I hate Ragnaros

I hate Ragnaros. He sucks the fun out of everything. And makes what had been a nice weekend end on a very sour note.

Let me back up. This weekend had been going pretty well WoW-wise.

Mornara and Kuan got their arenas done Saturday night. We had some excellent wins and each managed to get enough points to buy a new piece of gear. There were no humiliating defeats, and one excellent close fought match with one of our guildies and a friend of his. (Which reminds me I should check out a blood pvp spec.)

We got all of our 85s through a heroic or two. It's rather amusing to mix and match them so that we have at least one tank or healer in every group. Khyrie, my resto druid, is just barely qualified for heroics and I'm still learning all of her buttons and healer CDs. So it can get a little hairy while I remember what button will save the day. It was still a pretty good set of runs.

Our little bank guild side business is raking in modest profits. We've got a decent glyph business going and I'm emptying out a bunch of space in prep for Mists. It's enough money and then some to provide profession items and mount money for alts.

We had a Fireland run scheduled for Sunday night. Last week's run had gone so well I was looking forward to it. And indeed we smashed through all of the first 6 bosses. We had our boomkin extraordinaire there to get his staff items, so we didn't try for Bucket List. However, we did get Death From Above again and a few people were missing Share the Pain, which we just got incidentally. We even played around with Majordomo Staghelm and kept him in scorpion form for 43 stacks. It was hilarious, and he died so fast.

But then... then the fun was over: it was time to kill Ragnaros.

I don't like the Ragnaros fight in Firelands. It's recycled and not all that interesting. It is also one of those fights where if someone makes a small mistake it's unrecoverable. Most of the mistakes end up being about letting a son get through. Either through confusion about who was on what, or because someone got themselves killed and even with DS gear you still have to be on your toes to get the sons dead before they explode the raid.

As we got to Ragnaros both DraNgNon and I started to stress out. My stress was not reduced by one of our mages being a total nub and not knowing the fight or his class all that well. Nor was it reduced by the other mage being a smartass when I tried to give out instructions for the son assignments.

We had 45 minutes left when we got to Rag and we weren't able to kill him before we ran out of time for the night even though we did a few extra pulls. If we'd gotten to Madness with that much time, with the same group, it would have been a cakewalk. I really hate Ragnaros.

Raid Achievements!

This past Sunday and Tuesday were good nights for a few raid achievements.

Sunday we raided into Firelands. Our most progressed staff person was out on vacation, so instead of trying to kill everything asap for quest items we went for some of the more time consuming achievements. Bucket List and Death From Above.

Bucket List took a lot of clearing. Fortunately our group was pretty solid so it was just a matter of getting everything out of the way. It was a pretty fun achieve to do. I always take Riplimb so I can spam Chains of Ice if there isn't a trap handy. Kuanchichi ended up with the skull marker and, since DraNgNon knew where to go, ended up being the person that the Shannox tank followed around. It worked like a charm.

Death From Above took us a bit to work the strategy out for. I had to call for several wipes because we'd have a drone or two die in the second phase. But once we figured out the plan for how much and when to kill drones it was a very smooth kill.



Tuesday, we did Dragon Soul. I can't tell if it's general end of expansion burnout or everyone logging on to the beta, but we were just barely able to field a 10man raid. We tried for heroic Morchok and were very very close, but we were ultimately stymied by a number of disconnects. If you don't have 5 people to soak the stomp it's practically impossible to get everyone healed up to survive the crystal and next stomp.

However, all that practice on heroic Morchok made it very easy to get Don't Stand So Close to Me


That also happened to be our 50th raid boss kill since the guild achieves for raiding were added in. So double achieve!


I really love guild achievements, and Darkfall is now up to 1690 points.

Tired

Perhaps now isn't a great time to be making this post. Perhaps I should wait until I'm calmer and in a more reasonable state of mind. Perhaps if I were able to chill the fuck out enough to do that I wouldn't need to make this post at all.

However it is not the case that I am calm. It is not the case that I am feeling reasonable.

Let me say it again: I AM NOT CALM.

I'm tired, sick and fucking tired, of having people second guess every single raid call I make. I'm unhappy to hear that people aren't enjoying the raids. Especially since the people complaining most loudly are actually the ones causing the raids to be so excruciating. And I can not stand it when no matter what strategy I use for a fight someone doesn't like it. Often the same someone who whined about the original strategy until I changed it to the new one.

It saps my will to lead raids when I hear that the guild raids suck, or are run badly, or use strategies that are terrible. Fuck, it saps my will to play at all, when I get constantly get told how terribly hostile the guild is by the very person who is making it such a hostile environment to begin with.

Sadly, I'm not drunk and won't post this to the guild boards. But I'm having a really hard time looking forward to my imminent guild leadership with any thing other than horror.

I'M SO CALM

So there is a legendary for the 4.2 patch and Firelands. It's a caster dps staff. It has lore for the blue dragon aspect, as well as being a stupendouslu awesome dps weapon.

It requires a lot of effort from a whole guild to make. There are at least 3 big collection quest stages where you only get boss drops. There are a few solo sections, some lore-ish and some actually challenging. And there is a boss that takes a raid to kill.

We'd chosen a mage to get this staff first. It wasn't perhaps a well thought out choice, but he was actually in the raids when we started getting the first quest item drops. I accept responsibility for that ill-thought out and foolish choice.

Tonight that mage gquit.

The legendary is roughly 2/3 done.

I am ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS. I managed to keep my calm and get the raid going tonight, but most of the time I wasn't talking on Vent I was saying "fucking ******".

Perhaps it wasn't explicitly stated when he initially got the first quest items, but I thought there was some sort of agreement whereby the guild worked to get him the staff and he stayed in the guild, at the least until the staff was finished.

I want to be absolutely clear here. It's ok to leave a guild if you're not happy in it. If you don't fit in it's far better to leave before you cause trouble. However, it is NOT ok to get a guild's help for what is basically a group quest credited to one person, and then bail before finishing all of the quest. Especially when only one person can get the quest items at a time. If you're not in it for the long haul you should not be trying to complete a legendary.

Also the circumstance of his gquit are enraging.

He'd been busy on our first raid night of the week, and had missed killing the first 4 bosses of FL. Tonight he wanted to bring his rogue alt, because his mage was saved and he wanted to make sure that his mage got all the quest items he could for the week. Officers said ok, but we're going to bring mains before we bring your alt. Now, because we had to work around him it took us some time to get the raid set up. We had 2 spots open and were about to bring his rogue alt in when I don't even know what he was angry about but he gquit all his toons.

Just fucking like that.

We weren't willing to blindly gear up his rogue and so he took the guilds hard work and ran off with it.

Fuck I am so angry.



****** No, I'm not going to give out his name. I'm sure if you want to figure it out you can, but I'm not going to give it to you.

This week in Raiding

This week the Firelands nerfs hit pretty hard. A week ago Darkfall was at 4/7, and we'd only killed Shannox and Rhyolith on 25man. By the end of last night we were 6/7.

On Tuesday we had 22 DF people in the raid suddenly. I'd like to think that all of this was due to the super recruitment efforts of everyone, and for sure we did have a bunch of new people show up. However, the suspicious part of me also considers that some people were motivated to show by news of the nerfs.

Anyway, my suspicions aside, we had a very awesome raiding week. That first night we killed Shannox, Rhyolith, and Beth pretty handily. Our only slowness was due to having to pug a few people in, and to needing to swap people around later in the evening. We even had time for a few pulls on Baelroc.

Thursday we killed Baleroc and then Alysrazor. Despite about half of the raid not having seen Aly before and all of us having to learn the fight together as a 25man we still killed Aly the first night we actually saw her on 25man.

As a side note, my new trick for getting the raid to kill stuff is to tell them not to worry about dps and just focus on getting the mechanic down. It worked like a charm for Bael.



In preparation for Sunday night I watched both the Majordomo and Ragnaros fights. But honestly I figured we'd be really lucky if we got Domo down. The mechanics are deceptively simple, and it's one of those fights were one person can easily wipe the whole thing.

At raid time last night we had 25 people on and ready, plus a few more people who logged on after we'd started. It was fortunate we had some extras, because we needed to make some replacements as the evening wore on and a thunderstorm took out one person's connection while general lag/bad connection from Australia took out another person's.

We killed Domo on the last pull of the night. It was the thirteenth pull. Again it was our first night of seeing the fight as a group, or for most people, seeing the fight ever. And given that and how unforgiving some of his mechanics can be I'm super proud of how well we did. Really, when I think of how long it took to kill Lurker or Leo or Yogg or the Lich King, I'm absolutely awesomely impressed with us. I am super proud of Darkfall for getting to 6/7.



***
All that said, there was a lot of tension in and after the raid last night.

There has been a tendency in the last couple of our raids for people to argue about strategy on vent. I and others have suggested that people keep it to whispers. However either way, there are a lot of people with their own ideas on what we'll be doing. This is fine, I like suggestions. I like that people are engaged. But I want to keep vent clear. And I don't always see or have time to respond to all the whispers I get.

*I am not going to change what the raid is doing every single time someone has a new suggestion*

*I* am running the raid. The officers are helping me. As raid leader it is my job to delegate and get input to determine what we'll be doing. I need to work on delegation, but in general things are NOT going to be improved by changing them every pull. Darkfall is not a bad guild, but we're not world or server first guild either. And I'm sorry, but we have a variety of skill levels present in the raid. Darkfall has never used the cookie cutter strategy for our kills, we don't usually have the "ideal" raid composition to do so anyway. So we try and fail and progress until we've got our own strategy that works for *us*.

We have made phenomenal progress in Firelands, and I'm sad for anyone who isn't proud of that.

Firelands: Lord Rhyolith dialogue

Lord Rhyolith is the 3rd boss that Darkfall killed in the Firelands. He is a gigantic fire elemental who lives on an island surrounded by magma.

Rhyolith has two phases. For the first phase Rhyolith doesn't care about the raid. He just starts walking to the magma and once he gets to it will drink and then kill the raid with fiery death. The raid has to steer him away from the magma by hitting his right and left leg. He's also stomping which creaties volcanoes and spawns adds. So the melee is steering Rhyolith over active volcanoes to reduce his armor and the ranged is killing the adds. Rhyolith also causes the craters of the volcanoes he stomped on to erupt spewing lines of magma all over the place.

Phase two happens when Rhyolith gets down to 25% health. He breaks his remaining armor and goes all molten. If he hasn't been steered over enough active volcanoes by this point and still has any of his damage reduction buff you're going to die horribly.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Hah? Hruumph? Soft little fleshy-things? Here? Nuisances, nuisances!
Lord Rhyolith yells: I'll crush you underfoot!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Buuurrrnn!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Succumb to living flame.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Sear the flesh from their tiny frames!


Lord Rhyolith yells: Oh you little beasts...
Lord Rhyolith yells: Succumb to living flame.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Stomp now.
Lord Rhyolith yells: Graaahh!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Buuurrrnn!
Lord Rhyolith yells: Augh - smooshy little pests, look what you've done!


Lord Rhyolith yells: Oww now hey.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Eons I have slept undisturbed... Now this... Creatures of flesh, now you will BURN!
Once you've got him to 25%, and his armor is off you're mostly home free.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Uurrghh now you... you infuriate me.
Well home free unless you've taken too long and he superheats, which will wipe you.


Lord Rhyolith yells: Broken. Mnngghhh... broken...


The above shot is our first 25man kill and below is our first official 10man kill.

Firelands: Beth'tilac dialogue

Continuing my series of dialogue from the Firelands bosses we killed Beth'tilac the other night.

Seeing as Beth is a giant horrible spider she doesn't actually say anything. She just sits on her web for a while and sends lots of smaller spiders of varying sizes at the raid. After a while she deigns to drop down and try to burn the raid with her fiery spiderness.

Fortunately the raid is not quite as flammable as giant horrible spider would like.

Firelands: Shannox dialogue

Shannox is the first boss that Darkfall killed in Firelands. He's a big flamewalker (or fire naga as I say when my brain stops and my mouth keeps going) with two hellhound pets.

The basic strategy for killing Shannox is to have one tank for him and one for his dog Riplimb. Rageface, the third dog, will randomly attack people and needs to be focused down ASAP. Shannox will also drop traps on the raid and throw his spear for Riplimb to fetch. Riplimb needs to be kited over the crystal prison traps to freeze him so that tank debuffs can drop, and Rageface should be kited over the immolation traps for extra damage on him.


Shannox yells: Yes, I smell them too, Riplimb. Outsiders encroach on the Firelord's private grounds. Find their trail. Find them for me, that I may dispense punishment!

To get Shannox to spawn you have to kill a bunch of raid trash. Then he patrols around a fairly large area of the raid instance.


Shannox yells: A-hah! The interlopers! Kill them. EAT THEM!

Once you've actually pulled him though you've got to keep the group of them all fairly close together. Shannox and Riplimb will enrage if they are 60+ yards apart.


Shannox yells: Go for the throat!
Shannox yells: The Firelord will be most pleased!

Every so often Shannox will tell Rageface to eat someone's face. If that someone had done something like stand in an immolation trap or the healers weren't on top of their game you've now got a dead raider.


Shannox yells: Oh, you murderers! Why? Why would you kill such a noble animal?

Of course once you kill Rageface, Shannox is extra angry that you killed his dog.



Shannox yells: Riplimb! No... no! Oh, you terrible little beasts! HOW COULD YOU?!

And he gets even angrier when you kill Riplimb.


Shannox yells: Twist in flames, interlopers!
Shannox yells: Ohh... the pain. Lord of Fire, it hurts....



Darkfall's first kill was on 10 man, but we have now killed him on 25 as well. If the trapping of Riplimb doesn't go perfectly it can be really hard for tanks to drop their stacks of the nasty debuff without leaving the healers out of range.

Dragon Kite Hilarity.

I love my dragon kite.


It's seriously the most awesome non-combat pet in the world.