Summer down!

My favorite season has unofficially drawn to a close. My condolences to everyone who has to shuffle back to school/college/what have you.

BWL. To celebrate the end of summer, along with the demise of Door Boss, I put together a BWL raid on Friday night. It was mostly an achievement run to tick off another requirement towards the Classic Raider achievement, but I also wanted to get the Elementium smelting book for Cendra (to be my reliable Elementium smelter) and collect any ore that would be kind enough to drop. Unfortunately, only one Elementium ore dropped.

We hit a funny bug on Razorgore. Apparently when his MC drops off during a switch, if he has nothing in close range to aggro, he explodes and wipes the raid. This happened twice until we figured out what the deal was. After that I spent the encounter baby-sitting him, and tossing a Hand of Reck on him when MC fell off.

The last time we did BWL we only had four people so Vael was pretty much a no-go. People blew up way too early, and we were still in Naxx gear so we weren’t putting out quite as much damage as we do now. With an additional four people it was no contest. Although of course I still blew up.

It was a fun raid overall, and I walked out with the aforementioned new piece of Ore (bringing me to 5 total), along with the Elementium Reinforced Bulwark, and the Judgement Gloves (4/8 Judgement, now!).

We attempted Heroic TOC 10man last night, but that was a bit of a snafu. DPS was good, but we didn’t have a bloodlust and we kept having Icehowl come out when the worms were at 10-20%. We need to be about 30 seconds faster than we were, which is a pain. I think we can do it, just need a little more gear, a better group makeup, or maybe get fancy with two healers and six dps.

One thing that I think helped healing a bit was we’d start the fight with the DK tanking Gormok, and holding him to four stacks of Impale. Then when I taunted off him, I’d also give him a BOP to knock off his stacks. I’d then hold Gormok to four stacks, and the DK would taunt off me and I would Divine Shield + Divine Sacrifice to drop my stacks and ease up the healing for the closing stretch.

It was annoying that our execution was pretty well-tuned but we just couldn’t kill stuff fast enough. If not for the timed releases we’d be able to do it. But, that’s the point, eh? A challenge to rise to.

Uld10 Hardmodes. After our faceplant in TOC we headed over to Ulduar to stomp our some hard modes for our Rusted Proto Drakes. First one of the night was Orbit-uary which after an introductory wipe we killed it easily the second time. I’m proud to report that I did about 40% of the dps, basically standing still as much as possible and keeping my 10 stack up the entire time. It probably doesn’t hurt I’ve got a lot of 245 pieces to boost my dps.

We then burnt through Heartbreaker and cleared trash to the Iron Council. After downing Molgeim last pretty easily last week we wanted to try our hand at Steelbreaker last. We put in about three attempts before a couple of people had to ditch due to lateness, but honestly it was very easily. The only thing that screwed us up was the first time we were in phase 3 I exploded and killed the other tank (didn’t realize I needed to run for it) and then on our last attempt the tank switch went flawlessly, but then the DK got nuked by three ticks of Fusion Punch. I think I might have been coddling the healers with my self-cleanses.

Playing the auction game a bit. Lastly, in a non-raiding note, I’ve found a new source of enjoyment to the game being a Jewelcrafting tycoon. Once having overcome my crippling laziness, I started buying raw epic gems off the AH and cutting them for resale. Business is ramping up but I’ve already made a few thousand gold, which is pretty nice. I’m attempting to be super careful about not overposting, like only doing three at a time of each cut so I don’t have too many up.

Right now I’m buying the raw gems for about 150-170 gold and then reposting cuts of 210-230, so a slow but steady profit. I find that Bold Cardinal Rubies are selling best right now, but only because I seem to be the only one cutting them at the moment. Today should be a pretty good day for sales with all the raiding and upgrading going on.

I prefer to offtank, tyvm

I know there’s a certain lack of glory in offtanking. To some it’s the shit job that the newbie takes, to others it’s where the lesser geared tank gets shuffled. To me, however, it’s the tank role with the most excitement. Any meathead can sit in front of a dragon and get pounded in the face. It takes a special kind of knuckle dragger to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, tossing off taunts like beads at Mardi Gras, and keeping the healers alive so they can in turn keep the aforementioned meathead from expiry.

In just about every raid that Demogar (the warrior tank) and I deal with, I always quickly snap up the offtanking role. Golems on Ignis, adds on Freya, Icecrown Guardians on Kel, Mistresses of Pain on Jaraxxus. You name it–I’ve rounded it up, kited it, and consecrated it down.

Why do I do it… lack of confidence? My gear not measuring up? Nope, I’m a masochist and I enjoy the adrenaline rush of keeping some ancillary mob under control. And my gear’s just fine, thank you.

If you constantly get stuck in the OT role, don’t despair. Remember, the attempt depends on your success much more than the MT. You’re the one tasked with doing the grunt work, he’s just sitting there getting made into mincemeat. And if he dies? You swoop in and save the day while he has to suffer the indignity of a battle rez. And if you die, well, there goes everyone with the highest global aggro–goodbye to the healers.

The maintank may in the end get the fortune and glory, but the offtank is the one that invariably carries the day. It’s a thankless job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Of course, this all assuming there are adds. If this is Loatheb or Hodir we’re talking about, just switch to dps and have some fun smashing in faces for a change of pace.

The raid that wasn’t

I fully intended to write a post today about how we downed Anub25 and the loot flowed like milk and honey, but Door Boss somehow managed to snake his laggy tendrils in my raid and kill it.

Thanks to all the server repairs that Blizz has been performing on Lightninghoof recently, we had the absolute worst server lag in Col25 last night, and of course it hit hardest during Champs. We wiped about five times because we couldn’t react fast enough (I spent about five seconds at a time trying to chop down a Healing Stream Totem). We realized it was pointless to continue wiping on account of the lag monster, so we called it for the night.

Pretty disappointing as you’d imagine.

On the bright side, Door Boss seems to be dead in his previous incarnation. I managed to get into Molten Core last night and resume my epic quest for Binding #2.

The not-so-epic conclusion to the Coliseum

Yesterday my server came back up at around 8:40 server time. Usually we start raids at 7 server, so we were pretty delayed. I understand that the extended maintenance was because of extraordinary reasons (supposedly the Blizzard techs were doing a raid on Door Boss), so I wasn’t too miffed the Col25 raid was delayed for so long that we pushed it back to tonight.

They actually brought Lightninghoof down again this morning, which is good and necessary, because Door Boss was definitely not dead. More like pushed to phase 2.

Ildara, Cendra, and I somehow managed to slip past DB and get into Zul’Gurub on our first try last night (for the return of our weekly mount runs). Part of the desire to go there was also farming raptors for the pet, which the RNG gods surprisingly shined their countenance upon us and let drop. Grats to Ildara on her baby, giant-headed raptor!

After ZG we flew over to Blackrock Mountain where I was fully expecting to get into Molten Core after one-shotting Door Boss. Alas, we went on to wipe on him for about 15 minutes.

Hopefully they finally fix this ridiculousness with the extra maintenance today. I’m really itching to get back to farming my right Binding of the Windseeker. (Time’s running out!)

Hrm, I need to back up a little.

We did actually end up raiding Col10 last night, right as the servers came back up. I through together a quick run and we totally roflstomped the place. Aside from a sloppy first attempt on Beasts, everything else was a one-shot. Even Anub!

Amusing bug, the corpses never despawned, which was slightly annoying. However, also amusing when the Lich King strode into the Coliseum to taunt Tirion, walked into Icehowl’s corpus, and then the recently deceased Yeti began to castigate us for building a tournament on top of a Nerubian empire. [HIS] EMPIRE.

So then the floor collapsed, and poor Icehowl and Friends joined us in the cavern below. Requiescat in pace, my furry foe.

… Right–where was I? Anub. Oh, what a nub he is. Now, I’m not one to bandy about such terms, but I think it’s fair to say this gentlebug was quite the loot pinata.

The whole fight consists of three phases: Anub above ground, Anub underground, and Anub at <30% health.

In the first phase appoint a dps to bring down the frozen orbs that float above the fight. Doing so will drop patches of permafrost on the ground. Movement is reduced by 80% on these, but it’s a good thing because adds cannot burrow through permafrost and regain health, and Anub’s spike on phase two cannot penetrate these spots.

For tanks, one is going to tank Anub in as big a permafrost patch as you can manage. If Anub’s hitbox is completely in permafrost he can’t burrow and start phase two. Try to make that happen. Moreover, an add tank is needed to pick up Burrower adds and bring them to Anub and tank them on permafrost. All dps need to burn down the adds asap to make life easier. If adds are not tanked on permafrost they will go underground and regen lots of health.

One thing to look out for is every so often Anub will freeze the tank on him, which means no avoidance. That’ll be a neat little damage spike.

Now, after a while Anub will burrow (unless you have enough permafrost to prevent this) and go underground. He’ll then “pursue” someone and send spikes that them. The person with the pursue debuff should run away from the raid and stand on patches of permafrost so they don’t get spiked.

Meanwhile, scarabs will spawn, so the rest of the raid should group up and AOE the scarabs down. The bugs put a pretty nasty dot on anyone they melee, so ranged needs to be on the ball with dispatching these.

Eventually Anub will pop back up and dpsing will continue until his health reaches 30%. At this point the fight enters phase three, and Anub immediately puts a debuff on the raid called Leech Swarm that will absorb health. This part of the fight is tricky for the healers because if people have too much health it’ll just go right to healing Anub, so everyone should be left at no more than 40%.

The only two complications with this are the frozen dot that he’ll put on someone occasionally, which will need to be healed. The tank’s going to take normal damage, so they can be healed to full (better safe than sorry). Last night I was being topped off to 100% and it wasn’t negatively impacting the fight in the slightest.

Just pop bloodlust and burn this pest down, and he’ll spit up purples in short order. Very easy kill!

After Coliseum–but before ZG, stay with me here!–the raid then hopped over to VOA to try Koralon. Another unsatisfyingly easy kill. This fight is basically just “Don’t Stand in the Fire 101.” As a tank, kite him around the room and make the offtank, or a melee or two, stand on top of you to split Meteor Fists damage.

Thanks for the free loots Blizz!

I could say that these modes were hard

I received a foreboding suggestion this weekend:

Let’s go for the rusted proto-drake.

Um, okay, that’s an interesting idea. Sure, we haven’t kill Yogg, but I can’t imagine only one Keeper up would be that much more difficult… right? Oh, we’re screwed.

So that odyssey began last night. And by odyssey, I mean “thing we should have been doing two months ago.” We formed up at normal raid time and entered Ulduar determined to start the arduous process of banging out the various hard modes that make up Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10).

Nuke from Orbit

First on the list would be FL with 3 Towers up. We’ve done this on 25man and it really wasn’t much of any contest. We launched two people at the start, a warlock and ele shaman. They bloodlusted and burnt down the turrets causing a shutdown in record time. I keep a 10 stack of Pyrite up the entire fight and ended up pulling 126k dps. Very, very easy.

Heartbreaker

We actually already had this one, but a few were itching for the Aesir’s Edge so we decided to do it again. I tanked XT on the northeast scrap pile and just enjoyed working through my rotation. On the first tantrum I did a bubble+div sac to take some slack off the healers and then Hand of Reckoning’d him at the last second of his cast bar and cancelled bubble to repick up aggro.

During the fight the warlock actually DC’d, but the healers kept him alive to the point that when he reconnected a minute or two later he was able to jump back into dpsing. The only hairy part was when a certain warrior may or may not have died twice to gravity bomb-induced void zones. Ahem.

No Aesir’s Edge, alas.

I Choose You, Runemaster Molgeim

This was an interesting fight to say the least. We approached it like normal mode, I dragged Steelbreaker off to the side and the other two were taken to the other half of the room. Once Steelbreaker was down I went and peeled Molgeim off of the DK tank and held him in my spot, while the dps ran over to kill Bruundir. Once Bruundir was down the real hard mode started and the DK took Molgeim off me so I could turn into Capt. Utility Tank.

When Molgeim is last to die, his two big things are: Rune of Death *really* hurts, and adds are summoned. The adds explode it they reach their aggro target, so ranged needs to dispatch them. I attempted to do my part with Cobalt Bombs and the occasional shield toss, but really I spent most of my time dpsing Molgeim. As long as everyone stays on their toes, it isn’t too hard.

With Open Arms

We already had Disarmed, so we figured we’d give this one a go.

This one’s fun. Basically, you only dps the face and try to avoid doing any damage to the arms. The first two times someone got gripped we broke them out, but it was getting kind of worrisome how low the Right Arm’s hp was getting, so we decided to let everyone die if they got gripped. Three dead raiders later, we got the achievement.

Also, in terms of aggro, I started the fight by building a lead with Avenger’s Shield and an HotR, and didn’t use either for the rest of the fight. I didn’t have any issues keeping aggro with shield slam, Judgement, and Hammer of Wrath (when in execute range).

Crazy Cat Lady

This one was a good gear check for me. I insisted we one tank this and made the DK go dps. We used three healers as well, which I initially doubted but I’m glad we did. At certain points in the fight the damage intake got slightly intense (fears especially) and that extra oomph really helped. In the normal “stand still and do rotation” moments, the damage wasn’t as bad. Damn it feels good to be a shield tank.

I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare

The one hard mode I was truly looking forward to, because it had two pretty sexy tank upgrades for me. Of course, of the two I wanted The Boreal Guard more. I’m a sucker for shields.

We already agreed that if it looked like we weren’t going to get it, we’d just wipe and try again. We had a good group, everyone was competent, there’s no reason we couldn’t down this guy.

So the first go one of the dps died early and we decided it probably was going to be difficult to recover, so we wiped it. Then, the second time we got it to like 30% and that same dps along with the Void Zone Avenger bit it to standing in bad runes. Wiped it again.

Last try, right out of the gate everything went smoothly. Ranged was wailing away, I was keeping the threat ceiling high, no one died to runes. Eventually we pushed it to execute range with a minute still on the clock. Holy shite, I thought, we were going to get it. Hodir drops snowpiles and I scramble on one, ready to leap back into the brink. And then Big Wigs flashes on my screen “Frozen: [Warrior] and [Ele Shaman]“. Oh, and the DK dc’d. Dammit.

“Should we wipe it?” someone asks. 8%, 35 seconds left. Hellz no. Burn that mother down.

The remaining batch of us rip through Hodir and we down him with 26 seconds left on the clock. I immediately sprint over to the frozen cache and spot this sexy beast hiding at the bottom. Like some green-clad stereotype, I leaned into the glowing box, reaching in to grapple the shield, and then popped out with this verdant masterpiece held aloft and triumphant above my head. I could say that I was very excited.

Siffed / Lose Your Illusion

This one was a little more difficult than the others leading up to it. Basically, getting to Thorim in under the hard mode time limit means that during Phase 2 you have Sif flying around and hurling frost bolts at the raid, along with other annoying crap (like freezing people in place). It’s just some added chaos, not too difficult in the great scheme of things. All we did differently was Frost Aura went on when Thorim jumped down and everyone was on their toes with dispels/cleanses and avoiding the lightning bolts.

As you can see we had a little trouble with it. The DK tank died so I ended up tanking Thorim while eating Unbalancing Strikes. If the fight lasted a few more seconds we would have wiped, but we managed to pull it out in the end.

Fun fact: Thorim was actually married to a character from some terrifying Japanese porn.