Confessions of a botter

No, not me, him.

This guy makes very good points (and his responses to haters in the comments are worth their weight in gold), some of which hit near home for me.

I have run out of things to do in WoW besides raiding, and that's even after I switched mains (my DK now has almost reached the same level of gear that my Rogue had).

I'm playing Left4Dead when I'm not raiding now, but honestly, I would rather continue spending my videogame time in WoW, and that would probably be possible if I had more than two 80 characters, but I'd rather eat my own eye than leveling one more toon in this game.

Twilight Vanquisher

We finally killed Sartharion + 3 drakes last night.

The final kill was actually one of our sloppiest attempts of the night. We had killed Shadron a couple of times in our previous wipes with most of the raid still alive, but for some reason, we lost one healer and quite a few dps to enraged drakes and void zones during the Shadron battle. Still, with Shadron dead, the damage on our Main Tank decreased considerably and the remaining healers were enough to keep him (and the adds tanks) up.

I was one of the unfortunate people to die early, which was a bit frustrating since I'm usually one of the last people standing on our attempts, but this allowed me to witness the rest of the fight as the rest of the dps slowly whittled away Sartharion's health while keeping the add population under control and dutifully entering each portal as it spawned.

Looking back at our history, it took us over 120 attempts and it cost the guild about 20,000g in repair. By far the most difficult fight we ever faced.

DPS ranks per class for Wrath of the Lich King

I came across this very interesting chart on wowmeteronline.com that lists all the DPS by all the classes on the boss fights for Wrath of the Lich King (Naxx and Obsidian Sanctum). It's a good way to get a quick reference for how well you are performing on a boss-by-boss basis, but I thought I could derive more information by calculating scores for all the classes.

Here is the current standing:

Class	Score (lower is better)
Mage	36
Warlock	56
Death Knight	60
Hunter	60
Warrior	72
Shaman	97
Priest	107
Paladin	119
Rogue	123
Druid	150

You can find the full details in this spreadsheet.

Mages, Warlocks, Death Knights and Hunters have a commanding lead in all-around DPS, and it's especially surprising to see Death Knights in the top 3 since they are a melee class (most of the fights in Naxxramas and the Obsidian Sanctum are very mobile and therefore more suitable for ranged dps, which doesn't need to run back in melee range before resuming DPS).

My biggest dissapointment is to see Rogues so far down. For one of the few single-spec pure DPS classes in the game, it's depressing to see that they have so little to contribute overall. Not only do they provide close to zero raid wise utility buff, but their DPS can only be noticed on very specific fights, and it's not even that great. Another surprise for me was to see Priests so far down as well. I have noticed very impressive DPS from shadow priests these past weeks, but I guess they don't get a chance to express themselves fully in these fights.

Druids are the worst off but even though I have found Cat Form dps to be average overall, I can't really explain their very low score on this chart. I'm guessing the charts I got the numbers from don't really take specs into account, so it might be that most of these were not DPS specced.

Malygos Power Spark buff and dots

I have been wondering for a while if the damage buff we gain when standing in the Power Spark aura applies to dots or not, so I decided to find out for sure. 

Short answer: it does. 

I used wowwebstats.com to find out. The filter is unit="rozz" and spell="rupture" and you can see the result here.

In case the URL is not working, I pasted the trace below. In short, my initial Ruptures tick in the 700-900 range. Then they jump to 1628 (I believe we had two sparks stacked then), then drop to 1345 (probably down to one spark) and back to 900. 

I also tried wowmeteronline.com but 1) the event log browsing is broken and 2) it reports DPS that are half(!) those of wowwebstats.com. Has anyone else tried to update the same report to both sites to compare? 

The bottom line is that you can keep using your regular rotation while standing in a spark aura, unlike some other fights such as Loatheb (which only increases crits, so it doesn't make sense to use dots on this fight while you have the spore buff). 

-- 
Rozz 
your friendly and theorycraft obsessive rogue 



04:35'29.762 Malygos #1 suffers 965 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'31.589 Malygos #1 suffers 743 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'33.549 Malygos #1 suffers 743 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'35.549 Malygos #1 suffers 743 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'37.557 Malygos #1 suffers 742 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'39.553 Malygos #1 suffers 743 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'41.525 Malygos #1 suffers 743 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'53.228 Malygos #1 is afflicted by Rupture. 
04:35'55.269 Malygos #1 suffers 941 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'57.302 Malygos #1 suffers 941 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:35'59.293 Malygos #1 suffers 941 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'01.300 Malygos #1 suffers 940 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'03.287 Malygos #1 suffers 941 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'05.241 Malygos #1 suffers 941 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'07.240 Malygos #1 suffers 723 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'09.256 Malygos #1 suffers 724 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'27.374 Malygos #1 is afflicted by Rupture. 
04:36'29.436 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'31.401 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'33.358 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'35.336 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'37.317 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'39.359 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'41.353 Malygos #1 suffers 1628 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:36'43.383 Malygos #1 suffers 1627 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'15.141 Malygos #1 is afflicted by Rupture. 
04:37'17.169 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'19.167 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'21.149 Malygos #1 suffers 1034 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'23.175 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'25.207 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'27.231 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'29.143 Malygos #1 suffers 1345 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture. 
04:37'33.986 Malygos #1 is afflicted by Rupture. 
04:37'36.072 Malygos #1 suffers 928 Physical damage from Rozz Rupture.

Sartharion + 1 Drake

It was a pretty good week for us: not only did we kill Malygos in 10 man but we also had our first kill of Heroic Sartharion + 1 Drake (Vesperon, the health one). I give Heroic Malygos less than a week to live.

The Sartharion fight was a lot of fun and deliciously chaotic and so far, it qualifies as the supreme test of "don't stand in shinies". Our initial attempts made all the expected mistakes one by one: being overrun by adds, people dying from void zones, people being wiped by lava walls, tail swiped while running away from a wall, and of course, any combination of the above ("running away from a wall and then running into a void zone" or "tail swiped and then swept by a wall", you get the idea).

We debated a few times the strategy once inside a portal. The questions were:

• Get all the DPS in or only melee and range stays out to deal with adds?
  
• Go all out or try to time the kill so we come out of the portal right after a lava wall?
  

What ended up working for us was "All DPS inside" and "Go all out and be careful when you come out". There is still a little bit of risk associated with this last part but being hit by a lava wall doesn't have dramatic consequences and with our DPS, the Acolyte inside the portal usually goes down in less than fifteen seconds.

As for the rest, we tank Sartharion in the upper left part of the island and the Drake in the lower right corner.

It took us about one hour and a half to get the kill.

Dead Malygos

Here is the strategy we used to kill Malygos (10 man) the other night. I'm mostly focusing on the little details that we learned during all the wipes it took us to get there, please make sure you read the basic strategy for the full details on the encounter.

Phase 1

We have someone call where the Power Sparks are coming from and the main tank reacts by moving Malygos away from it ("Next spark north west", "Turning him south"). This way, the party is positioned between Malygos and the incoming spark. Additionally, the main tank will pull Malygos slightly toward the outer rim of the platform in order to maximize the odds that the Sparks will all die in the center.

Note that on our kill, we didn't do a perfect job at it: the sparks were not optimally stacked and I think a couple even reached him. We still managed to kill him before the enrage, so there is a little bit of leeway here, but obviously, stacking the sparks makes our job much easier in phase 3. We also try to decide when it's best to call a Blood Lust (typically when we have two sparks stacked).

Phase 2

We call an order for melee to climb on the platforms. Someone puts a skull/hunter mark on the closest Nexus Lord that lands and we all focus fire on him. Move to the next dome when it appears and keep track of the Deep Breath timer to make sure you won't be out in the open when it hits.

In order to avoid a situation where the tank and his healers are standing in two different domes and unable to get together, healers need to stay with the tank, even if he's not moving to the next dome right away.

Whenever a Nexus Lord dies, a melee gets on the platform according to the order decided. It is very important to let the melee go first, because a melee staying on the ground during this phase will be useless, which will make us lose precious time for phase 3. I'm not quite sure if there is a point in a range getting on a platform once all the melee is up in the air since the ranged person will probably do more damage from the ground(?).

Phase 3

We experimented with the "one healer per group" approach but it didn't work well in 10-man, so we ended up having raid healers. Everybody groups together at the south and we have 2 or 3 designated healers. We should be able to run with 2 eventually, but we'll start with 3 and see if we hit the enrage timer with people still alive, which would be a huge progress. If this happens, we'll just use one less healer.

The healers stack up 5 HOT's on themselves (3 3 3 3 3) and then cast an AOE heal (4). Remember to save some energy to be able to cast Flame Shield (5) in case you get targetted with Surge of Power, so you might want to insert a delay in your cast sequence to let the energy fill up (3 3 3 3 3 [pause] 4 3 3 3 3 3 [pause] etc...).

Same idea for DPS: 1 1 [pause] 2 1 1 [pause] etc...

Occasionally, Malygos will cast an Arcane Pulse, which causes a big AOE splash damage for anyone staying around it. This is the cue for the entire raid to move clockwise. We will all move 30-40 yards on our left and resume our cast rotations until the next Arcane Pulse, which will cause us to move again.

It is absolutely mandatory for everyone to have DBM installed, and not BigWigs. BigWigs will *not* notify you when you get targetted with Surge of Power, which means certain death. Again, we'll try to have a few people dedicated to calling who is about to be targetted so they can cast their Flame Shield, but don't rely on it: you should be able to manage this entire phase just by paying attention to what's happening around you.

28 hours to Northrend

My Death Knight hit 68 after 28 hours of /played time, mostly questing and a few instances here and there. I did about 250 quests and leveled pretty much exclusively in three zones (Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh and Nagrand). And I didn't even complete any of these zones.

The bottom line is that Blizzard did really cut down on the time to level, and I'm actually quite excited at the prospect of taking my plate AOE machine through the Northrend grind (third time).

At this point, I'm even seriously considering making her my main, but I'll save that for another post.