Lady Vashj Down

The Burning Crusade content past 3.0.2 patch is kind of a joke. Don't get me wrong, it still takes some coordination, but mostly the break-neck speed in which bosses die is just silly. We killed Lurker on our way to Lady Vashj, and he was at 50% before his first dive. The trash mobs that we used to solo kill are now all rounded up and Aoe'd.

Lady Vashj herself was a little bit of a challenge, but it was really more of a communication thing. Who's picking up this strider? Who's got the core? Where do I pass it? On our 3rd attempt last night, she was dead. Great job to Faytlynn for leading that one. I'm proud of our kill, but at the same time, saddened that we didn't get in more attempts before patch 3.0.2. (I think this is only our second night of attempts.) It's almost like I want to put it back on Heroic mode so that we could have the honorable kill, and not the easy mode. I know we could have done it. Oh well... at least she's dead and 1/2 of my Vials of Eternity quest is done.

It's kind of along the same lines as when a week ago, an ex-guildie whispered me to tell me that he had just downed Illidan. "So what?" I thought. First of all, I didn't care (he left on semi-bad terms, but also hadn't whispered me once since he left), and secondly, I knew it was less of an accomplishment.

The guild's pumped to be raiding again, so we'll see how far we can push in content before November 13th. Who knows.. maybe we'll be killing Illidan shortly. lol.

Bugs, Speed, and New Content

I think I just got out of the habit of blogging. What with Memorial Day here in the U.S. and all... yeah. But wanted to share a couple of things with the readers.

First off: Al'ar was slightly bugged for us on Sunday night. We had our paly add tank sitting up against the wall tanking the adds. In Phase 2, Al'ar would go up into his Meteor ability and then come down on our paly tank. Because he was right up against the wall, we discovered that it would consider Al'ar out of the room and reset the boss. Wow was nice enough though to also leave the adds (at 100% mind you) for us to finish off. After having Al'ar reset on us twice, we figured that maybe it was time that we tanked the adds against the ramp wall (at the bottom) instead of near the door where they're usually tanked. It was a relatively easy kill after that.

Speed: On Tuesday night, we had everybody online and invited by two minutes before start time. We had the first pull by just after 5 minutes. And we smoked through Hydross, Lurker, and Leo. It was a good night. Wednesday night was back to the old "who can we borrow" game so that we could hit 25 people. I know people have RL issues and whatnot, but I really wish we could start at 8:30 each night like is scheduled.

New Content: And with us breezing through (mostly) TK and SSC, we're going to start on Hyjal this next Monday. It's not so much about the loot as it is Hearts of Darkness and epic gems that we need/want to farm. We won't go past the second boss until we down Kael and Vashj, but we want/need to start farming the Hearts for our resist gear. And the rate we're going through these bosses, we'll hopefully have enough resist gear for everyone by the time we need it. In my opinion, the speed of the game has changed quite a bit with all the Badge Gear. While you had to farm "lower" raids for a heck of a lot longer before 2.4, now you can just get your badges and have most of your items epic'ed out and almost walk into Mount Hyjal and further. So, we want to make sure we're ready for future fights asap... hence the Hearts of Darkness farming.

Falling Behind... Again

I was off of work on a personal day and then on jury duty so I'm a bit behind as far as work goes. But wanted to post a quick update. We're now at the 3/4 TK, 5/6 SSC position. We killed Tidewalker last night. Took one attempt to figure it out (got him to 75%), and then another attempt to actually down him. Yep... we have a great group of raiders.

So, we're still determining where we want to go next. There's the obvious of Vashj and Kael, but we're also toying with the idea to take on Winterchill and start farming for Hearts of Darkness for our shadow resist sets. (Oh, and the epic gem farm after the second boss is full of win as well.) Since it's reset Tuesday, we'll venture into our "farm" content for the next few days, so we have some time to figure out our next kills.

Not So Daily Report

I'm sure all of you were sitting on the edge of your seats checking my blog every day to find out how we did on the night of Cinco de Mayo. And I left you all hanging. Bad writer. Well, I had the flu, so thinking really wasn't on my list of things to do for the past few days.

I did do some mindless grinding and questing on my druid though, and he hit level 43 (from about 39 or so). Yeah for mounts, although less of an impact since I had travel form.

Back to the subject at hand though... Monday night's raid was a pretty big success. We downed Fathom Lord Karathress with only 2 (or maybe 3 attempts (give me a break, I've been sick for 2 days)). Our kill order was Priest, Hunter, Shaman, boss. This fight is pretty similar to High King Maulgar in that the pull and positioning is about 90% of the fight. If you have the gear, once you get everyone in place, it's a pretty easy cake walk. That said, the priest frostbolted me to death, and I got to watch the rest of the fight from the ground for our first kill.

When we killed the Fathom Lord last night, it was a pretty clean sweep. It seems like a lot of sites out there tell you to leave killing the priest to last. That really doesn't seem to make sense unless you have a MT that can't generate enough agro. The additional spell that Karathress gets when you kill the priest is Tidal Surge. It basically puts melee in a ice block for 3 seconds every 10-15 seconds. But they don't lose agro and they still take damage. Seems rather harmless compared to the Spitfire Totems from the Shaman or the improved Beast Within from killing the Hunter.

Once the Priest is killed, that frees up healers to deal with the additional damage once the Hunter is dead. And if you leave the Shaman to last, you don't have to kite around Karathress when he drops the totems; you just have the raid kill them.

So, unless somebody can give supporting evidence otherwise, we're going to stick with our easy kill method of priest, hunter, and then shaman.

After only semi-success on Tuesday night (just killed Hydross), we took down Leo and Karathress in 1 shot on Wednesday night. See? It's an easy fight if you have the positioning.

The Worst Punishment

For those that aren't familiar with the Leotheras the Blind fight, he basically switches between demon form and human form every minute. About 15 seconds in to the demon phase, he'll summon people's inner demons on a few random people. Those people have to kill their own inner demons (nobody else can do damage to them) within 30 seconds, or the demon will MC them, and then the rest of the raid has to kill them. So, every 2 minutes, you have to deal with the possibility of some people getting MC'ed/killed.

It gets kind of tricky for some classes as well. Hunters and Warlocks cannont use their pets. If the pet lands the killing blow on the inner demon, then the person will get MC'ed anyway. Then there's the obviousness of not all people in a raid are used to having to do DPS.

At any rate, we've had a few people get MC'ed while fighting Leo. We've told people what to do to practice and get ready for the scenario that you get Inner Demons. So, on our forums, we started posting ideas of things for non-dps classes/specs to do to kill your Inner Demon. My "suggestion" was that any mage that did not kill their inner demon would be kicked out of the guild.

It was a rather flippant suggestion, but it got me thinking about how bad of a thing that would be. I mean, we generally value our raiders, and kicking somebody out would most likely be just a joke. There's only 1 person that I can think of that we actually kicked out of the guild.

We used to have a derogatory rank where the person could not talk in Guild Chat. Then it almost became too much of a joke (people were asking for it), so we got rid of it. It was always a joke, but when people starting asking for it, it got a bit too distracting from our purpose.

At any rate, I was trying to think of what a "horrible" punishment would be. Or what have other people done? You could always hit them in the pocketbook by making them pay x amount of gold, or else they wouldn't get invited to another raid until doing so. If you have the guildies on the sidelines, you can always sub the person out. But that seems to be more along the lines of a bad raider... which a lot of these people are not. If they live close, you can make them bake you cookies. (Okay, see? I've run out of ideas already.)

So, any effective punishments that you've seen in Wow? And no, I'm not talking about /gkicking. I'm trying to think of creative punishments. Hmm... maybe something like making the guildie kill a certain type of elementals until they've farmed a certain amount of primals. If it was a fire mage, for example (and none of our mages have gotten MC'ed yet), you'd make them farm primal fire.

Creative thoughts?

Hydross Down

There's really not much to report about last night except that we took down Hydross last night. We're really kind of steamrolling over a lot of these bosses lately. Besides the huge investment in time that we used for Al'ar, we've only taken 2 nights maximum on the next 4 boss kills.

Part of the explanation is the dedication that our guild members have to learning the fights. Part of it is the experience that some of our raid members have doing this fight already. But certainly part of it is also the new, 2.4 Badge gear that a lot of members have purchased.

I know there's at least a few guilds (that are probably about on par gear-wise with where we are) that have skipped a lot of SSC and TK because of Badge Gear and have gone straight into Mt. Hyjal. Why not? The attunement is gone, right? Well, call me more of a traditionalist, but we'll probably finish most, if not all of SSC and TK before we venture into Mt. Hyjal. And if we keep downing new bosses in 1 or 2 nights, we'll be in there in no time. :)

As evidence of how good the 2.4 Badge Gear is, and how many of our raid members have bought it... we're sharding "new" items that drop. We have all classes represented, but the items just aren't as good in a lot of cases. I'm sure we'll have Leo on farm for quite some time upgrading people's gloves, but there's a lot of upgrades that we can now skip because of 2.4 Badge Gear.

So, the point of this small tangent is: Yeah for Badge Gear. :)

Leotheras the Blind Down

I'd say we had some pretty solid play last night. Had a few different people in the instance from the previous night's attempts at Leo. Three attempts, and he was dead. Go Primogeniture. :)

I picked up up my T-5 gloves, Gloves of Tirisfal, so I now have the 2-piece bonus at my disposal. A couple nights back, I secretly went back to my mage trainer and respec'ed fire. I felt that I wasn't doing as much damage as I could/should, so I thought I'd do fire again. Well, with the 20% increase in damage and mana from Arcane Blast, I'll probably be respec'ing again. Sounds like I have a ton of +spell hit to ditch, unfortunately, most of it is in my gear, not my gems.

At any rate... only 2 days before the start of Guild Leadership Appreciation Day. How have you spread the word?

Leo Update

We brought our "B" game. We killed Lurker with some issues. Got to Leo with some issues. And then had some attempts where it was clear that not everyone had studied or listened to the strategy that we explained. We also went about 20 minutes later than normal. So, given that... maybe it was more along the lines of a "B minus" game.

p.s. Stay tuned while I finish a second post for today.

Lurker Downed

So, it's been awhile since our guild has actually been in SSC. I had forgotten about the elevators. And furthermore, I was only about 90% sure where to go to get to Lurker. (And I was leading the raid.) I was fine once we were actually in there, but was just a small reality check that it had been so long.

The plan was to take on Lurker, and then if there was time, to go play with Leo. The trash took a little longer than I expected, and I'm sure it was mostly because we were so unfamiliar with it. It took us a few attempts to actually beat Lurker, but we did it. We had enough wipe prevention in the group (Soul Stones, DI, Shammy self-rez) that we never had to walk back either.

As for our strategy, here's what we did. Phase 1 is your basic tank and spank. Jump into the water when you need to. (Note to mages: The scalding water is actually fire damage, so you can use a Fire Ward before jumping in.) In Phase 2, we had the tanks and melee take on the Coilfang Guardian, and all of the ranged DPS would take out the Coilfang Ambusher on the islands and then focus on the Coilfang Guardian. This was actually like the 3rd attempt; we tried different strategies each time. This one worked best for our raid.

We didn't have time to head over to Leo after Lurker, so we called it a night. I also realized that, never having been to Leo, I didn't know how to get there either. Not really a huge issue when we had other people in the guild that have been there, but just kinda would have sounded funny having the Guild Leader ask people where it was. Luckily, I had a pretty good idea, so I at least would have had a educated guess. :)

Detour

Last night was scheduled to be our first attempt at Magtheridon. Most of the leadership knew that we would probably wipe, but it would be a good reminder to everyone just how much gear we need. The bulk of our members are on by 8 (some much, much sooner), and we start our raids at 8:30. From all of our reading, we knew we needed at least 4 tanks (ideally 5), and probably about 3 or 4 warlocks. At 8:45, we still only had 2 tanks. So, instead of wasting everyone's time, we decided to go into Serpentshire Cavern to kill trash mobs.

The trash mobs aren't too difficult. It was really apparent that our raid, as a whole, needs a lot more stamina on our gear. (Not just the tanks which used to be the battle cry.) There's the potential to get drops of about a dozen purple patterns (blacksmithing, leatherworking, and tailoring), and about a half a dozen other purple items. While you can't completely gear up by just killing the trash, it's possible to give your raid some really nice upgrades. We did get one pattern last night that will eventually be an upgrade once the piece is made. One of our priests got the pattern for [Boots of the Long Road]. Other than that, it was just a good learning experience.

We did venture far enough in to kill all the adds around the Lurker Below, which boils the water and kills all the fish that normally eat you up fast if you fall in. You still get hit for about 500 damage per tick in the water, but that's far less then what the fish do to you. So, since we were there, we thought we'd give the Lurker Below a quick try. We got there and we started fishing (that's how you pull the boss). Apparently it can be 1 time fishing or up to about 8 minutes or so. Once we pulled him, we realized that nobody knew what to do. Lack of planning ftl on that one.

We had a good laugh, and then all three of the raid leaders that were on, started looking up strategies. We had all prepared for Mag, so we didn't even think to read up on the others. I think I sped read/skimmed fast enough to be able to explain most of the fight, with a short questions and answers session following. We tried two more times, each attempt was better, but we are still a long way away from downing the boss.

It was really a good learning experience. Like I said, a reality/gear check for most of us. And since we didn't expect much going in, everyone was in really high spirits when we left. (Nothing worse than beating your head on a boss that you've killed before, but now can't.) So, we get to keep focusing on those last few kara drops and keeping/securing Gruul's lair on farm.