efficiency, Naxxramas, speed run

We did our second speed practice run of Naxxramas in an hour and 23 minutes on Tuesday. The conclusion of the post-run discussion was that with a lot of work we could probably get it down to an hour and 10 minutes or so, but even if we did that it’s just not all that impressive.

The Problem with Naxxramas

Naxxramas has a few problems with regards to doing impressive speed runs.

• The zone just isn’t that hard. The more difficult the content is, the more room there is for improvement. Since Naxx is so easy, even after months of practice and playing our best there simply is less to gain. Even playing absolutely perfectly, we can only shave so much time off.
• There’s no tricks to it. There’s barely any skippable trash, there’s no “creative use of game mechanics” that we can exploit to finish it quicker. It doesn’t matter what order we do the wings in. In SSC there was a few optimizations you could do to boss kill order that saved a good deal of time. There was trash you could skip. Black Temple was FILLED with skippable trash if you took the effort to plan your attack route.
• The zone doesn’t take long enough to complete. Our original SSC video clocked in at just under two hours, and that was a *feat*. Our BT video clocked in at about 2 hours 45 minutes and that was a *feat*. We were clearing Naxx in two hours with no effort. The longer an instance is, the more opportunities there are to find niches to exploit.

Naxx Speed Run We Barely Knew Thee

The overall consensus in the guild is very much a lack of motivation to keep working on speed runs of Naxxramas. It would only be noteworthy if we could get it under an hour and most agree that that’s not possible with current gear. It pains me to say this because I had very much looked forward to having Fusion produce a speed run video but alas it was not meant to be. We’ll check back with Ulduar in about 6 months I suppose.

efficiency, Naxxramas, skill

Healers? We don’t need no stinking healers!

Last night we did a preliminary run at Naxxramas with minimal healers. First off, here is the WWS if you want to see it. Overall it was pretty fun and a lot easier than I anticipated. Naxxramas is really just not that hard and last night proved how easy it can be. We plan to do it again next week with a different healer composition and taking it a bit more seriously. This week was mostly a test run. Here was our raid composition for most of it:

• Healers: Shaman, Paladin
• Tanks: Feral, Death Knight
• 2 Mages
• 3 Warlocks
• 3 Hunters
• 3 Rogues
• 3 Warriors
• 2 Balance Druids
• 1 Shadow Priest
• 1 Ret Paladin
• 2 Elemental Shamans
• 1 Enhancement Shaman

click here to read entire article

achievements, malygos

This achievement is a lot easier than would seem to be indicated by our time to get it and also the low number of guilds in the world who have gotten it. It does require a specific strategy and some practice executing it, but it really just isn’t that hard. I’ll revise my previous requirements downand say you only really need 3 Druids and 2 Deathknights to reliably execute it which isn’t that harsh of a requirement. click here to read entire article

achievements, sartharion

In an effort to complete Heroic: Glory of the Raider for the majority of the guild, we had a fun time 10 manning Heroic Sartharion. Why did we do this? Because 15 naked people standing in Sartharion’s cleave and flame breath don’t live for very long. Yes, the easiest way to get Heroic: Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows is to commit suicide at the beginning of the fight. We had 15 people in our raid strip down and end themselves at the beginning of the fight to guarantee they’d get the achievement.

We expected it to be a long grueling fight, 10 manning a 25 man boss. However, our crack team of underman specialists managed to kill Sartharion in about 6 minutes. You can view the WWS here. We did it with two healers, two tanks, six DPS, and 15 dead naked people. Our class selection wasn’t really anything special. It was more concerned with who needed the achievement the most (or least) and also recruits got to be the bitches that did our dirty work for us. Sartharion is so laughably easy that he can most likely be two or three manned if you have the patience.

We also spent the night 20 manning Naxx and Malygos. With the gear we have, 20 manning the zones is far easier than it was to 25 man them when we initially hit 80. We managed to have no deaths on bosses for the first two wings but our hopes at a 20 man Immortal were dashed when someone died to the Decimate bug on Gluth. After the achievement festivities of last night, for many of our raiders all that remains on the Glory of the Raider to-do list is a five minute Malygos kill which we will hopefully be doing a week from Tuesday. 310% mounts here we come!

raid leading, sartharion, Strategy, three drakes

I’ve Never Been Here, Is This Boss Hard?

I mentioned in my last post that we often have to learn things the hard way because we are working on content without strategies or documentation. In this age of live streaming broadcasts, full strategies before content leaves the Public Test Realm, and detailed write-ups within a week of release, the opportunity to see content in this virgin state is limited to a very small number of guilds. The process of learning can be very fun and very frustrating. click here to read entire article

achievements, malygos

With our recent acquisition of The Immortal title, we’ve been looking to polish off our heroic raid achievements and be one of the first guilds to get Heroic: Glory of the Raider. That goal got pushed back a week last night after succeeding so hard that we failed.

In order to kill Malygos in five minutes to get the Heroic: You Don’t Have an Eternity achievement you have to stack your raid with at least four Druids and two Deathknights (hurray for raid stacking). During our initial three attempts while figuring it out I managed to yell at the GM due his criticism of my Entangling Roots skills. From this point on he dejectedly stopped using Ventrilo and used in game chat to communicate.  Despite this, we had exceedingly low Tard Factor and we mastered the strategy by the fourth attempt. Our night came to an end shortly after.

The downside to being on the forefront of World of Warcraft raid progression is that we rarely have any guides to follow or even any tidbits of information to work with. We learn things the hard way most of the time. We learned the hard way with Malygos that you can’t easily get a do-over once you’re past the point of no return. The main part of the strategy involves burning Malygos down to 1 health prior to phase 2 (he can’t be killed in the air). Upon arriving in phase 3, if you anyone does any damage to him he dies and the fight is over. If you’ve gone past the five minute mark then you lose your chance for the week to get the achievement. We did not realize what was happening, and the killing blow of a serpent sting tick came at 5:13 into the fight.

Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.