Sunday, January 15, 2012

Heroic Yor'sahj Down

That's right, my guild is now 2/8 heroic. After a major hiccup in terms of dps output (roughly 40 million damage behind), with some respeccing and a change in raid composition, we managed to get the dps required to finish him off. Previously we had been attempting to three heal that fight. But with the tight enrage timer this proved to be impossible. So we went with a discipline priest and holy paladin. It seems that a holy paladin is almost required to heal that fight properly. In addition, our marksmanship hunter respecced to survival and our frost dk specced to unholy. Also, our other healing priest went shadow.

On our first attempt with this new setup, we hit the enrage timer and wiped with him at 2%. Had we just ignored the last set of oozes, we probably would have gotten him. But hey, hindsight is 20/20, right? I've experimented with my spec a little to help with overall damage. Seems tank dps makes a bit of a difference on heroic. I managed to increase my dps output to around 17-19k on most attempts. I'm no bear tank, so I'm pretty happy with that. I changed out the Glyph of Death Coil for the Glyph of Death Strike a little while back and haven't bothered changing it. Seems to really help when I can hit a Death Strike for an 80-90k crit. I experimented with helping to bring the Mana Voids down in health while the rest of the raid went to kill each ooze. It definitely seems like the key to that fight is managing those. Leaving the first one up but bringing it low in health, then killing the first after the second has spawned and drained mana again.

Our composition for our kill was:

Tank
Blood Death Knight

Healers
Discipline Priest
Holy Paladin

DPS
Survival Hunter
Frost Death Knight
Feral Druid
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Demonology Warlock
Shadow Priest



One thing I've been thinking of writing about has been tips for dk tanks for each encounter, such as when I use each cool down. I honestly don't know how many people actually read this anymore. I see referring links from Repgrind a lot as well as some other sites that I haven't even been to. I really do appreciate that. I didn't think anyone would really want to read what I have to say.

If anyone has any suggestions on what I should write about, feel free to let me know in comments. Also, let me know if dk tank tips would be something that you would find interesting as well.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

On to hard modes!

Hello everyone... ok, maybe it's like 5 people who read this, but whatever. I haven't had a lot of time to update this in the last few months, as you've probably noticed. Work has been keeping me busy (remote start season), and with the new tier of raiding, I've been spending a lot of time doing that, reading up on fights, sifting through world of logs and all that good stuff.

So, how has my guild been doing you ask? Not too bad. Currently we're 1/8 heroic, in like a 10 way tie for third on the server. Took us 62 attempts to finish Madness of Deathwing. That was a little discouraging, but then we one shot it the following week. So, at least we retained all that knowledge.

Heroic Morchok seemed so easy on paper...or, internet text rather. Splits in two, divide the raid, designate a Stomp soaker, keep the boss moving towards each Resonating Crystal so all those soaking that will remain in range of the Stomp. Not so bad. But man, did it not go well. Since that fight is much shorter than Madness, we had almost as many wipes (57) in just two nights of work on him. But we eventually got him. Some of the info on websites like Icy Veins may not be entirely accurate. For example, we noticed the double share of Stomp that the tank and someone else takes doesn't seem to be based on proximity to the boss like most sites state. Rather it seems it's based on proximity to Morchok's (or Kohcrom's) main aggro target. So stacking on the corresponding tank seemed to work well in controlling who received that double hit. Let me tell you, a clothie taking a double Stomp is devastating. We also noted that Morchok ends up summoning three crystals each phase before channeling Earth's Vengeance and starting to cast Black Blood of the Earth, while Kohcrom only gets to summon two crystals. This makes the tank on Morchok have to move the boss more often.

On some attempts, it was noted that the healing required to keep me alive wasn't a large amount. That whomever was healing me could take a little extra time to heal others. Some of those attempts the healers died and I was left to survive without them, which apparently I could do very well. This played a part in our final strategy. We decided to put me on Morchok and only had one healer on that side. See, because this week we only had 3 healers. Most guides recommend two or four healing this fight. So, two healers on the Kohcrom side and only one on the Morchok side. This seemed to work well. Now this isn't to say that it's ideal to divide healers that way, rather that since I didn't require as much healing, only one healer was required to be in my group. This last raid lockout, we had a hilarious downing of him when the Kohcrom side died with the boss around 1-2% and we finished Morchok off. Not realizing that despite their shared health, Kohcrom didn't die when Morchok did. Instead, while looking at the loot, Kohcrom came over and killed most of my group. Luckily I was able to finish him off before he could kill me.



As I've continued to gear up in this tier, I've noticed that Blizzard seems to have done a pretty decent job in terms of making sure dk tanks are still quite viable. The PTR had me quite worried, but they did a great job fine tuning everything. As it stands right now, my survivability is incredibly high. For the Madness fight, I can sometimes completely absorb an Impale while using a damage reduction cooldown.

[22:55:22.345] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (155664)
[22:58:09.026] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)
[23:00:53.396] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 184719 (O: 71570, A: 2911)
[23:01:29.147] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 118164 (A: 43836)
[23:03:54.337] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 112100 (A: 211900)
[23:04:30.470] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 155664


[23:48:17.795] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 45552 (A: 92816)
[23:48:53.550] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 191994 (A: 2406)
[23:50:52.413] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)
[23:51:28.515] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 123299 (A: 71101)
[23:53:42.604] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 129772 (A: 64628)
[23:54:18.740] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 57009 (A: 83088)
[23:56:46.919] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 115732 (A: 59228)
[23:57:23.064] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (50435)

During our last downing of Madness, I died to an Impale because my Icebound Fortitude hadn't come off of cooldown yet. A problem when we kill things a bit faster than usual. This was definitely my error for not realizing before the Impale was being cast. But a battle rez solved that problem. Only issue then was when the other tank died on the final platform after the first wave of Elementium Terrors. Somehow the healers were able to keep me alive through the second wave of them. I don't know how, but it worked very well. I don't see Guardian Spirit in there, so I'm at a loss as to how I survived.


The last thing I want to talk about is how things have changed since coming to the guild. When I first came here, I was obviously an outsider. But I've gotten to know most of these people and they're fun to play with. True, it's not peachy all the time. But that's to be expected. I came in to be the second tank, essentially. But after the first weeks of Dragon Soul, whether it be to gear or otherwise, I've become the main tank. I have a 395 item level now. I know part of that is due to me being present for every raid and the raid leader making sure I got my four piece bonus early. The utility of an extra raid cooldown is pretty great. As it stands right now, my tanking partner (warrior) is at a 387 item level. Still very respectable, but obviously a bit behind mine. Unfortunately he's a busy man as well. Poor guy is always so tired from work. But at the same time, it seems as though his class is at a disadvantage compared to mine. He has reached full CTC, but there are so many times where the damage is magic or unavoidable. That's where my class shines with all that self healing. Before this patch I thought about going back to playing my warrior tank as my main. But now, I think I've made the right choice sticking with my death knight.