Heroic Yor’sahj Primer

Raid Make-up:

Tanks (2) – 1 protection paladin, 1 feral druid

Healers (6) – 1 restoration druid, 2 restoration shamans, 1 holy paladin, 1 discipline priest, 1 holy priest

Damage dealers (17) – even mix of ranged/melee. No balance druids present

Healer assignments:

The only time a healing assignment is ever really needed on this fight is whenever the purple ooze is present. At that point each healer was assigned one group of 5 players to be responsible for and one mastery focused restoration shaman was tasked with watching the tanks. No one was allowed to cross heal groups and healers were to be mindful of the Deep Corruption stacks present on their charges. I was responsible for group 2, though the specifics are largely irrelevant, and found no difficulty watching them during any purple phase.

Strategy

Ooze Priority:

We began the fight by grouping up on the edge of the pool of water directly in front of the green ooze starting location as that was our preferred ooze to kill. There are strats that suggest yellow ooze as a priority over the green with some exceptions but we found, given the strength of our healing, that prioritizing the green was more beneficial to our success. Our kill order was green ooze at all times, except when it wasn’t present and there was purple and yellow. In that case we opted to kill yellow. Killing the oozes themselves should not be an issue however if it absolutely became one for any particular ooze spawn the rogue (or rogues) on the boss could be called on to offer assistance. If absolutely need be tanks could come add some DPS though they generally spent their time off the boss helping on mana voids when applicable.

Blue Ooze/Mana Void:

The blue ooze’s mana void is handled slightly different in heroic mode. Once the first blue ooze makes contact with the boss initiating the mana drain the void is not killed during that ooze phase. Instead healers are reliant on mana regeneration cooldowns via mana tide, hymn if required, and their own innate abilities. For druids this means lining up power torrent, activating synapse springs if you have them (I happen to), and using innervate. You should generally be in pretty solid shape though worst case scenario if you find yourself in need of a little bit more mana a potion isn’t a bad idea to pop on this first drain. The mana void itself is kept at sub 30% HP until the next time a blue ooze makes contact with the boss. When that happens, and a second mana void spawns draining the raid’s mana the first void is then killed restoring everything that was taken initially from the raid. Bear in mind that the second void did not steal that much mana and when it is popped sometime later in the fight you will not return to full. The restores from these mana voids is generally enough to sustain you throughout the fight provide you make smart spell choices.

The moment of panic that may set in is during those few seconds after the mana drain but before the DPS manage to finish off the remaining life of the weakened mana void. Ideally you’d like to avoid using your massive raid cooldowns but there will come times where the mana void to be killed is just a little too high and going that long without any preventative measure will prove fatal. Do not hesitate to call for spirit link, aura mastery, or power word barrier. If the purple slime is not active and you have a divine hymn or tranquility free for use then those will help as well.

Purple Ooze

The purple ooze clearly adds a wrinkle to your game plan with the stacking debuff Deep Corruption. Some people may be less familiar with it as is the kill priority in the normal mode version of this boss. Given the deadly interactions of the other slimes we never chose to kill this slime and opted to heal through it as required.

Deep Corruption works as follows: every player gains the main Deep Corruption debuff with a timer duration of roughly 50 to 60% of the slime phases duration. While that debuff is active any heal (with some critical exceptions) will place a stack of a separate buff called…Deep Corruption. If that stack reaches 5 the player explodes dealing massive damage to the raid. Given the severity of these phases a single player explosion is generally going to be a wipe. The main Deep Corruption debuff eventually wears as well as the stacks but it is then immediately reapplied. This means all players will drop their stacks once roughly halfway through that slime phase. The second debuff duration wears off while the next set of slimes are making their way to yor’sahj. This is generally irrelevant unless you have active Black Ooze adds still up in which case healers will need to follow the raid and continue to heal them carefully.

What I did for this debuff was attempt to sneak in anything that I could at the start to improve my performance but often times little damage came to my group before my HoT’s expired. Just before the purple slime made contact with the boss I placed rejuvenation on each member of my group and refreshed lifebloom on the main tank. What this allowed me to do, should there be enough damage to warrant it, is swiftmend myself to drop effloressence and then barkskin to make sure that stack of deep corruption from a weaker heal didn’t cause an issue.

Heals that cause deep corruption stacks: Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Nourish, Regrowth, Healing touch, Swiftmend, Tranquility (raid wiper)

Heals that do not cause deep corruption: Effloressence, Lifebloom bloom

Slime Combinations:

(here is where I admit my knowledge is a little shaky, I’m more winging it on this section to be completely honest)

Black, Blue, Purple, (Green or Yellow, killed) – Arguably the tamest of the slime combinations. You’ll have only one set of Black Ooze adds and no active raid damage slimes up. This is an optional candidate for lust if your raid has the mana to carry through.

Black, Blue, Red, (Green, killed) – I believe we use Time warp/Blood Lust here as there is no purple to hamper healers usage of haste and only a single set of black ooze adds which increases boss uptime while buffed. It also helps get the mana void out of the way quicker especially if it is a little higher on HP. If there is a delay in getting the mana void killed before the raid damage starts getting high spirit link totem can be used to stabilize tanks and low players before mana is returned.

Black, Red, Yellow, (Green, killed) – Highest raid damage combination. We string together raid cooldowns during this combination using at least two each time it comes up. Power Word: Barrier is always our first choice and it is followed by a raid wide healing ability such as tranquility or divine hymn. Aura mastery and Spirit link totem if absolutely required can fill in if you have bad luck RNG wise with slime combinations.

Black, Purple, Red, (Yellow, killed) – Heavy raid damage occurs in this combination though the fact only one set of black ooze adds spawns is a godsend making life a lot easier. This is a great opportunity to use spirit link totem or, if your raid comb allows it, any non-rotation damage prevention cooldowns. Tank 4 piece cooldowns are fairly useful here as well as black/red/yellow.

Blue, Purple, Yellow, (Green, killed) – Moderate raid damage slime combination. Provided that mana is returned to the healers in a timely manner there shouldn’t be any difficulty in lasting through this phase’s AoE damage. Just plug away on your group as they take the shadow hits and you should be fine.

From a druid’s perspective we have different modes of healing dependent on what slime combinations are active. If purple is up you will play a bit closer to the vest and heal almost exclusively with Healing Touch (you will use Regrowth when applicable if it saves someone’s life or the debuff is about to reset giving you a HoT to use swiftmend with). Whenever purple isn’t up we go into full AoE healing mode using our standard arsenal of spells as we see fit. The only thing you need to keep in mind is managing your mana and scaling the degree to which you push yourself healing wise based on the difficulty of the combination at hand. Black/Red/Yellow for example is the deadliest and will require you to push yourself noticeably harder and consume a proportionately larger portion of your mana bar.

Final Thoughts:

First, don’t troll me too hard if I misquoted when to use some abilities. I’m more pulling from memory as my guide here is primarily to discuss what I saw from a druid’s point of view. As we don’t have any major prevention cooldowns or tank abilities it really just boils down to how the raid handles the ooze phases, how efficiently the blue and black ooze abilities are handled, and how well you can keep up with the damage with Deep Corruption active. We may not bring any unique major cooldowns to the table for this fight, but we are far from a liability in my mind. Focus hard on keeping your group up and let your HoT flag fly when unrestricted raid healing is required!

Good luck and happy hunting.

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Thank you for listening and stay tuned for more exciting posts here at R4HT

Heroic Warlord Zon’ozz Primer

Raid Composition: 2 tanks, 7 healers (arguably one too many), 16 DPS

Our tank/healer breakdown: Feral Tank, Prot Paladin, 2x Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman, Discipline Priest, 2x Holy Priest

Gear: My gear level at the time of the kill was ~394 average item level using 2 piece tier 12 heroic and 2 piece tier 13 utilizing both mana conservation set bonuses. I’m running ~2400 spirit, meeting the target haste breakpoint of 2005, and sitting at roughly 1550 mastery using the Maw of the Dragonlord with haste offhand.

General Strategy

I’m going to leave out specific abilities as you can read them in depth here: http://www.icy-veins.com/warlord-zon-ozz-detailed-strategy.

I do want to discuss how we went about adapting our strategy to work with the suggested guidelines detailed in that guide.

Phase 1 – Void Ball Phase (ping pong)

Gameplan for phase 1: On the pull we had our entire raid pull up behind the boss with one mage standing approximately twenty yards behind the raid group. The mage was responsible for bouncing the ball back to the raid group while simultaneously sharing the damage with everyone else. This allowed us to take full advantage of AoE healing abilities with small radii and cover a larger amount of the incoming damage. The only players we opted to dispel the debuff from are the hunters who we have standing off to the side not splitting damage with the rest of the group.

We settled upon the ball bouncing seven times before making contact with the boss as it suited our groups needs DPS and healing wise as well as the debuff duration and timer. In our setup the ball hits the mage on odd number bounces and the raid on even bounces. Leading up to the sixth bounce off of the raid and just afterward Power Word Barrier is placed to mitigate both the explosion and additional incoming damage from the debuff. After the sixth bounce the raid scatters to their black phase positions and we proceed to top everyone off while the ball makes its seventh bounce and heads back towards the boss. The mage that takes the seventh bounce does so by himself and will proc Cauterize. Healing is required to top him off quickly as the black phase starts.

Healing gameplan for phase 1: All healers had four to five players they were responsible for in the black phase though cross healing when possible is encouraged. In phase 1 I did not necessarily focus on my players as a more general AoE healing strategy is employed however I did want to make sure I left phase 1 with my group topped off, hotted, myself with 3x Lifebloom, and a respectable mana pool so I can maximize innervate +Tier 13 set bonus in the first black phase. Spell choice in Phase 1 is purely up to you as it falls under the standard “group up and AoE heal” scenario: keep LB up on the tank, maintain Harmony, WG as required on CD, Swiftmend to best utilize Effloressence, and cast Rejuvenation liberally. The players with the debuff take a more continuous stream of damage and benefit the most from your healing over time spells.

Note: Using seven bounces, at least for us, worked well with the timing of the debuff going into the black phase as they ended up falling off before or very early on into it with no new ones being added.

Phase 2 – First Black Phase

Our Strategy: When the raid scatters after the sixth bounce we have locations in the room that we had to move to. Our raid was broken out into five teams of players. Our teams were distributed as follows (dps classes specified where applicable):

Group 1: 2 healers, 2 rogues (on boss full time), main tank

Group 2: 1 healer, 3 dps, offtank

Group 3: 2 healers, 3 dps

Group 4: 1 healer, 4 dps

Group 5: 1 healer, 4 dps

Each of groups 2-5 initial positions corresponded to the four flails that appear around the room during the black phase. These groups were responsible for killing that flail as well as the two eyestalks that spawn on either side of the flail. In each group a healer was assigned to the three or four dps located within it for coverage. The additional healer in group 1 and 3 cross healed fairly heavily as well as prioritized the tank on the nearby claw tentacle. I was in group 2 and the second restoration druid was located in group 3. Admittedly we did have some trouble keeping our charges up until we learned to maximize our CD’s and communicate cross group healing needs. Once all of the smaller adds were down the ranged collapsed into the center of the room while the boss and melee were located near the left claw tentacle. As the tentacles are burned down the next Void Ball Phase should begin.

Healing gameplan for the first black phase: the black phases are far and away the hardest aspect of this fight to learn as a restoration druid in my opinion. The damage is brutal and your direct heals are going to feel incredibly insufficient especially if a player is being targeted by multiple eyes simultaneously. Going into this phase I generally sat at roughly 80% mana with my group covered with rejuvenation and myself with triple lifebloom. I would position myself in the center of the triangle created by my groups flail and two eyestalks to negate any need for movement during the early and middle parts of the black phase. As I use Maw of the Dragonlord my facing was important.

My goal would be to time my innervate and engineering glove activation with a power torrent proc for the largest mana gain possible although that isn’t always something you can achieve given PT’s ICD. Once innervate has been activated and the spell cost reduction up from the Tier 13 two piece set bonus I would go to work on my group. I would maintain rejuvenation on players as long as I could while using lifebloom on myself to reset the stacks. I would avoid Swiftmend while they worked on the flail as it dies too fast for Effloressence and opted to simply cast WG and Regrowth as needed.

Once my players (in this case all melee) moved to the first eyestalk I cast swiftmend, with no overheal, and dropped Effloressence on the group while continuing to land direct heals. I even chose to cast Healing Touch for the pure throughput when time allowed. I found the first eyestalk to be the time I spent the largest chunk of mana during this black phase. Once the stalk was completed I shifted over to the second and from that point I was in range of the main tank, two rogues, and healer from group 1. I re-hotted my group and then cast Tranquility which served to top off my group as the overall damage lightened up (successfully topped off quite a few players doing this). By using tranquility and innervate in that way I often ended the first black phase with roughly 75% to 80% of my mana pool. Once the ranged moved back into the middle of the room a mana-tide was dropped by our shaman.

Regroup Void Ball Phase

Strategy: The raid’s goal at this point is to regroup in order to resume bouncing the Void Ball while also making sure the two large claw tentacles cease to be. Cleave works wonders in melee and the ranged can remove what HP is left from theirs at the group up spot. If the ball’s spawn location is a little skewed the ranged can simply shuffle left or right to stack on it once it appears. What we did for these subsequent ping pong sessions was keep a ranged cluster and melee cluster and bounce the ball back and forth between the two as damage was required on the far claw tentacle. The ranged group in this case took the odd number bounces. Once the fifth bounce hit, the ranged chased the ball back into melee in order to share the sixth bounce, allowing the damage to be distributed much more evenly, and a spirit link totem was dropped to further maintain balanced HP levels.

After the 6^th bounce in hitting melee and ranged alike the ball then hurtles outward into the waiting arms of a shadow priest or mage ready to pass it back in while the raid scatters to their respective locations. This bounce is sometimes a bit longer in order to time it with the debuffs reducing (or eliminating) the duration during black phase as much as possible.

Healing gameplan for the regroup Ball Phase: While my group is running back in I continued to roll rejuvenation on them and settled into the central meeting location with the rest of the ranged. In my situation, my assigned players were melee so I prioritized dropping effloressence and wild growth centered upon their location. You will pursue your standard AoE healing rotation otherwise maintaining lifebloom and casting rejuvenation as much as your mana allows. We had the raid split into two halves so individuals, especially with the debuff, were taking more damage which allowed for more productive uptime on my heal over time abilities. My suggestion is to focus on efficiency here as opposed to blanketing the world with your healing. Spend some time at the tail end of this phase, possibly when running in for the last bounce you’ll be taking, to HoT up your group and re-lifebloom yourself.

This regroup ball phase will repeat after the second and third black phases. We activated priest mana hymns after the second black phase and mana tide after the first and third.

Second and Third Black Phases

Healing Gameplan – As the second and third black phases do not change at all strategy wise I’ll simply comment on the healing side of things. For the second black phase tranquility, at least for me, was on cooldown so I opted to work Tree of Life in to generate efficient constantly group healing to keep my charges alive. You may have players with the debuff still on them going into this phase. If you do, and cannot afford to heal them through the duration have them run to the side so you can dispel them. Only do this if you have the mana, means, and time to quickly heal them back up on par with the other members of your group. Nature’s Swiftness goes a long way here for emergencies. With tree of life active just prior to the poop hitting the spinning bladed machine start pre-hotting your people with lifebloom to build everyone up to three stacks. You will still be using WG on cooldown and swiftmending when your players are situated at the eye stalks. Added omen of clarity procs allow for a more liberal use of regrowth.

For the third black phase I ended up repeating the same strategy as the first one except I ended up spending slightly more mana keeping everyone alive. Tranquility still saves your bacon on the second eyestalk kill for your group and even works to stabilize any nearby players.

Last Black Phase

Zon’ozz’s berserk timer does not allow for four fully handled black phases so the fourth ultimately becomes a burn phase. The raid will group up behind the boss with Timelust active to knock out the remaining hp’s. Tree of Life will be off cooldown at this point and you are pretty much free to go hog wild and empty whatever mana you have left into raid healing like a boss.

This is our strategy. There are many like it, but this one is ours.

Disclaimer: This primer is NOT a perfect how to for this fight as your guild or guilds may opt for another method to complete this encounter. This is simply how we brute forced our way through the fight and how I learned to cope with the healing involved. This is not really a druid friendly encounter as our burst group healing on specific targets isn’t necessarily the strongest. I know some folk who unglyphed their wild growth in order to increase uptime on their flail/eyestalk teams during the black phases. I didn’t do this myself but I can see the merit in it.

Work with what you have and you will do just fine. While this isn’t a fun fight for druids it certainly is doable and there’s that whole doesn’t kill you makes you stronger mantra there somewhere. I certainly may have left out some important things and this wasn’t the most detailed walkthrough ever but if you get even a little bit of useful info from it then I have done my job!

Best of luck to you!

My shaman is currently healing in a 10 man alt run which has been a lot of fun. We only have heroic Morchok down and plan on pushing more bosses this coming Sunday now that the holidays are. For normal modes though the healing is so tame that our discipline priest and holy paladin completely dominate me. Perhaps I’m “doing it wrong” and I’ll completely accept that but healing as a shaman for 10 man normal modes doesn’t feel so fun these days with two very strong and better geared other healers in the mix.

What to do then? Well Skyrim had eaten up a huge chunk of my time for a while until the LFR system showed up. That was a colossal time sink with four (I know some of you have many more) active 85’s that I like to get in there. Realizing that I hadn’t touched Skyrim in some time I decided to do something else for a bit besides it and the LFR obsession.

So this long weekend I decided to download Star Wars: The Old Republic

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. The game is an MMO sure, but it has an honest to goodness plot. No I know that WoW “technically” has a plot but I’m talking about one that feels personal and directly tied to your character as well as the war as a whole. In WoW the opposite faction sometimes does a few silly things here and there to make you mad but the faction interaction in SW:ToR really gets your blood boiling and I like that very much. Here is my current list of pros and cons for the game so far:

Pros:

Voice Acted Dialogue – the VO really does enhance the quest experience immensely making you really feel like you’re in a quality RPG story doing good deeds for people and advancing the plot. Originally I poo-poo’d this as merely window dressing for “Go kill X guys” quests but it surprised be greatly. The reason for this is if you actually go and think of side quests in games like Dragon Age 2, Witcher 2, etc. they’re actually not that different than the ones in this game. The voice acting makes things feel authentic.

Graphics – let’s be honest having really nice quality graphics makes your experience enjoyable. I have a decent enough PC to run the game on “high” though I could probably push farther. The cartoon style seems reminiscent of the Clone Wars cartoon but significantly nicer of course. It doesn’t detract from the game and lets it maintain a level of seriousness it needs to achieve its goals. I rate this a major benefit to the games experience if you have a nice enough computer.

Story – as mentioned the stories for each class make the game feel personal. I like that it’s MY story (even if other people are also experiencing the same story). I really wanted to catch Skavak more than any other villain in WoW while questing at lower levels. The excellence of the story in this game is further enhanced by the following feature

Phasing – making solid use of phasing improves the gameplay experience immensely. Having quest zones or areas phase for just you and your party makes experiencing them a lot more fun and realistic. Why would there by 20 other smugglers running around the dock where YOUR ship is parked? Similarly having 2 to 4 person quests that take place in phased areas act as mini impromptu dungeons and some are of fairly decent length. These are not to be confused with Flashpoints which are the full on dungeons complete with bosses and require tank/dps/healing roles. Similarly the game’s ability to phase WHOLE ZONES when they become overpopulated is a magnificent idea. Imagine if, for some reason, Uldum was completely overrun by players leveling that it was unmanageable from mob shortage to server latency. IF the game could spawn a second or even third copy of the Uldum area and distribute the players evenly among them you don’t need to worry about that at all.

Companions – leveling as a healer, despite the fact I can do decent dps, is much easier with a tank/dps companion by my side. This feeling of never being alone really does make the story work as they are often people from your story arc anyway. My companion, Corso “Bugged harpoon of aweful” Riggs, was my buddy from nearly the first moment I stepped into the game he just didn’t fight by my side until level 7.

These are all fairly broad categories and in each one I think the game excels over WoW in some aspects. WoW clearly has better endgame balance in both PvP and PvE and will continue to be my raiding game of choice (given its pedigree) but SW:ToR clearly has a lot going for it. With the positives come negatives though

Cons:

Voice Acted Dialogue – you’re probably thinking “what? He listed that as a Pro” and you’re right I did. The VO however are also sometimes a bit of a downer as well. The alien language gibberish sometimes ends a LONG time before the next string of dialogue is scheduled to begin leaving some really awkward pauses. Sometimes the quest dialogue is way longer than it needs to be for something simple. In those cases I sometimes press escape out of frustration only to be forced to sit through it again. Edit: I want to add you can press spacebar to skip past dialogue rendering this a non issue unless you’re strict about letting it play out. A few people made a good point I should include this note.

Interface – It’s clunky. REAL clunky. I get what they are trying to do but I can’t say I’m a huge fan of how its set up. There’s no level of customization and the party frames are tucked away in the bottom left corner. As someone who is leveling as a healer it is increasingly irritating not having that level of control i’m used to in WoW. I don’t like having my critical buffs as tiny icons with no duration numbers visible to monitor. I don’t like having to look in the lower left corner of the screen to monitor allies and my companion. From a healing perspective (though only level 20) I give the interface a big thumbs down.

Quest Bonus Objectives, the GOTCHA moment – the game avoids quests that are directly “go and kill X dudes” by adding that in as simply a bonus aspect to an existing quest. If you need to recover 8 cannisters in an area you might get a message that pops up after killing a guy there “Bonus objective: Kill X dudes here”. This I think is fine and makes things easier to swallow. The follow up sometimes kicks you in the junk though. After killing those X dudes, sometimes a stage 2 to the bonus pops up with much higher requirements. e.g. stage 1 might have been “kill 10 dudes” and stage 2 is sometimes “kill 40 dudes”. It almost feels like i’m being Rick Rolled at times. This is hardly a critical flaw though.

Running and speed – there is a lot of travelling and running in this game. The zones are huge and you do not move nearly that fast so you can expect a LOT of time spent hoofing it from area to area. At level 14 you get “sprint” which lets you move faster out of combat. Gating a non-mount speed increase in a game this size is a terrible idea and i’m disappointed that it isn’t accessible much earlier in the game. Even with sprint the world is huge and there need to be either a.) more speeder locations available to players or b.) significantly lower cooldown of fast travel (50% perhaps). I understand back in older MMO’s like everquest and its ilk and even vanilla WoW players were forced to spend a lot of time traveling and running to flight points as a way to offer a time sink. In this day and age that level of punishment isn’t required and time is a very precious thing. Do not make me spend any more time running on foot than I have to. (Coruscant is also really really big and I hated every time I had to run into the tower to talk to a senator). Note: thanks to a comment below reminding me to put this gripe in here

Thoughts on the Scoundrel

So I’m playing as the smuggler healer who uses energy to heal which I find fascinating. There is a considerable amount of depth to the gameplay though and I wanted to share a little of that and compare it to WoW somewhat. The scoundrel uses an ability called “Upper Hand”, which is a 10 second buff that stacks to 2, as a secondary critical resource for casting spells in addition to the 100 energy. Your basic direct heal costs 25 energy (quite a bit) and grants one charge of Upper Hand. Your primary HoT, Slow Release Med Pac for 15 energy, has a 30% chance of granting Upper Hand per tick via talents and can stack up to two times on a target. Upper Hand may be used to cast a cheaper and faster direct heal called kolto pack  (1.5s versus 2.0s, and 20 energy versus 25) or an instant and free heal that doesn’t hit as hard called Emergency Med Pac (think of swiftmend to some degree). Scoundrels also get Kolto Cloud which is effectively Wild Growth in its functionality. What makes this system interesting is that your energy has variable regen rates. At 60% or greater you gain, assuming Pugnacity, 6 energy a second however if you dip below 60% you get proportionally less energy returned. If you bottom out your energy bar it gets really rough. Scoundrel’s have an ability on a 2 minute cooldown that restores 50 (66 talented) energy which can be utilized very similar to an arcane mage’s burn rotation followed by Evocation if necessary to get back up out of the red. Managing your resources is extremely important and makes the player feel like they are working hard to maximize throughput. There is a right and a wrong way to heal to be sure.

The scoundrel also does quite a bit of rogue-like duties which is pretty interesting as a healer. Scoundrel’s can stealth and have tranquilizer (sap) for organic targets and can overload (general CC) droids for some time. Having a stun in the form of Dirty Kick (sp?), an interrupt, and an AoE blind effect make for some really excellent in combat decisions. In a raiding scenario I am not usually fond of being tasked with doing all of those things and healing however I think it will work somewhat decently in this model as healing isn’t super spammy.

This isn’t an advertisement for the scoundrel or for SW:TOR in general but it is a little bit of a PSA for the game. It is in fact very good and definitely worth giving it a shot. Try any class you like and take it for a spin. I do want to thank Beruthiel, Tokudama, and a whole slew of the WoW druid blogging community for their recommendations and support via twitter conversations. It helped me stop waffling and take it for a spin.

One last thing of note that I wanted to include here: my girlfriend does NOT like MMO’s. I genuinely respect that as not everyone loves to play with strangers online and deal with the general awfulness that goes along with that. She has played (or watched) just about everything Bioware and loved the KOTOR games. To see her genuinely interested in the game and actually willing to give it a shot speaks volumes I assure you. Sadly SW:ToR does not offer a free trial at this time so she may wait a little while but the fact she is considering it and interested means a lot to me.

I was recently involved in a fairly nasty four car accident in which I was the second car in the line of vehicles and subsequently had my car sandwiched nicely in the middle. A rather terrifying and horrific experience that has left me very much in shock and fairly banged up. That being said I am alive and kicking, just a tad slower than I was before.

Story Time

I’m a fairly cautious driver by nature and I don’t often take risks when I’m on my forty minute commute to work as the highway traffic is often hit or miss each day. The morning of the accident I was cruising along the highway following the flow of traffic nicely when I saw up ahead everything was coming to a halt. Rubbernecking is notoriously bad on this highway and it is prone to rather nasty bouts of completely unnecessary traffic in the morning or evening. Given that I have a reverse commute it tends to be the only thing, sans holiday shopping, that tends to ruin my trip. So I slowed down and prepared for a rather long and tedious trip into work.

That’s when I felt the impact and heard the sickening crunch of a car plowing into me from behind. The vehicle clearly didn’t make much of an attempt to stop and if he did it certainly wasn’t soon enough. Perhaps I braked a little late on my own accord but driving too close will get you and this time it got him.

The initial hit wasn’t that bad though it buckled the rear passenger pillar. He ended up not hitting me square while his car then veered to the left out of control and slid into the guard rail. Upon being hit I was thrown forward jamming both of my knees into the console and my left leg driven hard into the footrest. If that wasn’t bad enough watching as your car lurches towards the car in front of it with such force is a really dreadful feeling. In retrospect I don’t know entirely what was going through my mind at the time but there certainly was a lot. I was thinking about my girlfriend, my family, and whatever else flashed in there at that moment. I was thrown forward hard upon impact but thankfully the seat belt held me firmly and the airbag didn’t go off. In any other situation I’d be livid that it didn’t but I actually managed less injury without it deploying strangely enough.

I was informed it didn’t go off due to the angle of my car downward from the rear impact and how that affected the force distributed to the sensors used for the airbag. This is an area of car mechanics that I don’t entirely understand so I won’t try to go any further with that. After the impact I crawled through the car to the passenger side and limped out of the vehicle not sure if my knee was ok. The police and fire department were quick to respond and tended to the fellow that hit me. Once he was loaded into an ambulance our other cars were towed away and we were tended to. The rest of the day was spent calling my loved ones, the insurance company, meeting the adjustor, and heading to the emergency room for a checkup. The emergency room doctor discharged me, despite being banged up, sore, and in pain, as nothing was evidently broken (though I am following up on that separately).

While the scary part is over the following week has been difficult to say the least. Having your car totaled is an ordeal that I was not at all prepared for. While yes they provide you with money to purchase a new vehicle and help to get your on your way it doesn’t make finding a new car in a truncated time frame any easier. That is never a decision you want to rush through. I’ve had lengthy conversations with my insurance agents who have been remarkably understanding and helpful in the process. I looked at a host of cars and evaluated multiple financing options and I think I’ve finally settled on something that works for me. Pretty soon everything will be back to normal in my life…well car wise that is. I’m just hoping that in my visits to the doctors that nothing is really wrong with me but I can’t honestly say that at this time.

The ticket to success for me, is looking at the group in LFR as something other than what it actually is:

This isn’t to say that they are mindless sheep (though you could make that inference and I wouldn’t stop you from doing so) but more that people need someone to lead them. No one likes admitting they don’t know how to play an encounter or how a fight works and I get that, but failing to admit that and proceeding to wipe the group because you don’t understand is a much larger problem. Asking questions takes very little time and is much safer than assuming a fight is a tank and spank and then getting waxed by Fading Twilight or Impale.

While it imposes a much higher level of responsibility on me I will often ask for assist to do raid warnings and sometimes I’ll be passed lead outright after I start helping people out. I like leading these groups because ultimately I know that If someone doesn’t and the intolerant ones are left to run the asylum then the berating and name calling happens. The most I think I ever say that’s questionable is something like “Please don’t be a tunnel visioning monkey and DPS something other than what you’re told”. It seems to work!

The fights in Fall of Deathwing aren’t really so bad on the whole but what I’ve found helpful is a whole array of handy ‘raid warning’ macros that I drag onto my bar prior to every fight. They are as follows:

Ultraxion

macro 1: /rw If you do not get Heroic Will special action button, you need to stop and make the following macro  /rw “/click ExtraActionButton1″

macro 2: /rw HOUR OF TWILIGHT CASTING, GET READY TO USE HEROIC WILL

I wish i could stay on top of things to walk the tanks through their taunts as that is what ultimately what wipes most groups but that’s a level of management I can’t handle.

Lootship

Macro 1: /rw DRAGON’S ARE TETHERED, RANGED GET ON THEM!

Macro 2: /rw GET IN THE GIANT SWIRLY  NOW!

Macro 3: /rw RANGED BURN DOWN GORIONA!

These are generally obvious things but you’d be surprised how useful it can be to some people to have reminders when they’re tunneling

Spine of Deathwing

Macro 1: /rw For this fight, you will kill one and only one Corruption at a time which I will mark with {skull}

Macro 2: /rw Tanks drag the amalgamation right up to the plate, DPS burn it to 25% and STOP until 9 stacks

Macro 3: /rw Kill bloods on Amalgamation to gain stacks. Once the Amalgamation starts casting its nuke, THEN you can move away tank

Macro 4: /rw BURN TENDON! {skull}

Macro 5: /rw Rinse and Repeat folks, don’t turn into tunneling monkeys on me

Madness of Deathwing

This fight while technically the most complex allows for more direct hand holding via macros. I usually start out by manually typing in /rw the instructions to the encounter along with the platform order which I generally do Green, Yellow, Red, then lastly Blue.

The most important thing I find, as I have to be long winded, is to specifically state something to the effect of “I’m going to explain this now to the folks who aren’t familiar, please don’t be that guy that yells ‘gogogogogog zomg!’ because if they don’t know the fight we’re going to wipe anyway”

Once you explain the fight even if done very simply you’ll be able to coordinate to people via macros fairly easily. The smarter you sound and the better you play though gets you more cred when it comes to leading.

Macro 1: /rw DPS SWITCH TO LARGE TENTACLE!

Macro 2: /rw METEOR INCOMING! GET READY TO BURN IT DOWN FAST!

Macro 3: /rw REGENERATIVE BLOODS SPAWNED, BURN THEM DOWN

Macro 4: /rw BLISTERING TENTACLES UP! BURN THEM ASAP (SINGLE TARGET ONLY!)

<note macro 4 usually has to be spammed a LOT on the only platform its needed, #4>

Macro 5: /rw YOU MONKEYS STILL ATTACKING DEATHWING’S LIMB NEED TO STOP NOW!

Macro 6: /rw FOLLOW ME TO THE NEXT PLATFORM

Macro 7: /rw KILL PRIORITY: LITTLE TENTACLES, BIG TENTACLES, THEN DEATHWING

MAcro 8: /rw TANKS MOVE YOUR ADD INTO THE TIME BUBBLE OR YOU WILL DIE

<While Macro 8 exaggerates I think a little hyperbole goes a long way.>

So while I may be a little overbearing when I “lead” a LFR pug i find my success rate has been reasonably acceptable and have received compliments after killing Madness from people who have struggled in LFR groups to kill him. My hope is that maybe others out there can take the reigns and keep people focused while PuG’ing in order to down bosses that really aren’t that challenging. At the end of the day the encounter isn’t against some digital monster, it’s against 24 other people who may or may not be clueless and have no repercussions for their actions due to anonymity.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Comment 1: It’s Blizzard’s fault for leaving the loophole in the system and not fixing it

Response: Just because something has glitched in the system does not give you the rights or privilege to abuse the system or break a law or rule. There are guidelines imposed upon you as part of being in this game (or life for more important matters) and you are bound to adhere to them. Those long documents you probably ignore each patch update and click “agree” have something to do with that. If there is a bank error in your favor and $10,000 dollars accidentally gets placed into your bank account it is not yours. If you falsely believe you have any right to that money and spend it then legal action will be taken against you as you are in fact stealing. You know the money isn’t yours nor should you have access to it so flying in the face of that knowledge will get you in trouble. If you do the right thing and report the excess of money immediately the bank will correct the error and everyone goes on about their business.

Comment 2: They needed to perform the exploit in order to keep up with the competition!

Additional source, Method’s Website:

“Currently the situation is as follows; multiple top guilds have apparently made use of this bug to gain the mentioned above. These guilds were basically presented with two choices on Wednesday 4.3 release;

Ignore the obvious bug and continue the LFR farm without looting the items, putting themselves at a disadvantage against their competition.

Utilize the bug, get their set bonuses and trinkets and stay on level with the competition and possibly risk the consequences from Blizzard.

Response: Honestly? Boo hoo. Clearly from their own comments they knew that it was a bug, knew there would be repercussions from Blizzard, and chose to proceed anyway in order to keep up with competition who they knew were taking advantage of it. Many of these guilds have sponsorships and funding so partaking of this exploit actually serves a monetary gain as well as the fame/notoriety that go along with world first heroic kills. Many of these players are in full BiS gear from tier 11 and I have a hard time thinking they would have been that worse off without the ilevel 384 gear with set bonuses…especially given the risk versus reward. If they had a little patience, and confidence that Blizzard would resolve the issue and punish those first offenders then they would have had much less competition for world firsts. Instead they’ve joined the ranks of the jailed and lost out on the opportunity.

Comment 3: Why should the punishment be anything more than the gear being taken away?

Response: If the only repercussion of someone stealing something is that what they stole had to be returned with no legal ramifications then what is the penalty for the actual theft itself? Rules and laws must have additional penalties beyond the initial violation. You can’t just expect a slap on the wrist and say “Sorry, I’ll give everything back now”. If you steal you return the goods AND get punished. Now these guilds, if you ignore the monetary gain they stood to make for the moment, weren’t stealing (arguably from other top guilds in a sense) but they were taking something illegally. Perhaps this is similar to those people who try to justify software (or music) piracy with the statement “I wasn’t going to buy it anyway for money so why should they care?”. You are taking something you don’t deserve and garnering enjoyment and entertainment, for what it was designed to provide, without the cost that everyone else must pay.

Comment 4: Who are they hurting really? Why do we need to punish them for gains that do not affect other people?

Response: It all comes down to the fact that rules are rules. There are systems in place be it in the real world, sports, business, or video game universes designed to maintain parity, quality of life, and fairness. We as civilized human beings are expected to follow these laws or rules provided they are fair and just (which isn’t always the case for everything). Takings steps to gain an unfair advantage over the competition is conniving at its core and regardless of whether it’s a proactive or reactive decision, still cheating. Even if it doesn’t directly affect other people it still must be addressed. If an athlete takes illegal substances in order to get stronger or perform better than his peers then his gains affect his profit margin, his team’s performance, his team’s fan base, and the players and fans of all teams he plays against and beats. If the player is seriously injured and uses illegal substances only to help the recovery process and heal back up to full health that is STILL breaking the rules. Just because you feel that your cause is more just, noble, or innocuous doesn’t mean that it can circumvent the rules.

Final Thoughts:

The only way that Blizzard could have punished these top guilds in a manner that would really affect them is a ban long enough to block them out from a full week of heroic progression raiding. The ban hits them in their wallets, their ego, and their hobby which should sting just enough that maybe, the next time they are faced with a potential glitch that could be exploited they would think twice. In actuality though we know that will not be the case. The threat of competition and fear of not keeping up will always cause players and guilds to push the “win at all costs” envelope and take advantage of whatever tricks they can. I wish I could say that I had sympathy for the guilds but I do not. If this glitch was stumbled upon by these top guilds and used for a few items total (these are players that had full 391 BIS gear mind you) then I’d probably be less animated about the whole thing. The fact that quite a lot of time was spent grinding these raids over and over to gear out full raiding cores shows a level of determination to break the rules that I simply can’t get behind no matter what.

I apologize if these past two posts have sounded like wild ranting…and they probably are, but I’ve felt strong enough about this that I simply had to get it out there. On the bright side I hope that everyone else’s week is going well and I wish a good luck to all the top tier raiding guilds that kept their noses clean.

UPDATE: Paragon has written an apology (update for me as I just read it) and has acknowledged what they did was correct and is not making any excuses on the matter.

 There has been a lot of misinformation going around, so to clear things up, here is a truthful account of what exactly happened with the LFR and what we have to say about it:

The patch hit EU servers on Wednesday. We started off with our 5x Firelands runs to wrap up legendaries and called it a night. For Thursday, we had an elaborate plan to run a personal LFR raid for every main character to get the maximum amount of loot.

As we were doing the first few runs, we noticed an unrealistic amount of tier pieces on some guilds’ armory profiles, which we thought was unattainable through normal means. We started looking into it, and found out that you can loot passed gear from bosses, regardless of save status, if you zone out and back into the instance. This did not provide the raid with any extra loot, but it did eliminate a major portion of the RNG that would have been involved in simply doing personal runs for everyone.

We acknowledge that using this unintended behavior, which was quite clearly a bug, to our gain, was wrong. The fact that others were using it as well is no justification for doing it ourselves. We apologize for doing it, and accept whatever consequences follow.

I will not go into specifics because 1.) it has been fixed, 2.) I don’t entirely know exactly how it was done, and 3.) explaining how to actually do an exploit is bad form. What I can say is that it allowed 25 man guilds to stack a raid with 24 people who could not receive LFR loot, 1 who could, and through some magic wand waving (it is not as simple as you might guess, e.g. simply trading it from that person without other things being done didn’t work I’m told) they could transfer the loot to whomever they wanted. Long story short many of these top world guilds have a sizeable chunk of their active raid roster in full tier 13 gear which is, for some classes, a boost over tier 12 due to set bonuses and the large number of increased sockets.

I find this saddening. MMO-champion has a rather long running thread on this going on and one person who did do the exploit has this sparkling gem of a response to the criticism:

“Coming from someone who did the exploit, I don’t really understand the reactions of you people.
Yes its clearly an exploit, theres no arguing that. I can even see why some of you feel it should be bannable (I disagree, but I don’t feel like wasting words arguing this).

But what I don’t understand is those of you who are screaming that those doing this are the scum of the earth, and that anyone who does this is pathetic, and that they lost respect for any guild doing it….. its kinda sad. Its really not that big of a deal. Half of the people bitching are just butt-hurt that they didn’t find out about it in time, and the other half are the care bare casual cry babies due to which this game is getting more and more watered down.”

Words of wisdom no? I found it telling. Oh, their armory activity feed is here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/blackrock/Kayytee/feed

I admit I probably would have been sorely tempted to take part in something like this had I found out right away, at least at the moment I found out. I like to think I’d be better than that knowing that it was an exploit and steered clear…scratch that I know I would have. Temptation is evil but ultimately we know when we’re breaking the rules or not. These people clearly did. There are links in many posts out there to many players in each of Paragon, Ensidia, Vodka, etc. raid teams that have all done the exploit.

I remember back in Vanilla WoW when my guild was working through Naxxramas there was a rather odd exploit that was going on with Heigan. It was fairly early on in Naxx’s life and we had just killed Heigan and the #2 guild was working on him shortly afterwards. What they discovered was that if Heigan was killed while he was up on his platform (during the dance) then he could be looted, and would respawn if the instance was reset. Since he dropped the Tier 3 belt at the time, they opted to repeatedly kill him on the platform and reset the instance in order to get as much loot as they could for their raid core. Shortly after performing this exploitation all evening they received a 72 hour ban and a removal of all ill-gotten gains.

I like to think that Blizzard would take as strong of an approach to this issue as they did with the example used and prove that just because these people are bleeding edge raiding groups it doesn’t excuse them from the rules we’re all expected to follow.

Just my two cents on the matter. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

 Really. In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

On a fundamental level the ability itself is creative and offers some rather unique experiences gameplay wise when it comes to borrowing an ability from another player. While we may not have any talents innately to support said ability it can, provided it was useful enough, enhance our performance in our current role. What I like is that this is a way to add some fluidity to the druid paradigm without going through the awkward motion of forcing us into offspec roles or other such shenanigans. We will be able to adapt to each situation based on encounter type and raid make-up. Ultimately though, and I’ll talk more about this later, there will be a correct ability to symbiosis per encounter and you will potentially be hamstrung by your raid make-up if you are in a ten man group.

Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s?

In order for this ability to work properly and be potent enough to be integral to our raiding experience it needs to provide a significant enough benefit once activated. The unpredictable nature of the ability, however, means that it might need to be extremely limited in what it can offer.

Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given.

It’s dangerous to accept a gift without knowing just we’re getting out of it and what price is paid for it. As mentioned before this ability will be highly erratic in its effectiveness depending on how strict the requirements are for the player targeted. If I target an enhancement shaman in my raid, will I be granted an ability to help me out that might be included in the restoration specialization specific list of spells or will I get something marginally useful but limited by what the enhancement shaman can cast. There are lots of important questions about the functionality of the spell that Blizzard isn’t forced to disclose at this time and are more than likely subject to change. I am going to go on the assumption, for the moment, that we are granted an ability of their class best suited for our current role regardless of the other persons current specialization.

Restoration must be balanced in both healing throughput, versatility, and usefulness without the ability granted by Symbiosis. The very nature of unpredictable raid make-up makes this a requirement. With the creation of healing mushrooms and ironbark coupled with tranquility and our normal raw throughput we need must be as good (doesn’t need to be better) as any other healer out there. We can’t foolishly accept, not that we have a choice really, an ability that adds immense flexibility if it comes with a tradeoff of being reliant on that ability to be competitive.

In a fictitious scenario, restoration druids would gain access to Power Word: Shield from priests when symbiosis is cast upon them. While we have nothing to boost power word shield talent wise this would offer us another option for healing and would somewhat increase our throughput. If without this granted ability we are some percentage, however small it may be, less effective or efficient at healing than that priest then we are at a disadvantage. Being unable to bring all of the tools you need to raid, or perform well, yourself is a liability and not a fun obstacle to deal with. This is why, in my opinion, the spell gained cannot be a core healing, damaging, or tanking ability that we would be expected to work into our rotations. One only needs to look back on shadow priests being reliant on the old Dark Intent to see the flaw in that design anyway.

But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

Given the logic outlined above, and given the fact that not all classes have a direct healing ability to offer we clearly cannot expect it to grant us that type of benefit. If not a direct healing ability, your thoughts might turn to a throughput cooldown as a borrowed ability such as Arcane Power, Avenging Wrath, or perhaps Elemental Mastery. These seem like rather awesome abilities however the list of potential candidates runs short once you leave the ranks of casters. There’s really no caster throughput that can be offered from any of the classes with only physical damage dealing specializations (for druid casters anyway). An extremely exaggerated example of a broken 10 man group for this might be: Tanks: Warrior/Death Knight, Healers: Druid/Druid, DPS: Rogue/Warrior/Death Knight/Hunter/Hunter/Druid. You’ve made your decision then?

 Not Remotely. Criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.

Now, now, no one here is a criminal but clearly we are at an impasse. If the ability granted by Symbiosis is a movement or get out of an emergency type ability then I think we’d be in a state of overkill. With access to dash, stampeding roar, engineering speed boosts, worgen dash, cheetah, increased cat form movement, and ‘fly to a friend’ (and its ilk) we’d be swimming in more ways to get out of danger with the addition of one more. While I love having access to all of that mobility I think that it would be completely unnecessary. Oh Blizzard your intellect clearly is dizzying.

WAIT TILL I GET GOING! Where was I?

Hopefully trying to help me understand your Symbiosis ability.

And you must have suspected I would have known the powder’s origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

You’re just stalling now.

You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You’ve beaten my raid bosses, which means you’re exceptionally strong, so you could’ve put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you’ve also bested foes in arena, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

You’re trying to trick me into giving away something. It won’t work.

IT HAS WORKED! YOU’VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE POISON IS!

I’m not so sure. It would be extremely difficult to make the ability granted something role specific that would slot into rotation and it can’t reliably be a throughput cooldown. Making in a movement type would only add redundancy to a class known for its mobility to start with. All that’s left is niche utility abilities. Things that fit into this category might be spells such as death grip or ‘life grip’. There are others but my brain is clearly too tired to comprehend them at this time. These would be neat of course but more than likely would be a take it or leave it type thing in my opinion. I give up Blizzard, you tell me how this is supposed to work, be balanced, and still make it feel like we’re getting something useful for our primary role.

 I will, and I choose– What in the world can that be?

What’s what? *looks at level 90 talents in the talent calculator* You didn’t try some kind of switcheroo while I was looking at that talents did you? I sincerely hope that you’re not going to give me some type of ability that doesn’t in any way help me heal and instead give me some kind of offspec funky utility….right?

 Well, I- I could have sworn I saw something. No matter.

Why are you smiling?

 I’ll tell you in a minute. First, let’s drink. Me from my glass, and you from yours.

I sincerely hope you know what you’re doing…

So while I am busy writing a Skyrim love letter post, a Symbiosis post (because that ability requires one almost entirely to itself), and battling a recent medical diagnosis, I’d like to give you something interesting to think about. A math riddle!

I know some of you were told there would be no math but…well if you’re reading my blog you know that I have a penchant for recreational math. As an engineer I generally deal with fairly concrete equations and guidelines so abstract mathematical analysis (which I did once upon a time) has long since left my brain. I will never compete with the likes of those that do the elitist jerks theorycrafting. If you’re comfortably on my level then hopefully you’ll appreciate this fairly straight forward puzzle! If you do come up with an answer please feel free to throw it in the comments but do so at your own risk as others may or may not drop one there. Do not leave explanations behind your answer as I’d like others who submit answers to not know if yours is right or wrong.

STONE RIDDLE

A long time ago there was a farmer who grew wheat to sell at the market. In order to bundle up his grain he would use a rather heavy-duty balance scale to check it against a stone that weighed exactly 40 lbs. Once a 40 lbs. Bushel was weighed it was strapped and thrown on the cart to bring to market.

One day the farmer’s neighbor came over and explained that he had broken his measuring stone and was in a dire situation getting his produce packaged up for the market. The farmer told his neighbor that he could use his 40 lb. stone, the only condition being that he had to take perfect care of it and return it safely. He was reassured this would be the case and off the stone went.

After a few days had gone by the neighbor returned on his wagon however the 40 lb. stone was not on it and intact. Instead the farmer saw four different size pieces of stone. The neighbor sheepishly admitted that the stone had slipped off of his scale and broke into four pieces. It turns out that each piece’s weight was a whole number, and once the farmer was told exactly how much each stone piece weighed he was no longer upset. It turns out that through clever manipulation the four pieces of stone could be used to measure any whole number increment of wheat from 1 to 40 pounds.

Goal:

If each of the four pieces’ weight is a whole number, all four of them add up to 40 pounds, and they can be used to weight any weight between 1 to 40 pounds how much does each stone weigh? The scale the farmer uses is a traditional balance beam scale with room to place items on either side. When wheat is being measured all wheat goes on the same side of the scale.