Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Nerf Incoming: Discipline and Saurfang

As some of you may be aware, Icecrown Citadel (henceforth ICC, as it's called on Windrunner) has been out for a while, and I haven't posted about it yet. The reason is real life reared its head, and blogging got pushed aside to make room for studying for exams, spending time with family and Assassin's Creed II.

To recap, the guild roared into ICC10 (yes, 10, I'm in a 10man guild now, we pug some 25s, but rarely make up more than 3/5 of one) towards the end of the first week, all of us having had a crack at it in a pug or two and failing miserably, and cleared through the gunship battle in a couple hours. We wiped for another few hours on Saurfang, and called it a night. I and one of our tanks poured over the World of Logs data, (which, by the way, is amazingly useful for debugging new raids) and designed a new strategy with which we came back and two-shot Saurfang the next night, and our kill was so perfect that Saurfang died without getting to cast Mark of the Fallen Champion at all. At first, we just assumed a few things: we're pro, the stars aligned, World of Logs is distilled awesome, we're pro, etc. Now, however, I know why it worked so well.

Disco is OP for that fight.

Quick crash course on the Saurfang fight (spoiler warning? Not sure anyone but me likes to go in blind, but w/e): Saurfang starts with zero Energy. Whenever he hits anyone with anything, he gets +1 Energy. Each Energy makes him hit 1% harder. When he gets to 100 Energy, a random raidmember gets horribly raped, and his Energy resets to zero. His AoE and pets all need to be managed so that he gains as little energy as possible.

Why is Disco OP, and why do I see a nerf incoming?

Fully absorbed hits (most notably DoT ticks and pet melee swings) don't trigger an Energy gain. This means that simply by having a Disco priest healing your raid, Saurfang is deprived of 2-5 Energy from every Boiling Blood cast, and you can cover the add-control team's fuck-ups.

Side note: Yes, the Boiling Blood tooltip says it hits for 5k per tick, which would lead one to believe that you can only absorb one, maybe two ticks, but it's physical damage. After armor, talents, and Renewed Hope, it's more like 1.5-2k on plate DPS, 3k on everyone else.

So, enjoy it while you can, my priestly bretheren. Get yourselves into failing topguild runs, save the day, make off with the loot, and get asked to come back next time, all because of some slight healing class imbalance.

(But don't worry, we're boned for that green dragon encounter that's coming up in a few weeks.)

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