What in Hera’s name is WRONG with people? YEESH!

Yes, you guessed it, it’s time for …  MORE PUG FAIL!

Utgarde Pinnacle: The DK

Vladimir of Sen’jin, congratulations. You were the first person I’ve initiated a vote-to-kick on.

You kept pulling when asked not to, you were rude to the original tank, and your childish and unnecessary behavior caused him to leave. You also used “gay” as a derogatory descriptor, which was just icing on the cake. The ALL CAPS thing you  had going on was annoying.

While you were out of the instance ganking lowbies or whatever you do for fun, the healer and the other DPS and i spoke openly about planning to vote kick you as soon as we were able. I almost wish we had waited until just before the final boss to get that extra dig in of wasting your time, but I was also glad to just have you GONE.

You’re on my ignore list. I never have to deal with you again.

Culling of Strathome: The Druid

This instance is annoying anyway. It’s a guaranteed 30 minutes, once you’re past the 5 minute opening sequence. It was quite obvious to me from the start that we had 2 new folks who didn’t know WHAT THE FUCK they were doing.

Two of the DPS left at the outset (right after Rixa the shaman asked if anyone had a Love Fool, not sure if it was related). No worries, replaced them quickly and moved on.

Rixa and Hordekiller i think the Pally-tanks name was, if you don’t know what to do in an instance … ASK. I’d be happy to explain it. But watching you run in the OPPOSITE direction from the little white flag on the mini map made it pretty clear you’d not done Culling before, despite your little conversation about “having lost the drake rolls SO many times…”

Other than that, the run went smoothly, no ones health got low, the gauntlet was a little sticky with the tank not paying attention to where the rest of his group was… and then, Rixa you little shit, you Needed on the Frozen Orb.  Right after you and the tank got your achievements for both normal AND Heroic Culling of Strat at the same time. I should have ignored you before I said “FU for rolling need on the orb” and quit group.

Frozen Orbs: The Principle of the Thing

Okay. I know they’re 10g on the auction house. I get that, when I have 8k in the bank, that’s Not A Big Deal (TM). It is the fucking principal of the thing.

Other than the Emblems of Frost, there are exactly two things that are useful to me out of those instances: Enchanting Mats and Frozen Orbs. I am WELL beyond the gear, and the gold I could make more through dailies and not have to deal with rude asshats.

So when you roll Need on the Frozen Orb, you are basically saying that you are more deserving of that loot than me, or anyone else in the run. That is not the case. I deserve an honest chance to get something useful to me out of the run.

So I will be rolling Need from now on. I will be announcing my intention to do so ahead of time, but I will be rolling Need. Until Blizzard makes those Frozen Orbs auto-greed, I will be rolling Need.

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Hello, all you party people. Here is a little update from my corner of the world.

Love is in the Air

I have, in general, ignored this holiday event. I had all the achievements from last year, and they all carried over. I did run through the new questline, and did all of the new dailies precisely once. Did the new boss to get the achievement, and that’s about it. If a friend asked, I would lend them my summons for the day, but I’m not actively pursuing the stuff off the holiday boss.

In a general, abstract “I haven’t looked that closely” sense,  I think the changes they made were a good thing, especially over the RNG screwage of last year.  You still have a chance to not get all the candies you need, but at least you can buy all the candy BAGS you need, without depending on a random drop for those, too.

I have not looked at ALL at the Lunar festival stuff. Hopefully they’ve done something similar, perhaps added one new achievement or something that I can do peacefully and go on my way.

Raiding

Raiding is going well. Has Aggro (my primary guild) is doing 10 mans, and on Friday 1 shot the first 4 bosses, Festergut and 2-shot Rotface. We had a couple wipes on the Princes, made it to Blood Queen with 1 minute to spare on the quest timer, then got our faces et.

I did the whole run on Timov which was nice, since they usually have me run Cali for the first 4, then swap over. I don’t mind it, but it locks both toons to the same instance and locks them out of loot.

On that note, Muradin’s Spyglass is the hotness, and everyone should get one. Except dorf rogues.

On Friday I sat out of raid because I was on call for the weekend. They had rostered me on Cal, and rostered out the warlock who’d gone on Thursday. (We do a random roll, high roll wins, with some fudging for role-balance). That let him follow through, and meant that if I got paged for work, they wouldn’t be waiting on me.

They got a first “kill” on the Dreamweaver event, and got a 2nd kill on Putricide. Go team.

Pug Madness

In general, I love the new PUG system. There are always specific cases of pure suck, however. Three tales of Pug Horror behind the cut.

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Okay. So after a quite spectacular FAIL in Pit of Saron the other day, I am, for my own benefit, posting a review of boss mechanics for both Scourgelord Tyrannus and the Devourer of Souls from Forge of Souls.

Both of these bosses have an ability where they transfer incoming damage to another player in the party.

POS: Tyrannus

(For added humor, remember that “POS” is also the acronym for “piece of shit.”)

Tyrannus is the last boss in Pit of Saron. The main ability he has that causes problems is Overlord’s Brand. Overlord’s Brand causes one of two effects:

• Any damage done by the branded individual is amplified redirected to Tyrannus’ target.
• Any healing done by the branded individual is amplified & mirrored to Tyrannus.

It is very obvious who is branded, as there are little lines of lightning between you and the boss.

What this Means for DPS:

NO DOTS. Which sucks for warlocks (among other classes) because a large portion of our damage comes from the DoTs we cast. Boomkins and Feral druids are also gimped by this. Death Knights can’t use diseases.

STOP CASTING. The minute the warning comes up on Deadly Boss Mods (you are using DBM or some other party fight warning, right?) stop doing anything.

Any damage you do from the second the Brand is applied, will get transferred teh the tanks.

This includes DoTs already on teh target, as well as spells “in flight”. I need to do the fight again with a good group. I don’t recall if there is a cast time, or if it’s an immediate application. If there’s warning, interrupt your own casting.

I could not find anything that stated explicitly whether or not the targeted player’s pet’s damage would also transfer. I pulled my pet back, just to be safe, but it may not be necessary since they tend to count as their own damage source.

What this Means for Healers:

If you have an off spec healer, ask them to help out if you get branded. Otherwise, your heals will still hit the tank, they’ll just also hit Tyrannus.

Pretty much, you hope that the healer doesn’t get branded too much.

FOS: Devourer of Souls

Devourer is the end boss in Forge of Souls, which has a very similar ability to Overlord’s Brand called Mirrored Soul.  (Copy cat…).

Opposite to Brand, when Mirrored Soul is cast, the target begins RECEIVING damage done to Devourer. ALL players must stop DPS immediately so the player who is targeted by Mirror doesn’t go down in a blaze. This includes pets.

As with Brand, all DoT’s, including those already on the target, will transfer damage.

Why this is so Frustrating

First off, it’s frustrating because both mechanics severely gimp the DPS output of many classes. Warlocks, Feral & Balance Druids all have DoT-heavy rotations. For Death Knights, their Diseases are a large part of their DPS, and many of their skills are amplified when their diseases are on the target.

These fights remove a goodly portion of DPS for those classes.  If I was going to play these fights by the book, Caliban would be casting one spell: Shadowbolt (Or incinerate for destro).  That is one spell, as opposed to 3-to-5 in a normal rotation.

As a warlock, I already have trouble doing DPS in heroics. (I REALLY need to do a full Destro spec for the burst damage), and this just makes me feel even more gimp.

Secondly, it’s an idiot check. And when the idiots are killing other people, instead of earning their own special Darwin Award, it’s incredibly frustrating.

In the age of GearScore, people have this notion that they can just face roll these instances. And with the level of gear players currently easily have access to through the badge system, that’s true in a lot of cases. There are some fights where you need to be situationally aware and get out of the fire, but for the most part as long as your IQ is on par with a chimp, you can get through most things.

However, in the Icecrown Citadel 5-mans the difficulty was ramped up severely. You can’t treat them like Heroic Utgarde Keep, you have to pay attention to what you’re doing, and some players just can’t or won’t do so, because they’re so concentrated on — whatever they’re concentrated on. On most fights, 4 competent people can cover for one idiot. On these fights, one idiot can get someone else killed.

And if you have more than one idiot…

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it's pretty pUgly in here.

I don’t like the new 5-mans, because they are pug killers. And when all I’m after are my 2 frost badges, they can be endless montages of humiliation and shame.

Case in point, the Pit of Saron pug Caliban got yesterday.

We smashed the instance, up to the gauntlet. Then we had problems.

The tree healer was not right on top of the tank,and the pally tank wasn’t dropping consecrate as often as I’d expect. Therefore, the tree was getting aggro and was lagging behind, and the tank wasn’t looking backwards.

We got through the first half of the gauntlet, but wiped at the end. The tree got dazed, stuck back in the tunnel with a pack of mobs, and splatted. He was unfortunately not close enough to the end of the gauntlet to use the soulstone and survive.

On the run back, I picked up one of the skeletons the tank had skipped and got splatted. We managed to get through the gauntlet in one piece that time, but Tyrannus took us down. Much bitching about fight mechanics (and I hate that fight anyway. It and the Souls guy deserve their own post).

On the way back in, the TANK aggroed the mob she’d skipped and I ended up getting close enough I got in combat, pulling aggro when I tried to help them kill it (sans healer) and died.

4th death in the instance. I thanked the healer for being good, and left.

I’m placing the blame for this one squarely on the tank. I did not see many consecrates while running through the gauntlet. Didn’t see many Avenger shield toss thingies.  I do not think she was doing all she could to make sure the gauntlet mobs were focused squarely on her.

The Tyrannus fight was mechanics and bad luck, I think. And I’m going to review that fight so it’s right in my head.

Timov also got Pit for his daily (I swear they run in streaks), but we rick rolled it, with only one death on Ick & Krick.

The new LFG is great. It can also be really frustrating when I have limited time, just want my badges, and having already spent 15 minutes waiting for a group, get in one that can’t do the instance.

I had a similar bout of stupid in a Culling of Strat instance last week, also on Cali. That group we could have done it if everyone had stuck it out for one more attempt. But half the people dropped, and I wasn’t going to waste time getting a group for a half cleared instance.

I think my new rule is going to be:

• Unless you absolutely can’t, make sure you go with at least 2 people you know.
• After 3 deaths that aren’t my fault, drop group.
• If you are frustrated and it’s past the 15 minute mark, don’t feel bad about leaving.

I play the game for fun. And my time is just as valuable as that of the other folks in the instance. I’m not going to be rude about it, and I’m usually more than willing to give it a chance, but I’m not going to beat my head on the wall repeatedly for the benefit of 4 strangers.

If I determine that the group is not capable of accomplishing what I need accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, I will leave.

*Image from WoWHead, not hotlinked.

ETA: Okay, I feel silly. I don’t pull out the pug pet because I found the butt scooting behavior disgusting. But I just got it. It’s a pug, and it’s wiping. Someone at Blizzard has a twisted sense of humor. Still not going to pull the pet out much, but I think that’s hilarious.

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Lich King! Get in the Van!

Look, Groups, if you have enough DPS to get TO the chase in Halls of Reflection… you have enough DPS to do the chase CORRECTLY.

So stop being idiots and just do it right, mmkay?

*Shaggy is copyright Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros’ Animation.

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So, not much from the gnome lately. Sad, I know.

My instance guides died after the first one (Nexus is half written, but don’t have the interest to go back to it at the moment.)

Raiding is okay, we’re stuck in plague and blood wings. I was not present for my guilds kills on either Festergut or Rotface or the Blood Princes, (or the associated ball jokes).

I was present for the 3 hour wipe-a-ron for Blood Queen and Putricide last night. (10 man)

Blood Queen’s AoE hurts like a son of a bitch. That was killing us more than anything. I don’t think we ever got to the point where the first person bitten passed the bite on.

We did make some progress on Putricide, but things still fall apart pretty quickly after the Phase2 transition.

So, a little disheartened. And now that school is starting, my raid time will be diminished. I’m sure the winter weather isn’t helping, either. We need the rain badly, but it gets depressing after a while.

I am off to learn stuffs. Hope you’re having a spiffy day. ^_^

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As with many guilds, we got our first encounter with Festergut and Rotface this past week. Some of this will probably be repetition from Friday’s post, but I’m sure you can deal.

For reference, this is all on 10-man.

Stinky & Precious

Stinky is definately the easier of the two. He summons no zombies, and just does his AOE Fart of Doom and Decimate. Other than that, straightforward tank-n-spank.

Precious is a bitch w/ her Zombie Summon. Our strat so far has been to stand there, burn the zombies when they spawn, then get back on Precious. As the fight goes on, she seems to summon them more and more frequently, so you can’t spend all your time on the Zombies, or you get no DPS on the boss. So far we’re using a “stand there and take it like a man” approach. We get her down, so it works, I suppose.

Festergut

Festergut is about a bajillion times easier than his “brother”, and I definately recommend that your raid start with him.

You can watch the vids on tankspot for yourself, but what we did is have all melee standing on him, all ranged spread out on one side of the room. Range collapsed on the person who got spored to get the inoculation.

Otherwise, DPS the shit out of him. I think we got lucky and didn’t have any 2-spores in the ranged. It only took us 1, maybe 2 attempts to get him down.

JerkRotface

This fight is a bitch. There is SO much going on. Each person needs to be situationally aware, and on top of their own shit.

Unfortunately there are some folks in my guild for whom this is a challenge.

Caliban’s Things To Know about Rotface:

• There is a lot of DBM text spam during this fight. Turning on the “special warning” for slime spray adds the little “alert sound”.  Since I’ve already got a lot of visual things to watch with dot timers, etc, the sound makes me look up, see where Rotface is facing and make sure I’m out of the line of spray.
• Slime Spray will hit you across the room. If you are kiting slimes, check your position when the slime spray cast warning goes off.
• Dont’ stand in the green stuff (duh). Slime pools hit for 2-4k every second.
• Don’t stand near the slimes. All slimes have a 10-yard aoe tick that HURTS. You have to get your baby slime w/in 10 yards of the other slime to merge them, but don’t hang out to party.
• The DBM warning for the ooze explosion comes early. Someone needs to watch the ooze until it actually shoots the oozes out and THEN everyone needs to move. It’s targeted at where the 3 players were standing when the oozes are “fired” and not when the actual warning goes off. We’ve lost folks because people moved early and folks ran into a slime bomb.

This is a busy fight, and absolutely everyone needs to be aware of their surroundings.

One thing we haven’t tried (because it seems as if folks don’t have attention to spare at the moment) is having the Infected person call out when they’re away from the group and can have their debuff removed. Although the damage from the ooze AOE is the same as the damage from the infection, so the healers would have to heal it either way, so I guess that’s not anything to worry about.

One other mechanic that I can’t find proof on is what happens to the little slimes when the person they’re attached to dies. Anecdotaly, I saw what looked like them “fixating” on someone else, but they never did it to me explicitly, so I can’t be sure.

Saurfang 25

We made some good progress on this on Sunday, getting him down under 14% a couple times. Unfortunately by that point he was gaining so much power that he was marking another person every few seconds and we just couldn’t muscle through.

I think we’re having problems with folks getting hit by the blood beasts, so we’re going to have to work on that.

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So, we ran ICC10 last night.

We were just inside the first doorway AoEing down trash when I saw … a horse run in. It kicked a couple times, then ran back out again.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to snap a screenshot, because it was hilarious. I’m sure my reaction was probably MORE hilarious than the horse show: “WTF is that HORSE doing there?”

It appears it was Fury, and he just decided to run in and help the other NPCs.

Good News! The Slime is Flowing!

So, we took our first look at Rotface last night, and let me tell you, it’s a look that will linger.

A quick note here on Stinky and Precious. Stinky was easy, and died pretty quickly. Precious took us two attempts because WTF Zombies. They seemed to spawn more quickly as the fight went on, and we just got nickle and dimed to death.

Rotface is an interesting fight. We got him (I’m assuming it’s a him, and I’m not getting any closer to check, TYVM) down to 30% a couple times, but we’d usually lost either a healer or a tank by that point, and the rest of us fell like dominoes in a hurricane.

Some important things:

• Don’t dispell the debuff, trigger happy decursers. It makes the mini-slime spawn immediately.
• Rotface likes healers. Or the RNG hates us. Or both. It seemed like nearly every attempt, the first person slimed was a healer.
• DBM’s warning for the Slime Explosion seems to happen a little early. You don’t actually need to move until he starts casting it, but it seemed like DBM Warned a good few seconds ahead of time.
• DBM’s warning for the Slime Spray from Rotface didn’t catch my attention much. I probably need to make it flash my screen. It happens a lot, and you need to keep an eye out for it.

We switched to 3 healers for our last attempt, but I think we lost a tank to bad timing or something and that was it. Having a druid for this fight will probably help, because there is a LOT going on, and with the insta-casts they can kite their slime and still heal.

I’m pretty sure we’ll get him down tonight. And then it’s onto his buddy, Festergut.

Whee!

The models are REALLY cool … in a gross kind of way.

*Image from WoWHead

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Heroic Anub is a pain in the ass. It didn’t help that at the phase 3 transition, our Dorf priest would die if the adds so much as looked at him funny. It was close, half of us were dead but we did it. (I need to check, I think a lot of my raid achievement posts contain the phrase “half of us were dead”…)

LOLOculus

So of course, right after I write up my guide to it, they nerf Oculus. I was well timed, or something.

They’re also nerfing Lady Deathstrike>whisper in terms of lowering her mana, and changing up the adds a smidge. Since we were … a little close when we got her down on Sunday, that should pretty much make her a guaranteed kill this next week.

Dammit, I can’t find the link for that one. Ah well, I’m sure it’s been linked by far more visible blogs than mine by now.

Happy Thursday, true believers.

[ETA]: Oh right. New bosses this week. Suppose I should go read up on them before I have to pretend to know what I’m doing. Or something.
Look! Something shiny! *runs off*

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The Oculus is probably the dungeon that gives me the most apprehension. Mainly because back when I was the level to actually run it, it was HARD and people hated it and stayed away.

This unfortunately has left us with a lot of players who don’t know what the heck they’re doing with the instance. (Or, how many bosses there are. >_<)

So, here is

Caliban’s Guide to : The Oculus

(intro post to guides here)

General Zone Info

The Oculus lies in the western part of Borean Tundra, and the intance itself encompasses the floating rings and platforms suspended above the Nexus. It has a bad rap because it used to be REALLY hard, and about 2/3rd’s of the instance requires vehicle combat in the form of flying drakes.

In 3.2 and 3.3, the health of many mobs was reduced, and the drakes were made to scale with the rider’s Item level.

There are 4 bosses, and you need to kill all of them to progress.

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