Thursday (30 Dec) - Cata Level 85 Dungeon Sweep

Thursday (30 Dec) - Cata Level 85 Dungeon Sweep

Wild's guildie friend, Rs, had offered his tanking services to help Wild gear up for Heroics and raids. We hadn't been able to hook up yet, but when Wild logged in Thursday night I was hoping he would be on. Rs was on, but he was in the middle of a dungeon. No problem, Wild had things to do in Orgrimmar.

In vanilla WoW the biggest and most populated horde city in all of Azeroth was Orgrimmar. Maxed out level 60 players set their hearthstone there, and the tales are legendary of the lag and DCs (disconnects) of those early days in the crowded city. When Outlands arrived on the scene, Org became an afterthought, a stopover for leveling toons. There were still a few level 60s and soon to be 70s hanging out there, but it's boom days were over. The new city for level 70s (the new max level) was the city of Shattrath. Then along came Northrend, and Dalaran became the home of nearly all the level 80s.

Today, the city of choice for horde is Orgrimmar once again. The blasted and reshaped city baffled Wild for awhile, but the underlying framework of the city had not really changed. Wild soon began recognizing the familiar layout beneath the changes and has settled in, comfortable once again in his old haunting grounds with it's new face.

Philly still had her hearthstone set to Dalaran, and when she logged in Thursday night the place was a ghost town. All of the portals that once offered instant travel to almost every major city in the world had been dismantled. Philly had to fly to one of the outlying zones of Northrend to catch a zep to Orgrimmar, where she set her hearthstone, and did a little business with Wild. Org is a happenin' place again, and the Christmas lights are still up. For a few more days, anyway.

Before Rs finished up his dungeon run, another guildie friend, Bd, (and the raid leader for the now defunct ICC10 G2) asked in guild chat if anyone wanted to run some dungeons on normal mode. Bd only recently got to 85 due to some real life issues and wasn't quite at heroic ilvl yet. He was interested in helping other guildies improve their ilvl and offered to tank. Bd is a superb tank and provides good explanations of boss fights. Wild immediately offered to heal. Another familiar face, Lady Hunter, joined us, as well as a warlock. We then got a nice surprise when an old friend from our FS days joined the guild, and we roped him into our group even though he was barely geared enough to get in and had just returned to playing. He protested a bit that he wasn't even sure he was playing his fury warrior right with all the changes, but we would not let him back out.

Let's get to it. Just remember that I have a hard enough time sorting out the details of one dungeon run. Thursday night we ran two.

No one in the group needed the daily (Wild was very happy he'd gotten that done earlier in the day), and Bd wanted to stick with the level 85 only dungeons as they drop the best loot. So instead of using the dungeon finder to pick a random dungeon and random players, we used it to send our entire group to the dungeon of our choice. That choice was The Lost City of the Tol'vir. I don't know what acronym is being used for that long title, yet. LCT maybe, or perhaps it will be TV. I'll go with TV for now.

TV is where the cat people who were created in the Halls of Origination are. Along with various other shady and deadly races. TV is also an outdoor dungeon, kind of like Zul'Aman. I kept expecting to see trolls (For those who don't know, most of the outdoor dungeons and raids in WoW - and there aren't very many - feature trolls).

Like HOO, there are a lot of mobs to kill, and they all come in clumps. The tank, Bd, made it a habit to mark mobs for crowd control and set a kill order for the DPS to follow. We may eventually get to where we over-gear these dungeons, but right now, prudence required we take a cautious approach. We worked our way to the first boss. We had one near wipe on the trash, but Wild popped into Tree of Life form and only two players died. Bd quipped during the battle, "Oh noes, Wild has gone Tree!" "Going Tree" usually means stuff has hit the fan and things are getting out of control.

The first boss was General Husam. A pretty standard boss with pretty standard abilities and we killed him. He dropped [Spirit Creeper Ring] and Wild won it. It wasn't completely to my liking, since it did not have any haste, but it was i333 and Wild needs to build up his ilvl. It'll replace an i325 ring. It was the only thing that dropped that Wild had any interest in the rest of the run.

High Prophet Barim was considerably more interesting, but mostly only for the tank and DPS. The fight starts as a tank and spank - until one of the eggs in the area hatch a Phoenix that moves slowly toward the tank, leaving pools of fire behind. The Phoenix will heal Barim if it reaches him, so the DPS have to bring it down before that happens. Once killed, it becomes an egg again and will then hatch into another Phoenix. Barim tosses about other nasty stuff, too, but all of that Wild had no trouble handling. Barim died.

Lockmaw and Augh are a paired fight in Heroic, but in normal mode only Lockmaw can be fought. Actually, I hear that Augh can be attacked, too, but he can't be killed in normal mode - he can certainly kill his attackers, though.

Lockmaw is an easy fight. The deadliest thing he does is target one raider at a time with Scent of Blood, which spawns three elite crocodiles that attack the target. Oh, did I mention that Lockmaw is a croc? Bd discovered a trick of positioning that took Scent of Blood out of the picture. Behind Lockmaw is a croc statue. The tank positions on the head of the croc statue, and the rest of us stand on it's tail. Since we are off the ground, the spawning crocs don't attack. Easy peasy.

Siamet is the final boss in TV. He stands at the center of a large terrace open to the sky. A convenient stationary tornado on the ground floor provides a quick, windy trip up to the terrace. The floor is ribbed with low walls that players can walk across, but which sometimes causes pathing problems for pets, which see the low walls as barriers to go around instead of over. When we started the fight, Siamet immediately cast a Shield which made him immune to all damage. A series of mobs spawned which were easy to kill, but upon dying they spawned mini-tornadoes which moved slowly around the room, doing damage and tossing players around who got tangled in them. Wild was constantly on the move, and very aware that there was no railing to keep himself or anyone else from falling or being thrown off. Siamet then entered a new phase where he can be hit. The tank picked Siamet up quickly. More adds spawned which attacked but didn't spawn tornadoes. Siamet, though, blasted back at us with lightning strikes that have a knockback. Sure enough, Wild was knocked off the terrace. But no sooner did I fall than an unseen hand plopped me back on the terrace. So, you can't really fall. [Side note: I read that if you get knocked off in the first phase, you are NOT automatically dropped back on the terrace. But you can run to the tornado elevator and use it to get back to the top]. We managed to wipe on our first attempt on Siamet, mostly because Wild got tossed around so much I was having a hard time healing. Wild's instant heals no longer carry the power they did pre-cata, and Wild can't cast his other spells unless he's standing still. That part of cata healing sucks. Says Wild. We took Siamet down on our second try.

During the run Bd was of course checking Wild's mana level, as any good tank would. Finally, after the third boss, he suddenly exclaimed in party chat, "Dam, Wild, I've been watching and you always seem to have at least 80% mana!" Apparently, that's not what he has been seeing with other healers. It made Wild feel pretty good, particularly since I know the other druid healers in the guild are better geared than Wild. He was interested in how Wild was managing that, and I told him that one big reason was to make 100% use of Clearcasting. Clearcasting is a proc making the next spell cast mana free. In a dungeon run, it procs pretty often, and Wild takes advantage of that to cast mana-free spells. "Really?" said Bd. "It makes that much of a difference?" Yep, Wild told him. Casting one regrowth takes away about 8% of Wild's mana. So about 12 clearcast regrowths add up to a full mana bar of saved mana. That is a lot of mana. I'll add one more aside on mana. When Wild pops into Tree of Life form, regrowths become instant cast spells. It is VERY enticing to spam regrowth in that situation because, as noted earlier, things are already getting out of control at that point. But spamming regrowth without a clearcast is a very fast way of running out of mana. The guidance is that lifebloom should be spammed, not regrowth.

After completing TV, Bd asked us where we'd like to go next. Most of us had yet to visit Grim Batol (GB) yet, so that was our next target. Stay tuned for Part 2 - Grim Batol.