Wednesday (20 Apr) - A Chat with the GM

Wednesday (20 Apr) - A Chat with the GM

Last week the MM2 raid, led by Bd, was scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Wild already had a raid scheduled for Friday with MM, led by Fn, and was not able to make the second night of the MM2 raid. Bd fixed that this week, scheduling his MM2 raid for Wednesday and Thursday night. If those days hold up Wild may be back to raiding three nights a week. I had to touch base with the Mrs, However, as I would be jumping from one night of raiding to three nights. "Get your raiding in while you can," Wild was told, "there won't be much chance of that on our trip." Smart woman.

The Horde had Tol Barad on Wednesday night, and Wild was asked by Bd if I wanted in on the Baradin Hold run they were going to do before going to Throne of the Four Winds. Wild declined, in case there was a chance to run BH with the Friday raid. It took a lot longer than anyone thought to take out the one boss in BH, and it was after 7:30pm before we started making our way to "4w" as the MM2 raiders were calling it.

Wild was a lot more on top of things this week. I knew the mechanics of the fight and, with last week's 11 attempts absorbed, remembered, and reflected on, Wild made a few adjustments. Wild had tinkered with the spells keybound to his keypad keys, and while I liked the new arrangement, one of those spells just didn't feel right. Swapping the position of Healing Touch and Rejuvenation felt more comfortable and natural. The second change Wild talked over with the tank he was be healing. During the Anshal phase of the battle, the tank moves between two points. Since the distance between points was still close enough for Wild to heal without much movement, Wild stayed at range. However, the mobs that spawn when Wild was at range sometimes spawned right on top of Wild, creating problems for both Wild and the tank. Wild decided to move into melee range during the mob spawns, and that worked much better. Sometimes small changes can make a significant difference.

Even as Wild was getting more comfortable in his role, the rest of the raid seemed to take a step backwards. We had a series of miscues that we rarely make, including one where the two tanks simply forgot to make a critical swap between platforms. Raiders were off center entering the wind tunnels, which can blow raiders off course and in two cases clean off the platform they were aiming at. Twice raiders were thrown off course due to a random bug in the instance that apparently Blizz hasn't been able to fix yet. Wild, it seemed, was "too" in sync on one attempt - He hit the wind tunnel dead center right at the call of 80 energy for the swap, was wind borne to the other platform, changing shape to Tree Form while in the air, made a perfect landing, veering to the left to avoid a nasty patch of ice - and then Wild realized that he had arrived at the platform before the tank. The genie Nezir killed Wild while his tank was still airborne.

We made seven attempts, and despite the miscues made further progress in learning and mastering this encounter.

The main concern that Wild has now is his healing, which is coming up short. Even though there are three healers for this fight, the way the fight works there is only one healer on any given platform at a time. The healer on the Rohash platform never leaves that platform. The healer on the Anshal platform (Wild) and the healer on the Nezir platform switch places just before each Ulitmate phase, passing each other as we catch the wind tunnels.

Here is how the fight plays out from Wild's perspective: Wild, the tank, and four DPSers start on the Anshal platform. The tank starts the fight. The damage dealt in the early seconds is very light. Anshal will start to cast Soothing Wind, which drops a green ring on the floor that heals him and Silences us if we stand in it. Again, damage is light. At the new position Anshal casts Nurture, which spawns five flower mobs that have an aura that stacks damage on all nearby players. The tank can absorb most of that with moderate healing from Wild, and the key is to kill the mobs as quickly as possible. The damage starts slow, but ramps up very fast, particularly on the melee who have no choice but to stand inside the aura in order to attack the mobs. There was a death knight who died the first three attempts no matter how hard Wild focused on healing him. He was pulling multiple mobs and essentially trying to tank them - once we got him to stop that, Wild could keep him alive. The problem was that we just didn't kill them very fast, and when we made the platform switch there were usually one of two still alive. That meant two things - one, the incoming tank/healing (with no DPSers) would arrive with both a boss and adds to deal with. Two, Wild's group would arrive on the deadly Nezir platform in less than full health.

In theory the Wild's tank arrives at the Nezir platform ahead of or at the same time as the rest of us. He picks up Nezir while the rest of us take up positions out of the ice patches and toward the back or side of Nezir to avoid a frontal cone attack that he does. As Wild is being blown to the platform, he shifts to Tree Form to get his maximum healing. In theory Nezir drops his first ice patch slightly to the left of where we will land, allowing raiders to veer to the left to avoid the patch. In practice, Wild landed in ice patches he could not avoid in five of the seven attempts, which slows movement speed and does enough damage to kill in about five seconds. Imagine raiders standing in that stuff - deadly. Add Nezir's Wind Chill, which is a channeled AoE that hits everyone on his platform, and that's more damage to deal with. Wild can barely keep up with all that. Thinking back on how the damage was being dealt, I have to believe that raiders are getting caught in the ice patches and staying in it too long - which would match the sudden, but consistent chunks of health being lost. It gets worse, though. The reason we put as many raiders on the Nezir platform as possible during this part of the fight is because Nezir's Ultimate is Sleet Storm. Sleet storm is 15 seconds of raid wide damage. Assuming that we have all six raiders that should be on the platform still alive, Sleet Storm will hit all six raiders for about 5k damage per second. Wild has to heal 30k damage every second to keep the raid alive.

Once Sleet storm is over Wild and his tank stay on the Nezir platform while the rest head back to Anshal. In theory we keep Nezir occupied until the next platform phase when the roles are reversed. In practice we haven't gotten to that point yet as we are mostly all dead by then.

In thinking this through and putting it down on paper I can think of several things - one, getting caught in an ice patch is one reason raiders are dying; two, Wild may not have the healing throughput to cover 30K damage per second to the raid during Sleet Storm; three, maybe the Anshal and Nezir tank/healer pairs should switch starting platforms. If the other healer can heal through Nezir's attack, then it is likely an issue with Wild's healing. If the other healer has the same troubles as Wild, then we have a different kind of problem; four, it's possible for one DPSer (usually a warlock with pet) to handle Rohash by himself. That would free up the third healer to help with Nezir. Wild will talk those things over with the raid leader Thursday night.

In terms of pure numbers, Wild is outperforming the other tank healer with an average 7800+ hps (8525 hps was Wild's highest output on an attempt) versus the pally healer's average 6300+ hps. However, because of the wipes the pally healer really hasn't had to deal with the full Nezir attack yet and his numbers would certainly go up when he does.

In terms of the spells used, it was clear that Wild was going to his large, fast, expensive spells in order to try to keep up with the damage.

Regrowth: 35% of all healing used this very mana expensive spell
Lifebloom: 23% mostly on the tank but raid-wide when in Tree Form
Wild Growth: 18%, should be higher although it, too, is an expensive spell
Rejuv: 14%, instant cast and expensive

Swiftmend was not used as raiders were too spread out most of the time to make the efflorescence proc useful. Healing Touch and Nourish just took too long to cast for too little healing.

Wild has to somehow reduce the use of regrowth. I thought about reforging away some haste to get spirit and more mana regen. It would help in the 4w fight, but would hurt Wild in the BT encounters where Wild has the mana but needs the faster casting speed haste brings.

So the questions remain. Can Wild can heal the raid if his top end healing is going to be around 8K hps? Would the pally healer do better?

After we ended the MM2 4w raid, Wild's MM guild leader asked Wild how the raid went. We talked strats and whether MM should take a shot at 4w even though we have raid groups that are already doing BT and BWD. Wild was getting some crafting done while we chatted, and needed some mats that JB had. JB logged in to pass the mats along to Wild. The guild leader sent "Jezzi" a whisper, saying hi to "Jezzi" and asking her if she was a main or an alt. I thought he knew that JB was one of Wild's alts, but JB whispered him back that she was an alt of Wild's and went back to crafting. Then I thought, he can see that both JB and Wild are in game, and that probably confused him. JB sent him another whisper: "I have 2 accounts." The light came on, then. He then moved JB up to raider status in the guild, which was nice of him.

JB logged out, but since I had the guild leader's attention, Wild decided to let him know that I had a friend who might be interested in joining the guild. I gave him Lao's name and that she was a shadow priest with a disc off-spec she usually reserved for pvping. The guild leader (who has more level 85s than anyone I know) asked a few questions but basically said that the guild could always use another priest. As for raiding, we are definitely looking for more folks who want to raid. All he asked is that we get Lao some heroic runs with guildies to get to know Lao, and of course, help with gearing. No pressure and no expectations, I just wanted to lay the groundwork for if/when Lao decides what she wants to do guildwise. Just to give Lao an idea of where she is gear-wise for raiding in MM, check out the gear of Shadowlovez. She is our raiding shadow priest (who often heals) - in fact, she was in her disc healing spec when she logged out. Her overall ilevel is 353 (349 as a healer).

PS - We finally have the ransom for the RV, and we'll be picking up that costly monster today.