Teron Gorefiend.  How I have learned to loathe thee…

I’m all for a challenge, I really am.  If you look at my list of Top 5 Five Man Boss Fights, you’ll see I have a preference for challenging fights.  I like to have to work to succeed.  Honestly, I do.

But Teron Gorefiend?  This encounter is just flat out frustrating, and not necessarily because it is honestly challenging.

For the uninitiated, I’ll give a brief rundown of how this encounter works.  Basically, a random raid member is targeted with a debuff called Shadow of Death every 30 seconds.  The affected player will die in 55 seconds, and when he dies four shadowy constructs will spawn around him.  The affected player will also become a ghost when they die that has special abilities controlled through the pet bar.  The Shadowy Constructs that spawn CANNOT be harmed by live players, only by the ghost.  You must kill all four before they reach the raid.  The Shadowy Constructs can and will wipe the raid should too many of them make it there.

In a nutshell, if you can’t kill your constructs in time, there is a VERY GOOD chance the whole raid will wipe.

Now, killing your constructs before they get to the raid is not impossible, but it can be quite hard.  You have to be quick and you have to be able to target the four constructs efficiently.

Basically how it pans out is that some people have a fairly easy time doing it, while others find it nearly impossible.  If you play a lot of First Person Shooters, this event would probably be cake for you.  The problem is, people who play WoW aren’t necessarily the types that play First Person Shooters. There will undoubtedly be at least a couple people in the raid that just can’t get the job done.  You’ll find yourself hoping that Player X does not get the debuff.

This is bad for raiding.  Raiding is already fairly stressful, what with gear requirements and learning all the different and difficult encounters.  Raiders already have a tendency to single people out for under-performing.  The last thing we need is an encounter that makes it blatantly obvious.

The Teron Gorefiend fight does just that.  It can drive a wedge into the raid as frustration sets in.  "Why can’t Hunter X kill his stupid constructs?"  It can very easily devolve into a bout of finger pointing and hurt feelings.  I can’t imagine how many guilds have been driven apart by this one stupid fight. 

If you’re lucky, you raid with good people who won’t point fingers and understand that this encounter is just plain stupid.

And I am telling you that it is.

As a disclaimer, this is not sour grapes.  I can and have successfully killed my constructs when given the opportunity.  I had trouble my first try, but after that I started to get the hang of it and am no longer intimidated. 

My problem with it is that WoW is not a first person shooter, nor a twitch game.  If I wanted that kind of challenge, I’d be playing Call of Duty 4.  I play WoW because I DON’T like twitch based challenges.  I had my fill of those in the old NES and SNES days.  (And, in the interest in full disclosure, I was damn good in my day.  People all around feared me when I selected Ryu in Super Street Fighter.  Hell, I even mastered Zangief just to embarrass my friends!)

I feel bad for the people that have never played twitch games, and might not be equipped to handle the speed and targeting necessary to get the job done.  Hell, I know quite a few people who never played anything prior to World of Warcraft. 

In a way it’s like the Magtheridon fight.  Sure, that necessitates quick reflexes and clicking the cubes at just the right time, but you have control over who should click the cubes.  In the Teron fight, it is completely and utterly random.

Boo.

So maybe you convinced  your wife to give WoW a try.  And as wives are wont to do, she rolled a healer.  Over time, she grew into a fantastic and reliable raid healer, and you invite her without hesitation to the raids.  But then you get to Teron, and she has to become a DPSer with abilities she’s never seen before.  And to top it all off, if she fails, the raid dies.

That is just plain idiotic.  How did Blizz come up with this stupid encounter anyway?  I have a theory.

One day, a dev was getting a root canal.  While he was getting this painful and tedious procedure, he also had to do his taxes at the same time, as it was April 15th.  So he thought to himself:

What could be worse than this?  If only I could come up with a boss fight that is the equivalent of this hell I have subjected myself to!

And so Teron Gorefiend and his Shadowy Constructs were born.  The WoW equivalent of a root canal and doing your taxes rolled into one.

Yeah, that’s fun.

Revenge.  I wanted to taste Zul’jin blood.  (Especially from his 10 Badge Vial.)  The last time PTD hit ZA, Zul’jin wiped him and his group out.  Sure, we only took two shots, but still, he wiped us out.  I hate to leave dungeons unfinished, and I could almost hear his mocking laughter as we called it quits and left.  It was embarrassing.

Well, last night was my chance at revenge.  The wife’s Mother is in town, so it afforded me the opportunity to sign up for a rare weeknight raid.  I have my eyes on the nice healing headpiece that the Dragonhawk drops, as well as badges for the Gavel.

We had a solid group: our two best tanks (warrior and pally), myself the tree along with our top CoH priest and a shammy for healing, and good DPS.  We went in trying for the first two timed chests.  Thus far I don’t believe we’ve been able to get the third, but I see that changing soon.

I won’t go into huge detail, but we one shot all of the aspects in this order:  Bear, Eagle, Dragonhawk (no headpiece, sob) and Lynx.  We did wipe once on the trash leading to the Dragonhawk, but other than that we were smooth. 

The real tests start after the four animal bosses are down, though.  That Hex Lord fight can be tough.  It turns out our mix of NPCs was decent, and it only took us two tries to take him down.  The first wipe was my fault, as I was standing a little too close to the Hex Lord and he went all Magey frost bolty on my barky butt and took me down.  They actually almost finished the job without me (I went down VERY early) and got him down to 6% or so before wiping.

Oh well.

We tried again and this time took him down pretty smoothly, with only a couple of deaths.  That is one tough fight, but it is also quite enjoyable.  Up to this point, I was leading the healing charts, but our priest cheated and racked up the heals with CoH during the Hex Lord fight(s).  No matter, the only meter that really matters is the "win" meter, and we were up on that one.

Next came my second look at Zul’jin.  Last time, if you recall, I had trouble with the third phase tornadoes.  Again, on our first try we had trouble with that phase, but did squeak through it.  We didn’t have enough people survive to continue though, and decided to wipe it and try again.

On the second try, I finally got a good tip on how to handle the tornado phase.  Keep a triple stack of lifebloom on myself at all times.  That allows me to toss LB on anyone who needed it without fear of the damage taking me out.  It worked like a charm.  (The tip came from the Shadow Priest who was with us, whose main is a Tree, and he is usually the tree in ZA runs.  My only question, Ease, is why didn’t you tell me before the FIRST attempt?  ;))

We got through that phase rather nicely on that attempt, and for the first time I got to see the Lynx part of the fight.  Man, does Zul’jin go nuts on people during that part.  My ability to help keep people up during his claws of fury attack or whatever is somewhat limited, but I did what I could.  A couple people went down during that phase, including one of the healers, but we got through it to his last phase.

Honestly, I don’t even know what was going on in that last phase.  I was busy trying to keep the tank up, and avoiding the fiery pillar thingys.  After a couple minutes or so of rolling lifebloom and rejuv, Zul’jin went down.  Yay! 

There was a time when ZA was released that the guild ran it at least 2 days a week.  I was never able to come, as they ran it on Monday and Tuesday, which are bad nights for me.  For a time we gave up on ZA, but it looks like we’re picking it back up again now that our gear is better thanks to T5 and T6 raiding.  Anyhow, as it turns out, this was only the second time we had cleared ZA in one night.  Yay for us!  And all together we’ve only cleared it around 4 or 5 times total.  I’d say we are a LOT better now than we were then, though.  I’m glad I was able to be a part of this run.

I think I can now safely say that I REALLY like ZA.  It’s challenging, there is great loot, and a decent number of badges for the time investment.  Sure, you get more in Kara, but Kara is mostly trivial to us at this point.  About the only time I find challenge in Kara anymore is if I’m in a PUG or trying to heal it alone.  ZA takes solid contributions from everyone to succeed.  You can’t carry a newb through ZA like you can Kara.  (I suppose maybe you could for the first couple aspects, but overall it’s not feasible…they would die a LOT.)  I look forward to more runs in the future, and since it reset this morning I’ll see if I can get something thrown together on the fly tonight.

Oh yeah, I suppose you’d like to see what I saw in terms of loot.  I picked up a nice belt for my kitty DPS set in Bladeangel’s Money Belt.  My kitty set is probably approaching T5 quality.  I need to get some enchants on a few things and pick up a good pair of DPS legs, but that’s about it.  This should help me level when Wrath hits, since I will most likely go feral to level.  I passed on the Staff of Dark Mending, but maybe I should have taken it.  It’s a very, very nice looking staff, but I’m saving up for the Gavel as I mentioned earlier, and I’ve always been a proponent of a one hander and off hand versus a staff.  Besides, after last night I’m up to 125 badges.  Yay!  The other stuff that dropped I paid little attention to, as it was mail or plate or uninteresting to me.  I know our Shammy got a pair of shoulders and another healy mail piece, and some fancy shield dropped off the lynx boss.

So that’s all for now.  I had a great time, got a nice off-spec piece, and a handful of badges.  Next time I hope the Dragonhawk drops my helm! 

They will tell you it can’t be done.  They will tell you that if you don’t raid at least 3 times a week, you’ll never see any success.

They tried and failed?
They tried and died.

They will say that you can’t learn the advanced encounters, that you’ll hold the group back.  They will tell you "show up 80% of the time, or don’t show up at all."

Lies, all lies.  And I am here to prove it.

One of the questions I often get asked is this:  "PTD, how do you do it?  How do you raid part-time like you do?"  Well, today I’ll try to give you some insight as to how I accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, and give some recommendations on how you can do it yourself.  Without further adieu, here are my five keys to casual raiding.

Key #1:  FOCUS!

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

The first key is simple.  To be a successful casual raider, you MUST have one character that is geared to the hilt, and raid-ready above and beyond any other character.  The more hard-core out there can afford to gear multiple characters for raiding, but for casuals like us, we need to focus.  In time, you can slowly gear another toon, but do NOT do it at the expense of your main. 

The problem with this key is that as a casual player you probably have a LOT of alts.  I know I have every slot filled with characters level 8 to 63, and I’m sure I’m not alone.  They key, though, is that my Druid is in very good shape.  I didn’t even attempt to start 25 man raiding until I was fully equipped in epics, with proper gemming and enchants. 

If you are going to try to raid only one night a week like I do, that one character better be good, very good.  Don’t get too wrapped up in gearing alts.  Make a decision on a main and stick to it.

Key #2:  Be Overly Prepared

Shield Practice.
Gurney, we had practice this morning. I’m not in the mood. 
Not in the mood? Mood’s a thing for cattle and loveplay, not fighting!

Similar to Key #1, you can’t afford to mess around in terms of knowledge, either.  You aren’t going to have the same number of attempts to learn about the various boss encounters, so be as ready as you can be.  To counter that, do your homework.  Read a few different strategy guides for the bosses you expect to see.  Watch at least one video, but if you can view a few different ones from different perspectives.  Admittedly, there is no replacement for actual in-game experience - but you need to get as close as you can. 

Also, make a point of being that guy that’s always early for raid night.  Make sure your gear is repaired, and make sure you are fully equipped with pots, oils, food, elixirs - everything.  Don’t be the guy that asks for a summons 2 minutes after the raid was supposed to start, or who asks if anyone has any healing pots.  Be there and be ready.  Be an example, and you’ll have a better chance of being invited back in the future.

One other thing regarding preparation is this:  don’t be afraid to ask questions.  If you show you’re actually interested in getting things right, the raid leaders will notice.

Key #3:  Be Honest About Your Availability

As the new Duke, I hereby invite you to ask me for whatever you wish. You may request anything of me, anything at all.

This part is just as important as the others.  When you are looking at raiding, make sure you are honest with the raid leaders about your availability.  Be honest with yourself, too.  Don’t say you can make 2 nights a week when you can only REALLY commit to one.  Don’t say you can make a 5:30 raid time if that’s the time you walk in the door after work. 

The point is to make things as clear as possible, before you even get an invite to any raids.  Don’t write any checks with your mouth that your butt can’t cash.  Chances are, they may already be hesitant about you and your limited availability, so don’t say you can do something you can’t.  On the nights you CAN raid, be utterly reliable.  If you can make EVERY Wednesday night raid, make sure the raid leader knows that.

This can also be important if you have issues similar to mine.  My wife wants nothing to do with WoW, and I have an 18 month old and another baby on the way.  I am VERY clear with her with regards to the nights that I raid.  She knows and accepts that Saturday nights I will get on the game before 8 PM, and she’s ok with that. 

Key #4:  Be Open to Other Raiding Avenues

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when my fear is gone I will turn and face fear’s path, and only I will remain.

You must be reliable if you are to raid casually, but you also might have to be flexible.  I know it’s frightening to think of, but there are in fact 25 man PUGs that happen all the time.  Don’t be afraid to give them a try if that’s your best way to see that content.  Perhaps in the course of PUG raiding you will find other people with similar schedules.  Maybe that can lead to a more established raiding group.  If you’re not raiding at all right now, it’s at least worth a try.

Also be sure to ask around and see if there are guilds out there that are open to outside members to fill their raids.  Use the official boards to look for guilds that may be doing that.  Believe me, there are MANY guilds out there that can’t quite fill a 25 man, and they’d love to have a reliable fill-in.  Maybe you can find a group that suits your playtime, and since you are so utterly prepared (See Key #1 and #2), your success will net you future invites. 

Key #5:  Perform

I’m dead to everyone unless I become what I may be.

Above all else, this is the true key.  Beyond preparation, reliability, and flexibility lie skill and performance.  If you have any dreams of being able to raid on YOUR schedule, you had darn well better perform when you get the chance.  You’re like the rookie that gets one shot during a pre-season game to show your stuff.  Make sure you show it.  You can’t afford to make big mistakes or even little ones, you have to show that you have the goods from the first pull.

Don’t randomly go afk.

Don’t ignore the orders of the raid leader.

Don’t break sheeps, AOE in a bad place, pull aggro, or let someone die.

Basically, don’t do anything stupid.  Be as close to perfect as you can be.  If you show that you can handle the job, you’ll get the job.  I am normally way down the healing totem pole in terms of gear.  My +heal, MP5 and everything else are usually bringing up the rear, or close to it.  I still routinely lead the meters in terms of overall healing.  I think one of the reasons for this is that I get so focused about the one night I raid a week.  I make a point to get everything right, because in some way I have to.  If we fail repeatedly because of me, I would feel like I let a lot of people down.  So I make a point not to do that.  I mean business when I’m raiding, and the raid leader(s) know that.  My skill and overall performance trump my gear.

There you have it.  If you’re looking to raid casually, that’s my advice.  Focus on one character, be prepared, be honest, be open, and, most important of all, perform.  If you follow my advice, I don’t know how any raid leader could turn you down, regardless of how seldom you can raid.  The point of all of this is to assure you that it CAN be done.  I raid one night a week for four hours.  That’s it.  I’ve seen 5 bosses in SSC, 4 in Mount Hyjal, and 4 in the Black Temple.  So don’t listen to "them" when they say it can’t be done.  They’re just jealous is all.  Thanks for reading!

It’s hard to believe, I know.  Your friendly neighborhood tree, all Bear-Butted out, tanking Moroes.  So hard to believe, in fact, that it could only be true. 

Anyhow, here is how it happened.  I didn’t have anything going on last night, and I had a good 3-4 hours to kill in game, so I joined the Kara LFG channel.  That usually ends bad, I know, but I need badges for the Gavel of Naaru Blessings and most of the guild was otherwise indisposed. 

I got an invite fairly quickly, as my note advertised me as a Resto Druid with 1923 Healing.  Should be sufficient for Kara.  ;)  I did a quick lookup on WoW Heroes of the person who had invited me, and I really liked what I saw.  A strong tank goes a long way.

So we’re trying to fill, trying to fill.  We have tanks, we have healers, we need DPS.  Though I had a hunter I could have brought, I really wanted badges with the Druid, so I stuck to my guns.  After about 20 minutes the RL asked if I would be willing to respec and DPS.  Why not? 

Next thing I know, I’m the OT for the night.  The other warrior in the group turned out to be pure fury, and he didn’t even have a shield if he wanted to OT.  The MT was VERY strong, so I figured what the hey.  I tanked.  Here are pics to prove it:

I felt a little bad for the healers, as I don’t have the most HPs around.  That’s one area I’d have to really improve in my Bear gear.  I have the defense and other stats, but the health is lacking.

Still, we got the job done.  I also got to tank all kinds of other good stuff, along with Romulo.  The MT did most of the heavy lifting, thankfully.

Yeah, that’s right.  Thankfully the tank was very strong, and we did just fine with me as the OT.  We made it all the way to the Shade, but it was 3 am and myself and others were too tired to finish him off.  Oh well.  Still, I had a great time, and managed to snag a couple staves while I was there.  In the interests of summarizing, here is what I got:

• Staff of Infinite Mysteries
• Terestian’s Stranglestaff

Not bad at all!  I’ve been looking to pick of the staff of Illhoof for awhile, and the other staff looks like it might be the start of my Boomkin off-set.  It seems I’m headed towards true druidism, the ability to play any spec.  :)  That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

That was the scene last night.  Some of you have been to ZA, some of you haven’t.  If you haven’t, that’s what it looks like just before the pull of Zul’jin, the last boss in Zul’Aman. 

If you recall, I wrote about ZA a few months back.  If you don’t want to go back and read, basically what that post addressed is the difficulty of ZA in comparison to Karazhan.  When ZA was first announced, a lot of people thought it would be a case of linear progression, you finish Kara a few times, then move on to ZA.

They were wrong.  As it turns out, ZA is just flat-out too difficult for a Kara geared group.  I suppose I should pull back on that a little, as it is POSSIBLE with a Kara geared group, it would just be incredibly frustrating and filled with wipes. 

So what is it that makes ZA so tough in comparison to Kara?  Well, first the trash is a LOT tougher to deal with.  There are a couple parts in the instance where you have to run through a "gauntlet", and it can be very difficult to get through.  There are times you have to deal with wave after wave of mobs, and you can easily get overwhelmed.  In Kara, everything is quite easily controlled.  You position the raid in one spot that is safe, and the tank pulls back to you.  Easy cheesy.  It’s not that easy in ZA.  The one very nice thing about ZA trash is there is a lot less of it overall.

So what about the bosses?  The boss fights in ZA are on par with a lot of what I’ve seen in T5 content.  Some of them last almost as long, too.  Sure, the bear boss is easy enough to deal with, and once you learn a couple of tricks the Eagle boss is pretty straightforward as well.  But then you start getting into bosses like the Dragonhawk or Malacrass, and the whole game changes.  You need strength in your group all around for these fights, and a solid plan of action.  This is not your mother’s tank and spank Prince fight.

So, all that stuff aside, is ZA fun?  You’re darn skippy it is.  When I wrote the above linked article, I was just barely getting out of Kara myself.  ZA still seemed like a waste of time for me, as the times I went I died over and over and over again.  To trash.

Now, things are a little different.  I’ve seen a great deal of T5 and T6, I’ve geared up significantly, and now the challenges of ZA have paled somewhat.  I can pump out a lot more healing, and take at least one or two more hits before I go down.  PTD’s all growed up since he first set foot in ZA, and much of the group I was in was T5+ equipped as well.

Now when I look at the instance, I see the kind of challenge I get in T6 content for a 10 man group.  Kara is a snoozefest nowadays, which is why I do stuff like try to solo heal the place.  Besides the healthy challenge, there are some very nice drops I could use.

So how did we do last night?  Well, we got to Zul’jin, but didn’t take him down.  Myself and the other 2 healers were fairly new to the place, so overall we did well.  We only took two shots at ZJ since we were already past the raid time when we got to him.  That Eagle phase of his is nasty, I’ll say that much.

As far as the timer thing, we only managed the first.  We wiped on the trash leading to the Eagle boss as we didn’t have a Pally tank.  Our Pally healer had to try to deal with all the birdies, and he went down.  On the second attempt at that gauntlet the same pally healer died again, but towards the end and we made it through.  Then he had to release and run back, and he got lost on the way.  So no second timer for us. 

Oh well.  At least the first timer netted me the Life-step Belt.  And with that I said my final goodbyes to the Windhawk set.  The belt was the last piece I was still wearing.  Into the bank it goes, where if I ever decide to try out a Moonkin spec I will regem it for that.  I also managed to pick up that froggy pet.

Still, we did make our way all the way to Zul’jin, which is pretty good considering all the healers were basically new.  That Malacrass is one bad mutha.  If you haven’t seen the fight, just think of a Moroes fight on steroids. 

One other note is that I managed to crest 4 million in overall healing.  That’s a lot of HOTs, man!  I don’t know if I’ve hit 4 million before, but here’s a screeny to prove it. (My recount is in the lower right)

In all, it was a very fun night.  I like a good challenge, and ZA provided that, with some good rewards.  While I don’t see a Bear mount in my future, I can see myself running this quite a few more times before Wrath hits.  There are still some very nice items I’d like to see, and at my gear level it’s a little more fun than Kara.  If anything, I think I’ve perhaps proven my previous post to be true:  ZA is basically a 10-man for bored T5 and T6 raiding guilds.  I just wish Blizzard had told us that in the first place.