Mother Shahraz Down

Just as an update for those that care... Primogeniture took down Mother Shahraz last night. Full shadow resist gear is not needed, but we did have a lot of it. Because of the Fatal Attraction, 1-3 people get ported around and then have to run away from each other. That's what makes that fight a semi-complicated dance. There's not much time to react, and you have to do it quick.

Kind of makes me think of high school (or at least movies) where the cool kids have to dance off in the center of everybody else. Only difference here is, the cool kids are just any random group of up to 3 from the raid. lol

Took a shot at Illidari Council, but in the 10 minutes or so we had, we didn't have a chance to make much progress. Oh well... we'll come back "soon" just for the fun of it and smack them all around.

We'll see what we can do to clear Mount Hyjal tonight. :)

Slight Wall

Alright.. last post of the day for now. And since my company has Veterans Day off tomorrow... don't expect any posts tomorrow.

Last night we continued pushing forward into Black Temple. With a more solid and better explained explanation on Reliquary of Souls, we cleared that boss in one attempt. So, not bad at all.

After that, we hit a slight wall named Mother Shahraz. Now, pre 3.0.2 there is no way we would have tried her. We still don't have all the Hearts of Darkness to craft the full Shadow Resist gear for a raid. So, we only have a few that happen to be Shadow Resist capped. But we've heard that it is possible to do without the Shadow Resist gear now that the hit points are less and we're doing more damage.

We tried a couple different strategies and got close (a couple attempts at 20%, I believe), but she's still alive. Healers not being able to heal while thrown up in the air is one of the many challenges we're facing. Had we had a few more priests with CoH, we probably would have been able to do it. So, we'll see what we can do tonight.

Worst case scenario: we give it a couple of tries and then we don't take her down. Hey... how many people (as a percent of total wow players) have actually gotten to see all the stuff we have anyway? I'm very impressed with the group we have, they all make a solid effort (despite our gear in this case). So, if we don't take her down, we'll just come back at 80 to clear it before the next expansion. :)

3.02: The Anti-Patch 1.10

For those that played long enough, you'll remember the days when you could bring 10 people into instances like Stratholme and Scholomance. Heck, you could bring 15 people into Lower and Upper Black Rock Spires. Then patch 1.10 hit, and the limits were dropped by 5. It was the "end of the world" for most people. "How can they expect us to do this?" and "It's so hard now". Then people adapted and realized that it was really too easy before. 10 people running through Stratholme meant that at least 5 were probably on follow and afk. You still had to know where to go, but you could pretty much Aoe everything and be super sloppy pre 1.10. Once that patch hit, you could no longer be

Last night was a continuation of Black Temple for Primogeniture. We downed Teron Gorefiend and Gurtogg Bloodboil. Gorefiend was a 1-shot and Bloodboil took 2 attempts. We also took an attempt at Reliquary of Souls, but we were pretty much at our time limit (got started late) so I gave a horrible and hurried explanation which got us through phase 1, but had us die due to the Spirit Shock in phase 2.

So, I was thinking... Maybe with the increased damage from new talent trees AND the nerf of all mobs in raid instances, maybe this is almost the opposite of patch 1.10. It's like letting people walk around Karazhan and ZA with 15 people. Gruul's Lair with 30. And basically letting everyone be all loosey goosey and still down pretty high end bosses. But hey... it's nice to see the bosses die. You still have to do the strategies and deal with stuff.. there's just a lot more room for error. I kind of like it (in a cheating way). lol

We have 2 more raid nights scheduled for Black Temple before reset. I'll keep you updated on how far we go.

Black Temple Progression

We didn't feel like we had the right mix for a good Mount Hyjal run last night. So, what did Primogeniture do? We went into Black Temple instead. lol.

Yeah, seems kind of backwards, but the logic was: we really don't have our strongest group, nor do we even have 25 online that are able to raid. We had waited around for some time in hopes to get more people online, but were starting to get too late for others. So, at 9, we put it to a vote in the guild, and decided to see if we could down Najentus with our highly melee group. 1-shotted him without any problems.

Walked over to Supremus (accidentally pulling multiple groups at times and having to Aoe them down), and killed him in one attempt.

It was then getting late, but we pressed on to Shade of Akama. The trash right before Shade of Akama is a bit stronger, and our accidental multi-pulls caused a few near wipes (go go Soul Stone). It was getting late, so once we cleared out the room, we thought we'd give Shade one try. Yeah... that encounter didn't last long either.

So, here we are on a Tuesday having killed all the bosses we've ever killed in Black Temple. To be honest, I'm not even sure where I need to go for the next boss. Guess we have some research to do before tonight's raid. lol.

Calling It... No, Wait!

On Tuesday night, we started our weekly farming and got through the first two bosses in Mount Hyjal (yeah for more Hearts of Darkness) and then Naj as well. This set us up perfectly for another quick kill on Supremus last night, and then hopefully some work on Shade of Akama.

It took us a bit of time to get through the trash to Shade of Akama. Only afterwards did we realize that we can get teleported through to the middle so we wouldn't have to face some of the bigger, uglier packs (and probably save a ton of time too). We went over a different strategy (needed way more DPS on the Channelers), and then tried it out. It was much better, but a few mobs got loose, and we eventually wiped.

Raise the dead. Buff... Oh wait. One of the tanks isn't rezzed yet. Well, X-perl says that he's been rezzed. "Hey Tank? Did you get the rez?" Crickets. Okay, he must have gone afk. wait a bit. "You back, buddy?" Nothing. One of our pallies, who's his neighbor, volunteers to call him, but he doesn't pick up the phone.

Well, we had another tank online that could come in, but we'd have to wait for the afk tank to get disconnected or else our replacement tank would get the "Instance Full" message. It was getting rather late, and we knew this would be our last attempt, so we didn't really have time to wait for the disconnect. "/sigh. Alright guys, we're going to have to call it for tonight. Sorry about that. We'll get back in here and kill him next week." And a mage opens a portal.

Two people take the portal, and then... Did the tank just stand up?
...
...

"You there, buddy?"
...
...

Our tank starts moving around, and getting in to position. Alright, let's summon back the two people. (Thank goodness for in instance summoning.) We had one attempt... and we practically destroyed him. The adds got a big out of control towards the end, but Shade of Akama was headed straight for Akama, so we knew the DPS race was on. I pulled one Elementalist to try and control him, but quickly got pwned (Mage Tanking ftl). And without even an order from myself or any of the Raid Leaders, I was almost instantly Battle Rezzed. Looking at both health bars, we were way ahead and killing Shade quick.

Yep, Primogeniture is now 3/9 in Black Temple.

Which Way Did He Go, George?

Last night, we stepped in to Black Temple again to go play with our friend, Supremus. We hadn't really had any solid attempts on him. Mostly just one attempt after killing Naj and before everyone needed to go to sleep.

However, last night, things happened a bit too smoothly. We almost effortlessly cleared the trash leading up to Supremus. And then we 1-shotted him in about 1/2 the time of the enrage timer. (15-minute enrage timer.) Previously, we had a hard time in the transition back to phase 2 where the tanks need to pick him up again. And he'd start killing tanks right and left since the healers had run away. So, we tried a different strategy, and needless to say, it worked.

I really hadn't planned to go any further than Supremus. He was kind of the plan for the night. But we killed him so quickly that we had to press on. I had researched the Shade of Akama fight, but it had been awhile. Furthermore, I had no idea how to actually get there or what trash mobs we would be encountering. So, from maps, I took an educated guess, and we moved towards Shade of Akama. We learned as we went, and got through the trash, and had a couple of feeble attempts at Shade of Akama.

Sometimes our guild is just too good. I really need to overprepare for the boss fights so I don't get caught looking like I did last night.

Supremus - First Looks

It must be contagious, because we seem to be having various people have either computer issues or Internet issues in the guild. Sounds like one of our dependable mages will be back tonight (even though we don't raid tonight), and we'll get one of our paly healers back as soon as her husband can figure out why her system keeps freezing up.

All of that said, we still got through Naj and got to poke a stick at Supremus last night. (I'll try to remember to upload the cool picture tonight.) Once you've cleared through Naj, there's this huge courtyard where you can see the "moon" of Azeroth, and there's a ton of Orcs and Netherdrakes. And down the way and to the right stands Supremus. Getting through the Orcs is kind of fun, but maybe it was just the excitement of actually being there.

And my first look at Supremus? He's huge. There's a lot of big bosses in the game, but for some reason, I was kind of in awe by the sight of Supremus.

The fight itself isn't too hard. He hits like a truck on the off tanks. The fire he shoots out in phase 1 is easily avoidable. It's phase 2 that was giving us some issues. He changes targets frequently, but does a Big Bad Wolf focused run towards that random target. That's not too much of an issue, but he also makes these volcanoes come up and people have to avoid him. I think on the second wipe, people understood the fight and what we needed to do, but it was already pretty late, so we had to call it. We'll kill next week.

(Note to self: post picture.. will make this post so much more enjoyable.)

Clockwork

It has always been my opinion that team sports have a huge impact on how people work together whether it is working at a place of employment or battling demons in World of Warcraft. Generally somebody that's been on an organized team can see the benefit of what's good for the whole. They also better understand the various roles that each person plays (maybe the difference between a forward and a center), and how things mesh together (think plays).

To further illustrate my point: back in High School, I played water polo. Towards the end of my high school career, things generally went smoothly among the players. We had essentially played with each other for 3 years. We knew who would make the shots from half-tank, who would lose sprints, and who would generally make great defensive plays. We didn't go undefeated or anything, but the games just felt good.

I think Primogeniture has really warped into a smooth guild. Sure, we have our off nights of low attendance or poor performance. But we generally seem to be pretty good at this point at absorbing new people into our culture and getting them to fit with our play style.

Last night was a perfect example of that. It wasn't really the fact of what we did, but how we did it. We went to go collect our weekly gems in Mount Hyjal, and the raid really felt smooth. A couple mistakes led to a wipe or two, but it didn't feel as much of a let down as it used to. We just picked ourselves up, and tried it again, knowing full well that we were going to be successful. We even got a late start, but ended Mount Hyjal way before our anticipated end time. We had a good mix of people, we had the right roles/classes... It just felt good. Even though this has only been the 3rd week we've done this, it felt like a Kara run. We were just running through, joking around, and we got the job done. It was great.

This will also free up tonight meaning that we should be able to take down the first two bosses in Black Temple. Hopefully this trend will continue. This is what guilds should be all about. It's just me hanging out with 24 friends to take down bad guys.

Internet Up and a Couple Bosses Down

As anticipated, the Installer came out on Tuesday, and he replaced the cable to my house. Apparently "up in the hills" where we live, a lot of people pass on having the cable grounded because it weakens their signal (so that's why he didn't ground it before). But the signal from the main box (or whatever) was still too weak, so they had to have another person come out to boost the signal. And yesterday, the cable company finally fixed my signal and brought me "within the acceptable range", so I once again have dependable Internet service. Yeah!

On Monday night, I decided to head over to a guildies house (he's just a couple miles away) so that I could raid. We had a couple hardware issues (my laptop couldn't connect to his network for some reason, so I used his laptop which ended up having issues with the screen, so we plugged in a spare monitor), but once those were out of the way, everything was fine. The raid itself was a success as we took down both Rage Wintherchill and Anetheron.

Just a side note: part of our strategy for taking down Anetheron involved having some dps (namely our mages) stand outside of the Carrion Swarm and focus entirely on the Towering Infernals. It really let everybody else spread out so they wouldn't get hit for the damage, and let us down the Infernals pretty quick too.

Tuesday night, I thought I would have Internet, so I didn't plan on going anywhere. When I figured out I didn't have it, I felt it was kind of too late to set something up again. I know my guild mate wouldn't have minded, but I just have that sense of security of being at home physically just in case something happens. (Yes, I'm well aware that I'm not there mentally.) So, it was off to Civ4 to destroy the Aztecs (Mongols were already dead) and set up a Defensive Pact with the Americans. There's now only peaceful-minded rulers, so I shouldn't have to fight anymore... unless I want to. :) And that might help when I'm trying to figure out where I was in that game when I pick it up again months/years down the road.

Then I was finally able to raid again last night. And what a night. We ventured in to Black Temple for the first time. We were a bit sad that there were exactly zero Hearts of Darkness, but oh well. Our focus was more to go take down High Warlord Naj'entus. And it actually wasn't too bad of a fight. I think we got him down to 30% the first attempt, 10% the next, and we completely destroyed him on the last attempt. Due to the Tidal Shield and the inevitable 8500 damage the entire raid takes when you break it with a Naj'entus Spine, we wanted everyone to be with at least 11k health. That apparently wasn't a problem for a lot of our guild. We had a few clothies (mage, warlock and priest) at 13k. But obviously, the more stam/pvp gear we used, the lower our dps was. The first attempt was learning. The second attempt was focused. And the last attempt, most of us changed out a lot of gear (shot for around 10.5k instead of as much as possible), and that was where the pwnage began. He's got an 8-minute enrage timer, and that was where we died on the previous two attempts. On the last attempt, I think we had about 2 minutes left before the enrage timer. Yeah... we destroyed him.