Ard's guide to being better!

Tank Harder, Heal Better, DPS More.

This is a little guide I put together and posted on a forum somewhere. It's a little summary of things I think everyone should do. If you've done everything on this list, you're likely in the top half/top quarter of your guild. It surprises me how little effort it is and how few people make that effort.

First of all. If you haven't already while you were levelling your character, level Cooking and Fishing. Also level First Aid if you have no healing abilities. Food gives great buffs at maximum level (40 stamina + a stat you want). It's essentially free. Fishing makes it easier to level Cooking as most fish you catch can be cooked, whereas meat has to be farmed with (some) risk to yourself.

Look up stuff about your class. Look up stuff about your spec. For every possible spec there are guides out there that tend to cover Talents, Glyphs, abilities (and their use), stat priority, enchants and gems to choose etc. You may learn something, it may tell you to try something you never even thought of. It may just show what that ability is for you thought was useless. Even if you learn nothing, it's a good thing to hear someone elses view on what you want to be doing. Guides also tend to suggest what Professions might be useful to you.

Get some professions. Most professions nowadays have exclusive buffs. Leatherworkers get wrist enchants that are much better than what's normally available. Enchanters get ring enchants. You may even be able to make yourself some starter-epics, that will help get you raid ready.

Gear up. A guide usually tells you what the desirable pieces are and where to get them. If in doubt, look at www.wow-loot.com, it has very comprehensive lists of what equipment drops where and who it's useful for. Each class/spec (far as I've seen) has 4-5 epics to get from Northrend Heroics, some pieces from a profession, the rest of the epics come from raiding. It might be different on your server, but on mine, LFG works. Use it.

Read up on tactics. theres are some excellent sites out there with info on how to tackle most fights. www.wowhead.com, www.wowwiki.com and many more. Knowledge = Power.

Lastly, be prepared. Carry food/drinks, ammo, bandages, potions, elixirs, switch-out gear and reagents if any of your spells need any. Repair your gear before you go anywhere.

I feel a little better already! Have fun.

Determination

There was a plan to continue our 25-man run last night but we just didn't have the numbers, so we decided to split the raid into two 10-man groups.

I was in the saved group that had already killed Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis, XT-002, Kologarn, Auriaya and Thorim. We decided to go for the Assembly of Iron first. Assembly consists of three bosses. Steelbreaker, steel giant, does an attack called Fusion Punch, hits for a lot and leaves a nasty debuff that must be dispelled. Molgeim, leaves runes of power that buff the other bosses or the raids damage output (you really don't want Steelbreaker to be standing in one when he does fusion punch as it one-shots a tank). Lastly, Brundir, casts chain lightning on random raid member and does a Nova (you don't want him standing in runes either, but he's a caster so sometimes tricky to move.)

I was the tank with more health so I was assigned to tank Steelbreaker, with another paladin picking up the other two. This did not go well, I wasn't able to generate a lot of threat (breaking rotation to dispell the debuff myself) and the attacks from the other two kept killing off one-two raidmembers, inlcuding healers. After a handful of wipes we decided it was best to move on to Hodir.

Hodir started off badly but we downed him in the end. It's a question of dispelling, standing in the right place and making as little mistakes as possible.

We decided to have another go at Assembly, this time switching the tanks, I was taking Molgeim and Brundir. On the first attempt we downed Steelbreaker pretty painlessly so it waslooking good, an unfortunate rune managed to still kill us. I think the key here was using an interrupt on Brundir as a rune of power was cast on him (seeing as I can only do that with Avenger's Shield a Warrior would be better suited). We downed them in the end.

I also won my first piece of tier 8 (10 man legs). all in all we wiped a lot (100+ gold repair costs total for me) but we kept going, kept spirits up and downed them.

The Weekend

Typical monday-morning recap. Levelled my Shaman to 27, so far completed the Draenei starting islands and Darkshore. I had planned to go to Ashenvale but a quest led me to Wetlands where I decided to carry on.

I gained champion status with the Night-elf faction of the Argent Tournament which completed the 5 and now I'm Crusader Ard! I bought myself the Turbostrider for 5 Champions's Seals and some gold to celebrate.

Lastly we ran a 25-man Ulduar last night that went exceedingly well. We killed Ignis on the first try (I was main tanking). Then proceeded to Kologarn, which took us a couple of tries (including where 2 of our 3 kologarn switch tanks got grabbed by the hand, leaving me tanking him alone, got two debuffs and got smashed). We downed the Assembly of Iron in a few attempts (our first 25-man kill) and we downed Auriaya.

Hodir is on for tonight, with Thorim, Freya and the dreaded Mimiron still up.

Last note (sort of to self): don't join a Naxx 10 pickup at twenty past two at night.

Not so good.

We didn't do so well last night. I can't really pin down what it was that went wrong, but sometimes it just won't work.

Our plan was to do OS25 + 3 however the DK that was supposed to tank it wasn't online so we decided to do Malygos. Further inspection showed we didn't even have 25 people so we decided to go for 'Poke in the Eye' and do it with 20. Didn't work very well, I was main tanking it and kept dying to the breath. There were long breaks in between attempts which I think led to a loss of concentration.

More people came online so we changed tack to a 25man attempt, which also failed. Moral was down so we moved along to something we figured we could handle a bit more easily. Wintergrasp was not under Alliance control so we settled on OS25 + 2. We tried, but failed, and again, but failed.

We lowered it to +1 and failed, tried again, and failed. And then we got Os25 + 1 after a whole nights raiding.

Sometimes, it just doesn't work. Ulduar 10 tonight, and the celebration of the 1 year anniversary of my previous guild. hope I have better news next time.

The Times...

They ain't a-changing.
I raid 4 nights a week. Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. That means I play until about 23:30 and get to bed about midnight. I get up at 6 so I'm suffering from lack of sleep most days.

My gear has been improving since moving to my new guild. Didn't get to do much 25man raids until I joined my current guild and the difference is noticable. Going into 25mans with 10man gear got me killed... a lot. Now I tend to survive the big double hits. (Kologarns melee + overhead smash comes to mind) It's nice to have 40k+ health as an Ulduar tank.

Coming back to something I've written about before, the block cap. I've got it unbuffed now (not counting holy shield as a buff). However it's divided as 23something% Dodge, 18% parry and 23something% block. Block is good, but not as good as avoidance. On something like Emalon's adds, block is awesome. they hit for about 3000 and blocking more than half of that is obviously a big reduction in damage taken. However when something hits me for 20k, blocking 1.5k isn't making enough of a difference. When I have some time I'm going to dig through my other gear and see if I can't rebalance my avoidance to block ratio while maintaining high stamina and the blockcap.

I've also started a Shaman which I intend to play as elemental. I must say I really like the Bind-On-Account items that are available for Emblems of Heroism. I bought the shoulders (which are mail, but neatly change to leather for my below-40 shaman.) Also the staff and both trinkets. Doing the quest that involves killing a level 20 elite dragon was a bit of a joke being so overpowered.

Good stuff, Ignis and The Future.

Well I had a good day yesterday! Because it was a bank holiday in the Netherlands I was able to get in a very full day.

Started off well by finally getting to Exalted with the Netherwing (and receiving my 55th mount!) Then in the afternoon I managed to throw some people together for an Eye of Eternity ten-man run where I obtained the Barricade of Eternity shield and was able to complete the Key quest and get the Drakescale Collar.

In the evening my guild ran a twentyfive-man Ulduar. We started off with XT-002 which we killed in two attempts. Then we moved onto Ignis. As you may have read earlier we got our first kill this week (before the reset.) We had had some tries on him after the reset (and relatively easy kills of Flame Leviathan and Razorscale) but they weren't succesful. Yesterday we went at him again and this time got him down. Not exactly on farm but getting closer. This is down a lot to the offtank's role of kiting the adds to the right pace and everyone coordinating to get them destroyed. Ignis was kind enough to drop our first shard for Val'anyr.

Future plans.
First I want to get an epic flying mount for my Rogue Alt. Seeing as I have my eyes on the Red drake I'll need to get 5000 gold for the epic flying skill then Exalted with Wyrmrest and another 1600 to buy the mount. When that's done I'll drop skinning and learn mining up to 450 on him. then I'll drop mining on my main and learn Jewelcrafting in it's place. Might be expensive to level but the benefits are great.

Update and some Ulduar

Well, a lot has happened since we last posted. Initiator of this blog has moved house and the week or so away from WoW has led to him not wanting to return. He is on. A. Break.

In the meantime... I changed guilds to a casual(ish) raiding guild on my server. I'd originally talked about joining them as Retribution but they asked me as tank which I was more than happy to do. I'd switched to tanking from retribution because at the time my old guild wasn't raiding yet, but there were plenty of pick up groups... looking for tanks. I'd collected some tanking gear while levelling to 80, crafted some and bought a few rep items from the outland factions (<3 Championing). I found tanking was a lot of fun and now consider it my main spec (to complete the Paladinic trinity).

So last night we hit Ulduar 25. the guild had so far only killed Flame Leviathan and Razorscale and they went down without any problems.Ignis was next and he proved a bit more of a problem. Initially I was tanking Ignis himself, with our (otherwise MT) death knight and a warrior assigned to the adds. After 4 failed attempts we found the problem was mostly add control, the warrio was having trouble positioning the adds (I've done it before on 10man and found it quite tricky myself). We switched and succeeded for a guild first kill.

next time I'll post some stuff on my goals for the future.