The ten mans didn’t seem to have a very difficult enrage timer, I know my ten man group didn’t even get our best DPSers bitten.  The 25 DOES have a difficult enrage timer, or at least an unforgiving one.  A single vampire death will most likely cause you to wipe.  You need every person’s dps and you need every person to spread the debuff to the next person.

Our raid comp was

6 healers
2 tanks
17 dps

G1 (melee)-
MT (Feral)
HP blob (Prot Pally)
Ret Paladin
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior

G2 (melee)-
Rogue
Unholy DK
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior
Frost DK

G3 (ranged)-
Ele Shaman
Warlock
Rogue
Hunter
Moonkin

G4 (ranged)-
Mage
Spriest
Warlock
Holy Priest
Hunter

G5 (healers)-
Holy Priest
All Powerful Disc Priest
Tree
Holy Pally
Holy Pally

• Group 1 was positioned on her left leg
• Group 2 was positioned on her right leg
• Group 3 was on the left side of the room at range
• Group 4 was on the right side of the room at range
• Group 5 was mostly healers and positioned in the back middle of the room (cheating forward as needed for range issues)
• We left the CENTER and OUTSIDES of the room clear for links and fire

Bite Order

One big pain in the ass about this encounter is the bite order.  Yes, you can assign a specific bite order and follow it, but that’s too much typing and thinking!  Plus it isn’t very adaptable and might cause confusion if you do subs at any point, or week to week for that matter.  I don’t want to spend 30 minutes setting up this fight every week.

Our solution was quite simple

• 1:  Hunter in G3 gets bitten from being top dmg (this was just how it was happening as our DPS went all out)
• 2:  Hunter bites the ret paladin in G1 so that we have one ranged and one melee to better spread the bites
• 4:  Hunter bites mage in G4.  Ret paladin bites rogue in G2.  This spread the debuff so that each group 1,2,3,4 had one person with the bite.
• 8:  Each person bit someone in their group.  Assigning specifics at this point would be a lot of typing/planning.  Each group now has two DPS with bite and at least two DPS without.
• 16:  Each person bites an unbitten DPSer in their group.  Each group ends with 4 DPSers being bitten.

Here’s what this strategy did for us.

• Spread bites between ranged/melee first
• Spread bites across the room efficiently so that nobody was ever without a suitable bite target near them
• Made bites “planned” but adaptable – meaning that you set your first four and can easily switch them mid-fight if someone unexpected gets the first bite.  After those four nothing unexpected should really happen.
• People eventually planned a bite order within their group for the last two bites, but this was kept in-party.
• It maintained my sanity as a raid leader not having to get complex in our planning
• The first four specific people being planned allowed us to fear ward them

Fear Ward / Fear Breaking 

We were finding that the first air phase often coincided with two people (hunter + ret paladin) needing to bite the next two people (mage + rogue).  Not only was the biter being feared all over the place, but also the bitee was being feared away from the biter.  To make this transition go more smoothly we had fear ward usage on these four people.  If your raid doesn’t have four priests then you can use fear breaking class mechanics to facilitate this.  We also waited to use our fear wards until we were sure that the order went off without a hitch.  If someone unexpected got the first bite we’d simply adapt our fear wards to include that person as well.

This was one of those “hidden” issues that are nestled in encounters which you can’t really see until you’ve done them a few times.  We had no trouble with the second air phase and bite timers.

Other than bite order and fear issues you just need to

• Spread out in P2
• Use class cooldowns and health stones to survive the P2 raid damage
• Run purple fire out of the raid along the sides of the room
• Make sure you’re not standing near fire before a fear
• Run to the CENTER of the room if you get linked – Do not run to the other people, this just causes you to shift back and forth correcting your direction in reaction to what they’re doing.  Just pick a single point on the ground (the square at the center of the circle) and have everyone run to that.  You’ll end up together, promise.  Once you’re there do not move away before the debuff disappears.

• DPS and HEAL REALLY HARD

As a disc priest that meant 9x shield, 1x ProM.  Challenging!  I feel like a druid =(

Without further ado…

Reps IRL

One of my favorite sportswriters often talks about repetitions or “reps” and how it takes a certain number of reps before anyone can be good at anything.  He talks about how reps extend beyond sports and can be applied to ANYTHING you do in life.

“Reps are easy to understand: The more you do something, the better you will be.”

Whether its public speaking reps, screaming kid in the grocery store reps, manual transmission reps, or even the magical phraseology it takes to order a plain turkey sub without it turning into a 5 minute conversation about what condiments you DON’T want on your sandwich reps.  Everything gets easier the more you do it. 

You learn shortcuts, you learn tricks, you figure out what people want to hear or what they expect.  You learn to imagine people in their underwear to make your speech easier.  You learn to bring cheerios to the grocery store so that your kid can have something to munch on.  You learn to accelerate from a stopped position on a hill after stalling out a few times.  You learn that when ordering a plain sandwich the only words you should ever utter following the placement of your order are “PLAIN” and “NO”.  Do not name any ingredients which you don’t want on your sandwich, they will inevitably end up a part of it!

Some tasks are actually nigh impossible without reps.  Take shooting a basketball for instance.  While the hypothetical act of shooting is perfectly scientific and calculatable… point of release, distance, arc, angle, force, spin… in a real life situation you’re not given the time to make all of these calculations.  What you need to rely on is muscle memory.  That is, your hands and body performing an action based on many factors, without any thought.  When you’re in the middle of a game you don’t have time to think.  You often catch the ball and shoot.  The best shooters are the ones that have trained their hands and body to simply DO without thought.  Without reps you cannot shoot well.

Reps in WoW

Reps apply in World of Warcraft too.

The more you do something in game the better you become at it.  This works because most of the game is scripted.  Even pvp has short term scripts.  When I used to pvp as shadow back in Vanilla I could beat most any class because I had memorized the order of moves each class would use on me.  It just became a series of if-then checks you’d have to make.

Rogue:

• Cheap shot (eat it)
• Kidney Shot (trinket this longer stun)
• Shield + Shadow Word Pain + Vampiric Embrace (instants which can’t be kicked)
• Fear
• Mind Blast immediately  
• Hop away to create distance and time for Mind Blast, Fear, and PWS cooldowns
• Mind Flay spam (spell which can be kicked, so you cast while the target is at a distance)
• Mind Blast when it’s off cooldown, fill with Mind Flays
• Shield again as soon as weakened soul wears off

= Dead Rogue

Because each rep against a rogue was a learning experience, eventually I developed a pretty concrete cast sequence which made me rogue proof.  It required a lot of failure.  At first I wouldn’t cast PWS right away because who does that unless they’re really low?  But two PWS during the brief fight was almost always a difference maker.  Or I’d fear when I broke the kidney shot because that’s what you do when something is attacking you, right?  But if I do that then I waste a lot of the fear time casting instants which aren’t going to do much damage and which are interrupt-proof anyway.  Or I wouldn’t bother with VE, but along with the second shield that little bit of healing was often enough to let me outlast anyone else 1v1.  Or I’d trinket the cheap shot (omg I dunwannabestunned!) only to eat a really long kidney shot.

These are all lessons you learn by DOING.  Reactions became automatic after a while.   You develop that muscle memory.  Its rogue muscle memory, just like free throw muscle memory.  Here is a rogue.  This is what I cast.  Dead rogue.  You can even hop around while doing it.

You can argue that PvE is even simpler (and by “you”, I mean all the pvpers who are like “omg pve is ezmode lolol”).  The encounters are almost always the same and once you figure out the mechanics to a fight it can become quite easy.  Getting 25 people all on the same page, executing their assignments, adds some complexity to it.

What makes a gimmick fight?

Sometimes Blizzard mixes things up by introducing “gimmick fights”, but if you think about it those fights are more accurately described as “things you don’t have reps on yet” fights.  Those fights work differently than anything you’ve ever seen before; you have no idea how to handle Malygos or Gorefiend because that hasn’t been a part of your game experience thus far.  Fortunately Blizzard gives you a daily which mirrors the Malygos drake abilities and some upstanding individual made a Teron flash mini-game which you could use to practice that gimmick.  People that didn’t understand these fights were encouraged to get in their reps using those tools.

Unfortunately we can’t just manufacture reps that easily a lot of the time.  You only have so many raid nights.  Your raid only has so much mental capital (read: sanity).  And sometimes (Teron, Rotface, Vaelastrasz) you can beat encounters without people in your raid even being chosen for the “important role”.  There’s nothing like discovering that Person X can’t do Teron ghosts on your 8^th week killing Teron.  

A REPrehensible Change

Reps are so important to raiding that Blizzard’s latest “let’s slow progression” concept is to LIMIT the reps available for each raid group.  If you can only attempt an encounter 10 times in a week that severely limits the amount of learning you can do as a group.  Gone are the days of wiping three nights a week to a boss, learning the ins and outs of a fight.  Blizzard’s encounters aren’t anywhere near as tough as the Sunwell days when it took you 2-3 weeks for most bosses, or 4-8 weeks for M’uru + KJ.  Those fights BROKE guilds.  I can’t count how many applications we get where someone “raided Sunwell, but my guild broke up at M’uru”.  These encounters were crushing.  We can argue about whether the change to easier encounters was good or bad, but that really isn’t important. 

Blizzard’s new way to ramp up difficulty is by limiting reps.

It’s sort of silly… imagine if your child wasn’t particularly gifted at math, yet studied very hard, and aced all their tests.  Then the teacher decided this was unfair, the other kids didn’t have time to study that hard.  If she made the test harder to challenge your Johnny then the other kids wouldn’t pass.  So what’s the solution?  Little Johnny is only allowed to study math one night a week!  No problem sets, no homework, no bringing his math book home.  No extra reps!

Reps are encouraged in real life, not so much by Blizzard.

More Reps!

So you need to cheat the system a bit.  Johnny might spend his lunch studying math, or swap his math book cover with his science book cover and sneak his book home at night.  What raid groups have to do is raid more… just as much, if not more, than they were when attempts weren’t limited.

Guilds are still spending three nights a week working on Putricide.  They’re clearing ICC on alts and doing 10 attempts with them first.  They’re doing 10 mans for experience.  And finally they’re going in with their 25 man main raids and doing these limited attempt bosses.  It’s the only way to get the reps people are so used to getting.  Not everyone is doing this of course, but the same guilds that would spend three nights a week on a boss in SW are definitely doing this.

LoD, Reps, and Alts

LoD has never been about brute forcing encounters, we’ve never spent 50+ wipes a week on fights.  But we’ve recently started a 2nd ICC 25 man run with alts to get a bit of practice on certain encounters.  It’s actually a great learning experience for our players.  By definition the alts aren’t as well geared as our mains, many using ilvl 232 and mixed pvp gear, so execution needs to be close to perfect.  When you can’t just brute force encounters with crazy dps/hps it forces you to learn mechanics and perform at a high level.  We still are doing a lot of learning on encounters during this alt run.

The first week the Plague Quarter was released we killed Rotface in a few attempts but all I could think to myself was “wow, I would have really preferred to wipe a few more times on this fight to get more practice”.  Crazy, right?  Sure the boss was dead, but the next week we wiped 3-4 times because we hadn’t learned the fight properly the first week.

Following those few extra Rotface wipes during our main raid we had our alt run focus on Rotface and learning the mechanics perfectly.  Reps reps reps.  It was a struggle, the encounter doesn’t get any easier with sub-par DPS.  But this handicap puts the focus on executing the fight.  Kiting slimes, proper movement around the room, avoiding damage… all things that our main raid probably doesn’t need to pay attention to because the fight doesn’t last that long.  Sure you can tell your players to focus on learning the fight, but until you take away their 258 gear and knock them out of their comfort zone you can’t really force them to play properly.

Reps make everything easier.  As a raid leader I’m looking for new and innovative ways to get the raid group practice on fights.  Blizzard has sort of forced our hand with the limited attempts, which spawned an alt run.  But the alt run has allowed us to practice fights which don’t even have limited attempts and learn them with handicapped characters.

How is your raid group getting practice or reps on encounters?  Do you run 10 + 25 mans?  Are you one of the guilds running alt runs to get Putricide or Blood Queen attempts?  Is this strategy cheap?  Has Blizzard gone about this the wrong way if guilds end up raiding just as much, if not more?