Feng the Accursed - Tactics

We beat this boss last weekend, and below is what we learned throughout the fight.

Composition:
- 2 tanks
- 3 healers
- 2 melee
- 3 ranged

We used the strategy guide from Icy Veins. Their guides are generally pretty damn good, but I can totally imagine that people would like a visual indication of where to stand that is not moving and flashing all about like the videos.

If you do like a video I can advise the video guides from Fatboss. I generally find those fairly clear :)

Phase 1.

Tips:

- Stack up properly in the center to make it easier on the healers, epicenter does a load of damage and heals have a hard enough job as it is. 

- Do not attempt to cast the nullification barrier on the ranged. This may work for some teams, it caused us only a lot of trouble because the boss would move along with the tank. 

- Make sure that melee can be under the barrier

- This is a tank fight, if your tanks are not good enough....good luck. 

Tips:
- Create a weakaura for the Wildfire Spark
- If you do not want to use weakauras, turn on your chatbubbles. DBM will make you say that you're affected and a chatbubble can function as a weakaura
- If you have really high dps you may be able to get the boss to the next phase before he gets to his 4th draw flame, you then want to use the nullification barrier on the 1st and 3rd draw flame.
- Use heroism in this phase, especially when starting on this fight. This phase is the hardest and you will wipe on it a couple of times. We used heroism here, and the first time we got out of this phase into the 3rd phase we wiped, but the second time we got into the 3rd phase we also killed him. Phase 2 is definitely the hardest.

Tips:
- Use any movement speedups to get to the boss faster when he does arcane velocity
- Do NOT overshoot the boss (roll did exactly that for me >_<)
- If you can save at least 1 big raid cooldown for this phase


If any of the more experienced raiders have tips to add please feel free to do so :)

Voice of an Angel - Cranius

I have been a fan of Cranius for a while already. Now I am someone who is really, really bad at following stuff, and I seem to notice stuff last sometimes, as I indicated in an earlier post already.

But I still wanted to point this one out to my readers. Such a beautiful, warm voice. And Legs did a brilliant job as well with the video that comes with the song. A very, very good team those two.

Skiving off from WoW

Have you ever felt guilty about not playing? 

Maybe an odd question, but it's these sort of questions I ask myself at times to evaluate my game behaviour. 

Let me explain how I got to this one.

Every second wednesday my parents watch our doggies during the day (we have two adoring bratling Cavaliers), and after work we then have diner with them. I personally find this a really pleasant arrangement, because it means that I get to sit down with my parents at least every other week, and as an extra-added bonus we don't have to cook, nor clean up after cooking. 

Anyways, we had a really pleasant time with good food, and good company, and it ended up being about 8.30PM that we were actually home again. Not all that late yet, but since I get up earlyish for work I try to be in bed before 11PM. So we had about 2,5 hours before bedtime....

...I knew I should log in and try to get some more valor points so that I could go get my belt this week before raiding...

...I knew I should log in and do my farm, and some dailies...

...I knew I should really create some flasks for raiding, and in order to that as efficiently as possible I should really spend the time to level my elixir master in alchemy...

But I was completely not looking forward to all the 'Chores' I still had to do in the game, so instead I hung in front of the TV and watched some series about hurricanes. 

It felt somewhat bad, I felt somewhat guilty.

Not only because it feels like I should want to play the game, I mean the expansion is only a few weeks old and already I am not feeling like logging on. But also because I felt like I should really take my responsibility as a raidleader and get my shit done. 

Problem is that I dread even more logging on tonight, because my list of tasks has not become shorter, but my time to do it in has. And that means I'm setting myself up for failure. Which means that I might be badly (or in my eyes badly) prepared for raid this weekend. 

I did not do everything I could reasonably do at least...or did I?

I am trying to convince myself that it's a game and that it should stay fun, but I find myself wondering when the fun is going to happen. 

Current WoW Feeling:

Shy's MistWeaver Monk Stat Priority

I was reading the mistweaver guide at wowinsider and I came to the conclusion that I should review the stat priority I posted a few posts ago.

So for my Mistweaver I will be going with:

Spirit up the wazoo > 8.32% haste > Mastery > Crit > Int

• Spirit because I have always been, and probably will always be, a thirsty healer. 
• 8.32% haste because the 5% haste buff is not always available, and haste is always useful, though not as useful beyond the extra tick
• Mastery because I do have a good raid team normally, and they will stand in little green orbs
• Crit because double healing numbers are nomnomNOM
• Then int because...well, bigger heals are nice and all, but a primary stat is way more expensive than a secondary stat and it doesn't do anything for my manapool anymore anyways. 

The other thing I realized when reading this guide is that I should jab more, jab all the time and constantly. It gives the nummy chi's to spend on heals without having to spend mana. 

I also have to set up some weakauras:

• One that shows me when my Serpent's Zeal buff is about to run out. 
• One that reminds me to cast Renewing Mist on cooldown (I didn't have to deal with that sort of stuff as a priest)
• One that tracks when I need to explode my Zen Sphere because, unlike the writer of the wowinsider guide, I do like this talent. I find this really really pleasant in stacked up groups, I cast it on a rogue in the melee and make it explode when it's close to expiration, while I keep my renewing mist travelling around in the ranged with the glyph for example. And I love being able to set it up before hand. 
• One that alerts me that Grapple Weapon is available again, if it goes off it increases healing after all

Things I should explore and play with:

• Xuen - I love the tiger in the dps spec, such a gorgeous pet to have around. So I really will have to try out how well it does for a healer. 
• Glyph of Surging Mist - I've been avoiding this glyph so far, but it seems that none of the major glyphs is really something I want in my playstyle so maybe this is an option. 

Current WoW Feeling:

When you just don't have the people...

Within my guild we have 2 groups of 10mans. This has been like that for quite a while already, in fact we still name them after the names they had when they were formed while raiding Karazhan. (though we used to have 3 groups back then).

One group raids during the week, and the other raids in the weekend (my group). Like a lot of guilds we ran into heavier weather during Cataclysm and a lot of people left. And not only due to Cataclysm, but sometimes personal situations just change. Then some of the people from my group shifted to the week group because the times fit better in their schedule, and now...yeah now my group is short people.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am NOT trying to get people to apply for my guild through here at all. We have an application process where you need a sponsor, and this sponsor needs to have known you for a while already before they can sponsor you into the guild.

This application process is there for very good reasons, and has worked quite well for a looong time already. My guild has a brilliant atmosphere, and we like to keep it that way.

This does however bring problems with it. Because when you lose people, it is hard to fill up the raid again. And my raid group is not just 1 person short...no we could easily add 3 people to our roster.

I've been breaking my head over trying to find a way to fill the gap, but in the mean time the only way to actually raid is with pugs.

Now, I am the first to admit that there is absolutely nothing wrong with recruiting some pugs for your raid. After all, I did lead a 25man pug raid on sundays for about 2 years, and quite a few people of this pug raid became guildies. But bringing pugs does bring issues.

At the least they are not in tune with the rest of the group. Everybody is new to them, and while they can be good, playing with new people is always harder.

Then there are those people who are pretty good, but halfway through your raid all of a sudden have their own guild calling for them. The raid gets disrupted, at best you can find someone to replace this person fairly quickly, at worst you can call the raid and continue some other time.

And then of course there is the possibility of getting an absolute newb for a player. People who have all the best intentions, and maybe they even have the potential to be good, but they just haven't got a clue what they're doing. Every single detail has to be explained to them, while everybody is sighing in guild chat.

But worst is when you get the 'aso pug'. The pug who thinks that they are better than your group and they are a godsend and by their holy presence allow the world to keep turning. Quite often when you review logs these are the people who feel that they 'deserve' to stand in shit while the healers just have to 'pick up the slack'.

In the end none of it is ideal, but not wanting to recruit bodies, just for the bodies, I don't see other solutions on the short term.

Luckily we might have some sort of solution coming up, but until then I guess I'll just be sighing quietly every time I get up at 5 am to try and find pugs to fill up the raid.