First of all if you have been following the blogosphere you know about the recent Allods s-storm, if not go check out this post by Syp and follow the linkage. My line in the sand is this: if micro transactions are required to play the game I don’t want anything to do with said game. I get the feeling lots of people have the same.
So this past weekend we tried our new raid schedule of friday/saturday to see if that would solve our lag problems and allow us to move forward in ICC. Well, it was the right move because not only we’re we lag free but it also allowed us to get Rotface down for the first time on friday night and allow us a full night of progression the following day. I wish I could tell you all we owned the place but Putricide had fun chewing our balls for 2 hours straight and we had a few tries on Dreamwalker. Still, an excellent raid week for a change.
The wipe counter
Once upon a time when I was raiding in vanilla WoW my raid leader told me that each raid had a “wipe counter” on it. That is to mean that until you would wipe X times in a raid there’s no way you would finish the content. When we had bad nights or we were learning a new boss he would tell us that we just had brought down the wipe counter by a good number so we had less remaining.
The funny part is that it seemed to work rather well. If we wiped a lot on a boss one night the next we would have one or two wipes and then down the boss. After that we would rarely wipe since there was no wipes left on the counter.
This is how ICC feels once your past the first wing. My guild got the first wing on farm right now. And when I mean on farm I mean we one shot everything in under 90 minutes and that includes the extra frost giant we had to get for the weekly raid quest. We even one shotted Festergut again, a boss wich used to give us trouble. And then we hit Rotface and suddenly we are struggling. Is it because we suddenly started to suck and forgot how to play?
Nope, it’s simply because we know the first bosses by heart and that everyone knows exactly what they need to do. Once we get to Rotface however we don’t know the fight as well, it’s more complex and people are learning what to do. But attempt by attempt we would get him lower until finally he bit the dust. I was tanking the oozes that night and I can tell you it ranks up there with the most intense fights I ever had to do. It was awesome and it also felt like I was truly doing something challenging so thanks Blizzard for giving me a real raid.
Wipes vs Progess
The following night with Rotface down we spent the better part of the evening dying on Putricide. The fight may seem simple but its a really hard one in terms of coordination and execution. There’s a lot of stuff to know and everyone needs to do everything perfectly in order to get him down. We started the night with the fight under total chaos and me not totally mastering the abomination control to finish the night with tweaking details in order to get him to phase 3 faster. We managed to get him to phase 3 twice with one of those two times giving us a solid shot at trying to finish him off but sadly our healers weren’t prepared for the tank switch. I’m not angry tough because it just means next time they will be ready.
Over the night our dps wich had taken a huge hit as they were learning the fight managed to get back about 500dps back due to them learning the fight, we would get less and less deaths due to random events and on average Putricide was going lower on each attempt. Sure at the end of two hours people were tired and mistakes were being made but as far as I’m concerned we went from a chaotic fight to a controlled one in a single night. The rest is practice from that point. Some people would call this failing but for me this is progression and raiding… and it’s normal too.