The epic weekend

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

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.

Call me Ishmael

Some weeks ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no gold in my bags, and nothing particular to interest me in Northrend, I thought I would raid a little and see the inside of Ulduar. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

Demogar castigated us, “But what’s this long face about, Enveloping Shadows; wilt thou not chase the white whale! art not game for Thorim?”

He went on to explain, “Aye, aye! It was that accursed watcher that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round the Storm Peaks, and round the halls of Ulduar, and round the inner sanctum, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, guildees! to chase that Thorim on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and gives up his purps.”

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Demogar, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Thorim. He piled upon the watcher’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Cairne down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering Thorim; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Getting back in the swing of things

Got back from my vacation yesterday at around 5pm, after driving through a torrential rain and thunderstorm that somehow managed to span the entire breadth of the state of Massachusetts. What a summer this has been so far.

Demo was secretly rooting against me getting home in time for the raid, I suspect. The running joke between us as you can imagine is Titanguard, which as of 5pm last night had failed to drop for the last 11 resets (aka every single FL kill since 3.1 dropped). And after last night that number bumped up to 12. Yeesh. I swear I’m going to put up a counter showing how many weeks in a row the RNG has been pushing me to alcoholism.

I might even organize a “We Are the World” style telethon where all the Pally tanks in the blogosphere will get together and sing for the benefit of getting me a Titanguard. … Or not.

Anyhoo, the night did not solely consist of the 30 minutes I spent weeping in vent with my push to talk key down. Oh no, there was more. We decided to be masochists and did a serious push for Thorim again, getting to his sparkly behind with about an hour left in the raid. Unfortunately, after two attempts one of the linchpins of our strategy (the FoK rogue) had to go to work so we really couldn’t continue. Putting Thorim off for tonight we wandered over to Freya’s area.

I am happy to report that Freya’s trash is very much a cakewalk these days. Gone are the hour-long wipefests to clean every nook and cranny of that room of various vicious flora. Now we can easily pick off all the groups and the elders that need to die in a tidy 30 mins or so.

One thing that bothers me about this fight though is how badly some people (read: dps) need to be walked through the encounter. The key to the various waves of adds are twofold: don’t kill stormlasher/snaplasher/water spirit unless they’re all low health and don’t kill all the detonators before the healers can get everyone up. During the fight Demo will constantly have to bellow in vent “STOP DPS STORMLASHER” “ON WATER SPIRIT” “STOP WATER SPIRIT” “KILL SNAPLASHER” “SLOW DOWN ON DETONATORS” “GIVE HEALERS A SECOND”, etc.

And if he doesn’t everything will go to hell.

Shouldn’t have to be that way! DPS should have half a brain to notice “oh hey stormlasher is at 30%, time to switch to next mob” or “hey, everyone’s health looks kind of low, better not nuke all these detonators.” Makes me envy the jerks that only have to show up and faceroll their way to 3.5k dps rather than do the serious thinking about how the encounter is going. (Not that all dps are like that, but some most definitely are the mouth-breathing, facerolling type.)

After the kill, Freya once again had a Conqueror’s pants token in her cache, but I couldn’t bring myself to win it. I need to save my dkp for the tiny, minuscule chance that maybe Titanguard exists.

(A man can dream!)

So close. So very, very close.

New raid week, kill number 11 (every week since Ulduar debuted) on the Flame Leviathan, and dontcha know it, no Titanguard. Again. I hate you RNG.

Like I described in a post last week, Thorim’s been a bit of a headache for us these last few weeks. For this raid period I had a new strategy formed and ready to go, and in order to get a shot at trying it we steamrolled through FL, XT, Kolo, Auriaya, and Hodir to get to ol’ Sparky himself.

Slight diversion: After we killed Kologarn a bunch of us bounded across the bridge to hit the cache o’ loot failing to notice that a pack of rubbles didn’t despawn, and they were chewing up the healers that hung back to rez. Oops. (See screenshot above!)

Anyway, so we get to Thorim and explain my crazy scheme. One mage is designated as the Evoker Marker. It’s his job to use the following macro:

/target Dark Rune Evoker
/script setraidtarget(“target”,6)

This basically makes him immediately target an Evoker and mark it for melee. Melee uses an assist macro on the Mage to target his target and start burning down the marked Evoker. The Mage watches the Evoker like a hawk to spellsteal any Rune Shields that the mob puts up on itself.

That’s the biggest prep work that needs to be done. When in the arena, the group that’s assigned to that part of the fight will stack in the copper circle in the middle. Yes, I know there is the occasional silence, but that’s just something that needs to be worked through. The closer we are stacked the easier AOE is going to be for burning down the mobs.

So, one tank is in the middle (this was me, last night) with the arena group and one tank stands just outside. This tank is assigned to pick up champions as they jump into the fight and tank them away from the stack. champions tend to whirlwind and kill in short order any squishees. So, they must be kept away at all costs. Likewise, three ranged are assigned to kill the champions and focus on them the entire time. That way the second tank doesn’t get overwhelmed with champs.

Big game changer that makes arena easy: Fan of Knives. Have two rogues (at least) and make them spec into improved FoK and apply the glyph for it. Then just have them mash the FoK button like there’s no tomorrow, with the stack tank as their Tricks of the Trade target. It’s unbelievably effective at taking out the trash.

Last night this strategy was doing wonders during the hour of attempts we put in on this fight. Clearly the execution was just what needed refinement. We even had one attempt that we absolutely would have had, no one was dead in the arena, the gauntlet group was almost at Thorim… and then the champs tank DC’d. And the champs ran into my group and the clothies got cut to ribbons. We absolutely would have had it that time had the DC not occur.

Tonight we’ll be heading to Thorim first.

Programming note: I’m away on a trip for the next few days, which means unfortunately I won’t be blogging again until Wednesday. I’ll be occasionally tweeting, though, in desperation about how much I miss WoW. Do join me for that!

Ow, my face

He exclaimed, after hitting the brick wall.

Actually, I’m being too harsh. Wednesday’s raid went extraordinarily well. We one shot Ignis again, despite some hecticness with the add management. Out of the three people that handle the adds (myself, another tank, and a boomkin for rooting/zapping them) only I was on vent. So it was really hard to coordinate the tanking and the rooting, and the zapping. Very messy but we got ‘im down.

And then we headed over to Freya with the memory fresh in our minds of last weeks roflstomping at the hands of her voluminous trash. Last time around it took us around an hour so to clear out all her little buddies, and then we had trash respawns come up during out 8 or so attempts. Total shit show.

This week however we did much, much better. Trash was cleared out in about 20 minutes with no accidental body pulls of Elder Stonebark or additional trash coming in to join the fun. CC was cleanly done and reapplied on the fly with little trouble. Altogether, it definitely was a good portent of how the night would go.

When we finally got to Freya we adopted the strategy of if the fight turned sour (like two waves of adds at the same time) we’d run out to reset it. We ended up doing this a few times initially because we had a couple of new folks who didn’t know the fight. After the first handful of false starts we got our house in order and pushed the fight all the way up to right before the last phase. She had about 30 or so stacks left and the last wave of adds were almost dead, but we lost a few folks, didn’t kill them in time and a wave of detonators was summoned.

Shouldn’t have been a big deal, we finished the wave that held us up, started to down the detonators, and then all of a sudden a green flash and most of the raid was dead. Turns out the stacks were reduced to 0 after that last pack of adds, so she dropped the exploded pods everywhere while we were occupied with the detonators. Woops.

After that attempt, with revenge searing in our hearts, we then went and took her out in one clean go. It was a thing of beauty, every add was reduced to the proper health percentage and targets switched like we called out. Detonators were killed quickly, but slowly enough that healers didn’t fall behind. And no one died to explodey pods. Always a plus.

With Freya freed from the whammy and having bid us adieu, we cracked open her cache and distributed the loot. Among the booty was the token for my tier 8.5 legs which I bid 100 dkp on, though truthfully wasn’t really interested in winning. For one I think we can all agree that the 4 piece bonus is unmitigated crap, so that had no bearing on my decision. Moreover, I’m pretty enamored with the EH of the Saronite Plated Legguards. Lastly, I’d rather not tank in a dress. As a blood elf, that’s a little… on the nose… dontcha think?

In any case, as luck would have it (and I mean that sarcastically) I won the legs. I immediately pawned them off to the #2 bidder who would get much, much more use out of them. Lesson learned: don’t bid on gear you’re wishy-washy on.

After Freya the next logical step was Thorim so we headed over to his (thankfully) trash lite hallway and forced our way into the arena.

Right now Thorim is totally and completely our brick wall. Like Hodir I am beyond confident that its not ability keeping us from his cache, but execution. We’re having serious issues with Evokers overrunning the arena and making it impossible to kill trash. Demo and I did a lot of research, and I think the next time we head in there we can do it. I’ll post more on the strategy if it works.

Even if we don’t down Thorim, this has definitely been our best week in Ulduar to date.