Holding patterns

So here in the States, it’s Thanksgiving week…a time where we take trips to see family members we really don’t want to see, eat until we’d want to puke except the l-tryptophan in the turkey’s made us too sleepy to lean over the toilet, and, oh yeah, watch the Detroit Lions lose.  Again.  (In the Panzercow family’s case, this Thanksgiving week will be taken up by packing, cleaning, and moving into a new bunker across town, broken by Thanksgiving dinner at Maggiano’s.  Something tells me by Saturday, I’ll be thankful for Ben-Gay.)

A lot of raids, including The Anvil, are off this week–in our case, because we raid Thursday and Friday, taking the week off is a no-brainer.  This enforced rest is a good time to sit and think about what we’ve done in the past near-year of Wrath of the Lich King, and start planning for what’s coming over the horizon…patch 3.3 and Icecrown Citadel, the last big raid before Blizzard blows the whole thing up with Cataclysm sometime next year.

Let’s talk about Lich King raids.  In the beginning, of course, there was Naxxramas.  Yeah, Blizzard grabbed Naxxramas out of the bottom of one of those bright blue plastic recycling bins and ran it through the crusher to reform it into Wrath of the Lich King’s first raid.  But Naxx in and of itself is, I think, a fairly well-designed raid instance.  You can tell it’s an old-world vanilla WoW raid because of the amount of trash inside…overall, though, they did a pretty good job freshening it up for level 80s.

The thing that shocked people upon starting to play around in Naxxramas was how fecking easy it was, by design.  Naxxramas was proof that Blizzard wanted to make raiding accessible to far more people in WotLK, and they succeeded.  Any raid group that wasn’t made up of people who ate lots of lead-based paint as a child could walk in there and clear two wings the very first night.  Get yourself a reasonable amount of heroic dungeon or ilevel 200 crafted gear, and lrn2play, and yes, you too could stand astride Naxxramas like a colossus.  We didn’t exactly dominate the entire place in one night when we started 25-mans in there, but it didn’t take us that long.  We went from a standing stop to dropping Kel’Thuzad in something like five weeks.  In BC, with largely the same cast of characters, we spent longer than that working on Lady Vashj in Serpentshrine Cavern alone.  We never did get Kael’thas down until the 3.0 patch went in, at which point we were able to roflstomp him.  After SSC and TK, Naxxramas was a Caribbean vacation, complete with college girls (or cabana boys, if you’d prefer).

Enter Ulduar.  Ulduar was a return–somewhat–to old-school raiding.  Unlike Naxxramas, Ulduar made you work, at least a little, for your rewards.  I wrote about this a few times back in April when The Anvil started on 25-man Ulduar.  It still wasn’t SSC or TK or Hyjal or Black Temple, and nowhere close to the oh-God-kill-me-now difficulty in Sunwell Plateau.  But compared to Naxx, it was challenging.

And Ulduar itself, I think, is Blizzard’s crowning achievement in raid instances, just barely displacing Karazhan from that spot.  It’s big, it feels grand and epic.  It’s pretty.  There’s enough trash to help you make your repair bills back, and the trash will bite you if you get lazy.  And the boss fights are varied and interesting.  There’s a vehicle fight that, unlike Malygos, doesn’t suck a bowling ball through a silly straw.  There’s fights that require offtanking, fights that require tank-switching, fights that require splitting your group, fights that require mobility, fights that are straight-up tank-and-spanks…and Yogg-Saron, which is up to fifteen minutes of pure craziness on crystal meth.  And with the introduction of “hard modes,” once you’d mastered the basic content, you could start ramping up the difficulty at your own pace and ability, in order to score achievements and some extra loot.  I’m not a big fan of hard modes in general because it feels like I’m only getting half the content I would be otherwise, but even I have to admit, in Ulduar, it worked.  We’ve been raiding Ulduar for seven months and we’ve only just now been able to get XT-002’s Heartbreaker, for example…and are still working on things like Freya +2, Thorim hardmode, or (oh God the pain) Mimiron’s Firefighter.

And then, we got patch 3.2.  And we got the Icecrown County Fair…uh, Trial of the Crusader.  In which Blizzard took all the good stuff about Ulduar and threw it right out the window into a passing garbage truck.

Now, I know that 3.2 was “filler” content between Ulduar in 3.1 and Icecrown Citadel in 3.3.  To ask for a Double Stuf Oreo’s worth of filling in between those two crunchy cookies, eh, that may be a bit much.  But ToC isn’t even a real Oreo.  It’s one of those crappy store-brand versions that’s got about 0.3 mm of godawful fake-vanilla stuff in between two stale soggy wafers.

Where to start.  Well, how about…it’s one room? That’s it.  One big round room.  It might as well be a Coke machine.  Right-click human dude to insert $1.25, machine dispenses refreshing beverage…uh, pissy magmataur, two huge-ass worms, and a yeti.  (Don’t stand in the yeti.)  What’s worse?  They recycled the same frigging room for the 5-man heroic dungeon.  Art fail.

But the real screwup isn’t how it looks, it’s how it plays.  When we finally headed into ToC for the first time, we dropped the first three encounters in about 2 1/2 hours.  That’s pretty good for a first time into a raid instance.  But here’s the trick–we got loot off those three encounters that absolutely peed all over the loot we were getting out of Ulduar at the time…where we were still working on difficult fights like Thorim and Vezax.

The fights in ToC aren’t difficult.  They’re stupidly easy for the rewards that you’re given.  They’re gimmick fights…learn the gimmick, and they’re yawners.  Only Faction Champions (the ultimate broken-ass faux-PvP nerdrage fight, now nerfed down to Faction Declawed Kittens) and Anub’arak will keep you awake in normal ToC.  Pretty soon, we were sharding two-thirds of the loot we picked up in Ulduar because our core group had already blown past that tier of stuff and were picking up ilevel 239/245 things out of 10- or 25-man ToC every week.

We cleared normal ToC after four weeks of work.  That’s right, kids, we cleared a Tier 9 instance faster than we did Naxxramas.  And all that time, we were scoring ilevel 245 loot and Tier 9 badges at a feverish pace.  This wasn’t just a vending machine, it was a stuck vending machine that kept dropping cold Cokes on our feet.  We can now walk into normal ToC and clear the whole thing out in less than an hour and fifteen minutes…and get around sixteen piece of ilevel 245 loot and 15 Badges of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.  Were it not for hard modes, we wouldn’t even be going to Ulduar any more.  And even when we do get the hard modes, it’s just to say we did it.  The rewards from them simply can’t compare to what we get sleepwalking our way through ToC.  Mudflation, much?

But ToC has one final kick in the nuts to deliver.  Switch it to heroic.

Our raid group could demolish ToC normal, no sweat.  Then we walked in there on heroic and got owned. As in, couldn’t get Gormok past 35%, forget the Twin Jormungar or Icehowl.  Gormok’s Impales were landing for 40k–that was 85% of my buffed health, in one shot–near the end of the fight.  Yes, I know, you’re supposed to use a rotation similar to what the tank gets on Mimiron’s Shock Blast–Hand of Something, Pain Suppression, Shield Wall, etc.  But I am not, to put it mildly, a fan of fights that basically come down to “if the priest lags for a half-second, and the RNG hates your dodge%, you’re dead and there’s damn all you can do about it.”  That issue aside, now this is the beat-your-face-in difficulty level I expect from a Tier 9 instance that can give me ilevel 245+ stuff.

The difficulty gap between Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader is the size of the Grand Canyon.  And it’s not so much because ToGC is too hard, although I’ve got issues with some of the fight designs (see Gormok above).  It’s because ToC is way, way, waaaaaay too easy for the rewards you get.

It is horrific design all around, and even though I go every week and tank it or DPS it for The Anvil, I am most heartily sick of it.  I do my job so we can get out of there faster and get on to something else that is actually fun and challenging…be it Ulduar, be it Onyxia (which still rocks my socks off), be it even Trial of the Grand Oh God Not The Face.

This leaves us, as a raid, in a holding pattern, and the strain may be starting to show.  We’re doing ToC every week to gear up for Icecrown, but it’s not like we can try hardmodes on normal ToC a la Ulduar.  We grind through our 15 badges, and then we go to the familiar confines of Ulduar to work on hardmodes, which are still actually hard to us, or Onyxia.  Every so often we take another poke at ToGC to see if we’ve ramped up our DPS and strategy for Beasts, but I don’t know how much heart we’ve got in that right now…because that will be a long grind to power through, given how hard it is, and 3.3 draws ever closer.

You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to Icecrown Citadel.  Bring it on, Arthas, I’m waiting.

In the grim future of Panzercow 40,000…

Sometime late on Sunday night, Achtung Panzercow passed the forty thousand pageview mark in just under 11 months of existence.  I still don’t know how.  I mean, it’s just me, one fat guy in the American South, taking time out of his occasionally-busy workday to randomly wank about WoW, right?  A little roleplay here, some warrior advice there (some of which is even, on occasion, almost correct!), a bit of raiding in the middle, all garnished by snark and profanity?  Doesn’t exactly sound like a winning combination…and yet, a couple hundred people a day troop through here, day after day.  (And half of you forget to wipe your feet.)  Thank you all, so much.  I couldn’t do this without the folks who come through here and read and comment, and I wouldn’t want to anyway.

The Anvil’s raiding this past weekend was a mixed bag.  This was the weekend we decided we were going to start making serious pushes on some Ulduar hardmodes.  But first on Thursday night, we stopped through ToC for our weekly visit.  They really just need to put a vending machine outside the place…we do a retinal scan, it gives us our 15 Triumph badges, and we head on to something actually, y’know, interesting, instead of spending an hour and a half staring at the same room and listening to Garrosh and Wrynn stroke their peens.  (OK, an hour ten minutes staring at the same room and then 20 minutes in Anub’arak’s pad.  Whatev.)  We went five for five on one-shots, including the hated Faction Champions, culminating on a nice clean kill on Anub’arak.  We are, unfortunately, falling into that large gap between Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader.  We’re able to cruise through 25 normal with relative ease now,  but 25 heroic would probably gut us like a fish.  It’s a somewhat awkward position to be in.

The second half of Thursday night was spent in Ulduar.  We went for Shutout on Flame Leviathan, with no towers up–a pure speed kill.  Well, how does fifty-four seconds flat sound for a speed kill?  (Pyrite spam is love, baby.)  Then it was on to XT, where we forced his hardmode for the first time by finally bringing enough deeps to destroy his heart.  We couldn’t quite bring him down–our best wipe was about 35%–but that’s OK, as it was the first time a lot of us had seen hardmode on XT and we’re still learning how to handle Life Sparks and voidpoo and whatnot.  We rounded out the night with Kologarn and Razorscale.

Thursday was interesting for me because it’s one of the few times–maybe the only time, come to think of it–that I’ve been pure DPS for every one of those fights except Faction Champions (where prot > everything).  My Arms gear is still at least a full tier below where it needs to be, not to mention badly itemized, and Arms is not a killer DPS spec for personal glory anyway.  But I managed, according to World of Logs, to squeeze out around 3500 DPS for the entire three hours, and actually beat a couple of other people on aggregate damage and DPS for the first time.  It’s still not my favorite thing to do, but all four of us who tank for The Anvil rotate in and out, and all four of us get our turn in the deeps barrel occasionally.  I got some deeps upgrades, ditched some of my excess +hit (maybe too much!), and once I get my new toys enchanted and gemmed, should be able to see a bit of an increase.

Now, Fridays have been our bane lately.  We’ve really had to scramble to fill 24 or 25 slots.  Because of the number of subs we were running, we pretty much knew that hardmodes weren’t going to work on Friday, so it ended up being a relatively laid-back three-hour tour of Onyxia, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim (who gave us a fair amount of trouble, more than usual), Freya, and Ignis.  I’m pretty sure our officers are going to extend the Ulduar lockout so we can take cracks at Mimiron (NO FIREFIGHTER), one of the IC hardmodes, Vezax, and Yoggy next week.

Personally, I’m pleased that Lin is closing in on a second piece of T9.25, because the warrior Tier 9 set bonuses are sweet.  My problem is, I don’t have a ToC 10-man.  All the 10-mans that my guildies, raidmates, and friends run are completely locked-in for tanks.  So I’m only getting 15 badges a week, meaning it takes quite a while to accumulate 45 or 75 for a T9.25 piece (or even 30 or 50 for the vanilla T9).  My wonderful wife tried to throw a 10-man ToC together on Saturday afternoon…yeeeah, it didn’t go well.  It’s easy to get cocky when your raid group walks through Northrend Beasts like a tank through a sheet of paper, and then you take a mixture of friends’ alts and a couple pickups in and Gormok hands you your ass after he’s bitten it off and had a snobold roast it.  It helps you remember that yes, it’s quite possible to dominate on Thursday night and look like a scrub on Saturday afternoon.

Oh, and Linedan, Azeroth’s Most Humorless Cow, has Hallow’s End wands.  Whether he actually uses them or not, we’ll have to see.  More than likely, he’ll accidentally hit somebody with one and be mortified.

The Sweet and the Bitter

The sweet:  Friday night, The Anvil, on the sixth try of the night, dropped Yogg-Saron to complete our run through normal 25-man Ulduar.  We had to extend our lockout two weeks to do it, so we’d have enough time on Friday to get some good attempts in on the Old God, and finally, everything came together.

The bitter:  While the rest of The Anvil was beating the Yoggy out of, uh, Yoggy…my lovely wife, my charming daughter Nublet, and I were in a motel room in Perry, Georgia, asleep.  We would be getting up the next day to sell my wife’s handmade shinies at a very cold but very fun craft festival.  (Aside:  54 degrees, 15 mph north wind, wind chill in the low 40s.  30 miles south of Macon.  In fucking October.  Global warming, my big fat hairy ass.)

Finding out on Saturday evening that the raid killed Yoggy gave me some mixed emotions.  Of course, I’m happy that “we” finally got the chance, by extending the raid lockout another week and creatively scheduling, to get enough attempts in to work through the chaos of the fight and bring it to a successful conclusion.  Even though I missed part of the week before as well due to catching a cold or hamthrax or plague or cooties or something that I’m still not quite over yet, I was still a part of clearing at least the front of Ulduar in that lockout, and had been there for our earlier attempts on Yogg as well.  We’re a pretty tight group, and like most good raids (cutting-edge progression or not), we live or die as a team, and team accomplishments are more important than individual glory.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tiny pang of “well, shit.”

I wasn’t there.  I wasn’t there for our first Yoggy kill.  I had a legitimate reason for not being there, of course…we do this craft show every year on the third weekend in October, it’s basically a (hard-)working vacation for us because my wife grew up going to it–her mom sold her handmade cornhusk dolls at every show for twenty-seven straight years until she got too sick to go.  In fact, we even now have her mom’s old booth spot…booth A1, right by the entrance gate.  It’s vastly more important that we be there–to make some money, to see old friends, to watch Nublet have the time of her life charming people and playing in dirt and riding hayrides and petting cows–than to attend our raid.  My raid friends understand that.  It was all planned out ahead of time, and honestly, my attendance has been so good in the past, even missing two weeks (one sick, one traveling) isn’t an issue.

But I wasn’t there for the first kill.  I wasn’t there to see my chat window vomit forth 25 peoples’ achievement spam.  I wasn’t there for the obligatory celebratory screenshot.  We’ll kill Yoggy again, I have no doubt, but when we do, it won’t be the first time.  It’ll be smoother and less painful, but it won’t be the first time.  (Draw your own analogies.  They’re glaringly obvious.)

And then there’s The Voice In The Back Of My Head.  I hate that bastard.  He’s the one that says things like, “see, they killed Yogg-Saron without you and we’re running a four-tank rotation as it is, they don’t need you.“  I don’t listen to him as much as I used to when he’d make me doubt myself and have me half-convinced every week that the raid was about to dump me for poor performance, but he’s still there, and there’s still a little part of the ol’ brain that buys into his bullshit.  Yes, I have a bit of a gear gap to the other three tanks because they’re all in 10-mans in addition to our 25, and none of the 10-mans I know have any tank slots available.  Yes, I am still the Minister of Silly Mistakes.  Yes, when I’m assigned DPS, my DPS is laughably bad, and when tanking my DPS is below our warrior tank and far below our paladin and DK.  But I’ve also successfully MT’d everything in Ulduar 25 up through Vezax and everything but Anub in ToC 25.  I’m not uber, but dammit, I don’t suck.

So here’s today’s topic for discussion.  How have you felt when you haven’t been there for a big important raid first–a first kill, a first clear, a first achievement or hardmode?  I think it’s natural to have a little undertone of bitter along with the sweet when knowing that your team pulled it off, but they did it without you.  Deep down, I think we all want to feel a little indispensable.  But the most important thing is that the team, the raid, pulled it off.  And even if you weren’t there for the actual kill, you did your part to help them get there.

Four whole seconds to spare

Yeah, uh, Mr. Fordring? Orkin here. Listen, we're gonna have to charge extra for this one...

Well, actually, four and a half seconds if you’re being really precise.

That’s how much time The Anvil had left on the enrage timer last night when we finally downed Anub’arak in 25-man normal Coliseum, after three weeks of trying.

To say that Anub’arak was a notch higher on the difficulty scale than the rest of the fights in the Coliseum (Faction Champions excluded, but more on that later) would be an understatement.  After all, Northrend Beasts is basically three gimmick fights in a row.  Lord Jaraxxus makes the healers cry, but as long as people know to run toward the wall and not stand in Bad(tm), it’s not too rough.  Twin Val’kyrs?  The ultimate gimmick fight, but if you can tell light from dark and can interrupt Twin’s Pact, it’s no big thing.

The Nub is a little rougher.  We’d gotten several good shots at him last week but the healers were having real trouble keeping the offtanks up.  Our plan was to have the offtanks grab and hold both pairs of Burrowers so DPS could focus on the big guy; otherwise we had no shot at dropping him inside his short enrage timer.  But despite having excellent healers in the raid, our DK offtank (who’s got more health than any of the other three of us) kept falling over.

It was then that our raid officers, looking through the logs, discovered what Spinks posted about over at Welcome to Spinksville yesterday:  The Anub’arak fight is one of the only encounters in WoW where Shield Block rules.

The Nerubian Burrowers stack a debuff called Expose Weakness.  Each stack causes you to take 25% more damage, up to a maximum of 225% (9 stacks, down from 10 pre-3.2.2).  But the catch is, apparently if you block one of their attacks, your shield block value is subtracted from their damage before the Expose Weakness debuff multiplier is added.  Burrowers only hit for about 2500 to 3000.  See where this is going?  Our 46,000-health DK, with no shield, had no way to mitigate the 12,000 to 15,000 he was taking per hit from two burrowers except his jealousy-inducing 33%+ dodge.  Our warrior, the other offtank, did.  The DK died.  The warrior didn’t.

So last night I was the #3 tank, and I was on burrower duty.  I dutifully loaded up my “trash” set instead of my normal boss-tanking set.  My trash set is a real hash of things, built for block value over even block rating.  I still rock the T7 helm with it, plus some of my four T8 pieces, other bits and pieces from Ulduar and maybe one other from Naxx still.  It isn’t so much designed for block tanking as it is designed for DPS…I even normally run two crit trinkets instead of tank trinkets (although for this fight, I strapped my tank trinkets back on) because it’s a set designed for light-hitting trash and any situation where I need to rip an 11k Shield Slam out of my ass.  I ended up losing about 10 points of Defense, a crapton of dodge%, and maybe 1500 health from my boss set, but my buffed shield block value was a tasty 2593, and I was still at 543 Defense and 42,200 fully buffed health.  My block rating was a bit low at 22.78%, but as a warrior, I’ve got two other tricks up my sleeve for that–Shield Block, for almost complete immunity to damage for 10 seconds out of 40, and 3/3 in the recently-buffed Critical Block talent, meaning 60% of those blocks wouldn’t be for 2593, they’d be for almost 5200.  I couldn’t block everything, but when I did block, I made it count.

The strategy, I’m pleased to say, works like a charm, and you don’t have to build a super-block set that gimps everything else to do it…well, on normal, at least.  (On heroic, yeah, you probably do.)  We did run into trouble on the first time we got Anub’arak to phase 3 when we had four burrowers up.  As good as our healers are, keeping up a tank with two burrowers, with 50% haste, and 9 stacks of Expose Weakness, and Swarming Leech, just wasn’t happening.

The last two attempts we got him to phase 3 with only one set of burrowers up, and as long as we kept the burrowers separated so they didn’t buff each other, the healers could keep myself and the other OT (paladin) up without much trouble.  Tanking one burrower, even with 9 stacks of Expose Weakness, isn’t too bad.  The first attempt, we just ran out of time and he enraged at 4%, finishing the last of us at 2%.  On the killshot, I thought we weren’t going to make it because he was still at 18% health with one minute left.  A couple of the healers shifted over to DPS, we lowered everybody else’s health in the raid even more to slow down the Leeching Swarm, and all of us blew everydamnthing we had (I was tanking a burrower while beating up on Anub).  And he fell over with precisely 4.5 seconds left on the enrage timer.

Now is Blizzard going to “fix” this little trick?  I don’t know.  Shield Block has evolved into a mechanic that doesn’t really fit with anything…it’s overpowered against trash and underpowered against bosses.  It’s good to see a fight where it actually matters, and fortunately Anub’arak is quite easy for a druid or DK to tank so there’s still great use for them there.  It seems mighty cheesy to be able to build a set that allows one warrior to tank four burrowers–on heroic, no less, as Spinks documented–with impunity, but that’s a very extreme example.  I wouldn’t put it past Blizzard to break our little Shield Block trick, but if they don’t, and until they do, we’re going to take full advantage of one of the few bones they throw us on a fairly challenging fight.

Oh, and as you may remember from the rant immediately below this one, I kinda hate Faction Champions.  And by “kinda,” I mean I’d like to find the guy at Blizzard who thought this was a good idea and beat him silly with a wiffleball bat.  Well, there was a little patch note in the 3.2.2 release that mentioned some changes had been made to this fight.  We didn’t know what to expect going in last night.  But here’s what you need to know.

First week, seven wipes.  Second week, five wipes.  Third week, three deaths.

Faction Champions got nerfed TO THE GROUND, BABY.

The biggest change?  Taunts no longer have diminishing returns on them.  Think about that for a second.  That one change alone, not even including the damage reduction they put in, turns the fight into cheesymode.  Seriously.  They assigned me to harass the death nugget.  I could just spam Taunt every 8 seconds, with total impunity, to pull him off of a squishy for a few…enough time for me to drop a Charge or Intercept on him, or Shield Bash him to slow him down, or Concussion Blow or Shockwave to stun…oh, and they didn’t go immune to my stuns, either.

Sure, there were times where the DK got away from me.  But not many.  And when he did, I got him right back.

As much as I hate that fight–and I still do, with every flabby fiber of my being–I almost felt dirty at the end of it, that’s how easy it was.  It reminded me of an AB match when a premade runs up against a PUG, except the Faction Champions didn’t /afk out halfway through.  Yep, after whooping it up at our expense for a couple of weeks, ol’ Wrynn the Chin saw his boys and girls get a straight-outta-Compton gangsta beatdown, Hordesiyyyyyde style.  Word up, yo.

Finally…so what reward does ol’ Tirion Fordring give us for completing the Trial of the Crusader?  The chance to do it all over again on heroic!  Well fuckin’ yay there big guy, excuse me if I’m somewhat less than enthused about going Groundhog Day on your little spectacle.  Catch me next week and we’ll talk about it.

The Anvil Wants You, Part Deux

Hi. I’m Linedan.  And it’s time for my every-so-often raid recruiting blog post.

The Anvil is a Hordeside 25-man raid on Feathermoon-US (a Pacific timezone RP server).  We are currently 12/14 Ulduar, with only The Yoggster left to go on non-hard-mode 25, and 4/5 25-normal ToC (more on that later) with a few Ulduar hardish modes under our belt.  We raid Thursday nights from 6 to 9, and Friday nights from 6:30 to 9:30 (Pacific time).  We also have a couple of 10-mans that are not technically part of the Anvil but are run by and composed of Anvil members, and we have a chat channel and Ventrilo available for use for raids, instances, PvP, Silvermoon cyb0rz, whatever.  You do not need to join one of our component guilds to be a part of the raid.  

Right now, Real Life has cost us a couple of our regular healers.  So, we needs us some replacements.  We need healers, of any class, that are good, competent, strong, and secure in the knowledge that the big cow in the plate is the one that should really be getting most of the heals. Really.

I know nothing about healing other than needing a lot of it, so as far as I know, here are the prerequisites for the job:

- You need some spellpower. I think somewhere between “a lot” and “a metric shitload” (which is, as you know, 0.6 of an Imperial shitload) is sufficient.
- The more flashy procs, effects and symbols that happen when you cast, the better. If you can singlehandedly cause an epileptic seizure by casting a Flash Heal, that’s bonus points.
- Disc priests are wonderful, but Regatta may challenge you to a trial by combat, or a bake-off, her choice.  Watch out for the pig, he’ll cheat. 
- Bonus points also if you’ve got a DPS spec and would be willing to pew-pew or bonk-bonk on some occasions. Flexibility is always good. And remember, Smite is a valid spell.
- The ability to psychically interpret what Ghaar says during healing assignments and understand that when he says “whelps,” he means “you’re healing the raid.”
- A love for burop soup, burop fish, burop chowder, burop strudel, and burop fish chowder strudel a la mode.
- The ability to keep both tanks alive while simultaneously cranking out bad puns.  Also, a deep and heartfelt desire to teabag Varian Wrynn is a huge plus, especially if you want to rip his own testicles off and use them to do it. 

If you would like to join our merry band of maniacs as we prepare to turn Yogg-Saron into so much gelatinous loot pinata and impress the hell outta the ladies in the crowd at the Argent Tournament of What the Fuck Are We Doing Here Instead of Kicking Arthas’ Ass, please head over to the Thundering Hammer Clan forums to get in touch with one of our highly-trained raid occifers for an interview, drug screening, psychological profile, and prostate exam. Bribes happily accepted.  Operators are standing by, call now! 

Mmmmbuhbye!

Revenge of the fuzzy kitten

Yes, Gentle Readers, someday I will get back to solid, practical posting on warriors and whatnot.  But after being repeatedly kicked in the mental nuts by Real Life over the past couple weeks, today is not that day.  Instead, have a funny story from The Anvil’s Ulduar-25 last night.

I was the main tank.  So you could say I was a bit of a stress puppy, because that’s how I am (as I tell my wife, it’s part of my endearing charm, dammit).  We’d gotten through Flame Leviathan, XT, Auriaya, Hodir, and Thorim, and with a few minutes left before stop time, we went back to clean up Ignis.

So there I was, tanking Ignis around in a little triangle, leaving scorch spots on the ground for the construct tanks.  We were just tra-la-la-ing along, and then…I died.

Me dying on some content is not unusual, but on Ignis?  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

See, I have this pocket disc priest, Regatta, who is so good she smells like awesome wrapped in bacon.  Seriously.  When Reggie’s around, I don’t worry about my health, at all.  I’ll get a heal or a bubble exactly when and where I need it; if the situation is salvageable, she’ll salvage it.  She is a wicked good tank healer, and she was assigned to me for Ignis.  And yet there I was in the Sprawl of Shame(tm), in the middle of a Scorch patch.

So the rest of the raid cleaned up Ignis and then Reggie started apologizing profusely on Vent…something to the effect of, “Lin, I’m so sorry, my kitten just killed you.”

*blink*  “Uh…what?”

See, Reggie has a new kitten.  Her (yes, her) name is Radical Edward.  Radical Edward, being a kitten, gets into everything.  So it turns out that mid-Ignis-fight, Radical Edward climbed a nearby lamp and started playing with the lampshade.  Reggie tried to remove her from the lampshade.  Radical Edward, taking offense, proceeded to jump on Reggie’s head, knock her glasses off her face, and start dancing.

While she was healing me, she suddenly had a kitten doing a Mexican hat dance, with claws, on her exposed head, dangerously close to her eyes.  There was shrieking and flailing and flying kitten.  And when she could look back down, there was dead Panzercow.

I still love me some Regatta, and I still love me some fuzzy kitten.  But I am going to suggest that maybe she needs to wear safety goggles and a hard hat for the raid tonight…

I got yer mountains, right here

The Anvil has been working on Thorim 25-man, off and on, for something like eight weeks now.  Now granted, in that eight weeks, we’ve been unable to even take a shot at him three times due to roster issues.  But still, that’s five weeks of hearing “…in the moooounntaaaiiiinnsss…”  several times a night, followed by the most painful wipes this side of a bad case of hemorrhoids.  “Cockblock” may be a vulgar term, but in Thorim’s case, it was appropriate.  Only Kael’thas in Tempest Keep ever held us up this long…we even got Vashj in less calendar time, although IMO, Vashj was a hell of a lot harder.

We went back in to Ulduar on Thursday night with a full raid (for once) and a determination that we were going to beat the Yoggy out of(tm) Thorim.  Once again, I was your friendly neighborhood gauntlet tank, preparing to lead an eight-man group to deal with happy fun trash and big fire-spewing minibosses while the other 17 folks chilled out in Thorim’s Mosh Pit and rocked out to Slayer under a big pile of about five hundred squillion iron dwarves.  With lightning.  And mullets.

By the end of the evening I was pretty much ready to give up and go find another line of work.  Something less stressful and more tolerant of failure, like, say, brain surgery or nuclear weapon handling.  The arena group, originally our Achilles’ heel, was on a roll, keeping great control of the dwarves and holding up under the heavy punishment.  No, Gentle Reader, our problems on Thursday night were primarily with the gauntlet group.

And that means, with me.

Holy Saurfang, was I a failtank Thursday night.  I broke sheep.  I lost agro on Iron Ring Guards and let them eat squishy fase.  I didn’t grab stuff fast enough when it followed us down the tunnel from the arena (that’s a new post-3.2 “feature” of Thorim–healers can agro stuff in the stands above the hallway in certain spots, through the ceiling, and when it starts moving, it’ll jump down and run into the hallway and hit the group from behind).  I got tripped up and dropped on my butt right in front of flame pulses.  I would’ve probably run across the center of the circles getting to Thorim and gotten paralyzed…had we even gotten that far.  I had the leader on the gauntlet side ready to kill me, I’m pretty sure.

And after all that, we still got him to phase 2 for the first time ever…and wiped when we hit the hard enrage with him at 3%.  Had we still had a warlock and mage alive that got killed in the hallway–because I lost agro on a guard–we would’ve gotten him.

That dwelled in my headspace all day Friday.  I couldn’t shake it off at work, or after I got home, or at prep time for the raid.  And as we were waiting for invites, I finally managed to focus and convert the “you suck”–which is not an easy task for me because I always think I suck–into “this will not happen again tonight, dammit.”  We had our strategy worked out–adding one more DPS, my wife Rashona, to the hallway group for a total of nine people–and this time, I was determined, if we failed, it was not going to be because of me.

We went in with 24 people, including several subs and first-timers, making jokes about “the Anvil man-down rule” that we usually do better with 24 than we do with 25.  We blew through Ignis and Freya, and soon we stood before Thorim again.  We charged in and massacred his little gladiatorial party.  He launched into his “…in the moooounntaaaiiiinnsss…” bad voice-acting again, and off we went through the opening gate.

First group.  Sheep left, let the hunter misdirect the acolyte toward me, don’t worry about him, grab the ring guard, tank him.  DPS burns down the acolyte (he hits like he’s got pillows on his hands), then my guard.  Bust the sheep, grab it, oh fuck get away from the fire.  OK, it’s dead, lather rinse and repeat on the second group.

Boss tiems.  Grab him, turn him, tank him, easymode.  Oh snap, Runic Barrier, call across the room for Rashonakitty to get out.  Sweet, he’s at 80k.  “First boss going down” over Vent, and I’m already turning and opening the door to bitchslap a guard across the face with my shield before the big guy even eats floor.  Two steps up, grab the second group, back up, Shockwave, booyah.  Not tonight.

“Get the boss, Lin.”  Right.  Drag the two up the stairs while a hunter and my pocket priest go with me.  Here comes the boss.  Shield Block and settle in for the tank, tab target, spread the love, oh fuck a guard is getting loose, Challenging Shout, GET BACK HERE BITCH.  Thunder Clap, Shockwave, DPS is burning down the guards first, not exactly the way you’re “supposed” to do it but it makes things easier on the healers, and besides, they’re shredding like paper.  Quick glance at Grid, nobody’s dead, way to kick ass arena group.

Second boss keels over…holy crap, we’re gonna hit phase 2 on our first attempt.  Run to Thorim, the shouts of “NOT THE MIDDLE, LIN!” still echoing in my head from two weeks ago.  One of the hunters agros him as they jump down, I pat him on the back as I go too.  He lands.  PHASE 2, BABY!

Settle in again.  Watch DBM for Unbalancing Strike messages and the telltale “doooong,” hit Taunt when it comes up.  Sometimes I get him, sometimes one of the other tanks do, no worries.  People on Vent yelling about the adds, “no, we killed them all.”  Constant calls of “lines!”, “move move move!”, “taunt!”  Eighty percent.  Sixty percent.  Forty percent.

I try and do the math in my head of the delta on his health versus the enrage timer, and the equation’s coming out in our favor…barely.  Thirty percent.  “Ten stacks.”  He’s hitting hard as hell now, 14k or more.  Get on those taunts, dude, remember, if we fail tonight, it won’t be because of me.  Twenty percent.  A couple of people are dead, our DPS slows.

Dooong.  Taunt.  “Twelve stacks.”  Fifteen percent.  Reach for Shield Wall on general principle–I’m not really even at low health but it’ll help stretch the healers’ mana–and FUCK I’M DEAD WHAT KILLED ME.  I’m face-down in the Sprawl of Shame and he’s still at twelve percent.  Two tanks left…”Gore, Kel, it’s on you guys, go go go.”  Ten percent.  Eight.  Five.  “Fourteen stacks!”, a note of panic creeping in.  Less than one minute to enrage.

Three.  Our other offtank drops dead.  Two.  Shit, our MT just died, no, dammit, no no no!  One…

“Stay your arms!  I yield!”

I slump back in my chair, put my face in my hands, and realize that they’re shaking.  I don’t cry tears of joy and relief…but it’s a close thing.

————–

Epilogue:  We got Mimiron to 22% in phase 3 the very first time we saw him.  I’m not getting cocky yet, as phase 4 of that fight is supposed to be total chaos, but I think we’re in pretty good shape on him.  Make out your will, you shrimpy little twerp, you’re next.

We interrupt our irregularly unscheduled programming…

…for an advertisement.

You’ve read here on Achtung Panzercow about my adventures with my Hordeside raid, The Anvil.  The Anvil is a long-standing multi-guild Horde raid on the Feathermoon (US) role-playing server…and if you’re a responsible, knowledgeable player who wants to kick some ass but only has a few hours a week to do it, we want YOU! 

Currently we are 8/14 Ulduar 25-man, working on Thorim and Mimiron.  The Anvil raids twice a week, from 9:00 pm to 12 midnight Eastern on Thursday, and from 9:30 pm to 12:30 am Eastern on Friday.  (Feathermoon is a Pacific timezone server, so server time is EDT-3 hours, or GMT-7 hours.)  Whispers for invites start one hour prior to pull time, with invites going out about 25 minutes ahead.

We use a Suicide Kings system for loot.  The raid keeps two lists, one for tier tokens and one for everything else.  When a piece of loot drops, people who are interested whisper the loot officer; whoever’s highest on the list gets the loot and then they drop to the bottom of the list and everybody else who’s there that night moves up one.  That’s it.  It’s a very simple system and works well for us, with basically no drama.

Now, there’s a few things you should know about The Anvil and Feathermoon:

- Feathermoon is a roleplaying server.  While The Anvil is not an “RP raid” per se and raid chat is out of character, most of the raiders are roleplayers of one sort or another.  RP in /say is encouraged.  RP griefers are not welcome, period, full stop. 

- You do not have to join a guild to be part of The Anvil.  We have officers and members from several different guilds.

- We are flexible in terms of attendance.  “Real life > raid life” has always been a motto of ours.  However, obviously, if you’re a prospect, we’ll need you to be there more regularly so you can be evaluated.

- Just because we only raid two nights a week in our main 25-man doesn’t mean the fun stops there.  We have a community chat channel and Ventrilo that are home to a larger extended “family” where you can find 10-mans (including one that has downed Yoggy and one that is close), heroic runs, “retro raids,” and PvP…including the occasional legendary city raid.

- Also, just because we are on an RP server and only raid for six hours a week doesn’t mean we’re soft.  You will be expected to demonstrate a knowledge of your class and proper gearing for Ulduar-25 level content (through Armory, etc.).  You’ll have to show appropriate ability in DPS or healing or tanking or whatever and will be expected to read up on fights ahead of time and know your role in them.  And you’ll be expected to come prepared with proper gems, enchants, consumables, etc., though the raid is more than willing to help out where we can.

- Raid chat and Vent can get decidedly R-rated at times.  Yes, we get raunchy.  We’ve raised the “your mom” joke to an art form.  If you can’t handle that, then we may not be the raid for you.  (Because of this, we generally only accept applicants 18 and over.)

- Finally, the most important things we look for are maturity and friendship.  It’s a lot easier to take a decent person and gear them up and teach them how to play their class than it is to take a great player who’s a douchemuffin and un-douche them.  Save the drama for yo’ mama because we don’t want it.

Now, what are we looking for?  Primarily ranged DPS.  Elemental shamans, mages, warlocks, hunters, and thunderchickens are our biggest need right now.  That’s not to say that melee DPS, healers, or tanks won’t get looked at, but our biggest holes to fill are ranged DPS first, and melee DPS (rogues, enhancement shamans, and DPS warriors primarily–we’re full up on DKs) second.  The summer raiding boss is wiping us hard about now, and we’ve had a few recent departures that have stretched us even further.

No, we’re not a cutting-edge raid.  8/13 Ulduar with our only hard mode being FL +1 is not earthshatteringly awesome.  But for a six-hour-a-week raid, we do pretty damn well.  When we bring it, we bring it hard (that’s what your mom said!) and we bring it right.  We have a lot of fun doing it, too, and really, we’re a lot more than just a two-night 25-man raid.  We’re a big extended group of friends who do lots of other things together as well.

If this sounds like it might interest you, check out this post on our forums by our raidleader Malkavet.  It talks more about the raid’s Core Values and how you can get in touch with an officer to talk about joining The Anvil.  If you’re already on Feathermoon Hordeside, look for Malkavet, Dorritow, Fyriat, Davien, Nikkei, Ghaar, or Ambika.

My name is Linedan, and I came here to kick ass and punt gnomes.  And the last gnome just went over the cliff.

Vanity, for once, thy name is Linedan

I normally don’t care much about fashion on Linedan.  Some of my characters do care about how they look; I admit, somewhat grudgingly, that I picked one of my hunter Illithanis’ pets because it was red and most of her armor was matching red mail at the time.  But Lin?  Nah.  He’s a function-over-form kind of cow.  Besides, so much armor just looks strange on the weird proportions of the male Tauren–bracers disappear completely under the gloves, the legs are so small that pants are hard to even see much less admire, stuff like that.

So it is a rare moment indeed when I have a squee like this.  The Anvil did Flame Leviathan with one tower up for our first hard mode attempt in Ulduar last night.  (It really should be called “sorta kinda hard” mode…even with a tower up, Loot Leviathan still isn’t too bad.)  And he gave us a little something for our extra effort…the Anvil’s first ilevel 232 epic loot.

A Titanguard.

You can't see it, but there's a big stupid grin under that helmet.

HOLY SWEET ZOMBIE JESUS DOES THAT THING LOOK INCREDIBLE OR WHAT.

Forget that it’s an epic.  Forget that unlike my old Broken Promise, it actually looks like a fecking sword you use to stab people with instead of a railroad signal.  Forget that I’m enjoying actually tanking with a fast weapon (1.6) again instead of a slow Broken Promise (2.5).  Just look at it, man.  It’s bacon-wrapped badass.  It screams, “hi, I’m Linedan, and I’m going to gut you like a fish and then hit you in the face with my shield until you stop moving.”

I have not been this stupid giddy gleeful happy about an upgrade in a long time.  And it’s not even because it’s a good weapon.  It’s just because of how it looks.  Crikey, next thing you know, I’ll be taking Linedan to the barber shop.

…nah.

(FYI, question for you cutting-edge tank types–what enchant should I put on this beast?  Right now I have a self-made Titanium Weapon Chain on it, which hit-caps me in my block gear and over-hit-caps me in my boss tank gear.  Is Blade Ward worth the ridiculous prices it commands, considering nobody in our raid can apparently do it yet (we’ve had lousy luck on drops)?  What about our old BC friend Mongoose?  You can see his Armory from the link at the top of the page if you’re curious.  Thank you!)

Gardening and snowblowing, Ulduar style

When The Anvil walked into Ulduar Friday night–with a full 25-man Friday complement for the first time in nearly a month–we’d already had what could be classified as a good weekend.  We’d shaken off the failkarma of a few weeks prior and downed Auriaya and the Iron Council for first-time kills on Thursday night.  Friday’s menu was a spicy appetizer of Crotch Pockets (Ignis), followed by a vegetarian main course (Freya) and some tasty ices for dessert (Hodir).

And we had extra incentive.  One of our raid officers, the gracious and charming Dorritow, told us that if we cleared Freya, Hodir, and Thorim, and got to Mimiron trash, she’d dye her hair purple.  Not in-game.  In real life.

Clearly, we had incentive.

A good primary tanking weapon for the Conservatory of Life.

Ignis fell, and so it was on to see Freya.  If Auriaya is Crazy Cat Lady, Freya is that woman who calls in to the local AM radio gardening show every Saturday morning and rambles on about her begonias before the host has to gently tell her that 7:45 am is too early to be spiking her Ensure with vodka, and then hangs up on her.  Her area is filled with different plant adds, all of whom are out to get revenge for every bite of salad you’ve ever eaten and every bouquet of roses you’ve ever given your significant other.  Basically, it’s PETA–Plants Eating Terrified Attackers.

Now many of us in the raid had never seen the Conservatory before, at all.  I sure hadn’t, in 10- or 25-man.  So you know how it goes on your first time into a place.  Wipe on the trash, steady things up, clear the trash, start grinding down the boss and do a little better each time until you hit your stop time or the boss dies.  Well, surprisingly, we cleared the trash with no wipes (though a few deaths), and set up for our first pull on Freya and her six exciting and dynamic waves of trash ™.

We dropped her.

Let me repeat…we kicked her ass the first time we ever saw her.

It was as close to a perfect performance as I have ever seen us give.  We never got behind on the waves of adds.  Each one died with a couple of seconds to go before the next one spawned in.  Once we got a hold of Freya, it was all over…we quite literally beat the Yoggy out of her in short order.  And everybody was standing at the end!

…for about one second.  That’s how long it took the little bombs that I couldn’t see to go off right next to me, hitting me for about 35k damage and leaving me in the Sprawl of Shame(tm) as the raid celebrated our awesome one-shot.  That is, if you’re keeping track at home, the third new boss kill of the lockout period, and the second which I was face down at the end of due to a lack of being observant.

We're calling this Hodir's Bane. We're going to put Berserking on it.

After Freya, it was time for Hodir.  Now we knew that Hodir wasn’t going to be as much of a pushover as his sister…uh, cousin…uh, common-law wife…?  was.  Despite the fact that pretty much all of us had conned his Sons into believing that we were generally cool and froody individuals who should get 20% discounts on their monopoly shoulder enchant prices, Hodir didn’t take it too well when we asked, “so, big guy, what’s in the box?”  Frozen pain ensued.

I lost count of how many times we wiped on the big blue bastard–five or six, maybe seven, I dunno.  This was raiding old-school, biyatch.  This was grinding and grinding and grinding some more, refining our strategy, tweaking assignments here and there, learning things the hard way that weren’t in the explanation–after all, you can read about a fight, and even see movies of it, but until you’re actually there, it just isn’t as good for learning, at least not for me.  Plus, I was in “roflcowpter” mode for this one (arms spec) since it’s a one-tank fight, so I had to shift gears and remember my “waiting for Godot” rotation that I hadn’t played in a few weeks.

But y’know what?  We eventually beat the Yoggy out of him, too.  Our fourth new kill of the weekend, and a great way to end an awesome lockout period.  Sadly, we didn’t have time to attempt Thorim, so Dorritow gets to keep her hair its natural color.  For now.  Doom comes for you, darlin’, and it comes with a bottle of purple hair dye.