As we set up positioning I am constantly spamming my PoH to make sure my group is always in range of me so that none of them dies from that lovely little debuff of low health (creative name there blizzard). With the increased effectiveness of CoH I am able to cover two groups with ease, allowing more heals to be focused towards the tanks. Until the last phase I spend my entire time in my AoE heal stance to get the bonus effectiveness of it, the lower CD on CoH, along with the benefit to renew which I always place on all 3 tanks during the fight.

So I use healbot (OMG what a baddie :P) and make a customized debuff called “low health”, this way when any raid member is in the “oh sh*t might die zone” their raid frame turns pitch black for me, and only once they are healed up to above 10k do they go back to normal on my screen, it helps me track it a little better rather than number watching. Generally I use binding heals on single targets to gain Serendipity for when 3 or more in a group get the debuff so I gain the hasted Prayer of Healing. Binding heal is one of the best spells in the game for this fight as a priest, for one it guarantees that I am always in the safe zone, for two it gains Serendipity as I already mentioned, and lastly it is a fast cast. Often there is the situation where 2 in one group have the debuff and 3 in my other group have it, this is where priest OPness comes into play. I ALWAYS have at least one stack of serendipity up at all times so i do a power PoH on one group and CoH the other, BAM everyone is safe. Mastery plays a huge part in this fight due to the fact that if someone I just healed gets the debuff again, they have my mastery and my glyph of PoH ticking on them right away, sometimes making my life easier not having to direct heal them again.

Prayer of Mending on this fight is a bit tricky, sometimes it is great and bouncing between all 3 tanks repeatedly and other times it’s being useless and sitting on a random player. So during the “spread out” phase it isn’t my number one priority to keep on cd. If you don’t know the fight it looks deceiving for the healing department but truth be told there is a lot of down time for regen, which is great :). I have adopted the role of guardian spirit on the main tank  for Feuds 1 and 3. In theory this sounds great but blizzard can’t be relied on to make the encounters timers span apart perfectly so sometimes it is a little touch and go but for the most part it works out great.

For the Feud I place my Sanctuary circle, start running and apply GS/renew as I make my way to the group up point. I discovered the addon Recount hated this fight so I always have it disabled or else I am in a lag fest for when we group up. Once there I use CoH, one binding heal followed by PoH, rinse and repeat on all the groups. I am so proud of my guild members because I have an alert set up to tell me who clicked my lightwell and during that phase it is constantly going off! Directly after the first shut down I use my trinket to return ~6k mana to bump me back up a little bit. I also use shadow fiend fairly early to ensure I can use it twice, usually the 2nd time is during Mortality.
Our raid leader has it set up for when all the players with healing cds (tranquility, divine hymn, etc) should use them, I am not going to lie, when it is my turn and the group appears to be doing fine on heals I save Divine Hymn for the time right before we hit mortality. This is all dependent on if we fell behind on healing during the shutdowns. I don’t recommend doing this for fear your raid leader will have your head, mine likes me I think so when he reads this I won’t be in too much trouble :P.

Alright so we just transitioned into mortality. Here is our disc priest’s time to shine. Due to the high mana cost of the shields he throws out we have a rotation of Hymn of Hope set up so he can continuously spam. For this specific encounter I always glyph smite so that I can think I am helping a little bit. To be honest I have no idea how much my dps contributes during this phase due to the fact its around 2k but it makes me feel better and useful so I just don’t care. I usually pick a spot near the wall so that I can life grip one of Chimaeron’s targets away from him to buy us some time and then proceed to dot/smite/chastise until he is dead or I am dead. Depending how the disc priests mana looks I may or may not bubble myself to let him focus on others.
If you are a priest struggling to do this fight or just hate it, hopefully after reading this you may think of it differently on how well designed it is for a holy priest!

Myth #1: “MOONFIRE (Sunfire?) SPAM LOL!!”

This joke has been floating around World of Warcraft since before Burning Crusade was released. However, recently I’ve seen post after post asking whether or not this could be a viable option for a PvE moonkin rotation. The rotation essentially is sitting in Solar Eclipse and spamming Sunfire while continuously refreshing Insect Swarm when necessary. This could very well seem like a viable option when looking at moonkin talents such as Lunar Shower (which requires constant movement) and considering the mana problems that people seem to be experiencing at level 85. Stacking mastery is also a suggestion when looking at this rotation as it depends on staying solely in Solar Eclipse, and Starsurge would be neglected for this same reason.

My opinion on the matter:

While this may have been super fun to play around with near the end of Wrath, actually using it in a PvE raid setting in Cataclysm is just plain silly. If you plan on using this rotation, do not be surprised when you see yourself doing only about 60-70% of the damage that you could be doing while standing still and using the normal single target rotation. The blaring problem I personally see is the neglect of Starsurge, which is a huge part of our dps rotation. For those of you not familiar with moonkin mechanics, Starsurge generates 15 Lunar or Solar energy, which will eventually push you out of Solar Eclipse. If you leave Solar Eclipse, you would then have to spend at least 45 seconds building up 300 extra solar energy in order to reach Solar Eclipse again. Sitting on Starsurge and ignoring Shooting Star procs due to the fear of leaving Solar Eclipse causes you to lose a good bit of your dps. Go ahead and spam in Solar Eclipse when you must move in an encounter (as this is how it’s meant to be used). However, don’t use this rotation when given the opportunity to stand still, as this rotation pales in comparison to the single target rotation on most boss fights.

Though this rotation may come up short for single target dps, it shines in an AoE setting. Tab dotting while sitting in Solar Eclipse does fantastic dps when used along with Hurricane and Wild Mushrooms. So lets sum this misconception up. Will spamming in Solar Eclipse out dps our single target rotation on certain fights? Sure, I’m not going to say this will never happen, however instances where this will actually occur are very VERY rare, so don’t count on it.

Myth #2: You should avoid mastery at all costs!

Now that we’re in the midst of the new expansion, everyone should have a basic knowledge on mastery and what it does for their individual specs. So therefore, this will not be a list on what mastery does for every single spec of every single class. For those non-moonkin out there, I will elaborate what mastery does for us. Mastery gives moonkins Total Eclipse, which increases the bonus damage from eclipse by 12%, and each point of mastery increases that bonus by another 1.5%. Now, most moonkins are under the impression that mastery should be avoided at all costs because it’s the lowest stat on our priority list (which looks like this incase any of you were wondering: Hit (1742:17%) > Intellect > Spell Power > Haste > Crit >/= Mastery).

My opinion on the matter:

Is mastery the worst caster stat for moonkins? Sure. Should you avoid all gear that has mastery on it? NO! Blizzard seems insistent on shoving mastery down everyone’s throat this expansion, whether it is good for your class or not. There is no way that you can feasibly avoid gear that has mastery on it, and if you are passing up gear solely because of this, then you are hurting yourself greatly. While mastery is our worst stat by far, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a dps loss. Mastery is still going to improve your dps anyway you look at it, even if it is just marginally. So when you’re pew pewing raid bosses down and that pretty caster leather piece drops that has mastery on it, don’t pass it up if you’re wearing a piece of gear with a lower ilevel. My rule of thumb is basically this: If the piece has a higher ilevel, then that generally means it has more intellect on it (which translates to dps increase). Just because that blue quality heroic gear has haste on it, doesn’t mean you should totally ignore the purple staring you in the face with mastery. Blizzard lovingly put reforging in this game for a reason, and that unwanted mastery can easily be converted into that haste you’re so fixated on. To sum things up, knowing the moonkin stat priority list is a WONDERFUL piece of knowledge to have, however, don’t be so fixated on it that you ignore upgrades that will improve your dps. A rigid moonkin is a bad moonkin.

I will write on more myths and misconceptions as I encounter them, so make sure to stay up to date with our blog! Feel free to discuss your opinions on these topics in the comment box below, or give me a few new myths to write about in the next installment.

It’s been proven time and time again that for every PvE rogue spec (Combat and Mutilate), the rogue could get better personal DPS by using some other glyph but the Glyph of Tricks of the Trade actually results in a much higher raid DPS. A rogue that is willing to take a personal hit on the meters while at the same time pushing somebody else ahead by another couple percent or more is more likely to be the same rogue who spends energy on interrupts, defensive cooldowns and debuffing.

And if you do ever run into a rogue who doesn’t have Tricks of the Trade glyphed? Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuunnnnnnnn!!!

Patch 3.3.3 is now on the PTR and with it come some changes to rogues. These changes are very likely to be the last we’ll see before Cataclysm. Blizzard says that they’re never truly satisfied with anything but the fact remains that rogues are in a pretty good place right now. Since the last round of nerfs, the caterwauling about our damage being OP has subsided to it’s usual low rumble and while there are a few fights that penalize us more than other classes (*cough* Sindragosa *cough*), it’s not anything we can’t learn to just deal with.

The changes are pretty interesting, let’s take a look.

• Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

This is the only real change for raiding rogues; it’s the 4-piece tier 8 bonus now made baseline. (For those wondering, the 4 piece tier 8 bonus is being changed to give +20% damage to Rupture.) Feral druids have had this for some time and rogues were jealous. During T8 content rogues ran with as high of a Rupture uptime as possible but as gear levels increased we all saw the writing on the wall. Once we were out of T8 content our other abilities which scaled better than a crit-less Rupture would force Rupture out of our rotation. Anyone who was reading my ranting in the LoD forums will remember me talking about how I’d be dropping Rupture from my talents/glyphs/rotation as soon as we were out of Ulduar. And I did.

Now that a crit-ing Rupture could become baseline we have to look at it again. If you’ve not been following the discussion on the web, I’ll sum it up for you.

1. Assassination builds have become far too dependent on the Envenom buff for DPS to lose any of it’s uptime to Rupture. Blizzard would have to buff the hell out of Rupture’s scaling and likewise nerf Envenom for Assassination to take the talents and use it.
2. Combat builds aren’t as cut and dry. Keeping the same strategy of gearing and gem’ing for Armor Penetration but changing talents and glyphs to support Rupture, Combat builds can get a 3% or possibly greater buff on fights where you can use Rupture, i.e. static fights with long lived mobs. On fights that aren’t as static and you can’t use the Rupture talents and glyphs it’s only about a 1% loss. Basically, giving up a small about of burst damage for some sustained damage. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but since the gearing is almost identical and each character can run two specs and glyph sets… well, you do the math.

The rest of the changes have to do with the perennially neglected Subtlety tree. Even GC himself says that no tree in all of WoW has it as bad off as Subtlety. It’s been a running joke for years and that’s sad. Subtlety is a lot of fun to play. In fact if you look at Subtlety, you can get a feel for how talent trees in Cataclysm will look. There are lots of talents in there that don’t just bump your damage by X%. A lot of the talents in Subtlety are just fun and unique.

And there-in lies the problem. The Subtlety tree is too much fun. There, I said it. If Blizzard buffed Subtlety to be even close to raid viable, every rogue without exception would flock to it, no question in my mind about that. And with all that said, they’re buffing Subtlety… slightly.

• Slaughter from the Shadows now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks and reduces the energy cost of Backstab and Ambush by 4/8/12/16/20, up from 3/6/9/12/15.
• Filthy Tricks now reduces the cooldown by 5/10 sec and energy cost by 5/10 of your Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 3 min.
• Waylay now affects your Ambush and Backstab hits (Old – Only Ambush critical hits). Movement speed bonus reduced from 70% to 50%.
• Hemorrhage now deals 160% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.
• Ghostly Strike now deals 180% of weapon damage if a dagger is equipped.

First off, the Hemorrhage and Ghostly Strike changes are long overdue. Subtlety has always had an identity crisis about what kind of weapon tree it is and this is just to make it clear. Subtlety is a dagger tree. There’s also a straight up damage increase as well as some energy cost and cooldown reduction in there.

Honestly, this looks like Blizzard’s attempt to give rogues a PvP tree again. Blizzard might love hybrid classes but they hate hybrid specs; Blizzard wants everyone to go 51 points into a tree in both PvE and PvP. Contrary to this, rogues have been running a Mutilate/Prep build for PvP since the dawn of time. Everything in rogue PvP is balanced around it and Blizzard can’t get us away from it.

Is Subtlety PvP viable with these changes? Probably. Subtlety has been on the fringe of breaking into PvP for some time and this looks like it might push it into the mainstream. I highly doubt it will de-throne Mut/Prep but stranger things have happened.

Is Subtlety PvE viable with these changes? Ask again later. Right now the general consensus is “no” but things on the PTR change all the time and there are some hidden benefits to Subtlety. First off, it has the ability to change targets as well as Combat and it’s mobility is unrivaled by any class/spec in the game. Talented with the new Filthy Tricks, Shadowstep becomes a 20 second teleport that costs no energy and give a 20% damage boost to your next attack. Right now all eyes are on 10/10/51 to be the best shot at raid viable Subtlety but for all that mobility and fun the damage is still sub-par and the rotation would make a feral druid want to tear their hair out.

Honestly though? I’d love to see Subtlety make it into raiding. That would be awesome. I’ll be on the PTR as much as I can this weekend to try it out and will report back what I find.

What separates the “hard core” gamer from the more casual one is not necessarily the amount of time devoted to playing the game, but rather the willingness to tolerate failure and try again.

On the face of it, this phrase is just a re-tooling of the “if at first you don’t succeed” motto but if we take a closer look we can see that there’s a lot more going on in here when we apply it to an MMO. Specifically, when talking about an MMO you need to be able to tolerate the failures of others as well as your own. Everyone is going to individually make mistakes or fail but when you add another 9 or 24 people into the mix it changes everything. Most notably, our relative perception of failure.

Suddenly, everyone is failing so much more than you are. In fact, I’d venture to say that in a 25man raid, “other players” are failing 24 times more often than you. And that’s where the real gamers prevail, the gamers who know that the more people you add to the mix, the more often failure will show it’s ugly head.

Raids are going to wipe – a lot – and a good portion of the time it’s going to have nothing to do with you and there’s nothing that you specifically could have done. It’s out of your hands. How you choose to deal with your own failures and more importantly the failures of others will define you as a gamer and as a person.

Everybody has alts (alternate characters). You may only have one lonely little bank alt or a server of max-level behemoths on both sides of the faction fence but if you play WoW you have alts. For a very long time, Tinwhisker was my only character. Leveling in vanilla WoW wasn’t terribly difficult (although it was more difficult than it is now) but I was busy learning one class in a new game already. The thought of another character was a bit overwhelming. Eventually though, I rolled my first bank toon.

Well, she wasn’t intentionally a bank toon. I rolled a priest because I had seen shadow priests running around and thought that Shadowform and Mind Flay were pretty awesome. I mean, even today I think that looks pretty darn cool. Unfortunately I really hadn’t gotten my head around WoW yet (I was a slow learner) and when she reached level 12 she stayed in Stormwind. Eventually I made her into a bank alt though I had never known what one was before. I had a level 12 bank alt for all of vanilla, all of Burning Crusade, and the first part of Wrath of the Lich King.

When Burning Crusade hit, I immediately got Tinwhisker to 70 and was raiding Karazhan. Besides that, I was excited about the new starting zones and started my Blood Elf Mage to try one of them out. Before I knew it, I had gotten her to 70, then the Draenei Paladin and got her to 70, then the abandoned Night Elf hunter made 70. Actually, once I started leveling, it all happened so fast I’m not really sure how long it took.

That was when I discovered what alts were for.

Having an alt makes you better on your main. No two ways about it, that is absolutely correct and I’ll tell you why. It’s because when you see a fight from a different perspective, you learn more about it than you would from a single perspective. In Burning Crusade, my paladin tank and hunter gave me insight on fight mechanics I didn’t have to think about on Tin. There are a multitude of fight mechanics that you’re never aware of if you only play a single class in a raid. Most of the time that isn’t important but there are quite a few times where something happens and you have to deviate from the plan a bit. Now you’re the melee standing at ranged and you have no idea what’s being hurled your direction.

Imagine you’re a healer on General Vezzax, standing in melee healing as you always do. BOOM! Uh-oh, there aren’t enough ranged out there anymore! Somebody needs to get out there and run with the groups. Do you run out there and save the raid like a pro or hope somebody else will do it because you have no idea how it’s done?

Matron touched on this when he was talking about reps, when you’re on your main you can often ignore lots of things without consequence when it’s all going well but when things go wrong and you’re out of your element, there’s the potential for real disaster. Going through the same (or similar) fights on alts means you’re being exposed to new mechanics and new situations. When those situations come up, you’re muich better prepared for them.

Right now I’m going through ICC on my main and also on my shadow priest alt. Her gearscore is fantastic but closer inspection reveals she’s more than 100 hit rating over the cap and suffering from other problems (gearscore is just one step above useless in my book). That is often the fate of alts but having to work a little harder on an alt is the best thing ever. You actually learn the fights from multiple perspectives; things you can faceroll on your main become nail-biters on an alt. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to see what actually happens instead of looking at some mobs but crack for five minutes.

But what if you don’t have an alt that can do the same fights?

Not everyone has alts that can raid with the mains, in fact, most people don’t. LoD is a top tier guild and part of that is that most members do. Blizzard isn’t stupid though. There isn’t a single mechanic in any raid that can’t be found in multiple heroics or elsewhere in daily quests. From boss abilities to vehicle content, it’s all there. It’s all a matter of having that alt and Blizzard has made leveling incredibly easy to do.

If you’re reading this and you have a max level alt that you play on a regular basis, good for you. I really hope you can see how knowing how to play in different roles and perspectives makes you a better player. If you don’t have an alt, go make one. I guarantee it will make you a better player. Find another class you like and play it; I can’t stress how much better you’ll be because of it.

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?