Ever since I saw the first player-recorded WoW videos, I thought the concept was fun. Unfortunately I was plagued throughout the years of either riding the fine line of having just about enough hardware power to just play the game or less, and it wasn't really an active project after trying and miserably lagging to pieces a couple of times.
Early in this year I decided to screw everything that was saving pennies and bought hardware with little to no holding back on the economic side. After some issues of riding on a very outdated bios version, I now got everything running perfectly and found I could run fraps recording with everything at highest quality. So I decided to give it a shot and see how it panned out with no real prior experience of editing whatsoever. Too bad Youtube butchers quality hard - my test video of a crappy Saurfang kill even after all processing looks pretty shanky at HD quality. But eh, you have to start somewhere.
Offnote: You really ought to watch it in HD to make out something meaningful of what's going on in the video.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Recap: Four weeks of progress
Time waits for no one, and this rings true without exceptions. I've been meant to post a few new entries for a while, and generally the problem isn't getting the text down or finding a theme for each update - it's rather the time of moving it from the unformatted notepad stage onto here and finalizing it into a somewhat readable piece of information. As such hopefully in general the coming updates may be a bit more closely posted (perhaps even to the point you wouldn't call me a slack-hobby-blogger) but that's not really important. It's of course fun for me to have readers but it was originally not the intent at all, I merely put up this simple basic page during a period of extreme apathy and decided to stick with it and update whenever I felt I wanted to. What strikes me as a problem for blogs I on occasion glance at is how once most of their owners gets a decent number of followers they feel a pressure to update - not because they got something to say or want to do it, but because they feel they have to do it. To be fair, this isn't what I envision a blogpage to be. Then it's more like a newspage. While that is nice in its own sense, it's not necessarily what most, and definitely not all, blogs are about.
But enough of that! As a guild we've had some incredible progress the past month, now sitting on 11/12 in heroic mode in Icecrown Citadel and having completed the frost wyrm meta achievement for the place as well (funnily before any of us got the 10-man one done, wonder how often that occurs?) Because of the sheer wall of text it'd procure to just put it all together, I'm going to break it down into a per-boss basis mainly focusing on the two harder encounters before Lich King himself: Sindragosa and Professor Putricide.
Sindragosa was, no matter how I try to see it, the hardest boss for us so far in the instance maybe tied with Lady Deathwhisper (and to be honest, most of the problems on her shouldn't have been occuring at all) even surpassing heroic Professor - I'll go into more detail on this later. What I can say about Sindra in particular is that it became apparent after just one try that this is a boss where there truly is little room for error, even with the buffet of the zone buff. Beating the enrage timer for something hasn't ever been a real issue for us as a guild, and this wasn't any exception either. The problem seems to most commonly either be breaking down to
1) Tanks dying
2) Other people dying
Which, when I think about it, summarizes the issue of wiping in a raid on anything...
Either way, the biggest changes from normal mode are mainly that the anti-caster debuff, Unchained Magic, does AoE explosions when instability stacks go off. As a result, there's a lot more micromanagement in both casting, positions, and most importantly: healing assignments. I can tell you this; I'm truly happy I'm not a healer anymore and keeping up with some crazy surrounding overview and ludicrously quickly needed switches in roles. Big props to our healers and the stuff they manage to pull off really - I may question everyone's play sometimes but then I remember I'd hate to be in your position and do what do you do.
Other things are details like one more frost tomb during air phases, and the fact the frost bombs dropping on the ground will one-shot anyone hit by it. It took a lot of combat-resses and patience to make sure everyone followed the concept of Line of Sight on at least some of the tries, but in the end it worked out fine.
Last phase with the magic buffet and hiding behind tombs is a lot more stressy. There's the instability dealing light aoe damage that may go off at one or two stacks in the raid, the stacking frost damage debuff from swinging at the boss, the boss' damaging aura, and the fact the magic buffet stacks increase the damage done by all these. I find myself casting a lot of heals on myself in this fight, in particular during last phase and when I need to stop attacking to drop my Chilled to the Bone stacks. It's nice though when an encounter design's difficulty goes on the point you'll start to resort to using things you under normal circumstances wouldn't have time or thought to deploy, and as long as everyone's aware of the situation for each individual I believe this is a great way to give the raiding scene more depth on occasion.
The fun thing is, after a couple of progress nights on her we eventually scored a kill - with no deaths. None. We didn't even have to combat-res someone, nobody died at any point at all. Now, of course the concept of "Nobody dying, and the raid doing enough dps" is all that you need in theory to beat an encounter, first kills very rarely go off on such a smooth level as this.
Now, Professor Putricide. While the boss' design inherently is terribly annoying for a ret paladin with all its endless target switches, the boss in heroic mode got such interesting twists that it still becomes one of the better experiences in the place.
So what's different? First off, there's an additional element to the fight called Unbound Plague that needs to be handled without fail or somebody dies. If you've ever done the Rotting Frost Giant weekly quest inside ICC, you'll remember that he casts a debuff that lasts for a few seconds and once it runs out, it kills you - so you need to pass it on to someone else before it runs out and in the process of doing so you become immune to receiving it again for a period. In the case of heroic Putricide, it's somewhat reversed when you pass it on. You will still die from the ticks after around 10 seconds, but when you pass it on you get a debuff that increases the damage taken from the ticks by 250%. This debuff also stacks infinitely. To handle this, we've used an addon that marks the player with the plague with a skull, and marks three other close players without the weakness debuff as possible candidates to pass it to. This needs to effectively be handled throughout the entire fight, albeit the nuke phase at the end can be done with just letting the plague jump indefinitely between melee as they won't leave the area they are in before the boss is dead.
Secondly, at the phase changes of 80% and 35%, he doesn't stun the raid with Tear Gas. Instead, he spawns one of each ooze while remaining passive himself at the lab table for 30 seconds. Half the raid will get a debuff each; one that only allows you to hurt the orange ooze, and the other that restricts you to damaging the green one. This is completely random who gets what, so if you're unlucky all healers and tanks could get one color and it'd be extremely tight to kill it. Also, these debuffs does not restrict the other colored ooze from performing it's chasing conditions on you: the orange one can still chase someone with the green debuff and the green ooze can still root someone with the orange one.
The biggest part about this boss early on was the ridiculously tight enrage timer. Not the direct 10 minutes hard enrage, but rather the phase three one with the debuffs stacking on the tanks. Even with the zone buff, we were hard pressed at the end running with 3 tanks, sitting on what I believe is 3 stacks, 3 stacks, 2 stacks at the time of the boss' death. And compared to normal, it's without doubt a wipe if a tank ever dies. Regardless, once we got the basics down and most of it came to raw dps numbers I felt this boss was easier than Sindragosa's level of micromanagement from most players in the raid. This is sadly also probably why our favorite Professor will be far too zergable at lvl85 in Cataclysm compared to some other bosses in the instance.
All in all, I feel we've been very productive recently. I'm not a very competetive person by nature and prefer the way we do things at our own pace with a lighter schedule than most raiding guilds, but it's sure fun when you do manage to keep up the good work at a quite good level. We killed Putricide at world 386 or something - which when you think about it is quite good when put side by side with the sheer number of guilds and players in general that play the game. Let's keep up the steam for heroic Lich King, boys and girls!
Random screenshots:
Lady Deathwhisper
Sindragosa
Frostwyrms!
But enough of that! As a guild we've had some incredible progress the past month, now sitting on 11/12 in heroic mode in Icecrown Citadel and having completed the frost wyrm meta achievement for the place as well (funnily before any of us got the 10-man one done, wonder how often that occurs?) Because of the sheer wall of text it'd procure to just put it all together, I'm going to break it down into a per-boss basis mainly focusing on the two harder encounters before Lich King himself: Sindragosa and Professor Putricide.
Sindragosa was, no matter how I try to see it, the hardest boss for us so far in the instance maybe tied with Lady Deathwhisper (and to be honest, most of the problems on her shouldn't have been occuring at all) even surpassing heroic Professor - I'll go into more detail on this later. What I can say about Sindra in particular is that it became apparent after just one try that this is a boss where there truly is little room for error, even with the buffet of the zone buff. Beating the enrage timer for something hasn't ever been a real issue for us as a guild, and this wasn't any exception either. The problem seems to most commonly either be breaking down to
1) Tanks dying
2) Other people dying
Which, when I think about it, summarizes the issue of wiping in a raid on anything...
Either way, the biggest changes from normal mode are mainly that the anti-caster debuff, Unchained Magic, does AoE explosions when instability stacks go off. As a result, there's a lot more micromanagement in both casting, positions, and most importantly: healing assignments. I can tell you this; I'm truly happy I'm not a healer anymore and keeping up with some crazy surrounding overview and ludicrously quickly needed switches in roles. Big props to our healers and the stuff they manage to pull off really - I may question everyone's play sometimes but then I remember I'd hate to be in your position and do what do you do.
Other things are details like one more frost tomb during air phases, and the fact the frost bombs dropping on the ground will one-shot anyone hit by it. It took a lot of combat-resses and patience to make sure everyone followed the concept of Line of Sight on at least some of the tries, but in the end it worked out fine.
Last phase with the magic buffet and hiding behind tombs is a lot more stressy. There's the instability dealing light aoe damage that may go off at one or two stacks in the raid, the stacking frost damage debuff from swinging at the boss, the boss' damaging aura, and the fact the magic buffet stacks increase the damage done by all these. I find myself casting a lot of heals on myself in this fight, in particular during last phase and when I need to stop attacking to drop my Chilled to the Bone stacks. It's nice though when an encounter design's difficulty goes on the point you'll start to resort to using things you under normal circumstances wouldn't have time or thought to deploy, and as long as everyone's aware of the situation for each individual I believe this is a great way to give the raiding scene more depth on occasion.
The fun thing is, after a couple of progress nights on her we eventually scored a kill - with no deaths. None. We didn't even have to combat-res someone, nobody died at any point at all. Now, of course the concept of "Nobody dying, and the raid doing enough dps" is all that you need in theory to beat an encounter, first kills very rarely go off on such a smooth level as this.
Now, Professor Putricide. While the boss' design inherently is terribly annoying for a ret paladin with all its endless target switches, the boss in heroic mode got such interesting twists that it still becomes one of the better experiences in the place.
So what's different? First off, there's an additional element to the fight called Unbound Plague that needs to be handled without fail or somebody dies. If you've ever done the Rotting Frost Giant weekly quest inside ICC, you'll remember that he casts a debuff that lasts for a few seconds and once it runs out, it kills you - so you need to pass it on to someone else before it runs out and in the process of doing so you become immune to receiving it again for a period. In the case of heroic Putricide, it's somewhat reversed when you pass it on. You will still die from the ticks after around 10 seconds, but when you pass it on you get a debuff that increases the damage taken from the ticks by 250%. This debuff also stacks infinitely. To handle this, we've used an addon that marks the player with the plague with a skull, and marks three other close players without the weakness debuff as possible candidates to pass it to. This needs to effectively be handled throughout the entire fight, albeit the nuke phase at the end can be done with just letting the plague jump indefinitely between melee as they won't leave the area they are in before the boss is dead.
Secondly, at the phase changes of 80% and 35%, he doesn't stun the raid with Tear Gas. Instead, he spawns one of each ooze while remaining passive himself at the lab table for 30 seconds. Half the raid will get a debuff each; one that only allows you to hurt the orange ooze, and the other that restricts you to damaging the green one. This is completely random who gets what, so if you're unlucky all healers and tanks could get one color and it'd be extremely tight to kill it. Also, these debuffs does not restrict the other colored ooze from performing it's chasing conditions on you: the orange one can still chase someone with the green debuff and the green ooze can still root someone with the orange one.
The biggest part about this boss early on was the ridiculously tight enrage timer. Not the direct 10 minutes hard enrage, but rather the phase three one with the debuffs stacking on the tanks. Even with the zone buff, we were hard pressed at the end running with 3 tanks, sitting on what I believe is 3 stacks, 3 stacks, 2 stacks at the time of the boss' death. And compared to normal, it's without doubt a wipe if a tank ever dies. Regardless, once we got the basics down and most of it came to raw dps numbers I felt this boss was easier than Sindragosa's level of micromanagement from most players in the raid. This is sadly also probably why our favorite Professor will be far too zergable at lvl85 in Cataclysm compared to some other bosses in the instance.
All in all, I feel we've been very productive recently. I'm not a very competetive person by nature and prefer the way we do things at our own pace with a lighter schedule than most raiding guilds, but it's sure fun when you do manage to keep up the good work at a quite good level. We killed Putricide at world 386 or something - which when you think about it is quite good when put side by side with the sheer number of guilds and players in general that play the game. Let's keep up the steam for heroic Lich King, boys and girls!
Random screenshots:
Lady Deathwhisper
Sindragosa
Frostwyrms!
