Thursday, January 28, 2010

ICC Time Woes

So the Crimson Halls have been open for a little over a week now. And the Frostwing Halls is set to open on Tuesday. That'll be the full deal. All of ICC.

So where do I stand in completion? Deathbringer Saurfang.

I've seen the inside of the Plagueworks once, and Rotface stomped us all night long. We had one reasonably good attempt (~30%), one fair attempt (~50%), and mostly miserable attempts the rest of the time. It was to the point where I didn't even know where to begin suggesting improvements because it felt like nothing was going right for us (which, as a raid leader, is the most frustrating thing in the world). Plus I was the Rotface tank, which means my job consisted of "stand there and tank." So I didn't even feel there was anything specific I could to do help out in my role.

So what's the primary reason for this? Time, really. Right now our guild has 4 scheduled raid nights. Tuesday and Sunday are the weekly raid for however many people we get signed up and want to go. More often than not we end up running a 25 and a 10 there. Friday and Saturday are our scheduled guild 25-man runs. That leaves 3 (4, tops, if you count Tue and Sun as half-nights) nights where we can make attempts at ICC. Most Mondays are out for me because I play hockey that night. Every other Tuesday is out because those are guys'-night-outs.

Because of the geographic spread of our core raiding members (Nova Scotia to Cali) and their own personal obligations, an average raid night for us lasts from 8-11 server time, if we get grouped and started right away. We often lose anywhere from 30-60 minutes in that area.

We've still cleared the Lower Spire almost every week. We've got that down to about a 90-minute run. Hell, we can even do it on alts, as we found out. But then because of schedules or raid member availability, we haven't even been able to get a second night in after that since the first week of the Plagueworks. Not even attempts.

I don't mind being in a spot where I have to continually work to down a specific boss. I don't expect to get every boss I try down in the first night. But I do mind that I'm not even getting the chance to try.

Could we extend the raid ID? Sure. But we're still not sharding things from the Lower Spire. Plus that's a guaranteed 8 Emblems of Frost that I hate to pass up. So it seems inappropriate to just save our progress past that content. But at the same time, it's starting to look like the only way we're going to continue to get real chances.

Oh, the trials of a casual raiding guild...

9 comments:

  1. What strat you guys used on Rotface?
    What was the raid setup? (like how many tanks, ranges, melees, and healers)
    i would like to share from the point of view as a healer.

    Darsonsind of Elune

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  2. Two tanks (Me and a Pally), 3 Healers (Disc Priest, Tree, and a 3rd I don't remember), DPS was a mage, a hunter, a rogue, and two others I can't recall. I think we had 3 ranged and 2 melee.

    I was on Rotface and the Pally tank was on add/cleanse duty. All the healers and DPS were stacked in melee range, except the hunter who was as close as she could get.

    We cleansed immediately because our healers were having a hard time keeping up with the debuff on the infected members.

    Our biggest two problems seemed to be getting the oozes to merge in a timely matter without someone being one-shot by the big one, and keeping the kited oozes from wandering too close to the raid. I think. But nothing we tried seemed to help.

    Honestly, it's been 3 weeks since I've even been able to try the fight again and it's really hard for me to recall what went on that night.

    Usually in our guild, when we have bad nights like that, we go back in a night or two later with clear heads and a little experience under our belt and things just fall into place for us. We just really need the opportunity to go in and try again.

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  3. I'd be okay with extending the timer just so we get some honest attempts. But that's just my little whine in the big whine pool.

    -Cheres

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  4. I actually completely forgot that you could extend raid IDs...

    oops...

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  5. @ Saniel
    I think you can have your hunter to kite ooze instead of dps. with the aspect of wild and disc priest shield, your hunter can kite the ooze around without any problem.

    A sidenote, HoTs from Tree should possible heal thought the 10 sec period of infection. 1 rejv+ LB stack should give a decent amount of healing to the infection member.

    Big ooze forming is kind of hard. Many people had purposed many strat. the most commem point was healing thru the period of the infected member and let 2 people stay with kiter to form big ooze. i am not sure which strat to benefit you the most. But,1 kiter, 1 tank, 3 healers and 5 dps should kill Rotface easiler.

    Darsonsind of Elune

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  6. I bet I could convince our hunter to be okay with kiting the ooze. The problem is we have no disc priest.

    -Cheres

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  7. Hey! I was going to make this same post.

    grumble grumble guildie bloggers grumble

    lol

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  8. Hey! I was going to make this same post.

    grumble grumble guildie bloggers grumble

    lol

    ReplyDelete
  9. But you can make it from the guild leader point of view not the raid leader point of view!

    That's really all I got.

    -Cheres

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