Thursday (20 May) - Welcome Back Party

Thursday (20 May) - Welcome Back Party

[Note: Somewhere in between picking up the dog at the kennel, getting our cat Toby's teeth cleaned, and getting the rest of our four footed family settled back into a more normal chaos after getting back from Palm Springs, I forgot to post this. See, it wasn't my fault! :P ]

It wasn't exactly a planned party, but when the MM raid leader, Bd, saw Philly login around 10pm Thursday night, he immediately lassoed her into a five man heroic. Bd was running on his druid alt as the healer. Philly had the added pleasure of having Lady Hunter also in the group on her paladin alt. She would be tanking. The other two DDSers were from MM and were also alts looking to improve their gear and have some fun. The MM guild is very active with alts, and grouping up with them for random heroics is becoming a daily pleasure for Philly.

The random dungeon choice of UP was a bit of deja vu for Philly, as she had done UP with a random (non-guildie) group earlier in the day. I didn't know we could get the same dungeon more than once a day, but apparently so. It was a pretty straightforward run with no surprises. Philly pulled 1825 dps, which wasn't bad, and at least beat the DK (1492 dps) but came in behind the fury warrior (1984 dps).

After UP players then switched alts around, and Bd played his own DK, becoming the tank while Lady Hunter's paladin moved from tanking to healing. It was a strange combination. Lady Hunter said it felt so weird that "Wild" wasn't healing and she was (she's usually a DPS). Bd and Lady Hunter were both still learning their specs and we had some fun in the next dungeon, Violet Hold. VH has a set of randomly selected bosses, and we got the toughest of them, the one with all the X's and Z's in his name. Most groups simply overpower him, but we weren't geared well enough to do that. We wiped on the first try. Also in VH, if you wipe you start over from the beginning. On our second run through VH we followed the strategy of kiting the difficult boss on a "run and shoot" kind of approach, and although it took a little longer than a heavier geared group would have taken, we killed him. Killing him with finesse instead of muscle seemed all more sweet.

In between the boss fights in VH we had to fight waves of adds, and we somehow managed to dally too long and got multiple waves. Both the healer and the tank died before we could get ourselves organized, but with three mobs still alive the elemental shaman in the group essentially tanked them while Philly switched to healing to keep the last three of us alive long enough to kill them. We are a versatile bunch. The tank also died on the final boss (even with Philly sneaking in some Shields and tossing in Prayer of Mending - I can't help healing even as a DPS), but we we brought him down anyway. It was riotuss fun.

From VH we decided to up the ante and go for a more difficult challenge, heroic five man Trial of the Champion (ToC). The random dungeon finder wouldn't let our full group of five port into ToC, however, stating that two of our DPS were not geared well enough. Philly was a bit gratified, though, to learn that she met the gear requirements. All that work building her gear set was starting to pay off. The two DPS alts were willing to switch to their mains, but we quickly decided that we weren't going to let the opinion of the dungeon finder change our plans. Casting caution to the winds, we ignored the dungeon finder, flew to the Argent Tournament grounds (where ToC is located) and entered the dungeon the old fashioned way - we walked in.

This was Philly's first introduction to ToC. She had planned on doing normal mode ToC first, to see how difficult that would be, but what the heck, we went for it in heroic mode. Heroic ToC drops i219 gear, so Philly might get a chance at an upgrade.

The first encounter in five man ToC is a joust with a wave of three groups of mounted mobs, followed by jousts against the Grand Champions, the three bosses. Philly is the most practiced in the Wild family at jousting on horseback, and she acquitted herself well in what for most is a pretty easy opening battle. The keys to making this battle easy are: (1) always keep up a full three stack of defensive shields; (2) if the health of your mount gets low, grab another mount as there are several lined up along the wall; (3) when a boss goes down keep him down by running over him or he'll run and re-mount; and (4) if you die during this part of the encounter you can run back from the graveyard and re-enter and re-mount (something that most dungeons don't allow and I often forget).

After the jousting we all dismounted to face the three bosses again, this time on foot. Just don't forget to replace your lance with your regular weapon. We downed all three of them on our first try, and we were feeling pretty good about our decision to tackle ToC in heroic mode.

The second encounter is against either Eadric or Paletress. I prefer Eadric as his only "trick" is to blind and damage players that are looking at him when he casts Radiance (so don't look at him!). Of course, we got Paletress.

Paletress entered the arena with her three groups of adds, which we killed efficiently to set up the showdown with Paletress. We hammered away at her and quickly pounded her down to 25%. Paletress then cast Confess, and a shadowy mob formed. Philly quickly noticed that her DPS casts at Paletress were now being reflected back. Philly wasn't planning on killing herself, so she stopped attacked Paletress and targeted the new mob, which was in fact stronger and more deadly than Paletress herself. I think all the DPS took some heavy hits before we switched targets, though, and in the end we wiped. On our second try, though, we hung in there through the Fears, kept our DPS firmly on the Summoned boss when it appeared, killed it, and then finished off Paletress.

The third and final encounter is against the Black Knight, and we have to fight him three times: as an undead, as a skeleton, and then as a ghost. If we were going to have real trouble, this is where it would be. Amazingly, we killed him all three times on our first attempt.

After our heroic victory over ToC, we decided to farm Toc a couple more times on normal mode as a couple of folks wanted the stone keeper's shards and frozen orbs that drop. Normal ToC only drops i200 gear, but that didn't stop Philly from getting lucky.

Philly did quite well in the gear department, as a matter of fact. She picked up two i200 trinkets, one with +hit and the other with +int. While their use is pretty situational, they give Philly some flexibility in gear choices depending on what she needs. Philly also won [Gaze of the Unknown] from the Black Knight, an i219 helm with a lot of +hit that immediately found a home on Philly's hit capped set. She also won [Embrace of Madness], an i219 chest piece that was a solid upgrade for both her healing and DPS sets. All in all a very good evening that ended well after 1am.