Now I know how the other side lives

Last Thursday night we headed back into ICC with a different group of 10 than we did on Tuesday. I ended up going on my Shaman (Daluaan) in his resto spec.

I'd healed up through Saurfang before. A couple times, actually. Or, rather, I should say that I've healed up to Saurfang. We always have one of our healers go DPS for that fight and every time I've gone on Dal, it's been me. I'm usually the weakest healer in the bunch and my Enhance DPS is not too shabby...so it works out.

Well it just so happened that our group was cooking along fairly well, so we thought, "hey, why not see what we can do against Festergut and Buttface?"

The funny thing about tanking (and DPSing) is that they don't really change. Yeah, you might use some different abilities if you're dealing with a group instead of a single target, or you might have to move to avoid different things. But in the end tanking is tanking. Dishing out damage is dishing out damage.

Now, maybe I just say this because I'm more used to tanking and DPSing. They take up 3 of the 4 specs of my two raid-toons and the leveling spec of every alt I've ever played. Maybe any healers who read my blog will disagree with my next sentence.

Healing changes. Holy crap, does it change. Healing the Ugly Bros isn't anything like healing that ranty queen B, Deathwhimper.

Even though Dal is a pretty competent healer, I've never healed current content on him. He's always been a tier behind, if not more. As such, I've never really been in a group with him where at least half the raid didn't moderately outgear the encounters or where I really had to pull my own weight healing. I just had to be "the 3rd healer." Even the couple times that I did the Lower Spire previously, I never really felt like I was in a position where I was being tested.

Festergut and Rotface? Yeah...they were a test. We ultimately two-shot both of them. But I directly attribute both wipes to my utter noobishness and inability to handle healing demands on fights where people can't get carried.

The most eye-opening part for me is seeing how hard it is for healers to cope with the mistakes the rest of us make.

As a tank, if someone else makes a mistake, it usually means I have to toss out a Growl followed by a quick FF and everything's good again.

As a DPS, if someone makes a mistake...well...I might have to stop DPSing long enough to throw a brez. But it usually doesn't affect me. Or there's usually very little I can do about it even if it does. (Flame Wreaths, anybody?)

Being used to these roles, when I did something bad, I usually brushed it off with a quick "sorry" and then went about my business.

Never. Again.

Healers, I have a whole new respect for you guys and what you have to put up with when I quickly say "sorry."

I think everyone should have to heal progression content at least once in their raiding career now. And the more mistake prone they are when they play...the more mistake prone people they have to heal.

I can't say it with anymore detail than that. If you heal, you know. If you don't, no description I could conjure up with words would do the experience 1/1000th of the justice it demands. You just have to experience it.

On the positive side, I found out that HealBot makes calling out the Mutated Infections a lot easier than trying to watch DBM announcements.

A Bear's guide to ICC: Rotface

Oh hi, there. Been a while since I've done one of these. Let's see if I still remember how...

The Rotface encounter requires two tanks doing two very different jobs. One is exceptionally easy. The other one can make or break your attempts. No pressure.

The Rotface Tank:
The Rotface tank has the easy job. Rage up, Charge in, and start tanking Rotface so that his teeny, tiny hitbox (don't tease, he's sensitive about it) is pretty much lined up over the teeny, tiny circle in the middle of the floor. Then...hold him there and tank away. You want to tank him there because throughout the encounter, any given quarter of the room may be flooded with ooze. (I love that word...it's so fun to say.) The flood leaks pretty far into the room. Holding Rotface in the center will minimize raid movement during the encounter. Plus it will help with Ooze management (which we'll get to).

Once you're happily beating on him, there's really only two things you have to watch out for.

1) On set intervals he will target a random raid member and start puking in their direction. 9 times out of 10, this won't affect you. However, if you happen to be in the line between Rotface and said targeted raid member, you will have to move out of the way. So don't fall completely asleep.

2) Occasionally one of the Big Oozes in the room (more on those below) will become unstable and explode, doing damage to anyone near it and sending 3 ooze missiles in a high arc through the air. The missiles can land anywhere a raid member was standing when they were launched and will do significant damage when they hit the ground. When the explosion happens, you want to drag Rotface to one of the corners of the room to avoid the falling ooze missiles. I like to drag him straight back from where I'm tanking unless I'd be headed right towards the exploding ooze or into a flooded corner of the room. Either way, communicate with your raid which way you're going to go so that you can all say together. You do not want to spend a lot of time spread out during this fight. Once the ooze missiles have all hit the ground, drag him back to the middle.

Rinse, repeat.

The Ooze tank:
If you are the Ooze tank, there's a lot riding on your shoulders. To make things worse, Bears might be the worst Ooze tanks in the game. We can do it, but it takes considerable effort.

So what's going to happen is Rotface will start hitting members of your raid with Mutated Infection (very similar to Grobbulus's Mutating Injection). The infection is a disease that ticks about 3K damage every second for 12 seconds or until cleansed. When the disease drops off (whether by cleansing or because the 12 seconds expired) that person spawns a Little Ooze. The Little Ooze cannot be taunted and it has unreachable levels of threat on the person that it spawned from. The Little Ooze has a small ticking AoE attack, and will also drop nasty pools of gunk near the feet of the person it's targeting. For these two reasons, you want to keep this thing out of the raid. You also don't want them combining into a(nother) Big Ooze in the middle of the raid.

Big Ooze, you say? What's that?

When two Little Oozes get within 10 yards of each other, they combine and form a Big Ooze. The Big Ooze is tauntable and it is what the Ooze tank needs to handle. Like the Little Oozes, the Big Ooze pulses AoE damage and sends out puddles of concentrated nastiness. It also hits quite hard. Most tanks can't stay near them for more than a second or so. They move quite slowly, though. So the idea is to kite them around the edge of the room. Bears, all we really have to help us with this is Growl and Fearie Fire. We have our caster form spells, too, but they don't really do much threat and it's dangerous to stop moving.

The Big Oozes will also absorb any Little Ooze (or other Big Ooze) that gets within 10 yards of them. So once there is a Big Ooze in the raid, the idea is for the infected raid members to run to the Ooze tank and follow along side him/her until their Little Ooze gets absorbed by the Big one.

Each time the Big Ooze absorbs a Little Ooze, it becomes more unstable. When it becomes 100% unstable (5 stacks), it does the explodey thing I mentioned above. If it absorbs another Big Ooze, it counts as 2 little Oozes + existing instability stacks.

While kiting, there's a number of dangers you still have to keep an eye out for. If Rotface is puking, you don't want to cross that stream. The Ooze that floods the room slows you and does damage, so you don't want to spend too much time in it. And you have to avoid the smaller pools the Oozes shoot out at all cost. Those are the really dangerous ones. Also, keep moving while the missiles from the exploding ooze are in the air and try not to run across spots where other raid members were standing when they launched.

It is possible to change kiting directions if necessary. When you do this, make sure you make a wide arc around the Big Ooze. You do not want to let it get within melee range of you. Again, it moves really slow, so this is very doable. Just pay attention and be careful.

And that's it. Simple, right?

A few things worth noting: Like the Grobbulus fight, the Infections come faster and faster the longer the encounter goes, acting as a soft enrage timer. Eventually your healers and Ooze tank just get overwhelmed and can't keep up.

If a raid member dies while they have a Little Ooze aggroed on them, it will go after the next highest threat target. This person will then have to kite that ooze to join the Big one. If the second highest threat member happens to be the Rotface tank (which actually happens often in our runs) then the only way to get it out of the raid is to let it merge with another Little Ooze right there and then get taunted away. This whole process will put a lot of strain on your healers.

A capable Hunter can very well be the Ooze tank.

We like using a Pally as the Ooze tank. They have a fair number of ranged abilities at their disposal, are able to free themselves from slow effects if they have to run through the flood, and can Purify the infected raid members when they get into the right position. (This last is insanely helpful, both in terms of saving GCDs from the healers and allowing them to not have to pay attention to when the infected raid member is in position to be cleansed.)

Edit: Talking about loot drops is traditional. I guess forgetting about that part isn't too smooth on my part.

On 10-man, Rotface will drop Shaft of Glacial Ice, which isn't too shabby. There's a decent number of better weapons in the game for bears, but it's possible this will be an upgrade over what you have.

On 25-man you can look forward to the Seal of Many Mouths, the Bile-Encrusted Medallion, and/or Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy. None are particularly amazing or must-have for Bears, but there may be something in there of use to you depending on what else you have (or haven't) picked up along the way.

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As with all my boss strats, I'm writing from the overall perspective of a Bear tank and what they will need to do. For you Cats reading this blog, I suggest you check out Dinaer's guides on Forever a Noob. They're written for Rogues but are a pretty good guide for melee in general and his gear drop suggestions (with the exception of weapons) will be spot on for Cats. If I have additional insight, I will try to add it in my blog. Here is his Rotface strat.

OMGICC!

We've been on a wave of ICC craziness in our guild lately. In the last 6 nights, I've spent 4 in ICC (3 on 10-man, 1 on 25). A lot has happened in those few days.

Two Sundays ago (the 7th, which is guess is out of that 6-night window I just mentioned) we got our 10-man team together and headed in to finally take advantage of a Raid ID we'd extended from the previous week. Yes, it took us until Sunday to do it. Like I said...our raid time is tight.

Anyway, with the recently-fixed Rotface injection timer and the 5% "pity buff," we were finally able to down Rotface. It took us two tries, and the second one was pretty sloppy. The last 250K was done with 2 tanks, a healer, and a dps. The last 100K was done sans healer. Fortunately one of the tanks and the dps were both paladins and I had all my cooldowns available. We scraped by. Much hooting and hollering and screen capping occurred.

We had about 3 minutes to give Putricide a try before we lost our tank for the night, so we buffed, pulled blind, and died fast.

Fast-forward to this past Sunday. There'd been some grumbling about how we were being too selective with our ICC teams. Fair enough. We were limiting our pool quite severely, even to the point of leaving out people who probably deserved to go. So I set up a run specifically targeted at some of those others.

We wiped once on Festergut because of a bad pull. And that was it until we started taking cracks at Putricide. Yep, that's right. Our not-quite-A team one-shot 5 of 6 bosses on the way to PP, including Rotface. Twas a good night. (We won't talk about our PP progress.)

This week we have two different 10-man runs planned. Last night's got stuck in the Plagueworks without downing any of those bosses, but it was a good run for the amount of time that we had.

Thursday night is our next shot. Then one of those two IDs will be carried over to the next week for some more progression tries, either on PP or the Blood Princes.

When it rains, it pours, I guess. Good times, though. And progress! :-)

Not so much

Once again, my planned topic of discussion is being derailed because I found someone else posting something that I could relate to and that my mind found infinitely more interesting at this precise moment.

This time it was Saffron posting some experience leading weekly raid PuGs.

For having been a raid leader as long as I have, you'd think I'd lead a lot of PuGs. Yeah...not so much. I don't even like participating in PuGs and really only do so out of occasional necessity. One of the things that make leading raids in a guild (or mine, specifically...I can't really speak to many others) is that the people in my guild are willing to be lead. They listen to me, try their best to follow my instructions, and generally respect me and the position I hold. It makes leading raids exceptionally easy.

PuGs...again, not so much.

However, a few weeks ago I actually participated in an Alliance Wintergrasp victory on my server (they're exceedingly rare, even when weighted heavily in our favor) and jumped at the chance to get into VoA and maybe get a piece of T10 gear that I wouldn't have to spend Frost Emblems on (because I'm horrible about logging in to do my random dailies and have fallen far behind most progression-oriented types in collecting them).

You would think a bear tank with over 50K buffed health or a kitty capable of sustaining almost 6K dps (in an unideal mix of Uld 10 and ToC 10 gear) on a tank-and-spank raid fight like Toravon would be in popular demand...especially as infrequently as the Alliance folk on my server get chances at him. Turns out...not so much.

So I convinced Student/Frat Pally tank in my guild to tank with me and then did the unimaginable. I pulled together a PuG VoA raid.

Before pulling the boss I asked if everyone knew the fight. No one indicated otherwise so we went ahead and pulled. Two wipes later it was clear we didn't have the DPS to bring him down. I could sense general uneasiness (how dare a PuG fail!) and some snippiness started appearing in raid chat. I ran interference long enough to get people to stop calling other people names, declared that we lacked DPS to finish the fight, apologized, and said I would be asking some of the lower DPS to leave.

One immediately whispered, knowing he was down on the list, and offered to bow out. I thanked him for understanding and let him go on his way. Then I whispered three more, apologized again, but said that I was going to have to ask them to sit this one out.

To my surprise, all three were very understanding. They all thanked me for giving them a couple chances before booting them. Two thanked me for talking to them before just dropping them. One thanked me specifically for whispering him instead of calling him out in raid chat. They all dropped on their own accord, rather than making me raid kick them.

We filled their spots along with those of a few people who were too impatient to deal with wipes or time needed to find replacements, then smoothly cleared all 4 bosses in the Vault.

I still don't like PuGs, leading or otherwise. I still try to avoid them when I can. I still tend to think that there's roughly a 102.8% chance that they're going to be a nightmare. But at least now I know, somewhere way, way back in the darkest, least used corners of my brain...not so much.

More Truth

So I was all set to make a particular post today when I came across this Truth post Bear Pelt put up over on WoW Trotter. And then my mind spun way off into the nether.

Immediately when you hear an individual plays games (particularly MMOs), you immediately form a number of assumptions and opinions about that person. I don't need to list them. You can probably think of a dozen right now. You probably did it between the last two sentences without even skipping a beat.

Does anyone meet all these assumptions exactly? No. It's just a stereotype that we're all familiar with. But stereotypes exist for a reason. While very few people fit them exactly, a large number of people will at least come close. You know, have at least a small number (if not more) of those stereotypical traits. But regardless, we go in with them. And then it's only time and experience and getting to know people that really make us change our minds.

Of course, all this is just talking about the real world. Referring to some nameless, faceless person like, "Oh yeah, I know Rob. He's a pretty hardcore gamer." But in a social and interactive game like WoW, there's a whole new layer of complexity.

In a game like WoW, once we've been forced into that base stereotype, snap assumptions are made on not just how we type in guild chat, but on the toons we play and (unfairly) the roles we fill and how well we fill them. Often times, once those snap assumptions have been made, collated, and reacted to, any evidence that contradicts them goes right through our minds without stopping. Whatever the MMO version of in-one-ear-out-the-other would be. (In-one-eye?)

Sometimes we'll play with someone for years before we realize we've improperly categorized them.

One particular member of my guild comes immediately to mind. He's a guy, but plays all female characters and is very animated and excessively squeees (as Bear Pelt put it) and such. Behaves very stereotypically female. Even on Vent, his voice is somewhat androgynous, which led most of the guild to assume he was female. It was a little bit of a shock to find out otherwise. I still have to constantly correct myself when speaking to/about him because it's just how I've come to think of him over the years that we've been in the same guild.

One of our core raiders who's been running with us for at least two years is only 15. We had no idea until he finally got a headset with a mic for vent. He's always carried himself so maturely, never resorted to txt-speak, etc, that everyone assumed that when he talked about "school," it was HS or even college.

I used to be surprised about how much football chatter goes back and forth in gchat on Sundays. I used to think I was a bit of a special snowflake in that regard. Turns out, not so much.

I was surprised how many of our guild's members (especially some of the more active ones) were actually adults with families. I was never under the illusion that married parents didn't play wow, but they make up a large portion of my guild's leadership, which surprised me at first.

Yes, these examples are all about me. I'm not any better than anyone else in this regard. I do strive to approach new people I meet with an open mind. Sometimes it's easier than others. But the attitudes exist. And the more aware we are of those attitudes, both in ourselves and the people we meet, the easier it'll be for us to enjoy playing this game together.

Random bits and linkage

Thanks, all, for the support during my whine-fest on Wednesday morning. I think no small part of my frustration was due to the fact that I'd put in over 30 hours of work this week, prior to posting that. It's been a hellish one. The end is finally in sight, though.

Over the past week we've gotten a little more detail on how Mastery stats are going to work and even got a Feral-specific touch from Eyonix. Alaron over at The Fluid Druid got the news out along with his initial thoughts. I don't think I can say it any better than he already did, so I'm just going to direct you there. (Although I still say +crit is more likely than +agi for our second stat.)

If you missed the news and want full coverage of blue input on the matter, you can check this blue-tracked thread over on MMO-Champion.

Finally today, before getting back to the grind, I want to point you over to a WoW.com post about some of the new in-game music we can look forward to in 3.3.3. As I'm pretty sure I've stated in this blog before, I'm a huge music nerd and I love the way Blizz has composed tracks for WoW (and all their games, really). These new tracks are no exception. The ZF Quiet and ZF Big Battle tracks, especially, have me really excited to figure out a way to get a high-enough level Troll over there and participate in the Echo Isles quests.

Guild Pressures

I've been limiting my WoW time quite a bit lately, for a number of reasons. Some of them have to do with wanting to clear out a backlog of other games I've been collecting (just finished Mass Effect 2 over the weekend and OMGSOGOOD!). Some of it is because non-gaming things (skiing, hockey, social events, work) have been taking up a larger portion of my time recently.

But mostly it's because, for the first time in the 4 years I've been playing, WoW's started feeling like a second job for me. And when I sit down and log in, I'm just not finding myself having much fun. I'll hop on in the evening, stick around long enough to see if a raid is going to come together, and then either go on that or log off if it becomes apparent there won't be one.

There's a couple loads that are typically spread out among multiple members in guilds that have fallen almost squarely on my shoulders as of late.

Our guild has 3 raid leaders. However one has involved himself much more in school and his fraternity over the last year than he has in WoW. Really the only time we see him with reliability anymore is during extended school breaks. I'm not faulting him for this. It's a very healthy thing and I'd be more concerned if he was ignoring these parts of his real life. But the simple fact is that it's one less reliable raid lead in our guild.

The other raid leader had work more or less blow up in his face and start consuming a disproportionate amount of his time right around the same time he signed on to help coordinate an entire convention. We haven't so much as seen a "X has logged on" from him in about 6 weeks, I think. Again, not faulting him.

But now I'm the only raid lead left. It's pretty much up to me to figure out what our guild is going to run any given week, whether it's an open invite or selective, and who to invite if it is selective. Then it's up to me to be the one showing up to actually lead said events. Normally I don't mind this. I enjoy leading raids. But I end up feeling guilty when other obligations call me away or when I just want a night off. I shouldn't get that kind of feeling from a game. Plus I end up scheduling our raids around my schedule because I don't want to force any of my fellow officers to fill in when I can't be there. A few have stepped up to help try and fill the gaps, but I know it's not a role any of them particularly want to play.

Then we come to the issue of tanks, particularly progression tanks. There is a reasonable number of well-geared tanks being played by skilled players in our guild. The problem is that most of them are alts of people who play their other roles much better (and have collected much better gear). There are really only two main-toon, main-spec, progression-ready, reliable tanks in our guild. I'm one of them. School/Frat Raid Leader is the other.

So, same thing. Any time we're trying to run anything harder than ToC 10, I feel obligated to be there tanking to give us a reasonable chance at success. I love tanking. It's a ton of fun. More than I honestly ever thought it would be before I took my first baby-bear steps into Kara. Plus it makes leading a raid really, really easy for me. I'm much more distracted when shredding ankles in cat form or bringing my Shaman in for a change of pace. I actually have to pay attention to me more than the raid when I do any of those.

But Cat is still my first love and I'm really, really starting to miss it. I've gotten to go Cat in a few VoA pugs and dungeons in the last month and I've enjoyed the hell out of it. And playing around with the Mangle change on the PTR has made me really want to flex those muscles in a raid environment. Honest to God, if our guild ever got 3 or so tanks that I reasonably trusted and thought were better than (or at least as good as) me, I'd be happy spending 90% of our raids staring at ass-end of everything we met.

But again, our raiding opportunities are limited. We have to make the most of them, especially on 25-man where our less hardcore members have less patience with wipes and such. So a-tanking I go.

I know this whole post sounds like a gripe-fest. I guess, to some extent, it is. But I don't want to get down on this game or my Guild. Both are great. And raiding is still the single most fun thing in the game for me.

I just really want to be able to share the responsibilities of it all again (with people that aren't just grudgingly accepting them).