Sang Grail

We had a great nigh in Icecrown Citadel Friday night. We one-shotted the following fights:

• Lord Marrowgar
• Lady Deathwhisper
• Gunship Battle

On Saturday we made several unsuccessful attempts at Saurfang. We made a lot of progress on our strategy. The key things to work on is the kiting of the Blood Beasts to make sure they die without hitting anyone.

The logs this weekend’s runs can be found here:

• Friday 1/30 - World Of Logs
• Saturday 1/31 - World of Logs

Continue to view more information like raid attendance and loot drops.
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This is the start of a series of posts to provide ideas on how to improve your raiding. These posts won’t contain specifics, as each class is different. However, I’m hoping these posts will help generate ideas that might lead you to find something that you think will help improve your play.

Idea #1 - Review your Glyphs

Glyphs are an important part of your raiding setup. You can have 3 major and 3 minor glyphs. The major glyphs are generally geared more toward improving spells and talents that are used during raids; however, you may have some minor glyphs that will aid raiding as well.

Here are some things to consider with glyphs:

1. Check to see if there are any glyphs that supplement your “end of tree” talent. Generally these glyphs are worth considering, as the “end of tree” talent is usually an integral part of your spec.

2. Consider the other glyphs that impact the spells that you use the most.

3. Pick the 3 major glyphs that will have the greatest positive impact based on your actual usage of your spells. The best way to determine this is to review the logs for several raid boss fights and determine how much of an impact each glyph will have.

4. Most importantly, make sure you have all of your glyph slots filled.

I thought I’d take a little bit of time to start a road map on how to gear up your character.

Six months ago, characters geared up by crafting a few epics for their new 80 and jumping into a Naxx run where other more geared players could make up the difference while the new character took in tons of loot.

Now, we are no longer running Naxx (except for Raid Weekly quests) and the new instances are a lot tougher, making it no longer viable to bring along a character that is still gearing up. This might seem like it makes gearing up a lot more challenging, but in reality, it’s become a lot easier to gear up quickly.

Continue reading some ideas on gearing up “quickly”.
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OK, so ICC is hard…at least a couple of notches harder than the previous content we were doing…which was also hard.

We got excited when we downed Lord Marrowgar on the first night we attempted him in our 25 man raids. However, our Lady Deathwhisper attempts and our most recent Lord Marrowgar attempts have made it clear that it’s not going to be easy.

As you all know, we are a social raiding alliance. We don’t require a certain level of gear / performance to participate; however, we’ve always encouraged people to work on improving their play and gear to add the most that we can to the raid. Sang Grail should all pat ourselves on the back as we have been performing well in the raids. We have all worked hard to gear up and know our class. However, As individuals and a full raid, we still have room for improvement.

What can we do to help?

If you are currently participating in the raid:

1. Continue to look for improvement in your talents / glyphs. Make sure you are utilizing all of your talents and glyphs. Adjust them if necessary.
2. Review your gear. There are several web sites and resources that can help you understand which items are best for boosting your dps / healing. It is not always true that the better gear level is actually better for your class. Improve your gear every chance possible. Even if you have bought all of the gear you can with Triumph emblems, try to run the heroic daily and raid weekly for the Frost emblems and purchase new items whenever you can.
3. Check your hit rating. If you aren’t hit capped, your dps will decrease significantly. Update your gems / enchants / food / flasks if you need more hit.
4. Check other key stats. For some classes, some stats have a much larger impact on dps / healing. For example, expertise might have a huge impact. Read up on your class to see what is important.
5. Review the logs at www.worldoflogs.com (find Sang Grail’s calendar of logged fights by navigating to the appropriate realm). Check your healing / dps levels. Check the deaths overview to see what is killing you.
6. Practice survival / fight techniques. Most fights require lots of moving around to avoid things that will kill you. Practice some of these techniques in the new 5 man heroics. Learn to use your “defenses” to protect yourselves when healers might be on the move. Also practice keeping your dps up when having to switch between mobs or when AOE’s are allowed due to crowd control.
7. Consider stepping out of the raid if you are having a hard time performing at the level of the top performers. We still need to fill out 25 people, but if we have people on the sub list that can offer a better chance in our progression, you may want to consider passing your spot. Instead, use the time to continue gearing up and improving your skills by running the new 5 man heroics and random heroics for the emblems and drops.

If you are interested in joining the raids:

1. Gear up. To be ready for ICC, you will want several drops from Heroic FoS, PoS and HoR in addition to as many gear items that you can purchase with Triumph emblems. Refer to the article on gearing up. Most of our top performers have most gear items at ilevel 232 and 245 (or above).
2. Learn about your class. Read the items listed above about understanding your talents / glyphs and other key stats like hit.
3. Test your tanking / dps / healing in the new 5 man heroic instances. These instances require significant dps / healing and also require you to learn specific fight mechanics to learn survival. If you are having trouble in these instances or performing at a level that is significantly lower than the other members of the party, you may not be ready for ICC. You can check your performance using the add-on Recount to view DPS (only one member in the party needs to have the add-on). You will want your DPS to be comparable to other members in the party. Most officers will be happy to run with you to see how you are performing. From a tanking and healing perspective, if you can successfully tank (maintaining aggro) / heal Heroic PoS and HoR, you can likely add value in the ICC Raids.

Who can help me if I don’t know where to get started?

1. Read the materials on this Web site under Raiding Information.
2. Talk to Daffnae or one of the other officers. We can help you understand the logs and share information on how we’ve been preparing for raiding.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from Daff and Duck!

Good friends in Key West.

Duck and Peacelock at the local drinking establishment.

We are gathering information to post on the Web site in the Know Your Class section under Raiding Information. Daffnae, Padred and Ranthiel have all submitted information so far, and we are looking for more valuable information that others can benefit from.

Please post information about your class in the Class Mechanics forums. I will then gather the information and post it to the web site. It doesn’t have to be a full guide like Ranthiel and Padred have submitted. Any information will be helpful.

A big thank you to Ran and Pad for their information. And another big thank you to Ran for using a layout that is easy to read and can be copied by others.

Keep checking the Web site often to look for new information.

~Daffnae

I have added pages to this Web site with the general raid information that is useful for new raiders and also good as periodic refresher for current raiders. Please Check out the pages under the Raiding Information menu available in the upper right banner above and also listed on the right hand side of this page.

Please offer suggestions for corrections or additional information that would be useful to include. I would also like to add more details on the strategy followed by the alliance on our current content.
~Daffnae

Well, its time again for some more imp-sized bites of information gathered from around the web.

Holidays are approaching and the Litch King is falling. There is definitely going to be a lot of  wintry cleanup in both RL and in game.

Patch 3.3 sounds like its going to be epic.

• Tier 10 Armor sets are available for viewing (at least my lock buddies and I have something to grab a rogue by…a noose)
• Dungeon LFG complete revamp - group with completely random strangers from your whole battlegroup, do a heroic more than once a day (well…randomly), Group with enough people and you can get a title and a pup.
• Heroics - All heroics will drop Emblems of Conquest - time for some of our alts to seriously get geared up
• 2, count em’ 2, Epic quest chains….one of which will give you Shadowmorne out of 25 man IC
• Hunters have a new target for a rare pet - Arcturis the Spirit beast Bear
• Breanni will have two more pets to buy…an albino snake and a calico cat
• As Harris Pilton gets older she gets more bags. Actually a 24 slot BoE portable hole for 3k
• New chance to get your “old salty”title….a new fishing tournament is going to be held in Northrend
• Revamp to Valentines day….not much known except a few quests and a “Big Love Rocket” mount…..for some reason I get the creeps just reading that.
• High level Rep requirement enchants are BoA….no grinding with your alts to get one single enchant
• Oculus gets nerfed again to try to make it actually playable
• Naxx - you can now skip all the wings and go straight to Sapphiron
• Best Thing Ever - Quest tracking in the games UI….no updates to carbonite every 3 days

Thats the most impressive things that i saw. There are a lot of miscellaneous changes to all our classes…but you just have to read whatever applies to your toons. As always, its going to be a grand old time having fin in the Litch Kings living room.

May all your heathstones be full of soulish delight

Xandalis

I don’t mean to knock other phones, but I wanted to point out this cool app on my phone. I know there are many cool phones out there.

I am writing this post from my iPhone, and I am pretty excited about being able to post to our web site from my phone.

Another cool iPhone app is the Blizzard WOW Armory app. If you have an iPhone, check it out.