Secrets of Shadowbolting

Arena has always been a side hobby of mine. I like it, but it kicks my butt regularly. Monday night is prime arena night so we get a 5 man together after I choose competent people who are willing to lose an hour of sleep to the pain of arenas. Since season 4 started I havent played much. My gear has gotten a bit better, I have a full gladiator set with a few pieces of vengeful thrown in but overall, I just havent played much.
The biggest challenge of arena and getting good is really two-fold.
Knowing your character and skills
Knowing your oppositions skills
and of course team bonding and teamwork.
A team that has 2 of the 3 can be mildly successful around the 1500 range but a team that has all 3 will excel. Our team had about 2 of those down, we knew what our players and our team could do, we have a pretty good idea of what the other team can do but we’re missing some of that teamwork aspect. We started to bond and gel after a few losses until we got into a bit of a rhythm at the end.

The group was: 1 destro warlock, 2 BM hunters, 1 holy pally and 1 ice mage

Talk about crowd control and damage central. We got sheeps, fears, ice traps, pets and a healer.
The most important thing is finding targets and focus-firing. We needed to improve our crowd control a bit but the general trapping and draining was working pretty nicely. Priests and mages with no mana are very squishy. Hunters get dotted or some damage and then break LoS.

The dual healing groups were a little tougher as we only had one healer, we needed to protect our pally, but cc one, burn one, and knock out a dps and you’re in much better shape. We had a few issues with a holy priest, restro shaman, shadowstepping rogue, BM hunter and warlock.
The shaman’s chain heals were the most destructive to our group makeup. The warlock’s felhound was easily banished, the ice trap slowed the rogue down, one of our hunters kited the other hunter around the bridge. First target was the holy priest – curse of tongues, arcane shots, spell lock from fel puppy, counterspell from mage. While all dps was on priest, i was able to fear the shaman since he had no fear ward totem up. Priest go squish. Meanwhile the rogue is beating on our paladin and the hunter is chipping away at us. The rogue is the next to go to get the interrupts off the pally. While we’re beating him down, we’re keeping the hunter occupied and trying to keep the shaman running. The mage freezes the other team for a few seconds but we don’t spread out fast enough. We get the mage down, the rogue is at 2% when he shadowsteps away and grabs a heal. at this point we’re down a hunter, the mage is just about down and warlock is almost done. A few well timed shots on their part, a chain heal or 2, and we lose to the hunter, shaman, rogue still left standing.

In actuality, Arena can be easy, the problem is the sheer amount of time and effort getting to your your character and the abilities of all the other classes and how best to combat them can prove to be long and best and frustrating at worst.

More on strategy in a later post

Some days you just don’t want to deal with your guild and the drama of keeping everyone happy. It just happens. When I found myself in this mood and wanting to show one of my friends WoW (she used to play dungeons and dragons and a little prodding could push her over into joining) I figure – lets go kick some butt. While we try and figure out how not to die (battle grounds just were not going so well) I see a message in trade chat looking for more for UBRS. Woot! a level 60 instance in the old world where we can go shadowbolting happy.

Off we go to UBRS where there are 2 other level 70s, a 59 and a 60. Vuur’s tanking. Looking at the gear on everyone else – I’m it. We have an afk warrior (one of the 70s) a mage, another lock, the 59 priest and a 60 warrior.

Now, it’s great you want to run an instance and you find people to go. However, in Vuur’s rules of raiding you must have the following in mind when you pick an instance
1. Know your way around or have a map handy
2. Have the keys to get in
3. Know where the bosses are

It’s really simple, if I’m not in charge, whomever is (even if they are lvl 59/60) better have some idea of what they are getting people into. Luckily I was in a forgiving mood and we were able to find someone with a key. I’m still not quite sure how many bosses we killed or how far we got – I really wasn’t paying that much attention but after 2 wipes I was done. When the squishy priest goes and gets themselves killed by aggroing the wrong mob, the warrior is afk and Vuur is crushing people on the damage meters (and it’s 1am and I’m sleepy) we is done.

So in short – you want to run an instance? Wonderful. Know what you’re getting yourself into and be prepared even if half the group is over geared. Wipes can still happen and this can be a very grumpy lock.

Speaking of which – Nixx wins for comment of the week(end)

V: Who is this psychopriest guy whispering me for a guild invite?
N: I dunno
V: well he said you knew him and you said he should talk to me
N: I don’t know – I sent him to you cause you can be mean and I don’t want to deal with him
V: Me? Mean
Biscuitville: Vuur, you’re scary

/sigh

Last night was a pretty decent Kara run. The lowest DPS was around 700 or so and we were whipping right on through. We got down all but the dragons because we still need to work on that raid cohesion thing and speeding up in between bosses, but getting maiden down in 1 min 13 seconds was pretty nifty. Anyway, I thought I did ok and with all the chatter about moving up into T5 and harder instances I have been working on my biggest issue – threat management.

I know I’m a warlock, I’m deadly, I’m scary, I’ll send a demon after you and you better just hope it’s the succubus.We’re talking threat management here. I love my pally buffs, I really do, but with them all my spell bonus is hovering around 1250 and I tend to have some crits in me occasionally. There are definitely a few times I try and cheat the aggro table and throw a shadow bolt or 2 a little earlier than I should (10k-13k threat lead by the tanks. i will start dotting around 3-6k but the sbolts tend to wait a little longer unless they are non elite. then I just giggle because by the time they find me they’re dead.). NORMALLY i can get away with this, however when the first 2 crit I tend to be in trouble. Lets do a couple of examples.

Moroes fight – We killed 2 of the 4 adds and then went after moroes. When he vanishes we swap to the 3rd add being tanked with moroes. Burn him down. Moroes is at about oh 45% or so and i’ve been casually shadowbolting, occasionally dotting ya know, my normal routine. Not really paying attention until OMG WHY IS HE COMING AFTER …oh. dead. freakin A. Now. Please. Explain to me how after that long attacking a target you don’t have enough threat to let your dps go nuts?
I’ll blame it half on the OT whose threat generation sucks and the 30% crits I was running that round up to a few 6800s.
We lost almost all the dps that round but because of being superbly over geared, we win anyway.
Nice work.

Next example.
maiden to opera – those 2 nasty little buggers who like to freeze people. Yes, it is good to behave. I do my dotting thing while the shackle is up and then carefully watching threat I see the tank has about 6k on me. That’s lower than usual but half the time on adds we burn em so fast by the time I’m passing the tank the target is falling over. No problem, Shadowbolt CRIT 5500, Shadowbolt CRIT 6300 oh ##$%. soul shatter. /hide
luckily no wipe. This is after I had to dig my soul shatter back out of the mess that is my icons because I had been playing with addon layout earlier in the day.
yeah.

Then today while doing my 9-5 (Ha ok but you get the point) job I receive a compliment.
“Vuur, You had some of the best threat management I have seen yet last night. Congrats.”

/pause

“thank you. I was trying to improve as we’re each trying to make ourselves better as we move towards t5″

/thinking to self…. “well I was some – especially on boss fights, but was I really that much better? hmmm. oh….maybe it was because of all the whispered conversations on the side that occasionally had me starting a little late in DPSing trash… (which is usually where I pull aggro and fall over like the clothie I am).”

so yes, threat management was better because i was working at it (some) and because I was half paying attention to all the conversations on the side (some).

/hides from the wrath of kaylok sure to be coming vuur’s way when he reads this….

And the last thing to end today’s commentary with is the following:
“Vuur, are you making it to ZA tonight?”
“I was planning on it”
“good, we need someone to pet the crocodiles”
/sigh

So some people think I do alright at what I do, I’m really good at helping people get upgrades and dragging some people along up with me into the super shiny cool purple stuff levels. Occasionally I feel appreciated

Until we talk about crocodiles in ZA. For some reason, just because i had a seed of corruption catch some of those elite crocodiles ONE time and wipe the raid… they don’t let me forget it. Luckily Spud was mind controlled this time as he consecrated while the mind control was removed and HE pulled the crocodiles.
pallies. gotta watch out for them. attitudes and ego’s the size of Oklahoma.

Just a few more comments on the Gruul win last week – Lock’s are loved, we just don’t usually have 3 like we managed to get the other day.

Surprise ensued when the fel puppies stayed under control and there was a (mostly) stress-free vuur in the raid. It took a few tries naturally – we’re still working on the 25 man coordination but we did it.

After that we beat on gruul for a while, took a break and came back the next day all refreshed to one shot him. This is a nice picture of a very very happy guild.

I was doing my daily troll through blogs and stumbled upon a few new ones today that were pretty fascinating.One of them had a somewhat older posting about mmorpgs and leadership skills gained that I found fascinating.

< a href=http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_subscriber=true&_requestid=131774&referer=/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp&reason=freeContent&productId=R0805C&OPERATION_TYPE=CHECK_COOKIE&FALSE=FALSE&TRUE=TRUE&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0805&articleID=R0805C&pageNumber=2"> Harvard Business Online

“True, leading 25 guild members in a six-hour raid on Illidan the Betrayer’s temple fortress is hardly the same as running a complex global organization. For starters, the stakes are just a bit higher in business. But don’t dismiss online games as mere play. The best ones differ from traditional video games as much as universities do from one-room schoolhouses. In fact, these enterprises are actually sprawling online communities in which thousands of players collaborate with and compete against one another in real time within a visually three-dimensional virtual world—one that persists and evolves even while a player is away.

“A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games. Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves.”

*cough* *cough* I know someone who fits that last one…. KY…

We did it! Finally! My baby guild is slowly growing up. (ok technically it’s not my guild but with all the work I put in and how much effort to keep it running – it’s partly my guild) We added in 3 people pugging our gruul’s run last night. After our success on high king we really wanted to get gruul down and after about 5 wipes last night we decided to leave off and try again the next night. I knew we could and we did. 1 shot and he was down. BAM. Notch up another mark.
25 man raids are all about coordination and yes, it is totally possible in the wrong place that 1 person can wipe a raid. Thankfully, that wasn’t last night.
Last night we were up to 13 grows when our Pally tank was crushed. Smushed. Pasted onto the floor like he belonged there and it was ugly. We were down 2 dps at this time and Gruul is at 6%. Knowing it’s all a matter of time before the raid gets turned into a sea of red I call out for massive dpsing and damage to get this sucker down. The group has been doing much better about avoiding damage so the healers are completely focusing on keeping the druid up and tanking. Knowing it’s all about damage – i curse of doom, pop a trinket and go nuts shadowbolting. The druid falls over in a sea of red and the dps starts getting smushed. Our death count is growing and the counter on CoD is ticking. I fall over with 1 second left on CoD, 7 people left standing and Gruul at 1%. CoD pops and with the dps still going Gruul goes down on a 10k CoD crit.
Very sweet.
I passed on the t4 legs as my badge gear is better and I got the shoulders from High King which is going to make me have to badge farm to break my shadoweave set bonus. I currently have the t4 head/gloves but that shadoweave set is still huge. T4 shoulders + badge gear gloves + chest = super dps… lotsa badges to go though.

THEN I make a super group and we go to ZA all is good until one recently specced elemental shaman wipes us on the eagle boss by not collapsing and then /raid quits.

< — angry Vuur.

Anyway, I pull a new mage in and get my butt handed to me in dps and damage done. Its been a while since that has happened and I liked the challenge. Its my new motivation to get better gear and better dps. AOEs of course I win on, but straight out damage I was lacking…

Pictures to come later. This poor sleepy warlock is stuck at work on a Saturday and the screenshots are on a different machine.

How to wipe a raid in Kara (for a select few bosses)

Maiden – As long as she is beating on someone, she is happy. Let your tank die during the repentance phase. If you are a pally do NOT cast Blessing of Sacrifice as this will help ensure you are able to cast during repentance. This is bad. Ensure that the tank goes down and the angry lady runs around rampant hitting people. /wipe

Nightbane – Stand in charred earth until you melt. This works best when you can bring your team down with you. “Hey guys! Stand here! Look it’s black and red and pretty!” If you fail to get others to fall for this trick make the tank lose agro on the skeleton phase so that they run around killing people. If you are tanking, let him tail swipe the raid – this usually ensures the squishies go down pretty fast. No healers = no living. /wipe

Illhoof – do not target demon chains. Illhoof will heal himself and the fight will continue on until all members are sacrificed or healers run out of mana. /wipe

Aran – The easiest of them all. Move during flame wreath. This is usually guaranteed to take out 4 members of the raid if not more. /wipe

Karazhan has not been a painful experience for me in a long time. Usually it’s a wham-bam-thank you maam give me my badges and we’re done. Sunday however was not so. We had 2 people who hadn’t seen some of the fights 2 pally healers and no priests. No biggie. Moroes was a piece of cake. Hunter trapped, mage kited warrior tanked 1 and the MT and OT took one with Moroes.

Maiden was a different story. The big lady in the castle whomped us 3 times. I think my jaw was actually hanging open from both the 2 fps on my laptop and the fact that my tanks kept dying. We hit 1% on maiden and I watch as the last warrior falls over, my repentance counter is ticking down with 2 seconds left and this big angry lady is coming my way… no good. Wipe.

Note on maiden and use of Blessing of Sacrifice:
Critical during the Maiden of Virtue fight in Karazhan, allowing paladin healers to be awake during the Maiden’s Repentance. All of the paladin healers should keep Blessing of Sacrifice activated on the tank and melee DPS.

yeah. and….never mind…

I haven’t wiped on maiden in MONTHS and I can’t tell what is going on as I’m running the bare minimum on my laptop so it can function and I’m praying for more than 10 fps.
This is a little embarrassing. I pull a shadow priest in to cast some HoTs, drop out, and they whip through the fight. One of my mages swaps with me to go level another toon and we’re back in business. Opera of Oz was simple – no issues. Next we try nightbane. 3 wipes later that’s also a no-go even though we got him down to 25%. Charred earth was eating ranged alive and the skeletons were not going down fast enough. Frame rate was up to about 20 fps so it was a little better but I was hurting. The tank dropped – wipe.

Ok. No more dying.  Curator downed in 1 shot. Shadow priest has to go – replaced with a hunter. On to illhoof. Now I’m barely running any raid addons which is very hard to constructively lead a raid. Illhoof we wipe a few times due to demon chains not going down. I don’t know who is not targeting demon chains, I’m seeding the imps as fast as I can but it’s a losing battle.
/wipe /cry
SKIP. Onto aran. One of the newbies is not on vent and he moves during a flame wreath.
/wipe
Aran round 2 – he’s 2 shotting people with fireballs and we’re down 3 people with 70% health left.
/wipe

I call it. It’s not worth the pain.

My weekend can be summed up pretty quickly. Friday night I went down to Molton core with some lower levels in the guild and cleared the place out. Thats right, me and my little blue wrecking ball took on the burning minions of the deep and got my guildies some nifty stuff.

Vuur and the path of destruction below… even blueberries need their rest.

Since I actually had time to play this weekend as I was not off galavanting, I was able to do my dailies. As I was coming out of netherwing area my screen flipped out the game bugged….and…and I WAS STILL ON THE DRAGON AND NOT IN MY ORC SUIT! hooray! it was all super exciting and I flaunted it around shat and didn’t want to get off.

That has been a TON of work.. I’m still not exalted but I get closer every day.

Eventually a heroic instance called but I was very excited to see what all my hard work will look like soon.

More on the ZA run and spell rotation fun experimenting later.

As only a warlock could say…. Luckily with 4 pallies and 2 that can tank, the salv saved me and was much more manageable to DPS with than say..oh… other tanks in the guild not geared nearly as nicely.

Fun in ZA I think we had about 3 Mojo’s out and about yesterday while we were running around.

Unfortunately with my Spirit of Summer, i have to make it go away for the lyynx boss so not to be confused with the Spirit of Halazzi….at least we got 4 bosses down.

One thing I will point out though on the wall of shame – lack of decursing from a certain individual. If the tanks can do it – you can do it. Pick it up.

Next in my rant list for today. Putting those stupid eggs for netherwing rep right by those nasty ascendent guys who beat you up. I was tired of getting my gear beat up so i went in naked – they can still 1 shot me if i don’t fly out fast enough. BUT IT IS RIGHT THERE AND I WANT IT…..and i can not have it.

/roar