Ever since I hit level 15 on Kaliah, my first character, and was introduced into the wonderful world of instancing, I’ve loved it. For reasons I myself can’t explain either, I love group play in WoW. However, the boyfriend and friends who introduced me to the game were higher level, and as such, didn’t have much interest in spending time with little Kaliah ingame. This meant that I was doomed to PUG, rather a lot.

I’ve been in countless PUGs into countless places ever since, leading anything from a 5-man to a 25. Let me say that, in my opinion, PUGs aren’t disasters, unbearable, horrible, etc, all the time.

Perhaps half the time.

Although, I can say with certainty that a good leader plays a great part in a successful PUG. So without further ado, to today’s post: How to lead your PUG to success. I will mainly focus on PUG raiding, however, everything I say can easily be applied to a 5-man context.

First things first: If this is anything larger than a 5-man, having an assistant or two, who are knowledgeable and handy, helps tremendously. Don’t randomly give assist to people who you think might invite more people. Make sure that your assistants are people whom you trust to handle things fairly and appropriately.

When I’m out to lead a raid, I’m the person who looks at the raid makeup and decides what classes/specs we want, and keeps track of the people we already have. I do things such as be on top of “Who’s tanking?” “Who’s healing?” “Who’s rolling on offspec gear?” “Do we have too many melee for KT25?” “Do we have kiters for Gluth?” “Are our priests able to MC on Raz?”.

I then tell my assistants who to look for, and they find people who fit the bill. One of us checks Armory, necessary questions are asked and answered, if all of us agree, an invite goes out.

This accomplishes a few things. First, you don’t get burned out from the responsibility of leading, because now there are other people who share it. Second, keeping track of everything, especially in a 25-man, is much easier when you delegate duties. Third, more people to discuss things with lead to easier, and in most cases fairer, solutions to problems.

So you have your raid, and you have your assistants. Time to find more people.

I’ve already written a post about how to write a good trade ad. Put yourself out there, and see what you get. Make sure you reply to everyone. I don’t care how much time it takes, make a “/r No thanks, not what we’re looking for” macro if you need to. Most people consider not getting a reply back very rude, not to mention that unless you reply, they can’t be sure you even received and read their whisper!

This is where assistants also are great, as they will help field many of the whispers themselves.

As for picking people – remember that gear, and achievements, aren’t everything. Try to pick people who have the right attitude (and yes, even a two-line whisper can give away a lot of things about your attitude). A lot of the time, I’ve recruited people with no achievement, and merely decent gear, after they were honest with me and said “Look, I’ve never done this, but I’ve read strats, watched videos, and I’m ready. Just try me.” I’ve rarely been disappointed in such recruits, whereas some people I’ve had a lot of trouble with were people who had the gear and achievement for the fight.

Striking a balance is a good thing. Decent gear, partial or no achievement, but great attitude: Gets in. Good gear, achievement, and bearable attitude: Gets in. But if any of the two lacks strongly, the person stays out. I’m not going to recruit someone who can’t pull their weight, or someone for whom I have to spare ten minutes before every boss fight to explain how it goes. It isn’t fair to the rest of raid if someone is getting carried, and during a raid, the leading team already has enough on their plate without having to deal with explaining tactics from scratch. On the other hand, I’m not going to recruit someone with a terrible attitude either, for obvious reasons.

The discussion of recruiting also brings us to another point about leading a PUG.

A bad PUG leader checks gear, checks achievements, and often has unrealistic expectations for the content that’s being done (”LFM Ulduar10, be in full T8,5″). When he gets his, in his eyes “uber”, group together, he is very sure that the instance will be cleared with no hiccups.

A good PUG leader knows that no matter how geared, skilled, and experienced people are, mistakes will happen. He sets up in his group in such a way that those mistakes will be compensated for.

My point here is that group makeup matters a lot in this compensation. While you can bring ten druids and beat Naxx10, doing that is not the fastest or the most advantageous route. Different classes bring different things to the table – and all of those things, you might need to beat the instance.

As far as classes and specs go, start by looking for diversity, and looking for balance. You know how many tanks, healers and DPS the instance requires. Now you should be picking various types of those.

Let’s say you want to bring three tanks. You can pick three warriors and they can do the job just fine – but remember, you want tanks capable of doing different flavors of jobs, so you can use different ones for different situations. Put in a warrior, a DK, and a paladin instead, and now you have:

1. A jack of all trades tank
2. A tank strong against magic damage, and bosses with occasional hard-hitting damage phases
3. A very strong AoE tank.

They all bring different things to the table, and while they can individually tank everything, they all have encounters they are best at. That little edge X type of tank has on Y boss is your mistake compensation.

Same with your healers. Six shamans? Will do the job. But it won’t be pretty. Seek diversity. Two paladins, a disc priest, a holy priest, a resto druid, and a resto shaman is a much better healing setup. You have your strong single-target healers, raid stabilizers, and massive AoE damage healers.

Last but not least, the DPS. You can’t expect to stack a single type of DPSer to success. Some fights favor melee, and some fights favor ranged. There are fights you can’t do without a healthy mix of both.

Buffs and debuffs are another important point. Anything that causes the boss to die faster, or do less damage, or gives your group more resources to do so, is something that will make up for inevitable mistakes.

In a 25-man, this doesn’t matter much. Because of the number of people involved, crucial buffs and debuffs come naturally. It’s hard to set up a PUG 25man raid that lacks Replenishment, or Bloodlust/Heroism, or basic stat buffs. In a 10-man, this changes drastically.

Blizzard has said that they balance raid encounters assuming that the group will have Replenishment. Assuming your group doesn’t completely overgear the instance, you will need someone that can provide it. Ret paladins, survival hunters, destruction warlocks, frost mages and shadow priests fill that role.

While, to my knowledge, Blizzard hasn’t said that they balance encounters around Bloodlust/Heroism, it is a massive DPS boost and can give you that final push you need. Get a shaman. Considering that shamans also come with a great variety of raidwide buffs, having one in your PUG is pretty much mandatory.

Try to get as many primary stat buffs as you can. Fortitude from a priest helps tremendously in fights that have heavy raid damage (which is pretty much everything in Ulduar). Your healers and casters love their intellect from a mage. Mark of the Wild is a nice overall stat and resist buff.

From there on, fill in the other buffs that you would like to have according to the makeup of your raid, and whether you overgear the instance. For your melee, Sunder or Expose Armor, Leader of the Pack, and a 10% AP buff from a blood DK, enhancement shaman or survival hunter are some of the basic ones you might want to have. Their magic equivalents are Curse of the Elements (warlock), Earth and Moon (moonkin) or Ebon Plague (unholy DK) for increased magic damage taken, a moonkin or elemental shaman for the 5% crit, and a spell damage totem from a shaman or the spellpower buff from a demonology warlock. Mutilate rogues, elemental shamans and ret paladins give the whole raid an extra 3% crit on the relevant mob.

There are more buffs that stack with these and can build on those – pick and choose according to your raid’s makeup. If you’re melee heavy, stacking melee buffs is to your advantage, a caster heavy raid, the other way around. At any rate, try to maximize the number of buffs given to both camps while keeping a balanced raid.

Here is an example Ulduar10 raid I might want to make. Let’s say I started off with myself, dual specced disc/holy priest. Plus my prot paladin and arms warrior friends (happens a lot these days, incidentally).

I’m going to take two tanks. I already have a strong AoE tank, so I want a strong single-target tank now. My primary choice would be a warrior, jack of all trades tank plus provides Sunders and Commanding Shout for the whole raid. However, I’m already bringing a warrior who can Sunder and CS if needed, so I’ll take a feral druid instead for all around 5% crit to all melee classes.

But really, any of the two will do, and I might prefer the prot warrior anyway because both Last Stand and Shield Wall will see some use on various chain-cooldown dependent bosses.

I have myself, healing. I want a resto druid for great raid stabilizing capability plus a combat res. In a real PUG situation, I typically leave the last healing spot open till the end – if I can find an elemental shaman, the last healing spot will be covered by a paladin. If not, I will take a resto shaman. But for now, I will assume I have an elemental shaman, so I am taking a holy paladin.

“But we have two paladins!?!?!” Yes, paladins are one of the rare classes that stack well, because they can provide different blessings. So I will not hesitate to take a second one.

Our healing team is quite well-rounded now, with a holy paladin as the strong single-target healer, a resto druid as the raid stabilizer and the holy priest on the AoE. If I get a resto shaman, I go as disc and cover the single target healing slot.

Ideally, I would take two melee DPS and three ranged ones. I’ll take an elemental shaman for amazing all-around raid buffs. If I do find a destro warlock that can supply Replenishment, I will take a mage for the last ranged spot, otherwise I’ll go for a survival hunter (a ranged Misdirect is quite handy). The reasoning here is as follows: I like having warlocks around because Soulstones and summoning stones are fairly handy to speed a raid up, they have good AoE, 13% more magic damage taken for the entire raid, and high personal DPS. Mages, if fire or FFB specced, supply a 5% spell crit debuff on the target, buffing both the elemental shaman and the warlock, and come with an intellect buff.

If my warlock cannot provide Replenishment, a hunter is the next best thing for it, however, remember that the hunter will benefit from melee buffs rather than the ranged ones.

This brings us to the melee. I’ll go for a blood DK for 10% AP for all my physical DPS plus extra threat for tanks. I already have an arms warrior for the last slot. Raid complete.

Our final lineup is:

*Tanks: Prot paladin, feral druid
*Heals: Holy priest, holy paladin, resto druid
*Melee DPS: Blood DK, arms warrior
*Ranged DPS: Elemental shaman, warlock, mage

I hope the example gave some insight into the line of thinking that goes into forming a balanced PUG. This would be pretty close to the kind of lineup that I want, with a balanced set of buffs and debuffs. I feel that this group will give me quite a high margin for error.

So you have your group, you’re all summoned, and ready to go. Part II of the series will deal with how to lead the raid during the actual raiding phase for maximum success.

Wow, I’ve been missing for about two months now.

Two main things that have happened are: I’ve leveled a human priest to 80, and our raiding alliance fell apart.

On the raiding alliance front, we’ve had a visible attitude change ever since a paladin alt from one of the server’s top guilds joined us. Going from “we don’t have the greatest group makeup, but we can damn well do this, and we will” to expecting people to switch their roles so that we’d have that elusive ideal makeup (which said paladin insisted we absolutely need) didn’t sit well with some of us. This plus getting introduced to elitism, snarked over small mistakes, each player getting too princessy, and such problems spelled the end of the group.

While I feel sad that the group fell apart, the real source of my disappointment is the realisation that this group I considered myself friends with were never my real friends.  We genuinely liked and respected these people. It was really sad to see they didn’t feel the same way.

As for my human priest – meet Elisse (I wanted a name similar to, but not the exact same, as my beloved priest). She’s been disc since she got her first talent point, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the spec.

I like the playstyle – there is no rest to it, no stopping to cheat the FSR, no big heals that take years to cast. It’s all very fast paced, and the most crucial casts are either instants or very short time ones. Borrowed Time is up for the majority of the time. Penance into PWS, then a GHeal, is a massive burst that typically takes around 4-5 seconds to deliver (currently 5.5k absorption, then a 9-10k Penance, then a 8k GHeal with my gear). I’ve also never had any problems AOE healing at any point.

People seem to think that I’ve only chosen disc because I’m a fresh 80, and that when I have better gear I’ll be legging it over to the, eh, light side. That’s not true – I find holy right now pretty /yawn, even if it scales better. It’s always relied on long casts and cheating the FSR, although the new Serendipity fixed that a bit. I’m quite bored of that playstyle after three years of it, so disc suits me best.

Our little 10-man got Mimiron down tonight, and I’m super excited about it. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of 10-man guides about it, so here is exactly how we did it and how we evolved towards killing him (I do hope you read the last post for last week’s tries though), with very few ranged to boot!

Group setup was:

Prot warrior, cat druid, retribution paladin, blood DK, arms warrior, mutilate rogue, destruction warlock (yes, just a single ranged DPS. It can be done, melee heavy groups, do not despair), resto druid, holy priest, resto shaman.

Phase 1:

Guardian Spirit the first Plasma Blast, Shield Wall the second, glyphed GS the third if it happens. GS glyph is a real godsend during this phase. We stopped Heroism-ing in P1 during tonight’s tries, but we never got a third anyway. MT always tries to drag him back to the middle after it Shock Blasts to spare the melee dodging various rings of mines. DPS pops cooldowns anyway, they will be back up for when it matters.

Phase 2:

A feral druid’s nightmare. No matter how hard you try, you can never be behind him. Popping short cooldown survival abilities is nice (I Barkskin every cooldown), but healers will have plenty of time to regen during Phase 3, so have no fear. Our paladin popped FR aura to ease the Heat Wave damage.

Rapid Burst will not track a moving target, so melee can keep moving out of the cone. Keep your ranged properly spread and more than one will never eat it. We call out every Rocket Strike we spot – they are hard to see for melee, so keep your eyes firmly planted on the ground. Our ranged though seemed to have no problem whatsoever with them. We also call out Spinning Up with a short note, as in “melee safe, healers move” “healers safe, melee run behind” etc.

Phase 3:

The best way we found of doing it, that made it a complete joke with lots of regen time for healers was this. Prot warrior sticks Vigilance on the feral (or someone else who will get hit frequently. You just want the prot warrior’s taunt to be off cooldown as much as possible). The feral, in this case me, will tank Assault Bots in cat gear and spec. The prot warrior will camp out underneath the ACU, soak every bomb, and tank every Junk Bot. This is where Vigilance on the feral or the warlock tank comes in handy, as Junk Bots can get out of control.

This limits incoming damage to very manageable amounts. Any class who is capable of tanking can withstand hits from Assault Bots, our DK in Frost Presence probably would have done the job fine. The bombs hit our prot warrior for about 15k, certainly much easier than letting them go off on a clothie and get them one-shotted. Note that Assault Bots can be stunned, which cuts off even more damage.

When the ACU comes down (our arms warrior was the core looter) all DPS immediately switch to him. All the adds get dragged to him and get cleaved alongside. Make sure you leg it afterwards though, so that you don’t catch the next Bomb Bot.

We had ACU down in about three to four Assault Bot kills, and we never had more than one Assault Bot up at a time. All our healers ended the phase at full mana.

Phase 4:

This is where it will all go to hell in a handbasket, very very fast. Your most immediate problem will be the chance of the first Shock Blast and P3Wx2 Laser Barrage overlapping. The tank needs to sit there and take the Shock Blast to prevent the unit from running amok. Just GS it out if it happens.

Your second most immediate problem is closely related to the first. And it is the one that caused us about 10 wipes before we figured out a solution. Here is your data:

1. The hitbox of the Leviathan is much smaller than the hitbox of VX-001.
2. In fact, the hitbox of the Leviathan is really damn small.
3. Laser Barrage is a conal attack whose starting point is the very center of the hitbox of VX-001.
4. When the Leviathan turns, all units will turn alongside it, unless the VX-001 is casting Spinning Up/Laser Barrage.

What happened to our tank was that he would attempt to turn if the route of the Barrage included his spot. However, this is much, much harder than it looks due to point 2. Because the hitbox of Leviathan is very small, no matter what the tank does, there is a very high chance of him turning around and/or running amok to chase the tank. This results in the Barrage being likely to mess people up (remember, if he moves from the center, the cone that the Barrage affects can get bigger).

So then, we tried not turning him until the Barrage actually started if it was possible to do so. However, if the tank turns very little, there is still the very high chance of being gibbed, due to points 1 and 3. Even though the tank is technically not on the same side as the Barrage, the smallness of the Leviathan’s hitbox and his proneness to move can drag him over the tank, to the point that the tank is just inside of the tip of the Barrage cone (but still on the correct side of the Leviathan), leading to a swift wipe.

Here is how we solved it.

For melee, ranged and healers, nothing changes. The Leviathan faced the entrance of the room to start with. We all stood stacked up behind him, and DPSed/healed as usual.

When the Barrage comes, if the tank needs to move, he needs to backpedal out of the way slowly, yes, using the S key backpedal, preferably towards a wall, very slowly turning the Leviathan if need be. This is the one fight where backpedaling will save your MT’s hide. As melee and healers are starting from right across the tank, this negates the risk that the cone will get larger and envelop the people on the edges. In fact, the cone on the tank’s side will get smaller as your tank will be backpedaling towards a wall. (I really do need to make a diagram of this)

The try we put this strategy to use was our kill try. Our MT still bit it during the second Spinning Up, but I took over in bear form, and it was a kill from there.

Other than that, we still announced every Rocket Strike, Shock Blast, and other relevant stuff such as “oh shit the warlock tank is dead BECAUSE SHE BACKPEDALED OUT OF A ROCKET STRIKE”. The head died first, followed by the middle and the bottom.

Pro tip: Ret paladins can reach the head with Judgment and Exorcism. DKs can Pestilence diseases onto it. Our gnome rogue was actually able to hit the head if he jumped, I personally failed at it.

And this, folks, is how we overcame the challenge that was Mimiron.

Well, I did announce the new “one piece per person per raid, unless other parties interested decide they can have more” rule last raid. Guess who wasn’t pleased? Our warlock who gobbles up loot like Pacman on steroids, regardless of who else needs it, and her boyfriend, but that was hardly surprising. Everyone else was completely fine with it, but then, everyone else possesses enough sense to know that we do our best to ensure every piece of loot goes to the person who will benefit from it most.

But what about offspec rolls? Cried she. We pointed out that a warlock hardly had an offspec like a hybrid’s. PvP spec, said she. At this point I had a brain overload, since ohmyGod you’re a warlock needs resilience there is no resilience on Ulduar gear jldsjla does not compute, but thankfully our MT pointed out that we will hardly let gear be DEd as long as there is someone willing to use it.

The way Stratomize, our paladin, put it, we have two options: Common sense, or Loot Council. I’d much rather we did Council since certain members of our raid group seem to lack this common sense thing (HINT: If you have epic wand and priest has green wand, please feel free to not roll on new wand), but it’s very easy for Council to look biased. So I guess new loot rule it is.

Also had to have a talk with resto shaman about his girlfriend’s consistent failure, since everyone always complains about her, and ultimately, people also see me as being at fault for inviting her. Since she and the resto shaman are a package deal, if we want to keep resto shaman we also have to get along with warlock, and we’re rather fond of the guy.

Resto shaman, unsurprisingly, found nothing wrong with his girlfriend’s style of play. I had hoped he also noticed that she was succeeding greatly at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and generally letting us down everytime we counted on her, but no. At the end, we agreed that everytime the raid decided she had failed, I’d mention this to resto shaman. I’ll start doing this tonight, and see how it goes.

Christ, people, please accept your bad. There is very little to be gained from not accepting it, and a lot from accepting it and trying to improve.

Oh and also, the subject of raid invites. This part manages to consistently drive me crazy, due to people who won’t accept or decline until the last second, thus denying the raid leaders the option to find a replacement if one person won’t be around. I think I will be creating a new rule saying that the event will be locked for more signs 24 hours prior to event start, and if you haven’t accepted your invite until then, it’ll be counted as a decline.

Well, my Vezax hopes were dashed by the cockblock that is Mimiron.

Thorim, as expected, didn’t take us more than 5-6 tries, and all of these tries were spent learning add-control in the arena. It seems to be the absolute hardest part of the fight. The strat that worked for us was:

*Prot paladin, feral druid, destro warlock, rogue, resto shaman, resto druid in the arena.
*Prot warrior, mage, arms warrior, holy priest downstairs. Tunnel group does their thing, they had absolutely no problems.
*Fast hitting melee classes such as rogues and ferals will be penalised in the tunnel due to an aura, so we chose to not send ours down. That, and we needed the feral, yours truly, up in the arena helping with tanking.
*Rogues also are a big help upstairs because they can dismantle the Champion to prevent the arena team from taking Whirlwinds. This is important as you’re all clumped up, clothies and all. If you lose even one person, things are probably going to get out of hand.
*We could have chosen to keep the arms warrior up as well, since the aura of the boss in the tunnels penalises melee classes pretty harshly, but we decided we’d rather have Shadowfury upstairs to help with add control.
*Everyone upstairs stands in the brown circle in the middle of the room. There will be little to no lightning damage like this, plus adds are tons easier to pick up.
*Prot paladin consecrates and does his AoE thing. I beared up, helped pick up loose adds, and generally swiped the hell out of everything.
*Hang on like this for 3 minutes and you’re set.

After Thorim lands, there is absolutely nothing to the fight – tank, spank, don’t clump up, enjoy the loot. We never once wiped on this phase. Just don’t lose a tank, since unless you can CR them you will wipe (we did lose ours, but I beared up and took over since I was in tanking gear from P1.)

Our tunnel group had to deliberately wait to not trigger the hard mode, so I have all the faith that we can do it once we clear Ulduar.

Mimiron, though, is another story. We put in some really good tries, and towards the end we were consistently getting to P4.

We opted for getting P1 over with as soon as humanly possible, in order to not run out of cooldowns to use for Plasma Blast. Our MT has the Shield Wall glyph and he swears by it, so even if he uses it in P1, he knows he will have it available for the next phases. So we Guardian Spirit/LS the first one (our priest also has GS glyphed, so if all goes well he will have it available for a third Plasma Blast), SW the second, and pop Heroism/DPS cooldowns right off the bat to ensure a third one does not happen. If it does happen, we’ll have GS again, but we never had it happening.

Sometimes he will wait for a long time to cast the first Plasma Blast (I am not too sure, but it seems that sometimes he can cast Shock Blast instead of the first Plasma Blast). That means if you are lucky and have sufficiently high DPS, you can get through P1 with just one Plasma Blast.

We had our ret paladin swap to his elemental shaman for Mimiron, and in P1, he would help heal Napalm Shell’ed people if someone had it during/close to Plasma Blast. It is a pretty tough amount of damage for someone to be taking, but you absolutely cannot afford to not have all three healers on the tank during Plasma Blast.

Preferably, your DPS would also pop survival cooldowns if afflicted by Napalm Shell during or close to PB. Mages can Fire Ward/block through it, druids can Barkskin, rogues can Cloak it off, whatever. Make people use cooldowns liberally, because in our opinion, P1 was the toughest of the first three. Fire resistance aura/totem also helps ease the Shell damage.

If you survived P1, P2 will probably feel significantly easier. There is not much to say, other than the fact that it’s again a healing game. Use fire resistance aura/totem to ease Heat Wave damage, pop any defensive cooldowns you haven’t popped to make life simpler for your healers, and nuke him down.

You might get lucky and never get Spinning Up/P3Wx2 Laser Barrage. If it happens more than once, you’re probably taking too long. At any rate, all it takes is for people to be aware, it’s really a negligible ability compared to others he has.

Watch out for Rocket Strike damage. There is no excuse for dying to it.

P3. Ideally you’d use a PvP specced warlock for tanking it (we did). Ideally your warlock is also not bad like ours and can keep aggro, so that your squishy mage and ele shaman do not meet an untimely demise (yes, I’m bitter).

I tanked Junk Bots in cat gear/spec in this phase to make our MT’s life easier. Drag them to melee and get them cleaved (<3 our arms warrior). Melee need to be focusing Assault Bots pretty hard, so that they will have as much DPS uptime as possible on the ACU + extra time in between to lose the Junk Bots. We assigned our arms warrior to core looter at this point. As soon as it comes down, let everyone stop whatever they’re doing, pop cooldowns, and nuke it down. As with other phases, the shorter it lasts, the better. You don’t really have the option of chilling.

Everyone needs to be dodging Bomb Bots hardcore. If you see one coming towards you, stop whatever you are doing and LEG IT IMMEDIATELY. They are pretty fast little buggers too, so run NOW NOW NOW. The explosion can easily one-shot lower HP classes – StratFu says they explode for 5k damage on normal, but trust me, from firsthand experience, it’s a LOT more than that. And needless to say, even losing one person can spell a wipe. We never killed the Bomb Bots, since they can be dodged and it’s a lot more important to just get ACU on the ground.

In between P3 and P4, you absolutely have to lose any leftover Assault/Junk Bots as soon as humanly possible. The start of P4 is pretty chaotic, no sense making it any worse.

P4 – we usually died at this point. There are a million things that can go wrong. Melee dying to mines, MT meeting an untimely demise, warlock tank losing aggro to mage who promptly gets owned, loose adds killing someone.

In all honesty, we’ll probably get him on Tuesday. We didn’t put in that many tries, yet we were pretty successful and progressed rapidly from wiping to Plasma Blast to getting to P4 consistently.

We attempted Hodir with frost resistance the first time today – 7 out of 10 raiders had over 300 FR, and we have all agreed that it makes the fight a lot easier. Icicles are no longer as penalising, so melee no longer has to move that much. Our tank was laughing at Frozen Blows – he resisted 50% off each hit. Not sure if it was a fluke, but we even ended up beating the hard mode + got the achievement for saving all the NPCs.

Tonight we’ll clean up Freya (here’s hoping your helm drops, Rageudder) and start putting in tries on Thorim and beyond. We probably won’t need more than 3 to 5 tries on Thorim, so I’m hoping we can beat Mimiron and put in some serious tries on Vezax. And dare I say Yogg? Vezax does not look like it will take long for our setup, as like I mentioned, we have pretty few mana dependent classes (pretty much only our healers), and our melee is great at interrupting.

And I finally got my Twilight Zone achievement last night, in a 10man zerg PuG (Grim Batol, I love you). We had pretty strong DPS – Sarth was consistently at 10% when he started yelling for Shadron to come down. But we had to sort out positioning requirements/not dying to void zones/not failing at fire walls, which took about five tries. Of the Nightfall was the one title I’d wanted since I heard about it, so I’m absolutely delighted.

I am pretty happy with the progress our little raid is making. We seem to have a steady lineup right now, and despite being _extremely_ melee heavy (Our DPSers are a warlock, a blood DK, an arms warrior, a ret paladin, and a rogue), we seem to be doing rather well.

Oneshot Flame Leviathan (but who doesn’t), Razorscale, Ignis, Deconstructor, and Iron Council. Kologarn took 3 tries, due to an unlucky disconnect and me being stupid with my AoE taunt.

Note to add tanks on Kologarn, do NOT AOE taunt them. Kologarn doesn’t care if he still has a valid melee target in range a la Ragnaros, but he does very much care if his primary aggro target is out of melee range.

Also note: You can do 10man Deconstructor with a single ranged, despite what people say. We lost our paladin to an unlucky bomb, but that was pretty much it.

The last patch has definitely made things so much easier, though. It makes me proud having beat those encounters on the first and second weeks. Tympanic Tantrum hits for pretty much nothing now compared to its old version. It’s also a lot easier to melt adds on Ignis – he used to be our bane and getting him down last week felt very good, but this week? We sped through him like he was nothing.

So, the new bosses. All I can say is that Auriaya, Freya and Hodir are very. Easy. They do require your tanks and healers to be moderately geared, especially Hodir (and we have both tanks in 4/5 Valorous and KT/Naxx25 weapons). But other than that, they come down to execution.

Auriaya’s hardest part is the pull, get the pull right and you’re set. It took us about 5 tries to get it right. The goal of the pull is not having both of her two adds pounce the same person. Even if that person is a tank, he will die unless he starts with defensive cooldowns popped.

This was our initial tries, but our tank died anyway before he even had a chance to pop Shield Wall. We tried pulling with totems and have them pounce the totems, but we were slow to react and it resulted in dead resto shaman. So we cheesed it and used our ret paladin to bubble pull to the tanks, from then on it went very smoothly and Auriaya died in short order. We only killed the defender two times, the third time it died to the cleaves anyway, just yell at your raid to move the hell out when the defender is about to die, and you’re set.

Hodir is a fight that requires your healers and tank to be geared. The end, really. You’ll probably fail with badly geared healers, unless they are incredible, and you’ll definitely fail with a badly geared tank. You don’t need extra Frost resistance. We did it with just the paladin aura. Lesser geared raids though might want to craft some FR items for their tank to survive Frozen Blows.

Our first three tries were spent learning how to recognize where to stand during Flash Freeze. There are a LOT of blue things on the ground during that fight, and they all look like each other. You are meant to look for the large blue runes. Not the tiny ones that appear when he is NOT casting Flash Freeze and meleeing normally instead, and signal an icicle falling on your head.

Once you find this extremely large blue rune, stand right outside it, and wait. You will see something drop inside it from the ceiling and the rune will turn white and solidify. Now is go time, so run in immediately. Flash Freeze should hit in the next 1-2 seconds. Do NOT go in before you see the icicle fall, as it will knock you back to someplace where you probably won’t have time to run back in before the freeze hits.

Note that you must have Projected Textures turned on in your video settings to see all this. It sucks for those with worse-off rigs, but yeah.

Frozen Blows will hit your tank and raid very. Hard. Rotate through tank and raid cooldowns, and do whatever it takes. Our next few tries after we learned Flash Freeze were spent learning how to deal with Frozen Blows. What finally worked for us was to have one dedicated healer doing nothing but spamming heals on the tank (resto shaman) and the other two topping off the raid (disc priest, resto druid). In retrospect, we would probably have been much better off with the disc priest on the tank and resto shaman and druid on the raid, but eh, it worked, no one died.

Flash Freeze and Frozen Blows are the only two tricks in this fight, nothing else to it, really. Get the gear and figure those out, then you’re good to go.

Also note that the aura Hodir casts on everyone is not like Keristrasza’s aura – on Keri, any movement will remove all of your stacks but on Hodir one movement only removes a single stack. However, Hodir’s aura isn’t applied anywhere near as frequently as Keri’s aura.

As for Freya, she has a lot. Of. Trash. Nothing she has is particularly hard except the Elders themselves, just pretty time consuming. The specials of the Elders do hit quite hard and are pretty likely to kill your tank without heavy healing. At least one Elder (the first one) is resettable, I’d assume the others are too.

Freya herself is much like Gothik. I’d say she is also about as easy as Gothik. Her healing aura and Attuned to Nature stacks prevent killing her before all 6 waves of her adds are dead. You will get 3 waves of different adds, and the same ones in the same order again, and then finally Freya. Oh, and also one random tree that pops up during the fight and heals Freya and Co. if not nuked immediately.

We wiped on her once because our melee cleavers missed the memo about “KILL THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME D:” on the triple-add wave, we went back and did her again with success. There’s nothing else notable I can say about this fight. Once the adds are dead, you’d have a hard time wiping – her berserk timer is incredibly generous and she has only 1.4 million HP.

I’m guessing it will take us another two, maybe three weeks to clear Ulduar normally, given that exam and job schedules of our raiders permit. Not bad for a ragtag bunch that aren’t even in the same guild.

1. Where you get to relive your driving lessons

Flame Leviathan is easy. No really.

After you get over ooh-ing and aah-ing over your vehicle abilities, and go over such important steps as HOW DO WE IGNITE THE FUCKING TAR, you can move on to the WHERE ARE THE FUCKING TOWERS phase. All as you trudge through a million dwarves, complete with choppers that shoot lazorbeems and big bad things that like to smash you in the face. I didn’t really pay attention to this phase, as I was busy giggling and squeeing and going pewpewpewomgikillthings.

After you stand in green glowy pads to heal your vehicles, and one of your group inevitably forgets to, you move on to Flame Leviathan. Did I mention Flame Leviathan is easy? After your guild gets over the hahaha woman driving jokes, your bike riders remember to pick people up from where they drop, and your DPSers thoroughly enjoy being launched into the air, collect your epics and move on to:

2. Razorscale: When Skadi isn’t annoying enough

Razorscale consists of two phases, in phase 1 you get to kill annoying adds and heal through annoying breaths while one of you harpoons the annoying dragon above, in phase 2 you get to DPS the annoying dragon while you move away from annoying blue fire and tanks pray they don’t get taunt resists. This might sound oddly familiar to you, however don’t dwell on it much, distribute the purplez, because ahead waits:

3. You might think this is the worst trash ever but it isn’t, aka HAI IS THIS MOLTEN CORE

The next thing you notice will be two giants who have made this their home. The next next thing you notice will be your tank screaming his dying breath as he gets to admire the floor up close because all the healers were stunned. After that, you will probably notice your healers cursing up a storm as they constantly get their drinking interrupted by the ball of fire. Next up will be the “Hey, try iceblocking” and the “How about Cloak of Shadows” parts as your entire raid slowly realises that the ball of fire is here to stay.

When your healers and DPS finally manage to drink up to full, you can move on to the next bit, which involves Trash That Does Whirly Stuff and Trash That Does Not Do Whirly Stuff.  Move out when the Trash That Does Whirly Stuff does the Whirly Stuff, and make sure each member of your raid lives through the unique experience of being bounced between two Whirly Stuffs. After your raid is done declaring this the worst trash ever, and the more knowledgeable among you giggling that they ain’t seen nothing yet, you can face:

4. LOL WHAT DOES HE HAVE ON HIS CROTCH

The Ignis fight involves a lot of fire. But it is one of those innovative fights that actually involves your offtank standing in the fire as he tries to figure out how to kite the adds through them without making your healers lose their will to live. You will go through a lot of tries at this point, most of which end with your offtank dying a fiery death, your main tank dying a fiery death, or someone else crucial dying a fiery death. Another of the biggest obstacles in your way will be your raid getting over the required KEKE YOU ARE IN HIS CROTCH jokes. When you decide you have wiped on Ignis enough and want to KILL HIM WITH FIRE, your raid leader will decide to skip him and you can say hello to:

5. “He sounds like he’s had his balls removed”

The first thing you’ll notice about Deconstructor is that he does aerobics. The second thing you will notice about him is ROFL HE SOUNDS LIKE A LITTLE GIRL. After your raid gets over the whole voice bit, and you wipe to the enrage timer because you tried to DPS all the adds, one of your tanks will hopefully be smart enough and will suggest offtanking the Pummelers until Deconstructor is dead.

This works perfectly, but there might be a few kinks to be worked out, such as How To Teach Your Melee to Not Die To Bombs and WHAT THE FUCK THE SCRAPBOTS ARE EVADING, combined with the ever-delightful HOLY CRAP SCRAPBOTS FROM THE LEFT WATCH OUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODHKSHK WIPE FAST. When these kinks are smoothed, onwards to:

6. The worst trash ever, part 2

If you’re lucky like us, you’ll have a friend who has done the trash pop on Vent to dispense advice, if you aren’t, prepare to wipe. And wipe. And wipe once more for good measure. After these wipes you will probably figure out that 1. You cannot outrange the 10k damage/tick DoT, 2. You still should not stand in things that will result in fiery death, 3. HAHAHAH FEMALE MOB THAT SUMMONS BALLS IS SHE A FEMALE OR MALE IF HE HAS ONE BALL LOLOL AHSHIT THE MT IS DEAD. Hopefully you will soon get through this most exciting trash, and go through the exciting experience of your raid leader gloating on Vent that the raid has figured out the Rune Giants until someone explodes in the middle of the raid. Next up on the list is:

7. THE LEFT ARM, NO I MEAN THE RIGHT ARM, FFS IT’S THE SKULL ARM ALREADY

Kologarn is normally a fight which involves healing the people that need healing and tanking the things that need tanking, not to mention running out of glowy lazorbeems. It also requires your raiders to be able to tell their left from their right when the right is really left. However, Blizzard in their infinite wisdom has decided that this is too easy and they must add in THE BUG OF DOOM, aka How To Wipe On Kologarn When Things Are Going Just Peachy. This bug involves Kologarn hitting everyone in the raid with Ability of Doom even though your main tank is perfectly in melee range. After you get sufficiently tired of wiping to this, you will want to try:

8. “…guys? Fusion Punch was dispellable after all.”

The Iron Council consists of a Very Big Mob, a Smaller Mob, and the Smallest Mob. You will want to kill the Very Big Mob first as he has many abilities that will hurt your raid. Your raid can put their Iron Boot Flasks to good use here to confuse the shit out of your tanks. Proceed to wipe a few times while your offtank figures out the range on the BIG EXPLOSION and your two disc priests try to heal through Fusion Punch without realising it is dispellable.

After all these things happen, there are but a few minor details to be worked out, such as 1. Your offtank interrupting Chain Lightning, 2. Your mage or shaman dispelling the shield because your disc priests are completely hopeless, 3. Your DPS not standing in bad things, 4. Your DPS standing in good things, 5. Your main tank not inexplicably dying, 6. Err shit I forgot but it does not matter anyway because we did not get to kill Iron Council.

NEXT WEEK: THE TRASH THAT IS CALLED TRASH, AND OTHER EXCITING STUFF

So we pugged a 25 Naxx today, cause, it’s fun.

Enter this priest. Not badly geared, and says that he’s specced for AoE heals. No Guardian Spirit, no Imp Healing, but yeah, we give him the benefit of the doubt, and sure enough, he’s topping the meters every boss.

Except he’s being really obnoxious about it. Boss dies, link healing meters, gloat gloat, point out how much more healing he has done than the others and is clearly special.

Well, bad, but bearable.

Every time I do a ready check, this guy is never ready.

He’s either afk drooling on loot (by his admission), or he is missing this minor buff or that, or he absolutely needs to make this important comment about how this boss should be done.

Oh well, we grin and bear it.

But then he starts dropping subtle hints about how he needs this piece or that, and that said piece would be much better off in his hands because he has the most healing done. Apparently there’s this bit we missed about loot not being determined by rolls, but rather, who’s topping the meters.

He gets outrolled on Forethought Talisman next boss. A disc priest wins it.

He immediately posts the healing meter, and starts going on about how the loot is “so very fair, right”. People point out that disc priests heal through damage absorbed rather than amount healed, and that said disc priest has over twice the dispels he has (for Heigan).

But no, apparently, no matter how much damage the disc priest has absorbed, it wouldn’t have been as much as his healing. Also, if the disc had not dispelled, he would have, anyways, so what’s the difference?

Thankfully, the raid response is /care, so he bitches about how he’s been carrying our raid and got nothing in return, then promptly leaves.

Then proceeds to whisper me that it’s not about epeen, it’s about how he’s been doing so much and went without anything just because he rolled low, but of course noobs like us can’t understand logic, and puts me on ignore.

Sometimes I actually enjoy pugging raids.

Then someone reminds me why I hate it.

On the other hand, Lumi landed Undeath Carrier, Gatekeeper and Cloak of the Shadowed Sun. Happy druid is happy.

Take a guild.

A good guild, if you were looking at progression. Everyone Twilight Vanquishers, rolling in epics, going for raid achievements, that kind of guild.

I have had the dubious pleasure of wiping with such a guild on Maly10 today.

It all started when some guy was looking in trade for people for a Maly8. After a five minute interview, he was convinced I’d do a good job, and chucked me an invite.

Mayling, who heard this, also wanted in, so I directed him to the group leader knowing how much resto druids were wanted for Malygos. He got in as well. Great, I thought.

Until he got kicked a minute later, apparently to be replaced by another resto druid, because the priest had threatened to leave if said druid wasn’t invited. It obviously didn’t help that this druid, who had the word “Noob” in his name (and who does that, seriously) had better gear, either.

I gave the group leader a piece of my mind, but I was in the instance already, and oh well, let’s give this a shot.

Try 1: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. Only one person had 18 stacks of the DoT, the others were at… 3. I suggest people put more effort on keeping their stacks up. The DK says DPS is bad in the first two phases. He has a point, since we have only two people breaking 3k.

Try 2: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. No matter how I turn Malygos, the DK doesn’t seem to be able to grip the spark next to the other. I don’t think we ever had two stacks at any point. I point this out, the DK retorts with “DG has a cooldown”. I don’t quite understand how this is relevant, because I mean, with the way I turn Malygos, he ought to be able to catch at least _one_ other spark on top of the one that we killed wherever it was. He also doesn’t manage to ever break 2k dps. Raid buffed. With 4 piece Valorous.

Try 3: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. How surprising. I’d say Malygos ate about half the sparks during this try. The non-guildie warrior, who’s been doing decent DPS, is kicked, because the DK will invite a “more imba” warrior.

Try 4: Same stuff, different try. The more imba warrior does 2,5k dps with best in slots.

The shadowpriest, who incidentally was our top DPSer, says he’s had enough and leaves. The hunter, who was the only other guy to break 3k dps, also leaves. The druid, who was a friend of the SP, follows.

The group is quickly filled with… more guildies, as the group leader decides to screw 8man and just go for 10. Everyone has great gear, we have a paladin for blessings, this is going to great, and we move on to…

Try 5: By some grace of God, two sparks end up in the same place. Heroism is popped. The other fury warrior pulls aggro and dies. I get yells of “OMFG CR”, which I can’t do till P2. However, the holy paladin also dies to Vortex (Vortex is srs bznss with a resto shaman and a paladin as your healers), because apparently, he doesn’t have a bubble button.

I combat res the paladin going into P2. He doesn’t accept. The whole group is screaming at me to res, and I’m trying to type that I have, and tank two Nexus Lords. Which is slightly more challenging than it should be, because attacking the skull is hard. The enhancement shaman who was attacking the not-skull also dies. Paladin finally accepts the res, and proceeds to die to the next breath with about… half of the group.

After the wipe, the enhancement shaman loudly proclaims that he is not staying for another try unless we get a priest or druid for Vortex. A resto druid is hastily found. At this point I’m giggling at the irony of them having kicked Mayling only to end up needing him various times.

Then the shaman starts yelling at me. Now I had been expecting that, being that I’m the only non-guildie in the group, the wipes will probably end up being my fault.

He claims that I haven’t been above 3k tps the entire fight (I usually fluctuate near 5k selfbuffed, breaking 6-7k depending on the raidbuffs I have), and that he can’t do as much DPS as he wants to because I’m not building enough threat. However, strangely, he also admits that he doesn’t have a threat meter installed. Because he “doesn’t need it”, because his guild “is very good”. I end up pointing out that half his guildies have died to the breath, and that you can’t get more terrible than that. Not to mention the Death Grip-challenged DK and the holy paladin who can’t find his bubble button.

Try 6: We have a Vortex at 51%, which ends up working to our advantage as Malygos goes to about 44% in between the break before Vortex and the one before P2. The Nexus lords go amazingly smoothly, thanks to one of the warriors (the not-failing one) yelling “Let the tank get some threat, and attack the skull” at the start of the phase. You know, to do the things that we learn at level 20 in DM.

P3 goes smoothly, and Malygos finally dies, with the only loss being the retarded fury warrior.

And this, guys, is how a good guild is not really very good.

(P.S.: And me? I admit that I make mistakes. I’m relatively new to druid tanking, having always been resto. I try my best to do everything the way I know how, but obviously I can’t always do it, as the mishaps show. I realise that I’m sometimes missing obvious things. But when I’m putting 100% into it and others aren’t, and I end up being blamed for everything that goes wrong at the end… does not sit well with me.)