We made it count September 16, 2009

To my one or two faithful readers (hi mom!), please “bear” with me as I continue to wrestle with this new layout. For some reason the style sheet that governs this entire page didn’t want to put actual font point-height line breaks in between paragraphs and each post ended up looking like a wall o’ text. WordPress ignores consecutive line breaks in your post codes, so that didn’t work. I spent a good half hour searching for options before finally narrowing down on a solution in a blog comment somewhere: stick a space between two line breaks. I really should have thought of that myself.
 
Anyway, that’s fixed. So I would like to direct your attention to …
 

 

 
Yay! Finally. Yesterday we went in with our super trash clearing group (DK tank, holy priest, shadow priest, fire mage, balance druid) and owned that place up. Death and Decay, two Mind Sears, Blizzard, and Hurricane helped us rip through every trash pack like a hot knife going through butter. I got the last two achievements I needed for GotH and finally got my Red Proto-Drake.
 
We did end up letting our Ulduar raid ID reset so we could clean up the first part of the instance for those who had missed it. We cleared ToC-10 and then razed a chunk of Ulduar:
 

 
Kologarn was Disarmed, Auriaya was the Crazy Cat Lady, and we did it all without Heroism (boooo!). Shaman-less guilds, I salute you. You are all freaks. I want Hebestia back.
 
This was only the second guild downing of Freya+3, and our first go at it with two healers. With the group we had we would not have made it damage-wise with three healers, and no one else in the raid was capable of healing at Uld-10 hard mode level anyway (at least, no one who wasn’t our MT). The encounter was stressful. The absence of our third healer for this was very noticeable. I used my Innervate at around 65% mana and then at every CD afterwards, popping my potion somewhat early. By the 5th or 6th add wave I was almost completely OOM (and Kristos was close). Luckily, we managed to scrape by. I can see now how the encounter is possible with two healers (mana-wise), but the raid definitely has to be better about spreading unnecessary damage. Some people in the group are still having trouble with killing Detonating Lashers when people are low on health and during and immediately after Tremors. I don’t know how many times Kristos and I had to comment on this in Vent. Unfortunately, it is very hard for us to notice who the guilty parties are because we are too busy paying attention to other things.
 
Our goal for this week is to reach Yogg-3 again, of course. On Monday we managed to make it to P3 a couple of times, so I am hopeful that Yogg-3 will go down this week with the right group and a bunch of us will get our Rusties.

I can’t make it count September 14, 2009

I have failed to get this achievement the past two times I have tried. Make It Count and Experienced Drake Rider are the two achievements I am missing for the Glory of the Hero meta achievement after cleaning up five achievements yesterday. Make It Count always goes smoothly until Ley-Guardian Eregos. Then we wipe. Admittedly, one of those wipes was my fault as I hadn’t been in the instance for many, many months and stopped kiting a Phase Anomaly too soon. The second time we wiped because we were trying to stack the Amber Void achievement on top of Make It Count for one of our group members, and it bombed. Pro tip: don’t stack the Void achievements with Make It Count unless your group rocks the socks off of 5 Ambers.
 
Anyway, hopefully a group of guildies will be able to go into Oculus some time today or tomorrow in order to clean this up.
 
In raiding news, we did manage to down heroic Northrend Beasts last week with two healers. Then we got monsterly owned by Jaraxxus. That guy does not play nice. We have got the portal-killing down to an art, but the infernal wrangling definitely needs more cowbell.
 
We’re still waiting for a perfect group for Yogg-3, and in the mean time we may let our raid ID reset so we can farm some of the other bosses again. Yogg-3 is the last achievement that a lot of us need to get our Rusties so we are anxious to try it again … but not anxious enough to run in with a group that will guarantee that we /headdesk fruitlessly all night.
 
Pookies became a Bloodsail Admiral two weekends ago and has since been (half-heartedly) repairing his goblin rep. The fastest way to do this while maintaining Bloodsail rep is to grind non-Bloodsail pirates. I have been working the ones in Tanaris since it’s super-easy to get to Tanaris thanks to that CoT portal in Dalaran. The more efficient way to grind the rep back for those who are going for the Insane in the Membrane feat of strength is to do the repeatable quest in Dire Maul, since you have a chance to collect Librams at the same time. The trek from Moonglade to Dire Maul just isn’t worth it though, IMO!

I can has The Summit of Storm Peaks November 27, 2008

Okay, first things first. Apparently I fail at looking up breadcrumb quests, because there was one to be turned in at one of the dwarves in Frosthold and I didn’t see it.
 
Thanks to the Wowhead comments on the The Summit of Storm Peaks achievement, I was able to figure out which two quest chains I was missing in Storm Peaks.
 
The first quest chain I missed starts after you energize the transporter on Gram’s Rise (northeast of K3). I don’t remember anyone telling me to go back there and talk to anyone for a quest, but there is one there that asks you to go into Gram’s Hold (the cave) with a pack of bombs and kill the ringleader there. You then get sent back to K3 to pick up the Frosthold breadcrumb quest and ride a missile out to Frosthold.
 
The second quest chain that I missed starts from a drop from the war golems south of Bouldercrag’s Refuge (on and around the scaffolding surrounding the giant golem). This quest chain goes on for about ten quests.
 
So I was finally able to grab the zone quest achievement for Storm Peaks, although I still have a couple of quests to complete in the Stormforge dwarves quest chain.
 
Another thing I did yesterday was run heroic Halls of Stone with a couple of guildies and a PUG pally tank (*gasp*). It was his first time in Halls of Stone and he wasn’t very confident (and we moved a little bit slower), but he did his job just fine. Our group composition was prot pally, ret pally, resto shaman, elemental shaman, and balance druid. During fights my spell power was spiking up to 1950 with shaman totems. It was delicious.
 
I found the boss encounters in Halls of Stone to be particularly enjoyable, because they really get the entire party involved. The Shatter effect on the Gruul-like boss was a little insane (with respect to its range), but other than that, he was a pushover. It took my party two tries to get the Maiden of Grief mechanics down, but it really was a fun fight. I think the good people at Blizzard could work on coordinating the Storm of Sorrows a little more with the spawn and despawn of the Pillars of Woe, but that’s my only beef there. It took us about five tries to finish the Tribunal of Ages event, and even when we finally did our entire party finished wiping just as it was ending. Thanks to a well-timed rock man towards the end, Brann didn’t take a point of damage and we got the heroic achievement for the event. (Woot!) Finally, the last boss took us two or three tries, but overall he wasn’t much of a challenge, either.
 
Overall, Halls of Stone was a fun and relatively easy heroic.

Heroics are srs bsns November 25, 2008

Lemme start off by saying that Wowhead is now blocked for me at work. I’m using my iPod and stolen WiFi to check the URLs for some of these links, but please bear with me if they don’t all work.

Last night I managed to convince some of my friends (in and out of guild) to run the daily heroic, which I thought was The Nexus. It turns out that I had misread the quest text, and the daily quest was actually for The Oculus (which also happened to be the daily dungeon). Well. Oh. Snap.

The problem is that I haven’t really replaced a lot of my gear since level 70. Either the gear has flat out sucked, or the upgrade was so small that I couldn’t be bothered to re-enchant and re-socket another piece of gear. I do have a new ring that finally replaced my Violet Eye ring. And I got a new trinket to replace Lower City Prayerbook (I have it macro’d to my Laughbloom now). Other than that, I am still wearing all level 70 gear … and most of it with level 70 enchants. So when I was specced resto (which I was yesterday), I was still only sitting at around 1350 spellpower unbuffed.

And our group comp was warrior, resto druid, blood DK, shadow priest, and lock. So we’re not talking about a shit ton of CC here.

But here’s the breakdown:

Dragonkin trash
By their powers combined (teehee), those non-elite whelplings and their frostbolts are a far bigger problem than the elites are. Watch your tank and watch yourself. The elites don’t hit very hard at all (you’ll be laughing your way all the way through the triple pack at the end of the first ring there).

Drakos the Interrogator
Pretty much the same as normal. He hits like a kitten and the bomb damage remains very manageable.

Construct trash
You’ve got two types of trash packs here. There are the triple construct/single summoner packs, which are fairly manageable without any CC as long as summoned Snowflakes are dealt with promptly. Then you’ve got the single construct/double summoner/double sorc packs, which are a royal bitch and a half. The Snowflake damage can quickly become unmanageable, and the sorcs chaincasting Blizzard doesn’t halp the situation in the least. I was not able to keep up with the healing on these pulls until our priest started MCing one of the summoners. At that point, the pulls became cake. (Make sure your tank is using LoS to pull the group to him, otherwise one or two of the elites will inevitably be on you right off the bat.)

Varos Cloudstrider
I had some trouble with this one because (nublet alert!) I’m still having a bit of trouble not getting zapped. But we did manage to get through him on the first try even though I died at around 40% (offhealers FTW). He doesn’t hit hard at all, and even the purple beam only hits for about 1 000 damage per tick in heroic mode IIRC. It’s the zap damage you have to look out for.

Mage-Lord Urom trash
Use whatever CC you have available during these pulls. Seriously. These are four or five mob pulls, and they are anything but a joke if you’re running with the shitty gear that I was running with. Be ready to contend beasts, humanoid mobs, and elementals. One Wowhead comment has tips for which mobs to take out first in each pack (serpent, ogre, and fire elemental, respectively). That air elemental is a bitch with its cyclone spell though, so make sure you watch out for that too.

Mage-Lord Urom
Like those before him, this boss hits for jack. He also doesn’t have any new abilities from normal (IIRC), except that his Frost Bomb debuff now stacks and does more damage the longer you stand in the affect area. His explosion is still a bit of a joke (I believe it hits for about 7-8k), not that anyone should be getting hit by it. But if anyone does, you have a lot of time to heal them back up to full health assuming that they are smart enough to stay out of the Frost Bomb.

Ley-Guardian Eregos
This was the first serious boss fight of the instance for my group, and it was completely gear independent. (Go figure.) My group tried all sorts of tactics. Seriously. I think we wiped about ten times on this guy. My gear was all red after about 6 attempts.

We started out with the one ruby (tank), one emerald (healer), and three bronze (DPS) strategy. According to Wowhead, some people have been able to finish heroic Oc this way. I can see it being possible with a shit ton of Time Stop coordination (like what you’d have to go through if you were trying to complete the achievement and do the fight with no emerald drakes at all), but we were not able to stick it. By the time I got to phase two, I was so behind in health points that I was in no shape to handle getting hit by a Phase Anomaly’s blast … which I did.

In the end we went with another comment on Wowhead which suggested that two ruby, two emerald, and one bronze was “200 times easier” than the first configuration (you’d have to consult the Leeroy Jenkins stat guy for confirmation on this one). I assigned the other emerald drake to healing the first ruby drake while I focused on healing our second ruby drake and keeping the emerald drake debuff up on the boss. The bronze drake’s job was to keep the channeled spell up on the boss the entire fight, while using Time Stop every time it was cooled down. This made phase one easily manageable, and then the focus shifted to phase two.

We probably shouldn’t have had as much trouble as we did with phase two. After all, all you have to do is kite the orbs, right? Right…

The first important thing about phase two is to start flying away from the boss the second that the phase starts, or your orb will most likely nip you. The second point is to spread out to avoid hitting other people with your Anomaly’s blast or getting hit with another Anomaly’s blast. Finally, it is important to maintain your ability to collapse immediately at the end of phase two so that 1) you can be affected by Martyr when the ruby drakes cast it at the beginning of phase one, and 2) you can be healed by an emerald drake at the beginning of phase one if you get hurt. Wowhead suggests flying at different altitudes, which works like a charm. On top of that, I’d suggest different radial positions. If you flew around the boss in a cross formation (positioned vertically, not horizontally), you’d be in excellent shape. (See what I did there?)

So, Ley-Guardian Eregos finally went down. And guess what? I got my first WotLK epic: Staff of Draconic Combat. I had to roll against the shadow priest for it, but I won. (To explain: The shadow priest’s main spec is holy. Additionally, he is an old friend of mine and he did ask if it was okay with me that he rolled before pressing the Need button.)

In the end, we did make money on the run after turning in the dailies (yes, even the plate wearers). And then I respecced and we grabbed a guild healer so we could run heroic Azjol Nerub. Since I didn’t really heal it I can’t give you the healer play-by-play, but I will say this: It’s all a piece of cake until Anub’arak’s Venomancers (and spikes and Pound) make you work work make you work. Five or six wipes. Damn. (Loot? Our shadow priest got the DPS cloth belt.)