GTFO! nub.

I got summoned into a guild 25 man last week, they were a touch short again, and in a clearly desperate attempt to scrape the bottom of the reservist barrel they asked me along.  Cho’gall was the foe, a boss that has eluded the guild for longer than it should have done.  This is a completely new fight to me, I’d not even read the strategy, other than a cursory glance over the BoT boss list a while ago, as I hadn’t planned on being here any time soon.  I’d learnt from my previous mistake of unpreparedness, and had a stock of flasks, food and assorted other niff-naff to aid my performance.  A quick run through the strategy text on the guild website and a few pointers from the raid leader over vent (fortunately we were waiting for one of the raid to reboot from a crash so I didn’t waste anyone's time) and we were off.

I’ve, on several occasions in this blog, referred to my basic cookie cutter heroic strategy:

"don't stand in the crap on the floor or you'll die"

"sometimes the crap on the floor will keep you alive, stand in it"

"kill the adds please"

"if you can't kill it, kite it"

Cho’gall, conforms nicely to these rules, with one slight addition on positioning; when there are no adds you need to stand RIGHT UP his chuff, I mean really close, the whole raid; this is for interrupting the worship ability.  When the corrupting adherent add is summoned the raid disperses, nukes it and then forms back on the afore mentioned bosses chuff, burning down the rather nasty blood of the old gods adds which spawn from the corpse of the first add.

This quite often leads to a smear of raid members behind the boss, rather than a nice close group.  This makes interrupting rather difficult, but also means it’s particularly difficult to spot the assortment of nasty crap on the floor.  there’s also an abundance of crap spawning as you move to kill the adds, and move back the the boss which must be avoided; given the speed movement must be complete to be in position, this is quite difficult, especially when you have a high “i don’t know what I’m doing coefficient” multiplier…

After a couple of attempts, I was surviving till the wipe, or there about, but it was pointed out that I was getting hit by a bit too much of the crap on the floor, when one of the raid members pipes up “have you got GTFO?” I didn’t, nor did I even know what it was. turning to my trusty laptop I quickly looked it up, and decided it was something that I should definitely have a look at.  A quick download and relog and I was up and running.

GTFO is a very simple mod, if you’re familiar with the acronym, you’ll be able to guess what it’s about;  very basically it’s an idiot saver… If you’ve not noticed you’re standing in crap, it alerts you to the fact that you need to move with a rather loud klaxon.  Whether you’re the day dreamer type or the flustered not got a clue what's going on type being new to an encounter, or just need something as a backup just in case you miss some floor-crap GTFO is brilliant.

Not only can it give you an audible alert, if you use power auras, you can get further visible “GET OUT” messages.   And that's not all! as if that weren’t enough, it not only tells tells you that you’re in crap and need to move, it tells you if you’ve moved out of good crap and need to move back!  It EVEN lets you configure it to give different audible warnings for must move now type AOE, or low priority, finish your cast and then move type damage. 

Pure, pure, genius, I don’t know how I ever managed without it.  Clearly last week, my games room office was lit up with the sound of alarm bells which we more akin to what you’d expect to hear in a burning building; on my return last night, where I’d had time to digest what was going on and what I was doing, and compare that to what the strategy says, I was far better at avoiding the crap – I was generally in the right place at the right time, but even then there were a couple of reminder bells which saved our healers mana.  The icing on the cake was downing Cho’gall, a guild first (and my second guild first boss kill) not bad for a slacker casual who ‘doesn’t raid’…. ahem