I had hoped, all those weeks ago, that taking a break from the instance would allow other people on the server to gear up a bit and increase the likelihood for success. This Friday afternoon I decided it was time to try the Vault again and joined a PUG looking for a few more people to handle the DPS.

Fifteen minutes, 2 tank deaths on trash, and one failed Emalon wipe later the group was disbanded. Unbelievable. This begs the question: Is Emalon still a problem on other servers?

The Poll

So how are things with Emalon on your own server? Is it a total disaster the majority of the time, with multiple wipes and dropped groups each week, or are things turning around and are you starting to see more successful attempts? Let me know.

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Just Join A Guild Already…

The idea of joining a guild gets to be more and more interesting with each passing day but there are few options on my server that I find appealing at the moment. I did briefly join a guild last month, which I never wrote about here on the site, because it quite frankly didn’t go well and probably wouldn’t make for interesting reading.

At this point I’m in a “wait and see” position while I show patience for the right guild situation to come across my path. In the meantime, I’ll continue to PUG as much as I can and enjoy reading about other players’ experiences in the new Raiding content.

The Poll

So how do you feel your Raid progress compares to other people? I’m a big fan of the new polling plugin I installed here the other day so I’ve put up another question for everyone.

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Recruit High DPS

I’m normally very quickly offended when someone asks what my DPS is before I am invited to a group but in this case I think it’s justified. The Emalon fight, as it currently stands, is just a DPS race on the enraged add. If you can get enough high DPS (mostly above 3K, from my limited experience so far) then you shouldn’t have much trouble eventually taking the guy down.

Boot Low DPS

Again, I’m usually pretty adamantly against harsh treatment of players but this fight is just too tough or even impossible without a lot of high DPS players. If there are people below 2K (and I’ve seen some groups with players under 1.5K this week) then those players need to be politely told they’ll be replaced. It’s just too difficult for the rest of the DPS players to carry the burden of low performing teammates right now against Emalon.

The group I was in this morning that finally took Emalon down had one wipe before the leader took charge and removed the bottom 5 people on the DPS chart. We replaced them with new DPS that were more prepared for the fight and did it on our second attempt. I’m sure some feelings got hurt in the process but it was either 5 people get upset or all 25 of us waste an hour of our time and leave empty-handed.

Make Tanking Locations Clear

For a room so tiny, I’m amazed at all of the different tanking strategies I’ve seen against Emalon so far. One PUG has people yelling for fighting on the stairs, the next one is tanking Emalon on those exact same stairs, another is pulling him to the back and bringing the adds up to the front. The best setup I’ve seen so far is Emalon on the right or left and the adds on the opposite side. This lets the ranged DPS sit square in the center, spaced out as evenly as possible, and still gives melee players a short distance to run when the add enrages.

Also, make sure you have tanks with some experience. My second PUG last night had a tank who, as I later discovered using PUG Checker (Shameless Plug!), had never finished any form of the Vault at all. We wiped eight times.

Calm Down

Finally, dear Raid Leader, I need you to calm down. I highly doubt, on my server at least, that a PUG has taken down Emalon on their first attempt. Acting like a crying, whining toddler when things don’t go well the first try doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the rest of the group. I’ve seen plenty of these Emalon PUGs already break up after the first wipe because the Raid Leader lost his mind and basically yelled everyone away. It’s only a game, children. Please be civilized.

Now I Predict The Future

This might be the frustration of my 7.7% success rate this week but I feel another nerf to Emalon coming down the pipe. Either they need to lower the health on the adds a bit more or they need to turn the Vault into two separate instances. As it stands now there are few PUGs willing to even bother with Archavon until Emalon is dead because killing one of the two saves you to the instance for the week. So if you kill one but bomb out on the other until the PUG disbands you are basically out of luck for seven more days.

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No More Loot Pinata

Emalon makes the original boss in this zone, Archavon the Stone Watcher, look like an even bigger joke than we thought he was before the release of the 3.1 patch. While Archie can easily be taken down by any PUG with even half-talented players the fight against Emalon requires enough coordination and communication that it’s going to be tough for unprepared groups to beat him.

Ch-ch-ch-chain Lightning

For starters, Emalon has a wicked nasty Chain Lightning spell that requires everyone in the Raid to be evenly spread out. A player in our PUG had the nice tip to type “/range 10″ to get a small information window that will show you any players you are standing too close to during the fight. Even with that help I still found people standing on top of each other. During our first attempt, most of us lasted about 20 seconds before we were one-shot by the lightning.

Elemental Friends

The other big problem with Emalon is that he has friends. There are four elemental adds in the room with him. At certain intervals one of the four adds gets an enrage buff and begins to grow in size. If the Raid doesn’t communicate which of the four adds has the buff and then quickly kills that add the whole Raid will wipe when the elemental explodes.

A Challenge Is Good

I think VoA desperately needed a boss encounter like this one. Archavon is basically a weekly joke for most people but now, with the addition of Emalon to the zone, players have a new challenge to look forward. And since he drops the new Emblems of Conquest in the 25-man mode as well as Tier 8 gear I’m glad to see the difficulty being ramped up.

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With PUG Checker, you can type in the name of a player and the server they are on and get a quick “scorecard” style display of their boss kills in all of the instances in Wrath of the Lich King. This is a quick and simple way to get some kind of an idea about the experience level of the player you’re about to group up with.

I’ve been personally using PUG Checker before every PUG I’ve ran over the last week and it’s been pretty useful for me so far. I’ve seen some stuff, when scanning players before a PUG, that made me a leery of going forward from the start that were proven correct. One particular Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run looked like trouble according to PUG Checker and after about an hour later and several wipes it was proven to be correct.

Of course, everyone’s mileage with the site will vary and it’s by no means advertised or intended to be a ruling body on PUG worth. If you find it useful though, please bookmark it and visit often. If you don’t think it’s fair or a valid representation of your character I understand completely but the data I’m using is freely available from the WoW Armory already. I’m just displaying it in a more useful and accessible manner.

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The Deeps

Over the course of the last few months I’ve started to turn into something of a Recount addict. I’m to the point now that I’m about topped off in gear I have access to so to keep running Recount at this point is more a self-serving practice than anything else. Do any of you have a strange Recount addiction as well?

As you can see from the self-centered image on this post, my DPS during the 25 and 10 man varieties of the Vault of Archavon has been pretty good when compared to other players in the Raid.

The Loots

I’ve never had much loot luck in VoA, as a matter of fact, but I still anxiously wait to run it again every week. In the last month I’m not even sure if I’ve seen any Hunter loot drop at all but I keep coming back for more. It’s a slow, but easy, way for me to farm Emblems of Valor as well as I inch closer and closer to getting my Valorous Cryptstalker Spaulders that I want so badly.

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On Monday night there are usually players, who haven’t gotten into their weekly Raids yet, scrambling to form PUGs. This is generally when, at best, I hop into a 10 or 25 Man Obsidian Sanctum run but for some reason this time I went looking for some Naxx action. What a mistake.

I got a /whisper immediately after marking myself as available for 25 Man Naxx in the LFG panel. I accepted the invite and thus began what I like to call the “PUG Dance.” For the next hour and fifteen minutes, people joined the group. Then left the group. Then joined on their alt. Then found out they were saved (How could you forget that??) and left the group. Then a healer disconnected. And so on and so on.

Eventually we were at 24 people and it seemed like there was light at the end of the tunnel. Then the Raid Leader disconnected. The new leader was one in title alone and we sat idle for five minutes waiting for the original leader to return. He never did but apparently to honor him we never kicked him out of the group. The new Raid Leader was in a “really big hurry” so he convinced most of the group to go in and get started with a group that had only 21 people.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Naxx in PUG form at least a three hour event? How much of a hurry can you be in then? At this point I was about to leave the group myself but things were shaping up to make an excellent post for the blog so I stuck it out. When we got inside the Raid Leader asked who the healers were and we only had two inside with us. That’s not good at all but he pushed ahead to the Arachnid Quarter and started taking on trash.

People were dying left and right on the first pull. Nothing was getting marked and it was utter chaos. We pushed ahead to Anub’Rekhan with a new healer joining us just in time for the fight. As someone in the PUG explained the encounter to those of us who hadn’t seen it before the Raid Leader kept screaming that we had to “hurry up” and eventually, seeing that this wasn’t going to work out, the informative bunch gave in and we attacked.

I think the whole thing lasted about 30 seconds. Before I knew it half the Raid was dead and those tiny corpse bugs were everywhere. I threw my virtual hands in the air, met my demise and immediately left the group along with everyone else.

I’d love to try Naxx again some time but I think I’d probably be better off trying a 10 Man PUG instead. The amount of organization required for twenty-five random strangers to come together and complete a task as long and, presumably, complicated as Naxx is probably a bit much. Running Obsidian Sanctum is much easier to PUG so I’ll definitely continue to make runs at that as I try to stock up on Emblems of Valor as much as I can.

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This particular PUG had a hard time getting its last few members so the pre-Raid chatter was 15 minutes of inane bickering between two tanks about armor mitigation and defense cap ratings and other things that make me sleepy. In between arguments, the Raid leader kept asking for everyone to post their DPS on the channel for either public humiliation or ego boosting. I decided to not partake in either.

Once our tenth man was found things became very serious as a Ventrillo server was offered up for everyone to use. Again, I decided not to partake. It was stressed to those of us that hadn’t been here before that this was a very difficult undertaking we were about to go through together. We needed to listen to instructions at all times and blah, blah, blah… It felt like I was in a guild and being told by an Internet stranger how I should behave and act. So far this wasn’t very much fun.

We finally went inside and after two trash pulls we had reached the first boss. Oh boy, I thought, now things get tough. The Raid leader explained that we were to shoot the drake and when a portal opened up go inside and shoot the guy there. Then resume shooting the drake. My initial reaction was “That sounds easy.” and I was right. Big scary drake was dead in no time.

A few more trash pulls and we were at the second drake. The strategy this time? Shoot the drake. There was to be no portal action for this fight. Bing-bang-boom and the drake was dead. The third, and final drake, on our circular tour of Lava Town was the same as the last one. Shoot him until he was dead. At this point I was pretty let down by the whole experience but I had hopes that the final boss, Sartharion, would really deliver the goods.

Again, as we stood before the last boss of the Raid, our fine leader went on and on about the strategy. There were going to be HUGE walls of fire that we had to avoid in order to succeed. Positions on the ground were marked with Elune Stones and the promise of hair-raising Raid warnings instructing the idiots when to run were made. Once everyone assured each other we were ready for this onslaught of dragons, elemental adds and, good Lord, walls of fire we started the fight.

Guess what? The reality is that all we did was shoot the dragon. Every once in awhile these really big walls of fire showed up with equally big gaps in them that you had to run to. Raid warnings pounded my screen telling me when to run but, honestly, you would have to be pretty dumb to not see them coming and find the hole to stand in.

My final thought on my first 10-man Raid is this: big deal. I can’t believe I waited so long to try this out. Since this encounter I’ve gone on to do the 25-man version of Obsidian Sanctum and that was even easier than this. I think we had that run done in about ten minutes. I know it’s harder with the more drakes you leave up and I that I should give that a go before I get all huffy about how easy WoW is. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.

The point of this post isn’t to complain about WoW difficulty as much as it is a way to tell people who might be gun shy about giving their first Raid a try that they shouldn’t be worried. There’s a weird intimidation factor that a lot of WoW players like to push on people and if you ignore that and give things a try you’ll have a lot more fun playing the game. If you’re worried you’ll look dumb in a particular instance than read up details on the boss fights on Wowhead first. A few minutes of comment reading over there and you’ll be prepared for just about anything.

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