Tag Archives: T8

Blocking with a dress, and the Spark of vindication

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Raid night number 2 and we had ahead of us Emalon, Ignis, Iron Council, and Thorim. About 10 minutes before the raid started the battle for WG began with Horde as offense, so it was pretty much as predetermined outcome that we would take WG and have access to VOA. Once said predetermined outcome was determined, we hopped to over to Lake Wintergrasp and began summoning the rest of the raid for a quick mop up on Emalon and Archavon.

We downed Emalon and lo and behold… he dropped my effing dress. The one piece of tier I hoped never to win. Damn.

Anyways, yes, I took it. It now holds a hallowed place in my block set for the 4pc bonus. I’m loathe to use it in my EH set at the moment, however.

Heading over to Ulduar we steamrolled Ignis (which I really enjoy tanking the adds during… I have a bad habit of popping my own brittle golems with a shield slam). I was very excited to see that the Blood Draining enchant dropped. I sent the mats for it to Gulli in exchange for a vellum with the enchant. I’m looking forward to finally having a survivability enchant on my weapon.

And yes, I know I poo-poo’d BD a little while back. I was wrong, dammit.

Post-Ignis the Assembly of Iron was dismissed from their posts and the raid was ready for some progression. Unfortunately our Thorim strategy relies on several linchpin players, least among them the tanks. And the DK tank that usually grabs Champions decided his Internet wasn’t working so he couldn’t be of much use to us. So, Thorim was shelved and I (because Demo was off fixing his Mom’s radio or something) made the command decision to try Mimiron.

I know, I know. It sounds psychotic. But I’ve had this nagging feeling for the last week or two that Mimiron, with all his nerfs, would end up being easier than Thorim. After last night I’m fully confident this is the case.

The first attempt we pushed him to phase 3 (purely a learning attempt, considering only 6 of us made it to P3). Then we had a few stalled attempts when Demo switched to DPS and I tanked P1, which didn’t go so well. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fight or class mechanics issue, just bad luck of plasma blast while everyone was scrambling away from a shockwave, and a moronic moment when I sat in the shockwave because I wasn’t sure if Mim would move with me or not, then taking out the dps around me. Like I said, was my fault. /shame

Nonetheless, we swapped around and Demo MT’d P1 with me backup tanking (and using Hand of Sac to help with the last plasma blast). After the switch the attempts became much more refined and towards the end of the night we were getting him to P4 easily and with most of the raid intact. Unfortunately, we only got to see P4 twice before the raid was called due to the time, but I think Sunday we’ll be able to down the sucker. We have three hours of attempts ahead of us that night and everyone was pretty charged by what was seen as an inevitable kill.

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All in all, we made serious progress. To use an old cliche, Mimiron is “on notice.”

It was 11pm when the raid concluded, so Dara and Cen and I headed down to Stranglethorn for our weekly raid attempts. After some wrestling with Door Boss we finally burst our way into ZG and headed over to the tiger boss. I’m a huge sucker for the Hoodoo piles in the area before said boss, so I activated one and only got a Voodoo doll (alas). The other pile however mindcontrolled me. The MC’d Rhidach immediately popped wings, switched to Seal of Righteousness, and took out Cendra in short order, then swung around and killed Ildara.

I wish I was that good at pvp while controlling my own character!

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After both mount-dropping bosses failed to drop their mounts we headed over to Kara to take out Attumen. Unfortunately, our luck failed us this time and we were unable to get past the front door. After about 15 minutes of running horizontally back and forth through the portal, we called it a night.

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Damn you, Door Boss.

Why I love Rogues (a raid recap)

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This is Falowin (also known in our guild and among the ranks of the Dark Touched Warriors as “Failowin”). I promised him in my previous post I’d write a little bit on the topic of “why I love Rogues” if he made the raid that night. He did, and unfortunately I didn’t manage to capture a screenshot of his corpse at any point, so I’ll have to deliver on the topic in haiku form.

Fail to win, he says!
Like a Forsaken carpet
He keeps the floor warm

My kidding aside, he’s actually really good dps. And he doesn’t die as much as he used to. Always a plus!

But, I digress. As to the raid recap …

We started Tuesday, as most raid weeks are wont to do, but in a slight panic. 8pm server hit and we only had 20 raiders on, which made the chances of the raid that night look somewhat bleak. We decided the best course of action was 20man FL and hope that a few more people hop on by the time it dies so we can keep going.

Thankfully luck was on our side and we had 25 people before we even pulled FL. The last few trash clears before the Leviathan consisted of people logging on, saying in guild chat “any room in raid?” and being quickly /invited.

So we had our full raid group and quickly downed Flame Lev. But, for the umpteenth week in a row Titanguard refused to drop. Alas. Maybe next week (when I have more dkp than Demo…).

In any case, Tuesday was a banner opening raid night for us, because we overcame the initial rough start and proceeded to steam roll right through Razorscale, XT, Iron Council, Kolo, and Auriaya.

Then with a decent amount of time left we turned out sights on Hodir. I enforced my rule about not leaving trash pulls up because I know, deep down in that shriveled black nugget I call a heart, that some knucklehead is going to bound right into one of those puffing snow mounds after a Hodir wipe, and we’re all going to have to each another 10% dura loss because they weren’t paying attention.

You better believe I body pulled every snow mound from the first pull to Hodir’s cavern.

Once we were at Hodir we kind of reinforced our previous strategy (as much as we had one) and put in a few attempts. Our best shot got him to 20%, which obviously meant we were doing something right (not completely though, there are some changes we need to make to our approach). But, after about an hour or so of wiping, tempers were flaring among some of the guild’s more… impatient… raiders. One of them declared in guild chat “F[e]ck progression. F[e]ck.” And then DC’d. Hrm.

In any case, we put in a few more attempts, but it was getting late, so we called it.

Still not a bad night, and more importantly, I was then 3 badges away from my Conqueror’s Aegis Faceguard.

Then last night we had something of the same issue, 8pm server time hit, and only 20ish raiders were on. With WG in Alliance hands we decided just to form raid, go plug away at Freya’s tree buddies, and wait for the last few souls to come on before we moved to Hodir.

Before we even pulled the first tree miniboss, the raid filled up. We stayed the course and downed the three (giving me my last 3 emblems, woo hoo) and then with all the trash cleared a consensus formed of “hey let’s give Freya a try.”

Surprisingly, the fight is very easy if you can manage the three pack that she summons. The way we handled it was I held Storm Lasher and the Ancient Water Spirit, and a druid tank grabbed Snaplasher and pulled it away. We nuked my two adds to 20% or so, then swapped to Snap and took it out, then switched back to my two to finish the pack off.

We had some initial difficulty, but once people realized how to moderate their dps, and learned to pay attention to the random healing tree that would spawn, we started making progress. We probably had two bad learning wipes, then one really close attempt (Freya had 30 stacks of attunement left when we died), then on the fourth shot we had a flawless execution on all the add summons and took her down. Our first 25man Keeper kill (so to speak)!

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Two pairs of the Warrior/Hunter/Shaman pants dropped, which is honestly for the best. I need to get the Saronite Plated Legguards so I can justify to myself passing over the T8.5 dress.

After the rejoicing following downing Freya we hopped over to Wintergrasp and downed Emalon for some extra emblems and to nab some more tier pieces. I know that between Freya and Emalon one hunter got two tier pieces that night.

And of course, the second people stopped paying attention to me, I slipped away back to Dal and grabbed my new helm.

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Hawt.

After WG we headed back to Ulduar (disjointed, I know) and gave Ignis a few shots. We initially had some difficulty, but at my suggestion Demo and I swapped spots (him tanking Ignis, I helping with adds) and thanks to his extra cooldown and better survivability (in addition to the syngergy I can give the raid with Divine Sacrifice/Hand of Sacrifice), and my natural acumen dealing with adds, we downed him easily.

Obviously it’s pretty disappointing that the raid was at a disadvantage with me tanking Ignis, but I’m not going to gimp everyone for the sake of my own ego. This is just the state Pally tanking in Ulduar is right now, alas.

Ultimately, it was an awesome night all around. Lots of people got loot, a few people (including yours truly) got their T8 2-set bonuses, and most importantly it gave the guild fresh hope that with a little elbow grease we can meet any challenge in Ulduar in due time.

Our crappy T8 bonuses get reworded, remain crappy

Basically the 4pc bonus now definitely applies the BV to the ShoR that triggers it in the first place. Woo.

  • (2pc) Increases the damage done by your Seals of Vengeance, Corruption, and Righteousness by 10%.
  • (4pc) Shield of Righteousness now increases your shield block value by 225 for that attack and for 3 sec afterward.

Ghostcrawler clarifies our crappy 4pc bonus

Looks like they’re aiming to have the BV bonus apply to the shield slam that triggers it.

The way we want 4piece t8 for Prot paladins to work is that the Shield of Righteousness also benefits from that extra SBV. We can try to make the tooltip a little cleaner.

The OP in this thread it right though, we’re still getting screwed compared to how awesome the Warrior 4pc bonus is.

T8 protection set bonuses

cinderblockThe tier 8 set bonuses have hit the PTR and now we know what the bonuses to the protection set will be.

  • (2 Piece) Increases the damage done by your Seals by 10%.
  • (4 Piece) Shield of Righteousness now increases your shield block value by 225 for 3 sec.

Edit: I’ve been think about this a lot actually, and I’m not as impressed with the 4 piece bonus as I was in my sleep-addled state last night. For one, does the BV bonus kick in after you cast ShoR, or during? Will our shield slam see a benefit from that bonus? If not… 225 more damage blocked… woo?

The four piece bonus from T7 was much, much better, considering it had multiple applications (keeping bubblewall up longer, or pulling damage from the raid via Divine Guardian for another 3 secs.

The four piece bonus is kind of disappointing this time around. I mean, I have a trinket that does twice its value already!

Hopefully they tweak it before live.

Update: Galyan illustrates (er, literally) this better than I do with his fancy mathamawhatsits.

We’re NOT in a dress again

mmo-champion.com is all over the PTR for 3.1 coming out today and is data mining like their life depended on it. I’m not going to recycle the notes they put up, but I’ll have a more thoughtful analysis when the dust settles.

In the meantime, onto more important things… Tier 8!

Over at Maintankadin, one of the posters found the helm/shoulders to Paladin Tier 8 in this thread.

Which means… we’re in a dress again…

Here’s the art from the booklet that came with the collector’s edition of WotLK that main suspected would be either the Shammy or the Pally T8:

Eh, it’s kind of cool. But, it’s really hard to tank stuff when you keep stepping on your skirt.

UPDATE: Ah, my panic was premature and thankfully shortlived. Here is the true Pally T8.

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Bravo, Katamai at Maintankadin, for digging this up.

So… Robopallies or Pallybots?