Greedy Goblin

Monday, May 24, 2010

Bye Mrs Kel'Thuzzad!

The blue-geared guild (around 3300 GS) raided this Saturday again. That brought bad luck to Mrs Kel'Thuzzad and the alliance scum of the Skybreaker. Logs here, for some reason the gunship battle is not listed as bossfight, the kill is this "trashfight".

The composition was 3 tanks, 2 healers, 5 DPS. One tank for each add. Before you'd say it was "HC stacking", I'm sure that every guild has DPS paladins, warriors, DKs or cats who can talent to tanking and get a shield. The adherents doesn't need defcapped tank. This way the fight was totally controlled and easy. We usually had 20-25 secs on boss between add waves.

Gunship revealed how many people are "farming ICC HC 5 times a week on their mains". Several people had no clue where to jump and when. Silly wipes happened when tank jumped over at the beginning or DPS tried to kill Muradin or got cleaved. But finally it went down.

After that we made some tries on Deathbringer Saurfang who is obviously impossible without 5.5K GS because he hard enrages. Despite we were tired, the last try ended on 6%. We had one mark, that arrived at 32-35%, and we can further decrease blood power gains by more careful taunting. I'd say 1-2 more tries and he'll be down (more, if half the raid will be different people).

Hunter video on one of the tries (by Ulatekso).

38 comments:

Victor Praxedes said...

i'm so thrilled to see marrowgar going down! good job and keep goimg. i wanna see what the naysayers have to say about saurfang.

Unknown said...

Hard enrage--> should be soft enrage. Bosses hard enrage starts 1shotting people because you were too slow/failed to do something. (Usally a time limit, so you can't just stack healers). Soft enrage= he gains more damage/haste, but it doesn't wipe you.(Ussualy happens at a % of health, with some notable exceptions. Example=patchwerk. Can't think of an exception at the moment) Grats, otherwise

Gevlon said...

@tyra: hard enrage. Naysayers mean it's impossible to create DPS enough to meet hard enrage.

Harusame said...

@praxedes

I don't think there are any naysayers left that come to this blog, so you wont see them saying its impossible

@Gevlon, which wing will you be tackling next? will you do a full wing or only select bosses from some wings till until you get the 30% buff?

Sean said...

Well, if you got him down to 6% then he should go down when the buff is at 20%...

ardoRic said...

Ulatekso FRAPSed one of our wipes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIsEGZ8NzKw

Unknown said...

I don't get it... how so that Nommie's pet does more damage than he himself, is he beastmaster or something? even though, how he can have lower damage than his pet?

Saithir said...

@tyra - Saurfang and Patch both have both of these. We died to the berserk one at the time limit.

Anonymous said...

I don't believe the naysayers were saying you can't meet saurfang's hard enrage. I think most naysayers are concerned about the blue guild meeting festergut's enrage.

Gevlon said...

@Harusame: plague quarter next (with naysayer's idol)

@Azzur: no, if we fail less with taunt and bloodbeasts we'll down him this Saturday

@Jan: beastmaster. The pet was on Saurfang all time, while the hunter kited bloodbeast

@Anonymous: we'll be on Festergut in 2 weeks (3 max)

ardoRic said...

@Anonymous

naysayers were also concerned about tanks being one-shotted by Gormok, Anub'Arak and Marrowgar and we proved them wrong.

naysayers also said that Marrowgar was as far as we'd get, since LDW had an enrage timer and we proved them wrong.

naysayers were saying "there's no way you can beat Saurfang's enrage timer" and "i'll be impressed if you kill Saurfang", and we're 6% away from proving them wrong (or impressing them).

the bar keeps getting higher, and they're not even considering tank gibs on Festergut anymore.

One thing I'm loving about this project, is the naysaying reaction to what we kill. They are still naysayers, but they'll change what they believe is the maximum we can kill, until we do the LK and they say "ah. you'll never do hardmodes", which we won't 'cause we didn't set out for it.

Oh, and don't forget to redo Festergut's math with 4k+ dps (previous math maxed us out at 3.5k), which is what we were doing on Saurfang.

Anonymous said...

I love you guys. I've heard too much of "we need better gear" in my guild over the years, there is always someone complaining when we extend our 10man id to try to finally get the Lichking down, despite doing a new 25man id every week.

Unknown said...

Your English is hard to follow. So you had one mark up at 6% when the boss hit the hard enrage?

That is some damn fine mitigation of blood power gains.

I figured you would have two marks up at the hard enrage.

Should consider evasion rogue tactic for the hard enrage. It may last long enough to be able to bring down that last 6%; but it would be fairly dicey.

Once Saurfang is down, there are several fights you could hit. Princes is execution, should not be that bad. Rotface might not be that hard. Dreamwalker is probably doable as well. Past that, I'm really uncertain. (at 15% anyway)

Made it further along on Saurfang than I would have thought possible though. I didn't think it was possible to have that little blood power gain with the "fixed" PW:S deal.

Ulatekso said...

@Chase When the Blood Beasts are properly controlled and are not hitting people often, and when tanks taunt in a timely fashion, Saurfang's BP gain is beyond pathetic on 10-man normal.

As you can see in the video, Blood Beasts were barely putting a finger (or claw) on people, bar that little mishap with Feign Death and a beast sneaking past Frost Trap. When Saurfang is only gaining BP from Blood Boil and Blood Nova, it really takes ages before he manages to put out a mark.

Anonymous said...

IMO, I trust that you will be able to down almost all bosses.
I am a naysayers on 3 bosses:
1) festergut. The numbers are.....well, they seem impossible tbh
2) proffesor. Even if you kill festy, proffesor has a major problem. You usually either change to more survivability or more dps depending on the fight. Proffesor has both survivability phase (up to the last phase) and a REALLY tough "burn phase" (last phase), so you can't specc purely for either.

3) Lich king. What can i say here? Extreme tight enrage. Huge damage spikes. Crazy >unavoidable< healing that will oom your healers in the first minute, valkyrs, extremely low reaction timer allowances (aka,you die in a single screw-up). if you down the lich king....well, i will go to orgrimmar yelling " I AM A FUCKING NOOB M&S, I DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE"

But, to be honest, i actually hope you prove me hope. I truly, TRULY hope

Ladron de la Noche said...

I am sincerely impressed, you've done well. It should be noted though, that most of the "naysayers" were commenting that some of these fights were not possible in blue gear at the time that you announced the project and there was no buff. I have no doubt that a group of skilled players can achieve some amazing feats in ICC but without the ezmode buff the math seems to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Gevlon said...

@Ladron: When I announced it I told that SOME form of nerf will come to ICC that will make it possible

Bernard said...

@Ladron

While the buffs open doors, most M&S PUGS are asking for 5.5k gearscore for the "first 4 bosses".

It's tiring to hear people whine about gear - they need to understand that they haven't got further because they're playing their class badly.

Anonymous said...

its kinda sad that you get "hardcore/nolife raider" title by doing icc hc _5_ times a week. if you need 5 days for icc run. your guild fails.
im in 11/12 25HC guild. we raid 2 - 3 times a week for few hours. first day is for 11 first bosses. second and maybe third day we burn our LK tries.

good luck with your project!

Leeho said...

Gz on this! Really impressive. If you manage to kill LK, even with 30% buff, it will be be just great. I think you can do it, if there will be enough people online every week, and tanks' hp will be enough with this buff.
Best of luck with this.

Backthief said...

Was wondering,


ilvl200 avg gear + 30% ICC buff you be equal to what ilvlgear in your opinion? The logical thinking would be ilvl260 avg gear, but would that really translate in ilvl260 dps/heal/tank?

Backthief said...

And do you have any plans to keep doing this on cataclysm? (with cataclysm content)

ardoRic said...

@ Backthief

Gevlon has already said he wanted to keep this guild as a progression guild: see http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/05/lfm-toc10-55k-gs-achie-or-no-inv.html

On my account, if we do go into Cataclysm, I'll most likely be re-rolling, since I'd like my shaman on my "main" realm.

Also, when making that math remember that blue gear does not sport as many stat budget as epic gear, and that stats don't scale linearly with item level (ilvl 232 epics has about twice as many stats as ilvl 200 blues, iirc).

The ICC buff, being percentage based, is much more of a buff to people with higher gear than it is to people with lower. It also does not increase the amount of mana and regen we have, and also not the avoidance on our tanks.

yes, 20% is 20%, but 20% of 3k dps is 900 and 20% of 6k dps is 1800. The raid damage goes up A LOT more the better geared you are (assuming equal skill).

Anonymous said...

@Backthief: The budget for stats on items is more complicated than that. Item stat values on a rare item cost 50% more iLvL points than an epic item and there is a constant offset. Small for a blue item.

If we are naively to assume that the value of each stat is 30% better under the buff, then you would have something like a 260 iLvL rare item. Using the formulas from WoWwiki this roughly translates into a iLvL 200 epic item.

Note there are subtleties in the value for stat points such as an item with one high stat are more costly than multiple lower stats. But I don't think it's unreasonable to treat 30% buffed blues as no better than unbuffed 10 man Ulduar gear at best.

Wilson said...

@andoRic:

I did check the math again. I see 25.1k dps on your 5th try against Saurfang, with what looks like 6 dps players. At 30%, this would be 28.4k dps. You need 31.4k to beat Festergut. Because it is a shorter fight with no adds, you will get some boost from your cooldowns, but nowhere near another 10%. If you have a different calculation, I would be interested in seeing it.

My doubts on clearing ICC have always been based on cold numbers, not on some emotional "You can't do X in blues!" knee-jerk reaction.

Shannon Fowler said...

I think I'm just repeating what's already being said in the comments. But I want to show my support.

No matter what you accomplish naysayers are going to set the bar just a little bit higher in hopes that they will *eventually* be right and you'll have 'failed', even though you're fast approaching the point where you'll have done more 'current' content than them. I promise to be quite amused when you get LK down (even though surely, surely Soul Reaper will one shot a blue geared tank!!!!!), and they start demanding you complete achievements for a dragon they'll never ride.

Keep up the excellent work.

Anonymous said...

Even if Festergut turns out to be a brick wall for ilvl 200 blue geared players, in what way does that differ from all those people who can't defeat him in 5.5GS epics?

It has been proved beyond any doubt that gear is not the crucial issue and all those Gearscore morons should finally accept that.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, I don't think anyone mentioned "you can't pass Saurfang due to hard enrage", they rather pointed Festergut.

But you can always try Blood Princes instead of Festergut, they're a "control, survival, execution" fight rather than patchwerk-style tank&spank, which fester is with 2 "perks" added. Blood Princes are the fight where skill > gear a lot, by perfecting execution you can prevent a lot of damage.

To the people "but you have icc buff":
- Gevlon stated from the beginning of the project "we will start raiding Icc when the buff is up"
- people who demand 6k GS + achi for "storming the citadel" don't turn off the buff!

Drakenrahl said...

The only 3 fights I can think of that may not be possible because of the gear are festergut (stated many times) lichking, since you need high burst (valks & raging spirits) on the ball healers (infest) and even with cooldowns soulreaper may still endup crushing your tanks. The third would be sindragosa because along with fairly high raid damage the tanks endup taking alot more damage then can be easily healed through if you have a few healers disabled due to unchained magic or icetombs. The easy solution would be to toss on some frost resist gear, but that's shiny and purple.

Andru said...

@Amyiss

I'm one of those naysayers.

And I pointed out so far, three fights that are impossible to beat.

One is Gormok 25. (Which, admittedly, I'll give it would be possible with 5-6 tanks, which is, obviously a valid tactic but impossible due to Undergeared's Tank situation, and even then, it's ridiculously dicey. I don't think you realize what punishment a tank takes in Icehowl 25 due to the periodic stun that he inflicts.)

The other is Festergut 10. While I admit that MAYBE at 30% it would be possible, it would require some hardcore raid stacking, or major improvement in personal DpS for all players across the board.

The third fight would be Sindragosa. There's literally no way that can be accomplished within the limitations of Undergeared. Even if you were to go the Frost Res gear route for tanks, you'd be hard pressed finding blue-quality frost res gear. Which means... Hydross-level frost res gear? Give me a break.

Not going the frost res for tanks? I, as a 245 geared tank back at 0% buff I saw AD proc ridiculously often when I killed her. (Haven't tried since then, though.) Phase 2 is incredibly confusing and straining for healers as is.

I resent your claim I have somehow upped the bar for naysaying.

I'm rooting for Undergeared to pull this off. Just because I'm naysaying, doesn't mean that I don't hope they prove me wrong.

If they do, great.

And yes, Lich King is undoable, but there's quite some way before him.

Ulatekso said...

@Wilson in my case, my DPS on Festergut should be significantly higher than it is on Saurfang. A lot of time is spent damaging Blood Beasts (which are not optimally debuffed, no 13% extra spell damage, no boosts from serpent sting and black arrow, no sunders, etc), and yet more time is spent running for trap placement and hotfooting it when a beast gets close.

Considering that I still managed around 4000 DPS on Saurfang, I'm fairly confident that I will manage over 5000 DPS on Festergut if I don't get shafted too badly by the random debuff distrubtion.

@Anonymous actually there was some guy claiming we wouldn't even have time to DPS Saurfang between the add waves (he seemed to have deleted his post today...), and I've read various posts claiming that even with six players doing X DPS and having Y% buff we still wouldn't make the 8 minute timer.

Iiene of Kul Tiras said...

You had Saurfang down to 6%? You had him.

Your taunt fails healed him for 15.8% alone. Now, It's impossible to get that to totally 0, but under 5% should be no problem.

There's where your money is... get that taunting right.

Antivyris said...

I think a lot of people that are comparing Saurfang DPS to festergut DPS are forgetting a few things.

On Saurfang, you have to be careful with AoE abilities. This includes standard DPS abilities that hit multiple targets that many classes use in a normal. rotation.

Also, on Saurfang, Ranged basically reset their entire rotation every 20-30 seconds, with very little time on the boss some blood-beast calls. This does not happen as often in Fester.

Also, a possible recommendation from a fellow elemental to the one in the log, and possibly as a whole. Most guilds save heroism for the soft enrage. However, if you are hitting the hard enrage, possibly blow heroism at the start? This gives close to 30-40s of pure DPS time on the boss. In a run with higher gear, it wouldn't help, but this might just be a benefit with lower gear.

Lastly, If you can have your restoration shaman drop flame tongue totem, your elemental-shaman could drop a fire elemental. Again, since you have lower gear, the 136 extra spellpower for 2 minutes might be a fair trade-off for the elementals dps, but I'm not sure off the top of my head.

Unknown said...

To be perfectly honest, wiping at 6% with only one mark up makes me wonder what in the unholy hell killed you. It sure as hell wasn't the mark.

Gevlon said...

@Terra: the hard enrage

Anonymous said...

EJ on Bloodlust/Heroism:

http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t49476-math_bloodlust_heroism_timing/

Anonymous said...

Just curious stat value wise, but what are the thoughts on using T6/Sunwell type gear. Because of stat distributions, set bonus's etc for a couple classes I can think of the sunwell ilvl gear is definatly better than the wotlk level 80 blues. The only thing you'd lose is stam, which while good, isn't too awfully threatening I would think.

Just thought of this since I accidently did hm10 saurfang in my shaman t6 the other day since I was parading around when someone started it.

Anonymous said...

I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again. I'm fully confident that Undergeared will down the 10 man Lich King when you have the 30% buff. It might be hard, but I really have no doubt.

However, as I've said before, it won't matter. Nobody is going to pay any attention to a regular mode kill on 10 man. It's absurdly easy. Without even trying many casual guilds did it with the 5% or 10% buff. Coming in and doing something on easy mode four or six months after it was important is never going to get much attention. I'd go so far as to say that it would only sway the truly incompetent people who at that time still haven't downed him. You might also get a mention on MMO Champion or something, but I doubt anything would come of that either.

The only way I can imagine you'll get any real attention or change any minds would be if you did something that's actually hard in and of itself. Yogg+0, Algalon, or ICC or ToGC heroic mode. If you could do that, and I think at least some of those are possible, you could get some real exposure and really affect some change. If not, then not.