Friday (4 Dec) - Bedding Freya?

Friday (4 Dec) - Bedding Freya?

There is a lot to cover for this past weekend, with Friday's raid, Saturday's Old School raid, and Sundays raid. So expect two, maybe even three posts as I try to catch up.

Before the Friday raid Wild spent all 28 of his Conquest emblems to buy a new pair of gloves called [Grips of the Secret Grove]. The ilevel 226 leather healing gloves were two levels better than the 213 ilevel cloth gloves Wild had. With that purchase there was little left that Wild could use Conquest emblems for except to pick up some idols just to add to his collection. All the "good stuff" above ilevel 226 required Triumph emblems. Wild had a few of those, too, but not enough to buy anything at the moment. Better yet, perhaps the night's run would be Wild's lucky night, since we would be going after bosses that actually drop things Wild wants.

Our Alt-10 group really likes to show up at the last minute. At 5:45pm there were 3 of us. At 5:57pm, 3 minutes before invites, there were seven of us. And at 6:02pm, we had a full raid. Wild had intended to foist healing assignments off on his druid friend Sp again, but the raid was starting in Wintergrasp's VoA and he had already run that raid earlier with a PUG. A pally healer took his place and Wild went ahead and handled the healing assignments. The raid leader, who is usually the main tank, passed main tank duties to a pally tank alt of another guildie. The pally would main tank for the whole evening, getting a wealth of experience.

Every time Wild does VoA, it seems to get a bit easier. The raid swept through the trash to Koralon and engaged the top boss in VoA with little fanfare. With a pally and shaman for healing, Wild let them tank heal while Wild handled the raid. That worked extremely well and Koralon went down on our first attempt. Koralon drops T9 gear, and he dropped two, but one was for priests only, and the other for priests, mages, and warlocks. We had no priest, so one of the drops was wasted. Tier gear cannot be disenchanted or vendored. It hurt to see it destroyed. We had both a mage and lock, and I think the mage won the other one. Emalon fell next even more easily, and dropped a nice pair of leather pvp gloves, but Wild already had better. The raid didn't bother to kill Archavon, who had even less stuff that any of us could use.

From VoA we headed to Onyxia. Wild likes the Onyxia fight, but at the same time it is monumentally frustrating to him because I always seem to get caught in Onyxia's Flame Breath and killed - more times than I want to count. Wild finally remembered to stuff his Onyxia Cloak from his vanilla WoW days into his bags, a special cloak designed for one thing - to mitigate damage from Onyxia's Flame Breath. Wild vowed he would survive that dragon this time.

We swapped healers for the start of the fight. Sp returned and the pally healer filling in just for VoA left. Wild adjusted the healing assignments to put Sp on the main tank.

We got off to a good start, racing across Ony's chamber to snare her and drag her to the back of the room. After pounding on her for a bit, she took wing, and we scrambled back across the chamber to intercept the incoming crowd of whelps. Things were going smoothly and then Ony wound up for her Flame Breath. Wild took off, following a couple of running raiders, and darned if he didn't catch the tail of the Breath. Even that light touch nearly killed Wild. Nearly. Wild healed himself up and got back into the battle. The second time Ony cast Flame Breath Wild thought he was completely safe, as I'd followed our best melee player and one who never got caught in it - until this time. What? He was baffled, too, saying in raid chat that Ony must have turned at the last minute, something she isn't supposed to do. The melee player lived through it. Wild died. Sigh.

Wild got a rez from the other druid healer, and even avoided two more Flame Breaths successfully on our way to killing Onyxia. It was only after the fight was over did Wild realize that though he had brought the Onyxia cloak with him - he'd forgotten to wear it. Sigh times two.

Onyxia drops a lot of nice stuff, and all of it went to someone who needed it. Even Wild. [Stormrage Hood], an ilevel 232 leather helm, dropped. Based on ilevel, it is better than Wild's currently equipped 226 ilevel helm. But that helm is a Tier 8.5 piece, and in comparing the two the Tier helm is actually slightly better for Wild's current needs. The other druid didn't need it, and no one else could use it, so Wild got it. Actually, Wild got two of them. Yep, two of the same gear dropped. Having two is kind of convenient, as I can enchant/gem one of them specifically for moonkin spec (which I can use immediately) and I'll still have another to use for healing should my stat requirements change and the Tier helm isn't needed.

With Ony down and VoA taken care of, we headed back to Ulduar to continue where we had left off on Wednesday, when we worked over Flame Leviathon, Razorscale, XT-002, Iron Council, Kologarn, and Auriaya (Cat Lady). Those were the "easy" encounters, though. Now we had our choice of four bosses to start with: Hodir (which Wild thinks is a particularly apt name since it's pronounced like "oh dear!"), Freya (the forest lady giant with an entire ecosystem of trash mobs), Thorim (seen a couple of times, but never killed by this group), and Mimiron (arguably the toughest of these four bosses, but which Wild has not yet had the pleasure of meeting).

We decided on Freya. Wild has had one prior night with Freya, and it was a doozy. I like the babe, but her entourage is a big pain. On that proir night it took nine tries to get her to bed . . . uh, I mean get her down . . . ok, never mind. Let's just say on our ninth date she gave up her goodies. ;-)

We were packing bigger guns now, and it showed as we carefully but quickly culled out the bunches of trash mobs, including three mini-bosses. We even accidently pulled two groups at once, bringing eight mobs after us, and survived it. We were feeling real good about Freya. Maybe Freya would remember us from last time? She did. We lasted about thirty seconds before wiping on our first attempt.

Over the course of the evening, we learned new ways to satisfy her with each attempt. When we start the fight, the main tank gets aggro on Freya and just keeps her attention. She has a huge self-healing buff on her at this stage, so it is useless to try to damage her. Think of it as her "wooing" phase, with the tank as the suitor. The rest of us circle her as the first of her entourage arrives. That can be one of several groups of trash mobs, but most often it seems to be a small army of nasty flowers. If we do things right, we all stay in our circle and the DPS AoE's down all of the flowers. Then, in no particular order, we could see exploding Lashers that have a complicated kill order to avoid blasting the raid, water spirit elementals using a druid's Tidal Wave, snaplashers (yet more flower children), and/or an Ancient Conservator, which virtually eliminates all healing and damage done by the raid. At the same time that the Conservator appears, mushrooms start to blossom. Only when under a mushroom can the healers and DPS do their thing. To make things even more interesting, one player will get tapped with a pulsing nature bomb - which will make you very unpopular if you happen to be sharing room under a mushroom with other raiders. And that's easy mode.

Six tries later we still had not brought her down, or even killed all the adds before wiping - but we were getting closer.

On our 7th attempt, we cleared all of the adds, and engaged Freya directly. We had lost three raiders and there were no battle rezzes available, but we had all three healers still alive. The tank and the three remaining DPS blasted away, and the healing stayed ahead of Freya's attacks. We knew it would take awhile with such light DPS, but we also knew we had her. But something was wrong. Freya still had Attuned to Nature, the healing buff that was supposed to drop off her once all her adds were killed. With that buff up it didn't matter how much DPS we had - she could heal through anything and everything we could throw at her. Talk about frustrating! We had this fight won, but it was bugged, and Freya's health never got lower than 98% before she would heal back again. We were forced to wipe so we could get in one last attempt before our evening ended.

On our 8th attempt we again cleared the adds, and a full complement of DPS was on hand to pound on her. For about five loooong seconds, that healing buff stayed on her, and dismay started to settle over the raid - but Freya was just being coy, and it dropped away. And so on our 8th attempt we bedded Freya once again. That woman certainly plays hard to get.

Nothing for Wild among the loot, and our evening was done. Still, it was a good night with four kills: Koralon, Emalon, Onyxia, and Freya.

The raid evening was over, but not Wild's. DER was in game looking for trouble, and Wild was happy to join him. Our target was Trial of the Champion. That's not to be confused with Trial of the Crusader, which is the 10/25 man ToC. Trial of the Champion is generally referred to as 5 man ToC, and it's very different from the 10/25. But that tale will have to be told in another post.