Jindi Ysera

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)

Our first Kalecgos kill was a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t until this week that I got it on video.

As the first boss in Sunwell Plateau, there’s a notable difference between the difficulty here as compared to, say, Illidan. It seems reasonable that a guild who can kill Illidan would not be immediately ready to kill Kalecgos; it took us maybe a month or so between our first Illidan kill and our first Kalecgos kill.

The dance on this particular encounter is somewhat complicated, and fairly unique (at least in my experience). Basically, the fight is split up into two fights that are carried out simultaneously. The first, in the “normal world” is carried out in the place you walk into when the fight begins – a circular area that contains a big blue dragon named Kalecgos. He does normal dragon stuff (tail whip, frost breath), and is himself not much of a problem, although he does hit decently hard, so the tank healers can’t slack. The second fight is in the “demon world”, which is a physically separate place containing – you guessed it – a demon! Both the demon and Kalecgos must be killed within a very short time of each other. The demon world also contains an NPC that can ‘tank’ the demon, but not for very long – if he dies, the encounter ends and you lose.

The difficulty of this fight is centered around how players move between the normal and demon worlds. At specific intervals, a random raid member is teleported from the normal to the demon world. A portal appears in the normal world where the player was standing, and the appearance of the portal causes pretty significant aoe damage (spread out!). The portal allows travel to the demon world, but it only lasts a short time *and has a global cooldown*. This means that players can only go through the portal at a specific rate, limiting the number of people who can theoretically get through any given portal to about 5. Once in the demon world, players have a fixed amount of time before they are automatically ported back down to the normal world.

In the normal world, players get a stacking debuff that increases arcane damage taken and also deals arcane damage. The fight is long enough that it could easily stack high enough to one-shot any player. The debuff is cleared by going into the demon world, meaning that all players must continuously move between the demon and normal worlds to prevent being killed by the arcane damage. When returning to the normal world from the demon world, players get a ‘debuff’ that prevents them from being teleported back to the demon world until it expires (like 30 – 45 seconds or so).

The raid should be divided into logical groups that move together (between worlds). The goal is to make sure that you have a tank with enough healers in both worlds at all times. Obviously right at the beginning of the fight, the demon is alone with the ‘human’ NPC which ‘tanks’ the demon; this provides enough time to get a tank + healers up to the demon world. DPS should be more or less split, but keep in mind that DPS to the dragon will start before DPS to the demon, and so more cooldowns should be used in the demon world than in the normal world.

Some challenges of this fight:

• Distributing the raid’s healing / dps / tanking resources properly across the logical groups
• Coordinating movement through the portals among members of one’s logical group. This is probably the hardest aspect of this fight. In most cases, you should enter the portal any time someone in your logical group gets ported, but there are exceptions in the case of ‘floating’ healers or tanks. See your raid leader for details :) Missing your portal is very bad, and often results in a wipe. The effects of missing a portal aren’t immediately lethal; instead, it throws off the movement rotation that is the key to this whole fight, and so eventually things like stacking debuffs or imbalanced resources will take their toll.
• Making sure that logical group members are close enough to each other that they don’t have to run far to reach a portal, but not too close to hit other players with the AoE damage caused by being ported. The AoE damage is arcane, so the stacking arcane debuff means you can easily die to portal damage.
• Coordinating the taunting of the demon to the next tank when the current demon tank is about to return to the normal world. This is not hard to do, just have to make sure there is another tank up there to do it. This means that three tanks are required for this encounter (remember that one would also be tanking the dragon)
• Coordinating the taunting of the dragon to a new tank (typically the one who just got back from the demon world) before the current dragon tank needs to head up to the demon world
• Coordinating the DPS distribution between the demon and the dragon – not terribly hard, just have to pay attention and communicate the health of both throughout the fight.

The damage intake is not hard to deal with as long as the movement rotation is proper. The demon has a phase where he hits his tank really hard, lasts maybe 10 seconds. In the demon world, there is no penalty for clumping, and so everybody should pile up near the tank to maximize chain heal efficiency. In the dragon world, you must stay spread out to eliminate portal damage, so proximity-based heals are less effective (read: chain heal). As a cherry on top, there are curses that go out to random raid members, such as:

• a stacking shadow damage DoT. When decursed, it jumps to another player. This means it’s usually advisable to leave this curse on a player until it’s ticking high enough to really hurt (or else you waste too much time decursing)
• “wild magic”, which does things like increase healing effects, increasing threat generation, or increasing cast times (by 2x!). maybe there’s an increase damage version also, but I don’t remember seeing it.

In this particular kill video, you may note that I was targeted by the portal almost every single time, which sure beats trying to find and then run through a portal :) In general, it was a solid kill, with minimal deaths – some of the deaths came right at the end when two healers both got the increased casting time curse.

Last night, we had the second boss, Brutallus, down to 8% when we hit the enrage timer (6 minutes). Prior to last night, we hadn’t gotten past maybe 65 or 70%, and never got anywhere near the enrage timer. The difference? We got the healing figured out, so tanks stopped dropping dead all the time. More on that later!