Icecrown Heroic: Day 3

It's been a rough week lately.

After having reached Deathbringer Saurfang two Wednesday's ago to see what he was all about and wipe repeatedly, we went back that Sunday to try out some new tactics, only to have computer problems stop us, followed soon thereafter by a complete vanishing of one of our raiding members. Having assumed he disconnected for good, we couldn't continue and called it, only to find out the next day, when we'd have our final scheduled raid of the week, that this "disconnected" member was unguilded suddenly and seemingly vanished without word.

Faaaan-fucking-tastic of you to shit upon us!

At any rate, we decided there was nothing for it but to finish off as much of Normal as we could before our raid ended and we faced a reset Tuesday.

Last Wednesday we went back in with a substitute for our 10th slot and made our way back through to Saurfang, having to rework our Blood Beasts strategy completely now that our Hunter was gone. Still, we eventually figured out how to get it done and had, literally, 4 wipes due to Berserk, including a 100k HP wipe of agony. Arg!

So, back to the drawing boards to discuss how, without any form of 50% Healing Reduction debuff and about 1000 less Raid DPS, we were going to drop him. The only explanation seemed to be: Suck it up and use two healers.

The good news is, we're quite used to using two healers, but 95% of the time it's our two resident Druid healers that do the job, but unfortunately it quickly became apparent that there was no possible way to defeat this fight at our gear level with two Druids -- they're great players, but the GCDs just aren't there to keep everyone up during 80+ Runic Power moments on 2-3 Marks + tanks + Boiling Blood + Blood Nova.

Instead, the only true solution is the almighty hax that is Beacon of Light. Unfortunately our Ret Paladin, who had to do the healing in this case, doesn't have the best healing gear by any stretch (36k mana sounds familiar), but it was by far the best choice as it was immediately apparent Mark healing would be much simpler with a Beacon.

The next big realization came when we decided to CROSS THE BEAMS and force Blood Beasts to path across the stairway, in the opposite direction they spawned, which allowed probably 90% of the spawns to get stunned from Shockwave.

So, we came back last night to have our hand at Saurfang for a third time, and it was brutal punishment after brutal punishment. Again, we could see progress as before, but one wasted GCD by our Paladin healer at the wrong time, one miscalculated Flash of Light instead of a Holy Light, one delay from ranged DPS on Blood Beast agro, one slow taunt on Rune of Blood transition, etc -- nearly any minor mistake would either cause a death or an unrecoverable Runic Power jump that all lead down the same dark, lonely path to WipeVille. We were the town's sole residents and every time we made a break for the border into WinDom, some asshat Sheriff of LoLs would pull us over and send us back home. I hate that guy...

In any event, we had the right ingredients, our DPS tweaks we made were all showing their colors, and we finally managed to drop the fool by the skin of our teeth with barely 5 seconds to go on Berserk! Well done Voxers, we earned that shit fo' realz yo.



The sad part is, seeing that victory message was, for the most part, met only with relief rather than excitement or joy from us, which is unfortunately sometimes the way it goes. We spent basically the same overall time/wipes on Heroic: Saurfang as we did Normal: Lich King, but somehow Lich King felt very satisfying and rewarding to defeat, at least for me and I'd say by others' reactions to the kill, they agree. Heroic: Saurfang just has a completely different learning curve to it and the tuning is of course much higher for Heroic: Saurfang than Lich King or any other fight we've seen so far, Heroic or otherwise.

Ultimately, that's the biggest complaint about this fight, which I eluded to in my Heroic: Icecrown Day 1 article after our first attempts on him: he is balanced to such a razor's edge that even the slightest error or bad luck can easily make or break an attempt. In fact, we spent hours discussing and writing up strategy on how to minimize Saurfang's Runic Power income, to the point we were able to add a full 47 seconds onto the delay from Engage until the first Mark was cast. Both of these scenarios are perfect play in terms of Rune of Blood taunting, never getting hit by Blood Beasts, and never chaining Blood Nova onto multiple targets. Still, it took tons of discussion and number crunching to find the most ideal situations for paladin/mage to self-immune or for our two Paladins to Hand of Protection to remove Boiling Blood, until the point we took the first Mark delay from 1:43 delay our first attempts to 2:30 delay for what ended up as our kill. That's a HUGE disparity in that it delays the next Mark and the next and so on.

In fact, on our kill, we ended up finishing the fight with only two Marks, even though our raid DPS as mentioned was barely high enough to beat the Berserk. And still the requirements are insane -- not to toot our own horns too much, but we got so good at Taunting for Rune of Blood that he only got 7 heals in total from our killing attempt for ~700,000 health, whereas most logs from overgeared raiders allow 15+ hits on average, over the 4:20-4:30 their fight lasts, yet the healing with 50% reduction for them is still only 1.2-1.5 million. Blarg!

In any event, what I love about this fight are also the things I somewhat loathe: the tight damage requirements, the required healing output, the management of detailed minutiae. All these things are great when it doesn't make the players feel helpless to react or control the momentum of the fight at any given moment. For example, we had a strategy for a while (we opted out of it later for something better, but still use it in a pinch), that put most of our ranged DPS on a single Blood Beast while our (now absent) Hunter agroed and killed the second Blood Beast while I, as a Prot Tank, taunted the beast off him when it got close. This worked quite well as Vigilance kept my Taunt available frequently when the other tank was actually tanking. However, any time the timing was slightly off or I taunted the Blood Beast slightly late or the Hunter's damage was slightly lower than spawn for whatever reason, my Vigilance wouldn't proc as Saurfang was on me and my taunt would be down and I'd just have to sit there and pray, spamming Taunt and side stepping to get into a bit closer range on the beast to hopefully snag it before the Hunter exploded. This wasn't extremely common, but when it happened, I felt so helpless and useless to watch what happened.

Now to be fair, in this example, we could (and as mentioned, did) change our strategy so that Taunt wasn't a necessary requirement, but these sorts of things are common in this fight, to the point that not having something go wrong, and thus winning, feels like a fluke rather than a well executed performance by everyone involved -- how it should feel.

Having said all that, there is one major caveat I want to be sure I include in this post, and that is simply: I realize we are not geared up yet for Heroics, and thus the content is likely tuned for a higher gear cap than we currently possess. We haven't spent weeks and weeks farming Normal 251 pieces and we're short on a lot of the big upgrades such as Lich King weapons, so I confess that, in part, I don't have full license to complain about the tuning of this fight.

However, a counterpoint to that is simply the manner in which Blizzard has elected to present Heroic/Hard Modes historically, and it's something I discussed with Thawfore, our resident Ret Paladin, for a bit.

Essentially, back in UBRS, Molten Core, BWL, AQ20/40, ZA, ZG, Sunwell, BT... everything prior to Ulduar and the inception of Hard Modes... every raid zone was designed such that bosses midway or near the end required gearing up from earlier content and often earlier parts of the zone to succeed. Now, that made sense because a "Hard Mode" as a separate entity did not exist. Instead, Ragnaros, Nefarian, and Ilidan were your Hard Modes and defeating them took gearing up.

The first true inception of Hard Modes in Ulduar, did, in my opinion, still roughly follow the guidelines of the aforementioned old school raiding zones, in that with a few exceptions, most required a fair bit of gearing up on Normal fights to have a decent chance. This goes doubly for some of the extra curricular achievements Ulduar had available. Even Flame Leviathan, the the very nature of the ilevel > damage/hp conversion, required some level of gearing up.

Then suddenly, Trial of the Grand Crusader changed all that. I haven't copied over our old website front-page posts yet due to laziness, but I recall making a post after we first got into Heroic ToC that was basically along the lines of: "3-shotted Beasts, 2-shotted Jaraxxus, wiped a shitton to the imbalance of Faction Champs (blah blah, irrelevant to this discussion due to the nature of the fight mechanics), 1-shotted Twins, wiped a dozen times to Anub, will be back soon."

Then the next night our front page post was something like: "Came back, downed Anub in half a dozen more tries, 30ish attempts left!"

A week later: "49 attempts, sadface"

And a week after: "Woot, 50 attempts and woot, Dedicated Insanity!"

And as many of our members agreed at the time, there's no possible way we wouldn't have defeated Heroic Anub our first night if Faction Champs weren't such a mess for odd raid makeup groups.

The point is, for whatever reason, Blizzard decided to throw the handbook out the window when it came to gearing requirements for Hard Modes after Ulduar once they put out ToC. The message was clear: If you clear everything available to you on Normal every week that you can, once you have access to Hard Modes, you'll have the required gear to do most of them.

And ignoring Saurfang for a moment, I'd say that trend continues in ICC. Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship, Rotface were all fairly easy to down in a handful of learning attempts, and we only had a chance to try Festergut a few times but he's for sure doable.

Yet again, Saurfang stands out like a sore thumb. And maybe, just maybe, that's intended -- maybe he's meant to be the gatekeeper ala Vael, except for one minor detail: Normal/Heroic toggle negates that completely. If, as I suspect, we find most of the non-wing bosses easier than Saurfang relatively, it's a bizarre implementation. Yes, he drops an armor piece, but if he's skippable to gear up on other heroic bosses if desired, why is such an insanely RNG-based mindfuck of a tuned encounter required at that point in the dungeon? I'll be completely happy and understanding if Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa, and of course Lich King are at least this difficult, because they are meant to be the wing-end bosses and are not, metaphorically if not literally, blocking off the rest of the zone.

Ultimately, I truly cannot imagine a strict 10-man downing Heroic Saurfang with zero Paladins (unless they have 4 mages perhaps). I also wouldn't encourage anyone to try without a form of healing reduction either, which I suppose could be argued that all properly built raids should have it, but sometimes the chips just don't land that way, and try as we might, we can't keep a 50% healing reduction-capable DPS on our roster for the life of us.