The Angry Dwarfs

So as you can see (if you actually visit the site and not read it through the RSS feed), I’ve done some changes to the site. One thing you can immediately notice is that I added some header graphics that I’m more or less content with – it’s based on a very old Blizzard wallpaper, but I think it suits the name and all. Maybe at some point in the future I will change it somehow, but it stays for now.

Other stuff is I’ve arranged the previous posts into new categories – there are a bunch of them in the category menu under Columns, and I’ll be trying to keep up with posting new things to them. I’ve even gone so far as to create a schedule for them, which I will share here – mostly as a reminder to myself. So, here it goes:

• Monday: Randomonday – might be a good idea to rant and complain about random things happening in and outside of the game – and if nothing interesting happens to me, Blog Azeroth’s Shared Topic it will be.
• Tuesday: Azeroth Views – where I’ll be sharing some nice screenshots with you – I have a bunch of them in my folders, ready to post.
• Wednesday: Adding Things Up – which is a column about UI addons. 
• Friday: Alternative Times – all about alts – I’ve got some things cooking here about leveling, professions, great quests that you shouldn’t miss and all that stuff.
• Saturday: Sat-Ulduar-day – as the name says, the guides for Ulduar will go up on this day, and also some other random pointers.
• Sunday: Bloody Sunday – which will be stories about PvP. Now I’m not a hardcore PvPer, so expect some battleground strategies, and maybe some achievements or other things.

Of these six columns you can expect at least 4 of them appearing here in any week – that’s of course not including other columns that are not on the list and are more general. That should get my lazy dwarven ass back in gear. ;) The schedule will be starting this Monday, and as I tank more and more stuff on Vrethir, you can probably guess what it will be about. ;)

Oh, and if you’re still reading this – go and visit Only Ten More Points – a blog of my insane guildie Glinda. She’s writing all about achievements, so if you’re interested, you might possibly find some useful tips there.

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The latest patch finally brought us the Equipment Manager. Since I’ve been using Outfitter to manage my gear sets and I wasn’t using any of the automatic features it provides, I switched it off and turned to the ingame version. I have to say it isn’t by any means perfect and I really wish it would have some additional features, but hey, it works and does the same basic thing.

I do have some tips and tricks for you if you want to try it out, so continue reading if you want. :)

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So yeah, that’s what I’ve been mostly doing for the last week. It began about Thursday with my warrior was sitting in Scholazar at level 76, which was when I decided to level him enough to get him back flying. After I did have it I found leveling with an epic flying mount (which he had since level 70) so much faster and efficient that I just went with it. And so here I am, dinging 80 on some starting quest in Icecrown.

I must say that leveling as a prot warrior was not as hard as it may seem. Sure, I don’t do a lot of damage, but I also survive a lot, and stuff will die eventually if I smash it with a shield enough times. :] I’ve also did a bunch of instances on the way, but with the expansion being out for a while there’s not much demand for tanks anymore. Still, it’s a valid way to level, and it gets a lot easier after leveling to 75 and getting Enraged Regeneration. You can just keep charging mobs and smashing them with your shield, which is always fun. It’s also a nice way to level on a PvP server such as mine – I have absolutely no idea why people (ones of the same level of course – you can’t do much about 80′s unless they suck) are trying to gank a tank with almost twice their HP, but they do. And then they get stunned, interrupted, charged and slammed with a shield. Fun. :]

I was able to get uncrittable with a bunch of crafted and AH gear shortly after, so I tried pugging a heroic Violet Hold. Unfortunately the run wasn’t as good as I’d like to see my first heroic go – we’ve encountered a bug with the rightside portal. The mob will spawn there and then fall through the floor, going out of range of anything and keeping the portal spawning mobs forever. Must be something introduced in patch 3.1, because I have never seen that happen before, but I poked around the forums and I’m not the only one encountering this bug. Too bad it happened though, the rest of the group was mostly from one guild – one which is 3rd on progression on my realm. I don’t think they were impressed.

Well too bad, maybe if I were overgeared for the instance it wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m not… and to be completely honest, I like it. It’s a fun time when the instances are still a challenge to do. I practically stopped doing heroics (I do it mostly if we want to do some achievements) on Saithir simply because it’s too boring to plow through mobs like that. On my alts though, I still have to show some effort for most of them.

Well anyway, now I have another character to play – currently I’m working on taking him through some heroics and getting his professions up to a decent level. Of course it involves getting a lot of silly achievements like “25 Fish” and similar stuff…

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This article is part of a series of Ulduar guides that focus on rogues and other melee classes. You can find the links to the other guides in the introduction post.

This guide is not a general strategy guide for the encounter. While you may find some overview, it’s only here so the melee classes know what is going on. If you need a full strategy guide, you can check out Tankspot’s Project Marmot, as they have lots of awesome strategy videos.

Of course, if you have any comments (including, but not limited to different strategies and differences from 10 to 25-man versions), feel free to use the comment form below and post them. I’m only a dwarf and I can make mistakes.

Also, feel free to repost this to your guild’s forums if you find the guide useful, just be sure that you abide to the Creative Commons license and provide my name as an author and a link to my site.

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So he wasn’t that easy after all. Took us a lot of tries, but we somehow managed to get him on our last try – it was both the ending time for the raid, as well as the last raid before the weekly maintenance (and instance reset) – so it was just the Right Thing to kill him then.

I know it will sound like a conspiracy plot, but I am now pretty much sure that there is a contest running at Blizzard, and whomever designs a fight not annoying to melee classes loses and has to buy beer for the others. Well you know what? The guy that designed Mimiron is the unmatched winner for a while.

Seriously though, it’s not all about unfriendliness, though the boss has a lot of abilities that will spell doom if you get caught in them. It’s about situational awareness. Lots of it. The boss drops landmines around him, you have to find a gap in them, and why there are none because the mines go in a nice spiral around the whole center of the room? He will also shoot rockets at you for milions of damage – you have 3 seconds to spot a red circle under your feet and move. Too bad the circle is red on a gold floor, and for any melees, usually also hidden under the tank itself. He will also do a blast AoE that you have to run out of. And a laser barrage that you need to avoid by moving to his back. Each of these abilities alone can one-shot any player (well, okay, mines take up to 3 shots), if he’s not aware of his surroundings.

And on top of that, he will most likely do all these things at once.

/shakes fist

What I find a bit weird is that after a lot of wipes I still kinda like this boss. While he could receive some cosmetic fixes, it’s a good encounter. Maybe they could change the color of the rocket strike rune, make him not move while doing the laser barrage or enlarge his hitbox a little – it would not change the difficulty much, but would make it so less annoying.

Popularity: 32% [?]

This article is part of a series of Ulduar guides that focus on rogues and other melee classes. You can find the links to the other guides in the introduction post.

This guide is not a general strategy guide for the encounter. While you may find some overview, it’s only here so the melee classes know what is going on. If you need a full strategy guide, you can check out Tankspot’s Project Marmot, as they have lots of awesome strategy videos.

Of course, if you have any comments (including, but not limited to different strategies and differences from 10 to 25-man versions), feel free to use the comment form below and post them. I’m only a dwarf and I can make mistakes.

Also, feel free to repost this to your guild’s forums if you find the guide useful, just be sure that you abide to the Creative Commons license and provide my name as an author and a link to my site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 50% [?]

This article is part of a series of Ulduar guides that focus on rogues and other melee classes. You can find the links to the other guides in the introduction post.

This guide is not a general strategy guide for the encounter. While you may find bits of an overview, it’s only here so the melee classes know what will happen. If you need a full strategy guide, you can check out Tankspot’s Project Marmot, as they have lots of awesome strategy videos.

Of course, if you have any comments (including, but not limited to different strategies and differences from 10 to 25-man versions), feel free to use the comment form below and post them. I’m only a dwarf and I can make mistakes.

Also, feel free to repost this to your guild’s forums if you find the guide useful, just be sure that you abide to the Creative Commons license and provide my name as an author and a link to my site.

Note: as this is a vehicle fight, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a melee class or not. This will be more of a general guide than the next ones. Also Tankspot unfortunately doesn’t have a video for it yet.

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So this weekend, our dps crew is either slacking, away doing other things, out of gold for repairs and consumables, or just afraid of the new bosses. Or all of them answers at once. ;) Meaning that we went again with the 10-man group and continued to free the Ulduar Watchers from Yogg-Saron’s influence. On Friday we killed Hodir again (after a bit too many tries for my taste, since we had to change the main tank to someone new to this), killed Thorim without too many problems, and worked on Freya. The next day we just executed our strategy on Freya, disposing of her quite swiftly and started on the last one of the watchers – Mimiron. We had to leave him be for now, but it seems we will most likely continue on Sunday’s evening.

I now like the Watchers area of the instance even more. The bosses are tricky, and that’s what makes them an awesome fun. They are not very hard (regardless of the “nerfs” and hotfixes – most of them were justified anyway), just very tricky. You have to know the strategy and you have to execute it well. What is even more fun, you have to do the same thing at the trash mobs. To be completely honest, I think they are fed up with calling them “trash”, and that is the reason that they can wipe the floor with a whole raid almost just as easily as the real bosses.

Now the Mimiron fight and the mobs before him – awesome stuff. Painful as hell, but I was able to jump into a gnomish spider tank and shoot things! As a melee with only some leather and Evasion for protecting myself, I was extremely happy to have range abilities and 300k health pool for once :] But the ride in the steam train after these packs, and the design of the Spark of Imagination area is a great reward for dying a few times.

Mimiron himself is a very painful fight though. I think it’s a bit beyond tricky – he does huge amounts of damage both on the tank and on the raid, and on top of that, half of his abilities are designed to instantly turn the player into a nasty stain on the floor. But working on him and getting further each try is awesome, and I’m pretty sure we will kill him next evening. It’s just a matter of doing all things the right way.

Oh, and the button pictured above? It’s a big red button that says “DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON”. And it was really blinking at me. Since I’m a respectable dwarf, champion of Ironforge and so on, I really had no choice but to go and push it. Of course that resulted in a very quick wipe, especially of the 9 people standing outside of the room, for which neither me nor the raid leader (“Ok, I’ve watched the video. Can I go press the button now?” “Yes” *the dwarf stealths and sprints away to the boss*) weren’t really prepared. Oh well, at least now we know what the button does. :)

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