Great raid week, or *the greatest* raid week?

In the past few weeks we’ve been running two 25 nights, doing most of Coliseum on Tuesday and then VOA and finishing up Coliseum on Wednesday. Worked well, we got stuff done, people got their purps, everyone was happy.

So I wake up Tuesday and find out that Blizz is throwing a monkey wrench in the works: they’re releasing patch 3.2.2. Obviously, I’m shocked. I wasn’t away from WoW so I was not expecting a patch to come out–

Actually, I’ll explain this. Running joke is patches only come out when I’m on vacation or traveling for work. For example, 2.4 came out when I was in Florida for work (bee tee dubs, running Heroic Magister’s Terrace on a crappy hotel wireless connection while loaded on minibar booze = best thing ever), 3.0 when I was in Marseilles, 3.2 when I was in New Hampshire, etc.

Right, so back on topic: suddenly we had Onyxia to squeeze into the calendar, and by squeeze, I mean we actually had plenty of room for the old girl. To appease the masses yearning for dragon’s blood we decided to go after her after VOA that night. Moreover, the initial thought was Onyxia was resetting Tuesday night so it’d be stupid not to kill her when we could do her again the next day. Though, as we learned, not so much.

So we rip through VOA25 and then get our butts down to Dustwallow for Onyxia. The pvpers were out in force with a contingent of Horde sitting on the summoning stone, making getting the stragglers a little easier.

Once inside we burnt our way through Onyxia’s trash until we were face to face with the Brood Mother herself. Now, my only experience with this encounter was once at level 70 when I completed the huge quest chain for the hell of it, and then a few times at level 80 to gather scales for cloaks and to nab my t2 helm and Quel’Serrar (originals, both). I was not familiar with how the mechanics would work when at the proper raid level, aside from what I learned from the hilarious and classic Onyxia Wipe Animation.

So ES charges down the hill with the DK picking up Ony and me hanging in the rear on whelp and add duty. We get her to 70% quickly and she takes flight. The whelp train leaves the station and I immediately do my best to round as many as possible and help with the burn down. The AOE must have been intense because my fps dropped to 19 quickly, when it’s usually 60 in raids. A few people actually got dc’d, hah.

The adds go down and someone cries in vent “Deep Breath, look at her and move away from it!” Contrawise, the mouth breathers all stare at the ceiling in confusion and get roasted alive. The rest of us darted away and fall back together to deal with the eventually descending Onyxia. Of course the DK tank bought it, so I ran over and grabbed Ony to position her for phase three. The priests start rotating their Fear Wards and I used a bubble/debubble macro to slip out of one fear.

After going through the fear-break fear cycle a few more times Onyxia dropped to the floor and gave up her purples. A hunter and warlock helm dropped as well as the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade which is damn sexy. I was one for my Ret set. Loot is distributed and it’s only 7:30 server time, we’ve only been raiding for 45 minutes or so, amazingly.

A couple of us tabard hearth to the tournament and begin summoning the rest. We all pour into the Coliseum and start working our way through… and one shot every boss. We were out of there in two and a half hours, a few minutes shy of the 10pm ST cap I put on the raid.

Faction Champs in particular was an absolute joke. Usually we lose 5-8 people in the encounter, but with the nerfs done to overall damage we didn’t lose a single person. Sure, some of that can be explained by “practice makes perfect” and all, but the whole danger feeling of the fight was lost. Anub itself was also a cake walk. They toned down the damage the Burrowers were doing to the point where I never felt threatened, even while holding three of them at once. I’m not going to lie, I was kind of disappointed.

Well, that was Tuesday night: VOA, Ony, Col25. All cleared, all one shots. Amazing night.

And then last night we were kind of at a loss for what to do so it was decided we’d finally put to rest one of the ghosts haunting our guild: Sarth25 3D. We went in and did two learning wipes to figure out the finer points that most guilds knew of months ago, and then killed Sarth easily on the third go. So lots of folks got their titles and my pal Gulli got the drake for his mount collection.

Speaking of progress, I was looking at wowprogress, at the suggestion of Falowin, to see how our guild was doing there. Apparently we’re ranked 10th on our server and hilariously got the 17th kill in the world of Twins25 (which obviously doesn’t mean much, considering there’s a billion guilds tied for 17th along with us). All this progress and we’ve never killed Yogg. It’s kind of funny.

After Sarth I put together a dream team for ToC-10 heroic. It’s been our goal for a while to start working on that, and after Monday’s bloodlustless snafu we marched in last night with renewed vigor, determination, and shammyness.

Beasts we amazingly one-shot, and this was after wiping to them 13 times on monday. I’m assuming there must have been a stealth nerf in there, because I swear we were too slow to kill Gormok but the worms died sickeningly fast. Then Icehowl we just went through the motions with and burnt down with a minute left on the enrage timer. A nice morale boost for sure. 50 attempts left on the clock.

Then Jarxxus we had some trouble with initially with getting the portals down in time until we decided to shrink it down to one tank and six dps. This made life so much easier, because basically if you find yourself with two Mistresses of Pain, you’re looking at a world of hurt. That’s two counterspells going around, two healers that can be pounced at a time, it’s chaos. On the attempt we killed him we executed the fight perfectly. Portals went down very fast so we were never left with more adds than there would be in the normal mode. Took six wipes to learn, but when we got it, it was a thing of beauty. 44 attempts left on the clock.

Then onto Faction Champs–and oh boy did we luck out with group composition. We had the pally and druid for healers–that is, the two easiest to control. And no warrior, which made Zilga, the one clothie breathe a sigh of relief, even if the DK was still there (ZILGA DOWN!). So the kill order we settled on was Enhance Shaman, DK, Hunter, then Druid, Pally, and Shadow Priest. Nailed the fight on the second go, leaving us with 42 attempts left.

Unfortunately that was it for the night, have hit the time most people had to bail. We’re reforming on Monday and hoping can clean up the place and score the A Tribute to Skill achievement.

Overall, though, an amazing raid week. One I’m proud to be a part of with a great bunch of people.

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.