Did Blizzard Screw up? Malygos 10 Commentary

This is not a boast post, but at this point in the game, a month and a half after the release of WotLK, I, a casual raider and PvP enthusiast have completed 5/6 of the game's possible raids. With PuGs. I suppose that you could say that I haven't taken down 25 Naxx fully because I don't care to spend hours upon hours of playing 'lets wipe' with a rotating roster of PuGhhhhs, but really, Naxx 25 is so much easier than Naxx 10, just by virtue of having more DPS. The only hard part is herding the cats to actually start the pulls.

...And of course making sure that the cats aren't brain dead zombie kitties who like to stand in the fire helps as well.

Again, not a boast post, but really, the question is, "What now?"

I'll be blunt here, and please do tell me if my reasoning is flawed.

Blizzard, from a long term financial point of view, did themselves a disservice with the introductory raids and because of this, probably cost them more long term subscribers.

The rationale is as such: Aside from Malygos 25 and OS with drakes up, all of the bosses in the introductory raids are easy execution fights. There are no high level gear checks and as such, there are no extreme DPS or Healer fights. Malygos 10 is somewhat of a gear check, but not entirely. At my current gear point, which is all Naxx 10 stuff with some 25 man stuff, I can easily heal through all of the content. As long as I have competent teammates, there is no overwhelming urge for gear so that I can 'save the raid'. Perhaps for other people, getting all super uber gear is the most important factor, but for me, the casual raider, this is enough.

As a healer, I'm probably seeing this effective cap phenomenon in a different light than most other roles, as my results are largely unmeasurable as compared to the 'damage taken' or the 'damage per second' statistics. However, if history is of any indicator and the stories of Raid participation declining after completing content is true, I'm probably not the only one to feel like there's not much more to shoot for. Ulduar coming out soon? I expect to be able to PuG that, too, on day one because healing Naxx 25 was a joke and if there's content that requires more than half my mana pool in a 25 man raid, I'll be surprisingly amused.

Here's the kicker: If I wasn't a PvPer at heart, I'd probably have quit by now out of sheer boredom, because jumping between the beams on top of Org bank is only fun for the first hundred thousand times. Not Horde? Ever square jump in Ironforge? Yeah, same thing. If I can feel this way, I'm sure there are many others who feel the same.

Scarily enough, this is the closest I've ever come to completing all available content, and it's not a good feeling. Keep in mind that I'm not a hard core raider, nor ever aspire to be, and nearly all of my raid experiences have been with PuGs. If I'm this apathetic about continuing to do completed content when it's not a challenge, I can't even begin to understand what the hardcore raiders are experiencing.

Although I'm all for discrediting Blizzard with their mistakes, I do have to commend them for the Malygos fight. It's incredibly fun and its one of the few fights that really highlights each and every class out there such that a 10 man raid with one of every class would actually do very well. Well, except for Warlocks, but I guess a healthstone is better than nothing. Sorry, Warlocks.

Simply, Malygos is a tank and spank DPS race. It is NOT a healer fight as people have claimed. Yes, there is a lot of damage to be healed in Phase 1 and 2, but its entirely predictable, unless Malygos eats a spark. Guild can't do Gluth? Forget about Malygos (besides that whole key issue). Vortex, for all its vaunted claims of being hard to heal through is only hard if people don't pre-heal with hots. Don't have a Priest and a Druid? Maybe it's time to recruit. Sorry, Pallies.

So if the fight isn't about healing, then what's the difficulty? Well, The key part of this fight is that DPS needs to be very high. 2.5k + DPS is probably the minimum that you want to be able to put out for this fight. That value isn't astronomical by any means, but the only reason why I give this number is because that's what our average DPS was we had an okay buffer for the Enrage timer.

Do you need all epiczzzz for this fight? I used to think so, from all the smack that was thrown about, but the answer is an emphatic "No!" The gear assumption was the amusing thing about my Malygos 10 PuG a few days ago. There were a few blues on most of our raid except for a few characters that had obviously (gear wise) completed this content and I initially thought were were headed to Fail City (population: Us). However, much like nearly every other LK raid boss, its all in the execution.

Our first attempt as a PuG? Phase 3 and we figured out the drakes a bit too slowly. Two more silly wipes in Phase 1 due to DK power spark mismanagement and the fourth pull was all she wrote. We even lost a healer towards the end of phase 2 (not me) and managed to pull out the W.

Anyways, Happy New Years, everyone, and don't do anything that vaguely sounds like a Sons of Hodir daily quest all by your lonesome!

We're Back! First week of Arena

Apologies to our readers, work has taken me to far and distant lands and away from my most popular diversion. That being said, I'm back now, and in time for the Holiday Season. Even though I don't bring in the ho's like Santa (oh stop it, Mrs. Claus!), I'm still committed to bringing raunchy stories and dirty experiences from the PvP floor.

Ok, no raunch.

In the few days that I've been able to log in some serious game time, I've not only ground massive amounts of honor, but also spent both Badges of Heroism and Badges of Valor on mediocre gear. It somewhat feels like re-rolling a character only to hit max level at the start of a season where all you can afford is the Season 1 Honor gear because you didn't save up 5k Arena Points at the end of last season for Season 2 gear. Yes, I know I couldn't have saved up Arena Points as they were all wiped the instant I hit 71, but this awkward transitory phase where no one has any arena gear is quite... amusing. Deadly gear, being a tad out of reach right now is that dangling carrot. I'll get there, but first, I need some way to live for more than 15 seconds!

Last night, out of sheer need for Arena Points, my DK buddy and I got a few 2's games in, and we went 8-0 (there were already 2 games played on that team) for the Achievement [Just the Two of Us: 1550]. Granted, its nothing to brag about because many of the teams just didn't have any gear or any strategy, but we capped off the 2's streak with a 2-0 'streak' in 3's, giving us the [Hot Streak] Achievement. Yay! Crowd goes wild! Well, not really, but it was kinda cool to flaunt that in /g chat. Honestly? 1550 is a joke. Go grab someone, focus fire and grab an easy achievement if you're a badge whore.

/g chat went something like this:

DKbuddy has earned the achievement [Just the Two of Us: 1550]
Rukuz has earned the achievement [Just the Two of Us: 1550]
[Rukuz][Guild]: Just the two of us, we can make it if we try,
[Rukuz][Guild]: Just the two of us, you and I.
[Guildy1][Guild]: LOL!

I plan on copying some more extensive lyrics from Will Smith's tear wrenching hit when we hit 1750 and getting some lyrics down when we get the [Three's Company] Achievement in 3's.

To touch more upon the environment, if you're a raider or just a heroic runner, the Hateful PvP gear can be a good filler for some of your pieces. In addition to being a gear gap closer, for those raiders who have already experienced much of what LK has to offer us in both 10 and 25 mans, which I presume is a pretty sizeable portion of the playerbase as there are PUGS for everything except Heroic Malygos on my server, it's something else to do.

So, if it's so easy to focus fire someone down, how did I stay alive? Well, aside from having ~600 Resilience from some crafted and gladiator gear, it all came down to spec and glyphs. For these fights (2's and 3's) I specced Borrowed Time/Spirit of Redemption (50/21/0) with the Spirit of Redemption (SoR), Dispel Magic and Holy Nova glyphs. The name of the game was personal survival while providing some additional utility and trying to save some mana wherever possible.

Besides the funky things you can do with Borrowed Time's haste bonus, such as casting instants very quickly with the reduced GCD and pushing out some incredibly fast Flash/Greater Heals, the real winners for many of the matches were the Holy Nova glyph and the SoR glyph.

With the Holy Nova glyph: Your Holy Nova spell heals for an additional 40%, but deals 40% less damage, the time spent between your instants (PW: Shield, Mending, Renew) while running from some angsty melee class is filled with the spamming of either Dispel Magic or Holy Nova. Why Holy Nova? Well, sadly, it's the only other self heal that you can cast while on the run. With the Borrowed Time haste buff, the instant heal for ~1800-2100 every 1.2 seconds were enough to keep me alive by a hair in many of the games. Honestly? It's better than trying to cast a Flash Heal through a) Mind Numbing Poison (screw you Deadly Brew) or b) the threat of getting Counterspelled. Give the glyph a try. You won't be disappointed! (But you will run out of mana super quickly. C'est la vie)

Taking a different approach, the SoR glyph straight up won us some games through dumb luck. Flat out won. Why? Well, the glyph itself: All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 4 sec, is ridiculously powerful if you just 'get lucky'. With a few procs of this glyph, I've turned a bad situation into a reasonable one. There's no denying the power of an unkillable healer spamming Flash Heal with the odd Prayer of Mending for 45+ seconds. I think I healed more as an Angel in some of the fights. Sad but true. But hey, I'll take the 'W'. As they say, "Better lucky than good!"

I'm looking forward to continuing to use this spec in future PvP or even trying a deep Holy spec again. One thing's for certain, there's going to be much more honor grinding in the future.

Give the spec a try, and keep in mind the immortal words of the Fresh Prince:

"But yo push come to shove

You was conceived in love"

Amen, brotha.

10 Man Naxx down

Not that it's some sort of extreme accomplishment, but 10 man Naxx = completed.

We also, as a guild, took on 25 man Archaevon with just 20 people, most of them fresh 80's in blues with just 3 healers. Archaevon enraged on the first attempt, hitting all of us with a warstomp that instagibbed the entire raid. We were 8 seconds from enrage on the second and final attempt.

I don't mind the (essentially) free loot, but seriously, shouldnt there be -some- hard bosses in the first tier of raiding? I haven't done Malygos, yet, but I can't imagine it to be that much more difficult than anything else I've seen. Maybe it will be hard with the nerfed CoH. Magtheridon and Gruul, even in their current fixed state, are harder than Vault/Naxx. Hell, even Nightbane is harder.

Honestly? I'm looking forward to Arena Season 5. Playing a Priest should be quite difficult in this world of uber melee, no resilience and sick nasty burst.

All the pretty trinkets

No ganking stories today as the past few days have been full of just trying to clean up our computer from the viruses obtained accidentally from a wow-heroes (the gear comparison site) advertisement. We accidentally clicked on an ad and it was all downhill from there. Please use protection.

Anyways, we're all cleaned up now and have been continuing to gear ourselves up. We realize that this gear that we're acquiring is equivalent to the Kara gear we started off with at the onset of TBC, albiet acquired much more quickly than a couple of years ago, so we're not really worried about putting in an excessive amount of effort to 'get the best of the best'. We've been focusing on obtaining healing gear and to that end have gotten our paws on some reasonable upgrades from various heroics and raids, both 10 and 25 man. Of the gear that we've been able to obtain, a couple stand out, both trinkets.

Egg of Mortal Essence is the 40 Badge of Heroism trinket and while the bonus 98 spellpower is exceedingly nice, the Haste effect is truly the shining star. With it's high chance to proc, you can almost guarantee that it will proc in the first few seconds of a fight. This amount of haste (approx 15%) will drop a Flash Heal (and your GCD) to 1.275s and a talented Greater Heal to 2.125s. Naturally, if it's proc rate is that dependable there are a couple of things you can do: Cast low cost spells prior to a pull to force a proc and count out the 45s internal cooldown to mesh up with other cast reduction spells or other haste effects.

Badge of the Infiltrator is the second trinket that I'm currently using and while it's green and unassuming, the trinket is an excellent example of a highly desired raiding statistic: Intellect. For those out of the loop, Intellect (Int) drives the size of the mana pool as well as a bit of crit. When looking at the current amount of raid healing that is necessary and the specific average amount of healing needed per raid member, a large mana pool is a must. This is especially true if a raid starts moving towards bringing less healers and more dps to power through some encounters as was the case back at the end of TBC. In addition, one cannot ignore the synergy between a large mana pool and Replenishment (the mana return buff from Shadow Priests/Ret Pally/Survival Hunters), making a large mana pool highly desireable. Toss in Shadowfiend's effect and it suddenly becomes obvious why many a casting raider are going with marginally smaller Spellpower totals in favor for stacking other statistics such as Int, Crit and Haste. This is also why I'll probably be going back to my War Mace of Unrequited Love for tonight's raid over my Titansteel Guardian.

It's all about the mana, baybee.

Well, not really, but we'll get to that in a later post.

How to be an A-Hole

Mind Control someone off of the turtle ferrys when you're in deep water.

Bonus points if you put a snare on them.