14 Things that can go Wrong and will go Wrong on Sindragosa

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sindy-hurts

She is the General Vezax to Yogg-Saron. Never has such an encounter led me to curl up in my chair and cry. The margin of error is so small and so minute (my-noot?). There are so many things that can cause failures. It contains of 6 minutes of sheer endurance before you get to the final phase. Anyone with a compromised computer or a laptop or a bad connection will not even do well. On other encounters, you can get away with a disconnect or a death. Here? Not so much. So here I’ve compiled the ultimate list of things that can go wrong when taking down Sindragosa.

  1. Guild leader’s WoW crashes during ground phase (True story, happened to me last night, and miraculously didn’t get pulled in)
  2. Raider inability to run out when Sindragosa chain pulls everyone (I specced into Body and Soul so I could hit the players who had the most difficulty)
  3. Raider inability to mouse turn when pulled into Sindragosa and go in the wrong direction.
  4. Raider runs out to the wrong side when pulled in and happens to be the target of a Frost Beacon in phase 3 thereby getting caught on the wrong side leading to insane stacks of Mystic Buffet resulting in a wipe.
  5. Inability to use own judgment to spread out on the bottom of the stairs when hit with frost beacons. We don’t need 4 guys on one side. It’s 2 left, 2 right, and 1 middle.
  6. People cheating too close to Frost Beacons before they hit resulting in more Frost Tombs.
  7. Melee building up too many debuffs and having to run out when pulled in and not getting a heal because the healers go one way and they go the other.
  8. Healers dying to Backlash because we’re too busy tunnel visioning the raid (I am guilty of this). Fixed it by setting Power Auras to show Instability in big flashing letters, 100% opacity, and 300% size. Manage to cut down the deaths some. It still happens.
  9. Mystic Buffet not clearing because we mis-time our ability to run behind a block and shake off the buff.
  10. Raiders cheating up the stairs instead of staying on the bottom as specifically instructed to before Frost Beacons are hit and then having to run back down and look for an open spot. God this pisses me off so much. I don’t know why people have to cheat up the stairs. I don’t know why waiting at the bottom of the stairs is so difficult to do.
  11. Thunderstorms knocking out internet connections.
  12. People who don’t have the Frost Beacon stand where people with Frost Beacons are supposed to run to resulting in a double tomb or a death on phase 3.
  13. People who are too slow and don’t get into position in time.
  14. Instability on half the healers leading to temporarily reduced healing on the raid, leading to more deaths due to insufficient heals. Like the Backlash problem I had earlier? It’s me getting people up to the survivability levels without realizing I have that stuff.

All I can say is, thank goodness we managed to take her down last week. It’s just unfortunate to have players who have computers or connections that just can’t seem to handle the stress of the encounter. The expansion is also winding down now even though we have Ruby Sanctum coming up and it’s getting a little harder to find raiders.

If we get her down again, I’m tempted to simply extend the lockout so we can focus exclusively on the Lich king.

MS Paint: A raid leaders delight

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, MS paint is one of the greatest things a raid leader can use. Not just for making fancy diagrams or editing pictures with positioning marks, but also for the hilarity factor. Often times raiding can be quite stressful and anything you can do to add levity and lighten the mood can go a long way to making everyone calmer, happier, and ultimately lead to that satisfying kill. Other times it’s just awesome fun.

Back when Hyjal was progression content, my guild had a hell of a hard time with Archimonde.  As was reported in Guildwatch on wow.com, we had a whopping 103 attempts before he went down. People kept doing stupid things like you know, standing in fire. The raid leader and most of the officers were getting very frustrated, so I decided it was time to add some MS paint goodness to the mix. Here is what I whipped up:

About two nights later we downed the boss. Everyone having a good chuckle and relaxing helped a ton.

So I placed a call out on twitter for people to submit some of their own MS paint goodness and share some of the silliness with us, here is what I got.

This one is from Kris (Antikris77)

A wonderful representation of the Festergut fight!

Next up is a submission from Krizhek one of my new guildies and a local boy around town here.

I enjoy the consistency of this piece, simple and effective!

Our next piece is from our pigtail wearing warlock of doom Saresa

She broke out the color on this one!

I also received a link from the guild <Devolve> on Altar of Storms – US.  Lakini’s guildie thought that these were wroth noting and they were right! Swing over to Lakini’s blog to take a look at the Visual Guide to Plague Wing and the Visual Guide to the Crimson Halls.

Personally I love stuff like this. It makes me smile and I can look at it as a reminder that we are indeed playing a game and we are doing so to have fun. Sometimes there are fights or just things in general in the game that agitate so much it carries over to real life. Being able to take a couple steps back and add levity to the situation is not only suggested, it is also good for your health in the long run.

So how about you guys? Have any MS paint masterpieces to share with us? Any funny stories involving a humorous picture you created?

Until next time.

Healing And Leading – Chalk And Cheese?

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An interesting quandary materialised at WoM headquarters last week. How do you raid lead as a new healer? Say you’re that new healer. You’ve been raid leading as a hunter for a while, now your guild needs a healer.

Let’s be frank. As a healer you’re spending most of your raid time with your eyes stapled to the raid’s health bars. Your thoughts are consumed with keeping the bars full and yourself out of the various patches of burny death.

As a raid leader you need to be spending most of your time watching the encounter as it unfolds. The boss, the adds, the players. The stuff healers hear of only as fable. The two roles don’t mix. Right?

Wrong. You can get these two roles to mix to create a fun and workable role. rather like steel and magic mixing to create the glee of downing a boss and seeing that it’s dropped your pixelated holy grail. All it takes is a combination of factors to get it working in your favour.

1. Healer, heal thy user interface

Here’s the catch regarding Ui and addons: you don’t need hundreds. Give yourself enough to facilitate thinking.

  • Space.You may feel cluttered or suffocated if your user interface has too much going on. This leads to distraction or panic so avoid it! Keep addons to a minimum and spend some time outside of the raid environment thinking about your UI. Is Grid bigger than it needs to be? Probably. Are your minimap and KG panels stealing screen real estate? That might be fine if you’re comfortable with your role(s) but not while you’re getting used to a new mental environment. Do you have more addons cluttered around central areas of your screen than tucked away in corners? Yep, can’t see the DPSers if I tried. Do you have target frames showing as a healer? Not needed.
  • Control. I’m going to assume that if you are a raid leader of a regular group then you actively lead. Get a couple of useful raid leading addons to provide information and keep you in control. Addons like obituary, raidbuffstatus, failbot and skada. Don’t load up on addons or you may start feeling like you’re not in control of the raid. For example, it may take you twice as long to give the go ahead to move because you feel obliged to check 20 new-fangled addons between each pull. Addons are a helping hand for different situations, not a catch-all crutch to excuse you doing the job of leading.
  • Don’t do it all at once. Don’t download 20 new addons to try to master the raid leading and then go raiding without trying them out. You’ll get in a tizwaz. Download your new raid leading toys one or two at a time and play with them outside the raid to see if you get on with them. If not, get rid of them and try something similar – there are usually several versions which basically do the same thing, like skada, recount and WoW Web Stats.

2. Watch

  • Ask around your guildies, your friends, your realm forums. Look for organised runs (or PUGs with a conscientious healer-leader (rather than loot-bot).
    • Watch them and see how they lead. Try to go as DPS so you can see what they miss and think about why.
    • If they’re approachable – like a good leader should be – wait until a good moment and ask them if they mind giving a brief run down. Ask how they raid lead and what help they have from other people or addons.
    • A good time to do this is during a break or after the run – not after a boss, as they’ll be handing out loot, nor during a fight, as both of you should have your fingers poised over your healing buttons rather than having a heart to heart.
  • Your screen. Is it big enough? Healers tend to have more on their screens by nature, what with Grid and whatnot. If you have a small screen things are going to be squished and your eyes and brain will miss things. Check your screen’s contrast and brightness settings, too. Are they high enough that characters are leaping out the screen? If you’re having trouble picking things up as a healer then have your technology help you. These may sound silly but there’s research out there to suggest monitor set up is important. Google for Joel on Software OR Jeremy Zawodny and large monitor.
  • Zoom out. No really. Zoom out, you’ll get more on the screen. Either zoom out with your mouse wheel or type /console cameradistancemaxfactor 20

3. Listen

Your eyes are not your only source of information while raiding. I personally find that I still can’t watch everything all the time. That’s fine. Not only that but the pretty health bars tend to be my visual priority both in and out of encounters  It’s healer instinct. So I get data and information through listening, and it’s a vital accompaniment to the visual information.

  • Your raiders are a goldmine of information. Ask their opinions about what was going particularly well or badly during encounters – whether or not you got the boss down. If you’re a hands on raid leader be sure to consistently make final decisions after a group discussion and let people know the outcome. Just because you’re a squishy healer doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to make decisions as a leader any more.
  • Keep tabs. If you have team members who are new to the group or the instance – or have a particular role such as kinetic bomb bouncing on Blood Princes – then try to keep tabs on how they’re doing, both in performance and morale. You can achieve this both by asking one or two trusted raid members to keep an eye on them, and also by having a quiet chat with the player himself. Both methods are likely to give you different answers and as such a bigger picture.
  • Instant calls. You’re looking at the pretty bars and don’t know what health the boss is at? Ask one of the DPS for a report. You see on Grid that one of your tanks has too many stacks of a debuff and you need the other tank to come back from faerie land and TAUNT THE NITWIBBLE NOW? You have two dead DPS, the enrage timer is short and you need the tree druid to CR the optimal player? You can make all of these calls and be provided with immediate information.
    • Be clear on whom you’re addressing. If possible use voice-chat programs such as Vent. I’d recommend organising it for your guild if it’s not already in use. If voice-chat is off the menu trying pre-typed macros so you don’t have to type mid-fight may help.

4. Learn

You do need to be able to watch the rest of the screen. A few tips for getting used to that:

  • Practice. No really, practice. Run some Heroics and focus on watching the characters and the monsters more than the bars. Also try zooming your eyesight out, as it were. Don’t focus on one box, one bar, one character. Try to see the whole screen.
  • Practice more. When you’re comfortable with that and bored of seeing the dungeons, take a step up. Heal a couple of raids which are lower level than what you’ll be raid leading. There will be lots more information, DBM warnings and fires to get in or slimes to deliver. Practice the same as you did in the heroics.
  • Flexible frames. If you want, you could also move your Grid/healbot/raid frames as near to the centre of the screen as you reasonably can without obscuring your character. Most encounter-crucial DBM warnings and character-movement happens near the centre: it’ll be less distance for your eyes to travel. Don’t get too used to it tho. Your aim is to gradually move the healing frames further away from the centre as you get better at keeping an eye on the rest of the raid.

5. Keep your perspective

  • Set ground rules. Do this and you’ve already done 50% of the work for raid leading, with no danger of eye strain. If you tell the group that loot is on a 100-75-50-25 rate and you expect raiders to behave in a friendly and polite manner or you will kick at the first sign of trouble, then you can be safe in the knowledge that you know what you’re doing. Literally. By stating rules and then staying in the raid both you and the rest of the group have agreed that that is how you will proceed, and that you’re respectively cool with that.
  • You’re doing an admirable thing. Remember that occasionally. The fact is that you’re willing to lead a team of people in a stressful situation, mostly for the first time. Raid leading in a new role – DPS to healing, healing to tank, whatever – means you’re learning at least some of the art of leading anew. Good on you for doing it.
  • What’s the worst that could happen? Serious question. Ask yourself what your nightmare scenario is if you get it wrong. Then ask yourself what “it wrong” actually is. I’d be willing to bet my beak-polish that your nightmare scenario doesn’t lead to a permanent or irrevocable situation, except that you’ll have learnt something. The beak-polish also says that “it wrong” is something in a game.
  • Healers are actually in a good position to be raid leaders. The fact that we watch the pretty bars means we are privy to a constant feed of information that other raid leaders don’t have time to watch. A tank probably doesn’t have time to keep track of Curse of Torpor or Death and Decay problems in Lady Deathwhisper. It’s no coincidence that if a raid wipes, raid leaders tend to come to healers first as a source of information.

 

A lot of these may sound like basic information but when you’re coming to raid leading fresh as a healer, a lot of it is just about thinking. Not as a healer, but rather putting a bit of thought into adapting your playstyle to encompass both healing and leading. Remember that it doesn’t take much to make the two cross: many general raid leader responsibilities like giving tactics or calling heroism don’t change; your role has changed, not the encounter. If you put some thought into helping your own visual centre and talking with your raid and role models you’re halfway there. Practice is the other half.

So, what are your thoughts and opinions? Have you been in this position or are in it now, and how are you dealing with it? Have you already been putting some of these to good use, or have been inspired to try something slightly differently now? Are you a grizzled healer-leader veteran with tricks up your sleeve to share?

This is a post by Mimetir, a druid of a raidleader on The Venture Co. (EU). You can find my twitter feed here.

Article image originally by Jackson Boyle @ Flickr

A movie list for Matticus

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So, this isn’t a sweeping post about movies Matt is in or can quote. This is favor I’m asking you, our readers.

It has come to light that there may be a series (read a lot)  of movies from the 80’s and 90’s that Matt has not seen.  So Here is a quick question for you. If you were to make a list of MUST SEE movies from the 80’s and 90’s what would you suggest to someone? Help me make a list of movies that Matticus MUST see 🙂

Thanks for your help!

 

Raid Leading 101: Maximizing DPS Uptime

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Normally, most bosses are kept still. There’s a cleave effect or some other ability which makes it difficult for tanks to herd them around. Every so often, a boss comes along where even though it isn’t necessary to move them, it can sometimes be extremely beneficial. In this week’s Raid Leading 101 post, I want to highlight a little trick that Conquest used during our first kill of Professor Putricide. It’s a really minor adjustment that our raid leader came up with and looking back now, I almost wish I had thought of it first. Who knew something so simple and minor would’ve helped out so much?

Initially, we had a DPS problem. We were having a difficult time burying slimes and phasing Putricide within a timely fashion. We were rocking six healers at the time. The raid was taking obscene amounts of damage and many players were struggling with avoidable damage. I myself hit a streak where I went 9 consecutive attempts being hit by Malleable Goo on the same night. That’s some serious tunnel vision going on.

If we downgraded to five, we’d solve our DPS issue but our stressed healers were going to be stressed even further. We found a way to help resolve these issues and it’s nothing to do with player substitution or gear. It was all due in part to improved movement and positioning.

In last week’s post about Placement and Direction, blogger What’s My Main Again made an excellent suggestion:

If I may make a suggestion on putricide… after the green ooze dies you waste a lot of time moving all the way to the other side of the room. Just have everyone move to the center. Ranged can dps the gas cloud as soon as it spawns and then melee can quickly switch after it targets someone. This also makes it easier to run back into the orange corner for the green ooze.

We’ve actually been doing that for a while, but I wanted to elaborate on that further and illustrate how we tackle it.

The orange ooze

We’ll use the Professor Putricide example.

WoWScrnShot_031010_113848 

When the orange ooze was active, we used to tank Putricide on the far right very close to the green wall. Our melee DPS had to run the length of the room to open up on the orange ooze when it fixated on a target. It was during these parts of the fight that we were able to close the gap on our damage. In order to do that, we made two changes.

First change: Instead of tanking him on the right, we placed Putricide closer to the middle where the pattern is. The orange ooze spawns, it locks on to a target and goes after them. If it happens to be a melee player, they still have plenty of time to hustle it and kite it around the room. Regardless, we cut the distance the melee had to travel to DPS the Ooze by half! They didn’t have to run as much. There was more DPS on the ooze meaning it died quicker which led to more DPS on the boss.

Second change: Instead of simply keeping Professor Putricide stationary, our Putricide tank was instructed to keep Putricide as close to the orange Ooze as possible. The reason? It allowed for incidental AoE attacks from melee to hit multiple targets. Chain Lightning would help. Divine Storm would help. Cleave, and the list goes on. The orange vials that the Professor drops wouldn’t be a problem since the entire melee group is constantly moving alongside the Professor and the orange Ooze anyway.

While it doesn’t seem like much, those two changes were enough to help put us over the top on our kill.

The lesson here is when working on a boss, try to set your tactics up in such a way that will cause the boss to take extra damage. Again, not every encounter will allow for this, but the possibility is there. Put those AoE strikes to maximum effect whenever it is feasible to do so.

If you’re curious, here’s a video of our first kill up:

Conquest_Professor_Putricide from Dannamoth on Vimeo.

This is from the perspective of one of our top mages. Look at how our tank gradually follows the orange ooze around. We have a set path to use when orange oozes are up that involve running toward the green wall, up to the table, then down the orange wall.

Also, excellent use of Invisibility during tear gas phases. Such cheater DPS!

If you look closely at the end of the fight, there’s about 6 or 7 players still alive. Yeah, we barely scraped by on this kill.

Last night, we managed to take down Sindragosa on 25. I want to stab my eyes out. We managed to get a video of it as well, so I’ll see if it can be placed up somewhere.