Heroic Madness Of Deathwing

So, with a US 18 final finish on the front page, we're done with another tier of raiding. This one was particularly miserable for all involved, and just like the last insanely brutal tier (T11 - though for different reasons), we've lost several good high-end US raiding guilds this time around. I can't really blame them, considering that the primary thing they have to look forward to is this:



Before I launch into what's just going to sound like another bitter tirade, I wanted to take a minute to point out how exceptional our raiding core was this tier. It's not something that gets brought up often in the middle of progression when you're struggling through a fight and unsure of your standing and how successful you'll be, and the frustration of these encounters can cause a person to lose sight of what's going on around them. I can't overstate how much our raiders really gave it their all in the face of the negativity that surrounded this tier, and they are by far the most dedicated group of people I've ever had the pleasure of gaming with. Even on the nights when we knew we didn't want to be there, when we knew we were going to have to do things nobody wanted to do to kill a fight, and when we knew morale was low, everyone still showed up. That was really important to me - and apparently to them, too - and I really appreciated everyone's dedication.

So, now onto the boring part...

Hopefully, and we tend to say this every time there's a fight designed that we all know seemed to have been deliberately created to encourage front-page posts like this one, we never see another fight like Spine again. There wasn't any good reason to put so many guilds through the level of insanity it brought to the table (the same argument can be made for LFR, by the way), and that guilds fell apart on this fight this tier was almost entirely the result of short-sightedness on the part of the designers. Their intentions may have been good, but there needs to be more consideration given to how fights translate into the high-end raid environment. 23 second window every 90-120 seconds = stack mages and rogues. I don't think this was well considered or understood by the people engineering the encounter, but hey, I could be wrong. They could just really like mages and rogues.

I feel like I need to apologize to people every time I talk about this tier with our raiders and those from other guilds. It's as if I can't find anything positive to say about it, and so it seems like there was nothing to like at all. There were actually some good encounters and almost all of them had great potential - we enjoyed Yor'sahj, for example, and its creative fight mechanics and multiple different paths to a kill. We liked the geometry lessons and awareness checks that were involved in defeating Blackhorn. We liked Madness for its (relatively) short progression time and straightforward mechanics. But, I guess the negatives were just so much more memorable than the positives, and maybe that's why this tier got such a bad rap for its Heroic-mode challenges from the guilds that went in there trying to complete them. It would be tough to argue that the disappointment wasn't warranted.

If Blizzard does continue with 25-man raiding in Mists, we hope that they pay more attention to the feedback that's being provided by the people testing the content for them. A quick read through several key posts made by raiders representing the top raiding guilds of last tier on multiple PTR threads could have at least raised the red flags required to reconsider many critical decisions. I can't help but think that more attention paid to what we felt were serious encounter design issues could have turned many Dragon Soul encounters from really negative raiding experiences into enjoyable, memorable challenges, and that's a big opportunity to miss.

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Heroic Spine Of Deathwing (25)

This was a world 54, US 16.

Against seemingly impossible odds, we somehow killed a dragon. It wasn't actually a dragon, though - it was more like small pieces of a dragon that were each individualized versions of the original Patchwerk DPS check if the Patchwerk DPS check needed to be met in greens and was a scan of your raid makeup that wiped you immediately if you didn't have a certain color quota of yellow and blue in your raid window.

Now that the tier is essentially over, I can finally say how much I didn't like it, and I think I speak for many of us here. Spine is a good example of a boss fight that shows a disconnect between how a fight is designed and the community that wants to do something crazy like try to kill it. The fact that the DPS window only lasted 23 seconds and came up every 90-120 seconds somehow got past QC strongly suggests that they were killed by their coworkers for bravely standing up against the notion that this fight concept might make it to live.

If the purpose of Spine was intentionally to present a hopeless brick wall to every guild that reached it without poaching (or crafting, from their own tears) mages and rogues in obscene numbers, then it accomplished its purpose admirably. But if it was intended to provide a difficult but passable challenge to all guilds that required them to bring their best players - not their best alts - then it's the greatest failure of encounter design since Pac-Man.

I also really appreciated, on a personal level, needing to make sure I brought the same raid stacked to hell with mages and rogues night after night, hoping that one critical absence of an alt that previously nobody wanted to play did not completely halt our progress for the week. It was only at the borderline-insane persistence of our raiding core with near-100% attendance that we managed to bring this thing down. It's always a great feeling to have a raiding core of 35 people and sit a third of them on the bench for three weeks in favor of alts in Raid Finder gear.

But hey, at least we're getting Pandas.

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Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn (25)

After returning from our winter break, we managed to take Blackhorn down in less than one full night of attempts. There's not a lot to it other than the awareness check that is P1 and a mechanic that seems designed only to test video card performance in P2. After learning that fire has been bad for seven years and continues to be bad to this day, we have this fight, which makes us deliberately stand in it. Once people realized standing in fire was a team effort, there wasn't much left to work on before he went down.

We're recruiting all classes for Spine progression, but we're particularly interested in well-geared ret paladins, warriors, frost DKs, mages, and rogues. Sorry, hunters - this isn't your tier.




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Heroic Ultraxion (25)

We are currently recruiting some classes for Spine and Madness progression, with emphasis on the following classes:
- Mage
- Warlock
- Rogue
- Death Knight (DPS)
- Druids (Feral DPS)
- Priest (DPS, Holy/Disc)
- Shaman (Elemental, Enhancement, and Restoration)

Orange sticks are a plus, and any parsing DPS is encouraged to apply as well. Most of our best players don't come from other top-tier US raiding guilds - they're the best of their current server or guild, and they want more from the hours they put into excelling at their class.

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This was a US 19/World 76. This kill was later than almost all of our recent progression milestones, but at the end of the day, we pulled it off without much of an issue and reclaimed our usual US front page (25) standing. We have to thank several recent and exceptional applicants that helped push us through this one by boosting an already exceptional and dedicated raiding team.

This was the first gear and, to a certain extent, comp check of the tier, and being able to progress on it meant having all of your core raiders together (or bringing many DPS warriors and fire mages). Also required was all of that the gear we've been stacking our raids with since most of us in the higher end raiding scene decided it was a good idea to spend a dozen hours running LFR for two characters at a time. The ability to gear up this way is probably one of the worst things Blizzzard has done to competitive raiding and it encourages some behavior that can hardly be categorized as "fun" and that can probably be considered borderline insane. But, I digress.

We were expecting a nerf to this almost immediately after the first kills came out given the outcry about the DPS check on certain forums. We were happy to see that Blizzard didn't go the Yor'sahj 25 route and react unnecessarily to what's clearly intended to be a test of both gear and the ability to hit one's buttons in the right order when confronted with an especially angry training dummy.

Geared DPS warriors are apparently optional for this fight, by the way. We checked.

We look forward to competing in the mages-and-rogues-with-legendaries recruitment race that is Spine progression after burning down Blackhorn. See you out there.





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Heroic Zon'ozz (25)

This was World 25/US 15.

This took us longer than it should have, but it's dead, and that's good. It was a challenging DPS check for the first week.



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Heroic Morchok (25)

This was World/US 9th kill. The fight was easy. Everyone killed it. People's cats killed this.

We didn't take a screenshot, so have a random one.



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Blizzcon 2011

PANDAS.

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Heroic Ragnaros (25) - It's All Over.

Finally, the Firelord has fallen.

Firelands is clear and this was, I'm proud to say, a US 9th kill of Heroic Ragnaros. All said and done, this fight took us a little over 530 pulls. We battled a night of no progress due to a hurricane, connectivity issues all around, a hit box "nerf" that actually could make traps in the final phase of the fight more difficult, and the RNG of P4 that all of the guilds that have killed or are close to killing this fight are very, very familiar with.

This fight was an exhilarating, aggravating, frustrating, and as a whole an intensely difficult encounter of epic proportions. It was by far the hardest encounter ever designed, and its length and complexity requires that for 15 minutes, the raid plays perfectly. Failure to do so ended up in a complete waste of a very long, very focused pull, and it required you to simply repeat the last 10 minutes over and over again in order to get to the point where you begin to make progress again and the difficult part of the fight begins for your raid. The final phase of the fight requires solid RNG more than anything, and a single lapse of attention in the opening seconds of the phase can waste 20 minutes of your raid night, which can really kill motivation, since getting there takes so long and is something the raid has done literally so many hundreds of times before.

It's a great relief to have this fight down in what ended up being a very well-designed and interesting tier, although a bit shorter than we would've liked. We also were not a huge fan of the recent 15% HP nerf to this fight (when less than 40 guilds in the world had killed it), which will make P2 and P3 much more accessible and doable for all of the guilds working on it, though to be honest did not significantly alter the difficulty of the fight for the guilds that were already just looking for that one solid pull in P4. It was still disappointing that instead of letting us kill the fight we were working on, they basically removed the need for us to continue fine-tuning that final frost patch where we had wiped so often before.

I'd like to thank our raiders for their exceptional attendance and dedication to this fight, in which we had incredibly low turnover over our 500+ pulls, and which ultimately allowed us to finish this tier in such excellent shape. We were also able to accomplish our goals for this tier without going consistently late or adding extra nights to our regular raiding schedule.

We're looking forward to the next tier and some well-deserved rest for our raiders. See you all next tier.

We're still recruiting exceptional players, now for the final raid of Cataclysm and the end of the expansion. Most of our exceptional players do not come from other top US guilds, so if you are an exceptional player and want an excellent, hardcore raiding experience, please check us out and drop in an application.

Our raiders went a bit nuts on the media for this one, so here's 3 different videos from 3 different PoVs (mage, prot warrior, and disc priest):



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_Hb2YLGwZE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COk1NURasc4





Congratulations to Lacaz, who received the egg:



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Heroic Majordomo Staghelm (25) Defeated

This was a US 25.

With this most recent victory over the final Firelands Heroic boss until Ragnaros, we're beginning the end of this tier and starting what is, by all accounts, probably the most difficult raiding encounter to date - Heroic Ragnaros. The post-change version of this fight was actually about the same difficulty of the previous version, which basically disabled the ability to "cheese" the Flame Scythes with extended use of abilities like Ardent Defender or spamming a bunch of pets and shadow priests in front of the boss.

We have some high-priority current recruitment needs, specifically we're looking for Death Knights (frost) and Hunters (must be able to play MM/Survival). And as usual, we're always recruiting exceptional players who feel they could compete with our current raiders.





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Heroic Baleroc (25) Defeated

This was a US 20.

After several nights of strategy-related issues, we finally developed one that worked, and two and a half nights later the fight was down. We had more crushing sub-1% wipes on this fight than any other we've done in a long while, and it is overall very tightly-tuned. Healer mana and DPS both needed to be managed extremely effectively, and we ended up getting the kill with a sub-optimal healing comp (resto shamanz lol) that still managed to pull it off with time to spare in the night.

We have several videos and PoVs for this fight, and we'll be releasing them soon.

We're still recruiting, and we're particularly looking for excellent hunters, rogues, and one holy paladin.







4 Comments