Yogg-Saron

This week, after some excellent progress in our first night in Ulduar (eight bosses down), we were in a good position to finally see the last two bosses of the instance. We only had Freya left to quickly down on Sunday night, then we were on to General Vezax.

Who went down in three tries. First attempt got him to 34%. Second attempt wasn't quite as good - a cast wasn't interrupted which took out the healer on me, and I died shortly after. At this point, our Paladin healer had realised he could solo heal me without any mana issues, so we downed General Vezax on the third try with one tank, two healers and seven DPS (four of which were melee).

We went on to Yogg-Saron, which was a disaster. We wiped twice in about ten minutes because people couldn't handle not standing in the clouds (what the fuck? It's not difficult to avoid them), then people said we should call it because people were getting unfocused. I have a different word for it, but whatever. We still had two days before the reset, which meant Yogg-Saron was (in my mind) going down this week.

Last night we went back to Ulduar, and had some more attempts on Yogg-Saron. Phase one generally went smoothly, with only the very occasional additional add spawn (which we could handle). The first few attempts on the second phase were ugly, with the group ending up spread out, DPS not knowing what they should be targetting, and people running in the opposite direction when they got brain linked.

We finally made some progress, getting Yogg-Saron to 49% before wiping. I was confident that, with a few more attempts, we could reach phase three. The next attempt was awful, with the melee DPS only getting 300k damage done on the brain in 12 minutes of the 15 minute enrage timer. Healer had to leave, we called it less than two hours after the first pull of the evening.

This is where I got annoyed. People having to go and calling a raid due to a lack of replacements I can understand. However, people seem generally unwilling to dedicate any more time to working on Yogg-Saron this week, which I don't understand and find frustrating. Apparently spending two nights wiping on a boss is enough. What the hell? We've spent less than one full night's worth of raiding wiping on the boss, it was just spread out across two evenings.

The raid content is only going to get harder - if they're unwilling to dedicate more than a few hours a week to learning difficult content, we're going to make incredibly slow progress and there's no point in me being here.

I can sort of understand wanting to do ToC for the emblems and loot, but they've already downed the Northrend Beasts this week, and Lord Jaraxxus won't (shouldn't) take an entire raid session to kill. Two attempts at most, otherwise something is wrong. Will we then go back to Ulduar and spend more time on Yogg-Saron, or just do nothing?

General Vezhax

See what I did there? Yeah, I'm cool.

There are about a million words I would use to describe this fight and none of them are what you might call positive. It may have something to do with the fact that Protection Paladins are basically given the finger in this entire encounter.

And, if I'm perfectly honest, I was expecting this to happen sooner. I've heard that pretty much every other tank class would be better suited than Paladins for almost every boss encounter, and was expecting to come across such a situation before the second to last boss of the raid. Yet I have succeeded on all of the bosses thus far, and will likely succeed again.

Being the only tank class that uses mana we're the only ones that are affected by the lack of mana regeneration. I don't gain enough back from Spiritual Attunement (my spec only has a single point in the talent) to cover continual full rotations, so I'm left with gaps where I have wasted GCDs. Add to that the lack of Paladin cooldowns making the encounter exponentially harder due to the absolute necessity for kiting (which, if you fuck it up, means a wipe).

I'm considering switching my Retribution offspec to a second Protection spec just to pick up 5 points in Divinity for the additional healing and the extra point in Spiritual Attunement for additional mana regeneration. Just for one boss. Fuck you Blizzard.

But I'm a pro. I work around my classes inherent disadvantages for the encounter as best I can. The major problem right now is the lack of mana efficient healing - we simply haven't been able to find a way to keep our healers from going out of mana well before the end of the fight. Not that that's anybody's fault, but it's something we're going to have to think about and work on if/when we reach the General this week.

Mimiron: 42 Rebirth: 1

As the title suggests, we finally downed Mimiron. After 42 wipes, but who's counting? Took us about six and a half hours across three nights, but we've finally killed him. Vent and the guild channel exploded when we finally got him, as you'd expect.

Our third try of the evening last night saw us reach phase 4 for the first time, but fail because of a lack of co-ordination - we only had two ranged DPS in the group, one of which was focusing on the body rather than the head. We would only reach phase 4 twice (the second time coming several wipes after the first), and down him the second time it happened. The kill was by no means perfect - we lost the only mage in the group during the second phase (druid combat rezzed while waiting for phase three to start) and we only had seven people up when he went down - but a kill is a kill. Hopefully improvements will be made next week.

We also downed the Assembly of Iron after Mimiron. My first time killing them, bringing my personal Ulduar progress up to 10/14.

We'll be trying General Vezax in tonight's raid after (hopefully quickly) downing Hodir, Thorim and Freya. I'm not sure if we'll get to see Yogg-Saron this week, but it is a possibility - we have three days of raiding Ulduar 10 left before the reset.

Ulduar Update

So I haven't really written much about Ulduar for a while now. That's because I haven't really seen any new content; 10 man progression is still on 10/14 (we've yet to even attempt Mimiron) and 25 man progression is now at 3/14 (Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and XT-002).

I've yet to down Ignis on either 10 or 25 man. Ignis should be downed easily, but it just hasn't happened. 10 man failures for the few attempts we've had on him seem to just be a lack of focus - we start on him late, so people are tired. 25 man failures are simply a lack of healing, at some point in the fight I'd simply not receive any healing for two hits in a row - I was sitting at just under 41k health unbuffed, so two ~20k hits (plus possibly a tick while moving out of scorch) without healing means I'm dead.

We've also been losing evenings. Saturday night's raid was cancelled due to a lack of available people - a large number of those signed for the raid simply didn't show up and the other tank had his account hacked. No big deal, it happens. We downed seven bosses in just over three hours on Friday night and haven't been back since. I was confident that this week we'd at least get to see Mimiron even if we didn't down him, now I'm not sure.

When raiding goes bad

So I learnt the hard way that raiding whilst exhausted is not a good idea. While finishing off as much of Ulduar as possible before the reset, I discovered just how much of a bitch the arena in the Thorim encounter is when you've had two hours sleep and can't focus.

We did, eventually, get him down but the majority of the attempts were one silly fuck up after another - mainly healers getting one-shotted by champions because I was too slow on picking them up. Tanking is fun when it goes well (or even mediocre) but knowing that wipe after wipe is entirely your fault definitely makes you feel like a complete idiot.

We went on to down Razorscale, and called it for the week - bringing the number of bosses I've personally downed in Ulduar to 8. Less than the 10 I was hoping for, but we lost a day because of healers being unavailable and had trouble finding replacements when people had to leave early because we'd run two groups earlier in the week. Not to mention wasting a couple of hours on Thorim because of my lack of sleep.

The Observations of Ulduar

I will admit that my experience of Ulduar is not as extensive as that of others, but I've downed six bosses and attempted two of the others. By the end of this week, I should have hopefully downed ten (or more) of the Ulduar bosses.

So this post can be considered to be one or two observations of Ulduar (mainly in comparison to Naxxramas) so far.

It's considerably more intense. Learning raid content can be pretty exhausting, especially when you've been at it for awhile. Learning Naxxramas wasn't anywhere as exhausting as Ulduar is, and I suppose that's to be expected. It requires a lot more work from everybody in the group, and that's not a bad thing at all. More frustration when you wipe, but also more satisfaction when you don't.

Offtanking Naxxramas was dull. There was minimal effort required to pick up adds, and if you were slow on picking them up it wasn't a huge issue. Not to mention that a lot of Naxxramas bosses were simply pick up and stand in place. If you had a tank that wasn't that great, not a problem: just have them offtank, and it doesn't really matter.

As a tank in Ulduar you have to be on the top of your game, regardless of whether you're main or off tanking. If you're lax about anything there's a real possibility that you'll wipe your raid. More kiting to be done, more situations where you may have to taunt a boss off of the other tank, more adds to be picked up (and they have to be picked up a lot faster), pretty much more of everything that made certain bosses in Naxxramas actually interesting. Even trash is more exciting; the tank and spank tedium of Naxxramas replaced in places with the necessity for crowd control, movement, positioning or tank switching.

Tanking raid content is actually FUN. My enjoyment of previous raid content came purely from the emblem/loot rewards, I'm now enjoying Ulduar for entirely different reasons.