The Angry Dwarfs

Like I wrote on Twitter, I thought I don’t have that much things to write about, and then I suddenly got an invite from a friend to heal his ICC-10 guild run. Apparently we’re not the only ones on Deathwing having low healer signups. ;)

The run was pretty cool, as expected from a guild run – the Gods of War folks there are more or less on the same progression level as my guild, so it went pretty much similar. We went through the first wing without much fuss, as the only bad thing I can remember was losing a roll on a staff with spirit, and I’m not that much bothered about it – I have one from ToC-10, the better one will drop sometime again, and /rolls are fair enough for me. After that we killed Festergut after sorting out the healing and after some tries on Rotface that was it since we were out of time. Overall, a nice run.

That was my second time healing ICC at all, and the first time in the new wings. A very interesting experience, even (or maybe especially) if I messed up a few times. I wasn’t the only one messing up though. ;)

We had a lot of problems on Rotface, which I think were due to not cleansing the Mutating Infection at all. That made healing the debuffed people unnecessarily hard, and led to some deaths. Still, I hope we can get the run going further today or tomorrow, as it was really fun running with them.

Another raid was for the weekly – being Ignis, it was really awesome. Or maybe I should say it differently. It was so bad that it was really awesome.

We had it all.

• A demolisher passenger pulling the adds before Flame Leviathan and therefore engaging Flame Leviathan with only one siege engine and two demolishers inside the room.
• Half of the group getting lost and going to kill a tower that was already disabled by talking to Brann at the start – therefore not being inside the room when we accidentally started the boss.
• The same demolisher passenger that was shooting everything that he shouldn’t and didn’t get me a single pyrite barrel even though I was basically standing in the middle of 10 of them. I ejected him from the passenger seat in front of Flame Leviathan because he was useless anyway.
• One tank where you should be having two, with a dps DK trying to grab all the adds (he failed a bit at it, but was really trying to do it as best as he could, so he’s excused).
• A mage with no enchants and empty sockets doing less dps (and damage) than the tank (incidentally the same person which was the demolisher passenger in the above fails).
• The same mage also kept saying “this time we’ll get him”. We finally replaced him to get a real offtank.
• The shadow priest saying “I have 10 fps that’s why my damage is so low” while he was second and doing 4.5k dps.
• And finally the so called “raid leader” looting the healing cloak to the paladin who lost it, ignoring two dps rolls and my higher healing roll as well. Fortunately Spellforce of the Gods of War guild is a cool person, so he offered (and even insisted when I said that I don’t really mind) to trade it to me. Thanks a lot. :)

Before this pug, I was quite surprised that hardly anyone pugs Ulduar. Now I’m not.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Eh, what? Very patient? Me?

That must be some mistake then. Silly post office, even in Azeroth you can’t trust them.

I like the pet, but I still think the Core Hound I got from the authenticator is cuter. I like the mail as well, and I think it’s the first time even though they’ve sent it from “WoW Dev Team”, not from some NPC like Breanni.

Popularity: 3% [?]

So, apparently the blog had it’s first birthday a few days ago, and me, in my whole post-holiday confused state of mind, totally forgot about it. Oh well. If I had one New Year’s wish to make, I’d wish for myself to write more posts here. We’ll see how that goes. ;)

It’s not like I don’t have any real excuses for lack of posts, though. First thing that was on my mind for much of the whole holiday break, was levelling my shaman Misaka I’ve mentioned last time. In the last few weeks I’ve levelled her from 20 something to 77, and I’m working on getting her to 80 and geared at least somewhat appropriately for our Undergeared project before this Saturday. Should be a totally possible goal now that I think about it.

On my main server I’ve had a few things to do as well, especially after the New Year, as I’ve been volunteered to become an officer of my guild, and I’ve accepted the offer. After that, I’ve had my head a bit full with raids, catching up with the forums, managing DKP for the runs, and other things like that. The guild got a bunch of new recruits all from one of the other guilds (we haven’t fished for them really, they just weren’t happy there), and we managed to switch our raiding focus to consistently having two 10-man groups each week, and also clear the first wing of Icecrown on 25-man without too much problems.

That would be about it for now. I’m back to getting level 78 and unlocking the Sons of Hodir once again, and then I have an Ulduar raid to run, to maybe finally get my last Sigil.

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you’re making a new raiding guild, that’s completely fine with me. After all, this is a game for everyone, so one more guild is not a problem. But, if you’re going to talk to random guilded people, like the person in the screenshot below, you’re just doing it wrong.

Popularity: 5% [?]

A lot of the features mentioned in the 3.3 patch notes was focused at low level players – changing some mobs from aggressive to neutral, dual wielding (and two daggers) for rogues from the start, and all the other similar things the endgame players usually don’t care about at all. Since now I have a low level character, I can test it out, and that’s what I’ve done while leveling my new shaman.

Questing

There are two biggest features of the recent patch for a low level. First one is the new map and quest interface. You notice it right away, when you open the full zone map. It shows your quests in that zone and offers markings, so if a quest item drops in some area, that place will be marked with blue color on the map.

Some of the players might say, “meh, a copy of Questhelper”, and they will probably have a good point there – Blizzard is known for taking ideas from popular addons and making their own versions of them. Usually the builtin versions are simpler and lack advanced features, but they are good enough if you don’t need any extra stuff.

I’ve never once used the Outfitter’s automatic changing of gear depending on stance, so why would I want to have an addon that does the same thing as the Blizzard Equipment Manager, and can also do a number of other things I don’t care about. It’s the same deal with the ingame quest interface and Questhelper. The game already has a quest interface, why would I want an extra addon that does the same thing (and takes a lot of memory at the same time)? So I can have an arrow showing me where to go? No thanks, that’s why we have a map in this game, and now that it shows almost exactly where to go, it’s even less needed to have anything extra or even look at Wowhead.

That being said, knowing where to quest is very helpful, and some of the quests can be very vague. That’s where I usually open Wowhead and check the quest out, or I just remember how I did it on my other characters, as I have a few of Alliance chars on level 80 already. With my shaman though, I can’t really do this – I have no idea at all where should I go next or where the quests are supposed to be done, so I have to rely on either Wowhead or now, the ingame quest interface.

So far it works very well, and the only quests I have to still look up on Wowhead are the dungeon ones, as the old world instances still don’t have any maps for them. If I had a wish that I could pass on the developers to work on, it would be exactly that – you can still easily get yourself lost inside an old world instance. Maps, like the ones the Northrend instances have, would be very helpful.

Instances

I’ve already mentioned last week about the new LFG system, and how cool it is on level 80, but for a new player, it’s even better. While I was leveling my druid, I think I haven’t been in an instance once until Hellfire Peninsula, but with Misaka, I can get a group in a few minutes, even for the instances I’d never run otherwise like Stockades.

Not only it provides me with a change from all the questing, but it also gives nice experience, even though I don’t have any heirloom items on her. Without any extra dungeon quests, I can gain a level by just doing two instances, and even with the size of the old dungeon, it usually takes less time than questing. Dungeon quests speed it up a lot, especially if there are a few for the instance – doing a full set of these can grant you another half a level worth of experience points. And in the meantime I can of course quest normally, and don’t have to sit in Undercity and wait for people – the new LFG teleports me from wherever I currently am, right to the start of the dungeon, and puts me back into where I was after. It’s not a big issue in Northrend, but in the old world, where the instance can be on a completely other continent or in a similarly annoying place, like Gnomeregan and Stockades, it’s just a blessing.

Of course there are also the rewards for doing random dungeons. Since I’m not doing level 80 heroics yet, I don’t get emblems – instead I get a bag with a random blue item inside for each random dungeon I finish. The items are sometimes useless – for example you can, and most likely will, get a neckpiece with strength for a caster – but sometimes it’s something you will definitely use, and they’re usually better than the green quest rewards.

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I’m leveling another Horde character. Meet Misaka, the level 30 elemental shaman. This time I will probably finish the leveling fast though, possibly in the next week or two, as she actually has quite a good reason to exist. After all, she’s not just a random alt I’ve made out of boredom, but a member of on Arathor-EU.

What is Undergeared? You might already know, if you read our GM’s introductory post on his blog. If you didn’t, here’s a short explanation – the greedy goblin Gevlon is teaming up with a bunch of players to clear every raiding content in the game. On normal level of difficulty, but all in blue quality gear.

Sounds interesting enough? Add one more thing to this – most of the characters are either fresh rerolls or non-raiding alts. The most advanced raiding achievement we now feature is killing Flame Leviathan one of the transfered level 80 hunters has. Obviously none of us has an excellent knowledge of his class. This is a big disadvantage to the previous Blue Ulduar run, as that one was done with a group of serious raiders that were playing the same classes they did Ulduar hardmodes with. Here, you can’t really know if the people are skilled or not, at least not until we start getting to 80.

This is what made me interested in taking part in it. We all like to say that “skill > gear”, here’s an excellent chance to prove it. I might not agree with Gevlon on everything he writes in his blog, but this is really something I’d like to take part in. Given that the holiday season is usually pretty slow on raiding in my guild, at the very least I’ll have something to do (and something to write about).

The guild was formed few days ago, and already has about 60 members – mostly rerolled alts of various low levels, a few new deathknights and 3 level 80’s. As the official start was supposed to be on this Saturday, I expect some more people to join then. Of course it should be obvious that not all of these characters will be raiding or even hit level 80 at all, that’s why it doesn’t really matter that there are 10 priests or 12 paladins.

It’s a pretty weird environment though – the guild chat is silent most of the time, apart from occasional class question or people looking for a group to some instance. Granted, all of this is explicitly written in the guild rules, but it still feels kind of weird to me. I don’t really miss the “gz” spam and other annoyances, but it’s really strange to open up the guild tab and see that suddenly you’re the only one playing and you haven’t even noticed when the rest went away. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m going to miss them or anything, especially that I don’t know anything about them anyway. ;)

Popularity: 9% [?]

The patch went online this week, so I’ve started to pug random dungeons for badges and achievements. Just as I was expecting earlier, the LFG tool is a great way to bring happiness to my playing time. Sure, some players are jerks, but there are also a lot of good players around.

The first day of the patch we’ve completed Occulus without any problems at all. Everyone in the group knew what they were supposed to be doing, there were no wipes, no “guys how do I damage with the dragon”, the only time someone died was at the last moments of Eregos fight, when they accidentally ate an orb explosion. A clean, fast run.

Some people are strange though. Or maybe strange is not really a good word for it. Today I went into heroic Pit of Saron to do some dpsing and get used to arms spec which I’ll use this evening in our raid. We wipe at the Forgemaster, lose a dps, then lose a tank, then a healer. Fear not, because here comes the LFG tool to the rescue! We get another pair of players – one deathknight tank, one druid healer. The tank inspects the druid and starts whining about how he’s not going to do this with this “crappy” druid.

So I check out the druid. First thing I see is that he has the Battlemaster title. Inspecting closer shows some random selection of heroics epics with some pvp parts, and a pvp resto spec. Usually neither of that is a good sign, but together with Battlemaster… Who cares. It’s one of the hardest titles to get in the game. Which means the druid should at least know what he’s doing.

Vote kick the whining deathknight, get back in tank spec and gear, grab another random DPSer, and off we go. Finished everything without any problems. Sure, there were a few deaths and a few moments when the group was close to dying, but nothing too unusual.

All in all, I like the LFG tool. Sure, sometimes it gets some jerks in my groups, and signing as a tank obviously reduces the waiting time by a lot as opposed to signing as a dps, but it’s an awesome thing anyway. Other parts of the patch are very cool as well – yesterday I was leveling my little paladin banker and the improvements to the zone map and the quest tracker are very helpful, even though I did these quests several times already. Even the Equipment Manager has been updated – it now shows which items belong to what set (making one little addon to do that no longer necessary), and it also shows which parts of the set you’re missing rather than showing a cryptic message like before.

And then there are the instances, which really deserve a post of their own.

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Rather than updating the first post, I’ve decided to make a new one, because it’s easier to keep them at a right article size that way. In this part, you can find more detailed tactics for Faction Champions and Twin Val’kyr encounters.

For tips and tricks on the two previous fights, you can check the first part of this guide – it has been updated a bit since the posting.

Faction Champions

This fight is so random. If you have the right raid setup, and the Champions spawn with an easy enough setup as well, this can be a piece of cake.

• Kill the totems. Make a macro for it, make your melees right click them, make your tanks right click them, make your resto druid moonfire them, but you need to kill the totems.
• Dispel, dispel, dispel. If you have a dispel button and a free GCD, you should probably press that very button.
• The enemy NPC’s are not tauntable at all, making it a little bit harder to control the melee ones.
• Note that you still can taunt the warlock and hunter pets – on one of the tries I’ve left one of them attacking me all the time for free rage – as a tank they don’t do a lot of damage to you, but will still run away so be sure to taunt them back.
• The most sure-fire way of killing them for us was to kill one of the healers )while keeping the two melees and the other healer under CC), then kill both melees (keeping one of them and the other healer still under CC), then finish off the other healer. At that point you’ve practically won.
• Which healer to kill first depends on what you get and what you have. There are two spots for their healers. If one of them is either a resto druid or a paladin, and the other one is a priest or a resto shaman, you should probably CC the paladin/druid and have everyone kill the other one first. If you have for example a druid and a shaman, and you don’t have a warlock to make CCing the druid very simple, you should CC the shaman instead and kill the druid first.
• Next will be their melee dps. Take out the most annoying one first – their annoyance is ranked like this: rogue > warrior > paladin > shaman > deathknight. After you’ve killed them both, you have just eliminated the thing that can most likely kill you pretty fast.
• After the melees are dead, kill the other healer. After he goes down, start killing their ranged dps, again with the most annoying ones first, which will be: mage > hunter > warlock > shadow priest > boomkin.
• Did I mention killing the totems and dispelling things yet? Yes? Then I will do it again, because it is VERY important. Kill the totems and dispel things (especially the paladin bubbles).

On a side note, the Faction Champions have a strange threat mechanic that can be possibly used to tank them, but while I’ve been able to confirm that it does indeed work, it’s not that easy to use (as they were still running for the casters), so in the end we just went and killed them with normal tactics. I’m including that link though just in case someone is interested.

Val’kyr Twins

We’ve spent a lot of time on this encounter trying out various strategies, until we found one that works. Well, actually there is also another one that works as well, the door tanking one – but as it requires a lot of luck and nothing else, I will neither use it or recommend it. This one is easy enough.

A bit of explanation of the positioning diagram above (and yes you can click it for a larger version).

• Both tanks take a dark or light portal each, aggro the bosses and position them with their backs to the center of the room, making some space for the melees to live in.
• Melee dps should be using dark or light portals (not all the same one), and attack the right boss for the debuff they have.
• Dark and Light soakers – these two ranged DPS will each take a different debuff and attack the respective boss, while making sure they grab all the orbs of their color that are going towards the tank and melee groups. You don’t have to be too zealous in doing this, but it helps a lot for the people in the center of the room to not be spammed by random colored orbs.
• Caster DPS and healers – take a debuff and stand next to the other portal – as in, if you’re going to stand near the light portal, you take the dark debuff.

This positioning makes it easy for everyone to switch dps to the shielded Val’kyr if needed, and lessens the amount of orbs in the center. And now, off to the fight.

• There is one new mechanic in the heroic mode of this encounter, and it’s called Touch of Light/Darkness. It causes AoE damage to people around you and disappears if you change your debuff color. So go and do that. Remember that especially if you are a soaker DPS, you probably want to change back to your previous color afterwards. This ability is never cast on tanks.
• Dodge orbs if they are not in your color. This is very important, because otherwise it’s a big chunk of damage. If you are surrounded by wrong orbs, of course it’s better to run through one rather than getting exploded by all of them, but in most cases it should be easy enough to just move out of their way. Don’t finish that cast (especially if you’re a dps), just move. It’s a bit more tricky for the melees and tanks, but unfortunately they have to do it as well.
• While grabbing orbs that are in your color, please be sure that you are not doing it close to the other colored people. That’s especially important for the two soaker DPS – if there’s a light orb close to the dark tank, let the tank dodge it rather than run into it and make the tank take the completely unnecesary AoE damage.
• If one of the Val’kyr shields itself, everyone need to switch and DPS it. The shield can take more damage in heroic mode, so if you have Heroism availaible, you might want to save it for this ability. Same goes for trinkets and other DPS cooldowns.
• When one of the Val’kyr does the shield, the other one hits for a lot and really fast – this is a good time for that tank to use his defensive cooldowns and to get more healing on him.
• While switching colors for the Vortex ability, remember that you need to switch back after. Also, be careful while running to a portal – there are two of them for a reason, so don’t make everyone run to the same one and then all die because there just happened to be a few wrong colored orbs on the way. Switching a color is not a reason not to dodge orbs.
• If you get the positioning right, and then can dodge orbs like pro dodgeball players, then the fight is not that much harder than the normal mode.

And that’s it for now. Right now we are still working on Anub’Arak, so the next part will probably come soon. See you next time!

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This will be a short one, but the Twin Val’kyr in our ToGC-10 are finally down. After some time of figuring out the right strategy (and then a few bad encounters with the bloody Faction Champions), we finally executed the strategy and got them down in a few tries.

No tanky loots unfortunately, but I scored a pretty sharp looking sword I can swing around. Offspec thing (won over another offspec obviously), so it probably won’t see that much use, but still I dps from time to time and it’s a very decent upgrade over my current Stormedge. And it has a nice metric ton of extra armor penetration, so even if it’s an agility based thing and not an axe, I’m happy.

I’ll make a post on Twin Val’kyr strategy this week as well, as I’m the one that does boss notes and tactics on bosses in the guild – so that’s two birds with one stone.

We also had a few tries on Anub, and made it to the third phase and around 25%, but we need some more training with placement of the Frost Spheres and kiting the boss around them. And possibly Heroism, as our resident shaman is currently afk due to real life.

Well, there’s always the next week.

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Yesterday there was no raid due to the lack of healers, so I’ve been kidnapped and forced to do PvP. Specifically, 2v2 Arenas with our resident holy pinkadin.

Hmmm. “Forced” sounds kind of wrong, like I didn’t like doing this, which is not true at all. Let’s try again.

Yesterday there was no raid due to the lack of healers, so our resident holy pinkadin Tuttebel invited me to have a lot of fun in 2v2 Arenas as a prot warrior – holy pala team.

Okay, this is a lot better and is at least honest, this can stay.

I’ve been already doing a lot of Battlegrounds on my warrior as prot, and I liked it a lot, so I agreed for doing some arenas to see if it would be fun as well. We started on Tuesday after the raid, just to get a few games done for her weekly points, but strangely enough we didn’t lose as much as we were expecting to.

During these few days I’ve tweaked my pvp spec a bit (note that I might not have it on armory currently, because at the point at which it was written I was respeccing my tanking spec for it – seriously Blizzard, make it cost another 1k or make it even 10k gold, but I really need a third spec) and got some better gear (and a little more resilience), so this time it went much better.

We did about 30 games of which we lost about 11, most of them at the beginning where I was still running around a bit like a headless chicken. Once I stopped that and got used to the arena maps and staying close enough to my healer to be able to Intervene her if needed, it went much better. Of course, we have a low rating of 1100 and something (especially me, since I’ve just started this week), so obviously the other teams aren’t the best either. Still, it was a lot of fun and you can expect some posts about it if we get somewhere with this.

There was a few noteworthy things this evening.

Facing a double rogue team was fun, but we won that one pretty fast – fortunately two plate users with a protection warrior, a rogue is not a big problem at all if you manage to survive the initial stunlock and burst, as I have just about the same amount of stuns availaible and an advantage of a ton (for pvp at least) of armor and avoidance.

We also faced one team of a cat druid and holy pala. That fight was… interesting, if that’s the right word. It lasted for 26 minutes, in which time I was trying to a) get the paladin healer low on mana (not an easy job when he has like 25k of it and I’m not a dps), b) get the kitty off Tuttebel’s face, while the other team was doing more or less the same. Fortunately the other healer went OOM faster, and then it was only a matter of silencing and stunlocking him and getting some lucky Shield Slam crits at the same time – and after the enemy paladin went down, finishing off the kitty was just a formality. Fortunately we only encountered them once in a whole evening, but I have to say that these were really cool and fun 26 minutes.

Speaking of Shield Slam crits – we had one team with a pve geared arcane mage. Have I mentioned already that I absolutely love low resilience targets? Here’s why.

That’s just a little over 11k in one hit, from defensive stance. Before you start thinking that protection warriors are overpowered, remember that a decent amount (700-900) of resilience reduces that to 5k on average, and on top of that I only have about 30% of crit chance on Shield Slam, and I really need to have procs, cooldowns and some setup in order to do so much damage. Still, seeing a mage’s health go down from 80% to 5% in one blow is just awesome.

I’ve also almost single-handedly killed a retri paladin and a deathknight. They both went for Tuttebel first and somehow bursted her down pretty fast, but I was able to dps down first the paladin, then finish off the deathknight with me having about 1k health left. Very lucky.

Of course this post would not be complete without mentioning the worst enemy you can ever encounter as a warrior – a discipline priest. If they’re any good, they will spam Power Word: Shield, making you unable to get any rage, and therefore unable to do any damage. If paired with a ranged dps class, like a hunter or a warlock, it’s not an easy team to deal with – unless you’re good at playing hide and seek with them. We didn’t manage that yet, but there’s always next time!

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