Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘raid’

Swearing at my slow-loading computer and wondering how long I have until the next major malfunction. The warranty’s expired so when that one’s rolls around I am probably looking at getting myself a whole new rig, I seriously doubt that it will be affordable to repair it out of my own money.

(On a side note, this makes me wonder if Cataclysm will run on it or if I will have to choose between upgrading to a new computer or quit the game.)

Locating my headset. Playing on a laptop means I ditch my headset wherever I used it last time, upstairs in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the den, and then it gets tidied away into some closet or on top of some bookshelf.

Updating addons. Why do I have PallyPower on my shaman? Why are my macroed hotkeys not working properly?

Flying to Sholazar Basin buying yet another mysterious egg. Bags full of ageing yolk and no green proto-drake yet.

Rummaging in bags trying to find the frost wyrm flasks my Altoholic tells me are stashed in there somewhere. Ah, there they are! No, that was the Endless Mana Potion that has the same icon as the flasks.

More rummaging to see if there are enouch stacks of my usual variety of food – haste food, spell power food and mp5 food. There are.

Thinking to myself, don’t forget to put Earthliving up on my Trauma again! This prompts two things, me thinking of how much I love seeing that weapon proc and splash green numbers all over my screen – all over! – and of course me forgetting to put the damn weapon enchant up until we are a long way into the Icecream Citadel. I really should enable Cork or some other addon to remind me!

Running off getting me a shoe shine from the cobbler in Dalaran.

Making sure I have some sort of random silliness gear in my bags to play with my raid mates. Bunny wand, baby spices, zeppelin, piccolo. Wishing I could make an Gordok Ogre Suit on my shammy.

Flying off to ICC to Be Prepared And Wait Outside.

Let the fun begin!

Varian Wrynn, King of Stormwind, decided some time ago to graciously lend his strength to all intrepid explorers of the Icecream Citadel, increasing our total health, healing done, damage absorption and damage dealt.

This buff started out at 5% and has been increased every 4 weeks in 5%-increments and is since Wednesday at 20%.

This buff has also been the object of many heated discussions and has some less than flattering names, like the pity buff or the l2play buff, like it is somehow demeaning or insulting to be offered some extra help – you can politely refuse the help and carry on without it if you so choose.

I’m not gonna delve into the pro’s and con’s of this buff anymore because Chas over at Righteous Orbs has already done so most splendidly and eloquently quite a long time ago and I can only say I agree with him completely.

(Incidentally, that pretty bear sitting in the screenshot in the first part of his post is me! Mah bear!)

I am just going to say that last night me and my guild went into ICC once again and made full use of the 20% increase from the buff.

Thanks to our sweetest Guild Master (sadly, soon to be ex Guild Master) we did Flu Shot Shortage especially for me! (probably because I keep pestering the RL’s about achievements) and it went like a charm. I am convinced we could have done it last week as well but never got around to ask for it then.

Then we went for Rotface heroic and in one of the messiest fights ever we got him down on the first try with just a few people still standing at the end, a bear tanking, a few dps’ers and me healing and popping off a Shock whenever I could to help bring him down those slow long last percent.

Could we have done it without the 20% buff? Not in this particular go but doubtless in another.

Was it easy? No, it was messy and frantic and hectic and hard, there were definitely no facerolling involved.

Was it fun? Hell yes, scrambling around to keep people alive and do some abysmal dps and stay alive myself with a pounding heart and sweaty fingers.

And then after having killed the Gooey Newsman (on normal, not pushing our luck) we proceeded onto the Princes and after a few messy tries the pale belf trio bit the dust as well.

Same here, not easy at all but so much fun. Not moving while trying to be in range of as many as possible for heals, shooting at kinetic bomb balloons, popping heals at whomever ran past, bracing for that fire ballon explosion, punding heart and sweaty fingers here too.

Doubtless we will be throwing ourselves at long wipe nights again when we face other heroic encounters, but it is fun to once in a while one-shot encounters, albeit very precariously hanging by the proverbial thread.

The Strength of Wrynn is like the lazy man’s version of running heroics for Emblem gear – I don’t have the time or inclination for excessive emblem farming to get me that 5% incremental increase in output so I freely admit I like the buff.

It gives me freedom to play the game at my leisure and do what I enjoy in Azeroth. And that’s my reason for playing.

My guild downed the Lich King-25 yesterday for the first time.

I was not there.

For what feels like weeks we have been struggling on that damned icy plateau of the Icecream Ciatdel, with that prince turned evil and his various minions.

We have had good raids, bad raids and all you can imagine in between. We have had screwups and lag and dc’s and just about everything going wrong but somehow we have been inching our way through the encounter, overcoming the setbacks and getting more and more practice and confidence in.

The raid ID’s been extended so we could focus on the Lich King only and not waste a raid night clearing away the rest of his cronies.

And yesterday you could feel it in the air, in the forum posts, in the in-game atmosphere. The LK was gonna die.

And he did.

And I was not there.

I was not not there because I was away having fun in RL, or even away doing important stuff in RL.

I was not not there because I was on reserve duty for the night.

No, I was not there because at the time the raid invites started, at about half an hour before the raid start, my laptop chose that very moment to go all Matrix on me – green pixels raining down all over the screen.

Several attempts at restarting the crappy piece of hardware yielded the same result – green pixel rain and then finally nothing but an all black screen.

Dead. Ceased to be. Gone to the happy hunting grounds. Ex-laptop.

Emergency reallocating computer assets at home (ie kicking my husband off his own old excentric computer and logging in there) did not help. The old excentric computer did not take kindly to having my needful addons installed and flatly refused to allow me to set them up – I managed to allocate Chain Heal to my left mouse key, not that it was very helpful though because the player frames refused to show up on my healbot anyway so I could not target anyone.

Fleetingly considering using the mod-less way of healing, with targetting every individual and clicking a key, I decided against it – I know I can’t heal very efficiently that way and I did not want to jeopardize this evening’s chance of a successful kill.

So I asked to be replaced.

I was in the raid, on-line in time, haven’t had a dc in ages, prepared and pepped and ready to go kick the LK’s butt – not some minor obstacle boss but the last biggest badass boss in this entire expansion, the one everything is revolving around.  I’ve been quitting all other WoW-playing to not strain my bad shoulder so I will be able to keep raiding with my guild and this is what I get for it?? My fucking crappy useless laptop decides to go bust on me??

The disappointment was so heavy I could choke on it.

I am really really happy for my guild, but really really sad for not being there with them on this first kill for this silly frustrating reason.

I know there will be more chances to see the Lich King dead, but like the sying goes, there’s no kill like the first kill.

I wish I’d been there.

Have you ever been at a philharmonic orchestra concert, or maybe watched one on TV?

If you have, you know there will be a lot of people up there on stage playing. There will be violins, flutes, basses, drums, trombones, or to sound like I’m into music and really know what I am talking about (I don’t!), there will be strings, brass, woodwind, harp and percussion.

And there will be one guy waving a stick in front of them. The guy may be a woman, but for simplicity’s sake I will refer to this person as ‘he’.

This guy, he doesn’t play any instrument, he doesn’t sing, he just stands up there in front of the lot and waves his stick about.

And yet I think he is the most important person in the whole orchestra.

I am quite sure every player in the entire orchestra knows the pieces they are playing by heart, know them so well that they could perform with their eyes closed and their hands metaphorically tied behind their backs.

The solo players know when it is their turn to step up into the limelight and rip off those dramatic or alluring or simply beautiful tunes.

The flutists know when to trill, the drummers know when to make loud noises, every player knows their place in the symphony, but without that lone guy in front of them the whole would not be whole, there would be misses and slight time gaps and the entire beautiful music composition would not be so beautiful.

Why? Because ‘that guy’ really is the most important player in the entire orchestra – he hears the music in his head, he hears how it is supposed to go and he leads the other players to his tune, coordinating their music, making sure it flows along, softly or dramatically, with just the right beat to make the entire piece a joy to your ears.

Now, think of your raid as a philharmonic orchestra.

You have percussion tanks, you have brass and woodwind dps, you have strings and harps healers.

To make it a really successful raid, a raid that is a pleasure to listen to, you need a conductor – you need that guy with the stick.

Your raiders know the piece, they know how to play it and they know when to step up and do their solo stuff. But just like the orchestra, having that guy waving his stick around helps make the music flow without hiccups or pauses or the drummer making loud noises too soon.

Calling out the flow of dps back and forth, calling out switches between tanks, calling out when to move out and when to collapse again makes your raid play wonderfully, orchestrating the major flows and important happenings in the raid music.

You might think a boss mod is an acceptable substitute, but it is not. A raid leader who calmly leads his raid through the perils makes me comfortable – someone knows the whole picture! – and confident – I know what to do but an audible cue is confirming I know what to do! – and I also know I play better with more vocal raid leaders than with the more quiet ones. Not a big deal in a farm raid but in a progress one every bit of help is appreciated.

So, in my opinion a raid leader who conducts his raid through the boss encounter like this is worth his weight in gold (and I am told master conductors fetch a pretty hefty salary too).

And if it fails and you wipe you can always use the stick to beat your raid up with. :P

Have you ever wondered what happens at Blizzard HQ when a server goes down?

In my mind, I see all these stacks of server racks, row after row of them, in some sort of spacious, almost cavern-like room.  In an open area before these rows there’s this control area, where computer screens and blinking lights indicate the status of servers and connections and data traffic.

The crew manning the server control is not big, 3-4 people only. Some are lounging in comfy office chairs, checking the screens and adjusting a little of this and a little of that. Some are walking around, listening to the humming fans of the cooling systems and the hard drives gearing up and down, just generally making sure everything is alright.

It’s rather futuristic looking, a few large potted plants the only things breaking the grey-white-black colour scheme of the interior.

It’s quiet, it’s calm, it’s things working as intended.

Then, suddenly, large red lights starts to blink and you can hear the wailing revving up of sirens and klaxons, shattering the peaceful tranquillity of the server control room. The people freeze in their motions, prick up their ears, they rush to the screens and start clicking away on their keyboards. You can feel the tension in the room. Houston, we have a situation.

Stormrage’s down. All players on it are instantly disconnected, thrown out of Azeroth back through their ethernet cables and now sitting blinking at their computers, illuminated by the blue light of the log-in screen. What happened?

The Blizzard crew work diligently, they locate the faulty things, they work swiftly ond coordinatedly to restart, to reset, to fix the broken things and mere minutes later the lost homeless players of Stormrage can log back onto their home server and their alter egos in cyberspace.

I guess this is an illusion only. I guess in reality, the Blizzard crew may be more similar to the IT department of my own day job, which don’t notice servers or systems are down and definitely not working as intended until enough people have called them to complain, and then they take long lunches and watches youtube in between actually fixing the problems? (No, I don’t work at Blizzard.)

Or is there another, more ominous and definitely more sinister explanation?

Is it just coincidence that the entire server crashed as me and my fellow guildies were facing down the Lich King on his throne of ice?

Is it mere coincidence that the Lich King has an obvious fondness for ice and snow and frost, and that the company who brings us all this is called Blizzard? Blizzard, you know, as in snow and frost and ice pelting down?

Is it possibly so that the Lich King works for Blizzard? Or is it perhaps Blizzard who works for the Lich King?

No wonder the server went down – I think the Lich King got scared as we were closing in on him and didn’t dare rely on his ghouls and val’kyrs to protect him, and so he ordered the shutdown of the entire Stormrage server.

But his resistance is futile, he will be thawed and beaten and forced to give up his throne and we will emerge victoriously. Soon. Eventually. Once the damned server is back up!

Ulduar really is a pretty place, the most beautiful raid instance I’ve ever been in (those titans sure knew how to build things) and now I have actually seen it all!

Last night we met up with Algalon the Observer in his Celestial Planetarium nested within Ulduar. It was actually our second date with the guy, our first being Saturday last and we seemed to have gotten it off at the wrong foot, so we decided to work on our relationship a bit more.

Algalon is an Observer, sent by the Titans after Loken, the Titans’ designated Watcher of Azeroth and jailor of Yogg-Saron, was driven to betray his comrades by Yoggi whispering to him, and subsequently killed by many a bold adventurer in the Halls of Lightning.

Algalon is here to analyse Azeroth for systemic corrption, and if he deems the planet beyond saving, the Titans will cleanse the place by killing all living organisms and start all over again.

Not to put any pressure or anything on us, only the entire future of Azeroth rests upon our shoulders. To further add to the burden, we will only have one hour to convince Algy that there’s hope still for Azeroth and it’s denizens, before he says screw this place, I’m going back to the heavens.

That actually happened last time and it was really disappointing, especially as it seemed we were getting along so well (and by this I mean we managed to stay alive longer and longer every try).

This time, last night, we nine-manned the Golf Cart and the Aerobics Instructor since our guild master and raid leader chose to be fashionally late, but as the very last Chamber Overseer right outside the Planetarium keeled over he logged into the game. He claimed he’d had some medical emergency resulting in a stitched hand, but we suspect he had planted a spy in our Vent channel and was drinking beer and watching football or something til it was time to kick ass and chew bubblegum :P

We had an interesting group setup, 2 resto shammies and a paladin for healz, a DK and paladin for tankz, and two shammies, a rogue, a warlock and a mage for the pewpew, so we fenced the gauzy see-through dude in with our totems, extended our collective hand and said “May I?”.

Algalon, possibly trying to follow some date guide line or other by not appearing to be too keen or too interested or too easy, made us work rather hard at convincing him we were worthy.

I know we were very overdressed for the occasion in our ICC 25-man gear compared to Algalons Ulduar-10, kind of like coming to a Sunday afternoon tea dance wearing ballgowns and tuxedos and the real diamond tiaras and cuff-links, but still the dance had some tricky moves and there was a bit of toe-stepping, black-hole-missing and general dying going on.

But we rose to the occasion, got our collective feet sorted out, and with 20 minutes left of the date we convinced him we weren’t that bad actually by doing our utmost to kill him.

There was a moment of dread and terror as there were quite a few seconds (which felt like minutes) between Algy disappearing as a target (woah, where’d he go? to the heavens? no, that can’t be! we still have 20 minutes left!) and the actual achievement popping up. But then there it was, spamming our chat windows:

Now, I just have to convince everyone that we must go meet him in his 25-man variety as well!

Larúe, ze resto shammy, is the girl I raid with nowadays and yesterday I was on melee healing duty in the Blood Wing, trying to take down the Blood Queen Lana’thel. I was standing smack in the middle of the melee, spreading the love and tender care around with my greenish-white lazor beams and buckets of waters and of course the imba, over-powered one and only Healing Stream totem.

The Queen is not yet a farm boss for us and so we were wiping a bit but making steady progress, fine-tuning the nibblings and positionings and group hugs in the middle, and then we suffered a tank disconnect. A serious one, it seemed, because even after we had all died and run back and gathered up in the Queen’s room he had still not gotten back on either WoW or Vent.

What to do? Well, the raid leaders decided that one of the retribution pallies should eqiup his pvp gear and act as a soaker for the Blood Mirror. And so he did.

Now, the Blood Mirror does not follow any threat table, or damage done, and it is not random, it is simply a spell that falls upon the player who is closest to the player tanking the queen. Anyone silly enough to get between the tank and the soaker would become the soaker himself.

Or herself.

I know what you are thinking, but no, I did not get between the tank and the soaker.

However, the soaker, our retribution paladin in pvp gear, died for some reason or other, and then I was not between the tank and the soaker, because as it turned out I had suddenly become the player closest to the tank and thus I became the soaker.

I did not expect to last long, even though I wear mail and carry a shield and have oh I dunno, 16 k armor or so, but my fellow healers went into overdrive and practically smothered me in heals, so many green numbers popping out all over my screen I could hardly see anything else. Or so it felt like, anyways.

They managed to keep me up for almost a full minute, all the time raining green heals on me, and I got some weird sort of omfg is this how it is-experience. I’ve been healing for a long time and have been dishing out a lot of huge green numbers myself, but to see them coming in in such a steady stream, almost fighting each other for space to drop on my head, and from so many healers, was rather amazing, perhaps because it was so unexpected.

I’ve been tanking a lot with my own furball tank, ze druid Joaquime, mostly 10mans but a few 25mans back in TBC, but I can’t remember ever feeling so giddy and high just by being healed.

Perhaps I was more blasé and used to it then, doing it regularly, or perhaps I had not the scrolling combat text enabled then. I don’t know, but I expect I will be talking about this a long way down the road, perhaps even when I sit in that home for the eldery, and tell my fellow elders about this one time, at the Blood Queen…

Should we feel sorry for Ensidia? Larísa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn asks this question in a recent post of hers.

My answer is “yes, I really feel sorry for Ensidia”, but not because they lost their achievement and not because they will be out of the game for three days. I feel sorry for them for being so utterly stupid.

As I see it, Ensidia’s action and their subsequent ban and revoked world first Lich King kill is a direct result of one of two things: Either they knew they were doing it wrong, or they did not.

Doing it wrong

Now, I don’t play this game at Ensidia’s level, I am not in a sponsored guild getting payed to play, so I can only guess at what obligations comes with that sponsorship, and what pressure they are under to provide results.

I am not a top player but that does not mean I can not personally feel the competitiveness and the will to get better, to desire to top those charts, be it as dps in a 5 man dungeon run or a guild member in a server wide guild ranking. I guess Ensidia would feel the same way, regardless of whether they are sponsored or not, and lately the competition at the top must have become a lot more intense than in previous raids. Never before has so many guilds been at the top, competing for those world first kills. As I write this, four guilds have defeated the Lich King in the 25man version according to GuildOx, with many more to come soon as many guilds have already defeated the first two bosses in the Frost Wing, opened their way to the Lich King.

I guess every one of those four guilds, five with Ensidia, were desperate for that little extra edge, that little extra boost that would push them to the top so they could claim their victory.

So when they noticed that their use of Saronite Bombs actually had a very very positive effect on the encounter, it actually seemed to trivialize it or a part of it as far as I can understand, did they stop to consider that this must be a bug, that this was not the encounter working as intended? If they had been using these bombs in their usual dps rotation, would they not be surprised that they did not only do damage in this encounter but actually helped rebuild the throne?

Or did they make a simple cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the risk of using the bombs was worth taking in order to get that first kill? Was the competition so fierce that the possible delay of asking a GM what was going on might result in another guild claiming the kill? Did they gamble on their legendary guild status to protect them should they be caught?

I don’t know, I can only speculate. But no matter why, the question is how they could be so incredibly stupid and believe they would not get caught? Every other world first and first kills have been scrutinized and achievements have been revoked during the entire WotLK raiding season, so how could they be so stupid and think their kill would survive if there was even the slightest whiff of something funny about it?

Granted, they have apparently been treated leniently by Blizzard before, but on the biggest bad guy of them all in this entire expansion? Come on.

Or did they not know?

But what about the other scenario? What if they didn’t know they were doing it wrong then?

You know, I have a co-worker whose mantra is “it is not criminal to be stupid”. He is right of course, it is not criminal to be stupid, to sit on a chair all day and do nothing except being stupid.

But while it is not criminal to be stupid it might well be criminal to act stupidly and most people do stupid things once in a while, some more often than not, and with very different consequences.

If you construct bridges, you are expected to dimension them properly or you might end up with a collapsed bridge.

If you are a construction worker, you are expected to know that using a power tool to cut reinforcement bars comes with certain restrictions or you might end up with a burning building due to a stray spark.

If you suddenly find 300 million Euros on your bank account when last you checked there was nothing but an overdraft, you are expected to contact your bank and not run off to South America for a life long vacation.

If you had spent years playing a computer game, analysing it into the smallest detail, poring over logs and videos to perfect your performance, knowing every spell in the book and having done all bosses many times on 10mans and 25mans and in both normal and heroic versions, if you were that player, facing the last boss in the game, the biggest badass of them all, and if you find that the platform you are standing on, the one that is slowly falling apart, suddenly stop falling apart and instead start to rebuild itself and thus making the entire encounter so much easier, negating the need to deal with the adds, would you not be expected to suspect Blizzard might consider that an exploit? Especially given their track record with exploit bans in this expansion?

The first three are examples of criminal stupidity, the last is an example of plain simple utter moronic stupidity.

So should we feel sorry?

I have made my thoughts on using so called exploits clear before, I think it is Blizzard’s job to make the game fool proof and if anyone finds a way to use the game or fight mechanics to work for them in a way Blizzard has not foreseen, then all the cred to them. If Blizzard does not like it they can always fix it, but why punish the players?

If I had my way, Ensidia would keep their achievement and would not be banned. They found a way around Blizzard’s encounter and beat it fair and square with the tools available to them.

But Blizzard obviously think otherwise, and we all accept their right to run their game their way every time we log into the game, so even if I don’t like their way of handling these things I have to accept it and be aware of if I want to keep playing. And anyone who plays this game at the top end can’t be unaware that Blizzard comes down hard on players they think are guilty of exploiting the game.

I don’t know the whole picture, I was not there, and I haven’t tried to look into it anymore than the posts on wow.com and Ensidia’s own site, but I can’t see it happen any other way. If they did know what they were doing, or if they did not, it does not matter, either way it was so senselessly stupid to not alert Blizzard to the fact that there seemed to be something smelly going on. It seems like such a waste.

Or is this entire thing a publicity stunt?

It was “only” a normal kill, after all. Maybe they are so sure of their own superiority that they believe this three-day ban will not interfere at all with their getting the world first heroic Lich King kill that they don’t mind giving the competition a three day head start.

And that would indeed be an achievement.

Imagine a world where you’d be deprived of three of your five sensory inputs, a world where you could not smell, you could not feel and you could not taste anything. Imagine how you would be confined to experience the world you live in by sight and by hearing alone, and how you would interpret that world.

Now, welcome to the World of Warcraft.

In WoW, you don’t ever touch anything, you don’t get any tactile input whatsoever. The rain or sunshine on your face as you ride through the great big wilderness, the magic bolts incinerating your innards or the melee swings ripping open your body, the pain in your knuckles as you scrape them against a boar when levelling fist fighting and or the warm smoothness of your lover’s skin under your fingertips when you engage in a bit of roleplaying in a secluded spot, these are things you only feel in your mind.

In WoW, you never smell anything, you don’t ever get any olfactory stimulation. The blood and sweat of your fellow raiders, the musty odour of your horse or perhaps the not-so-faint oily aroma of your mechanostrider, the sweet smells of the herbs as you gather them, the dry dustiness of the old inns and houses around the world, you can only imagine these smells.

In WoW, you never taste anything. Perhaps you are better off actually not knowing what Pungent Seal Whey or Bitter Plasma or Spider Kabob taste like, but wouldn’t you like to taste that Black Coffee or Delicious Chocolate Cake?

In WoW, you experience the world around you through vision/audio. You interpret the world through your eyes and ears and you react accordingly. But in a hectic environment, with a lot of information flooding through your eyes and ears, you will find it difficult to experience and interpret everything, and to react upon it. The more information, the more difficult the interpretation and the slower the reaction.

In real life, in the afk world, you would not need a flashing warning across your eyes and a loud sound to alert you to the fact that you were standing in a fire. Your burning feet would scream in enough pain for you to not even have to think and make a conscious decision about stepping out of it, your brain would have bypassed that and reflexively thrown you out of it. If you happened to be dressed in sturdy leathers or possibly chain mail, impregnated with enough dirt and blood and other body substances to form a rather functional fireproofing, perhaps your feet would not be the first to react but your nose, sniffing at that horrid smell of something burning.

In the afk world you don’t need to get a skull over your head to show that you are infected with some nastiness that takes out a sizeable chunk of your health every second and will spawn a gooey ooze that will follow you around and pulse more nastiness around itself until it meets another ooze and falls in love with it and the two little oozes becomes one. Ok, bad example for a RL comparison but I guess you get my point?

But in WoW, when you are staring intensly at your screen on that ugly mofo Gormok the Impaler and you also need to keep a close watch on the health of the other 24 raiders in there with you, chances are it will take you a second or three before the information that it is YOU that’s in the fire has filtered down through the layers in your brain, and then you may need an extra second or two to react and by then it is too late and you will be dead.

In WoW, when you are gathered up in a chummy group with most of your fellow raiders, humping hugging the leg of the rotted slimy abomination in Icecream Citadel, seeing the small yellowy flakes around you that indicates infection is nigh impossible in all the fireworks and slime spewing going on, and chances are you will spawn the baby ooze in the middle of your raid bringing the wrath of your healers down upon your head.

Enter the BossMods.

A BossMod is an addon that highlights certain things in a fight to help you see it and act upon it. They can also provide you with timers for those bosses that have various timed phases, such as Kel’Thuzad laving his phase shifted state and physically entering his room after three minutes and 48 seconds.

There are a few varieties of BossMods, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters to name a few, and most come pre-packed with a lot of nifty features enabled, most of which you don’t really need. The BossMod is there to make it easier for you to fish up those vital snippets of information out of the massive information flood coming your way in a raid, remember? They are not there to make you drown in even more information.

So what you want to do is set your chosen BossMod up to show you things where you find them easy to see. For some reason, BossMods often come configured to be as obnoxiously in the way as possibe, showing their pretty bars of various formats spot on in the middle of your screen. I don’t know about you but I generally want to see what is going on and not have it obscured with a bar showing me that a new ooze will spawn in 6 -5-4-etc seconds, so I have moved all such things to the sides or the top/bottom of my screen.

The next thing you want to do is check all fights and chose the information you think is relevant for you. I am lucky in that my guild goes for an exploratory “blind raiding” run first, spending an evening in the new raid wing without having read up on the tactics, with all BossMods disabled, just exploring and gathering information and trying things out, so when the next raid rolls around and it’s time to kick it up a notch, I generally know what I want to keep extra track of or where I need extra help to not screw up.

For example, in my BigWigs I show the Unstable Ooze Explosion because that is something I am not likely to see myself as my focus is generally on the people bunched up around Rotface’s legs. I don’t show warnings for Mutated Infections since I see them anyway on my Healbot and even though we are not blind raiding anymore on this one we still have someone call out who’s infected just to help people react. I use the Flash’n Shake though to alert myself to the infection if I have it, shaving that extra second of reaction time off. I don’t show warnings for Slime Spray because as I generally have the boss targetted I see his cast bar and, being so close to him, I see his animation too and can react to it without problems. I don’t show warnings for Ooze Merges because I don’t care about that. I show the Boss Death simply because I like the triumphant sound it plays when the boss keels over.

Another example, on Festergut I don’t show warnings for the spores because so far I have had no problem getting one, and I don’t show the Inhale Blight warnings because I see it clearly enough myself and there is not really anything I can do to prepare for the extra damage. I do show the Pungent Blight warning because I want to be prepared to heal my designated targets up to full asap when that happens, which takes some pre-planning and clever distributing of Riptides. I don’t show the Vile Gas because it should not be a problem if people spread out as we are supposed to. I use the Proximity Display just so I can avoid being too close to someone and vomit on them should I be in a ranged group healing. I have the Berserk timer enabled so I can see how close we are cutting it and I have the Boss Death chime of triumph enabled for the same reason as above – I like the sound.

These are the settings that work for me, resto shaman generally on raid healing. If you are anything else, tank, tank healer, melee, ranged dps, you probably think something else is vastly more important and should set your BossMods up accordingly.

There are a few problems associated with BossMods though

One is what Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn describes in a post recently, discussing another post over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog, that are we really playing the game if we allow BossMods and other addons to show us what to do? How can we complain that the game is too easy if we always use the training wheels of BossMods? Well, I decided a long time ago that addons let me have more fun and help me play my game better, but I definitely want them customized to my liking and to help me with what I want and what I need and nothing else.

Another problem is that even if you tailor your BossMod to show those and only those timers and warnings and messages that you yourself find indispensable, a BossMod happy raid leader or raid assistant may still flood your screen and your eyes and ears with raid warnings and countdowns in chat, putting a huge dent in your pretty customized layout.

Thirdly, you learn the encounters as if the BossMod paraphernalia were an integrated part of them. You train yourself to react upon the BossMod instead of the fight, which risk leaving you flailing helplessly if the BossMod plays trick on you.

Example: I was dragged into a late night Naxx Undying run with my priest Jools a few weeks ago. We started with killing Sapphiron and Kel-Thuzad, steamrolled through the Abomination Wing, Patchwerk went down in notime, and then we faced Grobbulus. And there we failed.

For some reason – perhaps because none of us had run Naxx in a long time – no one had an updated BossMod and the players targetted with Mutating Injection did not get a skull on their heads. They did not notice that they were infected and thus they dropped huge poison clouds in the middle of the room. Perhaps it was something else as well, because some players’ screens lit up with a lot of error messages so they could not see where they were going. The other healer was trapped out of range and I got confused trying to circumvent the spreading clouds so I failed to pop a pair of wings on the player going dooown.

We were all trained to trigger a run to the side when we had a skull on our head and not when we had an infection. So we relied on the safety net of our BossMods and it failed. Not a big deal, it was late at night and we were tired and/or inebriated, and we had had a good laugh together during the previous boss kills, but our reliance on addons did cost us that Undying title that time.

BossMods, like any other addons, can be turned on and off at your pleasure. If you feel you no longer need a certain warning, or you can do better without it, turn it off. Maybe you can still play as good as before, maybe you want to turn it back on.

So, use the BossMod as training wheels for as long as you need, but don’t be afraid to take them off sometimes and see if you can balance on your own. If not, no big deal, just make sure you keep the BossMod updated :-)

I’ve been talking about the joys of exploring before, and by exploring I do not necessarily mean just world exploring, I mean going into new instances without a clue of what will happen there.

Well, I know there will be mobs and bosses and Bad Stuff happening and hopefully some shiny things dropping now and again, but that’s about it. I don’t know if there will be fire or frost or poisons or void zones, if we need to spread out or stay together, if we need to run away from stuff or to stuff or maybe behind stuff.

The thing is, we will find out, and we will find out together, and although I know we will make mistakes and mess up I also know we will also have so much fun learning and progressing together.

Raiding is great but there will be plenty of time to research fights and follow in other peoples’ footsteps later, the thrill and joy of looking at bosses and their lairs with fresh eyes for the first time is one of my truly favourite things in game.

So you can imagine how I felt when the leaders in my raid guild announced that we were going to enter Icecrown Citadel without any prior knowledge gathering concerning its denizens and layouts! No reading up on tactics, no looking at videos, all bossmods disabled, we were just gonna walk in there and see what would happen.

And so we did.

We entered Icecrown wearing nothing but our raid gear and with our eyes and ears wide open. We looked at the scenery and the inhabitants of the place, we noted their abilities and their tricks and their way of doing things, and we talked to each other, both during the raid nights and subsequently on our forum, discussing and working out tactics of our own.

We did not one-shot all of the four bosses in ICC but within the first week we had killed them all as number 9 on our server (according to GuildOx), 6 days after the gates were opened.

The boss we had the most trouble with was Saurfang, but it was great fun to spend an entire night and a half wiping on him, working out different raid setups as our raid leaders ran around the platform deploying us chess pieces raiders to our designated spots carefully spaced so we would not splatter hurt on each other, and having the ranged practice Blood Beast targeting on melee so they would pick up the right beast immediately when they spawned and eliminate the risk of a beast running loose and hitting raiders in its way, and working out healing rotas so we would cover everyone and not lose any marked people.

We nailed our difficulties one after the other by trial and error and teamwork and after a lot of biting of dust and kicking of buckets it all slotted into place and we performed a flawless Saurfang kill even earning us the server first I’ve Gone and Made a Mess achievement!

Anyways, this post was not intended to brag about our raiding, but rather point out that it is quite possible to raid successfully without reading up on other peoples tactis or watching other peoples videos.

And, most importantly, to have a blast doing it!

I mean, these raid instances will be around for a long time, you will always have a chance of reading up on stuff but you will have only one shot at getting that fresh powerful feeling of wonder and awe and amazement that comes from experiencing something for the first time so why not make the most of it? Stuff those tactic guides and work things out with your guild, your friends! The kills will taste so much sweeter then, I promise!

Now another gate has opened in the Icecrown Citadel and we are putting on our Explorer’s hats again, bringing out our map-making kits, ready to go beat our sticks and heads and just about everything else we have available against anything that will come our way.

There be dragons there for sure, bring them on! :-)