Weekend (18 Jul) - The "Tier-y" Tale of the Ring, the Robe, and the Bracers

Weekend (18 Jul) - The "Tier-y" Tale of the Ring, the Robe, and the Bracers

It was an interesting weekend for gear. Philly's "get up" is starting to look like it belongs draped around some outlandish Egyptian queen, one who is equally at ease with reading poetry to her latest flame or gutting the unfortunate suitor for not getting the point of the poem. And getting the point for it. If you get the point. That didn't stop Philly from throwing a gargantuan tantrum over the weekend for the lack of progress in encrusting herself with better gear.

Happy marshalled his forces and suggested that Philly, being a priest and therefore being a cloth wearer, might be made happier if Wild, who was a Master Tailor, were to craft her some nice, frilly things that she wouldn't mind getting blood all over. Wild was a bit dubious, but magnanimously suggested he make her some [Deathfrost Boots]. In fact, Wild was wearing a pair he'd made for times when the moon was full and he wanted to release his inner Moonkin. Happy cringed at the idea, however, knowing that the pattern to make those boots required several thousand gold in materials . . . that Happy would have to buy. Happy had his own ideas. There was a tailoring pattern called [Royal Moonshroud Robe] available on the Auction House. This is a rare drop pattern, and expensive, but not nearly so expensive in materials as those boots. Surely Philly would find the robe attractive enough. Philly, looking over Happy's shoulder, also spied a jeweled belt for sale and crushed Happy to her breast - breastplate, actually, steel studded and linked to the very sharp protuberances of her shoulder gear. Ouch. Philly figured she needed the boots, the robe, and the belt, too. Double ouch. Triple ouch! But things did not go as Philly planned.

Meanwhile, Wild was in game getting his tailoring ready, and sure that he'd also be doing some enchants as well. Wild happened to see over trade chat a "LFM ICC25 need DPS and raid healer." Hmmm. Wild's patience was getting to be as thin as Philly's where gear was concerned. Although there had been some modest progress on his Moonkin gear set, it had been a month since Wild had gotten his last gear upgrade to his healing set. Wild badly needed a new ring and bracers. And he was sorely tempted to tell Happy to buy him the ring of his dreams, which tantalized him on the AH every time he looked: [Marowgar's Frigid Eye] is what it was called, and it was a random drop in ICC25. The i264 ring was a just what Wild wanted - and it cost 12,000 gold. Happy also saw that ring pop up on the AH almost every day, only his reaction was more like a kick in the guts. No way! You could buy a mechano-hog for that much! What is that? It's only the coolest flying motorcycle that . . . well, never mind. Happy dreamed happy thoughts about that cycle for a few moments.

Wild wasn't going to buy that ring. But . . . if he went on the ICC25 PUG raid, maybe he'd get lucky and the ring would drop, and Wild would win it! The raid leader for the PUG not only wanted to know Wild's gear score, he wanted proof that Wild had actually raided in ICC25 before. Wild's not a show off, but faced with having to show his credentials to get into the raid, Wild produced his almost 6k gear score and posted his Achievement for clearing the first two wings of ICC25 and part of a third. Wild got his invite.

Most ICC25 PUGs never seem to get past Deathwhisper, the second boss; or if they do, they take down the Gunship (3rd boss), break up, and call it a success. Most PUGs don't seem to have the patience it takes to go deeper into the place. The fact that this raid already had two well geared tanks, and four healers already in the raid to heal those tanks, was a very positive sign. Wild made it five healers, and I would be raid healing. I figured it would be easy to fill in the rest of the raid with DPS - tanks and healers are the hardest to get. But there were a lot people trying to fill raids - VoA, RS, the weekly, old school raids - you name it, and someone needed DPS for it. It took a little while to fill, and everyone waited patiently while the raid leader gathered the 25 raiders we needed. "Waited patiently" - another good sign. Wild liked the loot rules, too. They were fair and they were announced before we started, and all questions about the rules were answered.

Once we were all assembled and buffed up, the tanks were announced and marked, and healing assignments were laid out. As expected, Wild was asked to raid heal and to maintain HoTs on the tanks.

We bulldozed our way through the initial trash mobs. There was considerable overpulling of mobs and several raiders died, but we weathered the assault and quickly arrived at the first boss, Marrowgar. This raid used the "tank him at the door" strategy instead of Wild's more familiar "tank him at the center" strategy, but other than positioning the fight was the same. In fact, Wild found it a bit easier to re-position after the Bone Storms with the boss held at the doorway. Again, we had a number of raiders die, but Marrowgar went down. A ranged DPS necklace dropped that Wild would have loved to have, but it was off spec and several casters rolled on it for main spec so Wild had no chance.

We moved on to Deathwhisper. Wild thought he knew this fight well, but I'd forgotten all the little "extras" that came with the 25 man raid versus the ten man version. There were more of everything, of course, and the many adds that attacked us could not be "zerged" (killed by the overwhelming force of our well geared DPS) like we could get away with in ten man. And of course there was her mind control, which Wild had a less than pleasurable chance to experience three times during the fight. Death knight raiders immediately froze raiders that got mind controlled to keep us from doing damage to the raid, but that also meant Wild could not heal during the several seconds it lasted. It was a bit rough, and took longer than it should have, but again, like Marrowgar, we were good enough to kill Deathwhisper. Deathwhisper dropped [Ring of Maddening Whispers], which Wild thought was a very cool name for a ring. The i264 ring was a caster ring. It wasn't quite as perfect as the Frigid Eye ring, but it was far better than the i245 ring it would replace if Wild won it. Wild rolled. And got it. Finally, new gear for Wild's healing spec.

We won the Gunship battle handily with no problems at all. The big chest with the Gunship loot held [Boots of Unnatural Growth], a very fine pair of leather healing boots. Wild was the only leather wearing healer in the raid, and would have won those boots automatically - except that Wild was already wearing those boots. The boots went to the moonkin in the raid for his off spec.

The raid was not yet over, but let's return to Philly. After a bit of a layoff, Philly had returned to Wintergrasp for pvp and had helped the horde succeed in defending the fort twice during the weekend. After the second victory, she answered a call for a VoA25 raid. I've talked down the gear rating system called "gear score" or GS for short, many times. However, because it has infiltrated PUG groups so thoroughly, I felt that I had to at least be aware of it. So some time ago I'd loaded the in game addon, and so I could not only check the GS of my own toons, the Wild family could also check the GS scores of those around them. Philly's DISC healing gear is rated short of 4900 GS, and she could have trouble getting into raids where they demand minimum GS scores of 5000, which is a pretty common requirement. But nobody asked Philly about her GS, and she was invited to the raid. Philly was curious, and while we were forming up checked a good many gear scores of the raiders around her. I don't know if she was able to check them all, but all that she checked had higher - usually much higher - scores. Feeling a bit like the underage kid who'd slipped into the "R" rated movie, Philly was determined to prove that GS didn't mean that she couldn't contribute.

The raid killed Koralon and Toravon without any trouble. Philly delivered around 3200 health per second (counting her shield absorption), which was quite good for her, even though she finished 4th out of the 5 healers. One factor in that is that the #2 healer in the raid (over 5k hps) was also a disc priest like Philly, so the two of us tended to steal each other's heals and Philly often found that the other healer had already Shielded targets that Philly tried to Shield. Had there been just one disc healer, either of us would have posted better numbers. After the Toravon kill, Philly won an i245 pvp piece that was also an upgrade for both her healing and shadow specs! And then, when we killed Koralon, there was a priest only drop called [Zabra's Pants of Triumph]. There were two other priests in the raid, but neither of them needed these and Philly won that one too! The raid leader, however, asked Philly if she woudn't mind giving the pvp piece to one of the other priests, who had rolled for and lost the pvp piece roll to Philly. It was only fair, and Philly had no problem trading the pvp piece to the other priest. After the raid, Philly of course wanted to get her new pants socketed and enchanted, as well as see how they looked on her - and she discovered they were part of a set of gear. In fact, Philly already had another piece of the set - her shoulder gear. A quick check verified that Philly now had two pieces of Tier 9.5 gear for her shadow spec. Very, very cool.

Now, back to Wild's ICC25 run. After taking down the Gunship many raids break up, as I mentioned. We were into our second hour and attention spans tend to drift at this point. But the raid leader had been doing a great job, and he held us together for an attempt on the fourth and final boss in the first wing, Saurfang. It was quite a battle, and Wild really appreciated how the DPSers handled the huge number of beast adds that swarmed over us on every wave. Wild had been practicing his "strafing" moves specifically for the Saurfang fight, since getting caught by one of those beasts not only was likely to kill Wild, it caused massive healing to the boss, prolonging the fight. Wild strafed like mad during this fight, and the DPSers around him were very sensitive about keeping those beasts away from the healers. Wild counted five times I had to make emergency strafes to the left or right when beasts closed in on Wild, and watched them die when the alert DPS zeroed in and burned them down. Near the very end of the fight, with a number of raiders down, Wild got a beast on his tail that chased Wild completely out of his strafing lane and sent me fleeing across the outer edge of the raid, the beast still grimly after me. The boss was nearly down, and I think the DPS turned all their attention to finishing him. It was nearly the finish of Wild, as I was running out of room and out of tricks. Saurfang died, and the beast died with him. Wild was still standing.

Three raiders left the raid after loot was distributed. The raid leader told the rest of us that he did not have enough time to tackle all of the trash and go after another boss, but that if we wanted we could do the weekly ICC quest, which would be good for another five frost emblems. And he figured we could do it with just the 22 raiders we had. We were all up for it.

We clawed through the trash mobs, bringing down the two mini-bosses, Precious and Stinky. We nearly wiped on Stinky, though (a mental picture of toilet paper stubbornly refused to go away), and the raid could have cracked open and ended right there (note the clever use of wipe, Stinky, toilet paper, and crack :P ). It didn't, though, and we cleared all the way to the next two bosses, Festergut and Rotface.

Wild had never done this particular weekly, and it was one of the weirdest ones I've seen. The quest required that someone or someones in the raid get a vomit like debuff from both Festergut and Rotface, and then the whole raid had to crowd together at the questgiver in order to be able to complete the quest. We started with Festergut. In order to meet the time requirements of the quest, only half or less of the raid was sent in to fight Festergut; the rest of us hid around the corner out of sight of the battle. The group that fought Festergut would all die, with hopefully some folks with the debuff. Those of us that survived outside (and Wild discovered that Festergut's spewing vomit reached outside the closed doors of his chamber and half of us hiding out there were killed as well). Wild survived, save a few more, and then Wild helped rez all the dead.

We then pulled the same trick with Rotface. We quickly got everyone rezzed again and scrambled to the quest giver, crowding close to each other. When everyone was there we all were able to complete the quest. It was a very strange quest, but Wild got his extra badges. The raid leader was out of time, and we ended it there. Wild thoroughly enjoyed it, and really misses doing 25 man raids.

Philly is impatiently waiting to get her final say in, so here goes.

One must make some concessions for Happy, who at some point got very confused about what he was buying and not buying for Philly. Happy did get Wild the tailoring recipe for the [Royal Moonshroud Robe]. The pattern required several Crusader Orbs, expensive but not nearly so expensive as the primordial saronite was for the Deathfrost boots that were going to be denied to Philly. The robe was a very good one, and a very solid upgrade for Philly. Philly knew she wasn't going to win the argument over the boots, so she switched strategies and began needling Happy to get her the belt. The belt was over-priced, however, and Happy didn't want to pay it, prefering to wait until one turned up at a fair cost. Philly was giving Happy a hard time, though, and Happy decided to compromise. There was a pair of [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale at a reasonable price, which would be a lesser upgrade than the belt, but still something Philly should like. Happy paid 1500 gold for them, quite reasonable for what i245 gear was selling for these days.

After getting them socketed and enchanted, Happy handed over the surprise present to Philly. Philly took one look at them, stamped her foot, rolled her eyes, and crushed poor Happy with the words. "Great, did you bother to check my gear? I already HAVE THESE BRACERS!" Gulp.

If one looks, there is now a nicely enchanted and gem socketed [Moonshroud Bracers] for sale on the AH. Happy, always one to make lemonade out of lemons, thinks he'll actually make a profit from the sale. That's Happy, always finding that silver lining.

Philly, in the end, got her Tier 9.5 pants and a pretty new robe, so she was pleased as well. But I don't think she's going to stop bugging Wild about those boots.