Ding Dong the King is Dead!

That's right; the Red Devils snuffed the Lich King! Actually, this was our second kill - the first having occurred while I was on vacation. We had cleared up to LK each week since that first kill, but either failed to down him, or never managed to get another group together. This time, all the planets were properly aligned and we assembled a group with the sole intent of killing the Lich King.


It wasn't a one-shot, not at all. But it was very impressive and inspiring to see each of our attempts go significantly better as our team pulled together and finally executed a perfect kill! I am confident that the Red Devils will continue into Cataclysm as a successful raiding guild.


On a more personal note, I managed to achieve 100,000 kills just before the release of Patch 4.0! This was a milestone in my PvP career and as it turns out, a very timely one. Patch 4.0 has not been kind to hunters in terms of PvP. While hunters have not generally been a feared class since "vanilla" WoW, this latest version has made us extraordinarily easy to kill. The switch from large mana pools to the much smaller focus with its very limited regeneration has rendered us toothless in PvP. Blizzard seems to be confident that balance will be restored with our new abilities at the 85 level cap, but they have been so wrong so often that we hunters are highly skeptical. Most posts on the current beta seem to confirm we have good reason to be. Perhaps it is time to dust off my druid and learn to play all over again?

Just Another Night in ICC

Tuesday - raids reset and the Red Devils actually show up for the 25-man raid! Not by a huge margin this time, we only had a couple of extra players in our wait list tonight. We decided not to extend last week's lockout and started another fresh run this week. Other than a minor trash problem at the onset, you would have actually thought we knew what we were doing. Our hit list included Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide (in spite of my premature pull) and the Blood Prince Council… all one shot!


Then we took on Blood Queen Lana'thel and things went south in a hurry. We made a couple of half-assed attempts, but chaos was rampant. Tethered players neglected to run together, purple poopers ran through the raid and our carefully planned bite order was soon dropped in favor of pure panic and mind controlled players. This boss is gonna' take us a while to bring down in 25-man.


So, after two wipes we decided to go free Valithria Dreamwalker. Snyped and I were assigned to kite duty on Blistering Zombies (as usual), with Snyped assigned to the left side and me to the right. I was a little surprised to find him next to me as I was busily dragging my zombie out of the raid for execution, but that happens sometimes when we have to kite a long way before the zombie explodes. Odd that he didn't move back though… hey, why is he staying over here?? Oopsie, there goes our tank… and our healers… yikes - rot worms are on me! And… we wipe.


As we were running back, I whispered to Snyped, "You were on the wrong side!"
"No I wasn't"
"Yes you were, you were supposed to be on the left side."
"No I wasn't"

Hmmm… this was getting me nowhere, as usual. As we prepared for our second attempt, I asked our raid leader to clarify the kiting assignments. "Snyped on the left, Seabrat on the right" replied Xoroth. The next whisper I got from Snyped… "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" This is the respect I get as the raid officer - and from my very own "wingman" no less! At any rate, Snyped actually did the kiting on his "other" left that time, and we successfully set Dreamwalker free once again! It's always nice to end a raid with a win.

The Red Devils have had a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday raid schedule for quite a while now. We've also been plagued with poor attendance on every night except Tuesday. Over the past ten days or so, I conducted a poll of all our raiding members to establish what their availability would normally be for each night of the week. Based on the results of that poll, we are changing our raid nights to Tuesday and Wednesday, and dropping Thursdays and Sundays from our schedule. We hope that this change will encourage attendance on Wednesday and that back-to-back nights will provide better progression.


You can bet that I will be looking at attendance to see if people are showing up when they said they would, just like the famous Geico money eyes!

Putricide Goes DOWN!

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Well, we finally managed to put the old Professor down in 25-man. And all it took was an increase in the ICC raid buff to 15%! No matter, I’ll take it any way we can get it!



We were hot that night and cleared both wings with only one wipe each on Dreamwalker and Putricide. Nice job, Red Devils!

Oh, Oh Dream Weaver…

Holy smoke, it’s been two months since my last post! In that time, the Red Devils have made precious little progress in 25-man ICC. It took us a month to get past the Blood Prince Council, but the real problem has been attendance. Essentially everyone shows up for Tuesday’s raid and we have been starting fresh each week. By the time we get past Festergut and Rotface, our time is up for the night and very few show up for the rest of the week. As a result, we wind up running one or two 10-man groups and these have been much more successful in terms of progression. At least two groups are now working on the Lich King on a regular basis.

So, this week, we decided not to start fresh, reset the lock-out timer and picked up where we left off last week. We ran up and one-shot Festergut, Rotface, skipped Professor Putricide, took out the Blood Prince Council, and then focused on freeing Valithria Dreamwalker and succeeded on our first attempt!


Flush with confidence and full of ourselves having gone wipe-free for the night, we turned our attention back to Putricide. Apparently, our egos were writing checks we couldn’t cash and we proceeded to wipe nine times trying to off the old professor. We got close, by our standards, and hammered him down to 8% on several attempts. The raid damage was just too great for our healers to overcome and we called it a night.

I don’t know if we will continue the raid again next week (more progression), or start fresh (more gear). Many of our raiders are in dire need of the sanctification tokens that drop from Deathbringer Saurfang and he’s on farm status. We haven’t been as strict about those tokens as we have been with similar items in the past. As a result some players have three or more items from the sanctified set, while others of the same class have none. As the raid officer and loot master, this strikes me as a problem for the raid’s performance and unfair to some of our less fortunate raiders.

Bad News, Everyone - Putricide Didn't Make It!

I know, I know... I said I prefer to write about our 25-man exploits, but this is just too good. The Red Devils put together an "elite" 10-man strike force and headed into ICC. We one shot everything on our way to Putricide. Ok, we wiped a few times on the old Professor, but we DID IT! We downed Putricide in 10-man!

Now, there are a lot of guilds for which this would be no big deal. But, for us, this was epic - congratulations, Red Devils!

The guilty party members are as follows (will each of you please stand as your name is called?):

Aniraa (holy priest and Guild Leader)
Azurstorm (nasty, stinky ol' rogue - did I mention he's a rogue?)
Bohb (warlock and sacrificial gnome)
Damac (she-man extraorinaire and dps leader)
Deathbringyr (deathknight tank and abom master)
Jellopuddin (deathknight tank and Putricide distracter)
Nyyx (tree-of-life druid and rezzer of the dead)
Seabrat (scrubby old SV hunter)
Snyped (even scrubbier MM hunter, though not so old)
Unkldiesel (dps warrior of smiting power)

Festergut and Rotface in Same Night!

Good grief, it's been nearly two months since my last post! Unfortunately, that's because it's taken us that long to progress any further in ICC-25. Oh, we've done a little better in our 10-mans, but I prefer to write about the Red Devils exploits in 25-man instances.

In 10-mans, we've gotten Putricide as low as 10% and spent a few hours wiping on Blood Queen Latifah, but we can pretty regularly make it that far. In the 25-man version however... ohhh damn ... 25-man has been slow, slow, slow! That changed for us last night, when we marched in and one-shot everything up to, and including, Festergut!


After a short time-out for the official guild picture with Uncle Fester, we distributed the loot and raced over to see Rotface.

I was pretty jazzed, and was even planning on playing tag with the Professor, but Rotface wasn't quite the pushover for us that his brother Fester had been. And once our momentum was broken, it took us quite a few tries before we managed to put Rotface on the floor.


We did finally succeed, but it took up all our time for the night and we had to say goodbye without looking in on the Professor. We do plan to get back to him tonight, but Wednesdays often seem to present us with attendance problems.

Deathbringer Saurfang Brought to Justice!

Woohoo, 2010 opened with a big bang for the Red Devils as we easily put Deathbringer Saurfang down for the count! We started with our first attempt as we had before, tanking him on the portal and attempting to knock the bloodbeasts off the ledge. This time, the skybreaker had despawned leaving open space where it once stood and we were hopeful our knockbacks would push them into open air. This turned out not to be the case, and the beasts hit an invisible wall allowing them to return to battle.

We abandoned that strategy on our second attempt, and tanked Saurfang on the steps where he spawns. This provided a lot more room for us to spread out and avoid chaining the blood novas. I also felt like we hunters had more room to kite them around our frost traps. We made sure one hunter on each side had assist so that the following macro allowed for focus fire on a specific target:

/cleartarget
/targetexact Blood Beast
/stopmacro [noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 4);
/cast Distracting Shot
/y Nuke {Triangle}!

The 4 is the raid symbol, just change it to get a different symbol (don’t forget to change the yell):
1 = {Star}, 2 = {Circle}, 3 = {Diamond}, 4 = {Triangle}, 5 = {Moon}, 6 = {Square}, 7 = {Cross}, 8 = {Skull}

If the other ranged dps on each side assist the marking hunter, those bloodbeasts go down fast, allowing everyone to get back on Saurfang as quickly as possible. It’s a dps race, so that’s very important. Once we got the assist part down pat, Saurfang was killed easily.

There was not a lot of loot in the chest, one mail belt with spellpower, and two Protector’s Mark of Sanctification (Warrior, Hunter and Shaman classes). Those that have been saving their Frost Emblems are drooling over the Tier 10 armor! As a hunter, I am not all that excited about the tier bonuses and chose to pick up some of the non-tier items first. I already have the Longstrider’s Vest (chest) and am looking closely at the Logsplitters (gloves) for my next upgrade.

This week, another wing of the Icecrown Citadel (The Plagueworks) is rumored to open up with three new bosses: Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide. Now I have heard all kinds of crazy rumors, like an average dps of 7,500 being needed to down Festergut. Taken out of context, that number means virtually nothing, and without some kind of serious dps buff I doubt many raiders can consistently hit that level of damage. But - it’s a big number that the ‘leet like to spout off simply for its intimidation factor.