Tonight was my last raid night with Agony – for a while, anyway. This week I’m moving to CA, and next week starting a full-time job. My status as a hard core WoW player is coming to a close… at least as far as time commitment goes. I will continue to play casually, as there are plenty of fun things to do in WoW that don’t require such a strict schedule.
Tonight we had Brutallus to 5% (and enrage +9 seconds before tank death!), better than our previous best of 8%. It’s a pure DPS race with a 6 minute enrage, and the healing requirements are also more serious than anything previously encountered – even with perfect damage mitigation on the part of the raid… in fact, it pretty much has to be perfect or very close to it, or heals can’t keep up – at least on a first kill. Keeping everyone alive for the duration is pretty challenging, but also required, as the raid needs every single ounce of DPS (and healing) that is available.
It’s not a particularly complicated fight. For DPS, you just burn as hard as you can and hope he dies before 6 minutes is up. The overall raid DPS required for this is about 27,777. The biggest logistics challenge for us was the requirement of very accurate timing between the tanks and healers as Brutallus is taunted from one tank to the other (in order to distribute across most of the raid the effects of a frontal aoe cone ability called meteor slash). The taunt typically coincides with one of Brutallus’ abilities called Stomp, causing the tank who is stomped to take large spikes of damage for a short time. Most healers need to have bombs landing at just that instant (within about a 1 second window), or the tank usually dies. The rest of the healers need to be dropping heals on the tank who is taunting and taking over aggro.
Also, the healing required to deal with a timed / randomly targeted DoT called ‘burn’ has to be coordinated… the duration is one minute, and it starts small, but ends up ticking for about 3200 *at best*. If a burned player manages to catch extra +fire damage debuff stacks (meteor slash) along with the burn, they’re almost always going to die. For us, it usually works out such that HoTs keep the burn victim at or near full health for the first 45 – 55 seconds or so of the duration. For me, this meant paying special attention to the burn timers as provided by BigWigs, instead of only looking at the raid frames, otherwise there might not be enough time to start queuing up a heal between the time that I see them start to drop and the time they die (which happened… too many times). Burn is only targeted at one person at a time, with about 20 seconds between casts, however burn is also contagious with proximity. Spreading burn typically results in wipes, as healers will be stressed to the max even with a perfect execution of the entire fight. I typically run out of mana very near enrage, and that’s with some downranking during the fight (unless I’m in the shadow priest group! which I’m usually not…)
Meteor slash also does direct fire damage to whichever soak group takes it. Thinking about the forms of damage intake pretty much suggests how to utilize various healing classes. Pallies / priests are typically bombing the tank for stomp, with downranked heals between stomps. Resto druids are great for healing burn targets, as their HoTs can counter the burn DoT until about the last 10 seconds or so of the burn duration. In general, HoTs on the tank are not going to make a huge difference due to the extremely spiky nature of the tank damage. My primary role was to help see burn victims through the end of their DoT, when it’s ticking really hard. At other times, I was healing the soak groups via bouncing chain heals off the nearby tank, which also provided extra (and needed) healing on the tanks.
Overall, the damage patterns are generally very predictable if raid members execute perfectly, although there are some rare occurrences… for example, we wiped once tonight due to two taunt resists in a row. Of course our warriors are hit capped, however there is the standard 1% chance to miss, which puts the odds of two taunt resists at about 1000 to 1 – big money! Also, because the timing on the taunts and healing is so tight, any form of lag or computer hiccup can be deadly. It’s very much pushing the thresholds of the margin of error that one should expect with Internet traffic in general. This is the first fight where I’ve had the need to plan my casts two or three casts ahead of time. It’s the only way to deal with the fact that stomp and burn both have very small windows during which heals must be delivered, or we all die a horrible death to a big ugly pit lord!
In other news, our most recent Kelecgos kill scored me a set of t6 bracers, [item]Skyshatter Bracers[/item]. Woot! That makes 5 pieces of t6 for me in total. Even though there are no set bonuses beyond 4 piece, in this case my old bracers were from SSC, so this is a good upgrade.
The 11 haste on the bracers puts me up to 151 spell haste rating in my trash-plow gear, which isn’t *amazing* but is definitely noticeable (2.5s casts are 2.28s). Even still, there are many occasions where I just *barely* miss landing a heal in time, so haste really helps!
Anyway, I was a little sad tonight as I said farewell and thanks to the raiding team. I’m a relative newcomer to the guild, and only really joined in the first place because I wanted to do the content as a challenge for myself. I figured it would be a fairly business-like atmosphere, due to the amount of commitment required to play at this level, and so I didn’t expect much in the way of social involvement. As it turns out, Agony is composed of a bunch of friendly and smart individuals who know how to get the job done, but also have fun in the process. The content is cool, but the necessity for repetition means that it gets old after a while. I was ready to call it quits on content progression after we killed Illidan. I kept raiding into Sunwell because I enjoyed it socially more than I did for the content, which serves to explain how Agony still has the same core membership it’s had for many years, across multiple MMOs. I hope to maintain a casual status in the guild, and would strongly consider moving to another MMO with them when that day comes.
Thanks Agony! Here’s is a small snippet of video I took tonight, showing various Agony raiders gallantly riding into battle against Brutallus! I still have a good deal more footage to process and upload, including a complete Hyjal run, a nearly complete BT run, and almost all the Sunwell trash. That will have to wait, though… packing and moving is at hand!
Here’s what Jindi looks like with all that sweet raiding gear! (though I guess much of the mace is eclipsed by the wall… oops)
 