raid report: gruul & mag thursday

And after a long winter break my guild decided it was time to do 25 mans again.

This was probably the first time I logged into my main for over a week, and I was surprised at the graphics. I remember them being much more low rez and blocky. I think I might've fiddled with the graphics settings before logging off last time.

A lot of other people were logging on for the first time after the break too. And it showed:

Maulgar
Usually Maulgar isnt worth mentioning since he goes down quick and easy. For the uninitiated, if your guild can clear Karazhan, you can kill Maulgar once you learn how to do the initial pull.

We wiped Maulgar 2 and a half times.

The first two times was because the mage tank was getting a lot of spell resists on his spellsteal and not enough heals. I think the problem was mostly because he had too much of his Arena gear on and not enough spell hit on.

The half was because by the time we got all his adds down we were down to basically a few tanks and a few healers. Execute spam saved the day. He dropped two Hero pants tokens, so I finally got my second peice of T4. Hooray... sorta. Most of us dont even need T4 peices anymore, and are really only getting them for completionists sake. Even on the half wipe I still think he needed more spell hit on, because by the time we killed the first 4 adds, I and another mage managed to outthreat him on a mob that he had been building aggro on since the beginning of the fight.

Gruul
One shotted Gruul.

Our rustiness really only showed when there were a few times when I took over 5000 damage from shattering, where normally I only take 1000-2000 damage, if any at all. He died somewhere around 13 growths. Not the greatest fight. My DPS was somewhat lacking because I wasnt given salvation, and for whatever reason 3 different tanks were vying for the coveted 2nd position*, which meant three different people were getting misdirects. I also used Soulshatter way too soon into the fight and ended having to stop DPS entirely.

Gruul finally dropped his tanking shield, and I was wondering where that shield had come from since I've seen it around a few times. The shield went to our main tank automatically, but all the warriors, paladins and shamen (shamans?) rolled on the shield just to piss him off anyway. Our token DPS warrior got a 100, and "gave" the shield to MT, and currently claims credit for every block our main tank does with it.

Magtheridon
Triple wiped on Magtheridon and called it a night.

Wipe 1: A rogue on cube clicking duty died too close to the first blast wave and nobody could run into his position in time.
Wipe 2: DPS pulled aggro away from the first channeler that we kill. We got him back into position only to have him break away a second afterwards and get a heal. Everyone groans and the raid leader calls for a wipe.
Wipe 3: 2 cube clickers died right before the first blast wave, and one person was not in position.

On the positive side I had the foresight to only use Elixirs on these attempts instead of a flask.



*For the uninitiated: Gruul will do additional damage to anyone who is second on his threat meter, so to be safe all of the DPS tries to stay third or below.

why the current arena system is lame

As a player in general - not just a raider - I have an issue with the current Arena gear distribution system.

Its not that I consider them welfare epics. If Arena gear is welfare epics then that makes all reputation reward, crafted, and badge reward items welfare epics. The only real welfare epics were the things Headless Horseman dropped in my opinion, and that new item they added in Scarlet Monastery. And I'm pretty sure the latter only exists because they wanted to fuck around with people who make BG twinks. Back on point: from what I understand, having a set of Arena gear is necessary to compete in there, and I dont want them to change it so only the best teams have the best gear. Thats stupid.

Its not that I'm bitching about the stats. New seasons are necessary to prevent Johnny Q. Raider from coming into Arena's and being unstoppable because stuff he got from the latest instance is too powerful compared to Arena gear. Furthermore, for all of the Arena's +stats, the Arena gear really sucks for raiding. It doesn't have avoidance stats, so you can't tank in it. It doesn't have enough of the required stats for raid healing. And it doesnt have enough +hit to make it useful for DPS on anything beyond Gruuls Lair. It can fill gear gaps a raider might have in the middle of SSC, but with the new badge gear, ZA gear and various professions these gaps should have been filled by now. Similarly if you desire epics for grinding mobs or doing 5-mans, heroics and badge rewards fill out the armor slots quite nicely and easily.

The only Arena gear that can really interest raiders are the weapons, and now that weapons are getting ratings locked, its really more of a problem on Blizzards end with not properly itemizing encounters. One well documented case is that sword rogues pretty much have to PvP to get decent swords for raiding. This is not the fault of the Arena system having too good of items, but the fault of the itemization team for not including enough swords. Its easily fixed: there needs to be more loot tables like Prince Malchezaar, where you are gauranteed an armor token, a nice weapon, and something extra. On a more extreme side, Blizzard could reintroduce raiding weapon quests, where a quest item can drop that multiple classes can use and then assemble tradegoods and raid drops to create a nice weapon.

My problem is the cosmetics. With raiders, having unique looking gear is one of the side benefits of fighting bosses. Dont get me wrong, I'm not "raiding for the items". The items themselves become the battle trophies of the amount of effort you put into raiding. And while WoWJutsu is nice, its not nearly as built in as Arena ratings. I think this "gear as a trophy" mechanic is an important mechanic. Blizzard thinks so too, which is why S3 shoulders are ratings locked.

But in Arena, after a certain point, everyone starts to look the same from all scrambling to get the same, best gear. My proposition is this: allow gladiator/pvp gear to be upgraded stat wise at a discount, while at the same time ratings lock the newer items. The upgrade itself is a special kind of enchantment that takes up a special "arena enchantment" slot the item has, that doesnt overwrite standard enchantments. The discount should be great enough that it is cheaper for a newcomer to grab the oldest season items and upgrade them to the current season. The discount could be at least some sort of Arena point reduction, but perhaps contain a gold and/or honor point component. To not trivialize getting the newest Arena gear entirely, the "arena enchantments" only apply in Battlegrounds and Arenas -- perhaps only a weakened amount in the Battlegrounds.

This has 3 intended effects:
Removes the barrier for new gladiators even more.
Removes gear gaps that shouldnt exist in pure PvP competition faster.
Enhances the "items as trophies" mechanic on the newest season of items.

There also really needs to be a difference between the Arena gear and Raiding gear. I'm not saying Arena gear should look crappy, I'm saying it should look different. Raiding gear should and does look like you ripped it away from whoever was holding onto it and took it for your own use. PvP gear should look like it is worn by battle hardened elite, who are victorious in the field of battle. A good example of PvP gear models are the old High Warlord/Grand Marshal plate armors. They're a little simple compared to todays current super-cool-animated-glowy-armor, but they're a nice starting point.

At the very least, if they are going to recolor raiding tiers for arena gear, at least make them look different enough that you can readily visibly tell if somone is wearing arena gear or a raiding tier. Good: Priest T5/S2 (though honestly I think the shadow set for T5 should look like S2, make S2 have red highlights or something). Bad: Warlock T5/S2.

raid report: magtheridon

Raided Magtheridon tonight. Would have gone on to attempt Lurker Below, but a lot of people had to leave within the hour and our main tank had a family crisis that he needed to attend to.

On the plus side I got the Eye of Magtheridon with a 100 roll.
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28789
Granted you dont want to trigger its secondary effects, but some theorycrafters have found that its a really good trinket to have if you havent reached the spell hit cap -- which I havent.

We wiped only once, which is nice, since we can start saying we farm Magtheridon now. We had trouble the first attempt because after the 30% collapse too much healing was diverted away from the tank. Additionally for some reason anytime anyone talked over TS we got massive white noise interference, which didnt help since there was some assistance that needed to be done. (I also clicked the cube way too early one rotation and almost wiped the raid. I got super lucky by the fact that the moment my cube channeling ended the other 4 went up.)

2nd time we got close to wiping towards the end, two clickers ended up dying close to eachother and it was pretty tense since Mag was falling below 5% around then. Thankfully people stepped up on both occasions.