If anyone is interested in the domain just let me know so it doesn’t end up with one of those annoying domain-grabbing-thingies.

I’ll leave everything up here for a couple more weeks and then take the whole thing down.

Happy tanking!
Talldar

As usual, Veneritio is right in the comments. I was sure this worked on Gluth, but obviously I was wrong. Lessen learned: Do not post without really actually trying stuff once more, no matter how sure you are. Thanks Veneritio for the correction, sorry everyone else for any confusion caused.

There’s however one little detail the tooltip doesn’t mention: Not only is the maximum health raised, the padding is also filled with precious hp. So if you’re at 30,000/30,000 health and apply Commanding Shout, you’re at 32,255/32,255 health.

This is a healing potion. Instant. With no cooldown.

In a fight where your healthpool isn’t a problem, remove your own commanding shout. When things get close, reapply. When topped off again, remove. You have 1 healing potion. One soulstone. An infinite number of Commanding Shouts.

I first started to do this when we were working on Gluth. During phase 1 health isn’t an issue, just when he decimates the raid, those extra 2,255 health are very convenient to have.

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Thrall sits on his throne, left by himself with his guards, bored to miss out on all the fun in the outlands and northrend and ranting about the “good ol’ days”, when “this city was a breathing, eating, howling war machine built of the finest warriors under the red banner”.

The fine days, when Onyxia’s head was put up on a spear at the city entrance for all proud warriors to see and rejoice in the strength and unity this unstoppable army showed with pride. Invading alliance forces would be fought to the death and every single soldier would guard his leader, no matter how high the cost.

But things have changed ever since. The threats of Kalimdor are defeated and the heroes of the horde have moved on to fight stronger, more dreading enemies in the outlands. The impending doom those demons rained upon all life forced the arch-enemies from the horde and alliance to take a break from their neverending war and join forces, just as not to die. The eredar were willing to help ensure peace, and offered Shattrath as the base of operations for both factions.

Thrall, as a man of war, pride and glory, didn’t fancy this solution. But there is one thing he puts above victory. One thing he swore to ensure before anything else, and that is the survival and freedom of his people. The alliance must be defeated, but there is plenty of time for that later.

So, as long as it took to take out the threat of the outlands, the factions resigned to a more peaceful pace with each other. Finally, Kil’Jaeden was defeated and it seemed like things would return to their good, old, horde-fighting-alliance status. But evil isn’t sleeping. Arthas, the Lich King himself, returned with his scourge army and prepares a huge invasion in the cold mountains of Ice Crown.

Northrend. Once again the armies of the horde and alliance, the finest warriors of Azeroth, need to lay down their eternal struggle in order to, once and for all, get rid of one of their own who has turned to the dark side. And, once again, the arch-enemies are forced to live and fight side by side. Once again, much to their own and their leader’s dislike, they wander the same streets. The streets of Dalaran.

While every warrior, be he horde or alliance, only has one thing in mind: To kill Arthas and rid Azeroth of his terror, deep in their hearts they all still feel the hatred for their oldest enemies. The crimes, the killing, the betrayal – those things are not forgotten.

And some day, when there is no immediate threat, we will all get our revenge.

(End of rp-writing-experiment.)

Honestly, those shared capital cities are starting to annoy me. First of all they feel a lot more alliance-ish than horde-ish, both Shattrath and – especially – Dalaran. Second it’s just weird. I do not want to have walk by elves and dwarfs. I do not want to be forced to behave peaceful. In the next expansion, please, for the sake of people who are at least a tiny bit into lore, at least give the portals and/or trainers & auction houses to the faction-specific bases. I don’t even ask for two capital cities (yet that would be what I really, really prefer).

Just to not have a significant disadvantage to set your hearthstone to warsong hold. By the way, there comes an even better idea to mind: Why not have the next expansion use the old capitals again? I certainly wouldn’t mind returning to orgrimmar. Or, even better, give us a troll capital! Weee, troll capital!

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Tanking isn’t quite as dumbed down as I thought. As a dps I felt differences between better and not-so-good tanks.

Positioning

The better tanks did a great job on positioning. Positioning the boss, that is. With a competent tank I could just stand there and fire away. Lots of pain delivered. When there was repositioning of the boss to be done, the good tank either gets him in position so that dps do not have to move at all, or so they can conveniently and fast get to their new spot.

This not only is about repositioning the boss in range, but also not too close. More often than not I had to move back, which is even more annoying than moving forward or sideways.

I’d estimate that with really good positioning you can boost ranged dps by 5-10%, melee dps most likely even more. A boss that stands still will be hit for far more than a boss that’s moving around. Positioning counts, big time.

Threat generation

While I thought this is a total non-issue, playing a hunter of all threat monsters quickly made me realize it very much still is one. I’m usually in the top 3 dps of the raids I’m in, both 10 and 25, and I’m a bit proud of that. But threat is definitely an issue. Even being vigilance’d, and keeping misdirection on cooldown, with some tanks I’ll have to keep misdirection on cooldown the whole fight in addition to feign death.

With others, I can forget about misdirection and use those GCDs for more pain inflicting thingies. So, no, threat generation is not a thing of the past. If you have strong dps they will be up to you.

Vigilance

This ability really isn’t quite as straightforward as we thought. I’m often times being vigilanced in raids, because hunters generate a lot of threat. Yet I think sometimes someone else would probably benefit more.

Vigilancing a hunter turns vigilance into a one-way-ticket. Let me elaborate. There are two effects vigilance has:

1. it gives threat to the tank, making his job easier
2. it reduces threat from a dps, letting them go more crazy

Number 2 is not an issue for a hunter, because of feign death. If misdirection is used vigilance is useless for those attacks. With feign death a complete threat-reset is available multiple times throughout a fight. Sure, it’s one wasted GCD, but if your raid is chasing you on the meters, better you vigilance someone with no immediate threat reduction ability who would essentially have to sit a lot more than your hunter’s one GCD.

Trick question: What classes do not have viable threat reduction abilites? Answer

That’s it for now.

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I love it. Really do. It’s just awesome. It’s win-win all over the place. And it got me thinking. What if all the daily quests out there would be changed to a weekly system? I know that I for myself have found my “best return on time invested” daily quest hub, and that’s what I stick with. Because, after all, I’m not doing dailies because I love them so much. How about you? Anybody out there who loves their dailies? Somebody? No?

A change every once in a while would really be welcome. Also, it’s annoying to “miss out” on dailies every day you don’t play. So let’s run down a list of advantages vs. disadvantages of changing all daily quests to a weekly system, with the rewards scaled up appropriately:

Pros

• Flexibility
  I can pick a day or two to do “my weeklies”. Dedicated weekly-day, so to say. Like raid day. Which brings me to point #2:
• Saving time
  There’s no conflicts between raid day and gold farming. I can organize my week around my primary goals in the game and throw in weekly quests wherever they fit
• Variety
  Since people won’t be able to do the same quests for maximum profit, they’ll go out and try those other dailies. Thus people would see more content.
• More space
  I don’t know about your server, but my little-populated one is already having crowded argent tournament quest areas. Turning dailies into weeklies would spread the load over a couple days, thus giving us more room to breath.
• Less pressure
  I really don’t want to login every day to spend an hour on dailies, yet I really want to raid and keep my gear enchanted & gemmed. With the opportunity to focus the gold-grind on one or two days I could then lean back and enjoy the content with ease.
• A smack in the face of gold farmers?
  No I don’t know about gold farming tactics, but I would imagine daily quests are part of their routine. They bring the most profitable ones to perfection, do them in a couple minutes, and thus farm more gold than normal people, because they spend more time farming. With a weekly system everybody would, essentially, have access to the maximum of the 25 weekly quest’s rewards.

Cons

• More overcrowding
  I assume the quest hubs to be less crowded, but there’s a chance that with the increased rewards people will focus that much more on the “most profitable” quest hubs, thus crowding those even more.

I really can’t think of any more cons on this department, sorry, but I’d love to get some more opinions on the idea. What do you people think would happen, and would you welcome the change?

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“Does this count pieces that can be used for multiple sets when you change out the gem/enchant?  I’m still relatively new to the tank role and I have troubles recognizing some pieces as blk/eva/EH.  I have started to collect multiple items and gem/enchant them differently if I think they can be used in multiple sets but that is really starting to fill up my bags.  I’ve just started to collect tank pieces from Naxx gear and I have just about every piece of heroic instance/badge gear but have a hard time cataloging some pieces.”

And here’s my “grown-from-short-reply-to-philosophical-rant”-ish answer:

I’d say the problem is that there is no “absolute” in terms of what a piece of gear is. While for one person a new helmet might be a hell of an avoidance-upgrade, thus going into their avoidance set, for the next tank it could just as well be an upgrade to their EH-wardrobe.

It really depends on what you got.

After all, and after some experience the last couple runs, I really tend to think that we tanking folks just overdo the whole gearing thing. There’s so much room for improvement on the side of actual playing, doing the right things, using what you got appropriately.

1% more or less avoidance, 100 more or less health could, mathematically, make all the difference – but at the end of the day it’s not gonna be those 100 extra health that save your ass from being splattered, but the reaction of your healer, the nuke of your dps, the oh-shit-button that you saved for the right moment, or just pure good ol’ RNG-luck.

I guess by getting into tanking and realizing that it cannot be measured, or turned into numbers for our group mates to see, we tanks turn the other way and develop a deep affection for numbers ourselves, and brush the non-knowing off as “non-believers”. It’s quite the cult-thing, really.

Today we ran Ulduar normal mode. A green plate headpiece dropped on XT’s trash. It had +127 stamina, nothing else. I exchanged my fully gemmed & enchanted meta-socket-featuring Naxx25 helmet with it and, because we’ve been joking around, kept wearing it the whole run.

Quite frankly, it didn’t make a difference at all. Because encounters are not designed around “testing the tank”, they are designed to “test a raid”.

I have come to think that normal mode raiding really arrived at the point the game developers want it to be: If everyone makes the best possible use of their class from a basic ability and gameplay point of view, you can do content with gear from three tiers lower. Let’s face it: A group in full iLvL 187 blues that’s on top of their game could go out and clear Naxx25 every day. I’ve seen people with that kind of equip putting out damage higher than some decked-out T7,5 players.

The other way round: The better your gear, the less effort you have to put into playing. If someone takes their time and farms up all that badge- and heroic iLvL 200 gear and then heads into Naxx10 he can carry his weight by only playing his character out by half of it’s opportunities.

These days it’s the hard modes where gear becomes the significant factor stacked above player skills. Up until there my advice is: Take it easy. Have fun.

I’ll skip the usual blather that lengthens my posts and get right to the stuff I found working for me. Of course these are subject to personal style, yet following up on them always helped me to at least have a good time, if not a good run.

Be clear about your expectations

What kind of pug are you looking for? Do you crave to farm gear and badges? Is success and speed important? Are you concerned about people’s attitude? Ask yourself those questions and make an image about what you want today. Some days you’ll want to farm and don’t care if people yell around in teamspeak, call names and kick underperformers. You’ll probably look for that. Other days you might just want to enjoy running a raid, no matter how successful. Just be clear.

Don’t hurry

It is a PuG. If you’re lucky you’ll find yourself in the situation of being the last invite, so things are gonna start soon. But it’s more likely you’ll be somewhere inbetween, and it’s gonna take some more time to fill up that group. So don’t hurry. Stay where you are, keep doing what you do, just stick around with the raid. If you’re doing dailies talk to the guy that invited you. Tell him to count you in and just give you a short /w as the raid fills up. If that’s already a problem for him you might not want to join his run anyways.

Classify the run

There’s a lot of pugs. There’s real pugs where one guy starts inviting people and just wants to fill up. There’s guild runs who fill in those 3-5 people they couldn’t bring themselves. There’s regular groups of mixed guilds who do that run every week. It might be an alt-raid, or a small guild who is still progressing. If in doubt what you’re dealing with, just ask. The more random people are invited the more unstable and slow the raid can get.

Check people

The armory is your friend. You can at least check healer and tank gear. But first and foremost you can check the raid leader. His gear. His achievements. His guild. The character might be an alt, so a look at the guild doesn’t hurt. If this guy’s main is ulduar 25 equipped there’s a good chance he’ll know exactly what to do. If it’s a main from a 7-man-guild with mostly dungeon blues things could get a little more rough.

Ask friends and guildies

Ask them about the people. They might know some of the guys you run with. They might know their guilds. They could help you get a more clear picture. Then, try to get friends and guildies on board. However that run will turn out, a brother in mind always makes it more fun (or more bareable).

Get a feeling

The most important time to me is the when the raid fills up. Watch chat closely and you’ll be able to figure out a lot of things.

• How do people talk to each other, what about manners?
• How do they talk about potential invites?
• Are friends and guildies being considered, is the raid leader taking suggestions?
• Is the leader confident and knows what he’s doing or does he not have a clue?
• Are they thinking about raid composition, beyond “x tanks x healers”?
• Are they taking specific encounters into consideration?

A 10-man Naxx pug that tries to bring in at least 3 ranged dps, two different healing classes, no more than 2 of each class and talks about their recent Kel’Thuzad kills has more chances to be successful than a pug that just stacks 10 people, having 5 melee dps, 2 same-class-healers, and an overall score of 6 deathknights. Not only is this group gonna loose valuable synergetic effects, they probably just care about “getting in fast”. Plus, there’s loot drama written all over it, too.

Be prepared, and offer help

If you are a cook or an alchemist, why not ask around if someone needs stuff? Offer your professions. Not only are you bringing something to the raid even before it started, you might as well make some good tip out of that. Tell people to bring the materials, and you’ll craft stuff right there. On the other hand, come prepared yourself. Have enough buff reagents on you. Carry buff food, if you’re not outgearing the place. Come repaired. If everyone else seems reasonable, you should do your best, too.

Get questions out of the way before the raid starts

First and foremost: If you want any drops, ask about the loot rules. There’s plenty of various systems out there, and they might use one you’re not familiar with. If there’s special items (like recipes, the key off Sapphiron, T-tokens) you’re interested in check how the run is gonna handle them. Loot drama is, in my book, an embarassing thing to happen in a group of adults, but still it’s there. Try to avoid that.

Something people hardly ever ask about a pug is the limits, and time.

• Are they gonna have a time limit?
• A wipe limit?
• A certain amount of bosses / a certain boss they want to get to?
• Is it “open-end”?
• How about breaks, afks?
• Is everyone gonna stick around, or are there people who already know they’ll have to leave in an hour?

Start off patiently

Finally, the raid starts. Now is the most important part for morale, the first couple fights, the first boss attempt. Be patient here. Most of these people very likely never played together, and have no idea how the others play. There might be different tactics mixing up, people who never were in that raid before crashing on people who only want to get through fast. There’s a good chance that within the first 10-20 minutes some people will leave, or be asked to leave. Don’t get discouraged, this is usually a very good thing, because it sorts out those with unmatching expectations or insufficient performance. This doesn’t necessarily strenghten the raid, but it’ll smooth it out.

Do not, ever, be the back seat driver

Nothing’s more confusing than different tactics mixed together. It’s horrible. If there’s a raid leader who has tactics, follow them. Yours might be better, but there’s a good chance there are more people with more tactics they also think are better. And then there’s some poor fool who doesn’t know the fight at all and is being bombarded with all those suggestions.

Stick to one tactic. Whoever explains it, support it. Help shutting up other back seat drivers. Back seat driving is bad. You might even learn something new, or at least that something doesn’t work. After a wipe or two you could suggest trying a different approach. Just don’t be pushy, and don’t try to force your own solution down people’s throats – just whisper the leader, don’t make him loose his face by publicly stating that “his approach sucks”. Usually, however, pretty much every tactic will work eventually if the group isn’t a complete mess, so just stick with it and brush the wipes off.

Keep a good mood

This actually might be the most important thing here. Remember that this is a game you and the people around you  are playing, and you do that to have fun. So, however the run goes, as long as it’s worth sticking around you should keep a good mood. Joke around. Use those vanity pets and holiday-items, turn yourself into a snowman or a bunny. It is stupid. It helps.

About dropping out

The starting phase is your “feel free to leave” window. The more bosses die, the harder it will get to find someone replacing you. As you start to feel that this just isn’t your run you should start to prepare your dropout. No matter when it happens, follow some basic rules:

• Do it nicely.
• Do it politely.
• Tell people that you’re thinking of leaving and are looking for a replacement.
• Then do look for a replacement, and only as one has been found, leave.

Give the raid a chance to convince you to stay, you’ll be surprised by the effect a polite dropout-announcement can change things when there are decent people in the raid. Also, be clear about your reasons for leaving.

• “Guys, I’m sorry, this raid’s chat is more rude and offensive than I’m used to, I really don’t feel like sticking around for much longer.”
• “Guys, I’m sorry, the overall dps of this raid is way below what I’m used to, and I’ll not have any fun in this run.”
• “Guys, I’m sorry, but obviously I can’t bring the performance to this run that I should be bringing.”
• “Guys, I’m sorry, my son just fell down the stairs.”

Whatever it is, be clear, be polite, be neutral and don’t let yourself in on any flame war. If someone starts to get at you just brush it off. You’ll be out there soon enough, and they can have their flame wars without you.

One more thing: Never, ever, ever, ever drop out after you got your item. I know it’s tempting – that one piece you were there for finally dropped. You’re done here. Nothing more easy to fake a disconnect, or just plain leave. Don’t do it. This is a thing people will remember, and you’ll not be part of any further pugs they organize. Don’t even to it in a shitty run.

With a shitty dropout you’ll always prove that you’re nothing better than the raid you just left for it’s lack of what you think are the standards.

Final words

After all, pugs are always unpredictable. You can get all the good signs and end up with a wipefest after the first boss, just to be ID’d. Or you can already see things crumble, and then breeze through faster than you thought possible. Whatever happens, don’t take it too seriously. It’s nothing but a raid you don’t really need to do, so relax and enjoy the ride.

Good pugging, everyone!

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I’m sitting here at work, outside sun is shining, it’s 25° celsius. My brain goes long ways in these moments, and it just so happened that I had that crazy idea about revamping how a tank does it’s job.

See, I’ve only really played my tank, so there wasn’t much to compare tanking to. Now I’m at 78 with my hunter and I realize that being a damage dealer is so much more measurable. I look at my DPS and the overall damage done, and see how well I perform. Every action I take, every ability I use contributes to that performance.

Every gear upgrade can be translated into DPS. It’s like heaven.

In my last post I ranted about how boring tanking became, and I now realize that this is to a certain degree due to the fact that it’s not really measurable and can’t quite be controlled. The top DPS is there, on the meters. But no one can tell if you “tanked better” or “tanked worse” than the other guy. This is due to the duality of tanking and the massive part the RNG plays. Your passive job is to stay alive, by using abilities and gear. Your active job is to generate threat. The first one is heavily RNG-dependant, as everyone who died of an unlucky streak of hits painfully knows.

And then, both jobs are heavily influenced by other people.

If your healers are on top of their game, your passive job becomes insignificant. They will keep you alive, you don’t have to worry about it. If your DPS are mindful and you’re not a complete failure on what buttons to press, then your active job also becomes increasingly meaningless.

Where we end up is current normal-mode tanking: Stand there and move out of stuff. You’ll be kept alive by the healers, and there’s really no need to worry about threat. Thus it doesn’t matter how good of a tank you are, no one will recognize. No one can recognize. All that’s left for you to do is movement, and that’s neither class- nor gear-depandant.

So how about something different?

Spellbook, Protection:

• Dodge (15 rage, 10 sec. Cooldown, off the GCD)
  You dodge the next attack and get behind your enemy. He cannot parry or dodge your next attack and cannot attack you for 2 seconds. This ability generates extra threat.
• Parry (5 rage, 6 sec. Cooldown, off the GCD)
  You parry the next attack. This ability generates extra threat.
• Block (5 rage, 2 sec. Cooldown, off the GCD)
  You block the next attack, reducing the damage it deals by your Shield Block Value. Your next attack has a 15% extra chance to crit. Reduces the cooldown of Dodge by 0.5 seconds. This ability generates extra threat.

Then get rid of dodge rating. Get rid of parry rating. Get rid of block rating. Let SBV scale off strength entirely, and make it a factor 3 or 4. Make the success of all three defensive abilites work like hit rating, and let them scale off defense rating, thus making defense rating more straigthforward and the one defensive stat to cap. Crit immunity belongs deep in a tank’s talent tree. Thus there wouldn’t be that “hard edge” that is imperative right now, but much more a steady curve of improving tanking by capping out those abilities.

What would that mean?

All three abilites could come from talents. Or have a much higher base cooldown (let’s say 3 times as much), and then be brought down to “usable” by talents and glyphs.

Tanking would be a lot mor active. You’d have to generate threat by doing damage and using your regular abilites as ever, but you’ll have to work for your avoidance. It would take the RNG component out and all of a sudden tanking would become measurable and more controllable. You can decide if you want to dodge, or if you don’t have to. You can decide to dodge the big hits, parry the normal ones, and just block the weak attacks.

Would it make tanking harder? Damn sure, it would. You’d basically add three abilties to our already stuffed action bars and have us worry about offensive and defensive abilites. As a tank you would have to react fast and do the right thing at the right time. Beyond moving out of stuff.

It would change tanking completely. We could be doing a lot more damage, because we wouldn’t need to gear entirely for defensive stats. Haste could become an important tank rating for a change, and the whole 2-handed tanking would start to make at least some sense, eventually.

I know I would love to tank like that. How about you?

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I think this is due to two reasons: First off, tanking has been trivialized. No way around that. Back in Kara at level 70 you could tell from the first couple pulls if a tank knew what he was doing, or not so much. There were three levels of tanks: Great tanks, good tanks and bad tanks. The latter were either learning or just not up to their game, and wipes or chaos was what you got.

Good tanks were just that; good. You would get through and things would work. Bosses would die. Trash would be okay. And then there were good tanks. They had done their homework, made life easier for everyone and would make for a smooth and fast-paced, succesful run. The tank(s) was/were a very important part of “how the raid goes”, and a tank’s performance made a big difference.

Now, with all sorts of tanking WotLK-ified, really pretty much anyone can tank. You will recognize the difference between a bad tank and a not-bad tank by their movement on certain fights and by how often they loose aggro on 3+ trash pulls, but that’s that. There’s only very few encounters where tanks need real skill. Most fights these days for a tank are no more than a check on gear and if they can press their cooldown-buttons at the right time.

With EH triumphing avoidance and a lack of skill required due to spike dmg vs. cooldown encounter design, plus threat being a non-issue (if you’re not working on those hard modes) really every jack and joe with proper gear can tank.

And this is why DKs are so much in favor these days. They do have large health pools. They do have obvious and plenty cooldowns. They do have awesome AoE tanking capabilities. There’s not much to measure beyond staying alive and the occasional kiting, so honestly: What’s the point about min/maxing?

Most fights do not fail due to tank failure. Most fights either fail due to underperforming healers (their job with the whole spike damage design is even less forgiving and more depressing than ever) or a lack of dps. As far as I’m concerned these days it’s better to have the best players, the min/maxers, the dedicated, play a damage dealing or healing role and put anyone in proper gear on the tanking spot.

Naxxramas is a bit more challenging tank-wise, but still mostly tank & spank. Where’s a Moroes-like encounter where a good tank can shine? Where’s a Maiden-like encounter where that avoidance set we love to build comes in handy? How about a Netherspite, where tanks have to react quickly and be on their spot? Blizzard has taken a lot of challenges out of tanking, and thus taken away a lot of possibilities to make encounters more interesting. Tanking Akil’Zons adds in Zul’Aman was challenging, especially as a warrior or druid. That wouldn’t be the case now. Spike damage and moving out of stuff are, quite frankly, the only things left to throw at a tank.

Offtanking offers some challenge. Taking care of the lightning-guy at the iron council is the one thing I look forward to in Ulduar. Tanking the adds on Emalon is something where you can shine if you have the “picking up the new spawn” down. Offtanking XT’s robots, I’m all in. Gothik’s adds were somewhat interesting when we moved in freshly, but have lost their appeal with overgearing them. Razorscale’s most fun part are the add phases, not the boss. But that’s about all the fun tanking offers in my book these days. Heck, even some of the 5-man bosses are more demanding than Ulduar-tanking. To pin it down I’d go as far as to say most encounters are designed around a Razuvious-theme: Stand there and manage two cooldowns. Job done.

I can see the design idea behind it, really. Tanks were in lack. Now we have easy-mode tanking mechanics, easy-mode tanking encounters and another tanking class to begin with. The results? A serious lack of healers. I think the model of Tank – DamageDealer – Healer is getting out of fashion. People don’t like being stuck at a role, and more and more healers and tanks decide to just go DD, because their job – for the most part – sucks.

Tanking once was an awesome thing to do. Now it’s no more than taking damage. It makes me want to cry – not that I’m not the most important guy in the raid, but because I can hardly make a difference anymore.

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We are working our way through Ulduar (10) these days, currently the keepers are where we stand. Hodir is pretty much farm after three consecutive kills, but that’s as far as we got. We had two tries on Freya, but our time is limited (3-4h, 1 night a week), so as we clear out all the other stuff time is dripping, and usually for the last 20 minutes we’ll not start a new boss.

Last week we wanted to give it a more straightforward shot: Skip all the optional bosses and bang our heads against Freya. The plan was a focused speed-clear of the required stuff and then working on Freya for five intense tries. Needless to say, things didn’t go so smoothly.

We had deaths on every boss fight. We wiped on Kologarn (which, after the last patch, is quite embarassing) and we wiped on Auriaya twice. Motivation was down to a knee-level and so we decided to not start Freya-attempts, but instead go back and kill the easy bosses.

Razorscale and Ignis were the usual one-shots, but – quite frankly – not without deaths. Which is annoying and tells a lot about the mood that started spreading. It wasn’t for particular faults or a bad attitude, it just wasn’t a “good night”, some people were in for the first time at all, some for the first time with us (we’ve had the luck to pick up two more healers lately).

But then things changed.

We proceeded to the iron council which, in my opinion, is a quite intense fight. Not so much for particular difficulty, but it’s an endurance-test on all terms. Until the first boss is down healing and dispelling is absolutely crucial, positioning is an issue and it’s a race against time. I figured that, regarding how the evenening had been going, we would need some attempts, probably not even making it eventually.

But the kill was clean.

We had our fury warrior die on the very last arcane explosion after he lived through the two others (which also hit him, and him alone, all jokes on him, haha), but other than that the execution of the fight was flawless.

With that kill in our heads we went on to Hodir. There were only 10 minutes left on the planned schedule, but using ready-checks we did 4 tries until Hodir went down, with no one wanting to quit. Motivation skyrocketed. Mood was good. People started to fool around again.

What to take away from that

If you happen to work on a particular boss, there are skippable encounters on the way and you want your raid to be psyched, I suggest you clear the way and then kill other bosses until you get that flawless kill. Use the easy encounters, it really doesn’t matter, but get people into a solid and constructive mood.

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