Watch in High Quality and preferably in widescreen / fullscreen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7v2y6cYrJk

As always, since you can’t embed the HD versions automatically from youtube anymore – make sure you click the hd button. Better yet, click the link below the player to view it on youtube directly so you can put it into widescreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsbL2p4FNo

We ran a 2 healer setup as standard with an enhancement shaman who had resto dualspec just in case.  I would recommend that running a 3 healer setup will save some headache on all 3 of the new bosses.  In the end the only boss we swapped in the extra healer for was Putricide himself, however there is no issue with DPS on the other two and it was touch and go with 2 healers having not done those fights before.

Rotface was quite a bit harder than Festergut, but I think this could mainly be because we didn’t really quite know what to do having only a few people in the group on PTR previously.  As a result a fair bit of the fight could have been easier but we kind of brute-forced some things, like just healing through certain damage which could actually be avoided.

Festergut however was pretty much a faceroll, if you’re wondering which one you should go for first in order of progression I’d definitely say GO LEFT before going right.  Not only is Festergut easier, but there is also less damage flying around once you get some spores popped, tank damage is pretty high but raid damage is a lot lower than Rotface.  Again two healers worked pretty well for us here but I’d take three for safety in future, as there shouldn’t be much danger of getting an enrage if you lose 1 dps.

The LEFT side (Festergut) being easier is also compounded by his dog ‘Stinky’ also being easier than ‘Precious’ (marginally).

I’m just uploading the video of our 10 man Putricide kill right now which I’ll post here asap for anyone who’s interested.

1. Tonberry (Shadow priest)
2. Flaps (Arms Warrior)
3. Tweat (Healer priest)

I’ll post the link tomorrow as soon as it’s up – we should be starting as usual around 16:00 server time (CET), which is 15:00 GMT/UTC.  Although we often start these raids a few minutes late.  Be sure to tune in so you can either be there when we kill insanity for the 4th week in a row or take the piss when we inevitably crumble under the pressure and fuck it all up

I’d love to be on that streaming list above too, but unfortunately I live in a fucking backward country where the best upload speed I can hope to get, while not living inside a major metropolis, would be woefully inadequate to live stream without game lag.

It’s a bit off topic but some of you might have seen stuff about the new ‘Digital Britain‘ law details being published recently which was designed as a package of measures to boost digital industry in the UK.  But apparently it’s far more important to stomp all over anyone who might dare to download a TV show than to produce legislation to boost our, quite frankly dire, digital infrastructure.  While you have forward thinking countries like Sweden, Norway and Spain making (or considering making) it a legal requirement for it’s citizens to have access to greater broadband connectivity and capacity – we in the UK are still mostly using Victorian era telephone wiring.  Pretty disgusting that the country which was the birthplace for most of the modern telecommunication inventions (along with the world wide web itself) which make it possible for the internet to exist as it does today can barely offer 1/3 of it’s citizens >2mbit connection speeds. No, no it’s much more important that we disconnect people sharing that episode of top gear in a guilty until proven innocent process run by the content rights holders themselves.  Luckily some people are fighting back on this, these people will be known to all as ‘the ones with common sense’.  The fact that the guy spearheading this abolition of cyber civil rights isn’t even a fucking elected official – but just appointed into government having previously been forced to resign more than once for being part of scandal – leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Once 3.3 does get a bit nearer you can expect a lot more here, along with videos of kills as and when they happen.

There’s been a bit of discussion internally in Apex about releasing videos. There used to be an unwritten rule that many top guilds stuck to which essentially stated that guilds wouldn’t release full videos of new live fights before the top10 kills were decided.  However the advent of different modes within a fight has diluted this quite a bit and it seems that no one really follows it any more.  Right now whoever gets the first video of a new fight’s kill on youtube the fastest, gets all the e-fame on mmo-champ and other sites.  So it seems that’s what people are now going for and so will we.

Until then here’s a screenshot of Geoph gaining a well deserved Insanity achievement last week:

I recommend using the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons which can be found here, this version was modified to increase visibility of raid markings when used in the center icon position in grid – the normal version has rather translucent icons which can be hard to see on top of certain class colours.

You end up with something like this in grid when the raid gets penetrating cold, along with the rather pleasing whisper from whoever is running the addon

I’m not sure how useful this is for any of Anub’s versions other than 25man hardmode, as with the other 3 versions you can pretty much just have a normal raid healing strat of ‘heal ppl when they go low’ and just win. But since the idea behind 25man hardmode is to keep the whole raid hovering on as low hp as possible – the healer assignment needs to be refined so that the 5 penetrating cold targets get a 6k+ heal (or bubble) each, in under 2 seconds. We tend to run 4 healers – either 2 druids and 2 priests or 3 priests and 1 druid.  In the latter example each priest is assigned 1 raid marker to heal and keep alive, and the resto druid (in this case me) takes 2 due to max hasted, glyphed and specced healing touch being a super-fucking-fast 7-10k heal. The priests also have the secondary task of throwing a bubble at the druid’s 2nd target just to help with the first tick as that can sometimes come faster than 2 seconds and thus cause a death.

This certainly is a very nice addon, every now and then you notice it fails to put a marker on someone but this is not often and usually not a problem as the person who’s marker failed to appear just heals the unmarked guy who should have had it.

Just to confirm, only 1 person in the raid needs to have the Penetrator addon installed and activated. And this person must have assistant so they can mark – it should also ideally be the person with the least latency in the raid as this can make the difference between having marks placed instantly or after a delay.  All the penetrating cold healers should then have Grid StatusRaidIcons installed to allow them to see the markers in grid. It should also be noted that the addon only uses the markers you see in the screenshot – namely: moon, triangle, circle, star and diamond.  The only downside to this addon that we noticed when using it to kill anub last night was that it seems to wipe all other markers off whenever it sets new ones. By this I mean that even markers that it doesn’t use (cross, skull) appear to be removed from whatever they are assigned to as soon as a new batch of dots have their markers applied. This means you cannot use markers to identify between burrower adds for interruption and have to use positional based targeting instead – although this didn’t seem to be much of a problem for us.

The phase 3 healing in this fight is still very stressful, but this addon at least takes a small part of that away.

"Thank you Gnome-o-matic(tm)!"

So why would I want to make my beautiful hordie into a gnome?  Well since we don’t raid Ulduar anymore, and coliseum really doesn’t take very long to clear – I’m bored.  What better way to relieve boredom by :

1. Leveling an alt, but on Alliance side which I have never done so a lot of the quests are new
2. Actually being able to level in BGs like Alterac Valley due to alliance winning 99% of them in the lower brackets

Of course let’s not forget the massive fringe benefit (ok ok it was the main reason I did it) of being able to hunt down and kill guildie’s alts like the dirty dogs they are.  And this is where Carbonite is very useful.

For those who don’t know Carbonite is a leveling addon which provides quest objective tracking via a mini map, among a lot of other things. The map you get from Carbonite makes leveling a breeze so it’s pretty popular with most of Apex – but usually only turned on when playing an alt.  It’s a reasonably bloated addon with more useless features than I can list within this post, but is good for what I want to do because one of the bloat-features in this fat-ware is the ability to see any guildie who is running Carbonite on your map – anywhere in the game world.  This setting is by default turned on, and why not? Surely no one in your own guild would use your location information to your detriment, right?

I decided the first target should be Splirron, who is the other resto druid in Apex.  I felt like he should die for two main reasons really, number one being that his hunter alt’s name is taken from a massively emo vampire film.  Secondly that I strongly suspect my death on the Anub’arak 25 man heroic kill (at ~8:37) to be his fault!

Robert Pattinson‎ ain't gonna save you this time bitch!

And the inevitable result:

Twilight fucking sucks!

The next target was to be the dps DK Slavik.  As some of you might have seen in the Anub’Arak video at the very start while looking through Nos’ PoV he whispered saying:

Now I know that was just a joke but these crimes against healers cannot be tolerated without some kind of retribution.  A quick search of the guild roster shows me he has a Paladin alt called Doci.

Just my luck he was spotted in AV a bit later, and I managed to find him defending a capped bunker.

HEAL THIS MOTHERFUCKER!

Turned out to be a pretty fun day

External link in case you want to watch it in a larger window / fullscreen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DkfSRd04pA

Full video will be up soon but until then here is a short clip of the boss’ death. Since the video below has full Ventrilo sound, as you can imagine we were slightly happy with our kill so don’t play the video with speakers on in a library or something – there are a lot of loud swearwords

EDIT: This video has been removed, instead please see the full fight embedded youtube in this post.

And here’s a high quality picture of the kill:

Pretty good night for me as I also managed to grab the heroic version of [Suffering's End] which apparently isn’t on Wowhead yet so you’ll have to make do with my stats screen shot instead of the mouse hover Wowhead one.

Note the number of tries left too, damn that was annoying – I know my focus bar doesn’t show it but this was around a 7% wipe.  Suffice to say we didn’t get it down in a few more tries and then someone had to go (yes this shit happens to hardcore guilds too) and we couldn’t continue.

Ah well, Barring great catastrophe we should have at least the 25+ tries kill within this reset which isn’t too bad I guess.  It’s just very annoying to have a working tactic and as yet be unable to execute it due to stupid mistakes being made that shouldn’t be being made.  I’m frapsing every attempt so should get a video from resto druid perspective (with full vent sounds) up pretty quickly once it does finally die.