Our guild recently killed Heroic Hagara on 25man and I thought I would write up some tips for others trying this content

Lightning Phase

This phase takes some time to get right, essentially if you are to get this boss down you need the crystals dead within 3-4 pulses of lightning. For this reason, rather than running the lightning around in a circle like most do on normal, you need to get your raid into position to chain the lightning.

I’ve seen a few different strats around; some line up around the outside, however we decided to line up in a big X.

For this strat to be effective you will need;

• to ensure that you have your plate/mail or classes with personal CD’s from the first crystal (where the add is killed) to the middle, this section will take a large amount of damage.
• want to be careful where you place the classes with pets, lightning will bounce on pets, so if you place 2-3 classes like locks/hunters near each other, the chances of them getting smashed is pretty high!
• allocate 6 raiders between each point of the cross and one dead centre, which should give you enough room to leave some particularly squishy people out if you like (see how you go!)

I suggest before pulling the boss you get your team into position, place some raid flags for the spawn points of the crystals and make sure everyone remembers where to stand. If a key person is out of position, the lightning will not chain!

We had some real issues getting people back to the exact same spot, meaning their were too many gaps where the lightning wouldn’t immediately chain etc. For this reason I wrote a little addon;

Raid Spots
http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/raidspots/

This basically sets an arrow of each raiders current spot (they all need to be running the addon). When they move away the arrow will point them back to that spot. This allows the whole raid to know exactly where they need to run to! For us this meant we could move onto learning Frost Phase within 2-3 attempts.

So the phase should run like this;

• Add Spawns
• All burn the add until it’s about 20%
• Raiders begin to make their way back to their spots with Ranged finishing the adds.
• By the time the Lightning Chains to the centre every NEEDS to be in position.
• Within 3-4 pulses all Crystals are down and you smash the boss again.

Frost Phase

Frost Phase is intense but easy once you get the hang of it, basically we did the following;

• Once the Ice Wall spawns healers and ranged move into the middle, you will be slow but if you stack the damage is very heal-able.
• Melee runs out to one of the Crystals while Ranged focus on the opposite one.
• Melee then run around hitting the crystals as much as possible without putting themselves at risk of wall squish
• Be careful to not have ranged kill a crystal unless it’s behind Melee and will mean ending the phase quicker, get them low and move onto the next crystal with the highest health. This is to ensure Melee aren’t just running in circles with nothing to kill (i.e. you get the most out of that dps as they run through).
• Melee with the debuff move into the middle and call for a dispell and then move back BEHIND the oncoming ice wall. We found melee initially getting hit by the wall trying to get back with the main group.

Ideal Phasing

Ideally you will take more Lightning Phases than Frost, this is simply because Lightning Phase done correctly will be over VERY quickly! Frost not so much

Pro Tips

• Remember you can reset the boss to get your preferred phase first up, a rogue or huntard can do this
• If you have feral druids (including tanks) get them to use Tranq during Lightning Phase, they cant be DPS’ing during this part of the fight anyways and it will take some of the pressure off your healers.
• Somebody calling healing cd’s during Frost will also help but that depends on your healing group

Good Luck!

Upy

You can either go to the page I have setup for submitting your UI details here http://www.upyursh.com/want-feedback-on-your-ui or you can fill in the form (a duplicate of the one on the page) here directly

I will then look to publish some of your UI’s with my feedback and comments added to them

I realise the challenge Blizzard has with finding a happy medium between your highly skilled, end game players and your average casual subscriber.

Here’s the details as outlined at mmo-champion;

Challenge Mode Dungeons

• Heroic mode dungeons will not be as difficult as they were in Cataclysm, instead they will be similar to the Wrath of the Lich King level difficulty.
• Challenge Mode dungeons will require you to complete a dungeon in a certain amount of time to win a medal and other rewards, similar to the Zul’Aman timed run for the bear mount.
• There are Bronze, Silver, Gold medals that will be earned based on the amount of time taken to complete the dungeon.
• You gear levels are normalized by reducing your overall item level to a set level so that everyone is on equal gear footing.
• There will be no way to get better gear and just overpower the challenge.
• Completing the Challenge on gold will incur a stacking debuff on future attempts: it’ll start with a 5% debuff, but if you manage to finish with a gold medal time on that run you’ll receive a 10% debuff on your next run, and so on.
• The challenges will reward unique gear for transmogrification and valor points.
• Other possible rewards include pets, mounts, titles, and achievements depending on your score.
• A new challenge dungeons UI will be added, allowing you to check your medals, ranking, show what rewards you can unlock, and more.
• There will be realm wide leaderboards that allow you to compete with your friends, guild, or everyone!
• Challenge Mode will work only on Pandaria dungeons at the beginning.
• Challenge Mode dungeons will use the Dungeon Finder tool.
• It is possible that the system could be expanded to raids in the future.

My concern (and this concern isn’t for me personally, I’d like to think I can handle MOST challenges Bliz throws at me) is that their will be a different type of pressure put on healers this time around.

I feel confident saying that pretty much every heroic formed will be pushing for Challenge Mode rewards, just because PHAT LOOOOTZ > all.

This will result is fast, chain pulls with little care for healers and their mana pool etc.

I’ll wait to see how it works out but healers be prepared with your “I need mana, pull and die” macros

This extends to DPS and Tanks in some ways too, if you’re not pulling x DPS then you’re preventing others from hitting Challenge Timers. If a tank cant hold threat against that annoying mage who keeps blowing his CD’s on the pull they are holding the group back too.

Upy

You can see a sample of the UI here but will need to follow the link above for details

I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years I spent my holidays doing very important things like;

• Nothing
• Smashing My Head against the wall in LFR
• Writing a couple of new addons

LFR Smart Queue

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/lfr-smart-queue

Ever get sick of clicking Join Queue and waiting for ages, only to be prompted with a raid that’s only got 1 boss left? LFR Smart Queue allows you to define the maximum number of boss kills and will reject raid proposals and requeue you until a raid more to your liking pops.

This is a actually a module of UpysUIBase but I thought that people who aren’t looking for all the rest may appreciate it.

UpysUIBase

http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/upysuibase/

Combination of a number of key components/modifications I have made for my UI. The idea was to have a very simple to install starting point that can be quickly loaded and run with, using a handful of supporting addons.

The addon includes the following;

• Unit Frames for Player, Target, Focus, ToT, ToF (using oUF)
• Chat Tab Clean Up
• Minimap Modifications
• Artwork and Stat Blocks
• AutoLoot Switcher
• SmartQueue (for easier LFR Queing)

Detailed Description

Unit Frames

I have used oUF for building an easy to view HUD Unit Frames.

What it does Player – Unit Frame and optional Castbar and Buff/Debuff Frames Pet – Unit Frame Target – Unit Frame and optional Castbar and Buff/Debuff Frames ToT – Unit Frame ToF – Unit Frame

What it doesn’t do Party/Raid Frames – I decided that party/raid frames needs a lot of personal preference customization and there are other great offerings that can do this for you.

Chat Tab Clean Up

I got pretty sick of the ugly chat tabs, this enables class color chat tabs with no background images etc. Very clean and nice to look at and you can now also set the opacity of the text in both on/off states (i.e. have them hidden or near hidden when you don’t need to click them).

Minimap Modification

I got a little tired of the size of my minimap addon considering the small amount of functionality I really wanted.

• Removal of annoying Bliz buttons
• Set to square and location to Top Left
• Add Minimap Lock/Unlock (through options) to allow movement of the minimap
• Add a class color border and location text
• Add Coordincates
• Set minimap Scale

Artwork And Stat Blocks

using LitePanels to provide a central, clean place for your action bars. The layout provides multiple “stat blocks” that you can define the information you wish to display ranging from System/Net Stats (such as Latency, FPS etc) to player details (such as MP5, Intellect etc)

AutoLootSwitcher

Will automatically switch your AutoLoot setting based on whether you are in a party/raid. When solo AutoLoot will be enabled, when in a group it will be disabled

SmartQueue

Allows you to set the maximum number of dead bosses you want for your LFR run. With 0 being a clean run. The Module will auto decline raids offered and requeue you automatically.

Supporting Addon Recommendations

• Action Bars – I use dominos - http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/dominos
• Buff Frames – I just finished configuring Raven – very neat! http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/raven
• Chat Mod – I use Prat http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/prat-3-0
• Raid/Party Frames – I use oUF_Freebgrid for mine – you can check that out here:http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info12264-oUF_Freebgrid.html

Full Addon Pack

Get my entire Addon Pack here: http://www.curse.com/addon-packs/wow/upys-healing-raiding-pack

Gooooooood

• Provides people who would otherwise not see end game an opportunity to do just that
• Provides a means of giving raiders a look at the basic mechanics before attempting them as a guild in a normal or heroic environment
• I get to raid with people outside my normal raid group (this may appear in the Bad section too)
• Provides a good means of testing potential trialists, queue with them and watch them go. Could avoid fail trialists going forwards

Badddddd

http://wowprog.upyursh.com

You can add it to your own site using an iframe and it ends up looking something like this;

The first 4 bosses are very easily killed for anyone who’s read the fight details/strats and knows how to focus fire, spread out or stack. It was all in all underwhelming to be honest

I am yet to look at the remaining 4 bosses but I really hope Bliz steps it up a bit, if this is End Game for Cataclysm I may not sign on for Happy Happy Panda Land.

On LFR – it seems like a great tool to give raiders exposure to the content before running in normal/heroic modes and it was bloody quick to fill a raid. I think this will be a great thing to introduce to future raid tiers.. nice work

What are other peoples impressions?

So lets first look at the Set Bonus;

• Two Piece – After using Innervate, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for 15 sec
• Four Piece – Your Rejuvenation and Regrowth spells have a 10% chance to Timeslip and have double the normal duration

Two piece looks really interesting actually, will definately change the way we use Innervate going forwards and is a real buff to our mana regen throughout an encounter. Will be interesting to see how much of affect it has in oomform spamming regrowths on everyone

Four Piece is pretty pro too actually, I am interested to see what the internal cooldown is going to be like but it has the potential to be great for raid heals and keeps 2 potentially expensive hots up on a target a lot longer (pro for tank heals too).

Now the look, they have only really shown the skinny version, I have a feeling my cow will make it look a lot less appealing but it’s ok. Nothing stupid about it, but also quite plain:

Now on to the 4.3 patch notes;

Wild Growth healing has been reduced by 20%.
Glyph of Wild Growth now also increases the cooldown on Wild Growth by 2 seconds.

Clearly our logs are filled with Wild Growth goodness right now, a massive nerf but I do like the idea that a Glyph has both a pro and con. It really makes us choose the play style we wish to use, BUT right now we really don’t have a lot of viable glyphs to pick from. So while the idea has merret, they need to provide pros/cons for all glyphs and provide more options for those glyphs.

• Spent 6 months+ living in the US for a major project for work
• Lost some family who I’m very close too
• Taken a 3 week holiday to travel around, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia
• Gotten engaged to my lovely fiance Leng
• Enjoyed the last weeks of my 20′s and turned 30 on the 1st of October
• Started a Diploma of Project Management
• And of course dealing with Guild drama and trying to maintain a 25man raiding guild in an environment where 10man’s are a lot more appealing and easy to run/manage

All of this has really meant that I have leaned heavily on my officers to run the raiding side of the guild, I have been letting others work on strats and running the raids so my ability to push up strats here is somewhat limited. I have taken the changes to Druids in my stride as a lot of the recent changes haven’t really had a massive impact on my play style.

Life is always about finding a balance, sometimes this balance shifts depending on the things going on. For me my focus has really been on my personal/work life.

For those interested you can see my holiday photos here: https://picasaweb.google.com/103482474774833681463/VietnamCambodiaMalaysia?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCOmUj7vTtPCDgQE&feat=directlink

In terms of Bizarro we have had our ups and downs. We were progressing very well, getting to 2/7HM in Firelands before the Nerf but had a split off of 3-4 raiders, who wanted things to be run differently. While I was more than happy to see them go if it meant less drama (the leader caused a lot of frustration for the leadership group) in guild and raids, it was a crappy way for it to go down (sneaky and generally not nice) and we did lose 2 of our higher DPS. These things happen though and we have managed to push ourselves to get back on track and killed Heroic Aly last night, which was great

We have now had 2 of our old core raiding team return and are in the process of gearing them up. We’ve kind of come out of it about where we were but our numbers are tight. If a couple of people are unavailable or someone has an emergency we risk having an early night. This obviously adds pressure to the leadership group but recruitment is tough right now. Khaz’Goroth has recently lost one of it’s older guilds (ClanDropBears), who have been around about the same time as Bizarro, which is sad to see, but it shows that actually we haven’t done too bad.

I appreciate the changes Bliz have made to make raid content available to more people, but it has really had a massive impact for 25man raiding guilds on smaller servers. The 4.3 changes to implement 3 tiers of content (pug, 10 & 25) looks interesting and I’m hoping will lead to them eventually breaking up the 10 and 25 man content again (but I doubt it).

Sooooo Firelands content, it’s been a little hit and miss for me. Some of the encounters are great and really test a raiders ability to adapt to unexpected situations or pick up multiple mechanics in a single encounter which is great. However, I find some of the content to almost have so much going on that you kind of cant appreciate the entire finer detail of them. Maybe it’s more a reflection on my role in raids, rather than the content itself though.

I think that’s all I have in me for now but I will try to get some meaningful posts up in the near future

Upy