Our Madness

Our guild took down Heroic Spine for the first time on Monday.  Then 5.0.4 landed on Tuesday.  Then we took down everything including Heroic Spine on Wednesday in two hours (we wiped in a few weird places for weird reasons).  We put in two attempts on Wednesday on Heroic Madness but the bloods kicked our ass.  Then Thursday we hit Heroic Madness again.  For three hours.  We couldn't understand a lot of why things just weren't working.  We even got him down to 6% once.  Finally we noticed that it really was broken.  It was nice to think we weren't idiots.  Here's how broken it is:

• Bloods come out every 5% of Deathwing's health.  If they get to him, they heal him significantly.  None of our group's multiple slows worked on the bloods on the final platform.  Hunter, DK, Rogue, Mage, and Druids.  No immune messages or the like.  They just bee-lined to Deathwing and healed him with us just getting frustrated.
• Dream didn't do anything against Corruptions or Shrapnel.
• Hunter pets disappear from doing long distance pathing to things not a long distance away.  (Not the Kill Command bug.)   I also saw my pet in the water behind a corruption on the third platform instead of attacking from the side (on ground).  This is manageable as DPS isn't really any problem.
• We had two people with lag.  One was playing with hotel internet.  So while this was nice, it was also nuts: We were also able to get more than one battle rez off in a 10man.

                               

ROFLSTOMP DS and Shot Priority Complexity

Ten of us managed to update/change our addons, select and learn our talents and glyphs, reforge our gear and try to raid.  We started our raid a little late but in a little over two hours we learned that some people don't know how their character works now and some do.  We also learned that a 35% nerf to DS can overcome everything.  We cleared everything on heroic up to and including spine.  We took two people who weren't in our original heroic spine group before and got it on our third second attempt.  Not that the heroic spine fight is exactly the same anymore.  Because of the cleansing changes -- and despite the raid mechanic changes -- you have to cheese the cleansing a little with positioning, but it was probably easier that way originally too.

As a Survival hunter, I found that if I did my old rotation employing all the previously known spells (SrS, BA, ArS, ExS) I did significantly less damage.  When I added in Dire Beast and aMoCs I was coming close.  When I threw in Rapid Fire and Readiness I had the ability to burst.  I didn't realize how much I missed the ability to burst.  I didn't even need to use the valor trinket to feel like a king.  I like my wow 5.0 talents and glyphs.  I really like the defensive attributes around Deterrence (100%/50% resist and 1min CD).  Marked for Death isn't a bad thing either.

Now all of this is a much bigger job.  Much more complexity!  I look at that with approval.  If better hunters can do more in a better way and get more damage that's a good thing.

If you think of A Murder of Crows as a DoT, you can also think of Dire Beast and even your own pet as DoTs.  Add SrS, BA, and even ExS and you've got six DoTs.  Thankfully, you don't really need a bar to watch your pet (though honestly they're pretty complex).  Our biggest DoT (ExS) doesn't need to be watched anymore thanks to how they can all be dumped in as fast as is smart.  Still we have many more DoTs and cooldowns to watch.

I put together a pretty nice NeedToKnow configuration to watch all this stuff, which I'll share in another post soon.

Down to the Wire

With only a few hours until wow-5.0 lands and everyone has to re-learn their character abilities...