1.9. Enter: Blain

Blain adds some DPS to Buru the Gorger,
The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj

A Wild Rogue Appears

My Tauren Shaman took a seat at the mouth of Molten Core, drinking some of the Mages' conjured water, checking my inventory, making sure I had remembered to bring the Whipper Root Tubers I'd plucked from Felwood. Ater sent me a virtual nudge in the form of a /tell, indicating that the new Rogue would be joining us this evening. Fantastic, I thought, at last we'll get to see some real damage for a change. I spun Kerulak around to get a look a look at him.

His name was Blain, and he did not look geared for Molten Core. At all.

We'd spent half a year in Molten Core; it was now the second week of April, 2006. Both Onyxia and Ragnaros were regulars on the schedule. Weekly clears geared our raiders to the core-hound tooth; our players were some of the most well-equipped on Deathwing-US. Blain, by comparison, looked like any random scrub plucked from /general.

Yet, we struggled.

Part of the problem laid with the rogues; their damage was pathetic and inconsistent. They had one job: sustained DPS. A reasonably well-played, well-geared Rogue should easily top the meters. Ours weren't capable of such a request. Whether it was a lack of leadership on the part of my then-Rogue officer Evilexan, or the rogues' inability to grasp basic concepts like speccing out of PvP for raids, I wasn't certain.

They needed help.

The rogues needed guidance and leadership; someone to tell them to pull their heads out of their asses, get them educated on the proper specs and rotations. But the one thing they didn't need was gear. Seven months of running Molten Core had granted them nearly complete sets of Tier 1 Nightslayer armor. Some even boasted the Tier 2 Helm and Pants (Bloodfang), having been present to multiple Onyxia and Ragnaros kills. And in their hands they wielded Core Hound Teeth, Brutality Blades, Gutgore Rippers, and Vis'kags. No Alliance player on Deathwing-US was safe to perform their daily tasks with our rogues lurking in the shadows -- the might of their weaponry all but assured the Alliance a quick and painful death, perpetually terrorized by the "Descendants of Draenor" guild tag.

Razorgore held no such fear of our rogues.

So as I glanced up at this newly acquired Undead Rogue, standing before me wearing parts of the Tier 0 Dungeon set, augmented by a few random blues, wielding a Zulian Slicer in one hand and an Ogre Pocket Knife in the other, I had to ask myself:

How in the hell would this guy be our savior?

I sent a /tell to Ater, "Are you sure he knows what he's doing?"

Ater told me to have faith and to watch; I braced for the worst. Ater called out into Vent that he was about to pull the Molten Giants and for everyone to be ready. I swiveled my shaman into position behind the casters, and hovered over Ater's name with my mouse, my healing trigger finger waiting for the first blow to strike him.

And then, it happened.

Within seconds of making the first pull in Molten Core, Blain's DPS shot up through the roof, topping the damage meters, tearing the Molten Giants apart.

It was not a marginal increase in performance, it was an order-of-magnitude difference.

The raiders watched in silence as he moved from mob to mob, swinging around from behind, tearing each monster apart, moving with lighting-fast reflexes from one minion to the next, as his existing target was still in the process of falling over dead. It was as if he had the kill order already planned out in his head. I immediately had a flashback to that night in Scholomance with Maxxum and his guild members, ripping the dungeon open from the inside out. Precision. Efficiency. Speed. Maximum DPS.

Hardcore.

Warrior officer Annihilation wields The Untamed Blade,
Blackwing Lair

The Kill-All Strat

Blain mostly kept to himself. He didn't speak in vent and only typed responses when addressed directly. I continued to watch him, mob after mob, boss after boss, and night after night. Just as Ater had assured me, Blain continued to impress.

He and Ater had a synergy about them; they would work together to strategize and refine our current systems, making our Molten Core clears even faster. Long after the raid was over, Blain and Ater would venture off into a remote area of Azeroth, often with several other volunteer raiders in tow, mapping out new strategies, then trying them out in a kind of "dress rehearsal". Like kids constructing an attack plan in the sand with sticks and diagrams, they'd go over positioning, practice mechanics, movements, patterns. Ater had not lied -- Blain was a perfectionist. And when he assisted in the smaller 20-Man instances Zul'Gurub and The Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, he completely dominated the damage meters.

But this was all still junior-level stuff for us. Bosses we had mastered were, for the most part, brainless in their execution. The task at hand was to re-learn Razorgore, a boss we already knew was a brick wall. We'd already practiced and perfected a strategy, but patch 1.10 crippled its effectiveness. I feared what this meant. Weeks of unlearning, then even more weeks of re-learning, equating to zero progress in BWL. I doubted a single rogue would be enough to turn the tables as fast as we needed it to be flipped. Failing to put Razorgore on farm status in a timely fashion would most certainly spell the end of raiding in DoD.

---

The 40 of us stand in Razorgore's egg chamber, staring at the boss, wondering how we are going to pull this off. The only viable strategy that remains is the dreaded "kill-all" strat. Only the the very best hardcore guilds can do this; guilds far better geared and played than us. It's going to be extremely risky; it has a significantly higher DPS requirement than what we are capable of, not to mention the risk of the Legionnaires cleaving us. And the egg-chamber is small, enclosed area, so our out-of-combat battle rezzer is going to be useless.

Blain types into raid chat, "we’re going to be doing the kill-all strat."

This is crazy. We're not a hardcore raiding guild! We don't have the gear to meet the DPS requirements. The cleave is going to take players out all over the place. This strategy is absolutely destined for failure.

I watch in silence as Blain opens up the raid management window and begins re-arranging groups. One by one he analyzes the most efficient make-up for each corner of the chamber: A tank to control the mob currently being killed. A Mage to polymorph the incoming Legionnaire. The Hunter responsible for Dragonkin kiting. A Warlock to back the Mage up with a Fear, in case the Legionnaire breaks free. A Druid will act as another backup to sleep a Dragonkin if needed. A healthy balance of healers and DPS to burn through each corner as fast as humanly possible. I wait for him to move us into individual Vent channels to coordinate the communication, as each corner is going to have to call out DPS, polymorph, fear, stuns, kill orders, emergency heals...if we're all in one channel it'll be a catastrophe.

"We’ll be staying in one Vent channel," he types into Raid Chat.

What? This guy has to be absolutely bonkers, Vent is going to be a constant mess of talking; nobody is going to understand a damn thing with everyone yelling.

"Each corner has an identifier", Blain types, “A, B, C, and D. I want one person from each corner calling out their respective spawns. You'll call them out by 1st dragonkin, 2nd dragonkin, 1st mage, etc, so we'll know is crowd-controlling what."

This ought to be rich. How the hell is the raid supposed to know that?

"Here are the crowd-control assignments," he types. Blain proceeds to lay out every single call. Every crowd-control, every kill execution, from start to finish. He has, essentially, orchestrated the entire boss execution in front of us.

"Designated corner announcers in Vent will call out if their corner is overrun. Adjust as necessary."

We start. We swiftly knock out the controller and his guards, and the mind-controlling of Razorgore begins. Corners move into position. They start calling out their Dragonkin, just as Blain instructed. The Dragonkin are picked up and kited by Hunters. Mages begin to spawn, corner tanks pick them up, announce they have good threat, DPS begins tearing the Mages apart. We burn them as fast as we can. Legionnaires arrive, calls are made. Our raiders move quickly, polymorphing them into harmless sheep. How are we doing?

"Eggs going well, down to half", says the controller.

He continues to weave Razorgore throughout the egg-chamber, popping eggs left and right. One by one, more Dragonkin, Legionnaires, and Mages spawn. I start to get nervous, and glance at my mana bar. Still Ok, I can continue to heal, and throw out a Frost Shock here and there to assist DPS. Were we falling behind? More mobs arrived. I'm not sure how the other corners are doing, but am too focused on the Rogue’s strategy to divert my gaze. I keep my focus on the task, keep my corner tank alive. Careful...careful! Don’t break the sheep. How are the eggs now?

“Eggs still going well”.

I re-focus my attention. Burn the Mage down. Throw out a few more heals. What about the other corners? I'm nervous again; not getting a lot of feedback from the other teams. They are quiet, save for the "clang" of weapons and "whoosh" of spells being hurled across the room at our targets. Anyone overrun yet? Ah God, a Legionnaire is closing in on me. Watch out for the cleave, give the tank the room he needs to work. He grabs it up, faces it away; I'm safe from the cleave. How's my mana looking? I’m doing pretty well, I’ll throw out a Frost Shock, help my team get our corner down. Another Mage dies, the tank breaks a polymorphed sheep, and moves to the Legionnaire. My corner’s looking low on health; I get them back up safely. Ater's voice breaks the silence in Vent.

"We have extra mages in the middle, get them picked up".

A far corner sweeps over and gets those mages handled, I toss out some more heals. Someone calls out for how many eggs are left.

"We’re on the last egg, get ready to move Razor into position."

Wait...what?

Before I know it, the final egg is broken, and the Dragonkin are running out of the egg chamber in preparation for Phase 2. The tanks pick him up and face him away from the raid, bearing the brunt of his conflagration alone. I hide behind pillars and begin line-of-sight healing, stepping in only to top off the tank, and then stepping back, safe from Razorgore's conflag. The tanks switch. More heals continue. Blain and his melee are wailing on the boss, giving it everything they have, while Mages, Warlocks send ranged attacks flying from a distance. I glance at the damage meters. Everyone is pushing as hard as they can.

...and all at once, Razorgore falls over dead, the victim of a kill-all strat.

The 25-Man Progression team defeats
Razorgore the Untamed,
Blackwing Lair

Have Some Faith

I was absolutely stunned. I never expected my guild capable of such refined raid execution; to be able to come together and work in such a synchronized, coordinated fashion. But we had, thanks to Blain, who wasn't interested in hearing about how or why we couldn't do something...but was more interested in humoring the possibility that we were. He not only put that effort into his own personal performance, he turned the Rogues around until they were all top-performing, dominating the meters like they always should have. I vowed to never again doubt our capabilities and made it a rule to preach Blain's ideals to the rest of the guild.

From here on out, raiding wasn't about what we couldn't reach, but rather, how fast we could get started.

1.8. Razorgore the Unmaimed

Rogue damage is all over the board, as Kerulak
and the 40-Man raiders hover over Garr,
Molten Core

Terribad

At the macro level, we were making broad adjustments to our raid execution and seeing excellent increases in speed and skill. We were chain-pulling, tearing monsters apart, healers were buddying-up and managing their mana with much greater efficiency, and we had out-of-combat battle rezzers acting as a backup mechanism to ensure we kept a healthy amount of players alive through emergencies. Ragnaros was dead, and Onyxia's head was doomed to end up on the end of a pike in Orgrimmar, so swore our 40-Man raiders. It was time to raise the bar. Our sights were focused on the next tier of content, Blackwing Lair. However, the step up in difficulty was significant, and although no trash awaited us at the start of the instance, the first boss proved more than enough of an obstacle. After a few weeks of struggling on Razorgore the Untamed with no progress to speak of, we were desperate for answers.

I turned to my Ater for guidance, in the hopes of validating my own hunches as to where things were going south. A lot of those early months of raiding (and guild leading) in Descendants of Draenor were very much “learn-as-you-go”, and it wasn't uncommon for me to take a backseat and watch leaders emerge, taking note of how they addressed situations and resolved conflict. I had come to trust Ater's instincts more and more, as did the rest of the guild. People looked up to him, and when he spoke, they listened and followed. He exuded natural leadership, and employed all the basics (praise in public, scold in private, etc.) It was rare (if ever) that he had anything negative to say about anyone. So, it was that much more difficult to get him to speak negatively about anyone; it simply wasn't his style. It was this style which contributed to my mishandling of the Khaevil / Xorena situation, leading my Number Two officer, Graulm, to part ways with the guild. In my attempts to learn leadership by observing, I missed Blackrock-sized mountains of information.

I'd misread Ater's passivity as approval. Whether outright or innately, Ater understood the illusion of asymmetric insight, and didn't let it cloud his judgement of other people and the behavior we observed. We think we know people by watching how they behave and act, but we miss mountains of information needed to make accurate, impartial assessments. He picked his battles. He was less concerned with ego and players living out the persona of their in-game toons, and more focused on tightening up raid execution. Therefore, Ater would pour his energy into bringing clarity to raid strategy, rather than waste time telling someone they sucked. But even in the face of Ater's direction, bad players remained bad, and it didn't appear like he was able to get through to them. One group in particular took this terribad play to new heights, making them the biggest offenders of the bunch: the Rogues.

The rogues sucked.

Not having played a rogue, I couldn't be certain what they were doing wrong. Rogues in WoW were traditionally played by individuals who had a thirst for PvP (Player vs. Player) combat, and often specced into a role that would grant them survivability and burst DPS for that very reason (subtlety). However, these traits translated poorly into a raid environment, where high sustained DPS was a much greater priority. I discussed the Rogue situation at length with Ater, and while going over a few options one evening, he offered to reach out to a friend. They had played together in a previous game, Lineage II. He trusted this person, and stated to me that he would “whip the rogues into shape” and get us where we needed to be. Ater explained that, from his experience, this Rogue had an amazing attention to detail and could micromanage people's abilities on a entirely new level, providing insight into the tiniest of details, that even he wouldn't be able to keep track of while tanking/raid leading. It all sounded like a great idea...

...and then, Ater added, “there’s a possibility that this Rogue may rub some people the wrong way...”

The way I saw it, we didn't have a lot of options. Part of the reason we weren't making progress on bosses like Razorgore was that we were coming in way below the DPS requirement. If we could bring someone in who could tweak those numbers, I was willing to eat a few complaints from people who got their feelings hurt. I told Ater to seek out his Rogue friend, and determine if he could join Descendants of Draenor. In the meantime, I turned my attention to our other roadblock.

Kerulak and the 40-Man team prepare for an Onyxia kill,
Brackenwell Village, Dustwallow Marsh

Kiting Like a Scrub

The first boss of Blackwing Lair was a dragonkin named Razorgore the Untamed, and he would be the first of many bosses bring an entirely new level of complexity to our raids. It involved two phases, the first of which dealt with an steady influx of heavily armored Dragonkin, along with Blackwing Legionnaires that cleaved targets (hitting multiple players at once), and Blackwing Mages doing high DPS from afar. They trickled in slowly at first, but increased their frequently to such a pace that a raid couldn't simply overpower them all; they had to be controlled and killed in a focused, prioritized fashion. On top of that, a single player would have to mind-control the boss through the entire phase, weaving him back and forth across the instance, destroying all of the eggs in the chamber. Once the eggs were destroyed, phase two began, and Razorgore had to be taken to a corner and killed, switching back and forth between tanks, as one would periodically be doused with flames, causing them to become hysterical and run around in a panic.

Razorgore required a nearly surgical level of control, and communication was the most important priority. Many competing guilds stopped dead at this first boss of Blackwing Lair, never to progress further. In extreme cases, raiding guilds arrived at Razorgore, failed, pointed fingers at each other, and ultimately disbanded; a very real concern and possibility for us.

The longer the guild went without killing Razorgore, the greater the chance of completely falling apart.

At the time, we were employing a “totem-kite” strategy, made popular by raiding guilds on the Horde side (as the Alliance didn't have Shamans in Vanilla). The strategy involved the Shamans dropping Earthbind Totems (which had a slowing effect on enemies) and running around the room, casting their infamous Frost Shock on every cooldown, which caused monsters to chase the Shamans. Once the Shamans had aggro on all the Blackwing Legionaires and Dragonkin, players would run laps around the egg-chamber, re-dropping their totems, ensuring the the monsters remained slowed. This monster-chasing-you act is referred to as "kiting". With the Legionaires and Dragonkin in tow, the remainder of the raid would spread around the outer perimeter of the egg-chamber and methodically kill what remained: the Blackwing Mages. The theory to the strategy was that if the Shamans could maintain a healthy amount of aggro and kite these slowed minions or "mobs" through their Earthbind Totems, the raid would no longer be stretched thin, and would be free to focus on killing mages. The strat had merit, because when the first phase ended, all of the kited monsters would turn and exit the room in a scripted event, leaving us to focus on Razorgore himself.

From a practical standpoint, the strategy was anything but. It was difficult. It put the wrong players in the wrong roles. It felt "gimmicky", like we didn't know what we were doing, cramming a bunch of things together at the last minute like a bunch of amateurs. I felt like an idiot running around in circles. I hated it. It took me out of a role where I felt I could contribute (as a healer) to being completely powerless to help (running around like a moron with minions chasing me, one wrong move meaning instant death).

The only other option was a fabled "kill-all" strategy, employed by only the true hardcore raiding guilds in World of Warcraft. The rumor was that these top played, top geared guilds would separate themselves into four sub-groups, each communicating to one another in their own designated Ventrilo channel, and they would simply kill everything. Technically, they would ignore Dragonkin (due to their high armor), but Legionnaires and Mages together were fair game. The DPS requirements to keep up with the kill-all strategy was completely out of our league, not to mention the extreme level of coordination and focus that was required.

It was a level of discipline we simply hadn't reached.

So, we put this pipe-dream out of our minds, and continued on with the totem-kite strat. Several more weekends of attempts went by without a Razorgore kill and things became more frustrating and stressful. But on March 15th, 2006, the Shamans and I managed to kite our way into Phase Two, and Razorgore was dragged to a corner, tanked, and killed. We breathed a collective sigh of relief and set our sights on moving forward, confident that Razorgore was behind us.

He wasn’t.

Patch 1.10 added weather effects to WoW,
along with the undocumented side-effect of
Shamans' Totems generating threat.

1.10: Totem Aggro

Less than a week and a half went by, and we were treated to a new patch, v1.10, which added Weather effects to the game. While casuals frolicked through the rainstorms and snow out on the surface, the Descendants of Draenor had bigger issues to deal with. Upon returning to Razorgore’s egg-chamber, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, our strategy of dropping totems and kiting mobs around the room completely failed. Unbeknownst to us, a undocumented "stealth" change snuck its way into the v1.10 patch:

Shaman totems would now generate their own aggro.

As soon as the Shamans and I began our kiting, the Legionaires and Dragonkin would turn to the totems, destroy them with a single punch, free themselves from being slowed, then catch up to us and beat us to death. We were nearly ready to break ground on the next boss, Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, and now had to deal with a huge setback; we couldn't even kill a boss we were supposed to be farming. We picked ourselves up after many failed attempts in the egg chamber, crawled back home empty handed, and I thought to myself, “now what?”

Before I logged off for the evening, Ater took me aside and said his Rogue friend had decided to join us, and would be present for our next raid in Molten Core.

A glimmer of hope, perhaps?