Better late than never

Last week our little hard mode team (put together for Ulduar 10 hard modes) threw themselves at the Vezax hard mode for a couple of hours. We learned a lot but were unable to down the General. Yesterday we were at it again. We warmed up with a speed kill of Ignis which was probably our smoothest ever. I tanked Ignis and our warrior tank took care of the adds.

We moved on to the Descent of Madness, cleared some trash and then started on Vezax. Our first attempt had some problems that cropped up during the Animus phase - when kiting Vezax in the that phase we had some Shadow Crashes hit the melee group (due to kiting) and some ranged (because warnings were not getting through.) Just to clarify, in the hard mode no Saronite Vapors are killed and they coalesce into a Saronite Animus, a mob with 1.6m health that needs to be killed while still dealing with most of Vezax’ normal abilities. Our second attempt went really smoothly, we had Vezax down to less than 20% when the Animus spawned, we finished the Animus with no problems and downed Vezax – another step closer to Rusted Protodrakes.

Next we faced an Old God – Yogg-Saron. Our guild had not managed to kill Yogg on either 10 or 25. We’ve had some attempts on Yogg in the past. I thought we lacked either healing or coordination then but now I think we lacked the melee dps/experience to take out the brain room in the second phase. Experience there really is the key. We probably had more than enough dps all along. Most of our attempts last night were effectively spent learning the portal/brain room – getting that right is what made it possible for us to beat the encounter. Once we got that down (literally the first time we reached phase 3) we downed Yogg-Saron as well.

Three achievements remain – Flame Leviathan with four towers up, Firefighter (Mimiron hard mode) and Yogg-saron with only 1 keeper assisting.

Ard Impersonator Caught Redhanded!

My saturday morning session started out funny and a bit weird at the same time.

As you can see in the screenshot a mage on my server named Waika whispered me and asked if their was an officer online. (I was playing my shaman alt, now level 64 btw ^^)

I can only guess what 'Waika' was thinking, or trying to achieve. He had whispered my friend Fey and asked if there were any officers online.

My first guess as that he had applied to out guild and wanted to talk to someone about it.

When he said 'oh ye ^^ could you invite this char (my alt - Ard)' I didn't really understand what he meant.

Did he mean to say 'his alt' to me, Ard? So I asked and then he claimed to be 'Ard, human pallie.' It's highly unlikely that he would've gotten away with that with any of the other officers but what are the chances he asks ME for a sneaky invite!?

A screenshot to frame in my opinion :D

The Joy

I have times when I really don’t enjoy playing Warcraft. Usually this is sometimes around the end of the summer. It tends to be quiet online, raids are hard to fill up, the auction house looks like a flea market. At those times I log on, stand around in Dalaran for a while, realize I don’t feel like dailies, running dungeons or PvP and just log back out. I felt like this just a few weeks ago.

Well, summer is over and I’m really enjoying Warcraft. I’m leveling a Shaman alt, now 62, which is highly enjoyable as elemental really comes into it’s own in Outland, mainly thanks to gear. Raids are back to full and progressing. Our hard mode team is back in swing and attacking Ulduar 10. Last Monday we cleared Thorim hard mode, which went faster than some of our normal kills, this also got our guy-on-the-Algalon-key-quest the item he needed from Thorim. We Absolutely nuked down Hodir hard mode (yours truly delivering nearly 8k dps… in offspec!) We had to get past Mimiron so no hard mode there but our kill on normal really showed our progress, there were quite a few deaths, it had been a while since we had done Mimiron, yet we cleared the encounter quite comfortably. We also tried some tactics that should help us when we do start trying this on hard, just taunting the bomb bots and eating the damage instead of controlling it and a good tank switch tactic on the Plasma blasts in fase 1.

Then we threw ourselves at General Vezax. We don’t have a lot of experience with Vezax, we’ve only killed 3 or 4 times. This time we tried for the hard mode. We had many attempts but were not able to down him and the Saronite Animus. We did however learn a lot about how people should be positioned, the use of tanking cooldowns, kiting strategy etc. The evening was a display of progress each attempt being better than the last, getting as close as 20% left on both Vezax and the Animus. It’s seeing everyone hard work and effort slowly, but surely, paying off that is so enjoyable.

Last night we cleared Onyxia 25. She was kind enough to drop our first 25 version of Quel’serrar, which went to our warrior tank. Then we headed for ToC 25. On Anub’arak last phase we just let the burrowers go underground. As I was tanking the boss I could see and offtank with 1 burrower move about but it would not burrow. He moved again, still not. Then I hear him on voicechat “Mine doesn’t want to burrow” he sounded so sad. It made me laugh so much, it was worth raiding the entire evening just for that moment. We’ve got our Anub strategy down now, this was our third kill on 25, so I think we can call it farm!

I love this game!

Gearing strategy.

I was going to write something here about gearing strategy for (Paladin) Tanks. Looking back at the rough outline I had written makes me glad I never posted it.

Over the past 6 months I became a tank, gathered gear, stumbled through and learned a thing or two. One of the things that was eluding me was a total overview of gearing strategy. In effect all this time I had one set of gear which served me for all purposes. Then, today, I read this guide on Maintankadin and learned so much. A lot of things are a lot clearer now and I know I’ll be carrying a lot more gear around in the future.

Any tank, of any level of gear or skill, should read this. Many thanks to Wrathy for this excellent piece of writing. Here’s the guide!

Freya Hard Mode!

While other might very well be counting attempts in Heroic ToC, we made a 10 man last night and headed into Ulduar to work on some hardmodes. We raid quite casually (by some standards) so there’s quite a few we’ve never done. We started with Heartbreaker on XT-002 and did it in one go, with lots of breathing room. We sped ahead and took out Kologarn, earning Rubble and Roll. Auriaya was next where we also picked up Nine Lives.

Then the main course, Freya with all three adds. Our raid leader for the hard modes wouldn’t hear anything of trying it with one or two adds. Hard modes or bust. Our first few attempts really showed that this is still just that, a hard mode. A few wipes later we showed some improvement but we still had massive trouble dealing with the Detonating lashers. There’s a lot of (raid) damage flying around. Just the normal waves of adds can be difficult enough on Freya, the added damage and chaos, while still having to take out trees etc. was putting quite a strain on us.

After about an hour things were looking up, we were controlling the adds better and people weren’t randomly dying anymore. We had an attempt where we reached the final phase but with quite a few dead it didn’t work out. The next attempt, it did. We beat it with a minute left on the enrage timer. Another seal closer to Algalon and another achievement closer to a Drake.

ToC 25 clear!

The DPS requirement for Anub’arak is quite tight (at least for my guild.) Last night, after a few attempts we downed the bug-turned-death knight literally as his enrage was kicking in. He turned red and then died. Interestingly we have now cleared ToC 10 and 25, but still haven’t killed Yogg-Saron on either 10 or 25.

Last nights raid the continued on to get the first three bosses in Ulduar 25, we managed ‘Quick Shave’ on Razorscale even though quite a few people switched to alts. Our hard mode team will be playing on Mondays from now on, so hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about some new achievements on Tuesday.

Onyxia and Progress!

Last night raid was a good one, but it also highlighted some problems for us. First we went to check out the new Onyxia 25 man. A guild group had already cleared the 10 man version (I missed out as I logged on slightly too late.) It felt really weird walking down that old, familiar hallway and actually needing the 25 raiders to take down the dragon trash, especially as I’d been soloing this just a few weeks ago. I raided Onyxia when it still required 40 raiders. I played Horde then too, and a Hunter at that.

Of course I’d seen Onyxia from the tank’s perspective when we took her down for old times sake, but never with more than 4-5 people. I must say it was quite an experience to hold this massive black dragon in place while the rest of my raid took her down. It’s not tuned to be very difficult so we only needed the one attempt to bring her down. We didn’t get any achievements but I think we’ll try for those next time.

On we went to Trial of the Crusader. Earlier this week we beat the Faction Champions for the first time so we extended the raid and took down the Twin Valkyries without too much hassle. A very fun fight and especially nice if you’ve played Ikaruga (although /yelling Ikaaaruuugaaa got me some strange looks from guildies.)

The last boss however gave us some trouble, or at least some food for thought. We had a few wipes as the raid learned the mechanics. Our strategy did need some tweaking as the requirements are quite a bit harsher than the 10 man version. We made changes to the offtank/add positioning and we adjusted strategy for dealing with the small adds during underground phase. In the end we just seemed to lack the dps to take everything out before the enrage timer, to which we wiped three times. Perhaps this was due to it being quite late in the evening already, we’ll see that this evening when we go at it fresh. I think we can also just offtank the big adds for longer and let the raid damage the boss more, then take out the adds when he goes underground.

Happy note: I got my second T9.25 piece yesterday and thus the first bonus. I must say the ‘nerf’ to Paladin threat is hardly noticeable, After only 1 or two rotation I was very far ahead of dps, possibly less ahead, but not enough of a difference to be a problem in anyway. For 3.2.2 I tuned my spec slightly to maintain the cooldown I had on Hammer of Justice, due to some changes in cooldown reduction. Also the changes to Touched by the Light seemed to result in me having more spell power rather than less.