Onyxia and My Blood Pressure

So I'm playing WoW last night, and after a rousing stint in Ulduar, we decided to hit up the revamped Onyxia (25 man).

I'm doing the raid leadering thing and as we go through the entrance I'm always a little nostalgic for the old 40 man raid I used to lead with Sacred Flame back 3 years ago.

Nostalgic...right up until we pull her. Right up until I see people fighting her at her tail...

For those of you that don't know the encounter, the surest way to mess up an Onyxia encounter is to fight her at her tail. She is a dragon, and her tail can whip around, smack you in the face, and throw you across the room. If the angle is just right in fact, she can whip you into a cave filled with whelp eggs, causing them to all hatch and reek havoc on your raid.

It is a VERY simple strategy. Don't stand behind the dragon. If you are going to stab her, stab her in the side.

Yet...despite this...people are standing behind the dragon. And sure enough...weeeeee...all the way into a whelp cave.

It is times like these where I am no longer nostalgic. I flash back to the horrors of trying to get 40 people to do something simple like...don't stand behind the dragon. I'm flashing back to the high blood pressure of breaking down a fight into very simple instructions. Instructions a five year old should be able to follow. It is times like these, I'm happy that I only have 24 cats to herd, not 39.

Strategy:
Step 1: Fight Dragon from the side.
Step 2: If you are BEHIND the dragon, DON'T BE THERE...MOVE TO THE SIDE.

Before the fight, I explain this. And then I ask...are there any questions? Simple strategy. Nobody asks any questions. Everybody has it. Mind you, this is a group who have killed Yogg. A strategy that takes (what seems like) an hour to explain, and you still don't get it fully until you have seen it 5-10 times. Anyway...

We pull.

"WHY IS THAT ROGUE BEHIND THE DRAGON?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!"

My blood pressure rises.

I gather myself. I try and get the frustration out of my voice before keying the push-to-talk key.

I calmly ask "[Insert Stupid Rogue's name], please don't stand behind Onyxia. Fight her from the side."

He goes "Oh, sorry".

five seconds later....he is still there.

"[Insert Stupid Rogue's name], FIGHT HER FROM THE SIDE"

"oh...I though you meant...OH NOES, JUST GOT PUNTED INTO THE CAVE!!!"

Instantly, I'm thankful I have nothing nearby to stab myself through the heart repeatedly with. I do find my nerf sword (My totally AWESOME giant nerf sword) and beat myself in the head with it. Strangely, this calms me down.

We handle the extra whelps of course, but later in the fight, we have more problems. Breakdowns in concentration occur, and even one of our main raid leaders winds up in the cave. I don't even bother hitting push-to-talk at this point. I'd have screamed at them.

We get through all of it. The encounter is successful in that the boss dies, albeit with half the raid on the floor dead.

We loot and call it a night. I'm glad it was getting late.

Even though it is really one of the simplest fights in the game, after 3 years, Onyxia still gets my blood pressure up more than any other fight in the game, bar none. If you execute the strategy, it is literally the easiest "loot pinata" there is in all of WoW. All you have to do is stand in the right spot, and you win.

It is when people can't execute the simplest things that it drives a raid leader batty. In a fight like Mimiron, there is a hundred things going on, and if you didn't execute everything PERFECT, you lie on the floor dead. In that case, it is almost acceptable to fail it and die. It happens, even to the best of us. If it happens every week and becomes a regular occurance, its a problem that you need to address, but by and large, mistakes just happen on complicated fights. You learn to expect them and work around them. Not a really big deal.

When the fights are simple and people are doing stupid things though...

I'm going snap and start stabbing random people with a spoon, muttering things like "Attack from the side! and "Many whelps! Handle it" as I get dragged away in a straight jacket. It will probably make the news.

I'm back

Well, I'm back in the game and raiding again. My long (heh) hiatus is somewhat complete, and I'm attacking the game with a little newfound enthusiasm.

I took my break, and I'm better off for it, but I never could really let the game go entirely. I'm a gamer, and dammit, I like World of Warcraft. It's pretty damn fun. Plus...there is a new patch, and new bosses that I haven't killed. :)

So far in this game I can actually say that I've killed every single boss, except for the ones in Sunwell (and I hope to do those soon). Killing bosses is exciting and fun. The teamwork required to bring them down and all that. But, in the end, it wasn't raiding that brought me back to the game...

It was the theorycrafting.

I realize that may sound a little odd, but it really is the discussions about game mechanics that make life really interesting. For those that have no idea what 'theorycrafting' is, let me break it down a little:

Theorycrafting is figuring out what the game's mechanics are, and how best to make use of them.

Everybody 'theorycrafts' to a certain extent. If you have ever looked at two items and tried to figure out which one is 'better', you have done 'theorycrafting'. If you have looked at your rotations and tried to squeeze out a little more dps (or hps, or tps), you have theorycrafted.

What brought me back to thinking about the game again was a discussion on hunter specs. After the 'great BM nerf of 2009' and before the introduction of Ulduar, the hunter community was fairly universal in that Survival was the spec to be if you wanted to maximize your DPS. I spent a lot of time playing with different specs, gear choices, rotations, and doing a lot of reading to figure out how to play the spec to it's fullest potential. I'd like to think I did a pretty decent job.

And then, along came Ulduar. Not a lot of changes to the hunter talent trees, but there did come a lot of interesting gear choices. As you started getting upgrades to Armor Penetration and haste, the choice to be SV became a little more shakey. You see, Explosive Shot and Black Arrow make up quite a bit of the SV spec's overall damage contribution and they are both counted as spell damage, and thus gets no benefit from ArPen (which is only counted toward physical attacks).

All of a sudden, the gear we were getting was making Marksman look pretty nice. But! How much ArPen do you need to make Marksman a viable spec?

This I could solve using spreadsheets and math, but I had a more interesting issue: Marksman has a more complicated rotation, so can I turn a theoretical advantage on paper into a spec that beats out the Survival spec'd hunters on real fights? Inquiring minds want to know!

It turns out that I can...most of the time. Survival still has the advantage in some fights, but I think my experiment has been successful since the other two hunters I raid with are now both carbon copies of my spec. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I suppose, but I wasn't real happy when I lost out to BOTH of them last night.

Anyway, that is the theorycrafting on that front. I've also been playing my Paladin, trying to tank with him. After years of tanking on a warrior, the Prot Paladin is...completely different. I still have to get used to it, but can I just say one thing? HOLY CRAP I CAN GENERATE THREAT. Seriously, give me half a second to establish aggro and you can't pull aggro off me, no matter how hard you try. Honestly, playing my paladin is going to make me feel gimp when I go back to play my warrior.

Also on the news front...the good news is that I'm not a class leader anymore. During my brief hiatus I was replaced, which is awesome. I'm not really a good class leader in general. Basically a class leader is somebody who has to tell somebody else 'you suck, do it better'. I'm not that kind of person.

I was asked to come back to share in raid leading duties, so I'm not ENTIRELY off the hook in "guild leadership", but raid leading is something that I enjoy, so I'm in a better position overall now I think.

grrrr

So last night I had an experience that frustrates. It will certainly be one of the final nails in the coffin on the upcoming end to my raiding in WoW.

A little background: Last week, [Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned] drops off General Vezax in Ulduar-25. It is, without question, the #1 hunter weapon in the game. But...a warrior won it after arguing that it was also his best in slot (I disagree, but that is neither here nor there). Fine, whatever...I'll get the next one, no biggie.

Well last night, [Rune Edge] dropped. Arguably the #2 hunter weapon. The same warrior bid on it and won it.

This frustrates me.

He cannot use both weapons. If he was fury (he isn't), you can't dual wield the polearm. If he was arms, you can only use one or the other.

Ridiculous. It is selfish crap like that that has completely turned me off to raiding.

Yogg Saron Dead

Time to break out the Ogre Costumes. Boo.....yah

Top Ten Bossfights

Top 10 Bossfights in WoW (for me):

10. Kalecgos
One of the most technically complex fights for it's time I think, and a real wipe fest until we 'got it'. Once we did, fairly easy, but took a while to really develop the skills necessary to win. Going through that iterative process of trial and error until we found what worked for us was actually very fun.

9. High King Maulgar
I loved this boss because of the complexity of it all and the feeling of involvement that you could give to almost everybody in your raid. It was an organizational challenge as much as anything else and ultimately it was really fun. The first 25 man boss in BC, the challenge was in getting the guild there, after first breaking everybody up to do Karazhan to get gear. It was a huge challenge and a relief to finally drop him. Once you did, you finally had a (figurative) title of '25-man guild'.

8. Shade of Aran
Karazhan wins as my favorite *instance* of all time, and this guy was my favorite boss. So much going on, a lot of movement (the hallmark of a great fight for me), and my hunter got to blast a guy with low armor and no threat table. pew pew pew! :)

7. Sarth3D
The hardest fight around when Wrath launched, this turned out to be the only real challenge for us. Everything else we either one shot (everything in Naxx), or learned in less than a day (Malygos). Learning to dodge...everything...was a lot of fun at the end, and the only real screenshot-worthy moment until Ulduar came out.

6. Teron Gorefiend
When I first started on this fight, I was all 'please don't pick me, please don't pick me'. Later, I progressed to 'Please pick me and not [That guy]" ([That guy] is just a figurative person, not anybody in particular.). Once I was doing that, I really felt like I had progressed in the game into a real 'raider'. Plus hunters ROCKED the meters on that fight. :P

5. Hodir
I love this fight because it has such varied elements that require the dps to really be on their toes. Break the ice cubes, keep moving till you find a campfire, stack the buffs, watch for icicles, don't get flash frozen, and don't forget to actually shoot the boss! Stick and Move, Stick and Move!

4. Mimiron
The highest ranked boss on my list that hails from the current (Ulduar) content, I just love the fight because there is so much going on (which incidentally is also why it was frustrating as all hell to learn). If you survive to the end of phase 4, you really feel like you accomplished something. Not to mention the Voltron references. I mean, come on! I was a child in the 80's! :)

3. Venoxis
Honorable mention in the top-3 because it was the first raid boss I ever killed, in the first raid I ever led. It is an easy fight (relative to the fights I am doing now), but given my experience at the time, it was actually totally nerve racking. But once we found a strategy that worked and practiced until we executed it flawlessly, it dropped...double vanquisher (or you know...something purple and shiny. :P). It was a really good moment for me in my WoW experience, and one I really won't ever forget.

2. Illidan
Didn't think I'd ever see this guy with the bouncing around guilds that I did in BC, but when I did find an awesome guild and get the opportunity to actually tackle him, we spent a month learning this awesome fight, and totally felt like I 'finished' Burning Crusade when he finally died. Very epic. I guess I *was* prepared. Bitch. /flex

1. Ragnaros
Most epic 'wow' factor the first time I saw him. That feeling is something I do not believe I've seen since. Killing him was a true 'guild' accomplishment. I took a guild over that could barely scrape 10 people together to do UBRS, built a 40-man team up, and took down a giant end boss. (I didn't do it by myself mind you, I just herded the cats) Anyway it was just so....epic.

Just my list, I'm sure if you ask any raider what their list is, you will get something different. I like a lot of the other fights too: Vael, Heigan, Archimonde, Bloodlord Mandokir (ding!), XT002 Deconstructor ("no no no no no no"...hehe), Lady Vashj, and Onyxia were/are some of my other favorites, but they just don't make the top-10 for me.

Anyway, these bosses are why I still play WoW. The euphoria that you experience when everything finally clicks and you down a boss that you have been working on for a month (or more)...it is a drug. Once you try it, it is so very hard to quit. I don't raid to farm content for epic gear...never have. I raid specifically for those moments where you just have to whoop in vent, despite your best intentions to lay off the PTT button because there is no other way to express the emotion.

Good times.