… just what I do isn’t very nice
I logged in sleepily one night after coming back from seeing Brüno (short review: it’s patchy; the funny bits are hilarious, some of it is very close to the bone (sic), some bits fall flat (sic again), and Sacha Baron Cohen is probably one of the bravest comedians working today. If you want to find out whether you are shockable go see this film, and meanwhile enjoy the debate as gays and lesbians try to decide if they think it’s homophobic or not.)
Anyhow, whilst still mentally gigglesome from all the animated dicks my thought process was interrupted by a whisper to come help kill General Vezax with my awesome interrupts. “Fightus Interruptus?” I thought, “Count me in!” So I checked that my husband was OK with me going off to raid without him (I never for a moment thought he wouldn’t be fine with it but it’s polite to check since we’d just spent the evening out on a date), grabbed my best Fury gear and headed off to Ulduar.
Although it’s always flattering to be paged with invites when you log in, I felt bad for the raid. They’d been wiping for awhile because the only guy available with interrupts had terrible lag that night. And that’s a pretty miserable spot to be in. Sure, it was nice when I hopped in and we were able to get the kill fairly quickly – insert more fluff about my amazing interruptiness – but I wish it hadn’t been necessary. So I’m pleased to see the notion of paladins getting a better interrupt being raised in their class Q&A. Yes it makes me less unique, but if it helps the 10 man raids get moving then I’m all for it.
The deal with that particular fight is that in addition to all his other wondrous abilities, General Vezax attempts to cast Searing Flames at regular intervals. If he gets the cast off, it deals a large amount of damage to everyone in the room and adds a severe armour debuff to boot. So it’s very key to that fight that he gets interrupted every time he casts – and in case that wasn’t obvious enough, the spell has a very very large and glowy graphic that is impossible to miss. It’s as if he had a sign on his back saying ‘INTERRUPT ME NOW YOU DORK’.
You would think that this unsubtle graphical guidance would make the interrupting job very easy. Interrupts are generally not on the GCD so all you have to do is be standing in melee range and hit your interrupt key whenever you see the big glowy interrupt-me-now-if-you-want-to-live graphic.
But we have found that people find it surprisingly hard to consistently get every interrupt right over the length of an 8min+ fight. It took me a couple of tries to get into the swing of it when we were first learning the fight also (admittedly I was tanking on one of them – it’s much easier when you are dps and don’t really have to think about anything else) but, aside from lag, I’m surprised that some of the others struggle so hard to get it right.
My assumption is that because I mostly tank, I’m more used to having to use specific abilities in response to something the boss does. The pure dps are more used to regular rotations. (I figure that if we had any hardcore PvPers, they’d probably be even better at it than I am.)
Besides which, I’ve had years of practice in interrupting my beloved husband 🙂
Welcome to Spinksville! 
Ah that’s why you blog? So you can get it all out without being interrupted.
Seriously thought well done for the fight. The thing with interrupting is you do need to do a certain amount of mental re-programming. I was terrible at it on my Rogue until I got the idea I couldn’t be running myself out of energy trying to dps at the same time. Obvious in hindsight but somewhat counter-intuitive to the way I normally expect to play that character.
We use two rogues alternating to do the interrupts. But then again we also pretty much always use a DK tank for Vezax. The combination of easy-sauce fight for Melee DPS and that the rogues are usually near the top of the meters anyway means they can do great dps and hold their GCD for Searing Flames.
2 would be safer, just we don’t always have that option in 10 man. Actually, having done it a couple of times now, I’m pretty confident as the only interrupter but you never know when you’re going to catch a lagspike or somesuch annoyance so more is better.
IMO, all melee need the interrupt tool, since many 10-man raids are designed/tuned assuming you have an interrupt. It’s being patched into Shaman soon, and hopefully Paladins and Ferals will get a better interrupt of their own as well. It’s such a minor change that hopefully it won’t cause the classes to become too homogenous.
…erm I may be missing something here. Shammies do have earth shock and windshock. Of course they are on GCD wich may be what your talking about. Which gimps us trying to DPS or Heal AND get that critical interupt in. I’d love Windshock to come off GCD…maybe if they gave all the shocks a linked cool down. So hanging fire to interupt would harm your DPS but not massively.
Problem is that Earthshock is part of the regular DPS cycle, to hold it back every 10-20 seconds is counter intuitive and really really hurts the DPS. Not to mention when you miss because you just used something else and are waiting for that second and a half for the global cooldown.
They’re taking out the interrupt on Earth Shock and replacing Wind Shock with Wind Shear an interrupt on it’s own cooldown. Hopefully they keep in the Threat Reduction but I’m not holding my breath on that one.
Interestingly enough, I find it far, far more challenging to do interrupts as a DPSer on this fight than as a Tank. My hands are simply untrained in the art of dps and everything I need to do seems to happen all at once with my fingers having no idea how to accomplish what needs to be done.
As a result, there’s been more than a few times that I’ve just dpsed the fight as Protection allowing me to call out more stuff and do interrupts.
Bind pummel in berserk stance to the same key you usually use to taunt. When the graphic comes up, pretend you have to taunt it immediately 😉
I’m quite serious, that’s actually what I do!