February Blog Posts

I got asked to write up a description of how we handled things tonight on the PTR, walking into a boss where we had no information and getting him to the point where we were convinced the next pull we'd kill him (GM's seemed to be also, since they shut off him at that point when many guilds were one pull away from success.)

Raiding on the PTR is a lot about putting yourself in a mind to deal with the usual bugs of raw encounters combined with huge lag and crashing -- and this PTR didn't leave us disappointed in that regard.

The Prep

We've been prepping ever since we knew 3.1 was coming: everyone had instructions to copy characters over to both pvp and pve the minute copies were available. We didn't much around with getting consumables etc. We posted on the forums each time copies were up and even pause both a raid and an interview with an applicant to make sure people copied.

We expected the PvP server to be our preference: more casuals go to the pve server where they don't have to worry about being ganked, and things remain decently quiet on the PvP server because most folks just want to get in and experience the new content.

They're up!

As soon as the PTR's were up, everyone made sure they downloaded each patch as soon as they could, to avoid any delays whenever Ulduar might be available. We formed a guild and gave everyone invite privileges to streamline that obnoxious process.

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While in general Matticus has some good advice in this blog post of his, I do take exception with a few of his "What Matticus Likes" (although I suppose since it's what he likes I can't, in all fairness, say he's wrong. But I will anyways, because it's the internet.)

Simplicity: Don’t use 7 words when 4 will work. I scan most of my apps unless something catches my eye. Be blunt and straight to the point.

I've met very few apps that are actually too long. Most, in fact, are way, way, way too short. I would never give this advice to someone simply because I'd be afraid it'd result in a really too short app instead of merely a somewhat too short app.

Most people are a "just the facts, Ma'am" style of applicant -- which says too little about who they are. Remember, this is your only chance to guarantee some attention from the guild: the more you can say the better.

Goal: What you want to do. Make sure it’s something that you actually want. The successful applicants into Conquest were the ones who said “I want to raid”.

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"Raids are too slow" is one of the most common comments I hear from friends dissatisfied with their guilds.

The good news is it's fairly simple to speed up any guild's raids with just a bit of effort. And if you're willing to put in a lot of effort, you can speed them up a lot -- regardless of what your gear is or what dungeon you're working in.

"Fast raids" has always been a hallmark of Fusion's raids, although no one noticed until we posted our two-hour SSC clear video. The guild still jokes about how we were accused of using speed pots to run faster in order to finish the dungeon on time.

We then followed it up with a Black Temple speed clear in just under two hours, which set off a bunch of other guilds to try to beat our time. It relieved some of the boredom waiting for Sunwell.

This time around though, with our Naxx clear of 1 hour 24 minutes, I wanted to do something more than just a speed clear with music behind it (although that is available if it's something you want). Because, let's face it: watching people AE Naxx trash is only interesting for so long.

Therefore I put together another tutorial movie (about 50 hours of work, these things aren't easy!):

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Knowing how to move quickly through a raid zone is the best thing you can do to prep for a dungeon outside of storing up consumables. Practice now in Naxx so you can snag early kills in Ulduar. Watch PULL! A Guide to Faster Raids to learn how.

While it's wonderful to get some official Ulduar news, like 14 new bosses, bosses having hard modes that actually give out more loot, etc., part of it doesn't thrill me:

You and your friends will have to use these vehicles wisely to break through Ulduar's defenses. A mix of motorcycles, demolishers, and siege engines will be at your disposal, each granting unique abilities to the pilot and the passenger. Motorcycle drivers, for example, can create pools of liquid tar that snare opponents and can be set on fire by area effect attacks, while demolisher passengers can load themselves into the vehicle's catapult so that the pilot can launch them into the distance. If used judiciously, these and other abilities will help decimate the Iron Army and any other threats lying in wait between you and Ulduar.

I know it's "just one fight" in Ulduar -- so is Malygos. But, to quote a friend, until they let me level up and customize a siege vehicle, vehicle fights just aren't that interesting to me.

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Sometimes it's the day before Valentine's Day, and you realize that you have, in fact, again forgotten entirely about the holiday... Those days you wish you could split yourself into multiple copies so you can get more done more quickly. But part of you knows, it would probably go terribly wrong even if you could... there's always some bug you didn't account for.

In honor of Valentine's Day, I'd like to share with you some delightfully funny moments from a thread on mmo-champion about the stupid things the mage "Mirror Image" spell has done in WoW raids thanks to its incredibly buggy nature:

P-p-p-p-olymorph!

"I saw two of my mages have a fight over the same target .The one on the right would sheep it and the one on the left would frost bolt or fireblast it,they went back and forth the whole time they were active while I and the other clone stayed on the boss.

I have also seen one imagine a line of sight issue and run into melee range and begin stabbing my target while its brethren and I stayed at range(and it was the one that appeared right infront of me)

On one fight one of them did nothing but try casting polymorph on patchwerk."

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Interested in a tutorial about how to play Arcane and get high DPS without going out of mana?

Check out: StratFu: Arcane Mage guide

Vontre is a good friend of mine, even though he abandoned the mage class to play a DK. He gave me permission to reproduce these results of his here.

There's some very interesting stuff here.

Full credit for this post goes to Vontre of Mal'Ganis, author of MageGraf and DeathGraf.

Gentlemen.... behold!

Are you ready to rock!?

Well actually, I pulled up Manly's gear and did a lot of testing in magegraf. I fixed the coefficient, put in the new AM glyph, nerfed the timer stacking, etc. What I came up with was very interesting. There are a couple of ways to play arcane spec, mainly, an easy way and a best way.

Rotations

First I tried fixing the rotation at ABx3 AM. Now, using this, each time you use Arcane Missiles there's a 49% chance that the AM will be affected by Missile Barrage. Hmmm.

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So the stealth change is 10% less spell damage on ABarrage. And yeah, that's a big one.

On fights where you have a lot of mana, ABarr is about 17% of your damage, making it around a 1.5% nerf. On fights where you had less, however, you used the spell a lot more and it could've been 20% or more.

Rawr puts fireball (18/53/0) at 0.9% behind the new arcane. Asuming you do ~5500 dps, that's a 550 dps difference -- generally well within the variation for lag, etc.

So on the one hand, you can play arcane, which requires a lot more work and attention, will require using AM (and channeling spells are such a pain when you have random lag like I do), and ideally will want to suck down innervates in order to remain top DPS.

Or you can spec fireball, which is a rotation you can do in your sleep with zero effort, and require Vigilance and Hand of Salv to do competitive DPS.

What a set of decisions....

Anyhow. The new rotations are:

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In our continuing quest to entertain ourselves, tonight we did our first pass at a Naxx speed run.

We ended at 1 hour 23 minutes, but while we realized we could probably get it down to about 1h 10minutes, we decided not to bother: Naxx doesn't really offer much in the way of cleverness, and it's a pretty "tired" zone by this point.

That said, it was a good break from the monotony.

Why?
Speed runs are fun because they're the closest thing to a guild-wide shared goal we've found in the game, outside of just killing bosses. DPS pushes are fun, but they exclude the healers by definition. Immortal is... well, not fun at all, so we'll just ignore that part.

But speed runs require a balanced DPS/healer/tank crew, and require focus and coordination from everyone -- including a lot of reacting on the fly.

Raid Composition
Our composition was:

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Interested in a tutorial about how to play Arcane and get high DPS without going out of mana?

Check out: StratFu: Arcane Mage guide

Update 2/10: Please see the Updated Mage 3.0.9 post for the DPS impacts, etc. Some of the information below turns out to not be correct (MMO-Champion had the wrong information)

This post is still a good rant about the impact of pvp and pve, so I'll leave it up.

These are the relevant changes, the full list is at MMO-Champ:

Mage Skills

• Arcane Power now increases damage and mana cost by 10%, cooldown reduced to 1 minute. (Incorrect: actual patch has 20%/2 minutes. See Updated Mage 3.0.9 post for more details)
• Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power causes a 15 second cooldown. Presence of Mind, once consumed, causes a 1.5 second cooldown.
• Arcane Flows now reduces the cooldown of Presence of Mind, Arcane Power and Invisibility by 15/30%.
• Presence of Mind: The cooldown has been reduced to 2 minutes, (down from 3.)

Glyphs

• Glyph of Arcane Missiles -- Increases the critical strike damage bonus of Arcane Missiles by 25%. (Old - Increases the range of Arcane Missiles by 5 yards.)

Everything else is just tooltips or pvp-only.

It's not a huge pve loss. Estimates from EJ number crunchers are:

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Looking for help on doing Sarth3D with 10 or 25? Check out our Sartharion + 3 drakes narrated strategy video and written strategy guide: StratFu: Sartharion 3D)

There ought to be an achievement for doing Sarth 3-drake with only 20 people...

Bored tonight, waiting for Ulduar, we did 3-drake Sartharion with 20 people, getting "Heroic: The Twilight Zone" and "Heroic: Less is More" at the same time. (okay well technically we all had the Twilight Zone already -- but we did joke about bringing in a random pug just so both his achievements would go off at once.)

It was a lot of fun, and pretty easy with the experience of 25-man and 10-man Sarth with 3 drakes each week. Wiped 3x, once due to a MT death, the other times due to the usual stuff ("Is this a void zone I see before me?")

We went in with 4 healers (two paladins, a druid, and a shaman.) We had a druid tanking Sarth, a DK on adds, and our warrior MT on the drakes.

The WMO report for the curious:
http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/1563733#damageout

My only comment on the WMO report is: Grrr..... spriests and their mindsear!

In terms of what was hard about it:

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