Killing Ponies

Okay, so this isn't exactly breaking news. Heck, you can find all of these strategies out on Bosskillers or probably a dozen other raid strat. sites. But I'm going to talk about it anyway.

The fight is the Four Horseman. They basically all have to be "tanked" or have somebody in their aggro range or they'll do mass damage to all players in the room, essentially causing a wipe. I'm not giving details here, so if you want the actual strategy, go check out on the Internet. Another "basic" of the fight is that you can't stay near one of the Horseman for too long because they give you these marks that will cause damage and they stack. Generally you want to have no more than 4 marks. "Switches" seem to begin at about 3.

So... the strategy that we've been using is essentially have 3 people "tanking" Lady Blaumeux and Sir Zeleik in the back while the rest of the raid splits to tank Baron Rivendare and Thane Korth'azz with traditional tanking. The 2 Horseman in the back will stay in the same spots throughout the entire fight. These are the two you have to worry about mass wiping the raid if nobody's back there. The two in the front are punks, but of the two, Thane is more dangerous with his Meteor spell. Like I said, we split the raid and took out those two first, the continued on to the back 2. This strategy is pretty much the essential strategy for beginning Naxx, or lower raid DPS.

Primogeniture doesn't have low raid DPS.

For some reason, we kept having issues with this fight. Generally, it was 1, then 2, then all 3 of the "tanks" in the back. (Generally 3 healers.) Maybe we just left them back there too long, I don't know.

So, we changed to 1 tank and one healer on Rivendare (didn't we kill that guy enough when farming our blues back at 60?), the 3 in the back, and then the rest of the raid on Thane, basically making his Meteor kind of tickle and nothing more. (~52k damage split between 20 people is only about 2600 damage.) Pop all cooldowns including Heroism (or Bloodlust), and kill him before you get too many marks. I think we killed him just before 4 marks. Then head over to Rivendare, slap him upside the head, and then head to the back to finish them. Maybe it's just me, but somehow, that was way easier.

Morale of the story: if you have the raid DPS, focus, kill one at a time, and then the 4 Horseman are easy mode. This is, of course, assuming you're not going for the achievement. If that's your goal, go check out somebody else's post. (link is 10-man version)

Purples Aren't Always Upgrades

This past weekend, I started a 10-man Naxx run with my wife and other guildies as well. We downed Loatheb and the Sulfur Stave dropped. I still have the rep-based Flameheart Spell Scalpel. Blue vs. Purple. The staff must be an upgrade, right? Of course it is. I was trying move the raid along quickly, so I rolled a Need, won it, and then moved on.

But then... I looked at the full package. On my off-hand, I'm holding the Ward of the Violet Citadel. So, in wielding the Sulfur Stave, I'd lose 13 hit rating, 6 spell power, and 50 Crit. Sure, I'd gain 13 Stamina, 23 Intellect, and 89 Spirit (lolSpirit4Mages), but it's not really an upgrade. Yeah... bad mage.

Luckily, nobody else wanted it in the raid.

Except for the fact that my wife (currently running shadow on her priest) was wielding the Screw-Sprung Fixer-Upper and the Lantern of Enchanted Flame, and had also hit Need. That means she would have gained 26 Stamina, 41 Intellect, 89 Spirit (dual use as a healing priest), 59 Hit Rating, 90 Spell Power, and would have lost 21 Crit and 10 mp5. Yeah... huge upgrade. It's a good thing she really doesn't care about loot, or else I'd probably still be sleeping on the couch.

You'd think I'd understand this by now, but... Morale of the story: Just because something is purple doesn't mean it's better than your blue.

On another note, I finally got the Mark of the War Prisoner to drop from H-VH. Yeah, hit raiting!

Noth - The Loot Concealer

Ever get out of the habit of doing something, and then it kind of just stops entering your thought process? Yeah, not sure how it happened with the blog, but here I am writing again... back in the though process. At any rate...

This week, out guild headed in to Heroic Naxx to slay a few bad guys. To skip the details and get straight to the point, we killed Noth the Plaguebringer. For those that don't know the fight, he basically teleports up to his balcony every 90-180 seconds (90 the first time, 110 the second, and then 180 all subsequent times).

Well... again for brevity, he died up on the balcony. It's just a bit out of range to loot from down below. There's a couple boxes stacked below that somebody joked you could stand on top of and loot him, which didn't work.

So, we first opened a ticket. Then we checked maps to figure out how else we could get up there. We cleared all the way to the next boss, and then had to take this off the beaten path way to get up to the balcony. Once there, we didn't get the loot cursor on the mouse like you do when you can loot something, but we did get our loot. Had to waste a ton of time heading on over there though.

At any rate, this instance has basically been around for like 2 and a half years now. You'd think they would have fixed this bug feature by now. /sigh Oh well... at least we got our loot.

Gearing Up... WOTLK edition

As I am getting closer to 80 (yeah, I know... the flu bug hit me, whatever), I've started looking at all of my gear options. One of the big priorities is to get spell hit capped, or at least to approach it somewhat.

Without me having to write up a whole post on spell hit for mages, go check out Spicy Tuna's post on it. Basically, since I don't usually have a Boomkin with Improved Faerie Fire, nor a Shadow Priest with Misery, and my Dranei Elemental Shaman is now a Death Knight, I have to rely on my own talents and gear for a 14% miss rate (instead of 17%) with Elemental Precision. That means, that I need in the neighborhood of 368 spell hit to guarantee a spell hit against a boss.

368? Are you kidding me? That's a lot of hit! I'm currently at 197, and I've replaced very few pieces of gear since 70. Furthermore, a lot of my stuff is still gemmed for Arcane (Intellect and Mana Regen), so I could regem stuff since I'll either be staying Frost, or more likely going back to Fire with a side of Frost. But I also started looking at items that will help me upgrade quickly once the level restriction on items is no longer an issue.

I'm still a firm believe in Rawr, but I've fallen back on MaxDps.com a bit. Although with Rawr's latest patch of 3.1.4, they've put in filters to make it a bit more appealing again. There's still too many combination of gems if you ask me. I'm trying to look for the best item to upgrade to; that's the hard part. I'll plunk down whatever money I need to for the gems and enchants after that.

I'm not entirely sure MaxDPS has it right now either. They used to heavily lean on + hit, and now it seems like they're more towards haste. But it's still a good tool to start your search. As soon as you're running Naxx, you'll be replacing gear anyway.

So, with that said, there's a couple things that might be easy for you to get before you start your first raid.

Emeline's Locket is a guaranteed item since it's a quest reward from The Admiral Revealed. Sure you have to get a group together for the quest... and it's a fairly long "chain" if you consider all of the Icecrown quests you need to do. But after my recommendation, you were already questing there anyway, right?

The next item I would look at is the Dark Runic Mantle. It's a BoE off the Dark Runic people in Heroic Halls of Stone. You can also pick it up from the AH if you just want to give up the money. There's no + hit on this one, but it's a pretty solid shoulder piece.

As a mage, the Shroud of Dedicated Research should probably be one of your easiest upgrades. It requires you to be Honored with the Kirin Tor, and I believe we start out as friendly with them anyway. Yes, there's other upgrades, but it's a decently solid item.

I have a few options for my chest piece. I figured I'd start off with the Black Duskweave Robe since I have the mats and need to level tailoring. Then I'll upgrade that to the Robes of Lightning for the + hit (it's a quest reward for running Halls of Lightning). But then I'd really like to upgrade my chest piece to the Water-Drenched Robe which is a drop from Ichoron in Heroic Violet Hold.

So, those are some of my pre-Naxx choices. I'll take a look at some more options and let you know what I come up with. There's a lot of other options, and a lot of better ones as well, but I figured that all of these (except for the Water-Drenched Robes) were pretty eash for just about anyone to get. See? I can be "casual friendly".