Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Scheduled breaks

The biggest difference between serious raiding guilds and "casual" raiding guilds is how fast they move. Wiping a lot isn't so bad if you are also playing a lot. Playing the game is fun. Waiting is not fun. Sitting around for 15 minutes waiting for someone to explain the strategy again is not fun. Waiting 10 minutes for the afk stoner to wander back to his keyboard is not fun.

We just instituted a new convention in our raids: a scheduled 4 minute break every hour. It sounds anal, but it seems to really help. No more AFKs after every wipe as someone goes to the bathroom; everyone can go at the same time. And having a break every hour seems to help everyone's attitude, too. I know I enjoy the opportunity to stretch my legs a bit.

Check your talent points

DPS a little low? Getting crit even though you spec 3/3 Survival of the Fittest? Mangle missing from your toolbar?

WoW currently has some ridiculous bug where sometimes your talent points disappear. I just logged in today to find I was demoted to 0/34/11. You still have your talent points to allocate, so it's just a small nuisance to fix, but it's the kind of thing you can easily overlook. Because you know, you'd expect talent points to be permanent.

I'm usually sympathetic and understanding about software bugs. But this one's pretty deep and pretty fundamental to a major new feature. What's wrong?

Tanking Kologarn/25

Kologarn is primarily a healing challenge. The whole raid is taking a lot of unavoidable raid damage, three players are being focussed and taking huge amounts of damage, and the main tank is getting hit for 15k, 25k at a time.

• Two tanks switch off Kologarn to avoid the Overhand Smash debuff stacking.
• Off-tank picks up the Rubble spawn after an arm dies.
• Healers heal the crap out of the raid after Shockwave, and focus heals on the victims of Stone Grip.
• Whomever is the focus of the eyebeam needs to kite it away from everyone.
• Main tanks must never ever leave melee range from Kologarn

Kologarn actually comes in three pieces: left arm, body, and right arm. You can DPS any of them, but only the body needs to be tanked. The arms have less HP; killing them damages the body, then the arm grows back after a minute. The recommended strategy is to kill the Right Arm whenever it spawns, so as to avoid people getting trapped in its grip and killed.

The primary main tank problem is the Overhead Smash debuff. It's a physical attack that puts a stacking 25% armor reduction debuff on the main tank. Even without this debuff Kologarn is hitting enormously hard, enough to kill most tanks in two or three hits. A single debuff puts you into two-shot territory, and two stacked is very bad. So it's necessary to have two tanks trading aggro. We found it worked best with two bears and to have one of us taunt off the other as soon as we were clear of debuffs, even if the other tank only had one stack. Avoidance helps keep the debuff off you, too. I can't overemphasize how big the melee attacks are: our prot warrior nearly gave up in frustration when trying to main tank him. Even after the 3.1 nerf a bear's armor and HP seem to be a good match to Kologarn.

A third tank is also a help in this fight because every time an arm is killed it spawns several Rubble elemental adds. These Rubble are fairly lethal in 25 man, they do a stacking Stone Nova debuff that increases damage taken. It's essential to keep this debuff off the main tanks and it's important for AoE DPS to kill the Rubble before it puts too many stacks on the offtank. A feral druid may be a good choice for this offtank role, since you're only tanking about 10% of the fight and can go DPS the rest of the time.

In theory two tanks should be enough for this encounter; whomever is not busy with Kologarn can just go pick up the Rubble and hold it far away from Kologarn until it's killed. But things get tricky because of Petrifying Breath, a raid-wiping ability that Kologarn uses if his current aggro target is not in melee range. (Note: many strats say it's if no one is in melee range. That's wrong, it's the aggro target.) It's remarkably hard to be sure you're not the aggro target when you're one of the two main tanks. You have to be sure that you never ever Challenging Roar, that your other main tank doesn't die, etc. And picking up Rubble is tricky, it's tempting to try an AoE taunt or the like. In the end we found it safest to just put a third tank specifically on add duty. I haven't managed to get Kologarn yet in 10 man, still working on the two tank strategy.

One last word of warning for clumsy bears: it's possible to run forward and fall off the platform. You may want to warn anyone you battle rez of that. It's comic at first to see someone fall to their doom, but it loses its novelty quickly.

Easter, blizzard style

• Dress your children up in cute little costumes.
• Tell them exciting stories about the yummy chocolate inside hidden eggs.
• Promise them you'll get them a puppy if they find 100 eggs.
• On the big morning, take them to the nearby cute little town.
• Now that they're eager with anticipation, tell them to sit in the ground in one spot, not moving, and wait for an egg to appear.
• Tell them they need to focus very intently, because if they don't grab the egg fast enough some other little boy will steal their egg.
• Make them sit there, for several hours, until they get 100 eggs.

Feral tanking Iron Council (10 and 25)

Iron Council (aka the Assembly of Iron) seems to be one of the easier boss encounters in Ulduar, but it still requires some smart play. The way I've tanked it is quite the druid workout, which I always enjoy.

• Kill Steelbreaker, then Runemaster Molgeim, then Stormcaller Brundir
• Tank Stormcaller Brundir far away
• Kite bosses out of Rune of Power
• Interrupt Stormcaller's Lightning Whirl
• Be ready with Rebirth and Innervate

There's three bosses you can kill in any order. The easiest way seems to be Steelbreaker, then Runemaster, then Stormcaller. On 10 man you should only have two tanks, so have the feral take Steelbreaker and an offtank take Runemaster and Stormcaller. On 25 man you have three tanks, again put the feral on Steelbreaker. Any tank can tank any boss, by the way, I just like being on the thing that dies first so I have choices later.

Positioning matters a bit. You don't want anyone to be within 30 yards of Stormcaller Brundir and his Overload explosion. So have his tank drag Stormcaller far away, you'll need a spell interrupt to get him moving. You also want Steelbreaker somewhere near to Runemaster Molgeim, so that Molgeim can slide a Rune of Power under Steelbreaker occasionally. It's not clear what the range on this is, it may well be the whole room.

Once positioning is set the fight is pretty simple to tank. The Steelbreaker tank needs to watch out for two things. If a Rune of Power is placed under Steelbreaker, then move the boss away until the buff falls off him. Try to leave him so that melee can stand in the rune but the boss isn't. Second, keep a worried eye on the 3 second cast Fusion Punch ability. The moment that's cast on you, a Paladin or Priest needs to dispell it off you. I call it out on Vent when tanking.

Once Steelbreaker is down you move to Runemaster. In 10 man go ahead and taunt him off the Stormcaller tank and split them apart. In 25 man the Steelbreaker tank can just go cat form and DPS. Look out for the green runes on the ground and run away.

Finally when Runemaster goes down the whole raid gets on Stormcaller Brundir. He has a very deadly ability called Lightning Whirl that needs to be stunned or interrupted. In our kills the Stormcaller tank handled these interrupts while Runemaster was still up; it's somewhat easier because Stormcaller is stunnable. But when Stormcaller is the only target left he can't be stunned and it helps to have someone else interrupting. The Steelbreaker feral tank is the perfect choice: Maim is easy to use and your DPS is going to be low in tank gear, so take the hit for the team and just sit there waiting on interrupts. (Note that the Stormcaller tank has to re-aquire aggro after Lightning Tendrils, it's an aggro reset.)

The fight is challenging when things go wrong. Be on the lookout for opportunities to battle rez or innervate. It's particularly easy right after one boss goes down and you have nothing on you. The fight can go long, as much as 12 minutes on ten man (apparently no enrage despite what DBM says), so you may want to innervate a healer twice. Also be ready to pick up a boss if one of the tanks dies.

The fight is also more challenging if you do the kills in another order. If you leave Runemaster for last, he summons exploding random-aggroed adds that you have to kill while running away. Leaving Steelbreaker up is the hard mode. Once one add is dead Steelbreaker will gain a Static Disruption ability which puts a debuff on the tank which causes Fusion Punch to one-shot you, so you need to rotate tanks. And if he's last alive then you get to Meltdown, where he blows up everyone in 20 yards every 25 seconds; fun!

Three nuisances in 3.1

Dual specs are awesome. Having zero mana after switching specs and being unable to go into bear form is not awesome.

The mana nerf is rough on our tree friends. But it's surprisingly annoying as a feral, too. Mana regen is so slow that frequent form shifting becomes a problem in combat.

It's awesome that Improved Mark of the Wild gives +2% stats. It's terrible that 3/5 in Furor means you only have a 60% chance to get 10 rage when going into bear form. I hate playing bear roulette, constantly shifting to bear until I get lucky enough to have rage.

Tanking Razorscale/25

After a couple of weeks of killing Razorscale I think I understand the fight well enough to write about tanking it. This is the first tanking intensive fight you're likely to see in Ulduar, and it's a lot of fun. We currently use three tanks on Razorscale. After gear gets a bit better you can problably get away with two. Any tanking class can handle the fight fine, the primary problem is very quickly picking up 2-3 adds. Note: the fight was retuned a bit after last week, it seems there are more adds now.

Summary

• One tank on north adds, one tank on south adds, one tank on Sentinel
• Kill Watchers first, off-tank Sentinels somewhere out of the way
• Everyone DPS Razorscale when she's on the ground
• At 50% a tank has to pick her up quickly with taunts, then kite her facing away from the raid
• Tanks taunt off each other to avoid Fuse Armor stacking debuffs

Phase 1: adds

Every thirty seconds or so 2-4 mole machines will come out of the ground containing several mobs. The typical spawn is 3 machines. Two machines will contain 2-3  Guardians and Watchers each. One machine will contain a single Sentinel. Looking straight down on the playfield there's a circle drawn on the ground. The Sentinel, if it spawns, always spawns at exactly 3 o'clock just on the edge of the circle. The other adds spawn a bit further east outside the circle, somewhere between 1 o'clock and 5 o'clock.

One tank should pick up spawns from 1 o'clock to 3 o'clock (the north side); a second tank should pick up spawns from 3 o'clock to 5 o'clock. A third tank should pick up the Sentinel if it comes. The mobs materialize in the playfield and then the tank has one or two seconds to pick them up. It's a bit tricky because the mole machine itself is a physical object you can't run through, so if you're on the wrong side of the machine (or worse, stuck inside it) you may have a hard time with the pickup. For feral druids Swipe is your go-to move for the first attack, or maybe a Glyphed Maul. For Sentinels I just use a ranged attack to pick it up; Faerie Fire or taunt. It helps to know where your healers are, because if you miss then that's where the add will be going.

Once you have your mobs it's very important to bring them to the right spot. The north tank should pull the Guardians + Watchers back to the north, the south tank to the south. It's tempting to bring them together so everyone can AoE, but splitting them apart seems to help the DPS focus on targets and avoid some chain lightning. The Watchers are by far more dangerous than the Guardians. Make them the first DPS target and try to interrupt their Chain Lightning casts. If you're cat DPS, save your combo points for Maim. If you're a bear tank, use your Bash. The Sentinel is also dangerous, because it whirlwinds. A third tank should pick the Sentinel up and bring it somewhere safe for your ranged DPS to kill. Right where it spawns can work fine. Of course all through the fight you need to avoid the blue fire on the ground. And be sure there's no blue fire right behind the adds your tanking, lest you get your melee DPS killed.

Phase 2: chained dragon

The adds are all a distraction from the real target, the dragon. Every couple of minutes enough harpoons will be available to drag Razorscale down. The moment she comes down it is essential all DPS goes on her, ignore the adds. Guardians and Sentinels can safely be off-tanked for a long time, and hopefully the Watchers are dead. Unless you're tanking a Sentinel even the tanks should drag their adds over to Razorscale and help DPS her.

You want to get Razorscale down to 50% on her second landing: for Naxx/25 geared groups it's just barely possible. After her first landing she'll take off again, doing a Wing Buffet knockback and then breathing fire in front of her (to the west, 9 o'clock). You can Feral Charge after the Wing Buffet to get back in the middle if you want, but if you're tanking you really want to get back in position for picking up the next set of adds.

Phase 3: unchained dragon

Once Razorscale gets to 50%, she'll break free from her chains, Wing Buffet, and start running around chaotically owning people. This transition is the moment of crisis for the tanks, the pickup is difficult and essential. Unfortunately at the exact moment she breaks free she also knocks all the tanks far away, so it takes some swift action to pick her up correctly.

The Sentinel tank should pick up Razorscale at 50%; he's least likely to have any adds on him when she lands. If that's your role, then when you're dpsing her go ahead and get in front of her at about 51%, ready for the pickup. That way when she Wing Buffets she'll knock you to the west, away from the rest of the raid. Go ahead and shift to bear form before she breaks free and be sure you have plenty of rage. Also taunt her early, before she breaks free, to give you plenty of threat.

The moment the Wing Buffet goes off immediately Feral Charge back in. Taunt again as soon as you can. She may still run away from you, but hopefully she'll come back soon and be facing west, away from everyone else. There's still a few scary moments where she's out of melee range. All DPS must stop on her the moment she breaks free to help you get aggro. They should also use any cooldowns to shed aggro: Feign Death, etc. The DPS should kill the remaining adds while the main tank gets control.

Once you pick up the dragon the fight is still not over. She hits hard, 25k-30k melee hits, and the healers have to adjust accordingly. The tanks need to be on point and respect the tanking rotation, the healers need to know who's going to have aggro before they take damage. And she's dropping blue fire on the ground and occasionally taking a Deep Breath over everything in front of her. It's essential to keep her faced away. I also found it helped to constantly kite her in a path, just to stay out of blue fire.

Finally, the main tank challenge is her Fuse Armor debuff on the tank; each stack reduces armor and movement speed by 20%. Given her high melee damage even two stacks is awfully bad for the tank, and a third is probably lethal. So it's critical to have multiple main tanks trading aggro on her with taunts. Since there's three tanks go ahead and taunt off each other after you get the first Fuse Armor debuff. No need to wait for two: by the time the third tank gets one the first tank will be clean again.

One final note, the enrage timer on this fight is pretty tight, for my guild we killed her once 20 seconds after the enrage (ouch) and once 5 seconds before. Once she enrages there's no point in trying to tank her in a conventional way, she will one shot anyone she hits. Your best bet is to range kite her. Our fast-thinking Hunters helped save the day with a 40 yard Distracting Shot + Deterrence for 5 seconds of tanking. I've also been able to buy a couple more seconds by getting as far away as I could and range taunting her back. You won't last long this way, but if she's almost dead then a few more seconds can make for the kill.

Professions for the feral druid

I'm fed up with Inscriptions, patch 3.1 made it worse in every way. Time for a new profession, which is most beneficial? In  Let's look at Wowwiki for what actual stats boosts you get from the profession-specific enchants or buffs.

• Herbalism: 2000 point heal
• Mining: +50 stamina
• Skinning: +32 critical strike rating
• Alchemy: +64 attack power (Endless Rage)
• Blacksmithing: +32 agility (2 sockets)
• Engineering: nothing useful (really?)
• Leatherworking: +50 stamina / +64 attack power (over regular bracers). Also resist enchants.
• Tailoring: +75 attack power average (instead of +22 agility)
• Jewelcrafting: +27 agility (three gems)
• Enchanting: +64 attack power / +48 stamina (ring enchants)
• Inscription: +64 attack power / +32 dodge (over Hodir exalted shoulders)

It's interesting how carefully normalized they are: just about everything works out to +50 stamina or +30 agility, more or less.

I'm happy with Leatherworking; the extra stamina on bracers is fantastic and it's nice to be able to swap in elemental resistance relatively cheaply. The other profession buff that looks the most useful is Blacksmithing: two sockets is quite flexible and will scale even better with epic gems. Jewelcrafting looks great now, but I'm guessing +21 agility epic gems will come out soon so the JC bonus drops to +18 agi instead of +27 agi. And the Alchemy buff is nice, particularly since you also get double flask duration.

I'm disappointed about Engineering, that's the profession that appeals to me most. It's really goofy, has some fun tricks, and will give me two more mini-pets. But their special armor enchants are mostly overwritten by other more useful enchants, belts being the exception. Really doesn't make sense in PvE.

Thoughts after a week of 3.1 raiding

My guild hit up 25 man Ulduar and Archavon this week. We had a lot of fun, it's great to be in new content again. It's a good challenge for us, too. Because of downtime and roster problems we only got about six hours of raiding in, but we got down four bosses: Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, and Emalon the Storm Watcher.

The good:

• The boss fights so far have been interesting. Flame Leviathan will get old quickly. But Razorscale is a good tank / coordination challenge and XT-002 is a very interesting DPS and healing puzzle. Emalon was surprisingly challenging in 25 man, too, but in a fair way.
• Every win was an epic kill, achieved after a bunch of wipes and the last one everyone played just a bit better. We felt like heroes after every progression kill.
• The hard modes and achievements give us something to look forward to while re-doing the old content.
• 10 man is great preparation for 25 man. It helps that a Naxx/25 geared team outgears Ulduar/10 so the progression goes quick and you can learn the fight well enough to then work on it in 25 man.
• Dual specs make for a lot of useful flexibility in raid composition.
• I don't miss the trash at all, although I guess it's going to be added back soon enough.
• Ulduar is pretty. If I never see a Scourge temple again it will be too soon, so drab and green. Iron Dwarves bring monumental stonework with glowing tracery.

The bad:

• A big component of Emalon, Razorscale, and XT-002 are DPS races. And in each case we just barely beat the timer, in fact both Razorscale and XT-002 were enraged when they died. DPS races don't scale with gear (rather the opposite) so this challenge won't persist.
• Raid signups are a problem. We lost people to boredom over the last month or two in Naxx, and fewer came back than I expected. We're recruiting pretty aggressively now.
• So far the loot upgrades haven't been too exciting; we've generally only had one person interested in any particular drop.
• Not enough new content in 3.1 other than the raid. The Argent Tournament is a big snore so far and I sure wish we had a new 5 man to keep us busy when we're not raiding.

From what I've read guilds like ours will be able to clear all the bosses in Ulduar in short order. Then the real progression starts, working on hard modes. I think that's good game design and I look forward to it, but I wonder if everyone feels the same way.

Razorscale is hard!

I'd forgotten what raiding challenges are like. We took our first shot at Ulduar/25 last night. Flame Leviathan is no big thing, but Razorscale totally owned us. All the numbers are so big; incoming damage is a real problem there, both for tanks and random fireball victims. And the adds spawning are pretty chaotic, I wish now we'd focussed more on a slower fight where we could plan out tanking and crowd control a bit better. I'm pretty sure our "group everything up and AoE" thing isn't going to work, but that's all we know how to do now.

I've never done a raid fight without access to a well known, proven strategy before. Ulduar guides are pretty thin on the ground right now. Any advice for Razorscale?