On the fifteenth episode of the Molsan Method podcast, I contemplate why I would move (or not move) my raid team to new content, and other things I’ve learned as a raid leader. (5:10)

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So I’ve learned that I don’t tank fast enough. I know I’m probably more of a conservative player, but even I know when I’m pulling packs of mobs at a decent pace… especially since the “Molsan Method” was named after yours truly. However, what I didn’t know was that PUGs formed by the glorious “Looking for Dungeon” tool expect an even more rapid pace. Chain pulling, zerging, and engaging bosses without mana are now standard.

Halls of Lightning – I Don’t Have All Day

In my last two random heroics, I was called out for my slow and lazy approach. In Halls of Lightning, I pulled the first group with Avenger’s Shield. While that was on cooldown, I pulled a stray mob with Exorcism. My tanking abilities were immediately questioned: “Why are we killing unnecessary mobs and pulling with Exorcism?” I stopped to think about this. Am I doing it wrong? While contemplating justifying my skills and approach to tanking to this complete stranger, the person decided to quit the group, leaving us with a “lol I don’t have all day. thanks. bye” parting shot.

Since they were DPS, they were replaced by my friend, LFD, in a matter of seconds with a new person. After we buffed the new guy up, I went ahead and pulled the next pack of mobs, General Bjarngrim, and his adds. We then continued on, skipping the other three corners of the platform, and breezed through the rest of the instance. We stacked up on Loken, took him down with no trouble, and disenchanted all of his loots. I apologized to the group for taking too long.

The Nexus – I Have a Raid Starting in a Minute

I figured that these kinds of people are few and far between… right? Wrong. In The Nexus, we were moving right along, having taken down the first three bosses with little effort. We had a great pace going; there were no deaths and lots of shards passed around (not by me, but by the aforementioned LFD). As I headed down the hallway towards Ormorok the Tree-Shaper, a player asked, “Can we please hurry it up?” I asked, “Why?” and the player responded with, “I have a raid starting in a minute.” Now, me being the literal person that I am figured, “Gee, no way we can finish this thing in under a minute. I hope he doesn’t bail on us… oh wait, he’s DPS, and there are probably fifty DPS players in line for a random.” I confidently told the group, “Ok, I’ll pick up the pace. Let’s go.”

I skipped a few Crystalline Frayers and let the rest of the party deal with them while I headed for the boss. I patiently stopped to tank the elites, and then moved right in on Ormorok. Without any trouble, he went down; we then proceeded into the tunnel, hopped down, and headed towards Keristrasza. We decided to stack up in front of Keristrasza, and we smacked her around regardless of how intense her Intense Cold was (it really wasn’t that intense). Before I could finish typing, “Sorry I took so long” for the second time, the hardcore raider rolled greed on everything, and quickly left the party. I’m going to setup a macro for my apology… I wonder what the macro syntax is for targeting the top whiner of the party? “/target QQ?”

I’ve been waiting for this patch for five years. Far and away, my favorite feature of World of Warcraft patch 3.3 is the new “Looking for Dungeon” interface. It’s more than an interface, though, it’s completely changed how I play the game.

Azjol-Nerub

When I first signed on last night, a tank from my guild was asking if anyone wanted to run a random dungeon with him. I joined him in a party as DPS, and we were inserted into Azjol-Nerub. Right away, we headed down the ramp and started pulling. I buffed everyone along the way. The first boss went down with no problem, and we began chatting about the viability of a dual-wielding, tanking Blood spec for Death Knights. The other bosses went down easily, and I had my first two Emblems of Frost.

Utgarde Keep

I then partied up with a friend of mine, and switched back to my main spec (Protection). We put ourselves in the queue for a random dungeon and were selected for Utgarde Keep. During the run, I noticed something interesting about the party members for these cross-realm dungeon groups: nobody talks. Now, I’m a big fan of no talking, but this was a little strange even to me. The only chatter we had during our UK group was a question about who was tanking, and why the Hunter wasn’t rescued while inside a frost tomb (which I didn’t mind since I still needed the achivement).

Forge of Souls

After a fast and successful run, we decided we would do another random dungeon. In under two minutes (maybe even one minute), I was prompted to enter the dungeon. After clicking the button, a loading screen appeared that I didn’t recognize. It was for the Forge of Souls! I panicked for a second since this was new to me, but wanted to see the new content so we went forth in hopes of obtaining victory. The instance was really cool, and gave off a great perception of depth. It was a mixture of the Nexus and Utgarde dungeons, sprinkled with the Icecrown look and feel. We ended up taking down both bosses in one attempt, and both were fun fights. I did feel bad for the Hunter that refused to move and died in Bronjahm’s vortex. Actually, I didn’t.

Gundrak

Still partied with my friend, I figured why not keep going while we’re hot. Next up was Gundrak; not one of my favorite instances to run, but at least it wasn’t Drak’tharon Keep. While the first three random dungeons were quick, painless, and quiet, we had our first taste of a real cross-realm PUG. About three-quarters of the way through, our Shaman healer started to get pushy and was telling me to keep pulling because he had to leave soon. During the Gal’darah fight, it seemed as though he was distracted, and let two of the DPS die. We prevailed, though, and completed the dungeon. He said, “sorry,” rolled need on the Frozen Orb, and quickly left the group. Who ninjas Frozen Orbs these days? Sheesh!

Caverns of Time: Stratholme

My friend ended up logging for the night, but I wanted one more shot at a random dungeon… especially since the dailies had reset. I wanted a break from tanking, so I switched to Retribution and entered the queue. I watched for several minutes as the estimate to enter the dungeon was frozen at a five-minute wait. It was getting late, so I swapped specs and went back to Protection. I re-entered the queue as a tank and almost immediately found a group. A minimap configuration problem, pushy and undergeared players, wipe with only three minutes left to engage Mal’ganis, and me pulling the gauntlet without talking to Arthas in “Caverns of Time: Stratholme” later… I was done.

Conclusion

In summary, I picked up twenty-three Emblems of Triumph, six Emblems of Frost, over eight-thousand Knights of the Ebon Blade reputation, and well over a hundred gold in profit (not counting Dream Shards and Abyss Crystals). Needless to say, I’m super-pleased with this feature. Time will tell, though, if my luck and success with the groups was due to the fact that the patch was less than twenty-four hours old, or if it was because Blizzard has finally solved the “looking for group” problem and implemented it in a way that everyone loves. You can count me in on the latter.

How many more times, treat me the way you wanna do
When I give you all my love, please, please be true
I’ll give you all I’ve got to give, rings, pearls, and all

When you’re progressing in a raid, you eventually hit a wall on a certain stage of the raid. It could be a particular set of trash mobs, but it’s typically going to be a boss fight. The question is: how many times do you attempt to take the boss down before giving up? When you do decide to call it quits, do you move on to a different boss, or call the raid early and hope that getting everyone back fresh and well-rested on a new day will give you a better approach?

My current 25-man raid group is struggling with both Ignis the Furnace Master and Kologarn in Ulduar. Last week, we tried to take down Ignis seven times, and Kologarn four times. This week on our first night, we had three decent attempts on Ignis, and only one on Kologarn.

Any Progress is Progress

On the whole (insert Preparation H joke here), our raid made serious strides in only one week. We two-shot Razorscale, and XT-002 Deconstructor went down with three fewer attempts than the previous week. It seemed to me that giving our all on Ignis until our raid time was up was the best strategy, but we were told to switch over to Kologarn with thirty minutes left in the raid.

I immediately thought that, at most, we’d get one attempt on Kologarn and I was right. It was as good as our first attempt last week, getting the right arm down only once before our tanks lost all their hit points. Beating up the trash to get to Kologarn seemed like a complete waste of time compared to two to three more attempts on Ignis. I would have appreciated more attempts on one boss, or calling the raid early if the raid leaders felt like we didn’t have the gear yet.

Our second night of 25-man Ulduar didn’t start out quite how I expected. I was asked to tank because one of the main tanks no-showed, but I declined. I’ve been a Retribution Paladin with this group for about a month now, filling in as a tank on certain fights when needed. We had three Protection Warriors in the raid so we were covered anyway.

I used to be one of the main tanks back when we started our 10 and 25-man Naxxramas raids, but was eventually squeezed out after the raid leaders recruited additional tanks. I don’t know if I was doing a poor job for them as a tank, wasn’t vocal enough on Vent, or just smelled funny. I probably will never know, but don’t really care at this point anyway since I’m enjoying playing with this spec.

Ignis the Furnace Master

We started out with Ignis since we had cleared the other three Siege of Ulduar bosses on the previous night. The path down to Ignis is huge! It definitely felt epic, and the homage to Molten Core with the two Molten Colossus giants was a nice touch. Dancing around the whirlwinds cast by the fire revenants was pretty fun. After our raid leader performed the thankless job of explaining the fight to everyone, and from their perspective (how he knows all this I’ll never understand), we engaged Ignis and began the fight.

The attempts — all seven of them — were chaotic with the tank dying early and often. We had some difficulties with aggro management, mainly because there is no aggro reset (sorry, old joke). I was tasked with slapping Ignis in the leg with my mace and staying alive when I was put “on the pot.”

I Out-heal Priests

What was most surprising was the amount of passive healing I was doing with Judgement of Light. I was showing up third on Recount under “Healing Done.” Come to find out, this is getting nerfed in 3.2:

Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker’s maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.

Although I got a kick out of the Priests whispering me and wondering if I had changed specs again, this really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ll enjoy being able to simultaneously DPS and heal until this gets changed in the upcoming patch. Who needs a combat medic hero class anyway?

Raid Reassurance Time

We were reminded again that we wouldn’t be one-shotting bosses, even though all of us already knew that. Although I don’t think anyone is concerned that we’re not doing well and learning on each attempt, plenty of reassurances of how many attempts and wipes it will take us to defeat a boss were given out.

After the sixth attempt, the raid leader put out a vote to stay for another attempt, or move on to Kologarn. The majority voted to stay on Ignis, so we tried again. The main tank and off-tank switched, and the attempt was our best yet. We had Ignis down to 70% before any deaths occurred. We ended up wiping, and the raid leader put up another vote. This time, the majority voted to move on to Kologarn. This was strange to me because the last attempt on Ignis was clearly one where we had made some serious strides towards learning the fight.

Kologarn

We hit the trash hard on our way to Kologarn. When I say hard, I mean hard like you ran as fast as you could right into a brick wall. We attempted to sheep two of the mobs, but those were quickly broken by AoE. An exasperated voice on Vent pleaded for players to not break crowd controlled mobs, but this is probably some of our raiders first experience with a 25-man dungeon with crowd control. In Naxxramas, AoE was used on everything, so I don’t blame them for using AoE in their rotations.

We eventually made our way to Kologarn and had some decent attempts, four in total. We basically re-spawned the right arm once on each attempt, but called it there due to time constraints. I didn’t feel like everyone (including me) knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing on this fight, but hopefully we’ll be able to build on our experiences for next week. All in all another night full of learning experiences and several servings of humble pie.

The raid group I participate in ventured into 25-man Ulduar for the first time last night. Although this was my first official time in Ulduar (ok, I may have snuck in with a PUG a month ago that wiped repeatedly on Kologarn, but I’m not counting that), we had several raiders that had at least seen the 10-man version, and a handful that had experienced some parts of the 25-man.

Flame Leviathan

We took care of Flame Leviathan in one shot. I had heard that the fight was easy, but… it really was easy. I drove a Siege Engine and zig-zagged across the room with the other tanks while the gunners took care of the choppers. I had played a lot of Strand of the Ancients and Wintergrasp, so the vehicle mechanics of the fight were familiar to me.

Razorscale

Next up was Razorscale. Everyone understood quickly that we were not going to step in and one-shot every boss (although some were already looking ahead and boasting that we would be able to one-shot XT… more on that later). On the fourth attempt, though, everything came together.

The only dicey part came when one of the Death Knights popped Army of the Dead. Razorscale then started to violently spin around, wrecking havoc on our hit point totals. I personally wish Blizzard would disable Army of the Dead when Death Knights zone into raid instances.

A Fragment of Val’anyr Dropped. Now what?

After Razorscale fell, it was time to address the loot. A Fragment of Val’anyr dropped and the raid leaders didn’t know what to do with it. They ended up deciding to let the mace-wielding healers do a random roll. The raid leaders explained that whoever wins the roll will be allowed to pick up all future fragments that drop in the raid, assuming this individual shows up.

Prior to this decision, there was a debate on how this should be handled. Should the player with the highest level of attendance get it? Maybe our “best” healer? Or maybe someone that has some kind of Internet fame? I didn’t expect our raid leaders to have this completely figured out prior to the raid, but turning it over to a random roll seemed very strange to me. This was especially odd after they had decided to use a loot council for the Heroic Key to the Focusing Iris during our 25-man Naxxramas days.

XT-002

Next up was XT-002. The first attempt went okay, but since it was our first look at him (or is it her? Oh wait, it’s a robot), a few of us died early on and we weren’t able to recover. We continued to have difficulties on XT, particularly with the gravity bombs. One of our healers assigned to the main tank got the bomb right away on one attempt, costing us the tank, and a quick wipe of the raid.

What was interesting at this point was the constant reassurance that about 40% of the raid was giving to everyone else. I never got the sense that anyone was expecting one-shots of every boss, or that anyone was feeling disgruntled and frustrated with our apparent lack of progress. In fact, it was just the opposite; we were doing quite well, learning something new on each attempt, and getting back quickly with buffs and positioning.

On the eighth attempt, we finally put XT away to rest. Our previous two attempts were terrible, and I think it was because people started to fall asleep. Vent was very quiet at this point, but everyone seemed to perk up when one of our raid leaders explained that this would be the last attempt. Our healing was fantastic, the Pummellers, Scrapbots, and Boombots were dealt with accordingly, and, thankfully, nobody used Army of the Dead.

Our first night of heroic Naxxramas went well this week, even though we fell one boss short of our normal three-quarter clear. We decided to call the raid fifteen minutes early and leave the Four Horseman for night two. I had two goals for the night: obtain five Emblems of Valor for my next upgrade and not embarrass myself again. I definitely achieved one of those two goals.

Five Emblems of Valor and I’d have myself a nice cloak upgrade: the Hammerhead Sharkskin Cloak. I was a little worried when we arrived at the fifth boss, Heigan the Unclean. Our tank lost track of the phase eruptions on the second and third phase-one sequences. We lost half the raid during the second sequence, but I survived by not following the tank, and we were able to DPS him down. Our healers saved the day by healing the tank, me, and several others through the mess.

Earlier in the raid, I picked up Ruthlessness, upgrading my Ring of Indignant Rage, which is second only to the Inscribed Band of the Kirin Tor on my gear list. I outbid the main tank for the Libram of Resurgence for my last drop (I’m not sure what a main tank with a Holy off-spec would do with that anyway).

A quick look at WoW Web Stats from last night showed that I was at the bottom of the DPS list yet again. Although my DPS rose about 150 points from the start of the raid, it showed my swing (physical) miss percentage at 15.6%, Divine Storm miss at 18.6%, and Crusader Strike at 18.9%. My melee hit is very low (5.22%) so I’ll be switching out my glove enchant for Precision, and gobbling up as much Snapper Extreme as my stomach can handle.

Dual spec has given me something unexpected: a new alt. Not an “alt” in the traditional WoW-sense. You know, a new character. A re-roll on a different server. An Alliance toon to “experiment” with, and so forth. This time, it’s an alternative build for my main. When dual spec was finally released, I imagined all of the potential — especially for hybrid classes — that this would bring about. It wasn’t until last night, though, that I realized how much fun it really is.

LFM DPS

I’ve always challenged folks who claim that there is a shortage of tanks and healers in the game. My main spec will always be Protection, but I chose Holy for my second spec when the ability to dual spec was introduced to the game. I figured I’d be able to fill one of those two roles that there is an apparent shortage of. Boredom quickly set in as I sat in Dalran with a second “raid spec,” and couldn’t find a group. You would think that in a guild with over 4,600 characters, you’d be able to find an all-guild heroic that needs a healer.

Along Came Retribution

In one night, I ran more heroics as Retribution than I ever did as Holy. So much for that healer shortage. With most of my tanking gear on, I hovered around third on the damage meters for the night. This was partially because the shadow priest in our group disconnected for a bit in Violet Hold. All the mechanics of the class were working, and all those nifty spells and abilities were present on my action bars. The output was lacking, though, and my expectations for high burst damage were failing.

Gearing Up My Alt… Err, Second Spec

In these heroics, I really felt counted on, much more so than in heroic Naxxramas. After successfully completing heroic Violet Hold, Utgarde Pinnacle, and Utgarde Keep, I owed it to myself to start itemizing properly for this spec. The first place I started at was my weapon. I had been using a polearm and, for whatever reason, this really embarrassed me. A trip to the auction house and 1,100 gold quickly took care of that as I became the proud owner of one Titansteel Destroyer. I slapped Greater Savagery on that bad boy and I was off to find me some quests.

I located a nice cave in the Storm Peaks filled with worms that were eager to see me with my new weapon. With Seal of Command refreshed, I ran in, reared back with the mace, and swung as hard as I could… and missed! What happened? What is this “skill in two-handed maces has increased to 2″ all about?

Thirty worms and a few dozen worgs later, my two-handed mace skill was up over 350, and I finally got a taste of what the spec can do when itemized correctly. I hearthed back to Dalaran and turned in some leftover Emblems of Heroism for the Mirror of Truth and the Pendant of the Outcast Hero.  I also added a Jormungar Leg Armor kit to my pants for an additional stamina and agility boost.

Although I made the Kal’uak sad when I vendored their polearm, I now feel like a real Ret Paladin.

In last night’s Naxxramas 25-man raid I changed specs to Retribution. This was the very first time I had gone Retribution on my main. My second spec had been Holy since the dual spec feature was introduced to the game. I had healed Naxx 25 once and ran a handful of heroics, but never made the most of having the Holy spec.

Now, while I’ve never gone Retribution on Molsan, my other Paladin has always been Retribution. Yes, I have two Paladins. Yes, they are both Horde and both on Earthen Ring.

DPS is DPS

So I was at least familiar with the abilities of the spec, the DPS rotation, etc. What I didn’t realize is I had none of the gear! I could have sworn that I had picked up several pieces of DPS plate prior to them being disenchanted, but I was wrong. So, I equipped my tanking gear, a couple of rare rings, and a polearm from the Kalu’ak; I was off and running.

Thankfully, the group I play with out-gears the instance now, so my bottom-of-Recount DPS (1721) went unnoticed. We one-shotted most of the bosses except for Razuvious (we lost him at less than 1%!) and Patchwerk. No loot for me, but I did add a few Emblems of Valor to my collection. I have over 50 Emblems of Heroism collecting dust, so the Mirror of Truth might be a good pickup if I want to get serious about my Ret set.

Going with a different spec gave me a new perspective on the raid. I believe this will help me be a better tank in the long run. I was also more motivated and excited to raid a dungeon that we’ve been working on for a couple months now. Old is now new again… at least for one night.

Not only will I be at Blizzcon in August, I’ll also be at the Twisted Nether Blogcast meetup. The roster continues to grow over at the Twisted Nether. They are a great group of folks that have inspired me to contribute more to not only my own blog, but increase my interaction with the WoW community as well. Thanks for the link and the mention on episode 47 of the TNB!