And the better you know the fight and the players in your raid the harder you can push this health resource.

25 man raids are filled with AoE damage, and from judging rage, health, heals, incoming damage, position in my dps rotation, my brain is constantly running estimates on whether taking a couple of thousand more damage will provide a significant bonus in dps out put. Sometimes the answer is no, sometimes yes, I just go with my gut instincts on it and it rarely lets me down.

This is the reason why even with my sub par gear (mostly crafted and karazhan/gruuls gear) I can still provide good dps in most fights. But this comes at the price of the "always dead" reputation. Because I push so hard one small mistake is often all it takes to kill me, and I am the Incompetent Warrior after all. Also there are times, usually in the last few percent of a boss fight, where I feel that the extra damage I can do in the time it takes for me to die is actually more than the damage I would do if I were to play it safe and survive, and a quick study of the combat log and the situation after I died have proved me to be right more often than not. There are also times where I know I'm going to die whatever I do, and getting in one last damage rotation has got to be better than running away and dieing anyway.

Told you it was a long ramble about arms, and for the life of me I don't know why I wrote it ... but I'm sure as hell not going to throw it away after spending so long on it.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.

I Gots Me T5 Glove YAY

Hurray!!!

I got my first piece of Tier 5 gear ... and it was completely undeserved. I was having a completely crap night that night, I mean seriously I stank. The only saving grace was that I was running as dps and not as a tank where having such a bad night would have let everyone down even more.

I had picked up some kind of virus that kept trying to open Internet Explorer, but having banned it from making any kind of Internet connection all this resulted in was it periodically minimizing WoW repeatedly for about 20-30 seconds. I spent most of yesterday tracking it down and eradicating it from my pc, but that night I just couldn't find it. Maybe it was having this happen which threw me off my game so much, but whatever the reason I just didn't bring my A-Game.

On the Lurker Below I was completely mistiming my movements to escape being hit by his whirl which eventually lead to my death close to the end of the fight. At one point I was so low on health that I couldn't risk jumping into the water to escape his Spout and had to run around behind him as he spouted hoping a healer could throw a heal on me as I did so. Fortunately one did, which was lucks since after his spout I misjudged whirls range again and was knocked into the water.

On Leo I kept messing up my damage rotation and misclicking abilities which crushed my dps output in an already melee unfriendly fight. Although on a plus note I did manage to survive for the longest I ever have in phase three. In fact according to the WWS report it was after he died ... if only by a fraction of a second.

Anyway hopefully I can get over this funk and bring my A-Game for the next raid. And to lighten the mood here are a couple of fun events that happened.

My Epic DPS fail on the trash in heroic black morass broadcast over Guild chat.

Click to enlarge

Proof that no one can resist my dwarfish charms. Here is Lady B obviously overcome by my Fiendishly handsome dwarven features, and also my apparently charming voice on vent (or so I've been told, personally I can't stand to hear recordings of my voice and I don't know how other people can).


We had to restrain her for her own good after that.


So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.