Thursday (14 Jan) - ICC, The Kalu'ak and VoA

Thursday (14 Jan) - ICC, The Kalu'ak and VoA

Wild got his second look at the newest dungeon, Icecrown Citadel, on Thursday night. Wild's first trip inside had been with his guild as a guest of one of the guild's ten mans. This time it was with the MM raid. Wild had signed up for the raid, and got the invite without being asked if I was available. Wild is signing up for their raids, but I think the raid leader has been careful not to assume too much. Wild has made it clear that I'm not changing guilds, so now I'm making it clear that the MM raid is my first choice for Wed/Thurs raiding, even when it conflicts with guild events, so they don't have to consider whether I will make it or not each week.

The area around ICC is what Blizz refers to as a "phased" area. Phased areas were introduced awhile back as a way to add more richness to the storyline and lore of the game. What a player sees, and who he can interact with, is dependant on where the player is in his progression on quests and other tasks. For example, an area might look deserted, with only mobs around, for the player who has not done any quests in the area. Another player who has done the quests might find a friendly town at that same spot because his quests helped clear the area and get the town established. Those two players could be standing next to each other, but they would not see each other because they were out of phase with each other.

ICC is set up differently than most dungeons. Entering the instance portal of most dungeons takes one from a common area into the special zone that only the players in the raid can enter, and where the mission/battle begins. In ICC, there is a small outpost inside the instance portal where there are npc merchants and such, and there is no division or demarcation between this outpost and the rest of the dungeon. Meander a few feet away and you will aggro mobs and engage the raid. I'm guessing they do it this way so that there are no complications with the phased area immediately outside the instance. But Blizz forgot one thing - there is a Summoning Stone outside the instance in the phased area, and it is both frustrating and funny to use it. Players in the same raid often can't see each other outside by the Summoning Stone because they are out of phase, so it becomes a guessing game to find two raiders who are in phase with each other to summon someone. And if the person you summon is out of phase with you, you can't see him when he arrives. It's just weird.

Anyway, this was the MM raid's first foray as a group into ICC10. The raider leader, Bd, was tanking this night, and assigned Wild as his healer. No raid healing for Wild this time. Cv, a very good holy priest, was the off tank healer, with the shaman, Sh, handling raid healing. There were a couple of new faces, but Wild knew most of the raiders now.

We engaged the first mobs cautiously, and Wild massively overhealed at first while I gauged how much healing would be needed to keep the tank up. Bd is very good, and Wild quickly found the right levels. We moved down a decent sized passage, picking off small groups of mobs and staying alert for the traps. Encased in the walls of the passageway are very deadly mobs that are activated by tripping unseen traps at random spots. We made a point to stay to one side of the passage, as we would use that same route each time. We were doing fine. Even when we had two mob groups pulled accidentally, the healing kept up and only the mage died. Mages die if you breathe hard on them - at least that was the healer's excuse. :)

The adrenaline spiked when we tripped the first trap, and the large nasty stepped out from the wall with the words, "I am awakened!" We were in the middle of a battle with a group of mobs, but the tank picked up the new bad guy and we brought the whole gaggle down without any deaths - except for the mage, who died again.

More mobs were engaged, and more mobs died, and the mage died again of course, and we made it to the first boss. The mage asked if someone would post the "Death List" from recount, the addon that counts such things. We got the giggles as he solemnly pointed out that the list had one line: "Deaths - 3 - mage."

The first boss in ICC is a multi-limbed and multi-headed skeletal monstrosity called Lord Marrowgar. He's the gatekeeper to the rest of the instance, and something of a raid check to see if we are ready for this place. By all accounts (probably written by hard core raiders) he's not supposed to be that hard to beat. Yea, right. Check out the 27 Dec '09 post for Wild's first look at the place. Wild's comment at the time - "Lord Marrowgar may be the toughest boss fight Wild has ever had to learn." That December raid, over two nights, made 17 failed attempts and took more than six hours before finally bringing Lord Marrowgar down on our 18th try. Yep, he's easy all right.

This night there would be no cheering a first try kill against Lord Marrowgar, who deserves to have his full name and title used - until we can kill him. Our first two attempts were pretty good, though, from the standpoint that we had a semblance of an idea what to do. After that, though, there were positioning issues that the tanks had to work through. Two tanks are needed for this fight, and coordination between them is critical. Small mistakes meant massive damage and multiple strikes beyond the ability of a healer to match. Things got worse as we started trying different things, learning what works better, and what didn't work at all, looking for something to jell into a successful strategy. The healers had no wriggle room at all. For the tank healers, nearly our entire focus had to be on keeping our tank alive, and we had to do it almost constantly on the move due to several raid wide attacks Lord Marrowgar harrassed us with. Worse, the boss routinely skewered random raiders with a large spike. That immobilized the raider struck, and the spike had to be destroyed quickly. The raid healer had to get heals to those spiked raiders until the spike could be destroyed, but was not always in range, and precious tank healing time had to be risked to get a heal to the spiked raider. Even worse than that was when a tank healer got spiked. That caused a double problem. Someone had to heal the spiked raider, and someone had to heal the tank that the spiked healer couldn't heal. With no margin for error, the death of either a healer or a tank meant a wipe.

We made nine attempts, with our best attempt being our last one, getting Lord Marrowgar down to 65% after nearly three hours effort.

There was no discouragement. If it was easy we would have gotten bored with this game a long time ago, and this group is very much up to the challenge. The back and forth playful taunting and off color innuendos may have been a bit muted as we focused on the fight, but it didn't disappear entirely. To help in positioning, one of the raiders, Cv, the lady priest, was given the triangle mark so that we could see where she was standing. That triangle mark is near universally called "panties" for obvious reasons. Cv was good at positioning, so we were using her to help the rest of us get where we needed to be. One problem was that the mark would fall off when she got spiked. Another lady raider noticed that and informed the raid in vent: "When Cv gets spiked she loses her panties." You can guess where the conversation went after that.

Wild took the healing honors on the night, but it was close.

#1: Wild - 2367 hps, 35% healing
#2: Cv (priest) - 2181/30%
#3: Sh (shaman) - 2291/26%

Next week we will go after ToC10, hopefully clearing it in one night like we did this week, and then going back to ICC10 for more learning.

On to other things.

Wild is on his mission to win Exalted rep with the Kalu'ak so that he can get the nifty fishing pole these seashore abiding folk offer. He was barely Honored with them when he started, and a single daily quest to gain rep with them were all that he was aware of. Recently, though, Wild uncovered new quest threads that pushed his rep into Revered, as well as two more daily quests. Each of the three daily quests are of the "cute" variety.

The easiest is in Kasgala, which is a frozen waste of a town in the Borean Tundra. The kalu'ak are at war with the invading kvaldir (vikings and viking ships), and the quest is to take boxes of supplies away from the invaders. In flight form Wild can do this quest in under a minute.

Kasgala is far to the west on the continent of Northrend, and the second quest is far to the east, in Kamagua, Howling Fjord. The height of cuteness, Wild must catch special fish and then use the fish to entice a sea lion bull to cross a wide, shallow stream to the female sea lions on the other side. One can do it the hard way, feeding the bull handsful of fish as it makes it's timid way across. Or one can take the simplest approach - attack the bull, make it mad enough to chase you across the stream, and then toss it a fish when it reaches the sea lion female. Sweet love is the result of either approach, and gets the quest done.

In between, at Moaki Harbor in Dragonblight, there are wolvar pups that need saving. The message is a bit mixed here. The wolvar are being hunted by the kalu'ak, but they are afraid of wiping out the whole wolvar race. So instead of not hunting them, they send out folks like Wild to kill wolvar mothers and steal their children so that their race will survive. Huh?

The practical aspect of this is that Wild can earn 1500 rep each day by doing all three quests. Wild is banking on getting that pole in the next two weeks.

And speaking of fishing, the Kalu'ak also have a weekly fishing tournament. The tournament is as dumb as anything I've seen Blizz do. Basically, between the hours of 2pm - 3pm on Saturdays, one simply fishes in the fishing pools anywhere in Northrend. If you catch a special fish and are the first to bring it back to the quest giver in Dalaran, you win. Most of the time it takes less than 15 minutes for a winner to be announced. No skill is required, just blind luck and being able to come to Dalaran. It may be dumb, but one of the prizes is a Bind on account ring that has a +5% experience bonus. Wild wants it, and so when possible he'll be perched next to a fishing hole at 2pm on Saturdays.

Wild was puttering about in Dalaran after finishing up his dailies, and a guildie asked if anyone would like to join him in VoA 25. I looked at the guild roster, and there were only three of us in game. The other guildie said he wanted to go. What the heck, why not? I said sure. The guildie gave me the name of the player who was organizing it, I whispered him that I wanted to go and was a healer, and viola! Wild was in.

The organizing player did a good job, and already had most of the raid filled. We tackled Koralon, who drops T9 level gear, wiping on him once and then taking him down. Koralon is the boss everyone wants to get, so I thought there would be a lot of defections once he went down. But apparently we did so well on Koralon most stayed around to try Emalon. In theory Emalon is a lesser boss than Koralon, but in reality it is a much harder fight for a PUG because DPS have to change targets, adds have to be killed quickly, or the whole raid goes boom. It's not hard if DPS do what they are supposed to do, but hard to do in a PUG. We wiped on our first try, and there would be no second try as players started bailing out.

The WoW gods deigned to favor Wild, however. On the Koralon kill [Runetotem's Gloves of Triumph] dropped, ilevel 245 Tier 9 gear. Two druids rolled on it (there were three of us in the raid). Wild's competition rolled an 88 - Wild rolled 97. This drop totally rewired Wild's gear progression plans, because how could I predict these gloves falling into Wild's hands? Gloves were high on Wild's priority to purchase with triumph emblems, and now I had to rethink what to spend them on. Even more interesting (and I didn't notice this until later) is that this T9 piece is for moonkin spec, not healing spec. I was trying to figure out whether to spend hard earned emblems on moonkin gear, and here one just drops out of the sky for me. And since I have one piece, now I need two pieces in order to get the two piece set bonus. Now I knew what to buy with my triumph emblems - the T9 i232 chest piece for moonkin. The VoA gear is good enough for Wild to wear with his healing set, too, so lots of good news for Wild on the gear front.