One small Gnome

So, here I am. I was asked to provide some awesome content for this blog, so here we are. Today, I want to talk about our most recent raid, and specifically how utterly shite it was. I'd like to take the time to try and explain what went wrong, how it could've been prevented, and how we could suck less balls next time.

This is essential to our success.

We value skill over class and gear. This is one of our main policies. The buff reforms in MoP allow for a very versatile set-up, and allow us to take nearly all set-ups into our raids. However, this thursday we actually managed to miss two out of the eight possible buffs. This is unacceptable, and seriously hindered our ability to get things done.

So, who do we blame for all this? First of all, I'd like to take the time to extensively blame San for not getting his sign-ups in order, leaving him unable to attend last-minute. This left us with a botched set-up to begin with, and wasn't a good start overall.

Raids with botched starts tend to be very 'unorganized' in my mind. I like having things in order before a raid starts, and when I open the invites, I want to see that raid filled with 10 people within 5 minutes. I'll get to this, for I am not done with the blame-game yet.

I want to blame myself for our raidly cock-up as well. I distinctly remember San saying he could not make it this thursday, due to having to work late. At the time, I was like "Yea sure, we'll fix it". But I didn't fix it, and completely forgot to check whoever the fuck signed for that night. I should've double checked.

So, that basically explains why we had such a horrible raid that day. Oh, and one more thing. We missed our Gnome. I still thing he should change his name to "Loozi", but that's besides the point. As Bert mentioned in one of his earlier posts, my raid-leading capabilities have diminished to a point where I can't muster up the will to chase behind everyone's pants, just to get the full 100% out of them. I've never been more happy to have Luci raid-lead than now. It takes a load off my mind while raiding.

So yea, while I (we) tend to make jokes about his audio books (explanations he calls them), and his Denglish, everyone should know we can't do without that little shit, so be nice to him sometimes.

Now, about those raid invites. I'd like to get more strict in the on-time EPGP distribution. I know it's not a huge amount, but it's supposed to be an incentive for everyone to be ready when the invites open. 

Please re-read our rules on what gets you the EP, and how you can avoid not getting it. Pretty please. This makes it so much easier for us to creat a successful raiding environment. Which I'm sure you all want.

In summary, I think we can safely conclude that the success of a raid depends on many factors. But, with our limited time, we NEED to make sure all is organized. Losing time on things that shouldn't be taking our time, is not acceptable. I will learn from my mistake, and it should not happen again.

Help us, help you to create a better raid. Sign up on time, be on time. We've got this.

So, drive safe, drink in moderation, and please don't watch your eyes all the way out.

Until next time.

Bertman vs the raid - Murphy's law

Our raid the 8th of November


A new reset, farm bosses still alive and the knowledge of last weeks roflstomping of the four "farmbosses" in Mogu'shan Vaults made me look forward to this raid.

What didn't make me look forward to it was the fact that I'm quite sick. Soar throat, runny nose, headache, the works...

We got a nice raid together although my buddy San had to cancel at the last minute.

We replaced him by Eerdragon, our resident resto shammy.

Loozi was back again to lead us so at least I wouldn't be talking a fuckton over vent which was a good thing with my soar throat.

We started with the Stoneguards (obviously) and immediately I noticed something was wrong.

The bosses didn't die.

Our dps usually is great, this time, not so much.

People died a lot, our dps was quite low and then it dawned on me. Loozi earlier made mention over vent that we had the "toughest" set up and apparently that was very true. We had the bombs and the puddles on the floor and the chains chaining people together screwing us over.

Early on we had a very good attempt (with almost no need for taunting between the tanks - I remember thinking "is this stuff bugged?")

Sadly in the last 15 % people started dying and we wiped at like 2 % or so.

This great attempt made me confident that we could kill this boss in a timely manner. We didn't.

It took us an hour and a half (half of the raid) to kill the stone guards. At one point we even changed our strategy to no avail. After a short break - some of us where getting agitated - we returned and killed those damn dogs.

After that we got to Feng.

I don't know what it is with this boss and DMB but whatever you do, DO NOT THRUST DBM timers.

Phase one fucked us over when I somehow I couldn't reliably steal the interrupt anymore. (Something I did flawlessly last week)

I've been watching for the cast animation ever since. Best thing to do really is to wait until the boss casts the skill you need to steal (it has a cast bar) and then channel that crystal on your co-tank.

On our next pull Gudran couldn't bubble because he didn't have the skill. Turns out it was a user interface problem because on our third pull of the evening we had to do some "fancy" taunting to allow him to reload his ui.

You can hear us talking about it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKkx4XeUyj0&feature=youtu.be

Big thumbs up to Skyknight for making these videos! Awesome stuff.

After this we had like one hour left for two bosses.

And somehow, someway, somewhere we found the strength to get. it. done.

The next boss, Garasomething the Spiritfucker, was a two shot and it would have been a one shot if we didn't have some RNG screwing us over with some miscommunication, a DC and a bad phase transition.

We arrived at the spirit kings with 10 minutes left.

And we one shotted the encounter.

It was a bad raid - we could have done so much better

It was a frustrating raid - RNG was not our friend

It was a lootless raid - almost all loot that dropped went for offspec or DE

But we killed every boss we had killed before.

It was an awesome raid!

Bertman vs the raid – Elegon

Our raid of 06.11.12

Yesterday we had the entire raids duration to make progress on Elegon.

We went in without our esteemed raid leader Loozi. Real live happens and Loos had warned us in advance so Gudran, Bala and me took over as raid leaders for the night.

Back in WotLK the three of us led Renown to a top 50 world ranking. Doing so implies we know our shit. Needless to say we were feeling confident in our raid leading abilities.

We got off to a good start. We figured out the trash fast.

You have these mobs that project a cone of lightning-y shit in from of them. Turns out you have to stand in it. It kicks you back quite a few yards and allows you to kite them quite easy.

The kiting is necessary as they gain a nasty buff for a few ticks that kicks your ass, even as a tank.

Of course, to fully benefit from the kick back, you can’t stand with your back against a wall. All that tanky knowledge that is ingrained in my brain went out the window for those trash pulls.

The next pull consists of those kick back mobs and one caster like mob. Our DPS just burned down the caster. We had Pug (DPS DK) tanking that mob but I don’t think it’s really necessary. He hits like a wet towel.

Gudran and me dragged the kick back mobs back in the hallway to avoid pulling the next trash pack.

The third and last trash pack before Elegon is the hardest.

5 mobs.

The big one in the middle heals so we owned him first. He doesn’t need a tank.

The two smallest ones are casters again and they don’t need to be tanked either, we killed them second.

Then it was time for the two remaining mobs to bite the dust. They were of the “kick back” variant again.

Once you get the strategy down it’s really really easy.

After the dust settled, we went over the Elegon strategy.

And gawd damn are we rusty.

Our explanation was all over the place, interrupting each other and even contradicting each other on some aspects.

I can’t say enough how happy I am that Loozi takes the brunt of the raid leading on his delicate little shoulders. I really don’t have the time to do all anymore. I think we have a good spread of the tasks in our guild right now, I hope everyone else thinks the same.

Anyway, back to Elegon and his raid-owning ways.

I had to go DPS for our attempts. I don’t mind going DPS for fights but sometimes I feel like me and Bala are the only ones with a viable off spec. Normally it doesn’t bother me to much but yesterday I got the feeling it hurt our raid a bit.

I am the best geared tank and having me go dps hurts the team. Especially since my dps spec is raid ready, but not amazing.

I’m not bashing anyone here, a good off spec is something that usually comes after we have farmed a raid a bunch. I realize we are very early in the expac and it’s just easier as a tank to pick up off spec gear I think.

Anyway, I went dps for the fight and Bala went tank. We did this so we could have two healers, two tanks and six dps which is apparently the best set up for this fight.

At first we didn’t get very far, we usually wiped after one or two of the bigger adds died. Turns out our healers had to move too much because the tank tanking the add just dragged it to the outside of the circle that was closest. We fixed that by setting a designated point on where to tank them.

It made the tanks and dps run a bit more but the healers had to move less, which is usually a good thing.

With that adjustment we got into phase 2. We failed to kill all the little adds early on, going completely unprepared into phase 3 and having people all over the outer ring unable to reach each other. Reason this happened was because the transition between phase one and phase two sucked balls.

After some tinkering with the strategy and explaining it through the use of every raid marker in existence we were ready to pull again.

Our strategy for the night was simple:

In phase one, when a big add dies, it does 100k damage to everyone in the raid. Bala, X-man and me rotated our raid wide cooldowns to lessen the incoming damage.

In phase two we used heroism to get the little adds down quick enough after three waves but that turned out to be overkill as on one attempt we killed five waves. In our later attempts we stopped using heroism on that part.

The tricky part was again the phase transition from phase 2 to phase 3. We wiped several times there due to people not being in the right spot or due to adds.

In phase three you have to kill 6 pylons before you can go back to dpsing the boss.

The pylons are standing around the room in a circle and they are connected with the pylon on the opposite side of the circular room. You have to kill the two connected pylons before you can get to the next pylon because as long as one of the pylons is active, a force field keeps you from continuing

The best way, the only way really, is to be where you have to be before the pylons activate there force fields.

Once again an explanation involving a lot of raid markers was needed.

I’m really glad that our guildies are very patient and actually involved with the strategy and come up with ideas too.

 Once we cleaned our shit up we got through phase 3, killing all the pylons with a minimum of adds up and then, once again, the phase transition from phase 3 to phase 1 kicked our asses.

I think the important things here are:

1. get a tank asap back on Elegon

2. use a raid cooldown to minimize incoming damage and personal, minor dps cooldowns to burst down the adds. I think the best place to tank the adds is where we kill the big add in phase 1.

Anyway, we didn’t have time to test that because our time was up.

We progressed from wiping in phase one almost immediately to wiping in the transition between phase 3 and phase 1. It may not seem like a lot but once we got that fixed it’s just rince and repeat and then kill Elegon.

I’m confident we can kill him. It may take a while though.

All in all, it’s a fun fight and I’m looking forward to more attempts and progression on him.

Props to our guildies for not complaining when we manhandled the explanation(s) and major props to Loozi to lead our sorry asses to victory time and time again.

Bertman vs the raid – great raid, sour aftertaste

So last Thursday, the 1th of November, we prepared ourselves once again to kill the first bosses in Mogu’shan vaults.

As I wrote last time I was quite concerned about our healing team. Our two “main” healers weren’t there.

With “main” I don’t mean Eerdragon or Sky aren’t main healers because they obviously are but San and Bala are our unofficial healing leaders really. They are both most vocal on vent and are experienced healing leads.

So with Eerdragon, Sky and Linutari healing (Linu has resto as off spec!) I was afraid we would be having a rough time.

Boy was I wrong.

Eer and Sky proved they are more than just healers. They are MAIN healers. And Linu proved he knows a thing or two about healing too. I even saw him top the meters from time to time (not that healing meters matter much, but yeah…)

They really put my troubled mind to rest.

Eer, Sky and Linu proved they are more than capable of holding there own. Those guys did amazingly well.

And so did the raid.

An hour after we went in, fearing it might be a wipefest, we where getting ready for progression attempts at the Spirit Kings! It only took us an hour to kill every. Single. Boss. We killed before.

/mind blown

And so we started our attempts at the Spirit Kings.

And from the first pull, it was ON.

If you ever played sports you must know that feeling that you got your opponent where you want him and that you just know, if we just push a little harder we win.

That was the feeling in the raid that evening and that’s what we did. We pushed just a little harder, a little better, a little more focused and the Spirit Kings fell.

Not only did we clear the first 3 bosses in record time, not only did we kill a new boss, we actually bought us time for 2 or 3 attempts at Elegon himself!

What a ride!

Sadly, it’s not always good news.

Wildharp left Renown this weekend. There had been some annoyances between her and several other officers and this raid was the last drip.

I don't want to linger to much on it but I think you guys at least deserve a run-down on what happened.

She did not agree with the way we killed (!) certain bosses and this argument came to a climax in officer chat.

I will never understand why people want to argue over a good thing but it obviously happens. I’m all for improving our raids but much better than 3 boss kills in under an hour it won’t get with our gear level and our experience with the bosses.

I wish her all the best in finding a new guild that suits her needs.

Bertman vs the raid - the Spiritfucker

And another post cleaned up for the masses.

This time it's about our raid on the 30th of October.


Our raid last night was a success. Nothing more to be said about that really.

First up was Spiritfucker the Troll.

The fight itself wasn’t really hard for tanks. Honestly, it’s one of the easier fights I’ve ever done.

Thing with these easy fights is that you get disconnected as a player. I literally had to force myself to focus.

It’s also extremely frustrating to have such an easy job when the raid is struggling. I couldn’t do anything to help really. When I was in the spirit realm I always tried to kill one or two mobs myself but I doubt it really helped a lot.

Somehow I’m surprised we didn’t come up with the duo heal strategy earlier.

The fight is a typical duo heal fight. More dps actually means less damage. I’m usually a bit cautious of going to a duo heal strategy ‘cause I always get the feeling that it’s like giving dps permission to suck.

Maybe that’s just me being old skool, I don’t know, but I have the idea engraved in my head that it’s two tanks, three healers and five dps on all fights. It’s weird ‘cause I think that we where one of the first groups of people on the server to go one tank/two healers/seven dps in Karazhan. We certainly where the first group of people to pug like that. I still remember pugs leaving when they heard we only had two healers and one tank.

Anyway, I’ve done some more research and apparently it’s the set up everyone uses on the Spiritbinder fight so we’re not really doing anything special or compensating for anyone. It just irks me a bit.

The kill was “messy” with only harp surviving. According to Guddy an ex-GM of Renown used to bitch about that. I don’t know why you would be anything but happy after a kill like that. I can see that you want bosses asap on “farm status” and that “messy” kills of “farm bosses” are not desired but on progression a kill is a kill. It’s one of those things we have in Renown. We push content hard. We used to be super hard core in LK and reached very high highs. Cata can be described as our low. MOP is going to be the expansion where we really fortify our foundation of a guild that raids “professionally” in the limited time we give ourselves.

This means pushing bosses with “lesser gear” because we aren’t online 24/7. This also means a lot of exhilarating bosskills in our future (and 1 % wipes)

Anyway, back to the Spiritfucker.

He died once we switched to a duo heal strat on the first attempt. I saw it coming two minutes into the fight.

In the end it got dicey with only la Harp surviving but we did it. Another boss down.

To bad Linu wasn’t there when his weapon dropped. I’m confident killing the spiritnab again won’t be much of a problem though. If we have a team that can get past the first two bosses, the third one should be a loot piñata.

The spirit kings will follow the spiritturd soon enough. Once again another fight that’s really fun to do.

I’m almost certain that we’d have killed them on our last attempt if bolo didn’t dc. We did get favorable spawns of bosses twice though. The one that mind controls (or whatever the fuck it is) is a though one. I doubt we could deal with the fight as well as we did if he spawns second.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to next reset.

I’m a tad bit worried about our healing situation on Thursday though. Without San and Bolo the other healers will have to step up big time.

Bertman vs the raid - unlikely kills

Once again a post intended for our officer forum only. Once again I cleaned it up to allow you guys to read something when Loozi is explaining bossfights :p

This one is about our raid on the 25th of October.


Another raid, another blogish post from yours truly.

I must say I’m impressed with last night’s raid.

I thought we would be getting some progress in on Feng and then kill him next raid. Oh how was I wrong.

First of all, mayor props to Bala/Shao. He picked up the tanking very fast. Both on the Stone Guard as on Feng. With Bala, Gud and me the tanking team is solid.

Our second Stone Guard kill was hectic. Part of it was because we had a new tank in the mix and that’s always iffy. Another mayor part of the confusion and hectic character of our kill was that we had a different set up of enemies as on our first kill. The mines needed some adapting on the raids part to get through. Still it only took 5 pulls to kill it. I’m confident we can put this fight on farm the coming weeks.

The kill came unexpected to me. We were making solid progress but not “we gonne kill him now”-progress. I wasn’t surprised there was a fuck up with the taunting somewhere near the end. The fight gets more and more hectic the longer it takes. I WAS surprised healers seemingly effortless healed through the overload of a non-petrifying Stone Guard. After the second non-petrifying Stone Guard overload people started dying left and right but somehow our healers got the raid stable again and we had just enough DPS to kill them off. An awesome kill indeed. Mac and Bala got epax and after one hour we could go and do progression attempts on Feng.

Feng is another fight that needs some serious attention (and dare I say skill) from the tanks.

Once again this was the first time Bala tanked the fight so he needed some practice pulls in before we could start our actual attempts.

Once again Bala picked up the tanking faster than I anticipated and before we knew it we were pushing phase 3.

A kill was in the air. Renown sniffed blood. Game faces where on. The A-game was brought. Shit was gonne go down.

Our kill was a thing of beauty. Phase one and phase two went off without a hitch. Earthquakes interrupted, Moving fire shit blocked and then we got to phase three.

Last raid Eerdragon pwned the raid with an epic suicide maneuver.

This time Eer resisted his urge to kick our behinds and moved in and or out when needed. Shit was going well. Cooldowns where being popped and pain was being brought.

Until people started dying.

Now, one or two dead dps is recoverable that late in the fight (3 %). But a dead tank is another issue entirely. Bala died and without him there was no-one to taunt the boss back and forth with.

The debuff started stacking on me and I started popping cooldowns left and right, my finger hovering over my lay on hands button.

Picture this: dead DPS everywhere, a dead tank and out-of-mana-healers.

It was then, in our darkest hour (an impending 1 % Renown style wipe) that a hero stepped up.

One of the most cool-headed reactions I’ve ever seen happened during that kill.

It takes skill, experience and balls the size of Azeroth to pull that shit off. And I’m almost
100 % certain non of you realized.

What do you do when you are a healer, completely out of mana and an impending 1 % wipe is incoming?

You die.

You intentionally take damage until you bite the dust.

That is, if you are a holy priest.

San’s Spirit of Redemption saved our collective asses.

And as soon as San’s Spirit faded, the boss died.

A victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

Nerdgasms filled vent.


After the spoils of war where dividend we realized we had more than an hour left to do some progression attempts at Gara'jal the Spiritbinder.

We got Gara’jal to enrage at one attempt so I’m confident that once our DPS/healers get the fight completely under control, we will be victorious once again.

Perhaps as soon as next raid

Bertman vs the raid - a lovestory

My first post, intended for our officer forum only but I edited it a bit and made it readable for the masses.

This is about our raid on the 23 of October, our second this expac. We had killed the Stone Guards on our previous raid.



So yesterday we were facing Feng and I was getting the “steal shit the boss casts-skill”.

My job in phase one is to steal a skill called “lightning fist” from the boss by casting the “steal shit the boss casts-skill”.

The “steal shit skill” is a channel, so what you have to do is make sure to be channeling it on the other tank that is getting hit by the spell you want to steal. So, Gudran has to get hit by lightning fist AND I have to be channeling the “steal shit skill” on Gudran. Thing is that you have to time it right because the boss is also casting other stuff and if you do it wrong you steal the wrong spell and then you can’t interrupt.

At first I didn’t get anywhere with the stealing but after a while it turned out Gudran wasn’t getting hit because he was standing too close to the boss. Reason he was standing too close is because Gud was tanking him with his back against the wall.

This is quite the normal tank reaction really. Position your back against a wall and the boss can’t kick you away. It wasn’t needed in this fight but it’s just the easiest way to position him right so I don’t blame Gud. At one point I was questioning myself though. I had a hard time with the first boss (being rusty and all) and then this. Had I lost my tanking mojo?

Turns out that after Gud positioned himself differently (not with his back against the wall, but still away from the raid) I could steal the interrupt skill at will. (If he casted it anyway, more on that later).

I’m 100 % certain we got the tanking down for this fight.

Phase one really isn’t that hard, just turn him away from the raid in time after he does the earth quake thingy to avoid lightning fist on the raid and we are golden.

Phase two depends mostly on how good our raid drops the flames really. Gud and me had to do some repositioning on the fly in some of the attempts. On other attempts we fucked the positioning up but after we got more and more into phase two we know where and how to tank him.

Gud got the bubble spell down remarkably fast too.

Phase three is really not that hard from a tank POV, just tank and spank really. (for tanks that is)

Throughout all the phases tanks need to taunt from each other because of debuffs that get applied (taunt on two!) but that’s just good communication and that’s never been a problem between Gud ‘n me.

Anyway, with the tanking in the bag, it’s the other 8 nabs that need to do their job.

I think it took us about an hour to get the tanking right. It could have been faster if Gud wasn’t tanking him with his back against the wall but there was no-way we could have foreseen that.

It’s not mentioned in the movies I saw, and it’s not mentioned on either Maintakadin or Tankspot so yeah…

I think it’s because the fights are so new and most of the general wow populace hasn’t done them outside of LFR.

There just isn’t much info about them. I like it though 

Anyway, after about two hours we were getting reliably to phase 3 unless something weird happened that screwed us over.

Timers didn’t always seem correct in DBM, sometimes the boss would just cast the earthquake thing almost the second he got into phase one without warning.

Things like these led to needless wipes but there is no way around this really. It did slow down progression though.

By the time we got from “getting reliably in phase 3” to “almost killing the motherfucker” we were running out of time.

The second to last attempt was gonne be our kill though. Phase 3 was going perfect. Boss’ health ticking away every second, we got him into execute range, then we got him to around 10 % and then suddenly it all stopped.

We had this beautiful kill attempt going that was going so well that we could taste the sweet taste of victory already. Renown was gonne be 2/6. I could see the newspost already.

“TWO RAID IN, TWO BOSSES DOWN – Gudran forgot to take a killshot”.

And then Eric came along and fucked all those daydreams in the butt.

He got that “arcane bomb explosion fuck up the raid”- spell and instead of running the fuck away he ran right at us.

Like Loozi said afterwards it happened in slow motion. I SAW what he was doing, I KNEW what was gonne happen but I was powerless to stop it.

boooooom

Shitton of peeps dead, wipe, game over.

Our next attempt wasn’t as clean and we wiped again in phase 3 but this time not as close to victory as the attempt that Eric manhandled.

All in all I had a SHITTON of fun tonight. The fight is fun, the raid is pretty and the atmosphere on vent was amazing. Really really really fun.