The Angry Dwarfs

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. :]

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A bit of quite interesting information from Blizzard appeared today on the European WoW forums and website. The Bosstiary – an interactive map of Ulduar with bits of information on the various bosses we can encounter there.

It’s nothing major, shocking or gamebreaking, but at least it confirms two things: Razorscale is in fact Thorim’s mount Veranus (which was speculated since the PTR, but I believe it never was officially said) and XT-002 is male rather than female (the child’s voice didn’t make it easy). :]

I certainly hope they will continue to make these type of maps for other instances. While I’m not an extremely knowledgable person when it comes to Warcraft lore, I still like it – so I do appreciate things like that.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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