We has rings March 27, 2008

Last night was K3’s second night of getting the third timed chest in ZA.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 2.4 sucks. I have yet to find a working HoT timer, so I have been relying on the little Lifebloom icons underneath the tanks’ unit frames and my internal sense of Lifebloom timing to keep those HoTs up. I don’t know how people play without addons.

Anyway, last night was kinda rocky. We had to run Nalorakk out twice. The first time someone decided to loot a troll that was right under him, starting the encounter early. The second time, our bear form tank got gibbed seconds into the first bear phase. Somehow, we still managed to make the second chest. Then, somehow, we still managed to make the third chest. And, somehow, Life-Step Belt has yet to drop.

These past two weeks, Jan’alai has just seemed to pose less of a problem for us. I think it has a lot to do with our new hatching strategy. What K3 does is send our AoE team after the main hatcher, while our single-target (melee) DPS goes after the second hatcher. AoE team usually lets the hatcher hatch four times (fifteen eggs), while the single-target DPS hatches two or three times (three to seven eggs).

You see, if the DPS responsible for taking down the second hatcher simply kills the hatcher and returns to the boss, you will inevitably run into the “approaching 35% health when there are too many eggs left” dilemma, unless you are hatching an insane amount of eggs on the other side. In that case, all DPS on the boss has to stop while most of the remaning eggs are hatched, resulting in wasted DPS. The fight takes longer and your healers have to heal more during the soft enrage.

It’s a better idea to give all DPS something to occupy their time during hatchings and have Jan’alai’s health go down at a slower, safer rate (with respect to the 35% mark and all of the remaining eggs being hatched).

With the egg situation under control, the rest of the fight is cake.

I’m actually kind of disappointed that players are no longer teleported when they are already in the main section of Jan’alai’s platform. I felt that the teleport was one of the more interesting (fun) parts of the fight, and I also feel that if the teleport mechanic was making or breaking the fight for you, then you have no business getting Jan’alai’s loot anyway.

It’s kind of like Magtheridon. I’m embarassed that CBYIH didn’t take him down before his nerf, because the mechanics of the fight were just not all that difficult. We had downed Hydross with the once-a-minute aggro wipe, we had downed Lurker with the Spouts and Submerges, I’m sure that we could have negogiated ten cube clickers. I think it’s just downright pathetic that we didn’t spend more time on Magtheridon just because he is a “high coordination fight”. We totally could have gotten him down before Blizzard set him to easy mode.

Oy vey! March 24, 2008

All of my friends know that I have never been that big on PvP. In fact, I pretty much downright hate it. My toons are rolled on a PvP server because and only because I originally rolled here to play with a friend (who has since gone back to our old server).

Anyway, in spite of my loathing of PvP, I have done a little bit of battleground and arena grinding to pick up a couple of pieces of PvP gear. All of my arena teams have been very hit and miss, with none of them showing any real promise.

Until now.

Over the weekend my friend Colossal and I decided to mess around on a friend’s old (and unused) arena team, Oy Vey. A resto druid and an arms warrior, we marched bravely (well … he marched bravely) to the arena battlemaster and we queued up. By the end of ten matches, we were 7-3. That’s not bad at all. I’ve had it in my head for so long (mostly because of past arena experiences) that I suck at PvP … but I think I actually did OK. Not to mention that 2v2 is infinitely, infinitely easier than 3v3 or 5v5 (which may explain why you get less points each week for the same rating).

One thing I noticed is that, at least in the lower rating bracket in which we were playing, a lot of teams didn’t have a healer. Being relatively new to the 2v2 scene, I’m not sure if two DPS is a common 2v2 arena build, or if these are teams that are simply queueing up to lose ten games each week and get their arena points. For the most part, these teams were cake. I’m talking about the two warriors, the elemental shaman and hunter, etc.

Anyway, things I learned this week:

• Always trust your partner to follow the predetermined strategy. When I saw Colossal attacking a warrior before a paladin, I started Cycloning the paladin. Later, I found out that Colossal was just Hamstringing the warrior for me, but his plan was to hit the paladin immediately after. We lost that round.
• Always precast Abolish Poison against rogues… possibly even on both team members (I have to experiment with this). You should never have to trinket out of Blind, plus you know that Wound Poison is going to be a bitch.
• Shadow priest/frost mage really, really sucks.

This week I think we’re going to focus more on trying to get our rating up a bit instead of just playing ten games and then stopping.

A long time coming … March 20, 2008

Last night we got our first new kill in ages.  Well … it wasn’t really a kill.  We finally took down Jan’alai within the sacrifice timer, netting us our third ZA timed chest and making us 9/10 ZA.  And have I mentioned lately that we’re (largely) a T4 guild?  *Beams with pride* The PVP ring dropped (Signet of Eternal Life), which went to our feral druid.

More importantly, Jan’alai dropped Helm of Natural Regeneration for me, which is the first piece of loot I have actually gotten out of this instance that will actually be used for my healing set … after running it for more than a month! I’m still waiting for the first chest to drop my belt (we got Elunite Imbued Leggings for the sixth time), and for Halazzi to drop my chest piece.

We razed the instance all the way to Zul’jin and got him down on our second attempt. Then we decided to make a quick and dirty Prince run (Moroes, Opera, Curator, Shade, Chess, Prince) to try to get Prince’s dagger for our shadow priest. Pookies finally got his T4 glove token for resto (which would be a “meh”-grade without some set bonus action) … but, unfortunately, no dagger.

And that’s it … with the cancelling of our Friday night Karazhan run, I am on raid vacation until Sunday!

Karazhan 3 in crisis March 18, 2008

Over the weekend, the leader of Karazhan 3 and her fiancé announced that they would be quitting the game. This is a huge blow to Karazhan 3, which had quickly become the most successful 10-man group in the guild, being the first group to accomplish a one-night Karazhan clear and being the only group to clear Zul’Aman. Our raid leader was our feral druid OT, who had an awesome DPS set for one-tank encounters. Her fiancé was our holy paladin, and it will be very difficult to find a replacement who I can trust to heal with me like I could trust him. I don’t know exactly what is going to happen from here on out …

Badge loot is gawdly March 13, 2008

A piece has been posted over at Apathy Inc. which discusses the predictable outcry against T6-equivalent badge gear. The author makes some good points about who is going to actually have access to this gear when 2.4 goes live, thereby explaining why this break for some WoW players may not be as preposterous as some guilds on the forefront of progression would like to think.

As is mentioned in the linked article, Blizzard is not necessarily trying to give a leg up to casual player Joe. To buy all of the new badge loot, a player would need hundreds upon hundreds of Badges of Justice. Clearing ZA and Karazhan every week, as well as running a heroic here and there, it is still going to take me forever and a day to save up for just the pieces that I want. Heck, there is still 2.3 badge loot that I am eying (albeit not for PvE).

I think it’s great that Blizzard is trying to give a break to guilds that are slow on progression so that they can see more of TBC before WotLK is released. The guilds this is going to make a difference for are guilds like my guild, Can Beat You In Halo (2/6 and 1/4). We are a casual guild that only raids 25-man content two nights a week. Our progression night is spent in SSC, and our farm night is spent in Gruul’s Lair. The other two raiding nights that most of us keep are spent progressing in ZA and farming in Karazhan. As things stand, I see us being limited by time spent progressing rather than collective player skill (where we seem to be doing fine, for the most part). With 2.4 badge loot, I can see us making better time on our progression night and shooting forward a couple of bosses. Is this progression we don’t deserve just because we don’t raid as much as hardcore raiding guilds? Well, I guess some might say so. I think that we would eventually tackle these encounters anyway, given more time … time that we don’t necessarily have before WotLK is released.

Will we ever see the inside of MH/BT? Will we ever have T6 set bonuses? Honestly, all signs point to no. I think we’d be happy to be 5/6 and 3/4 by the time WotLK comes out. But that’d be good enough for me. Don’t worry T6 guilds, your status is safe! And 2.4 badge gear? DO WANT.

A digest March 10, 2008

With more going on IRL lately, I’ve only really had time to do some of my dailies, make my mage alt’s cloth, and raid. Here is a recap of the weekend:

Due to poor performance on our Friday ZA runs (because they don’t start until 00:00 EST FFS), our group’s leader decided to turn Fridays into a Karazhan badge run instead. Last week was our first week going in with two healers in an attempt to make the run go faster. We finished in a record two hours and forty-five minutes, which is more of a normal clear time compared to our four hour clears before.

Last night we went back into SSC, as is the usual Sunday thang, and blazed through Hydross and Lurker within the first hour and a half with–get this–24 raiders. One of our raiders was having lag issues and we didn’t feel like waiting, so we didn’t. We finally replaced that raid member after Lurker and went on to give some solid attempts on Leotheras, getting him down to 3% on the last one. We reached the enrage timer twice, which was impressive. We just had two main problems learning this fight:

1) Leotheras would go apeshit after Whirlwind because of the aggro wipe during Whirlwind. From what I’ve read, Whirlwind is a double-edged sword. Since his targeting during Whirlwind is not based on his aggro table, so you can DPS as hard as you want without consequence … until he wipes aggro at the end of Whirlwind, so it’s important to know when to stop DPS so a tank can actually establish aggro on Leotheras.

2) Some people could not kill their inner demons. Our prot warriors had the biggest problem with theirs, although I think a couple of them were getting the hang of it by our last attempt. Some of our priests were having trouble with theirs, no matter how many times it was mentioned that the Inner Demons take extra damage from holy spells. What I simply can not understand is that some of our DPS got owned by their demons! In particular, I think a hunter got mind-controlled twice.

Leotheras would go down next week if we could just get people to actually read strats. I followed a strategy for a resto druid to take down its Inner Demon (Moonfire -> Barkskin -> Wrath spam for Barkskin duration -> Moonfire spam until dead) and it worked like a charm! I’ve got my fingers crossed for T5 gloves to drop next week …

Putting on the farm March 6, 2008

Last night was our first one-night ZA clear, which took us about three hours.

We are getting closer and closer to that third timed chest. Last night we quickly downed Akil’zon and Nalorakk before blazing through Jan’alai’s trash (one of our smoothest Jan’alai trash clears yet!). When we started on Jan’alai, we had six to seven minutes left on the sac timer–more than enough time to take Jan’alai down. Once again, our problem was that we had too many people who were unfamiliar with the fight and they got messed on adds or bombs. As we try to make our weekly ZA group more consistent, I am confident that this will no longer be a problem.

Halazzi and Malacrass are very much on farm for us–we dropped them like flies. Having a holy priest for Malacrass makes healing through Spirit Bolts a joke.

Our first attempt on Zul’jin went very smoothly, especially considering that we were running with three raid members who had never seen the fight before. For some reason phase three was a joke last night. I can only assume that everyone was popping their pots, stones, and bandages, because there were few times when I felt the need to actually run out and heal someone. What got us on our first attempt was the healing not being quick enough in phase four. We got lucky on our second attempt (our feral druid got Claw Rage three times in a row as opposed to, say, our holy priest) and Zul’jin went down, marking our second Zul’jin down.

And now … 2/6! March 3, 2008

It looks like Lurker is now on farm mode. We stampeded into SSC last night and got Lurker down within an hour (for the second week in a row).

We then decided to make an attempt on Hydross and got him down on our second try (and within our second hour in the instance!). This was a guild first, and, I have to admit, not really expected. The vast improvement between our first try and our second try with respect to add management was startling. On the first attempt, it would take no less than thirty seconds to take the adds down, leaving little or no time for DPS on Hydross before switching forms again. We wiped right before the enrage timer (thanks to a stray DoT) with more than 30% to go. On the second attempt, adds were down within ten seconds in most cases, and we made the enrage timer by less than a minute. A job well done, that’s for sure:

Our healers were set up as follows:

Holy priest and resto druid (me) on MTs.
Holy paladin and holy paladin on OTs set 1.
Holy priest and resto druid (another one) on OTs set 2.
I think we all kinda whack-a-moled raid healing, which didn’t turn out too badly.

Did we do this with six healers? I’ll have to check my Wow Web Stats report when I get home to double check, but I’m pretty sure that we did it with just six healers. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

After that, we dove into completely new waters as we started on Leo’s trash. Leo’s trash was not fun, but we made it through to the boss. Completely unprepared, we were able to get Leo down to 87% before wiping it up completely. Next week I’m sure we’ll be ready with our strat research and lock in fire resist gear. Here’s to 3/6!