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Archive for the ‘SeaBrat’ Category

Tuesday – raids reset and the Red Devils actually show up for the 25-man raid! Not by a huge margin this time, we only had a couple of extra players in our wait list tonight. We decided not to extend last week’s lockout and started another fresh run this week. Other than a minor trash problem at the onset, you would have actually thought we knew what we were doing. Our hit list included Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide (in spite of my premature pull) and the Blood Prince Council… all one shot!

Then we took on Blood Queen Lana’thel and things went south in a hurry. We made a couple of half-assed attempts, but chaos was rampant. Tethered players neglected to run together, purple poopers ran through the raid and our carefully planned bite order was soon dropped in favor of pure panic and mind controlled players. This boss is gonna’ take us a while to bring down in 25-man.

So, after two wipes we decided to go free Valithria Dreamwalker. Snyped and I were assigned to kite duty on Blistering Zombies (as usual), with Snyped assigned to the left side and me to the right. I was a little surprised to find him next to me as I was busily dragging my zombie out of the raid for execution, but that happens sometimes when we have to kite a long way before the zombie explodes. Odd that he didn’t move back though… hey, why is he staying over here?? Oopsie, there goes our tank… and our healers… yikes – rot worms are on me! And… we wipe.

As we were running back, I whispered to Snyped, “You were on the wrong side!”
“No I wasn’t”
“Yes you were, you were supposed to be on the left side.”
“No I wasn’t”

Hmmm… this was getting me nowhere, as usual. As we prepared for our second attempt, I asked our raid leader to clarify the kiting assignments. “Snyped on the left, Seabrat on the right” replied Xoroth. The next whisper I got from Snyped… “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” This is the respect I get as the raid officer – and from my very own “wingman” no less! At any rate, Snyped actually did the kiting on his “other” left that time, and we successfully set Dreamwalker free once again! It’s always nice to end a raid with a win.

The Red Devils have had a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday raid schedule for quite a while now. We’ve also been plagued with poor attendance on every night except Tuesday. Over the past ten days or so, I conducted a poll of all our raiding members to establish what their availability would normally be for each night of the week. Based on the results of that poll, we are changing our raid nights to Tuesday and Wednesday, and dropping Thursdays and Sundays from our schedule. We hope that this change will encourage attendance on Wednesday and that back-to-back nights will provide better progression.

You can bet that I will be looking at attendance to see if people are showing up when they said they would, just like the famous Geico money eyes!

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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Well, we finally managed to put the old Professor down in 25-man. And all it took was an increase in the ICC raid buff to 15%! No matter, I’ll take it any way we can get it!

We were hot that night and cleared both wings with only one wipe each on Dreamwalker and Putricide. Nice job, Red Devils!

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Holy smoke, it’s been two months since my last post! In that time, the Red Devils have made precious little progress in 25-man ICC. It took us a month to get past the Blood Prince Council, but the real problem has been attendance. Essentially everyone shows up for Tuesday’s raid and we have been starting fresh each week. By the time we get past Festergut and Rotface, our time is up for the night and very few show up for the rest of the week. As a result, we wind up running one or two 10-man groups and these have been much more successful in terms of progression. At least two groups are now working on the Lich King on a regular basis.

So, this week, we decided not to start fresh, reset the lock-out timer and picked up where we left off last week. We ran up and one-shot Festergut, Rotface, skipped Professor Putricide, took out the Blood Prince Council, and then focused on freeing Valithria Dreamwalker and succeeded on our first attempt!

Flush with confidence and full of ourselves having gone wipe-free for the night, we turned our attention back to Putricide. Apparently, our egos were writing checks we couldn’t cash and we proceeded to wipe nine times trying to off the old professor. We got close, by our standards, and hammered him down to 8% on several attempts. The raid damage was just too great for our healers to overcome and we called it a night.

I don’t know if we will continue the raid again next week (more progression), or start fresh (more gear). Many of our raiders are in dire need of the sanctification tokens that drop from Deathbringer Saurfang and he’s on farm status. We haven’t been as strict about those tokens as we have been with similar items in the past. As a result some players have three or more items from the sanctified set, while others of the same class have none. As the raid officer and loot master, this strikes me as a problem for the raid’s performance and unfair to some of our less fortunate raiders.

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I know, I know… I said I prefer to write about our 25-man exploits, but this is just too good. The Red Devils put together an “elite” 10-man strike force and headed into ICC. We one shot everything on our way to Putricide. Ok, we wiped a few times on the old Professor, but we DID IT! We downed Putricide in 10-man!

Now, there are a lot of guilds for which this would be no big deal. But, for us, this was epic – congratulations, Red Devils!

The guilty party members are as follows (will each of you please stand as your name is called?):

Aniraa (holy priest and Guild Leader)
Azurstorm (nasty, stinky ol’ rogue – did I mention he’s a rogue?)
Bohb (warlock and sacrificial gnome)
Damac (she-man extraorinaire and dps leader)
Deathbringyr (deathknight tank and abom master)
Jellopuddin (deathknight tank and Putricide distracter)
Nyyx (tree-of-life druid and rezzer of the dead)
Seabrat (scrubby old SV hunter)
Snyped (even scrubbier MM hunter, though not so old)
Unkldiesel (dps warrior of smiting power)

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Good grief, it’s been nearly two months since my last post! Unfortunately, that’s because it’s taken us that long to progress any further in ICC-25. Oh, we’ve done a little better in our 10-mans, but I prefer to write about the Red Devils exploits in 25-man instances.

In 10-mans, we’ve gotten Putricide as low as 10% and spent a few hours wiping on Blood Queen Latifah, but we can pretty regularly make it that far. In the 25-man version however… ohhh damn … 25-man has been slow, slow, slow! That changed for us last night, when we marched in and one-shot everything up to, and including, Festergut!

After a short time-out for the official guild picture with Uncle Fester, we distributed the loot and raced over to see Rotface.

I was pretty jazzed, and was even planning on playing tag with the Professor, but Rotface wasn’t quite the pushover for us that his brother Fester had been. And once our momentum was broken, it took us quite a few tries before we managed to put Rotface on the floor.

We did finally succeed, but it took up all our time for the night and we had to say goodbye without looking in on the Professor. We do plan to get back to him tonight, but Wednesdays often seem to present us with attendance problems.

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Woohoo, 2010 opened with a big bang for the Red Devils as we easily put Deathbringer Saurfang down for the count! We started with our first attempt as we had before, tanking him on the portal and attempting to knock the bloodbeasts off the ledge. This time, the skybreaker had despawned leaving open space where it once stood and we were hopeful our knockbacks would push them into open air. This turned out not to be the case, and the beasts hit an invisible wall allowing them to return to battle.

We abandoned that strategy on our second attempt, and tanked Saurfang on the steps where he spawns. This provided a lot more room for us to spread out and avoid chaining the blood novas. I also felt like we hunters had more room to kite them around our frost traps. We made sure one hunter on each side had assist so that the following macro allowed for focus fire on a specific target:

/cleartarget
/targetexact Blood Beast
/stopmacro [noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget(”target”, 4);
/cast Distracting Shot
/y Nuke {Triangle}!

The 4 is the raid symbol, just change it to get a different symbol (don’t forget to change the yell):
1 = {Star}, 2 = {Circle}, 3 = {Diamond}, 4 = {Triangle}, 5 = {Moon}, 6 = {Square}, 7 = {Cross}, 8 = {Skull}

If the other ranged dps on each side assist the marking hunter, those bloodbeasts go down fast, allowing everyone to get back on Saurfang as quickly as possible. It’s a dps race, so that’s very important. Once we got the assist part down pat, Saurfang was killed easily.

There was not a lot of loot in the chest, one mail belt with spellpower, and two Protector’s Mark of Sanctification (Warrior, Hunter and Shaman classes). Those that have been saving their Frost Emblems are drooling over the Tier 10 armor! As a hunter, I am not all that excited about the tier bonuses and chose to pick up some of the non-tier items first. I already have the Longstrider’s Vest (chest) and am looking closely at the Logsplitters (gloves) for my next upgrade.

This week, another wing of the Icecrown Citadel (The Plagueworks) is rumored to open up with three new bosses: Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide. Now I have heard all kinds of crazy rumors, like an average dps of 7,500 being needed to down Festergut. Taken out of context, that number means virtually nothing, and without some kind of serious dps buff I doubt many raiders can consistently hit that level of damage. But – it’s a big number that the ‘leet like to spout off simply for its intimidation factor.

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Once again, the intrepid Red Devils have concluded another successful year of raiding! 2009 was a year of change, particularly for hunters. The Beastmaster spec was nerfed into oblivion and Survival became “the” spec for raiding hunters. We went from a shot rotation to a shot priority and managing cooldowns became the new skill to master.

The Red Devils successfully cleared Naxx, then eagerly jumped into the new raid content in Ulduar, the Argent Tournament and finally into Ice Crown.

The hunter community lost what I believe was our greatest asset, BRK . In a desperate bid to save his marriage and family, he quit WoW (cold turkey). So loved was BRK that Blizzard chose to immortalize him with an epic gun from Heroic 25-man ToC, the BRK-1000.

I found myself stalked by a hacker for a while, but was finally able to secure my account and get my grubby hunter mitts on an authenticator (every WoW player should have one!).

I even managed to cut the power to my house (again) and this time it was winter instead of summer. At least I got to use a chainsaw to do it! [insert man-like grunts here]

But enough of memory lane and on to our final raid of 2009, the Ice Crown Citadel! After a rather frustrating Tuesday night trying to down Marrowgar with a less than ideal group, it was decided to make a more serious attempt. This would require us to be more selective in our invites, even going so far as to leave some of our lower performing members on the bench in favor of higher performance non-guild players. Fortunately (surprisingly?) we actually had enough acceptable level guildies online and only pugged one spot. It was a night and day difference from the previous night. We one-shot Marrowgar and then downed Lady Deathwhisper for the first time in 25-man!

The gunship battle was a piece of cake, though it did get a bit hectic due to the lack of experience with the fight by some of the members. Then we found ourselves facing Deathbringer Saurfang. The raid leader decided to try a new strategy, tanking Saurfang on top of the portal near the ship. The idea was to use knockbacks on the Bloodbeasts when they spawned. Unfortunately, we had precious few players with any kind of knockback ability and we found ourselves struggling to control the Bloodbeasts. I observed several occasions where one of the critters would instantly zip right over the frost traps directly to a player (possibly a LOS bug) resulting in a chaotic scramble to get the damn thing under control. To make things worse, the ammo switching addon I use was malfunctioning and kept trying to drop the ammo with each switch. This seriously hampered my ability to turn and kite, an essential element of this fight for hunters.

We ended up making three attempts (not counting several resets when we ran back to the gunship) before it got late and we had to quit for the night. Nonetheless, I count the night as a huge success with three of four bosses down in the first wing of Ice Crown and a nice conclusion to the Red Devils 2009 raiding season!

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Uh-rah! The Red Devils have downed the first boss in the new raid instance; The Ice Crown Citadel! Lord Marrowgar is a four-headed, bony freak standing guard just past the entrance to the Citadel. Clearing trash just to reach him is a major pain, but Marrowgar himself spawns no adds.

He does, however, spit out cold blue flames at ranged players and impales them on a huge bone spike. You better hope your buddies aren’t pissed at you, because if you get boned they have to help you out, pronto! Then, just to make it interesting, he will yell out “Bone Storm!” and start whirling about chasing random players and spawning four more cold blue flame trails. As always in WoW, do NOT stand in fire, regardless of what color it may be! Fire is bad, mmkay?

Once Marrowgar gets all tuckered out from his bone storm, he seems to forget who he was mad at before and will attack whoever hits him first. Unless you are a tank, you might want to lay off him a little while until one of your tanks can get his attention again. The fight will resume as before, with cold flames and bone spikes, followed by another bone storm fit of rage. Keep going, make sure you de-bone your buddies and stay outta’ the fire. It won’t be too long before your happy little group of raiders will be picking through his pile of collapsed bones and finding some phat loot!

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I wouldn’t go so far as to say our attendance problems are over, but the Red Devils have managed to successfully acquire several of the more hardcore casual (casual hardcore?) raid members from another guild, Upper Echelon! Like most guilds, UE was having difficulty putting together a full raid group. One of our officers (Hilfer) approached them with the idea of a merger/acquisition and instead of being rebuffed, the idea was received warmly. We put together a test run of Ulduar on Sunday, followed by a successful Ony/ToC/Vault clear on Tuesday. Everyone was impressed with the performance of the UE members and the guild invites were issued!

This made a busy night for me, putting together the raid report, issuing invites and updating the guild records for the new members. Some of the new members from UE have a LOT of alts (all alts are welcome!) and the Red Devils keeps the name of the main in the guild note for each member. Everyone joins as an “Alt” rank, and mains are promoted to “Friend”. Promotions are done roughly every two weeks and are based on raid attendance over the past 60 days. Given the scarcity of raids in our recent history, our new members should quickly climb in rank as we raid more frequently now!

I use the addon “Chatter” which displays the name of the main character for alts in the chat window. This really helps me keep track of who’s who! With all the new members, that’s even more important now than ever.

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Ok, I know, I know… this blog has been comatose for weeks. It’s not that the Red Devils haven’t done anything; it’s just that we haven’t done anything new. Well, ok – we did clear the newly updated Onyxia, but I can’t say it was much of a challenge for us.

At this point we are able to clear Vault, Onyxia and ToC all in one night, which kinda’ leaves us with little else to shoot for on our other raiding nights. As a result, we are once again plagued with a lack of raiders logging in! A few of our more “hard core” members would like to fully clear Ulduar through Algalon, but now that the instance is considered outdated by many, we can’t get enough players together to make a serious attempt.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the shift that Blizzard has made in the game away from a raid focus to one of PvP (i.e. arena). The top end gear is no longer the coveted boss drops from endgame content; instead it is limited in availability to only the highest ranked arena teams.

So, what’s a WoW addict to do? PvP, my friend – battlegrounds galore! I have put together about the best PvP gear set that I can, outside of the current seasons arena gear (and arena matches are very painful for me). I just can’t seem to get together with a consistent team, so battlegrounds with a few friends is a lot more fun… usually. Some nights the Horde just romps all over us, but occasionally we can turn the tables and do it to them. Close battles are fun (win or lose), and steamrolling the Horde is always fun, but getting romped… not so much.

Is there anyone more despised by all other classes than a ret pally? This coveted position, once the domain of rogues, has been held for far too long by those bubble popping maniacs. Find one of these suckers guarding a base with a tree druid by his side and you better bring an army with you, buddy. You’re gonna’ need it to take that flag.

In other news, I have recently joined the ever swelling ranks of the unemployed. Given that situation, you might think I have a lot more time for WoW (and this blog). Sadly, that’s not the case. As official househusband of the Seabrat home, my duties are overwhelming! I buy the groceries, cook, clean, wash dishes and even (gasp) scrub toilets, all of which leaves me with precious little time for play. Speaking of which, I think I just heard the dryer beeping – signaling it’s time to get back to my new “job”.

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