Progress – Its a wonderful Thing

Just a note to say that the Inquisitor dps guide is still under construction, it’s a lot more in depth than I thought it would be so its still on its way!

Last night we were raiding as usual and got a new boss kill which is always good for morale. 

We logged in at the usual time but the raid was kind of bare.  Our MT is in America, which is fine, we have other tanks anyway.  A lot of other people must be still having issues logging in as we headed to Palace of Roehn Theer with the usual less than full raid.

We still did good though, a silly wipe on the Seer but we ploughed through.  I managed to DPS and heal on all of the fights till Barrier, then it was a little more healing than dps as an AOE to the face is tehowies!

Then we headed to Malus!  Now we had a couple of pulls on this one night and it seemed like a hard fight.  Well two pulls later it was dead.

It’s a good fun encounter, as is a lot of the raid mobs in this expansion and as such I wont give anything away right now but managing the different curses and having good healers is the key.

I also want to say I had a couple of new records for myself.  Firstly I hit a new record heal of 11.1k on our tank, which didn’t get logged so im annoyed, the 10.6k heal did though so ill claim morale victory on that.

However I DID get logged a new autoswing record of 17191 damage!  Didn’t furry but hell I was happy with that.

I also rejigged one of my red adorns and took out the Spell DA and Flurry for whoever I put inquest on for groupwide T9 tenacity since I got the master cheaply.  I feel it’s a bigger benefit to the group than buffing one persons DPS, even if our warlock did love the DA 😀

We did take a look at the “New Sisters” as im going to call them after Malus but didn’t find out anything significant other than we need more tanks… im not saying anything about tanks since it will just be stirring the pot…

Tonight will hopefully be spent smashing through Labs for gear for people.  Hopefully I can get a little more DPS/Healing data for the breakdown.

Highest parse last night?  A 19k on a boss in Tox lair.

Are SF raids too easy?

I have literally been wracking my brain for the post for today, I know I said I was going to do the inquis breakdown for DPS however we raided last night and I didn’t have the time.  Mrs B is off to Bingo tonight so ill hopefully get it cracked then.

Well this came to me all of a sudden and the question is, are SF raids a little on the easy side?  At least to start with anyway.

Im not talking about the “hard modes” but the meat of the raids.  Ill break it down for you all.

Upon Sentinels Fate release there were 3 raid zones:

Lair of the Dragon Queen (Or Toxx’s Lair)

Perah’Celsis’ Abominable Laboratory (Labs)

Palace of Roehn Theer (Palace)

Ive listed them here in order of “hardness” and the relative order the lore dictates you should complete them.

Ill start with Toxx’s Lair.  This instance as a first zone since TSO was a breath of fresh air for a healer, nothing to cure (well maybe when some of the adds pop on one of the fights) and a boatload to heal.

3 Mobs one after the other like a ring event.

Once you figure the strat for each boss (they slightly vary.. and I mean slightly)  its pretty much cake.  Our first kill of every boss in the Lair was a shorthanded victory with 3 groups…… and this was with our first time in there…

Next up on the pecking order is Labs… however the funny thing is you need to be level 90 to zone in, but you don’t for Palace… I just try not to think about it.

Now im not sure how many first kills we did shorthanded, but last night we went in with 21 people… and shorthanded all the way up to the last boss.

Last up is Palace.  The “hardest” instance.  Again we have shorthanded all the way through Illisads barrier (Which is where we are for progression right now) and even first kills done with 18 people (2^nd boss in there springs to mind, yes our first kill was done with 18 people)

Have SoE made the SF raids more accessible to those without raid gear from TSO and thus making it much easier for guilds who did raid last expansion, or is something else out of whack?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind that the early bosses are easier to down, from what ive seen the next few bosses in Palace may be a challenge so ive got that to look forward to anyway.

Servers Stable?

After my initial rant post and little tweak by SoE, it appears that a lot of the zoning problems have been lessened.  There are still issues with zoning, but nowhere near what its been like the last few days.

Last night we actually managed to zone into the Abandoned Labs on time!  We are trying to learn the final boss and we had some good tries.  I reckon another couple of nights of tweaks and he is ours.

We also visited Palace to quickly burn down everything which we’ve killed before (up to and including Illisads Barrier) so this leaves us with nothing but new fights for Wednesday.  However Toxx will be resettable so will most likely hit that first.

Im really enjoying raiding in this expansion.  Less cures is a big thumbs up from me, of course some cure fights are fine but its nice not to have to constantly stare at the bars, I can actually find time to throw my reactives and do some damage myself.

Going on about damage, My next post will be a breakdown of Inquisitor dps and things you can do as a raiding inq to be able to dps and heal at the same time.  Look out for that soon!

Server stability – Not cool SoE, not cool at all!

Since the expansion, but more importantly since Battlegrounds were introduced the server has taken a pounding.
It isn’t uncommon to have 15 minute plus zone times, when you aren’t getting kicked to character select and having the game not be able to locate your characters that is.

So what is the cause? The forums are very vocal on the subject, yet not a word from the Devs about it. As far as I am aware: Runnyeye, Splitpaw and Oasis are the worst hit and people seem to think its stemming from the BGs.

If its not a duping problem, or a transmuting issue then its this, use your brains SoE, disable to BGs again find the cause of this issue and fix it.

As an example, my guild raids at 1900. We usually have Toxx’s lair cleared in roughly 30 mins. Well we finally managed to zone into Toxx at 2013 last night. This time includes trying to log in, and zone from the guildhouse to SF, then into the raid zone itself, its beyond a joke.

SONY FIX YOUR SHIT

As an aside, I just spotted this post from Rothwell on the official forums:

“Battlegrounds are still having a pretty big impact on DB performance especially during primetime and on weekends. We’ve decided to throttle back the number of BG matches that can run concurrently until we can get some additional optimizations made. This should resolve the issues with a little longer queue times instead of us needing to take them down altogether.
We are currently looking into the reports of stuck characters and missing items. We think that these issues are caused during times of severe database overload. Throttling back the matches should solve the issue until we have a more permanent fix.
We apologize if you’ve been affected by these issues. CS has made these types of issues their top priority so please file a petition if you have a stuck character or missing items and they will take care of it.
Thanks for your patience.”

Wonder if this will fucking work….

Grabbing the Bull by the Horns

Yesterday was the first night off of raiding (being a Thursday) so I asked Mrs B if she fancied doing some instances after dinner.  She did, so I announced in guild that 1900 we would be putting together an instance team to hit as many as we could.

I got some tells of people who wanted to go so I was pretty set!

The time rolled around and we had the following:

Borgeo – 90 Berserker

Hunni – 90 Warden

Koya – 90 Bruiser

Hiob – 90 Warlock

Scythia – 90 Swashbuckler

Johnniecash – 86 Dirge

I was glad Johnnie came online as this was a good opportunity to get him some exp.  I checked what instances he had done before and he said some of The Hole ones so I avoided those.  First dungeon on the hit list was Vasty Deep: The Conservatory.

This was the first zone I ever tanked when the expansion hit, when I was level 80!  10 levels should make a huge difference, and they did.  We had little bother save for the last boss killing JC but it was soon done.

We then moved onto Vasty Deep: The Abandoned Labs,  this is the slightly higher level one and its still good, the only real speedbump in this one was the final boss as we ended up picking the wrong two mobs to kill first for our group setup (no regen) so we all got out of power and promptly exploded.

Once we sorted that out it was easy.

We then took JC on a murder mystery tour of the Erudin Library which is always a laugh, Hun and I have 3 manned this in the past so I wasn’t that worried so tanked the whole thing in a full dps set.  Murder solved successfully.

Lastly we headed into the Erudin Research Halls.  I like this one too, despite SOE reusing the same boss mechanic four times.

Loot of note?  None really, no fabled drops but a few masters for our group including my own single target taunt!

It was really good fun, it reminded me that I like tanking instances so im looking forward to doing some more today!  I think we got JC really close to 88 too, I meant like 99% or something!

Yay for tanking!

Sentinels Fate: Raids

Its been a little while since the last entry so ill do a quick recap of what has happened.

Ive dinged both my dirge and my Inquisitor 90, and brought the Assassin up to 82.  In fact both the other 90s hit about 2 days after Borgeo did.

We have also started raiding SF properly.  Now im having some good fun raiding these zones but that is down to my class, it seems sony heard the cries from healers regarding curing and so they put in massive uncureable aoes instead!  Doesn’t bother me all that much.

So first instance in raid progression is Tox’s Lair.  This is located in the Sundered Frontier in that big bogey thing on the map.  This basically consists of a huge ring event, with each boss aggroing after the last dies.  We cleared this place in our first proper shot at it so not  a lot to say.  There probably is a way its intended to do it but we do it our way and it works.

Second instance is the Abandoned Labs, this is located within Vasty deep and has to be my favourite raid zone so far.  I like the look of the zone anyway (insert homage to Quake here) and the fights are varied enough to make it fun.  

Last Instance is the Palace of Roehn Theer, now im not sure if this is intended to be the last zone but some raids have finished this already however we are progressing nicely.

Now the problem I have with the zones is this, it seems that they should be done in the order ive listed, however for Labs you need to be 90 to zone in!  But not the others…. Surely this is a mistake and Palace should need the 90 flag?

Only boss that’s causing us issues at the moment is the second one in Palace.  We kill it every week but we need to bring an extreme group setup to do it…  not fun.

So why am I enjoying these raids then?  Well ive found out that an Inquisitor is a dps god!  I am regularly in the top 5 for dps in our raids.  Part of this is due to me gearing myself for melee healing the other part due to me not sucking.  I hear your cries now, “Shouldn’t you be healing”  Well lets put it this way, my group never dies……

We generally run two healers per group and I tend to get put with a Shaman.  This means that all I need to really do is keep group reactive running and that coupled with the wards and my melee proc heals will keep us up.  Not to mention I can throw Inquisition if required.

This all comes together to mean I can heal in melee range and keep heals up in between autoswings and dps like the best of them.  Obviously being a healer I never get any dps buffs, but I still do well, self buffed only.

The fights with uncureable AOE?  Simple, throw my Holy Shield on myself, get reactive up and hit group heal if the damage spikes, all the while DPSing.

Im looking forward to getting some more Red Adorn slots so I can slot in my Inquest and Tenacity bonuses but ill get those in time, last night I blew 200dkp for gear for Borg so ill have to save again.

We are raiding again tonight, and hopefully starting in Lab, we have a boss to kill and a fresh raid will be the key to this I reckon!