[3.3.2] New Icecrown Citadel Weekly Raids (Weeklies?)

I was excited to see some new weekly raids, so I went ahead and looked them up to see what was in store. Of course, I stopped by Wowhead's nifty 3.3.2 page. While it said very little about it, I was able to find the information I sought, by looking up the reward, a Sack of Frosty Treasures. From there, you can investigate what each quest requires.

Frosty Treasures?

Well, the obvious first question is - what's in the bag?! Based upon feedback thus far, you can get the following:

The Contents

• 5 Emblems of Frost
• Gold (so far, the least I have seen reported is 5 and the most is 50)
• 350 Reputation with the Ashen Verdict
  
• [Random] Epic gems
• [Random] BoE trash drops, e.g., Wodin's Lucky Necklace
  

Getting the Quest
Unlike the other raid weeklies, there are different NPCs roaming about Icecrown Citadel (ICC) that will provide you the quest. It appears that there are 10- and 25-man versions, so perhaps you can do this twice a week, provided you have the raid to do it.

Some of These Quests Are Not Like the Others
Brace yourself, they are not all easy. I know the other raid weeklies have been pushovers, but some of the ICC ones may be beyond your guild's progression. They range from killing a miniboss to downing multiple ICC bosses without wipes.

1. Blood Quickening

This one is akin to the prisoner quest in Heroic Shattered Halls, where you had to stop the executioner from killing his prisoners by pulling him in a certain time window; and, of course, not unlike the Baron run of WoW 1.0.

Well, in this case, you have to save someone, Infiltrator Minchar, from being food for Blood-Queen Lana'thel. The quest giver will be right outside the Crimson Halls. Once you begin pulling trash there, a 30-minute time will start (it used to be 20). The current information is that you just need to pull the Blood Queen before the timer runs out; if the time expires during the fight, you can still finish the quest successfully.

2. Deprogramming

What good would a cult be if you didn't have to rescue someone and deprogram them? This one should be reasonably feasible, but it will require some discipline on the part of your raid, because it seems that the only hard part is making sure you don't accidentally kill him.

Darnavan is the guy you are trying to save. He is an Arms Warrior, and can Bladestorm, Charge/Intercept, and Mortal Strike. He will spawn as one of the cultists, but he will look distinctly different; I guess they didn't have anything in his size.

There are few ways to deal with him:

• Have a regular Tank hold onto him; he will sunder his Tank, but is not fatal. If this Tank is also on the boss, it could become tedious for the healers when he used Bladestorm or Whirlwind.
  
• Have a Tank pet hold onto him. According to Wowhead, this is feasible with a Tank pet. Just Tank him off to the side and have the Healers keep an eye out for the pet.
• Rooting him. While he is immune to just about every other CC, he seems to be rootable. However, it is reported that he can break out of roots with Bladestorm (of course), so be ready to pick him up.
  

3. Residue Rendezvous

On the surface, this looks a little hard. You need ONE person with the quest to get a debuff from both Festergut's cloud (easy) AND Rotface's slime spray (not necessarily as easy). Oh, and if you die, the debuffs go away, and they only last 30 minutes.

So, if you can kill Rotface and Festergut without wipes and get back to the quest giver in under 30 minutes, you will have no problem. For many guilds, that will be a problem.

However, the quest is to get the two residues, not kill the bosses. So...what can one do to accomplish this in a tricky fashion? Well...

First, the good news - only one person needs to turn it in for the whole raid to get credit. Thankfully, the Blizzard Developers realize that if people do their job well, many will not get Rotface's debuff.

No matter what you do, you need someone that has been spit on. So, if you can down Rotface, I would down him first; I feel that Festergut is either impossible (due to inadequate DPS) or easier than Rotface (because it does not test everyone in the raid as heavily as Rotface). In the process, you can have your Rogues and Hunters tagged as extra insurance.

Now, you need your Rogues and Hunters to get the other buff. Not really a problem. If things go south do your best to try and hold out and wipe when he has fully inhaled the blight. If you wipe when the room is clear of the blight, your Rogues and Hunters may be able to drop out of combat with their buffs still up. If the blight is still up, there is a great risk that your Rogue/Hunter will get hit by damage and either be pulled into combat or killed.

In fact, we did that last night. It worked out surprisingly well, actually, because at that point Festergut is hitting like a ton of bricks. We lost our Tanks (we were light on healing last night) and quickly called a wipe. Everyone managed to get dead or Vanish before the blight was spewed back out, and we got our credit!

Now, there is another trick I have read and it pretty much sounds like an exploit to me, so I will describe it only to illustrate what you should NOT do. It's simple - a Warlock places a Teleporter outside Festergut's door and ports out when he has both debuffs (unless his raid can easily down Festergut, of course; but then why would you worry about this anyway?). I am pretty sure that Blizzard closes that door in his room for a reason and they do not intend for people to port out. So, I recommend you don't do it.

Additional note: anything that makes you immune will wipe the buff, so no tricks with Divine Intervention.

4. Respite for a Tormented Soul

Another quest that is a little deeper into the content. For this one you have to be able to kill Sindragosa. From comments so far, it sounds like a pain. Here's my current understanding from what I have read:

• The channel has to happen while she is at 20% or less health
• Anyone can channel
• The channel begins a stacking debuff that lasts only a few seconds
• You want to get her to 30 stacks

On the one hand it's not as hard as it could be. You don't need one person to stand still and channel for 30 seconds straight. You also don't need everyone to do that. However, given the various mechanics of the fight, it can still be a pain and if you can't afford to give up one of your raiders to play around with channeling stuff, this could be very difficult.

5. Securing the Ramparts

Hooray! A truly easy one! You do need to be able to down Lady Deathwhisper to reach the Rampart of Skulls, but once you get there, you just have to down a miniboss. Yay!

Basically, he will be on the opposite side of the rampart. Just clear your way to the Frostwyrm you usually kill, kill him, and then keep going around the Rampart (don't worry, the gunship will wait). Kill the Rotting Frost Giant and win!

Since you get this quest from your own faction folks, there are twice as many listings for this quest (Horde + Alliance) x (10-man + 25-man), but you can still only do one 10-man and one 25-man...unless maybe you did a faction change...hmm...how much money would 10 more Emblems of Frost be? ;)

Have fun with the weeklies, I know I will!

[3.3] The Maturation of a Guild

Our guild, Grim Legion (Kirin Tor), has been going strong for over three years now. We are an end-game guild that pushes 25-man progression raiding content without adopting a hardcore raiding schedule/attitude (although we do expect folks to "put on their game face" for the raids).

We have not fractured, disbanded, reformed, etc. in that time. From what I have seen, that seems to be somewhat miraculous.

In my recruitment message I say that we're not hardcore and we're not casual, we're just right. Well, that's a tough line to walk and much easier said than done. Most applicants in the past, deep down, have actually been purely hardcore or casual and saw what they wanted to see in our policies. What many of them miss is that we are committed to that median policy and will not tolerate the extremes.

Hundreds have come and gone in those three years.

Now, most of those hundreds were from an earlier time in our guild, a time when the filter on applicants was nigh nonexistent and policies were applied a little too haphazardly; things that resulted in lots of time spent putting out fires or containing drama.

A little under a year ago, the core triumvirate that founded the guild became a duo - myself and my wife. Since then, we have worked very hard to tighten up our focus on this median. We have formalized our policies to facilitate the clean and objective removal of folks that are too casual as well as those that are too hard core. A significant part of this has been a greater engagement and empowerment of our fellow officers; to my wife and me, the ideal role of officer means sharing BOTH the responsibility and authority; all too often we see guilds that focus too much on one or the other and the officers are more prone to being either slaves to the guild or members with too much power.

On the applicant side of the equation, I have worked hard to refine our application. It has gotten longer and more detailed over time, but it does an increasingly better job of identifying the folks that will be a good match. It discourages the lazy/impatient and helps clarify our policies to discourage those that are too hardcore or casual for us. We have also formalized our interview process and tightened up our ranking procedures to support better recruits and a stronger social integration of new recruits.

And it looks like it's really paying off. ICC is the first time that we have felt truly ready as a guild for the new content and we are pleased with our ability to conquer it. Sure, we did not have 100% full strength raiders; we had a few undergeared/new folks, and many that were simply geared for ICC as opposed to well-geared or overgeared, and the holidays hurt attendance, but we succeeded in spite of it. And we downed Lady Deathwhisper before the nerf! :)

As an illustration, consider the current content. At the moment, we dedicate two nights to ICC, 3 hours each night, for a total of 6 hours a week. The Plagueworks (the second region of ICC) opened two weeks ago. We sailed through the Lower Spire, killed the trash leading to the first boss in Plagueworks, and managed to squeeze in one attempt on Rotface-25.

The second week, we hammered through the Lower Spire and managed to get thirteen attempts on Rotface-25, with obvious, if irregular, improvement throughout the night as our people learned how to deal with their oozes.

We have a few guilds on our server that are decidedly farther into the "hardcore" camp and have downed Putricide-25. Sure, we wish we had also downed him, but we also need to accept the reality that having a schedule that slower progression is the price we pay for our median choice. You can't eat your cake and have it too.

We only raid 6 hours in ICC per week; 3 hours in VoA, ToC, etc.; and a completely optional ICC-10 night. We can have active social lives and our schedule works well for folks with jobs and classes during the day. We have a balance of joking around and being serious. In a nutshell, our guild activity is sustainable. Casual enough that real life does not have to take a backseat, but hardcore enough that we make meaningful progress.

All of this is just context for the fact that only now does it feel like we are really maturing fully into the vision of this semi-hardcore guild. It's taken a year to shake out the membership and recruit and train new folks to thrive in this more focused vision, but it's really starting to bear fruit and I find myself anticipating Cataclysm even more.

But the moral of the story is intended to be that realizing a vision for a 25-man guild takes more than just a vision and it takes more than one, two, or three people. It takes time, patience, and the commitment of many people. More importantly, I think it takes the humility and patience to listen to your officers (and prod them for opinions) and fully entertain their ideas. If you take that path, then at the end of the road, you find you have arrived at a guild that has built itself and everyone can take pride in it.

[3.3] Showing HTML Code in a Blogger Post

Heya! If you use Blogger, you probably already know that sometimes it is too smart for it's own good. HTML code is an excellent example. If you type out "<head>" in a post, it will be gobbled up by the HTML gremlin, rather than display in your post.

I found this out when I was creating my last post to inform you what code to include in your Blogger page to render Wowhead tooltips.

Well, how can we get around that?

I have seen two approaches.

Using <textarea>

This is very simplistic, but quick. You simply wrap your code with <textarea> and </textarea>, like so:

<span style="font-weight: bold;">Blah</span>

Notice how the code is not rendered automagically now? However, it's a bit hard on the eyes, because if I just put some breaks in there, it will get rendered as HTML code, which confuses things.

So, I don't like this method that much.

Using Character Entity Definitions

HTML has various funky definitions for characters that involve an ampersand (&), some letters, and a semicolon. We can use those to define our brackets so that Blogger will not process them as code delimiters.

• & + lt + ; gives us <
• & + gt + ; gives us <

I can't render this properly without putting some spaces, so, be sure and chop out the spaces when you try this. When we type out (remove the spaces in practice):

& lt;head& gt;

we get:

<head>

However, that can be tedious if you have multiple lines of code. So you have some options to make that easier.

1. Copy your code into Notepad (or some other simple text editor) and replace all of the angled brackets with the character entity code.
2. Use this nifty parser on the Blogcrowds site. The parser will also convert other special characters, such as single quote marks; even though that does not seem to be necessary to accomplish the above, it does not seem to hurt either.

I hope you find this as helpful as I did.

[3.3] "Powered by Wowhead" (Enabling WoW Head Tooltips)

After being prodded by a guildie to enable our forum to display Wowhead Tooltips when folks mouseover Wowhead links, I went ahead and figured out how to set it up on this blog.

It's pretty simple actually.

1. Head on over to you Dashboard.
2. Go to the "Layout" tab and choose "Edit HTML".
3. Scroll down in the code until you see "".
4. Copy and paste the script from the Powered by Wowhead page just above "</head>"[feel free to add some blank lines to delineate it from the other code.]
5. Done!

For extra points, you can add in comments like so (note: this is using the script that is correct TODAY):

<!-- WoWHead Mouseover-Tooltips -->
<script src='http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js'>
</script>
<!-- /WoWHead Mouseover-Tooltips -->

It's not necessary, but it's good form.

And now, a sample link:

Carrot on a Stick

I feel so empowered. ;)

[3.3] Checking In On Moonkin

We have a new Moonkin in our guild. Not only new to the guild, but new to being a Moonkin. So, as a good officer Druid type, I thought it wise to get an update on the state of the art for Moonkin.

Spell Rotation/Priority

We are using the same "twisting" spell rotation that appeared in 3.2.

1. Improved Faerie Fire [Could skip if you are certain that a Feral Druid and Shadow Priest will keep Faerie Fire and Misery up]
2. Insect Swarm
   
3. Moonfire
4. Cast Wrath (and refresh DoTs) until Lunar Eclipse is triggered
   
5. Finish current Wrath
6. Cast Starfire (and refresh DoTs) until Solar Eclipse is triggered
7. Finish current Starfire?
   
8. Repeat 4
   

Should I blow off refreshing a DoT when...

The time when it would seem most likely to be a problem is in the last few seconds of an Eclipse. The Elitist Jerks' page says the DPS difference is too small to model for those last few seconds.

I stick with simple and say refresh DoTs when they drop, period.

Pretending to be the Kwisatz Haderach*
* - If you don't get the reference, click here.

There is a 60% chance of getting Lunar Eclipse to trigger on a Wrath Critical Hit. Nature's Grace now appears when the spell is cast as opposed to when it lands. Eclipse has to be up when a spell is finished to count for it. So, some folks say that when you see Nature's Grace while casting Wrath, just switch to Starfire, because chances are that you will be in Lunar Eclipse by then; their view is that it basically squeezes more seconds out of Lunar Eclipse.

However, there is no such guidance for Starfire triggering Solar Eclipse.

Once again, I say stick with simple and say just keep casting whatever until you see an Eclipse trigger.

Glyphs

The big three still seem to be:

• Moonfire
• Starfire
• Insect Swarm
  

Idol

The best idol is now the Idol of Lunar Eclipse [30 Emblems of Frost], but the Idol of Lunar Fury [25 Emblems of Triumph] from the Tier 9 content is almost as good.

Nuke Boosts

For that extra bit of oomph, use a Potion of Speed during Lunar Eclipse.

Addons

• SquawkandAwe
  
• Quartz [or some other cast timer]
  

It's important to note that using Quartz effectively means using it to get your spells to queue up back to back on the server so there is no interruption. When you are talking about cast times on the order of 1-2 seconds, a few tenths of a second can mean up a 15-30% drop in DPS if you are just casually casting spells.

The way to get the full benefit from Quartz is to start casting the next spell when you get into the red part of the bar (this represents Quartz's current estimate of client-server lag). Some say try to start a few tenths of a second before that.

Stats, Gear, Itemization

Haste has gotten pretty cool, but Hit Rating to cap and then Spellpower is still great. I recommend reading the EJ post on Moonkin PvE DPS for more details.

Go Forth and Pew Pew!

References

• Moonkin PvE DPS (updated for 3.3) [Elitist Jerks]
• Patch 3.2 Moonkin Spell Rotation [Moonkin.info]
• Blow By Blow Discussion of Squawk & Awe Updates [Elitist Jerks]
  

[3.2] School of Hard Knocks - Fire BAD, Week 6

Another week and only time for the minimum 10 games once again.

As with the previous week, almost every team we saw dramatically out geared us. It gets a little tedious to consistently see people with 20-30% more health and seeing your folks start to drop before you can get one of theirs down.

We're definitely having to play better than them to win. We managed to swing a 4-6 record this week though, so we're learning. I have to say, it's quite satisfying to beat a team that clearly out gears you and/or out comps you.

Our rating crawled a bit closer to 1500. It does beg the question - have we obtained everything we can gear-wise for our current rating? That sounds like an excellent future post.

[3.2] School of Hard Knocks - Fire BAD Week 5

Ouch, this was not a fun week. We're not sure if it was just another case of heavily-geared and experienced 3v3s marrying 2v2s that also liked long walks on the beach, but something was up.

Once again, we started later than planned and once again limited to the minimum 10 matches. Unfortunately, we ended up losing most of them. It got really old hearing "they're in full Relentless" or "those are Gladiator weapons" or "damn that's a lotta Health". I think we fought a couple with similar gear, but it seemed to be the oddity. I think we ended up only winning 2 out of 8.

Now, we did lose a couple that we probably should have won, there is not doubt. We were simply not on our game last night. That said, I think that if we played to the limit of our ability, we would have been very lucky to win 5 of the 10. In many ways, it felt too much like when we started.

But in some important ways, it did not. We are able to weather alpha strikes a bit better. However, we could still feel the gear mismatch, as the alpha strikes burned too many CDs and focused so much of our attention on healing that my CC was dramatically reduced.

Our gear and ability are getting to the point where the surprise of a team with four DPS is less of an issue. We weather the damage, get some CC going, and proceed to get to work.

Gimmicky teams, especially with the gear we faced, still gave us some issues. We faced a team with three Rogues. We managed to weather the alpha strike, but our DPS was too split up, a consequence of having 3 Stealthers appear suddenly - coordinating your damage onto one with great effect is a little more challenging. And you could see it, as Sistajuju dropped, all the Rogues had some damage and one was half dead. Not sure what would have solved that short of /assist macros; maybe we need to consider that.

On the bright (?) side, we stayed in the 1400 bracket, and I should finally have enough points to buy a Relentless armor piece (Gloves).

I wonder if Monday has become a bad day for arenas, given that we were usually outgeared, no matter how much we lost. We have little choice in the day we schedule, though, as there is generally exactly one day that we can all play. That day is changing to Saturday, so here's hoping there is a broader group of teams then.