Farm Farm Farm Farm... zzzzzzzz

Blast Furnace...

More progress this week as we downed Heroic Blast Furnace!

I'm not a big fan of this fight if I'm honest, it's probably my least favourite in the whole raid.  There are no real challenges, no mechanics to handle... well, none that really matter.

Hmmm... it's difficult to explain what I mean. 
There are lots of mechanics but none of them are particularly challenging, reminds me of Paragons of the Klaxxi in SoO.  There's lots going on but, as long as you mostly get it right, you can just kind of muddle through the rest.

Stay spread out so the damage is under control, hit the right target at the right time and everything just dies. 
Even the Primal Elementalists seem a bit lacklustre - You are supposed to go flat out to kill them in one "shield down" phase but it doesn't really penalise you if you don't, you can just leave one person on there to finish it off while the rest move on.
Maybe the delay means more adds and more Heat for the boss but I can't tell if it really makes a difference.

Having said that, it still irritates the hell out of me that our rogue kept his Blade Flurry on to pad on the Slag Elementals.  There were times on the wipes where we were about 100k short of killing the PE in one go and he still had Blade Flurry on the whole time.

I tried to shift the focus of people to those Primal Elementalists by linking the top dps on them and challenging the other players to catch those top people.
Not sure if it actually had any effect but we 1-shot all of the PE's on the next attempt and pushed into P3 in great shape.

P3 is meant to be a burn (haha) phase but it was a bit of an anti-climax too, we pushed him down so easily we never really seemed in danger.  The regular blasts were comfortably handled by our healers and the big Melt pools were dropped well behind the raid.

We were about halfway round the outside of the room when he died, before Heroism came back off cooldown (and with Blade Flurry still on of course - got to cleave those Slag Elementals). 

Roughly 40 wipes in total to learn the fight and kill it, makes me think we are overgearing these bosses now.

On to Blackhand but, after our triumph on Blast Furnace, the focus wasn't really there and we laughed and joked our way to a few quick wipes before raid end.

Background Downloader...

Patch 6.2 background downloader started this week so, with a mischievous twinkle in my eye, I posted a question in our FB group...
Is it time to extend the raid and go all out for Blackhand?

I knew when I posted that our RL would hate the idea, he has very strong beliefs about doing things in the 'correct' order, but I wanted to open the discussion anyway.

We spend a lot of our raid week every week going over farm bosses with most drops now being disenchanted.  I would rather skip these bosses and try to push guild progress.

I can see some merit in chasing tier sets, they will help us progress on Blackhand and in Mythic content (if we ever get there). 
I'm bored to tears of killing Gruul, Hans and Franz etc. just for the sake of it though. 

The only challenge they offer now is the fight to stave off complacency, which we failed miserably at last night.  5 wipes on H&F because people couldn't be bothered to move properly makes me think I'm not the only person feeling this way.

In my opinion we have all the gear we need to kill Blackhand and move on to Mythic but I have a couple of possible compromises:

1.  Go Backwards
Start on the big guy on a Wednesday and spend the night there.  If we kill him, great! Reset and go to Blast Furnace, then Iron Maidens, and so on.
If we don't kill him, reset it on the second raid night and farm as usual.

2.  Selective Farming
Just kill the bosses that drop tier pieces, then extend and go to Blackhand.

Option 1 guarantees us one full night per week on progress and we still get to farm bosses for miniscule upgrades on the other two nights.
Option 2 should give us two nights on Blackhand but less loot coming in overall.  Not a big deal as most of it goes to DE now but there are still a couple of upgrades out there for people that would be missed.

We won't do either of them.

Our RL is adamant we have at least 4 weeks so will resist all pleas to extend for the next couple of weeks at least. 
He says it's because people still need the loot but I suspect it has more to do with the fact he has just convinced his girlfriend to return to the game and she will need gearing up.  Well, it will be a factor in his decision at least.

Me, though, I'm just bored and looking for the next challenge.

The Project - Levelling through the expansions

The hunter has made it out of the old world and started her journey through the expansions.  Levels 64-78 (ish) have always been very slow for me and are always a slog before I speed up again as I near the current content.

Not much has changed in Outland or Northrend, they did feel marginally quicker than previous runs but nothing really remarkable.

I always seem to power through the Cata zones incredibly quickly so I was interested to see if there had been any more XP nerfs since the last time I was here, and also how quickly I would get through the MoP zones now they weren't current content.

Cata zones...
I had a pretty much set plan for Cata in the past. 
Do the whole of Mt Hyjal, which would take me to roughly 82.5
Quick jaunt to Deepholm to finish up level 83.
Almost all of Uldum, avoiding Schottz in the deep south, to reach roughly 84.5
Open up Twilight Highlands and the portal back to SW, this would almost exactly get me to level 85.

So I set off with the same plan in mind...
Around two-thirds of the way through Mt. Hyjal I reached 83 and realised this was going to be much quicker than expected!
Straight to Uldum where roughly half (if not less) of the quests took me to 85.

Wow, that was fast. 
Without doubt being able to wear the heirlooms for the whole journey made a big difference but I barely completed 1 full zone's worth of quests before I was finished with the whole expansion!

On to Pandaria!
Heirlooms all the way up to 90 so this could be fast too!
Again, I have a plan for MoP...
2/3 of Jade Forest, 1/2 of Valley, 2/3 Kun Lai, virtually all of Townlong Steppes then finishing off in Dread Wastes.

I wasn't expecting to do all of those quests, that was the plan when it was current content so it will definitely have been nerfed for the new expansion.  Plus, I had the heirlooms to help me now.

So, how fast would it be?
Jade Forest - Roughly 1/4 of the quests
Valley of the Four Winds - Passed through it on my way to Kun Lai, zero quests
Kun Lai Summit - Around 1/2 of the quests
Townlong Steppes - At most 1/3 of the quests

Ding! Level 90!

It all went by so quickly I hadn't even moved my Hearthstone from Dalaran!

I looked back on my journey through the game and it was just a series of 1-shotting mobs while I quickly out-levelled any storyline (I've been through them all before so wasn't that bothered anyway but that's not the point).

A total of 3 deaths in the whole process, 2 of them were from falling before I worked out I could Disengage to avoid taking the damage.  (The other death was from a big dinosaur in Un'Goro Crater... if you were interested)

I'm not convinced the levelling process adds anything to the game these days (but maybe that is just from the jaded view of an 11th alt running through with full heirlooms.)

Would it be more engaging without them?
More importantly, would a new player still enjoy it as much as I did on my first time through?

Now heading to Draenor, and current content, still wearing two pieces of gear from WotLK!
No heirlooms to carry me through now, and no gold support, so it should be a little more interesting anyway.

Khadgar! Hold that portal for me...

Blackhand... We're coming for you!

After an enjoyable week's break in Spain, it was back on the progress trail with Iron Maidens Heroic!

This fight is wonderfully set up for Elemental Shaman... 3 bosses all stacked up just waiting for super-powered Earthquake after super-powered Earthquake, the rest of the raid just doesn't stand a chance :-)

Even the movement, with a bit of good luck, can fit in nicely for us.  The duration of  Glyph of Spiritwalker's Focus is perfect for Rapid Fire and can help out a bit on the second (for us) boat. 
I am routinely sent up to the boat, generally so I can coordinate the group up there for more than any other reason.  I am quite glad because I think I would find trying to dps during the bomb phase quite frustrating.  And it adds a bit of variety to the fight.

It took a night, or slightly more, of wipes to get us into a position where we could start thinking about the kill. 

The bomb phase seemed to confuse a few people, the usual people who seem to be confused by any and every type of fire that we need to avoid.
I had only done it on lfr but it seemed easy enough, bit of Hokey Cokey and you're all good.  I know lfr is lfr but the mechanic is the same, it's just the penalty for failure that changes.

As the night went on, we either got better at the bomb phases or we moved those failing on to boat duty, finally beginning to reach the hectic burn phase at the end.

To AoE or not to AoE...
When one of the bosses reaches 20% HP, all hell breaks loose!
Damage ramps up dramatically and it's a race to kill one of them to relieve the pressure on the healers before people start dying.

We choose Marak to die first.  He does massive, mostly unavoidable, raid-wide damage so it makes sense to get rid of him as quickly as possible.

Here is the crux of the issue...
We ask our dps players to stop AoE/Cleave and just focus down Marak single target to get him down as quickly as possible.

The problem is... nobody wants to do it! :-)
All that potential dps lost by not cleaving, who can blame them?
It's all about Recount after all!

Our RL tells the raid to single target but some people just don't listen and beyond repeating the instruction to the whole raid again, he does nothing else. 

What can he do?

Should he start kicking people out of the raid?

I don't think that's the answer but there has to be some way to make these people understand, make them want to put the raid before their own dps. 
Is there a way?

The worst culprit is a combat rogue who point blank refuses to turn off Blade Flurry.
I don't know whether he doesn't believe that we need to single target, or just doesn't care, but Blade Flurry stays on in all possible cleave situations.

His refusal to go single target even made me question the need for it at all so I looked at the logs...

Marak has roughly 20M HP at 20% with our raid comp but, by the time we had killed him, we had done a total of 28M damage.  That's 8M damage on things we weren't supposed to be hitting at all.
Well, not 8M, as 2.5M was done to the turrets which were still the priority of the ranged players so 5.5M 'wasted' damage.  That's about 20 seconds he was alive for longer than necessary after allowing an arbitrary amount for passive cleave.

Did it make any difference though? 

Well, in that 20 seconds, Marak does 4M+ more damage so it's nothing to be sniffed at.  On a couple of occasions, we lost 3 or more people during that 20 seconds and then wiped.
On the third occasion... even more died but the rest of the raid managed to continue on to get the kill!

Iron Maidens down!  Only 2 more to go!

It still doesn't solve my dilemma though.  We killed the boss so was the rogue right to stick with Blade Flurry?
Personally, I think it was a riskier strategy, more in line with an overgeared farm boss than progress.

Should I even care?  I'm not the RL after all, I'm just another raider.

What would have happened if we all stuck to our AoE/Cleave?
I think we would still be running round avoiding bombs instead of looking at Blast Furnace