The Angry Dwarfs

Monday is usually a day free of raiding here in my guild – or at least free from guild organised runs. Logging on yesterday’s evening I was planning to do some fishing, since I’m the main provider of the Fish Feasts for the guild. But after doing half of my standard daily routine, I saw a bunch of officer’s in Storm Peaks, and shortly after came a raid invite. This was our 10-man group from this week, so I figured killing new bosses is better than fishing. :)

Last time we left the instance just before Auriaya (I call her “Maiden” usually – it’s a female, so doesn’t qualify for “Bob”), so we killed her first. That took us a few tries, since we didn’t have a tank with a ranged AoE for the tricky pull. As much as it is entertaining to see two healers out of the 10-man group dead within 5 seconds of the pull to the cute little kitties, it’s obviously not a right way to do it. We found a good spot near the stairs to keep the whole raid out of their line of sight, and then it was just a matter of running back quickly enough after a fear.

After Maiden’s death we explored the area a bit, and decided to fight Hodir. I even managed to wipe the whole raid by sneaking past the visible trash mob and getting jumped on by a swarm of little worm hiding in a snow mound. We got to Hodir himself after a while and some more unexpected trash wipes, like getting knocked back into an incoming patrol. We used the frost resistance sets from the beginning, and it helped a bit, at least on the trash mobs – they deal quite a lot of frost damage.

Hodir himself was an awesome fight. It’s like Keristrasza and Heigan combined – you have to move constantly to avoid getting too many stacks of Biting Cold on you, and once in a while you have to be in the right spot on the floor, just like with the dance. We used frost resistance as well at the beginning, but we found it gimps our dps too much, so all the dps left only one of them. We should be good even without them. We made it to the end not long after he shattered his rare chest, but got a bunch of achievements anyway (Cheese the Freeze for example), and of course he dropped a T8 leg token for me. Well, not exactly for me, because with more than a half of the raid rolling for the thing, I didn’t get it. But at least we made our local tree a happy one. :] Oh, and for the ones interested – no, you don’t actually kill him – the fight stops at 1 HP.

We were almost after our usual raid end time, but we decided to go and try out Thorim anyway. We made it to him after a few very nasty trash mobs (see a pattern there? You can’t just grab them all and AoE them down, and it’s awesome). This boss was a bit harder, and we might read on him just a bit more. The raid gets split in two parts – one stays at the arena, and second continues to go up to the boss. All the times we died it was because the arena team died, and the small corridor group didn’t have too many problems on their way up. After a few tries we left him for the next try, since it was almost midnight and people had to go to work early today.

So in the end, I still like this instance a lot, and I like it more as we go further in. The fights are tricky and not exactly very easy, but they are certainly not impossible. It’s all about focus and execution of the plan. Awesome, but on the other hand, we don’t do so well in the 25-mans. I think the reason is that when we have only half of a raid focused and determined to kill stuff, and the other half is not. It is disappointing, and the fact that Blizzard added the proffesion recipes and fragments of the legendary mace only to 25-man bosses is not making it any better. If they would drop in the 10-mans as well (maybe with even lesser drop rate, it would be fine), I would just opt for our guild to do the 10-mans exclusively. 10-mans are just so much more managable and funnier.

Popularity: 26% [?]

I think that the image on the left says it all. After a long time of playing WoW, and competing in the tournament for quite a long time (with a lot of quite long breaks in the meantime), I finally won the STV fishing tournament. Since it was Noblegarden, I figured that most of the players will be chasing the eggs and making love with their rabbits, so it would be a nice time to try. And they sure did – there were significantly less players there than on the earlier Sundays, both the Horde and the jerk Alliance.

I have to say that I loved the excitement of getting over 30 fish, then racing around with 38 of them, then trying to hearthstone to Booty Bay, dying to a horde shaman (/wave Laemporio), and finally getting a spirit res and racing on the mount to the quest giver – just to be a few seconds faster than some other horde. This isn’t a raid, this isn’t a hard mode boss kill, but this excitement is really really awesome. Now I only need some kind of rare fish for my Salty title, so I will probably spend the rest of the day fishing in Howling Fahjord.

Earlier this day I did almost every achievement of Noblegarden. We had a group of guildies doing it from midnight to 4 – 5 in the morning, and some of them got lucky, so they got their titles a bit earlier. I just couldn’t find a dwarf female anywhere, so I decided to grab some sleep, and I found one easily enough after I finally got up. I liked this event – it was fast and very fun, and the designers really did a good job with reducing the amount of random drops that you need to do the achievements. If you’re not lucky, you could save some hundreds of chocolates and buy all the stuff you need, which is so much better than Valentine’s Day random drops of randomness. I was a bit worried about it finishing after the Children’s Week starts, but it’s not that much of a problem.

And yesterday, my luck kicked in for the first time, which you can see from the above screenshot as well. We went with a group of guildies into 25-man Ulduar to kill some trash mobs and get the Heroic: Dwarfageddon done, and after that one of the mages asked us to go to Zul’Gurub to finish off his exalted reputation. Sure, why not. So we go in, kill every boss there is (you don’t need a healer there anymore if you have the superior firepower of 2 mages, a warlock, a fury warrior and a rogue ;] ), and from the tiger boss drops a mount. And I rolled the highest on it!

I will now have to go with them for every ZG run they do in the future, but I don’t really mind. The red kitty is totally worth it.

And now, Howling Fahjord, here I come. Anyone wants a few hundreds of herrings?

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Since the latest patch added a whole new dungeon to the mix, I think there is a lot of room for strategy guides of many kinds. Similar to the Naxxramas guide that Dinear made over at Forever a Noob, this guide will focus on melee classes in general, with some points specific to rogues, like survivability and cooldown usage.

The reason for that is simply that I write what works for me. After raiding as a rogue for about a year now, I found that our beloved developers just love to design fights that are (for lack of better word – especially one that isn’t considered expletive) unfriendly to melee classes. These guides are designed to show how to deal with that, and “bring your ranged dps alt” is not considered a valid strategy here.

You can also expect a bit of the general strategy here (you should be familiar with a whole encounter, even though you will most likely see the bosses feet most of the time), as well as some info about the achievements tied with them. The guide will also focus on the 10-man versions of the fights, and I will be trying to point things out if they change drastically on the 25-man. There will be also mention of the shinies we get for killing the bosses, but these loot lists will be strictly limited to rogue loot.

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Popularity: 52% [?]

With the 3.1 patch being live for over a week now, I think it’s about time for a new blog post. I’ve been waiting with writing this post for a while, because the first few days of 25-man raids weren’t that much successful anyway, and I’m quite sure nobody would be interested in my constant whining.

This Wednesday though, we started working on the 10-man version with a solid group of raiders. It went much better that day – we tried for a bit on Flame Leviathan with one tower up, but he’s not a total pushover anymore, so we just killed him without the hard mode after a few tries. We then took down XT-002 Deconstructor and Razorscale with no big problems at all. Ignis was the last boss of that evening, but after a few tries we left him, as it was getting already late.

Yesterday we were supposed to go and try the 25-man, but with only two tanks and not enough dps signed up, that’s of course not going to happen. Funny how people give up so quickly. We did go again with our 10-man team and killed few more bosses. Ignis went finally down, Iron Council was quite fun, and Kologarn was surprisingly easy. We decided to finish a bit earlier before Auriaya’s trash mobs. It’s certainly not on par with the hardcore guilds that do world firsts, but I’m fine with what we accomplished.

After all this, I still like the instance a lot. The bosses aren’t very hard if you follow the strategies and stay out of the fire, and the trash mobs are finally to be killed carefully (the Tier 7 way of grouping them up and AoEing them down will not work anymore, and I’m so happy about that), but as there’s not so many of them, clearing the instance does not feel tedious. It is a lot of steps up from Naxxramas, though. You can’t just screw the tactics and outgear the instance so much that you don’t have to watch out for stuff that happens around you, or move out of the fire. The fire here will kill you in about 5 seconds.

Blizzard’s developers are still fiddling with the difficulty of the fights. Some are eager to call it “nerfing” and other silly stuff that I won’t use here. I’m fine with the changes. Shaving some damage from an ability or extending an enrage timer so that you don’t really need a Heroism/Bloodlust to kill the boss is not really a big deal. And in some cases, they even buff it – a perfect example is the Flame Leviathan. It was a total pushover, so much that we did him with a tower up on our first kill in the 10-man, and now each tower adds significant HP to the boss. You just can’t do it anymore if you don’t know the fight well.

Even with the melee unfriendliness of some fights (it seems Blizzard’s encounter designers can’t design a fight without some kind of AoEs on the floor placed on top of the boss or whirlwind abilities that make a leather wearing melee go splat instantly… ), the bosses are still very fun. And this is why we do this in the first place, right?

I just wish the sword models were better.

Popularity: 18% [?]

So the patch is finally live, meaning half of my addons are kinda useless. Sigh. We didn’t do anything new this evening, since we have a planned raid for Thursday.

We did a quick testing run of 10-man Naxxramas, to see what have changed. I have to say that I’m very pleased with my spec now – I managed to top the damage on some fights with less movement, right with the feral kitty and a DPS deathknight (of unknown spec, not that I could ever tell them apart anyway) – and that as a Combat Swords, not CQC Combat. Which I could use and I even have the weapons for that, but I’d rather wait for some new swords to enchant properly. Still, that’s not a bad DPS boost for a content patch.

Other than that, I’ve played a bit with Argent Tournament, sold a bunch of glyphs, and now I’m off to doing some more dailies. And tomorrow… Ulduar!

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The patch is coming, we are all doomed!

Check out the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSbEr5ar0Zo – we’re going to be heroes again. It’s about time, ain’t it? And there’s an older video as well, not that good, but still nice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlIonr1mU1o

This is a post I compiled for our guild forums, but I think it may be of some use here as well. Since it’s a bit long, check the changes after the read more link!

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This was supposed to be a comment on Critical QQ’s blog post, but as it was getting a bit large already, I’ve decided to make a whole post out of it. This is written from Saithir’s point of view  - my other characters are not so much shapen story-wise, and not as experienced.

A new danger is drawing near – the horror that the Titans imprisoned so many centuries ago is about to break free. Yogg-Saron, the Death God. Who will defend Azeroth from him? We, the heroes of the Alliance? Are we even worthy of such title, given that some of the things we do, we do just for gold? Or does that makes us just a mercenaries, ready to take on whatever enemy, as long as it’s profitable?

Well I don’t know about you (and I would gladly listen to your tale as well), but I know I am a hero. What, ya don’t believe me now? Just sit down and let me continue…

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Yeah, so. The bad weekdays at work aren’t exactly beneficial to the amount of posts here or not even to the fun things I do ingame. With a holiday weekend though, I can at least spend some time playing and not worrying over work stuff. Happy times, too bad they end so soon ^^;

Yesterday for example I’ve spent most of my time grinding for my Cenarion Circle reputation. That took a good while, but I managed to get from just a bit over friendly to 14k/21k of Revered – I just did all the quests that I could in Silithus and killed few hundreds of Twilight Cultists. It’s not a bad reputation grind at all, because even if you can’t get any items from the Auction House, the quests give a lot of reputation, and since now I’m aiming for The Seeker (and maybe a Loremaster someday), I don’t mind doing them at all.

I also did every quest in Icecrown that wasn’t a 5-man group quest (I play a rogue – I may be overpowered, but I can’t heal myself. Give me a healer and we’ll duo them all), and there are some really awesome quests there. I don’t want to spoil any fun for anyone that might be reading, but if you haven’t yet – go and do them, you seriously won’t regret it. The Icecrown quests, the Sons of Hodir chain in the Storm Peaks, and the Battle of Darrowshire from Eastern Plaguelands – these all are truly awesome.

Oh, and the best part of this week – we finally killed Sartharion with 2 drakes. I know it’s a very late kill, but I’m still happy about it. I even got the loot which I wanted from the extra loot – some nice epic pants, that unfortunately look like they have been chewed through by the freaking dragon a few times. Their model is really awful, but oh well, I’ll find something else in Ulduar. ;)

Otherwise, it was a pretty standard week unfortunately. Get back from work, do cooking daily, do Oracle dailies, do some stuff or raid, go to sleep, repeat. Maybe the next week will bring something better – and for now, till next time and have a happy Easter Holidays.

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So once again it’s a slow weekend after the Wednesday’s success on Malygos. I haven’t got much things to do, so I’m basically runnning around the world on my rogue and doing random achievements that I previously just couldn’t be bothered with – like completing Shadowfang Keep and Dire Maul, or getting the two missing keys for The Keymaster.

I also remembered that I have enough UDE points for another TCG promotional tabard, so I finally got 25 of them – the reward was the awesome looking [Tabard of the Achiever]. Now I have to find another goal… maybe I will work on getting The Seeker from the 3000 quests achievement, I’m pretty close to that with 2754 quests completed. Oh, and I also finally fished up the [Giant Sewer Rat] from Dalaran sewers.

A bit of an interesting thing was our try for the Undying yesterday – unfortunately after we did two wings with no deaths, something went awfully wrong on Razuvious. 3 people dead, goodbye, see you later. Since nobody needed anything from the 10-man at all, we decided to not continue – the Undying was impossible already for this week, and we all had everything else.

I went to the Stranglethorn fishing contest earlier today, and it was the same deal as the previous week again. I would like to “congratulate” Morrigan of Requiem of Light for winning – and inviting your friends to spam trades and duels at other Alliance fishermen. Way to go, jerks. Even the Hordes aren’t a problem there, and they pretty much never was for me (I think they ganked me only once, long time ago) – I usually just ride by them, and they do the same to me. Well, there’s always the next week – at least this time I got a rare fish from the first catch of the tournament, which gave me the [High Test Eternium Fishing Line].

To top all the bad things off, even the 25-man raiding doesn’t go well. We had to call off Sartharion with 2 drakes raid on Thursday due to not enough people signed, and of course today’s Naxxramas raid is full with even more people signed than it’s needed. Yay for waste of an evening – I only need something like two minor upgrades from there (and one gun from Kel’Thuzad, which I’m not going to get anyway before our hunter does), and we probably won’t be doing any achievements at all. Just like always.

And now if you excuse me – I have an absurdly large dungeon to clear, so I’ll be back after I decimate some Dark Iron Dwarfs – and maybe something interesting will happen later. But I doubt it.

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So this one epic dwarven hunter gnome mage, Davlin, apparently wanted to take some revenge on me for tagging him some time ago. Crazy evil creatures, these gnomes, aren’t they?Anyway, there you go!

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

Rules:

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Thank you for tagging me, but I’m not sure if I can do 10 honest things at April Fools (and no, I really didn’t choose this day myself… it just happened). I will try, though – I’ll mix up some real and WoW things, and maybe even some will not be real… It is April Fools after all. ;]

1. My 31st birthday will mark the end of the world – at least that’s how some ancient folks foretold – so I will simply try to live up to the challenge.
2. My first WoW character was a nightelf huntard.
3. I still have no idea at all what do I do with this Twitter thingy and how.
4. I’m a gamer – it doesn’t matter if it’s PC or console – if the game’s good, I will probably play it.
5. I enjoy writing a lot – I even wrote some games reviews for some quite big polish portal.
6. I also enjoy reading books and blogs – when I ride the bus to work, I almost always have something to read with me, and my room is basically overflowing with books. And consoles.
7. Final Fantasy VIII totally owns Final Fantasy VII.
8. I live on coffee, pizza and LCD monitor’s radiation.
9. I like collecting figures and other stuff – be it anime ones, game ones, or WoW figures, WoW TCG, and other associated stuff.
10. I have a TV which I don’t even turn on other than to play a console game.
11. I still don’t have a driver’s license – I’m planning to buy a scooter in the near future, though.
12. I had to backdate this post, since I started late and it’s 2nd now here where I live. ^^;

So that will be it. Oh yeah, and wasn’t there a seven blogs thingy… Lets see… Eresin, Zaltu, Birdfall and Greedy Goblin. I’m especially curious what would Gevlon write – I usually don’t agree with his views, but still. :) Oh, and about the seven ones? Well it is April First, so bear with me. :P

Popularity: 21% [?]