twin ogrons Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Kargath’s Hat

December 17, 2014 by Belghast

Festive Occasion

Today is going to be a really strange day, for so many reasons. The group I am with at work is the first group in years that I have actually cared about holiday parties. So when my boss had a party a few years ago, it was quite literally the first “work Christmas party” I have ever actually attended. This year due to some odd circumstances we are not actually having a real party, but instead doing a Christmas lunch of sorts. The plan is to have a long lunch at a local restaurant, and then in place of our normal Wednesday staff meeting we are having these product demos. This year we had these team projects that we had been working on as we had time. Each of them did something that we felt was needed in our environment.

In the meeting this afternoon we have to demo our progress, but I am taking this probably way more seriously than I actually should. I have a product pitch like presentation, with a power point and everything. My hope is that I can burn through the presentation pretty quickly, because once all of the products have been demo’d we are off for the rest of the afternoon. I have a feeling that if any one person runs too long there will be much groaning, so I am trying to make sure things are polished enough to go quickly without stumbling on anything. In any case today is going to be a strange day, and hopefully it will be a fun one.

Kargath’s Hat

This morning I am struggling a bit to focus as I write my blog post. In part I am groggy from having stayed up a little bit too late, but I am also struggling to figure out how to explain just how awesome last night was. This so far has been hands down the best start to an instance raid wise I have experienced in World of Warcraft. Generally speaking our guild and the raids connected to it, have taken a significant amount of time getting our act together before actually hitting the content. With this raid we attempted to hit the ground running on the week the content was actually released. Of course Argent Dawn our server did not cooperate… and the game was essentially unplayable for us on that Tuesday, however the following Thursday they managed to down the first two bosses. Since then we have been progressing steadily each week. Last week we managed to down our very first Heroic boss as well, but due to some bugs not a single person in the raid got any loot. The bosses share separate lockouts, but it seems like last week you were only able to receive loot from one of those lockouts.

As such we altered the order in which we did the content so that we could take down Heroic Kargath first before doing any of the normal mode content. That way if we were only going to get loot from one version… we would at least get the heroic version. I can’t say we have this boss down on “Farm” yet because it took us a few tries to get him down, but it does feel like it was more solid than last week. Last week was definitely a “by the seat of our pants” kill, feeling like we barely got him. This week we had a few rough attempts but then on the time we killed him everything went pretty solidly. I struggled a bit with staying alive this week in general, which is part really bad luck and part sluggish reaction speed. When he died I got quite possibly the worst helmet I could use statwise…. which directly replaced the previous version I had… but at least it has the festive green text saying “Heroic” on it.

Twin Ogron: Doubly Dead

Wow-64 2014-12-16 22-00-15-15 This week on normal everything is starting to feel like it is easily farmable. We downed Kargath and Butcher with ease, before moving forward to Brackenspore. After struggling a bit last week, this week everything felt smooth. I can say that pretty much every job on that fight happened flawlessly, but we also got some luck on the mushroom spawn placement. In any case we one-shot Brackenspore before moving on. Tectus on the other hand gave us a bit of a problem. While we one-shot him last week… it was definitely a lucky attempt. The way we were “handling” things was far more “by the seat of our pants” than it really needed to be. In fact the attempt mostly involved me running around like crazy dragging the bosses with me, trying to avoid crap as best as I could and keep the melee out of it. If we were going to take on that fight on heroic, we needed to start developing a strategy and last night we did just that. The first few attempts were nonstarters, but there was a moment when everyone started to grasp what needed to happen and just executed it. While we had like 20 seconds to the enrage timer on our first attempt, this time we managed to down him with a minute and a half left, feeling like the fight is definitely in the sustainable territory.

The fight we struggled with last week of course were the Twin Ogron: Pol and Phemos. More than anything we really did not have solid strategies for dealing with things like the fire and whirlwind. We made a half hearted attempt on Tuesday, and then managed to get some serious tries Thursday… which was enough to propel some research on the matter. Our attack was two prong… firstly we changed up where we were fighting the Ogron, and secondly we now understood how the axes work and where the fire comes from. Things went perfectly, and the new placement combined with understanding the patterns gave us our first Twin Ogron kill… and it was a one-shot. In one night we managed to clear six bosses, one of which being a brand new kill… I feel like that is pretty much a banner night for our raid. Now we need to do research for the next encounter, which I actually saw on LFR after last nights raid… and which is why I was up way too late. It looks like it is going to be madness, but hopefully we can struggle on and make good attempts this Thursday. Unfortunately I spent a token on every boss but normal Kargath, and the only piece of loot I walked away with was the heroic hat. It’s amazing how being handed fistfuls of gold can make you so sad.

Deathknightly Values

December 15, 2014 by Belghast

Ogron Going Down

Last Thursday we struggled quite a bit with the Twin Ogron encounter. It felt so completely random that I could not quite grok how to deal with the fire. This weekend I resolved to fix this problem and did quite a bit of research to try and grasp exactly how the fire worked, because once we figured that out I figured we could easily down them. Yesterday afternoon I watched what felt like a dozen different videos until I finally found one that showed the fire clear enough for me to catch what exactly was happening. If you watch this video it clearly shows what happens to the fire when the axe lands on the ground. As such I created this handy visual aide for our raiders, because it seems as though the fire travels in the direction the axe’s handle is leaning. This means there is a relatively safe spot on the far side of the axe head.

By relatively safe I mean that you only have to deal with dodging fire from one of the axes. It seems like there is some time between when the first axe falls and the second axe falls, which also added to our confusion during the encounter. Essentially we need to move the raid behind the axe head and then be prepared to adjust to dodge the second axes incoming fire. Now the fire does not travel in a straight line, which also makes it seem more random, but instead arcs outwards in a curve, but not one steep enough to curve back on itself. My hope is with this tidbit of information we will rock the hell out of Pol and Phemos and take their candy. When I realized how it was working I was absolutely pumped… and I am sorry to anyone I tried to explain this to yesterday. I was a little over stimulated by the discovery, and probably made very little sense.

Deathknightly Values

The focus of my weekend gaming was to finish the push of my Deathknight to 100. Saturday night I managed to hit 99 which just left me a single level to push through on Sunday. The problem is my focus shifted from acquiring levels, to instead acquiring gear as Nagrand is really my last opportunity to improve my ilevel before being confronted with the choice of running dungeons. My side goal of course was to somehow manage to hit 615 ilevel before sitting foot in a single heroic to prove it could be done. My friend Cuppy said she managed to do it, but as I got further through Nagrand my heart started to sink. Each quest turn in that I did not get a blue or purple upgrade from was like a punch in the gut, because I knew more than likely I would not make my goal. When I dinged 100 last night I still had quite a bit left to go of Nagrand, but I continued to soldier onwards in search of items to bring up my ilevel.

After wringing every drop of potential gear goodness from the zone… I was still way short of my goal sitting at only 609, so not even heroic ready. I had one last shot at getting the level up there, because I had yet to do the quest that would give me a ilevel 640 ring. I queued as dps for normal Skyreach and the queue popped considerably faster than I was expecting. We steamrolled the place, and unfortunately I got no upgrades. I did however complete the quest for the ring and it took me to 612. I purchased a second ring which took my total “in bag” iLevel to 614, so one shy of being able to queue for LFR. Now one of the problems with switching zones every two levels is the fact that I did not do much faction work in Spires of Arak. This means I am shy of the honored required to buy the Arakkoa trinket. Once I get that faction up a bit, and purchase that trinket I should be able to queue for LFR… but I also raid tonight so not sure how all of this is going to work out. I doubt I will be able to get in on the free epic goodness of LFR before the reset tomorrow.

Hatch Phase

As I said above, tonight is our raid night in Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping we are able to finally push past Turn 5 and get Twintania’s candy. From what I have heard this is the roughest content we will face until Turn 9, and I am okay with that. Mostly because I hope it means that turns 6-8 will be much faster progression than Turn 5 has been. Twintania is probably the single most complicated raid encounter I have ever faced, and I like it. It is kinda like having to learn five different boss fights, and as of last week we were finally up to the last phase which is reportedly the easiest to get through, or at least nothing compared to the twister phase. My hope is that tonight we can see enough of it to absolutely wreck her. Thankfully we have not come close to hitting the thirteen minute hard enrage for the encounter.

I realize at this point that Binding Coil of Bahamut and Turn 5 are quite literally a year old at this point, but it still feels super relevant. In fact there are large swaths of the FFXIV community that can’t do it. That has been the interesting thing about FFXIV raid content is that it remains difficult even with the Echo buff. I am perfectly fine not being on the bleeding edge of progression in this game, but I am super happy that we are still progressing in our own way. My real hope is that after struggling to finish this fight as a team… the various extreme mode primals are going to seem easy when we return to fighting them. We have learned to move as a group, and play off each others strengths… and quite literally have had a raid forged by fire. I am pumped to see what we can do during a “normal” fight, instead of this insane assemblage of phases.

Boogey Bested

December 12, 2014 by Belghast

Bladefist Banished

One of the cool features this expansion is that each of the raid difficulties shares a separate lockout. This means you can go to normal with one group, heroic with a a completely different group… and then mythic yet again with a different group. However for the case of our raid this also means that when we get a boss solidly on farm on Normal mode we can ramp up the difficulty and try it on Heroic as well. Before last night we felt we solidly had the mechanics down for Kargath Bladefist, as we managed to one-shot it this past Tuesday before pushing forward and doing the same to Butcher. Last night our raid lead decided before we returned to working on Brackenspore that we should at least give a few attempts at Kargath heroic. Turns out this was a pretty great idea because on the first attempt we managed to make significant progress.

One of the things I like about normal and heroic being the same mechanics is that it allows you to get the key concepts in the fight down solidly before moving up a difficulty level. Our biggest challenge seemed to be reacting fast enough, since everything the boss and his environment does is serious business. I was the first death because I managed to get knocked back into a flame pillar and just evaporated. Similarly we lost a lot of people to the berserker charge because in normal you can survive a tick or two while getting out of the way… but in heroic it straight wrecks you. On attempt four we managed to get our mojo working and downed him in what felt like a fairly solid and repeatable victory. Unfortunately I am not sure if anyone in the raid actually got loot, as we seemed to mostly get double gold.

Boogey Bested

Wednesday morning I referred to the next fight we worked on as the Brackenspore Boogey, and I still feel like this is an apt term. The entire fight is this awkard dance between the tank swaps, and the burning of the fungal creep, and even the placement of the raid next to the appropriate mushroom and burning down the add quickly. Each of those things can screw the raid up if not handled properly. I have found myself falling back into being a rather vocal member of the raid, and unfortunately its a role I am not sure I can stop from doing. When you lead a guild and a raid for as long as I have, you find yourself filling a vacuums of responsibility whenever you see them. I felt like it would help if I started calling various things out, since this fight is all about awareness of what is going on. So when I saw that the add had spawned, or the creep was getting too close to the boss… I was announcing this over Teamspeak. Hopefully our raid leader and crew as a whole does not want to throttle me.

The awesome thing is… we went from getting wrecked to wrecking things rather quickly. One of the positives about LFR is it gives you a time to work on mechanics when the overall risk is extremely low. You can pretty much ignore every single mechanic on LFR but we treated it Wednesday night as a dress rehearsal for the real fight. After Tuesday night I had some theories on how the tank swap needed to happen, and Wednesday night our two tanks refined these to glossy perfection so that last night that was just a non-issue. All that remained was dealing with the particular quirks of the fungal creep, pushing enough dps and interrupting on the add and dealing with mob positioning. The only problem with the fight as a whole is that it is insanely long. I am pretty sure our first try lasted around fifteen minutes, but that is mostly because we fought the moss longer than we really should have. Our second attempt ended with us downing the boss, and it felt extremely solid.

That Click Moment

If I had to sum up in one thing the reason why I enjoy raiding, it would be the “Click Moment”. There is something magical that happens that I still can’t quite explain, but I have watched it occur over and over. There is a clear moment when everyone in the raid grasps what needs to happen and just does it. You can go from wiping horribly one attempt, to everything going smoothly the next, and it is as though some collecting cog just happens to click into place between those two tries. I still find it phenomenal how a boss fight goes from utter chaos to a well oiled and repeatable machine in a single attempt. Sure there are some boss kills where you kill the boss in spite of yourself, our raids first Sindragosa 25 man kill was this way with us barely killing her as the last person got frozen. Most of them however there is this magical spark that takes a boss from impossible to farmable, and I still marvel each time I see it.

This week it felt like we reached that moment on three of the four bosses we downed, and quite honestly I feel like Tectus and Heroic Kargath are both repeatable… but more DPS race than anything else. Twin Ogrons on the other hand… we are still very much in the utter chaos phase. This fight has a lot of moving parts, with at least one of them feeling completely random. Every so often during the fight Phemos will throw down his weapon, and from it will radiate fire. The fire moves in a pattern that is not really predictable… or at least the problem is we have not quite groked how to predict it. It seems to spread first in a star pattern and then sidewind through the room unpredictably. Watching it while completely zoomed out it reminds me so much of Conway’s Game of Life simulation. I keep thinking that it cannot be as random as it seems… and I feel like the “click” moment for this fight will be whenever we reason out how the fire works. All in all however it felt like an amazing first week of raiding for me… and I am hooked.

The Kill Count

Normal Kargath
Normal Butcher
Normal Tectus
Heroic Kargath
Normal Brackenspore

I can’t wait for the reset so we can wreck everything all over again and start making some serious progress on Twin Ogrons. I feel like there is just a lot of research we need to do between now and then. I am also looking forward to Monday night in Final Fantasy XIV because I feel like we are going to down Turn 5 finally. We have functional mastery over all of the phases except the last one, and finally got to see enough of it to grok how it works. Now it is just a matter of pulling together all of the moving parts and claiming victory so we can move forward into the Second Coil of Bahamut. I guess I am a “Raider” again… and surprisingly I feel none of the frustrations that I did previously, even when we have struggled a bit to clear Turn 5. It seems like I am now in two different raid groups that are about the ideal mix of casual and serious so that I feel like I am not being chastised for screwing up… but at the same time feel like everyone is working towards the same goal. I am in a very happy place as a gamer right now.