GWJ BHA 4/5-4/11 Raid sign up (UPDATE #2.0)

maxox wrote:

Yeah last Tuesday we did 5/6 BWD in two hours. That was probably the best night of raiding we've had since T10. Until we can do that week in and week out it is the exception and not the norm.

My personal goal for tonight is taking less than the eleventeen tries I think it took last week to take down Captain Planet. That stupid second phase has just enough randomness to it to keep screwing us over just when we think we have things under control.

Complacency?

Complacency?

You mean the whole "not re-flasking for the last two kills thing?" If so, then yes.

zeroKFE wrote:
Complacency?

You mean the whole "not re-flasking for the last two kills thing?" If so, then yes. :P

No. the whole "wiping endlessly to bosses we already know".
Five bosses is great and all, but it shouldn't be taking as long as it did.
Are people getting bored? Just lazy?

Oh, that. Yeah.

In this economy, we should be grateful that we killed 5 bosses.

I'll take the blame for last night. I have never tanked Bastion of Twilight before so undoubtedly those wipes were largely attributed to me learning those fights. Thanks to everyone for being so patient.

I am happy everyone showed up. I saw 6 replies to this thread and started thinking of names of possible alts for tonight.

Evilmantis wrote:

I'll take the blame for last night. I have never tanked Bastion of Twilight before so undoubtedly those wipes were largely attributed to me learning those fights. Thanks to everyone for being so patient.

Naw, our overall performance has been going downhill a bit for a couple weeks. No single person to blame. Besides Grinds.
He's out of town hitting on tan beer-cart girls, we can blame him for stuff.

maxox wrote:

getting acquainted with Al'Akir no matter how painful it ends up being.

I am coming into the conversation a bit late and I understand that we ended up not getting to this point, but I will say that as a more than seasoned raid leader in this game, this is a dangerous direction in terms of keeping morale up when it seems to be heading down a little bit. Right now, our priority should be focusing on putting content that is supposed to be on "farm" on "farm" on a consistent basis.

There are some things that I have been tossing around that would ease us into this transition.

1. For starters, we need to consider the deeper progression fights like Nef, Cho, and Al a little too distant to start throwing around seriously, again. The stuff that we can down, we keep doing and making that not only the absolute priority, but the only priority. When we end up getting at the end of the 5/6 and 3/4 rotation, call it for the week and do something fun for the rest of Thursday and Sunday evenings. Or, just give folks a night off. As we end up gearing people up the content becomes a little easier and more people have developed more good habits because they have seen those fights more often. This means a better understanding of mechanics via experience coupled with better gear, it makes the next stage not only manageable, but also seem manageable. This is an integral element of raid progression and one that is forgotten all too often.

There will come a point when the end bosses and unlocking heroics will be a viable course of action, that time is not now.

2. We need to be better about communicating which people need which instances for the sake of gearing up. We have folks that are still rocking a lot of blues considering that most slots should be filled with epics with as much time as we have spent on so many bosses and how many shards/OS purchses that end up from some of our raids (Some of which cannot be helped). This, by the way, is a little disproportionate and could be due to people seeing the wrong instances. This is not a raid scheduler's responsibility, or a raid leader's job, its each individual raider's responsibility to speak up about what they need. If it gets to the point where someone simply cannot be afforded a slot in the raid that they need, OK, so long as everything was done to try. The more we're concerned with steering people toward the gear that they need in order to progress their character's performance, the better off we are at reaching the next level.

3. Wipes - When a raid leader calls for a wipe make sure that you're stopping what you're doing and finding some way to die fast like go stand in bad stuff. When that wipe call goes out its basically a call for mass suicide (character's, not IRL). That means you go find something to die in. If you still want to get a few abilities off to pad the meters while you're on your way to death, that's perfectly fine, but make sure that you're not prolonging the wipe because you're padding the meters (for either heals or dps). Long wipes are a waste of time. I have seen in some cases where we have taken well over a minute or two to actually wipe it up. There are also times when wipe calls are not clear. This can cost up to half of an hour on time. Considering a raid night of 3 hours long, that's a hefty chunk of time. The night drags out with few bosses down considering the time spent for the evening and people have yet another reason to feel a little burnt.

Guys, I'm not sure what the problem is, but my internet looks to be kaput...maybe a dead modem? I'm going to keep working on getting on but it's not looking good.

Well said Rezakh

It is extremly well known by alot of casual guilds that 10 man is significantly harder than 25 man, especially for these end of tier fights. Goojers were talking about a challenge being good, I agree but this is not a challenge for us its been a brick wall. And thats specifically for us, we don't raid with the same groups, people make their own schedule, and we like to have some fun when we raid. I like that and I think everyone here does as well so I'll back not hitting this stuff until we just plain outgear the fights.

And the next time rez dies and starts talking about wiping it up tell him his scrub nonsense ain't going to slow the rest of us down. And if your a blood dk and can last like 2 extra minutes on some of these fights when all hope is lost, and of course rez is dead, then you should pull every trck out of your book to stay alive, for practice of course.

And go yell at ghostcrawler if you don't like the "oh your not a 5 night a week raiding guild with the same 10 people showing up every night and a stalin impersonator as your raid leader? Well go and grab the other 80% of the subscriber base and cry me a frickin river"

Sunday is up. Sorry, but it includes progression.

Unfortunately with the end boss fights execution > gear (Sindragosa and LK were the same). We could have a raid decked in all 359s and if you stand in corruption on Cho then you are standing in corruption on Cho in 359s and not doing it right.

I'm not interested in backing down from these difficult fights. But I am interested in choosing our battles wisely. In less than ideal group compositions we should call it a night at Council or Chimmy or whoever.

I like progression stuff, and I like having fun. Sometimes it is hard for these two things to mix. We struggled with it a bit when we first began raiding Cata. It is the nature of the beast, I've learned. People get focused, or frustrated, or something, Vent is quiet and we just do our job attempt after attempt. It isn't for everybody. But it is for a part of our guild population; as is the casual stuff. There needs to be room for both.

Mesh wrote:

...call it for the week and do something fun for the rest of Thursday and Sunday evenings.

What kind of things would people like to get together and do that is fun once there are no more current tier bosses left to kill? I'll set it all up if people bring me some ideas.

maxox wrote:

Unfortunately with the end boss fights execution > gear (Sindragosa and LK were the same). We could have a raid decked in all 359s and if you stand in corruption on Cho then you are standing in corruption on Cho in 359s and not doing it right.

No one's disputing this. As a matter of fact I agree with you 100%, bud, and I do not think anyone has really stated anything disagreeing with this point of view that I noticed (I am dyslexic, I may have missed it if they had), but execution > gear has never meant that gear is not an extremely important part of progression. Simply put, gear provides you with cushion, that margin for error if issues do arise in the middle of an attempt. The less gear, the tighter the raid has to function as a whole. Gear is not the icing on the cake or gravy on your mashed potatoes, its part of the meat and potatoes of raiding. If execution is the meat, then you had better believe that gear is the potatoes. In some cases they're so even in necessity that you could reverse their positions in that analogy and still be accurate in your description.

Execution also comes with time and practice, particularly on fights prior to the ones that are in need of it more. I guarantee you we spend a month putting all the bosses we have down now on a legitimate farm status (more on this below) and you'll see improvements in execution from raiders, across the board. For a casual guild with as many people that move in and out of the raid, we're moving quite fast through the normal content. I know that this sounds a little odd of a statement considering how slow we seem to be moving compared to other guilds (a mindset that players like myself and Zeered are quick to jump to) but we should not be comparing ourselves to others. Instead, let's focus on moving at our own pace.

If we start taking steps backwards, then we have something to really worry about. Right now, every boss that we have downed each week, continues to die each week. Does execution of these kills fluctuate from week to week? Absolutely, that's where practice can really help. We need to be patient. Look at how much we have improved just in the last 6 weeks in the time we spend killing the first 4 bosses of BWD. When I started raiding, we were lucky to down 3 bosses in BWD the first night and now we can do between 4-5 with time to spare.

And defining progression may be a good objective for us, right now, because there is a difference between progressing and punching walls. We're starting to heavily flirt with the second, if we have not crossed into it entirely by going after cho so relentlessly (which even I was in support of). And do not get me wrong, I want to do the guy, I want to keep doing attempts on him, but I think that we should hold off for right now, maybe even for just a couple weeks, nothing really long...just my opinion based on experience. I have seen raiders want to go too far too fast and have seen the burn out that ensues. It can be devastating to a raid roster.

The stages of progression are typically downing a boss or group of bosses at equal skill level, getting those bosses down consistently with no issue (farm), then move onto the next tier. Right now, we're at the second stage of progression. The bosses we're currently downing need to be done with enough focus/practice that we can go in every time, regardless of our members that are there that night and, for the most part, one shot them. Keep moving forward and you're stretching patience, talent, and effort too thin. Spend too much time on the same stuff to where most of the membership no longer needs it and gets bored and you're seeing textbook problems with complacency. It's a balancing act that has no one right answer.

jam3 wrote:

And the next time rez dies and starts talking about wiping it up tell him his scrub nonsense ain't going to slow the rest of us down. And if your a blood dk and can last like 2 extra minutes on some of these fights when all hope is lost, and of course rez is dead, then you should pull every trck out of your book to stay alive, for practice of course.

When Blood DK healing gets nerfed into the ground, I am throwing a party...and you're not invited.

...oh, and if they end up ressurecting the living bomb Barron Geddon mechanic, I am getting that debuff and bee-lining for you (Grinds will be second, not sure on third...maybe Zeered). Btw, Ghostwolf is faster than unholy presence just so that you're next argument is already taken care of before you get a chance to voice it.

How do you like that?!?!?

IMAGE(http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/rescue_cat.jpg)

Rezakh wrote:

...oh, and if they end up ressurecting the living bomb Barron Geddon mechanic, I am getting that debuff and bee-lining for you (Grinds will be second, not sure on third...maybe Zeered).

Man... all this hating on the GM... you just want to come hug me cuz I'm so cute looking as a laserchicken. I know... I should share my hugs more often and then you wouldn't have the urge to come see me.

I kind of look at this like a big puzzle...like the 2000 piece ones. You sit there staring at it for awhile and nothing...you come back a day later, and then you seem to get like 15 pieces in quick succession. All that being said, I bet that after we've already taken a week and a half off of cho, that we'll go back and roll that fool. If not, then we could take another week off and go back at him. But taking the break from whatever boss and coming back later always seems to make our next few attempts real good.

tundra wrote:

Man... all this hating on the GM... you just want to come hug me cuz I'm so cute looking as a laserchicken. I know... I should share my hugs more often and then you wouldn't have the urge to come see me. :P

And I was trying to be nice by making you something other than the primary target...and you just had to make yourself the center of hate, again. Fine, they bring the mechanic back, you're at the top of the list. And don't try switching to cat and sprint, cause ill bribe the priests to grip you back to me.

Actually, this works out better, cause if I go after Arasyn and he's tanking, I wipe the raid. But who's going to care about another dead lazerchicken?

Now that I think about it...wiping the raid by killing Arasyn may actually be a lot of fun. This could very well be one of the hardest decisions of my WoW life. On the one hand I'm dropping a fat lazer chicken which could be viewed as a great public service to raise awareness about the dangers of bacteria in raw poultry (blowing you up should render you cooked all the way through). On the other hand, I drop a DK, a class notorious for spreading the stupid virus like rats spread the plague through medieval Europe, and I could make a lasting statement to the WoW community about how intelligence and Death Knight are mutually exclusive.

Either way, Zeered knows I'm too focused on two other people which should help him breathe a sigh of relief.

You are just jealous of the laser chicken... IMAGE(http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2561/laserchicken2.jpg)

Watch your back... or you will invoke the mighty power of the chicken.

IMAGE(http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/3799/175pb.jpg)

I look forward to running ICC tonight

I look forward to more drunken grinds antics.

I want to go Screw people's birthdays!

A certain boss dropped tonight .... yay team....

IMAGE(http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/8835/wowscrnshot041011214007.jpg)

sorry crappy photo

LOL. I love that you made us pose for that. That could be anyone with a tiny laser chicken.

GJ getting a group together that could down Cho this week, Max.

And big thanks to our raid leaders for dragging us kicking and screaming through it.

A good job all around, I think.

It really proves the point that everything is in the execution. We had a group that could not have been any better suited to the fight, but it took everyone avoiding corruption to down it. Keep this night in mind next time someone throws out the argument that we need to stop trying progression content- no amount of gear would have made up for executing poorly.