Big Crits Weekly Update - H Zon’ozz and H Yor’sahj Down

Since our last weekly update (three weeks ago), Big Crits’ progression team has continued knocking down the heroic bosses in Dragon Soul.  On December 16th, we downed Heroic Zon’ozz, but it took another couple of weeks to get Heroic Yor’sahj down, on December 29th.  The attendance boss reared his ugly head due to the holidays, which may have hampered the progression a bit, but the progression team pulled through late on Thursday moving to 4/8 hard mode.

This week the Raiders will be working on Heroic Ultraxion.  According to Raid Leader Basek, “Ultraxion is going to be extremely tough, a lot of our raiders are worried we will not have the DPS to match the enrage because of its extremely hard requirements. But we’ll handle it like we did Ragnaros.”

The progression team stands at U.S. 56th and world 189 with 4/8 Heroic Dragon Soul as of Monday January 2, 2012.

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Big Crits Weekly Update - H Hagara World 10th

It has been an amazing week for Big Crits.  The progression team are 10th in the world to kill Heroic Hagara the Stormbinder.  At one point over the weekend, Big Crits was showing up on the front page of Wowprogress, as 7th overall in the U.S. and 13th in the world.

As of today, Big Crits is 18th in the U.S.  and 49th in the world.  Look for us to jump back up in the rankings this week when we return to Dragon Soul to kick some more ass!  Raid Leader Basek put together an inspiring video that should help keep the momentum going; you can see it here.

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Heroic Ragnaros - Analyzing Phase 3 DPS

If you are working on Heroic Ragnaros then you know one of the key components of this fight is to get out of phase three with as few meteors as possible. In Big Crits we were focused on getting out with only one meteor. For our kill last week, we switched to three healers in order to ensure we pushed Rags down before the second meteor came out.

However, during our process of learning this fight, and then focusing almost exclusively on phase 3 DPS, one of our warlocks, Democles, began breaking down the World of Logs reports to show our performance during that phase only. This analysis was a key element in not only selecting players for the fight, but more importantly, in working with our current raiders to optimize their DPS.

Because we relied so heavily on Democles to provide us this breakdown from World of Logs, he was kind enough to make a screencast video. What follows is excellent tutorial about how to get the most out of WoL.

Big Crits World of Logs page

Full logs from our first H-Rags kill (the one used in the video)

May all your hits be crits!

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Ten Man Raiding - A Postmortem

After raid leading 25mans during Wrath, I decided to see how the 10man side of progression raiding would measure up to what I thought was the more stressful and chaotic 25man side of things. While it lived up to my expectations in some areas, 10man progression raiding underperformed drastically in others. Would I call it a win or a loss? I’d call it a wash. Both models have their warts, but as long as the Internet exists there will be people from both camps lobbing grenades at each other.  Let’s dive in.

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Progression vs. Gear

On Monday I made this post on the Big Crits guild forums and it was met with a bit of controversy along with some vitriolic responses -- to use Adam Savage's favorite term. I am partly to blame because my main point got drowned out in my supporting points. My main point was that as a guild we have goals, and achieving those goals may require some sacrifice.

Here's the original post:

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Your Cataclysm Tank(adin)

Are you level 85 yet? Have you had your world rocked yet? If not just wait a few minutes, let it sink in.

I went back to tanking for this expansion, and things got really interesting. First of all, your health pool and everyone else’s is really big. While taking damage is still not a good idea, you have a little breathing room in terms of how much damage you can take before you die. Heck, I have seen a clothie take a couple hits from a boss and survive.

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Boss kill video: Big Crits vs heroic Lich King

After defeating Heroic Halion: The Twilight Destroyer, Big Crits set its eyes upon The Lich King once more. Their decision to leave him alive was one of great importance. If The Lich King were destroyed too early, the Scourge could reign havoc on Northrend. It was now time to end his reign, secure the hope of peace for Northrend and put Big Crits in the record books!

 

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Heroic Lich King kill

Once again, Big Crits comes in at the last hour, the last minute, and the last pull of the night before the patch for a last second kill. Heroic Lich King, after less than 4 weeks of work, falls to the talented blades of Big Crits.

We started ol' lichie poo right after Blizzcon, after patch 4.0.1, and of course after our 11th hour heroic Halion kill. The guild's first night looking at heroic LK was Wednesday 10/27 and our kill was Sunday 11/21.

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Raiding in Cataclysm

Basically, this is a Nostradamus type post. I am not expecting these things to happen, but I think that Blizzard wants raiding to become more cerebral than it is currently.  This is the road map that I have come up with based on what I have seen in the beta, and what Blizzard is saying in blue posts. The game is severely lacking in depth at the moment and I think players are hungry again for a game that poses a challenge, instead of how fast I can hit my nuke button.

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Closing out Wrath with a bang

October 11, 2010, the night before patch 4.0.1 drops and makes all Wrath content irrelevant, 25 Big Crits raiders group up to face down Halion, the Twilight Destroyer on heroic mode. Two hours later, and Big Crits comes through with a perfect kill!

Though it was just two hours of work on that night, the kill was the culmination of hundreds hours of work by dozens of raiders. When we make the episode for this week (Ep06) it will be the story of a guild that started as nothing but a concept in March, and by October accomplished something only 200 other guilds in the US were able to achieve.

Since the release of Ruby Sanctum, Big Crits has fought an uphill battle for this victory. We battled the departure of some core raiders, weathered the loss of more core raiders to real life priorities, and others just losing interest this late in the expansion. We made a huge recruitment push, built a team capable of doing it, refined a strategy to accomplish it, and fought off exhaustion, drama and the fear of failure to come through and achieve a our goal.

It’s more than just the singular achievement, it’s the journey to get there, the persistence of the raiders who’ve been there since day one, the adaptability of the new raiders to join, and the patience of the raiders who are great players and invested their time but weren’t selected for the kill shot. It’s the friendship, the hard work, the bonds forged in the intensity of battle, it's everything that makes playing an MMO great. It’s why we play this game.

Congratulations to Big Crits on heroic Halion 25 kill!

May all your hits be crits!

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