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.

Months behind, but we still had fun

Late Friday night a couple of us were online and bored. After throwing out a couple of options someone suggested a good old fashion drunk raid, and the responsibility was passed onto me to decide where to go. After some thinking, I decided that we’d finally put to rest an old bugbear that’s haunted us since 3.1: Yogg-Saron.

You might recall from my 2009 in review meme response that my biggest disappointment from the previous year was that the guild never killed Yogg-Saron, mostly because our raid organization was a little more than slightly askew back them. Now, months behind, we were going to do something about it. The plan was to skip worrying about achievements, just go in, kill Yogg, and get out before we all passed out from lateness and alcohol poisoning.

And thus, with a gin and tonic in one hand (yes, I have the drinking taste of an elderly British colonialist) and a mouse in the other, I headed into the titanic prison for the first serious raid in a long time.

This rules were simple, generally following the old Naxx rules: socials after boss kills, when a green dropped whoever won the disenchanted mats could instruct someone else to drink, if you died you drank, if you were b-rezzed you had to finish your drink before you accepted it, if you looted a gray armor/weapon you drank.

We took a pretty direct path, rolling over Flame Leviathan, downing the hard-mode XT somewhat by accident, dropping Kologarn while attempting to solo tank it and skip adds, then killing Auriaya and Hodir (drink if you forgot frost resist gear! … and everyone drinks) in short order. On Thorim we accidentally did the hard mode, even while splitting the group down the middle regardless of how much dps was on either side.

Nordicslayer, usually a dps warrior, and he of not-so-Undying fame, tanked the hallway. Towards the end someone warns him not to stand in the runes being cast and he calls out in vent, half-panicked, “no one said there’d be voidzones!!” He was playing to his reputation, but definitely one of the funnier moments of the night.

The funniest, hands down, though was in Freya’s room. At the entrance, someone of course let go the guild motto of “It’ll only take twenty minutes!” We all laugh and start clearing. Finally, after slogging through all the trash and a somewhat messy job on Freya an achievement pops up. Con-speed-atory, what the hell is that? We all click it and the description comes up: “Defeat Freya within 20 minutes of the first creature you kill in the Conservatory of Life in 10-player mode.”

It actually took 20 minutes. I had to excuse myself so I could go convulse with laughter in the other room. I almost lizzed a little.

Once we got to Mimiron, one of the warriors dc’d and I brought in Falowin to replace him. We engaged Mimiron and were doing great until phase 3 when a shockwave finished off three melee too slow to get out of the way. Thankfully, we probably had twice the raid dps we needed and easily dropped him.

Then is was down to Vezax who was mostly a joke. By this point I was sporting a fantastic buzz and really enjoying the colors and lighting. In short, my tanking was getting somewhat sloppy. But, I was having a great time.

And then we walked over to Yogg-Saron, ran in, and in a huge clusterfrak wiped spectacularly. Like someone flipping a switch, I immediately sobered up in nascent panic.

My dumb, drunken idea was to solo tank it, and that generally worked with a little finesse. By the third attempt I had managed to harness what little buzz remained, allowing me to slow down time and dance among the green clouds under Sara. No one tripped any extra clouds aside from myself right off the bat and we pushed it to Phase 2 nice and clean. Then we moved fluidly as a group, slaying tentacles like a Lovecraftian gardener, and the melee hopped into the brain room when the portals appear. Unlike the first attempt when half the melee couldn’t find a portal and then those that did eventually came our mind controlled, this time they maximized dps on the brain and came out ready to go back in.

The time between brain attacks was minimal because dps was blazing fast, and before I knew it we were on phase 3. I quickly remembered what little I knew about the phase and attempted to pick up all the guardians while keeping my back to Yogg when possible. Falowin counted off health remaining while I jumped into a sanity well and panicked over the flocking numbers of guardians. Suddenly a wave of calm washed over me when the numbers hit the single digits, and finally the Beasts with a Million Maws slumped over. I had killed a god. I was like a Ghostbuster.

Anyway, it was a great night. We had lots of drunken fun, managed to snag a (sadly and hugely late) first kill for the guild, and scored a lot of shards for the guild bank. Most of all it was laid back and truly enjoyable. Something I don’t really get often in the high stress, progression-esque 25mans.

Now, back to the hard modes.

This is MADNESS

Been busy with some non-Uld25 things lately, the least of which being the fire festival. I’m a huge fan of anything that gets me to explore Azeroth and be reminded of how vast it is, especially if there is a fair bit of coin involved as well. And oh boy is there, I’ve already made up a huge chunk of the hit my wallet took after stupidly buying those six runed orbs.

Only drawback: farming Slave Pens to get my pet-crazed friends their scorchlings, haha. As you can see above, we’ve made some progress. (Grats Gul, I hate you).

On Friday one of the officers has been doing a semi-hardcore/semi-fun run of Ulduar 10, with the goal of knocking off a few hard modes. Hanging out with a friend this past Friday, we decided to jump into the run.

Raid started off trying two towers on Flame Lev which we initially wiped on because we didn’t notice that someone who had never tossed a passenger before was riding a catapult. Oops. You can imagine how that went. I managed to pull down some obscene dps in my demolisher thanks to my mostly-226 gear. It’s kind of satisfying seeing 100k crits when you’re usually stuck with the low numbers in normal raid circumstances.

We then ran up to XT with the goal of downing his hard mode.

Our first two attempts went well, we had the dps (even with three healers) but the raid damage was apparently too much for the healing set up we had going. After a dps had to drop out we brought in Ildara with her crazy hots. One-shot XT after that.

Best strategy seems to be this: tank XT like normal on the wall. Melee dps XT on his back right, ranged directly in the back with a healer on the north side and one on the south side. After the heart is shattered, whenever a light bomb hits someone, they run over by the north scrap pile (just far enough away not to damage anyone) and when the spark spawns melee quickly takes it out. If someone gets hit with a gravity bomb they run over to the south scrap pile and drop the void zone there.

All in all, the fight is pretty simplistic. I wasn’t taking much damage and usually got lucky with no large robot spawning off the first heart drop. If a robot does spawn, have a hunter MD it to you then focus it down to minimize how much damage you’re taking/stress on the healers. You can kill it yourself as long as you pay attention to your threat levels on XT.

Past XT the raid was pretty straightforward in the consistency of our roflstompings of the various bosses. I used Thorim as a chance to study the Evokers a bit (a little anthropology outing if you will). It looks like they don’t put up the Rune Shield immediately so you have a small window to burn them down before they become a huge pain. Not sure if they’ll exhibit the same behavior in heroic mode. Further study is clearly necessary.

The last boss that we attempted that night was Mimiron, which I was dreading. I still clearly remember how awful that fight was when we first tried it and how painful it was to work our way up through the phases. I know they nerfed the fight a bit but… honestly Blizzard? We one shot the guy… with no difficulty. It was a total cake walk.

I suppose I should be relieved to have downed this boss after all the anguish he inflicted on us. At the same time the victory feels a tad hollow, considering how obviously nerfed to hell this once mighty foe was. Rest now, sweet prince.

Nonetheless! After Mim we called it, because it was 2:30 in the morning, and dammit I needed my beauty sleep. Saturday they went back and down Vezax (woo hoo) which left us last night to try Yogg-Saron.

A slight diversion if you’ll grant me the luxury: I hate multi-phase fights. With a passion. They go on forever and it’s a bitch to progress in them because you have to hope that someone doesn’t screw up an earlier phase so you can get to the phase you need to work on. I understand why they exist, they make the fight longer and more epic. And obviously the last fight needs to be that much more difficult, but it’s such an artificial difficulty increase.

Perhaps I’m venting because this fight wasn’t the cake walk that that little voice that tells me to burn things, or commands me to steal from old people, let on.

I hate you. Yeah you, you toothy bastard.

So I don’t sound so downbeat I should emphasize before we hit the “oh god I’m so sick of wiping, let’s switch to wiping on phase 1 so it takes less time” point, we were doing pretty well. We hit phase 3 pretty easily a few times. Phase 2 is pretty much down, phase 1 depends on how much everyone is paying attention. Also would have helped if the DK wasn’t playing with 1000ms… but I digress. And Phase 3 is terrifying and I never want to go there again.

We’ll get him eventually. Though, I can’t even begin to imagine this fight on heroic difficulty.