The new 3.32 patch just came out and with it the final wing of IceCrown Citadel has been released. With it comes the 3 final bosses of Dreamwalker, Sindrigosa, and the guy the expansion was named after Arthas the Lich King.
In our 25 man raiding group we are still a bit behind. We have been trying pretty hard to get Professor Putricide down. It's always impressive to go from it being almost impossible to get to Phase 3 when we first started fighting the guy to getting their consistently. We had to change up our strategy a bit and it seemed to help out a lot. We used to move the entire raid from one side of the room to the other side of the room and that had hurt our dps a lot. We discovered that if we keep everyone on the right side of the room where the green slime spawned we were able to group up on the slime better burn him down and get back on the boss and bring him into phase 2 before we started working on the second add. We also maximised our dps by keeping the boss close to the abomination while he was drinking the ooze to get him to phase 3 a lot quicker. We were able to bring him down to Phase 3 constantly but we were having a lot of issues there. We were having a lot of sub 10% boss wipes and it was frustrating. We got him all the down to 1% before we had to stop for the night so we weren't able to claim victory as early as we wanted.
The following raid night we didn't have our best composition for Putricide so we went over to the Frostwing halls to try out our hands on the new bosses. Dreamwalker was our first challenge and this is a fight I was very much looking forward to . During PTR testing I was checking out a lot of videos of the new bosses and Dreamwalker sounded very different. To defeat the Dreamwalker encounter you have to heal the boss from 50% health to 100%. Throughout the encounter adds will spawn from different doors throughout the room that have be tanked and burned down while your healers bring the dragon to full health. Since the boss has so much health and healers have a limited mana pool there is a portal that healers can take where they can get a stacking buff that makes mana a non-issue and increases their healing output.
This isn't a hard execution fight. We go through a few attempts to get a feel for the encounter. At around the 6 minute mark the encounter has a soft enrage in which adds come out at a pace that is almost impossible to manage. At this time we would have the boss's health around 90%. The logical solution would to be throw more healing at the problem which is what we did. We upped our healer count to almost 9 at one point. The more healers we had the worse our attempts. We didn't have the dps to burn through the adds and by the time the soft enrage happened we were around 80%. The final kill shot happened when we actually only had 3 healers dedicated to healing Dreamwalker. The problem we ran into was the more healers you put through the portals the more likely it is that their buff stacks would fall out. When we dedicate only 3 competent people to go through the portal they were able to get immense stacks of the buffs that far outweighed having extra healers.
Before raid had reset last week we had went back in and attempted Putricide again. We still didn't have the best group set up but we didn't have anything else to work on so we went with what we had. We had fought the boss so many times that almost everyone was a pro at knowing what to do. People weren't getting hit with mailable goo or standing in Proximity bombs. We got our Phase 3 tank rotation in order and we finally got the boss down. With 2 bosses down in the week reset we were pushed up to a solid 3rd on the server.
As far as progression goes we are doing pretty well but as a guild we have been having our issues. I've been in 4 hard-core raiding guilds since the beginning of WoW. Each of them have had the same set of problems that seem to constantly repeat themselves. In a Dream Raid we would have 30 consistent raiders logging on every night, ready at raid start time to pull the first mob. Each of those members would be fully prepared with max level gems, enchants, gear, and consumable that they can realistically achieve. Each of those members reads elitist jerks and has a deep understanding of their main-spec, off-spec and abilities of all other classes in raid. They have read over the strategies for all progression bosses and watch multiple videos from different view-points of the encounter that they are about to face. Everyone would have an amazing connection to the WoW server with almost no lag and have computers that constantly push over 30 frames during a 25 man encounter. During raid times there are no real life tasks that have to be taken care of that would have people waiting.
Oh what a sweet dream that would be. Unfortunately it is a dream and these are real people we are dealing with. I know a bunch of people who actually fit into that Dream Raider mold. They know how to maximize their role, theory craft all the time, and show up to every raid fully prepared. You never get 25 people who fit the mold though. The last couple of weeks in Last Hope we have been having issues. Just last night we were 24 manning a lot of the bosses. Each night we raid there is always something going on. Usually its not having the right mix of players. We have good competent people but we often times have to many healers and not enough DPS. We are constantly pulling in applicants who don't know the fight or who can't pull their weight in progression content. The common theme in most guilds is people showing up on farm night to get loot and badges but not showing up to wipe on new bosses. We raid 4 nights a week for 3 hours each. We should be spending the majority of that time working on a new boss but often times can't because we lack the people. On Tuesday we have over 27 people on . On a Thursday that number dips to around 23. We have to constantly ask people to switch to their off-spec and I feel bad asking our shaman who spent 6 months on acquiring Val'nyr to go enhancement and play a spec he doesn't want to.
We have a lot of good players log on every night. There are 20 constant people and a list of about 15 people who rotate in every night. It is frustrating for the 20 people who show up to have to deal with the missing few. Tempers get high and yelling happens from the Officers and they want to punish the people who don't show up. In the end it is usually the 20 constant people who get punished because they are actually there to receive the punishment. They log in ready to raid ICC but have to run older content in order to keep it "random" to force people to not only log in on Tuesday. Those people still don't log in the next night and we lost a night that we could have been using to learn and defeat another boss. It is usually the people who don't care that just want loot. The rest of us want to move forward and fight the Lich King. The loot happens naturally through that process. Life is sometimes a bitch. Things come up. We have family, friends, and obligations that we cannot get out of. We feel bad because the other 24 people are relying on us but the real world has to come first.
In the end we are still doing well. Our raiders do a good job at their task. IceCrown Citadel was not meant to be an easy raid. It does take time to learn and in time we will get there and defeat the Lich King. Once we do we will start working on hard modes and continue raiding unless something Cataclysmic happens.
In our 25 man raiding group we are still a bit behind. We have been trying pretty hard to get Professor Putricide down. It's always impressive to go from it being almost impossible to get to Phase 3 when we first started fighting the guy to getting their consistently. We had to change up our strategy a bit and it seemed to help out a lot. We used to move the entire raid from one side of the room to the other side of the room and that had hurt our dps a lot. We discovered that if we keep everyone on the right side of the room where the green slime spawned we were able to group up on the slime better burn him down and get back on the boss and bring him into phase 2 before we started working on the second add. We also maximised our dps by keeping the boss close to the abomination while he was drinking the ooze to get him to phase 3 a lot quicker. We were able to bring him down to Phase 3 constantly but we were having a lot of issues there. We were having a lot of sub 10% boss wipes and it was frustrating. We got him all the down to 1% before we had to stop for the night so we weren't able to claim victory as early as we wanted.
The following raid night we didn't have our best composition for Putricide so we went over to the Frostwing halls to try out our hands on the new bosses. Dreamwalker was our first challenge and this is a fight I was very much looking forward to . During PTR testing I was checking out a lot of videos of the new bosses and Dreamwalker sounded very different. To defeat the Dreamwalker encounter you have to heal the boss from 50% health to 100%. Throughout the encounter adds will spawn from different doors throughout the room that have be tanked and burned down while your healers bring the dragon to full health. Since the boss has so much health and healers have a limited mana pool there is a portal that healers can take where they can get a stacking buff that makes mana a non-issue and increases their healing output.
This isn't a hard execution fight. We go through a few attempts to get a feel for the encounter. At around the 6 minute mark the encounter has a soft enrage in which adds come out at a pace that is almost impossible to manage. At this time we would have the boss's health around 90%. The logical solution would to be throw more healing at the problem which is what we did. We upped our healer count to almost 9 at one point. The more healers we had the worse our attempts. We didn't have the dps to burn through the adds and by the time the soft enrage happened we were around 80%. The final kill shot happened when we actually only had 3 healers dedicated to healing Dreamwalker. The problem we ran into was the more healers you put through the portals the more likely it is that their buff stacks would fall out. When we dedicate only 3 competent people to go through the portal they were able to get immense stacks of the buffs that far outweighed having extra healers.
Before raid had reset last week we had went back in and attempted Putricide again. We still didn't have the best group set up but we didn't have anything else to work on so we went with what we had. We had fought the boss so many times that almost everyone was a pro at knowing what to do. People weren't getting hit with mailable goo or standing in Proximity bombs. We got our Phase 3 tank rotation in order and we finally got the boss down. With 2 bosses down in the week reset we were pushed up to a solid 3rd on the server.
As far as progression goes we are doing pretty well but as a guild we have been having our issues. I've been in 4 hard-core raiding guilds since the beginning of WoW. Each of them have had the same set of problems that seem to constantly repeat themselves. In a Dream Raid we would have 30 consistent raiders logging on every night, ready at raid start time to pull the first mob. Each of those members would be fully prepared with max level gems, enchants, gear, and consumable that they can realistically achieve. Each of those members reads elitist jerks and has a deep understanding of their main-spec, off-spec and abilities of all other classes in raid. They have read over the strategies for all progression bosses and watch multiple videos from different view-points of the encounter that they are about to face. Everyone would have an amazing connection to the WoW server with almost no lag and have computers that constantly push over 30 frames during a 25 man encounter. During raid times there are no real life tasks that have to be taken care of that would have people waiting.
Oh what a sweet dream that would be. Unfortunately it is a dream and these are real people we are dealing with. I know a bunch of people who actually fit into that Dream Raider mold. They know how to maximize their role, theory craft all the time, and show up to every raid fully prepared. You never get 25 people who fit the mold though. The last couple of weeks in Last Hope we have been having issues. Just last night we were 24 manning a lot of the bosses. Each night we raid there is always something going on. Usually its not having the right mix of players. We have good competent people but we often times have to many healers and not enough DPS. We are constantly pulling in applicants who don't know the fight or who can't pull their weight in progression content. The common theme in most guilds is people showing up on farm night to get loot and badges but not showing up to wipe on new bosses. We raid 4 nights a week for 3 hours each. We should be spending the majority of that time working on a new boss but often times can't because we lack the people. On Tuesday we have over 27 people on . On a Thursday that number dips to around 23. We have to constantly ask people to switch to their off-spec and I feel bad asking our shaman who spent 6 months on acquiring Val'nyr to go enhancement and play a spec he doesn't want to.
We have a lot of good players log on every night. There are 20 constant people and a list of about 15 people who rotate in every night. It is frustrating for the 20 people who show up to have to deal with the missing few. Tempers get high and yelling happens from the Officers and they want to punish the people who don't show up. In the end it is usually the 20 constant people who get punished because they are actually there to receive the punishment. They log in ready to raid ICC but have to run older content in order to keep it "random" to force people to not only log in on Tuesday. Those people still don't log in the next night and we lost a night that we could have been using to learn and defeat another boss. It is usually the people who don't care that just want loot. The rest of us want to move forward and fight the Lich King. The loot happens naturally through that process. Life is sometimes a bitch. Things come up. We have family, friends, and obligations that we cannot get out of. We feel bad because the other 24 people are relying on us but the real world has to come first.
In the end we are still doing well. Our raiders do a good job at their task. IceCrown Citadel was not meant to be an easy raid. It does take time to learn and in time we will get there and defeat the Lich King. Once we do we will start working on hard modes and continue raiding unless something Cataclysmic happens.
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