Last night at officer insistence the raid killed Sarth 2D with 20 people. It took about an hour with a thrown-together random raid makeup, but it was good practice for 3D and a challenge for the team to chew on a bit. The reaction to our plan was amusing, with most people saying, “You know there’s no achievement for this, right?” Um, YEAH, I know. Why does everything challenging need to come with an achievement now? I mean, achievements are great, and I have chased some mercilessly, but everything we do doesn’t need to be validated by some flashing lights at the end. We’re done with 25-man content and we’re bored. Let’s spice it up a bit, even it it’s outside the official Blizzard channels.

That being said, I feel extremely fond of some of my completed achievements. And in a stroke of synchronicity, I noticed yesterday that the shared topic over at Twisted Nether is “What three achievements are you most proud of?”. Let’s see…

Heroic: The Twilight Zone (covered in detail here)
This one is probably fairly obvious, and I bet it would appear on many people’s lists. This was the very first and last boss encounter thus far in WotLK to give me that “new kill buzz” and to make everyone cheer on Vent and congratulate each other. Plus, I have to give it to Blizzard, the title mechanic is pretty awesome. Only one person (not me!) walked away from that fight with a pretty new drake, and only a handful (also not me!) got some gear from the fight… but all 25 of us have a piece of our accomplishment that we can wear proudly.

Ambassador of the Alliance (covered in detail here)
I usually shy away from multi-day achievements, because I am lazy and have a short attention span. Or, if I do have to do them, I throw a lot of gold at the problem until it goes away. This achievement is tied to so many others, though (exalted reputations, mounts, Seeker, Loremaster, and all the things you can do while running around), and I was trapped at home over Christmas by bad weather, so I figured I would do this one the old fashioned way. A few days of doing low and medium level quests, grinding corpse parts in AV, and just a tiny smidge of runecloth.. and I was Ambassador Liore, pleased as all get out.

Level 80
No, I was never in doubt of reaching level 80. However, getting there was dang fun. I hit level 78.5 early on a Thursday night, and then did something completely impulsive and unlike me — I decided to call in sick to work the next day with Level 80 Fever. I level in a holy smite spec (yes, I could go shadow, but that would be too easy), but fortunately my DPSy raid leader took pity on me and spent almost the next 24 hours marching us through every single quest in Storm Peaks. The highs of hitting level 80 (hooray!) were very shortly followed by the lows of discovering that We Were Not Prepared for heroics (boo!). It was a crazy couple of days with some crazy friends, and one of my favorite leveling memories.

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Achievements Achievements, Sartharion

Last night the Cats defeated Heroic Sartharion 3D, and I could not be more proud. And good on Blizzard for putting this encounter into the initial release of WotLK. I think for the first time ever in this expansion we all felt that strong satisfaction that comes with learning and accomplishing a new boss. It was a really awesome kill.

It took about 8 hours of attempts. Our strategy can probably be tightened up once we get used to the fight and continue improving our gear, but it worked for us this time.

We used four tanks: one on Sarth (druid), one on Tenebron (pally), one on Shadron and Vesperon (warrior), and one on pure add duty (warrior). When Tenebron died, the tank ran around and helped out with loose adds. On our winning attempt we also had the Shad/Vesp tank die partway through the fight, so the Tene tank took over his duties.

Our healers consisted of two paladins, two priests, one shaman, and one druid. One paladin was assigned to the Sarth tank for the whole fight. We had a priest assigned to the Tenebron tank, the druid and second pally focused on the Shad/Vesp and add tank, the shaman raid healed, and I kind of pinch healed where needed. (I started on raid healing, moved to the add tank during the tricky phase, and then after Vesperon landed I helped with the Sarth tank.) The tricky healing bits were keeping the add tank up after the second whelp portal opened, keeping up the Shad/Vesp tank when both drakes were active, and of course the flame breath portion of Sarth tanking.

We used up heroism on the first drake to get it out of the way, and asked people to not really DPS Sartharion before then so they didn’t blow their internal proc timers. After Tenebron died, ranged and AoErs handled the whelps while single target DPS moved to Shadron. When Shadron died, everyone took the portal and killed the two Twilight dudes. Then Vesperon, then portal, then adds, then Sarth. For cooldowns we only needed one feral druid thingy, one Hand of Sacrifice, and one Guardian Spirit.

The thing that made the most difference on our winning attempt was only ONE person dying to void zones. You need all the DPS you can muster, and there is certainly no room to lose a healer. Last night we tried is running the Failboat mod and having the output print to officer chat, and I think it helped. It’s a lot more intimidating if I can say in between attempts, “Okay, we lost exactly 11 people to void zones on that attempt, and I know who each of you are. Stop that.”

You need good DPS, tanking, and healing, but at the end of the day this fight is about spatial awareness and team coordination, and I am so proud of my crew this morning. They did real good. Bring on Ulduar!

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Raiding Ruminations Achievements, raiding, Sartharion

Over the weekend a group of us achieved Sarth 2D. It was without a doubt the most difficult thing I’ve healed in a long while. I think Archimonde is the last fight that required so much healing and so much situational awareness. We did the fight with two tanks and two healers. My insane pally friend stayed with the feral druid MT, and focused almost exclusively on the two of them. I was in the back with the drake tank and the six DPS.

For the first 30 seconds of the fight, the MT dragged Sarth into the position seen in the graphic. The drake tank (DT) took his position at “1″, and the rest of us milled around the middle. When Tenebron arrived, the DT picked him up and moved him to point “2″, with the drake facing out towards the lava. DPS starts in almost immediately. If you do not have the DPS to kill Tenebron in 90 seconds, you are likely not ready for this fight.

Tenebron will spawn at least one round of whelp portals, which appear at point “3″. When the portal was up, the DT would swing the drake sideways so he was closer to the whelp portal, Thunderclap when they appeared, and then move back to point “2″.

Tenebron usually died in about 80 seconds. DPS would use the remaining few seconds to clean up any adds and leftover whelps. Vesperson was picked up and tanked at point “2″. The DPS ended up going through two portals to kill his Shadow Disciple (and more importantly the nasty debuff), but ignored the third one in favor of burning the drake down that last little bit. While in the portal the DPS were healed as necessary by a shadow priest, elemental shaman, and enhancement shaman. I stayed out to keep the DT alive. Once Vesperson was dead, the rest of the fight was the usual easy Sarth.

A few tips for anyone doing a similar healing job:

* Don’t stand next to point “3″. It’s easy to forget, because it’s a good spot to heal everyone, but eventually you will get an unexpected face full of whelps and die.

* Instead, I tried to always stand at point “4″. You’re close enough to the DT that he can taunt adds off of you, and away from the cluster of DPS so you can more easily see void zones.

* If you’re a priest, I found using Guardian Spirit when Vesperon arrived to be very helpful. It’s a little chaotic: there might be whelps left over, there’s a new drake.. give yourself a helping hand.

* Keep your eyes open! Whelps, adds, drakes, lava waves, void zones: all of these want to kill you.

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Raiding Ruminations raiding, Sartharion

Planning your raid’s progression was pretty easy in Classic WoW. You cleared one instance, farmed it a bit, and then started on the next one. It was a little more complicated in The Burning Crusade, but not too much. After clearing T4 raids, most guilds kind of picked at the first few bosses of The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern at the same time, but usually focused on Vashj first and then worried about Kael. Hyjal and BT worked the same way — it was pretty common wisdom that a guild would kill Archimonde first before moving on to Illidan and the last few bosses of BT.

Granted, there are a few progression generalities in WotLK. I think it’s pretty unlikely that any guild is going to start with Malygos-25, for example. However, you have at least two new avenues of possible “progression”: Sarth plus multiple tiers of drakes, and achievements. And my job as a guild leader is to find a way to meet everyone’s progression expectations in (for our guild) nine hours a week. As usual no two people want the same thing.

Most of our folks love new content, and get bored really quickly when they’re not facing an unkilled boss. Some are more concerned about item drops, and rate progression by the level of their gear. Many are super gung ho about achievements, but it seems an equal number of people just see them as having do to things ‘the hard way’. Is Sarth 2D more or less progression than Maly-25? Does it even count? Getting The Safety Dance on Heroic doesn’t take a ton of skill (although we haven’t gotten it yet..), so is it less progression than Heroic Arachnophobia (which we DO have)? With so many options, it’s hard to know exactly in which direction to lead the team to get the most satisfying bang for our buck.

We still have Heroic Malygos to defeat, which will hopefully happen on Monday. I’d like to do many of the Heroic Naxx achievements, although Naxx Ennui is already setting in pretty hard with the more active members of the team. Sarth 2D seems possible, but 3D makes me nervous. I don’t even want to THINK about a 6 minute Malygos yet, even on Regular. (And on a personal note I am jonesing to finish off my 5 and 10 man Achievements. “Liore the Undying” sounds awesoooooome.)

So we are both quickly running out of fresh content AND flooded with multiple event options at the same time. Ahhhhh!

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Guild Management, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion

My bad luck with Sartharion + drake attempts continued as a very good guild group got their butts handed to them by Tenebron. We wanted to try Tenebron because we figured his increased shadow damage debuff would be easier than Shadron’s fire damage aura, but we underestimated the effect that many whelps can have on a small raid. (Yes, I did yell at people on vent to “HANDLE IT!”) We gave it our all, but I just don’t think we had the right group for the whelp drake. I stomped my feet a bit and made some disappointed faces, but at the end of the day we killed Sarth the old fashioned way. I’ll be back, stupid drakes!

On the bright side, the guild had three Naxx-10 runs last week that resulted in three Sapphiron kills and two Kel’Thuzad kills, a first for us! I was really pleased to see so many people eager to get into Naxx, and that our teams were so evenly balanced. Organizing 10-mans in a 25-man guild is always a bit of a balancing act, and it can be pretty fractious. Two of the groups were organized through a public signup, one was put together privately, and all three kicked ass.

After killing Kel’Thuzad, our group swanned triumphantly over to Malygos (or, as he’s known in the Cats, Malligoose), who promptly ate our lunch. Many times. Finally, a really tough fight! This one will take a while to get…

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Raiding Ruminations Archavon, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion