Tree With a Buzzsaw

 Many weeks ago when the first Throne of Thunder LFR was released, I was very excited to find out that the Zandalari Council would drop a healing weapon in the form of a fist weapon!

I used to run around on Turny, exploring old dungeons and collected a myriad of strange and wonderful weapons in which I would equip randomly to heal heroics back in Wrath. Transmogging before it was cool. Having picked up my druid once again, I managed to win this said fist weapon and immediately opened up my Mogit to find some cool transmogs. One of the most easily obtainable fist weapon was [Calamity's Grasp], which drops off 25M Kel'thuzad. A spinning buzz-saw...as a healer, and a tree? AWESOME! I am not going to be running Nightbane in Karazhan for a nice flamethrower offhand!

Weekly Progression

This week's progression update actually has progression within it! We downed Tortos! We put in several attempts last week at the end of raid and our healers just kept dying. Having re-thought our bat acquisition methods and allocated our turtle kicking appropriately, we finally downed this turtle-a-hole and I can reasonably say that we can do this again fairly easily.

In retrospect, I think next week I can manage my embers a bit better, perhaps saving one to F&B an immolate on all the bats, and also to keep my uptime of ROF on them a bit higher. But...I'll worry about that this weekend.

EAT CRAP TORTOS!

Random Notes

Now that the entire set of TOT LFR is out, I find that I don't have enough time to do them all on two characters. I am now picking and choosing which has the prettiest upgrades, then weighed based on which wing is the easiest.

Last week it took about six or seven queues of trying for the Pinnacle of Storms just to get into FRESH queue. I somehow managed to maintain top heals, EVEN when I was exclusively the one going in connecting the star-dots for the celestials. WTF?

It's an odd feeling not doing everything for once. My warlock did not even touch the 4th wing. Time and time again I'd get into a failed Lei Shen run. Seriously who wipes to Lei Shen LFR more than 5 times? What mechanic is still not getting through or not being communicated it boggles my mind.

Anyways. Missed out on some rep and possible Secrets of the Empire, but then again I do not yet have a qualifying helm (still using a 483 of all things) to put the new shiny meta in anyways.

The sucky part is, Iron Qon and Twin Consorts are so easy, coupled by the fact that they drop the two more awesome tier pieces, shoulder and helm. For druids, this helm is the only model and I believe is not imitated by any other off-set.

I believe the phenomenon happening now is that once Twin Consorts dies, HALF the raid is "peace out", because we sure did when we finally managed to get into a fresh queue.

Frustrating indeed, perhaps this will get better in the next couple of weeks. STOP QUEUING US TO LEI SHEN! And let's end off with a cool picture!



Turny the Buzzsaw Healer

MoP LFR Tips: Throne of Thunder - Lei Shen

Oh hello!

The fourth and final quarter of the Throne of Thunder has been released in LFR as of yesterday and I am sure many people have questions or want to have a quick brief understanding of the Lei Shen fight in order to facilitate a smooth kill.

I am skipping over Iron Qon and Twin Consorts momentarily as they are fairly insignificant. Let's get straight to Lei Shen.

Lei Shen

Organization
First off, you will want to assign your raid to cover the four different quadrants of the platform. I'll tell you why later. Mark each corner and split people up making sure there's at least one healer in each group. Also make sure people are paying attention and make sure they know what group they are in.

Lei Shen's general mechanic throughout the first phase is that he needs to be tanked near one of the four lightning conduits around the room. By doing this, he will charge the conduit instead of doing an AOE to everyone in the raid.

Dangerous Ability: Occasionally Lei Shen casts Thunderstruck, denoted by a bright blue lightning circle on the ground. Get out of this circle!


Tanks: I believe you taunt off each other after each "Decapitate".


Overall Strategy
The Lei Shen fight boils down to handling each mechanic at each different conduit located on each corner of the platform, and also splitting up into groups to handle ALL of those mechanics at once in each corner. Now I will explain what to do at each conduit:

You will probably tank him starting at the north conduit, and once this conduit is charged once, you will move to the east, then south, then west and so on. As he is moving he will do his AOE since he is not near a conduit, but it won't last long as long as tanks move quickly. Heal through it.


The Conduits
Each conduit, which will be denoted by the cardinal points of the compass, N, E, S, W, each have a different mechanic tied to them when Lei Shen is near them.


North: If you get targeted by an arrow, stack with everyone as this will do HUGE damage that needs to be split.

East: Spread out, as he casts a chain lightning that spawns adds when anyone gets hit. Kill the adds ASAP.

South: Someone will get targeted by a lightning ring that will explode after 3 seconds, stunning anyone caught in it. As a healer I found this platform to be moot as there are no adds. Or perhaps it was because I was healing it.

West: Occasionally you will see pale blue circley pools on the ground. STAND IN THEM to soak lightning balls. If you do not, an add shows up and adds a lot of unnecessary damage. Don't confuse these with Thunderstruck, which is really bright.

Hopefully by the time you've seen all the conduits he's at 65%....

Phase 2: Once Lei Shen hits 65% and 30% he will teleport to the middle of the room and this is where the assigned groups go to their assigned corners. You will need to handle the stun, kill adds, and soak damage all at once in your smaller groups. Once this phase ends, kill off any additional adds and continue to kill the boss. Most importantly, someone will get targeted by the north conduit ability and must split this damage between the group.

Post Phase 2 & Phase 3: After the Lei Shen teleports to the middle (65%) he will gain lightning whip, which is a huge cone to dodge, which leaves lightning streaks on the ground. You can jump over these streaks. And after the 30% phase he gains a wind ability which is moot. Keep moving to stay on the platform, continue to mind the mechanics in phase 1 and dodge his whip.

Additional Info (Probably not necessary for LFR purposes):

One of the conduits in the room will become inactive if they have the highest charge during the two intermission phases, I believe no adds/mechanics happen in that quadrant and you only have to deal with 3. Also, each conduit gains power the more you charge them. For example, the northern conduit will begin to target additional players, requiring smaller groups to stack up to split damage.

That should cover the brunt of the fight hopefully I did not miss anything but I must go eat lunch now, goodbye and have fun.

Turny the Helpful Tree

The People of LFR

Good evening,

Hey reader, are you proud of me or are you proud of me? I have not moaned nor groaned about LFR woes for a very very long time. I've been trying to co-ordinate or take up leadership (what little of it there is) or at least voice my most objective recommendations on how to clear most of my LFR runs.

Because seriously, just do this shit right so I can get my 90 VP and complain about not getting loot as quick as possible.

As of T15, Durumu has been the sore point and honestly as long as two healers, two tanks and some DPS are alive...get ready to carry the rest of your raid as their writing corpses receive upgrades while all you get for thanks is a steaming bag of gold, and to add insult to injury, your fail bag doesn't even have anything else in it. This is what I mean when I complain about reward vs effort. There is none and don't expect it. /bitter

Anyways this post is about the various types of people I've observed going through the various LFRs and here it is:

The Unhelpful Elitist: This elitist will first off state passive aggressively that they have cleared this on regular/heroic but will not provide any valuable advice. They will scoff and scorn the lesser folk for wasting their time and that's "why I don't do LFR". Well fuck you. If you've done the fight in a more complicated manner, why don't you pull some tips out of your almighty fat-ass and help the group out? No one gives a fuck that you've cleared this on reg, let's just get this over with.

The Bitch: Yeah there's always one. All they do is complain about how the group sucks or that everyone is mentally challenged, and yet again they do not provide any useful recommendations for improvement. They will say "this shit is easy just do it". Well, HOW? This is usually when I pipe in with the how as their underdeveloped brains are probably incapable of communicating their thoughts further.

The Pro Tank: This tank knows all the fights and lays out the perfect plan, co-ordinates with their off-tank and the raid follows and executes. This person is my dream tank as it saves me from having to type anything at all.

The-Anyone-Doing-Less-Than-50k dps: The min i-lvl is 480. Act like you are 480+. (I changed the threshold from 80k as that would make me an elitist, but it really should be 80k)

The Helpful Elitist: This is me. I'll give you the tips and tricks to look out for, without boggling you with spell details and perhaps giving class tips and that's it. Behind the screen I am wondering how the FUCK did you wipe twice to LFR Tortos?

So, in your respective roles, what have you observed?

Turny the Observant Tree

Ignorance is Bliss: When do we Draw the Line Between Having Fun and Being "Good"?

Hello my three readers,

Yes you heard it, I we have a new friend! /wave

So as we all know, there is a new set of quests on the Isle of Thunder that requires us to gather summoning stones to call upon and kill these rare elite mobs for weekly rep with the Shado Pan Assault (SPA). There was only two of us on last night and went off to pug in general chat. Surprisingly the island was very quiet and we only managed to find one warlock. That's fine, I was on my healer, we had a tank and a warlock. Warlocks are OP at doing damage so we decided to 3-man Kros.

Biggest mistake ever.

Now here's the part of the story where I want you to put on your objective glasses and try to throw away any of your pre-conceived notions of what "should" be and just listen to what happened.

Alright. We summon the boss, he's angry and I have hots up and our tank is pulling Kros away so he has some time to run to the little add that he goes back to gobble up and heal himself. Okay.

The warlock who still has his Voidwalker up is now standing there doing nothing. Ok, maybe he's laggy or DC or something. Or confused.

The add spawns and he's still standing there, I start to wrath the add down and he dies ok great. The warlock is still standing there. My recount says he has a few ticks of corruption on the boss and has used Fel Flame a couple times. Ok wtf?

The add spawns again and I am unable to wrath it down, the boss heals to full. We ask the warlock to stand by the add to kill it when he spawns. But intrinsically this also meant, "be near the boss and also kill the add".  Well, he's just standing there. Now he's summoned his wild imps and is casting soulfires at the boss. Ok. After about 10 minutes of trying to get this person to kill the add, he finally starts to help, but it's geting real close because he has not yet used Metamorphosis or used shadow bolt once. Say what?

10 minutes later, the boss is dead. Longest fight ever. And we now confirm can be done with a tank, a resto druid and a warm body doing 10k dps.

In the Moment

At that moment, my inner warlock was literally asking:

"What the fuck is this guy doing? Kill the goddamn boss! Why the shit are you using a void walker and why aren't you using all your goddamn abilities?" Why won't you kill the fucking add? Where's shadowbolt? Cast doom on Kros! Use a fucking imp!

Afterthoughts

Now that I think back, I made the right choice to be civil and just /cheer as we made the kill. This is where my question pops up: Where do we draw the line?

This warlock was ilvl 435 and had no reason to be on this island. He obviously had no concept of what a damage rotation was, what spells and cooldowns his class had, or even the fact that certain pets have different purposes.

As a raider, this is a no no but when you think about it, for someone who doesn't even have the concept of these things, or the knowledge that he is actually being measured for knowing or not knowing these points, what does it matter?

For all we know he's a 10 year old having fun with his warlock, he found a quest and wanted a group. I have let my younger cousin, who is also 10, muck about on my characters. He'll admire my mounts, check out the various pets and ask to kill random things with all the shiny abilities. There's no concept of which ability to cast first, or how they interact with each other since it's not even a thought that crosses his mind. He's just "a warlock, who can kill things". He'll say "ooh I'll use Soulfire on you!" "..ooh what's Fel Flame?" It's that simple, and perhaps it's us who are bound by optimization and performance who are actually the victim of the system.

Where do we Draw the Line?

So now I ask, when do we have the right to berate others for how they push their buttons? He never pre-emptively promised us that he'd be a good warlock. We just assumed. Should we offer constructive feedback? Smile and be on our way? Tell them they suck? Had we said that, I don't think he'd know what we meant by "suck", is there a way to not suck? (Well yes, but you know...)

This is just too mind boggling, I'll just start armory-ing everyone from now on.

Turny the Mighty Tree

The Trolls Are Cleared

Good evening my two readers,

We've been making some good progress over the past...uh day in the raiding world. We were having some issues on co-ordination on Horridon for the past couple weeks but yesterday his giant corpse lay battered and bruised as we cut him open to see the shiny loots within his warm quivering dino body.

We then went on to attempt the Zandalari Council and surprisingly got him down in about four attempts. Nothing too dramatic. I shall update everyone (if you care, which you probably don't) on our attempts at Tortos tonight, I would actually be quite delighted if a 522 bow dropped for our wonderful hunters.

Now I don't want to taint this happy post with my next topic so I shall start a new post riiiiiight now.

Truny the Progressive