Day of the Tree

Wednesday, yay! Weekly maintenance and what’s most important – clearing of the raid lockouts. What that exactly means is that I can run the Vault of Archavon on all three of my level 80 characters.

So I was doing mostly that for a while – I’ve succesfully tanked the 10-man on my Warrior, even though he hasn’t even been to Naxx yet. I can do that fine – the old Archavon is really not a problem, and on Emalon I try to stick to the boss himself, as he doesn’t hit for that much. I think I should be able to tank the 25-man as well, since I should get more raid buffs there, but I haven’t tried yet. Of course nothing useful dropped – some stuff for warlocks and paladins, which we had none in the group.

I also did a 25-man on the rogue, which resulted in upgrading my T8 legs to the 25-man variety, but that group was a lot more organised, since it was run by our resident guildie hunter Rosmarinus as usual. He does the pugs the right way, making sure that there’s enough tanks and healers and then getting it filled with dps. We don’t usually ask for the achievements though, at least I don’t think he does – what we do is just looking at the Recount meter for the two new adds before Emalon and replacing people that aren’t performing well enough. I think it’s a better way to do it rather than simply checking the linked achievement, but it also requires a bit more work.

Next was healing the 10-man on my Druid. That went quite well as well and I was invited into the group even though I didn’t have the achievement for Emalon. Healing the two bosses wasn’t hard as well. I didn’t got any useful drop unfortunately, but at least now I will have a bit easier time getting into another group next time with my new achievement. :)

I also took Sheven for a random Obsidian Sanctum 25-man pug that was being advertised in the trade channel. We got through the drakes with no problems, but when we got to Sartharion himself, things kinda went downhill. The main tank placed him in a totally wrong place, so the adds and the tail were all over the place. Shortly after the start, the add tank died, and half of the raid followed shortly after.

We still had the main tank alive as well as some healers and dps though, so I quickly combat ressed the unlucky prot warrior and we just killed the big dragon with half of the raid admiring the floor. Fun times, and what’s even better I’ve won the T7.5 gloves token. It’s a bit funny, since when I joined the raid, I was joking in the guild chat about how there is a half of the raid that will roll for that – and it almost was. I rolled the highest from about 8 or 10 people, so I guess the little bit of complaining helped me win the favors of RNG against all these other Death Knights. ;)

Then there was our guild run into Ulduar. At first it seemed like we won’t have enough people to do it, but after a bit of poking around we had 10 raiders ready at the Expedition Camp. One of them was my poor healing druid, not really sure that he would do well, but ready to help anyway…

It was a very enjoyable evening for me. I got to see the fights from a completely different perspective, and it’s very scary and very fun at the same time. We killed all the bosses in the first area and also managed to do Kologarn, with most time spent on him and Ignis. Out of the run I got a bunch of Valor badges, which is never bad, and I got an epic belt to replace my old pre-raid [Belt of Vivacity] – no cloth wearers wanted the [Conductive Cord] that dropped from XT-002, so I could finally replace that, and a bit of lost armor is not really a concern in PvE.

Ignis was very annoying – as a rogue it’s an extremely easy fight, you just stick to the boss and do whatever damage you can do to him. Healing that fight was not so easy – especially in the beginning, where I wasn’t really used to dodging the Flame Jets locking all my spells for 8 seconds, which usually resulted in someone dying. After a while I got better at this and on our killing try we only had one death due to getting both the Slag Pot and Flame Jets at once – my dots weren’t enough to keep our potted rogue up, and we didn’t have any priests to help out with the shield or a Renew.

Kologarn was a bit easier for me though – I was really scared that I would fail horribly on the Eye Beams, as I never needed to dodge them anyway, but it was quite easy to see and dodge them. We did have a few wipes – a few due to healing problems, such as when our MT healer got beams on her and the other two of us weren’t fast enough to switch healing to the tank, but in the end we killed him.

So, fun day and very fun evening. Looking forward for more of that now that I’ve tried something different than stabbing the titan constructs in the back. :]