Icing the Frost Queen

I’m still in shock we pulled this off. I mean, not completely, I did know it was going to happen. Mathematics demanded a kill, and we gladly complied. Still, it’s a pretty big deal for the guild that all our hard work paid off. I could not be more proud of our raiders, this was a kill we all needed to keep the faith.

We started the week with a rough patch, to say the least. Tuesday was… brutal… and we’ll leave it at that. So Wednesday we had something of a chip on our shoulders that demanded satisfaction. We buckled down and righted all the wrongs that held us back on Tuesday and still managed to get to Sindragosa with the usual 2 hours left in raid. Our game faces on, we got to work.

The first attempt was ok. We had a flawless first air phase, then a disastrous second. The second attempt we did immaculately until the third air phase, then the attempt collapsed. Shaking the rust off, as we say.

Subsequent attempts were so-so, generally requiring battle rezzes to be used in air phases, which was killing me. At least at this point we were hitting phase 3.

Finally after another attempt where the same mage (who I don’t often bring, but was dragging along as an Unchained Magic human shield) died for the umpteenth time to a Frost Bomb, I removed him from raid–something I should had done attempts ago–and brought in a newly recruited shadow priest.

Around this point we also imposed some pretty severe discipline onto vent. Basically, the rule became in phase 3: no talking unless it’s a healer announcement, a tank swap, or something life threatening. Everyone else just focus and lock it down. I think this was a huge key to our success.

The next attempt we got the fight to 7%. It was going fantastically, but Ana was cut off from heals momentarily and died, and then I went to pick it up but was eventually rocking way too much buffet stacks. Still, everyone was filled with hope. There was not a single air phase death that attempt. There was even a great raid awareness moment where a block got dropped the opposite way from where we were taking them, and everyone got out of the way, and then we kept the correct direction going afterwards. All in all, the mojo seemed to be back.

So we lined up again, and after a quick stupid wipe, we did what was destined to be the money shot. Air phases were nearly perfect, we had one death because someone was DC’d, but we kept going. Phase 3 starts and I get to work. Ana and I swap like clockwork, blocks go down with expert precision, healers are calling out roles and switches through vent without interruption. Finally we hit the single digits and it’s just gogogo time.

The enrage timer was ticking down, leaving us about a minute at that point. Everyone just pushed it as hard at they could and as I watched Sindy’s health slowly tick away from 3%, to numbers I never dreamed could lie beyond that. The “holy bleep” moment of “this is going to die” hit me in a euphoric wave, and then the Frost Queen crashed over dead and coughed up her purples.

I scored the 277 token from her for a hefty, hefty amount. Worth it nonetheless. Everyone was elated, and for some reason we rode that high over to heroic Putricide just to throw in some faux-attempts and get some idea of the mechanics of the fight.

Obviously we didn’t get very far. This is indeed our next dragon to slay, so to speak. I look forward to our coming weeks together, Putricide.

Oh, and as a humorous sidenote: remember how I said I was going to start rolling for Abom Duty? Well, prior to the first pull Ana, Nordic, and I rolled off for the right of riding the Abom. Nordic always wins, and I thought I finally had him when he rolled an 11. I then rolled a 6. Ok, well, Ana could be our last hope, right? Wrong. She also rolled a 6!

Curse you Nordicslayer.

Nonetheless, with five minutes left in raid we swapped it over to normal mode and quickly did the achievement in preparation for our eventual drakes scramble.

Great raid night overall, and a fantastic end to an ignominiously beginning week.

TIL: The Putricide Abom is a lot of fun

Why wasn’t I told?!

10man last night and I was tanking with Morvain, the Death Knight with the cat problem, and when we got to Putricide there was a moment of pause. Usually Nordic just takes the Abom, or him and Ana roll off for it in the 25man. And yet last night, on a whim, I decided to take it for a spin.

I knew the long and short of it: mash 1 when standing on a puddle, 2 to slow (though we were doing the achievement, so no slows), and apply sunders with 3. I spent the fight running around, gulping puddles, and applying sunders as needed. And I had a blast. It was a nice change of pace over just ducking around with the good Professor in tow.

I need to start ninjaing that job in the 25man.

The rest of the night we wrapped up some outstanding achieves that various people needed, like a Heroic Blood Princes kill for Gulliveig, and Portal Jockey for myself.

We then moved on to Sindragosa to finally put away the heroic kill. It took us three shots but we finally got the old girl down (in 10man at least). One of my main goals last night was to use the spinning strategy and to prove to myself that it can be done, and that it doesn’t hamper the raid. It seemed overall to be a huge help, if only to keep blocks uniform, so I’ll remain firmly in the “pro-spinning” column.

We had issues with the enrage timer because we’d lose a dps here or there in phase 3 to what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds. Namely, Chilled to the Bone being stacked too high. I’m sympathetic to the idea that if the healers can get you, you’re golden, but crunch times happen, Unchained can be unkind, and healing might be stretched. And then suddenly having so many stacks of that debuff is going to kill you.

In any case, good practice for Wednesday I hope.

With the heroic Sindy kill, a bunch of us got our drakes. (This is the part where Ana comments “MONTHS BEHIND!”) It’s a nice achieve to have, but I don’t particular care for a boney dragon. I’ll probably still to my Rusted Proto for now, I like the cut of his gib far more. Is that weird?

Been waiting a long time for all you can eat

Another step closer to getting my ICC drake, as we wrapped two of the harder achievements in the 10man meta last night. One was the terrifying All You Can Eat, the other the endurance-testing Been Waiting a Long Time for This. With these two under my belt I need only Portal Jockey and a heroic Sindragosa kill, and I’m golden. Or… boned… in this case.

And yes, I know Ana’s team has had their drakes for a few weeks now. But Team Alpha is all about catch up! It’s how we roll.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s talk about how we did each achievement.

All You Can Eat

The first attempt we did for this achievement was using a zerg strategy that Anafielle had touted in the past. I’m always very wary of zergs, and this was no exception. Having one healer get consistently Unchained was not fun, and having two mainspec healers go to offspec roles that they don’t typically raid with didn’t help either. We quickly wiped.

So we started doing it the non-cheese way. For the next two hours (and I know it was two hours because we had trash respawn), we kept breezing through phases 1 and 2 and then crashing hard in phase 3. People would stack a debuff too high and die, or blocks would go in the wrong place (since we were trying to keep them close to the head)… in short, it was a series of clusterfarks.

A lot of us were tired, some were hungover, and basically the general raid wasn’t operating at peak efficiency. I was questioning whether this was going to happen.

After the trash respawned, I had a brain storm: positioning blocks and getting them in the ideal spot seem to be our biggest issue, so why not change how we drop blocks? We’ll drop that first block in that ideal spot, and then every time we need to put down a new block, the tank rotates Sindragosa slightly so that a new ideal block spot opens up to the left of the existing block. Then there’s a close, pristine block to hide behind for the tank swap, and dps can instantly identify which block to nuke down.

Here’s a terrible diagram (nothing to scale) to demonstrate my crazy talk:

Sindragosa starts with her face at position A. First block goes down just to the right of her face where that white dot is. Next time someone gets frost beaconed, the current tank rotates Sindragosa to a point halfway between A and B, and the block goes to the next white dot. Old block is burnt down, raid has a close block to hide behind, and dps still have access to Sindragosa’s stomach.

Just crazy enough to work, I thought. And anything else was preferable to the same old that we were doing and wiping with for so long.

So we tried this new strat, and got the achievement on the first try with it.

I’m so going to try this strategy with our 25 heroic run on Wed.

Anyway, some other helpful tips–and apparently I’m the last one to know this–but if you’re LOS’d at the 2 second mark on your Buffet debuff, it’ll fall off. So you can start running at the 1 second mark, which gives you a whole ‘nother two seconds to beat feet and relieve the other tank so they can drop their debuff. Moreover, the RaidAchievement addon is amazing for this. Will instantly tell you if someone screws it up so you don’t kill Sindragosa and miss the achievement because some dope wasn’t watching their debuffs.

Been Waiting a Long Time for This

We went into this achievement with an equal mix of tiredness (it was 30 minutes before raid end), confusion, and ignorance about the mechanics of the achievement. After talking with Ana about the rules (you need to get >30 stacks and hold that til transition) it became obviously that no one did their homework. Thankfully, Ana is an achievements expert.

So anyway, first attempt we did the first phase like normal, stacking diseases and just holding off transition, and by the time the disease got to about 20 it started murdering ghouls instantly. The disease fell off and we had to wipe.

Again, didn’t do our homework! We consulted Ana and she explained with great patience that we should RTFA and actually do the strategy: basically, cleanse the first disease far away so it doesn’t pass to the group or the mobs, then dispel the second disease onto the mobs, then after that dispel the rest of the diseases far away so no one gets it.

You skip the first disease so you can gather up the first wave of ghouls, giving you time to build up a solid base of fodder for the plague. I know this now because on our next attempt the first person to get the plague forgot and ran to the mobs. Diseased passed onto the mobs, and we just shrugged and kept going. But the plague hit >20 stacks, it was quickly murdering mobs left and right. We had the LK at 72%, and held him there, and I frequently had to run back to him and get the disease passed either to a freshly spawned ghoul or to a teammate to keep it alive.

Utter chaos.

Finally, we had it up to 32, and pushed LK hard. We finally pushed him over with the disease on someone at 31 stacks, it got cleansed, passed to ghoul that somehow survived, I pulled them aside on the edge as we worked through the transitions. Each ghoul dropped dead in short order, then I self-cleansed the plague off of me, removing it from the fight.

We then went back to autopilot through LK10, eventually downing the fight with the only moment of difficulty being when Gandy the Rogue accidentally overshot the ledge while his rocket boots we active and plummeted to his death. We almost wiped because people started laughing, but Frank whipped everyone back into line.

Towards the end, I was eyeing the enrage timer nervously. We were down one rocket man dps and had about 3 minutes left at the 30% mark. My fears abated, we hit 10% with 1:30 to go. …I so did not want to have to play plague-juggling again.

This achievement is definitely easier than the Sindragosa one, but the tradeoff is it’s a much bigger pain.

And now that both of those are done, time to start worrying about Sindragosa 10H for next week…

More smooth sailing, &c.

I love Tuesday nights right now. Thanks to the Icecrown buff we are sailing right through 11 of the 12 bosses (which even a month ago seemed an impossible task for a single night), racking up huge chunks of loot, and everyone is in a fantastic mood, joking and having fun.

Apparently our server isn’t doing too well as we head into the summer, one of the major raiding guilds on the server has been completely stalled due to attendance, another from their Shadowmourne guy going on hiatus immediately after getting his legendary (ouch), leading to further hiatuses, followed up by one of the officers emptying out the bank and server transferring.

We’re oddly one of the more active Horde guilds in ICC25 man, which has lead to us getting a few pretty good apps from said disaffected guilds. I will gladly pick those bones, tyvm.

Fuh-nee

Two new guild in-jokes started up fairly recently. One of them, playing on my quickness to stressing out over the roster and other guild management issues, involves my imaginary ulcer being given the name Frank. So now whenever someone does something death-defying or otherwise gives me a quick jolt of stress I let them know that “Frank says hi.”

The other, actually funny one, deals with Zilga (one of the priests) and her jingle about poor dragon positioning and cleaves–Zilga’s gonna eat a cleave, doo da, doo da. On Spinestalker, the last drake before Sindragosa, I’ll drag it up the steps and chase Zilga around attempting to get it to cleave her. She then proceeds to taunt me with “I’ve been cleaved by better tanks than you!” So that’s our little game now.

Last night I also had the opportunity to bring three new raiders into ICC to try them out and get them some gear (again, I love that buff). One of them, a Rogue, did some ridiculous dps on many fights, placing in the top 5 despite being in 245-251 gear. He then over the course of the night picked up seven upgrades. I expect him to be a beast tonight on our LK attempts.

Also tried out a Demo Lock for the first time, something the casters have been lobbying for forever. Unfortunately our top two caster dps weren’t on last night, so I won’t be able to ask how they thought of having some extra SP.

Speaking of sailing

After raid, Morvain and I dragged a group to Uld-10 so we could finish the last achievement for our Rusted Protos. After one full go across Razorscale’s 10 minute enrage timer and then a minute into the next attempt we finally managed to roast the 25th Iron Dwarf we needed for the achievement.

Done and done.

I finished up the night by dragging a few more people into MC for my weekly dose of disappointment re: Thunderfury. And, of course, alas, no binding. Nordic taunted me with the fact he ran the place this weekend (he needs the opposite binding from me) and the one I am seeking dropped. I died a little on the inside. Ok, understatement–I died a lot on the inside

And speaking of slow deaths, more LK-25 attempts tonight! If I post about the kill tomorrow you’ll know it went well (obviously), if silence … er, send flowers.

Azeroth was screwed

At Azeroth’s darkest moment, it depended on a motley crew of about 20 heroes (and that is questionable) to defeat Archimonde and keep him from destroying the world tree. I pity the world if they really were saved by the group of people I joined in Hyjal on saturday night. The pug consisted of about seven people from my guild, six from a 70-capped raiding guild called Glory Days, and a smattering of other random 80s.

It must have been a full moon or something, because there were some colorful personalities in that pug. The leader spent the entire raid falling behind and taking forever to dispense loot. There was a ret pally who was constantly screaming in all caps for a SUMMON to Hyjal, or for some friend of his to be SUMMONED, or for him to be SUMMONED because he fell off a cliff. I use all caps because that’s how communicated, petulantly and in a demanding, infantile manner. I wanted to reach through the Internet and slap him.

He must have been some 12 year old kid spending a saturday night being babysat by the Internet, because I can’t imagine a high-functioning adult could ever behave in the way he did. It’s just not possible.

When we were meeting in the Night Elf village to head down to Archimonde, the warlock ran off the cliff, somehow aggro’d Archimonde, was one shot, and then caused the boss to immediately kill everyone in the zone. I was standing up next to Tyrande, saw everyone suddenly drop dead and a golden sheath of light burst from me. “Oh, hey, AD procced.”

Once we pulled it became obvious that, of course, many of the assembled dopes didn’t get their tears and eventually fell to their deaths. It was fun watching the squares on grid of each mouth-breather one by one turn grey to reflect their easily prevented-demise.

And let’s talk for a second about the stupidity of this strict-70 raiding guild that organized the run. How are you a strict TBC raiding guild when you depend on 80s to carry you through lvl 70 content? Like the old robot adage goes, “does not compute.” Basically they organized the run (and I use that word as loosely as possible), took all the loot they wanted since they could make the loot rules, barely contributed (if at all–most of the mouth-breathers were wearing Glory Days tags), and then when we finished were like “ok, let’s go to Sunwell!” I could not drop group faster.

5/8

After we fled that clusterfark, those of us that went to Hyjal continued our bored old-school raiding antics and went to BWL at someone’s suggestion. I am always game for BWL because I’m trying to compile a full Judgement set. After scoring the Judgement Spaulders off of Chromaggus that night, I’m now at 5/8. Just the chest, boots, and belt to go. I think my ultimate goal is to assemble the full judgement gear, my Thunderfury (still waiting on your binding, Garr, you jerk), and some equally awesome shield, and then (if this is possible with the new system) queue up for a random Stratholme and run some levelers through the place. It will be bewilderingly awesome, especially since as an 80 nothing will be able to hit me for much, regardless of what gear I’m wearing.

Three more Kingslayers

Last night finally saw the end to the latest 10man lockout I’ve been running. I do a 10man once a week in ICC and we usually just extend the lockout until we finish it up, then shake the roster up a bit. My big goal for this lockout was to get the LK kill for some people that run in other groups, so we could have a second 10man doing hardmodes and getting some 264 loot. Now that that’s done, the next lockout I run will be more focused on hard mode progression and less on another LK kill.

Our second LK kill wasn’t anymore difficult than the last one, I think we got him on the fifth attempt or so. Defiles are pretty much cake once you get everyone focused and hyper aware (though, I say this in 10man, where I can weed out those incapable of paying attention) and Valks are a non-issue with a 15% buff. We had some initial trouble with Infest, but that’s only because we were so used to having our pro disc healer neutralizing them before they ever became an issue. How complacent we were.

I’m mostly looking forward to taking my guild into the 25man version of this fight, but also terrified at the thought of it. We’ll see how it goes when the time comes for the greater group of us to face down Arthas.

Three years in the making

Happy birthday Gulliveig!

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t wish a very happy birthday to my pal, Gulliveig.

Check out the cake my girlfriend (she of the Rhidach Cake) made for his birthday party Friday:

A pug shaman surrounded by troll totems. Celebrating his two loves–pugs and shamanism. That pug face is kind of haunting, though.

Many happy returns, buddy.

A weekend of achievement

I’m delaying the UI post one day so I can tweak some things tonight. It will go up tomorrow! In the meantime you can see my new UI in these screenshots.

Friday we were supposed to wrap up ICC-10 and finally kill the Lich King. Hell, I even named the calendar event “The Dethroning”. I was going all in on any possible, and probable, jinxes. Unfortunately, raid didn’t happen. One invited person didn’t show and two couldn’t make it. And those in guild were either severely undergeared or all ready saved. To salvage the night we instead went for some good ol’ fashioned Uld10 hardmodes.

They went last weekend (when I wasn’t around) and cleared up to Firefighter but couldn’t down that fight. So Friday we started on Mimiron and after finally managing to scrape up a healer (one of our super geared raid healers came on) we were good to go. We then defied our expectations and easily one-shot Firefighter. The glories of severely overgearing an encounter!

With that easily acquired feather in our caps, we then double backed and opened up Algalon’s lair. Because, why not? We had the keys, none of us had ever seen the fight, it would only take an hour max. Might as well take a few whacks at it.

Algalon is, to put it lightly, a very intense fight. I can only imagine what it was like to do this when it was end-game content rather than the playground of a pack of drunkards. There are multiple counters letting you know when different dooms are going to befall your raid, the least of which was definitely not the Big Bang. The way we ended up handling that was Morvain, the DK, would tank initially then when I picked it up from him, after my first phase punch, the first Bang would occur.

I’d get hotted up and a everyone would go in a black hole and the hit would typically proc Ardent Defender, and the hots would push me back up to nearly full health immediately afterward. The second one Morvain would take, using a guardian spirit for similar effect. The third I would have AD back for, so I’d eat it and maybe pop Divine Protection if I got uncomfortable.

We did a bunch of attempts just working out the various mechanics, usually wiping to some little mistake that would kill someone and then domino effect into a wipe. That would lead to us quickly sprinting back to our corpses ASAP to get another lick in.

With about 30 minutes to go I was getting a bit nervous if we were going to get it that night. Then that attempt everything clicked, I guess, and we pushed it to the sub-20% phase for the first time. Suddenly waves of enemies were appearing and Morvain and I just went crazy taunting as much as we could. In a blur, Algalon dropped combat with us and then went into his monologue. It was pretty cool to get to see the fight, let alone kill it, however cheap the victory might have been.

Also, Algalon is hands-down the most beautiful boss encounter I have ever seen.

After Algalon I started debating with myself which Keeper I wanted to send down for One Light. Normally you’d want Thorim to get rid of the Immortal Guardians, but at our gear levels Phase 3 would probably go by really quickly, and I would be capable of holding a huge number of the guardians. As long as I kept them far enough away to prevent Yogg from getting free heals. I was trying to talk myself out of sending down Freya who would bend the difficulty curve a bit by giving us sanity wells.

I eventually settled on sending down Freya, dooming that lockout perhaps. Nonetheless, during my epic wasting of time up top running back and forth between Freya, everyone continued to clear down to Vezax. Once I got down there we finished off the trash and then went on to one-shot Vezax’s hardmode with little difficulty.

The real challenge was, as I suspected, Yogg. And not because of the hardmode. A lot of us were tired, some of us were clumsy, others rusty. It was pretty late and we kept stalling on the normal mechanics of the fight. People not getting out of the brain room in time and getting mind controlled, not enough dps being done to the brain, etc. If it was earlier in the night, I doubt that fight would have been much trouble. We ended up calling it at midnight, server time because a few had to go.

On the last attempt, as we were wiping, I ran into a portal to check off at least one the visions from my In His House He Lays Dreaming achievement. The wages of being a tank, eh? Certain achievements you usually have to finagle or trick your way into getting, like Hot Pocket or Denyin’ the Scion or Take Out Those Turrets, or snatch them mid-wipe.

Then yesterday was, in addition to Easter, the beginning of Noblegarden. The latter being the last holiday I needed to get my Violet Proto. And of that holiday I only needed three achievements: Chocoholic (I was 25/100 on this), Desert Rose, and Spring Fling. So in the morning I buckled down and headed over to Falconwing Square, which was crawling with pink bunnies darting from egg to egg and I was immediately reminded why I hated Noblegarden so much.

I eventually just camped in one spot in Falconwing that had near me three to four different eggs, and just darted between the four spawns grabbing them as they popped. Eventually my eyes started to bleed, so I bought the Spring Robe for Desert Rose and moved on to Brill, determined just to do Spring Fling and not hunt anymore eggs.

Then I saw how nearly deserted Brill was and what easy pickings the eggs there could be. I found another fruitful camping spot and hung out for a while, getting enough eggs to finally put me over the top for Chocoholic. From there I finished up my epic rabbit breeding journey and then did a quick tour of the various dry spots in Azeroth. Finally I finished up the last achievement of the last holiday I needed for What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.

I’m so glad that’s over.

… I should do Noblegarden on my druid if I’m going to use him in Cataclysm. Ugh.

The undying ghosts of the past

Note: This actually happened last weekend, I just let this sit in drafts for a while.

The very first time we tried Undying it was on a whim, a drunk Naxx run that we suddenly realized was going perfectly. We kept going through each wing until we reached Kel’Thuzad. Seconds from victory, one of our raidmembers (while very inebriated) died in a voidzone.

The second time we tried, months later, we got up to Sapphiron before one of the healers forgot you need to hide behind the iceblocks and was killed by a frost bomb.

The third time, a few weeks ago, I didn’t have my pet frame enabled, couldn’t quickly dismiss my mind controlled Student on Razuvious, and a warlock got killed. Raz died from dots before we could make a break for it.

Fourth time, we did it on a whim after a drunk Ulduar run and managed to fail on the second attempted boss (Sapphiron) because someone was too far to the left of an iceblock and couldn’t LoS the frost bomb.

Saturday night we went to Naxxramas for the fifth time to attempt an Undying run. With seven people: myself, two healers, and four dps (with one dps a possible OT).

We started on Razuvious, with me double checking my pet frame was active, and dropped him with no trouble. Considering each dps in the raid was doing 2-3 times the dps that someone was doing when Naxx10 was progression, that wasn’t much of a worry. Our main concern was making sure no one died to environmental hazards during boss fights.

After Raz we ported up to Saph to drop the two “hardest” bosses in the raid. When Saph died I’m sure you can imagine my relief, considering so many of our attempts have ended with her. After the dragon we took out KT, though that was a bit more stressful than I thought it would be. I knew we generally would have no issues, but I was still getting constant flashbacks every time a purple ring formed on the floor or someone got trapped in an ice tomb.

It didn’t help that DBM added this awful noise whenever someone got ice tombed–like a “woooo-ong… woooo-ong”. Very unnerving to say the least!

So KT was dead and we were raid for some less stressful fights. Or, at least, less stressful to me. Everyone seemed to be having a great time while I was seeing spots and grinding my teeth down into nubs.

The rest of the run went generally smoothly with only a few bumpy spots. Our biggest hurdles (or so we imagined) were going to be Heigan and Thaddius. For the former, it wasn’t bad at all, despite the fact that all the damn casters made me and the two melee do the dance rather than just camping on the platform for most of the encounter. Somehow I managed to not screw up all the dancing and we got through all right.

Once Plague was cleared it was on to Construct for what we assumed would be a straight run to Thaddius. And then we remembered. Gluth.

We had one tank and one dps switching to tank here and there. Moreover, there were only seven of us total. How the hell were we going to kite adds and pull off a tank switch.

As we stood on the pipe, eating the slow ticks of damage from the slime, the answer came to me. The offtank, Morvain, would kill zombies and I would solo tank Gluth myself. Once the stack hit 10, it should fall off rather than renewing, and I was pretty sure I could hold out that long.

How wrong I was.

We started the fight and I’m watching my stacks steadily climb, hitting about 80% healing reduction by the time the first Decimate was approaching. My first instinct was to bubble off the stacks, and I suppose I got lucky because I bubbled right as Decimate hit, didn’t take any damage, and yet my stacks continued to climb. In short order they were at a full 10 (and, eek, not falling off) and I was at 84% health. For the rest of the fight I basically dodged/block/parried/and absorbed (thanks to disc shields) every incoming hit. I never dropped below 80%.

So despite the odds we managed to pull that one out pretty smoothly. Likewise, Thaddius went according to plan with some minor dps pacing issues on Fuegen/Stalag and then I guess at some point during the fight someone got zapped denying us the achievement for that. Ah well. Nonetheless, no deaths and we marched onward.

At this point we started to debate our next step. It was obvious the biggest hurdle now was going to be doing Four Horsemen with seven people. Finally, we decided to bite the bullet and head right for 4HM, doing spider wing last. One way or another Undying would end on that fight.

We ended up bringing in the pally healer’s fiance, a warlock, for some extra dps since we were stretching ourselves out so badly. Two priests went in the back, as heals, and healed themselves. In the front Morvain tanked Baron and I tanked Thane with the rest of the dps plus the pally healer. As soon as the fight started we burnt down Thane very quickly, so I yanked Baron off Morvain so he could go to the back and relieve them. We burnt the Baron down, then fled to the back to kill the remaining two Horsemen.

Once Zeliek dropped we got an interesting surprise.

Considering we hadn’t cleared Spider wing yet, looks like the achievement is bugged a tad. I wonder what the requirements are? KT and 4HM? Sapph, KT, and 4HM? Everything but Spider wing? Who knows!

At this point I was feeling a little hollow about the achievement. It wasn’t bad enough we severely outgeared the place, but it was just adding insult to injury that the damn achievement was bugged. Nonetheless, we went and cleared Spider with no deaths, scoring our Dedicated Few achievements in the process.

Perhaps not as epic as it would have been pre-3.1, but it was pretty fun overall. And it’s nice we finally put that nagging desire to nab Undying to rest, finally.

Highs and lows

Low point

On Saturday I was struck with the desire to bring my lvl 65 hunter (my very first WoW character, rolled the day after the game was released) out and try to finally get him going again. I bought 145 emblems worth of heirloom items, paid for normal flying, and then tried to figure out how to play a hunter again. I lost interest immediately.

High point

Rolled a new warlock instead–yes, this is on top of my other alts: the 42 druid, the 41 shaman, the 48 mage, the 80 DK–I have Alt-ADHD.

Spent the better part of yesterday leveling it with Cendra’s new rogue. Was pretty fun, and I love all the spells it has at such a low level. I’ll probably play it until 40 or so and then get bored.

Low point

Saturday I threw together a somewhat impromptu Undying run. Razuvious was the raid weekly this week, so turns out half the people invited were saved already. Finally decide we’ll just 8 man it, everyone’s pumped for a fun drunk raid, and we go to do Razuvious first. While manning one of the Understudies, my pet frame was turned off and I couldn’t drop mine in time to save Zilga’s from dying. I pick Raz back up, we’re doing good, last 10% of health. Then I lose aggro, Razuvious runs over and instagibs a poor warlock and then before we can all flee to reset, the boss dies. I screwed up Undying on the first boss.

High point

Went and did ToGC-10 instead, finished it with 48 attempts left. Got a few upgrades for the warlock, who I hope will start raiding soon. One for the win column, overall.

Low point

After that tried a late ICC-10 alt run. Never got past Marrowgar because people couldn’t switch to spikes or avoid dying in the fire.

High point

No one got saved to a fail run.

Low point

Didn’t kill Putricide last night in ICC-10 (mains run).

High point

On our best attempt we got him to 26% and there was a marked improvement every attempt that didn’t have some crazy RNG screw up early on (ie, every “real attempt”). We definitely could have killed him with a lot more time.

Also, as you might have guessed, we killed Roface on 10man for the first time. We had a third healer in the group switch to actual heals for the fight and it reduced a lot of the “one healer dead = wipe” issues we had last week. Our first try we wiped at 7%, second at 1%, third a clean kill with no deaths. Was a thing of beauty.

Low point

Went into an AV yesterday to drop a Great Feast and score my Dinner Impossible achievement. Someone asks if there’s a tank and some tool responds he can tank it. Another guy says “Rhidach has 51.1k” (no wasn’t me) and the tool retorts “I’ll out threat him and live longer.” I kept trying to type in /raid a witty riposte (“Oh ho ho, so you think …”) but I failed to realize that you use /bg to talk in the battleground raid channel. I lose my chance to salvage my ego.

High point

I haunted him the whole way to Vann where he pulled and after a few seconds I pulled aggro by out tpsing him. He taunted back, the healers didn’t have enough time to react, and he died. And I lol’d. Oh, how I lol’d.

Interrupting the Council, and some achievs fun

After Tuesday’s lagtastic night we had downed the first five bosses of ICC, leaving us Rotface and the Blood Council as Wednesday’s agenda. I admit, I was full trepidation, our Rotface kill last week was a bit messy and I was worried we’d get bogged down in that fight.

The first attempt though alleviated a lot of my worry, we got him to 17% on the first go, and that was with a snafu involving someone’s first time on the fight and them not realizing they got infected. So, messy finish, but hopeful nonetheless. Second attempt we got him down to 12%, mainly due to another ooze issue where a second Big Ooze got made and it ate a few people. Third time, however, was the charm and despite everyone going to hell at 5% we got Rotface down. Very exciting.

I don’t want to say to say the “f” word just yet (er, I mean farm), but we’re definitely getting there.

With Rotface down the time came to go put some attempts in on the Council (my thinking being we’d have more success against them than against Putricide). So happily off to the Blood Wing we trudged and lined up for a trash pull.

The trash before the Blood Council is… interesting. It requires strategy and–believe it or not–crowd control. For the two huge packs before the Blood Council’s stage we ended up shackling one guy and trying to use hunters to take one of the Tacticians out of commission. The Tacticians (basically Rogues) suck. They pop in out of no where, sap a tank, making him drop aggro, and then the mobs run roughshod over everyone. Definitely do what you can to burn down the Tacticians one at a time while the other is controlled.

Once we cleared out the trash we were ready for some potshots on the Council.

The fight itself isn’t too awful, it just requires a lot of juggling, so to speak. There’s the shock waves, the beach ball, the conjured flame, and the dark nuclei all to contend with. The fight is a huge orchestra of different clashing cacophonies, and the point of the fight is to get everyone to herd those dangers into one smooth harmony. Not as hard as it seems, but we spent the rest of the night learning everything that can go wrong (as is our usual habit) which lines us up for a kill next week.

Some things I learned:

• When Valanar is empowered and casts his shock wave you have 4.5 seconds not to run away, but you find your own spot away from other melee. When the cast time ends a shock spot appears under you and explodes for a chunk of damage. The trick is to be by yourself so you don’t get hit by other shocks.
• When someone gets chased by an empowered Conjure Flame they need to run for it (this means all ranged need to be at max range from Taldaram) and wave through everyone around them. Every time the Conjured Flame incidentally hurts people around it, it will do less damage when it explodes. So the kiter should take it through ranged, burn as many stacks as possible, and then explode it with them 15 yards away from everyone.
• The ranged tank on Keleseth has a really hard job.

Some things I read today that I wish I knew last night:

• It might make more sense for a melee tank to deal with Keleseth in the 25 man. If he gets into melee on the ranged tank (especially while empowered) that poor ranged will go splat. I think next week I’m going to try to tank him and Demo can take Valanar and Purraj (the druid) can get Taldaram. It’d be a boon for raid dps at the very least.
• If you sic a hunter’s pet on a beachball the pet will stand under it, wait for it to get low, and then hit it enough to send it up in the air. This will trivialize the beachballs.

Pretty complicated seeming fight, but once we get the hang of it, it should be cake. I’m looking forward to trying it next week.

Speaking of months behind!

Probably the more exciting thing last night was the last minute achievement burst I was inspired to do. Before raid I gathered some buddies (Cendra, Ildara, Gulliveig, Gandy) and we jumped over to Gundrak to try to do Less-Rabi. The strategy I outlined was gently get him to 51%, interrupt the next transform, then bloodlust and push to the kill while throwing interrupts like nuts at the 5 second mark.

I pulled and after the first transform he was already at 41% health. I boggled a bit but kept going. Somehow, not sure, we nailed the next interrupt which must have been a millisecond long since it took place at like 10% health. Moorabi dropped before he knew what hit him. So, Less-Rabi done and two more to go: Share the Love and Amber Void.

Since we were already in Gundrak we finished the place up to get to the last boss and then Gandy jumped on his DK to initially tank at first. Once I got impaled I took over and held him for the rest of the fight. After about three rhino phases everyone was impaled and we dropped the boss and grabbed the achiev. That was the last one Cendra and Ildara needed for Glory of the Hero so I dropped a mailbox for Cendra so he could retrieve his Red Proto, which was then the 100th mount he needed for Mountain of Mounts. Crazy achievement day for Cen!

After the raid we then headed over to Oculus so I could grab my last Glory of the Hero achievement, Amber Void. It was a quick run (as Oculus is stupid-simple now) and it wasn’t long before a Proto was also waiting in my mailbox.

Now to help Gul get his Glory achievement.

Let’s talk tankey… er, turkey

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.

I’m finally back from my work trip to the Czech Republic (beautiful country, btw) and ready to get back into the blogging swing of things.

When I logged on this morning at 6:30 am, riddled with jet lag, I discovered it was Thanksgiving in game. Completely slipped my mind that I’d be coming back during a new holiday. Anyhoo, I ran through most of the achievements this morning, and I have some Pally-themed advice for those of you burning through the achievs as well.

The Turkinator is a bit rough, and more easily done on a low pop server or early in the morning/late at night when no one is on (like 6:30 in the morning perhaps). For us Paladins, the easiest way to do this is first make the following macro:

/target Wild Turkey
/cast Hand of Reckoning

Then do a circuit of Tirisfal Glades (or Elwynn Forest, if you’re into that sort of thing) and just mash whatever hot key you bound that macro to until 40 birds bite the dust.

For Tirisfal I recommend this path:

You should run into more than enough birds to complete the achievement just following the pink line. Moreover, I hear the area south of Scarlet Monastery has tons of birds, if you want to frontload your count a little.

I have no idea where the best turkey spots are in Elwynn (being a Hordie). If anyone could suggest for our Alliance friends an optimal path, I’d appreciate it.

Now, I need to start checking out what I’ve missed on mmo-champ. I’m sure lots has happened in my absence.