Tuesday (28 Sep) - About That Raid - Never Mind
Now, don't make anything of this, but while Wild has been cooling his considerable heels, little Philly has been busy behind the scenes. Who's Philly? Oh, well, I guess it's been awhile. Philly is a priest. A Horde priest on Silvermoon. In Happy's guild. Starting to remember? She's level 81 and had aspirations of greater things, but that was before ... whatever it was that side-lined her. Probably a little bored with life - but now she's back, because now it's Wild's life that has gotten a bit boring.
Philly cleaned herself up, got rid of a couple of bags worth of old pre-Cata pvp gear that was really pretty useless in the here and now, and straightened out her spell rotations and talent specs for DISC and Shadow. She's keeping her goals very simple, starting with a little pvp as a DISC healer. Philly had a lot of fun with that back in the Wintergrasp battleground days, and pvping was sounding fun again. The shadow spec could be used for leveling, or maybe some dungeon runs ... but slow down, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
On Tuesday night Philly tried out a random pvp BG and found herself in Warsong Gulch. Neither the horde or alliance teams knew what they were doing, but we were a bit less bad than they were. We capped their flag somehow, and Philly thought we might actually be getting a little organized, but no, we fought mid while both flags sat in their bases. Ok, Philly got in some good healing practice. She was really pretty rusty. I also realized my mouseover keys were not set for mouseover use, so Philly had to do the clicky-clicky thing for the whole fight. Eh, have to fix that. Not using the Nostromo, by the way, that's strictly Death Knight use right now.
We did win 3-0. Philly died a lot but still led in healing with double the heals of the #2 - although there may be some problems with the stats since it also showed a hunter second in healing. Hmm. Oh well, no matter, Philly had fun and is going to fool around some more. She was already 74% of the way to level 82, and that one WSG win pushed her up to 85%. She only had 55 honor, though, having used a lot of what she used to have on heirloom gear for Hunter Fortress and the allie cousins. She's back up to 202 honor now.
Then there was an Isle of Conquest. I barely remembered this place and Philly had never won a battle here, which I knew because Horde won and she got the achievement. Now 91% to level 82 and she has 292 honor. She led all comers in healing, too. This is fun.
The next BG, Alterac Valley, was a loss, but Philly followed that up with a second Isle win and with that Philly DINGED! to level 82.
Don't be surprised if Philly wanders off again, though. She's keeping things very low key. But it's nice to have her around again.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Monday (26 Sep) - Some Battlegroup Wins
Monday (26 Sep) - Some Battlegroup Wins
Bruiserbabe continued her practice with the Nostromo in the Battlegrounds on Monday and actually won a couple, and in Warsong Gulch no less. There was also a few others that I've lost track of. Not much to say about that other than BB continues to improve. She collected 7 killing blows in one of the WSG matches, although the damage and DPS she does is still near the bottom despite being a level 64 in a 60-64 bracket. That is still a bit disappointing.
I had to cut things a little short on Monday night as my right hand muscles have gotten very sore, including some cramps, from all the heavy use of the mouse in my right hand, which I'm not used to. I can feel it all the way up to my shoulder.
BB is doing well, otherwise, reaching level 65 and is close to 3,000 honor points toward the goal of 4,000.
Wildshard did not even come in game Monday night. There were more than enough signed up for Mf's Mon/Tues raid, they have plenty of healers, and Wild is not really considered a regular with that group even though Wild has run with them many times. There has been no sign up for posted for Lady Hunter's Tues/Wed raid. The raid folded last week without running and without a sign up and with Mf's raid still running on Tuesday the odds are that there will be no second raid. Bd's raid remains on hiatus, although Da and Fn try every week to cobble something together. Wild can't do anything about this situation, so I'll stop complaining. Wild is considering testing the waters in a PUG Firelands raid ...
Bruiserbabe continued her practice with the Nostromo in the Battlegrounds on Monday and actually won a couple, and in Warsong Gulch no less. There was also a few others that I've lost track of. Not much to say about that other than BB continues to improve. She collected 7 killing blows in one of the WSG matches, although the damage and DPS she does is still near the bottom despite being a level 64 in a 60-64 bracket. That is still a bit disappointing.
I had to cut things a little short on Monday night as my right hand muscles have gotten very sore, including some cramps, from all the heavy use of the mouse in my right hand, which I'm not used to. I can feel it all the way up to my shoulder.
BB is doing well, otherwise, reaching level 65 and is close to 3,000 honor points toward the goal of 4,000.
Wildshard did not even come in game Monday night. There were more than enough signed up for Mf's Mon/Tues raid, they have plenty of healers, and Wild is not really considered a regular with that group even though Wild has run with them many times. There has been no sign up for posted for Lady Hunter's Tues/Wed raid. The raid folded last week without running and without a sign up and with Mf's raid still running on Tuesday the odds are that there will be no second raid. Bd's raid remains on hiatus, although Da and Fn try every week to cobble something together. Wild can't do anything about this situation, so I'll stop complaining. Wild is considering testing the waters in a PUG Firelands raid ...
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday (21 Sep) - Joining the Rest of the World
Wednesday (21 Sep) - Joining the Rest of the World
As I write this I don't know if there will be a raid Wednesday night or not. So, just to make sure I have something to report, I'm going to talk about a recent technology upgrade Judi and I made. Judi and I are pretty up to date on most things - We have three desktop computers and two laptops. Judi has her Kindle eReader and I have my Kobo eReader. We have two HD TVs, his and her IPODs, TomTom GPS, Netflix, Skype, gmail, facebook, and any number of other online resources for education, news, and fun. We're old, but we're hip (or whatever "hip" is these days) - sort of, anyway.
We also have cell phones, of course. The kind of cell phones that you flip up. The kind that can't text, get online, take pictures to send to someone, or do anything else other than make and receive phone calls. Ok, so Judi's phone can text and take pictures - but those features aren't activated.
On Tuesday we went to the Sprint store. The store clerk was very nice, even though I think he swallowed his gum when he saw how old our Sprint service contract was. He was smart enough not to ask if we were Sprint's first customer. We have a family plan that is very inexpensive and has served us well. We might have stayed that way indefinitely if it hadn't been for a couple of things. One was that traveling around in an RV gives us a better appreciation of the things we have that we either have to do without or have to pack to go with us when we are on the go. A plain cell phone doesn't offer much, so we need other devices to do those other things. Second, friends and relatives (some who are older than I am) have moved beyond plain cell phones and they couldn't text us, send pictures to our phones, etc. The real reason? - there was a jazzy new phone that had just hit the market, and we both got that "I want that!" feeling.
No, we didn't get an iphone. What we were looking at was the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. You T-Mobile folks have to know all about this phone. It rolled out last week for Sprint customers, and I just heard that AT&T will get their version of it in October. T-Mobile is supposed to get it, too, at some point.
Now, knowing what we were starting with, ANY smartphone would have been a huge upgrade for us. But I have to say we love our new phones, even if using it is a whole new world of exploration. The rep at the store walked us through a lot of things, most of which we'll forget and have to learn again as we go along. Probably the funniest thing that happened not long after we left the store with our new toys was trying to call each other. Who knew that we had to do a finger swipe on the little phone icon to pick up the call? We managed to figure that out ourselves. So far we've figured out texting (everyone we've ever had a phone number for has probably gotten a text from us by now), voice mail, GPS mapping, getting online, contact lists ... it's like Christmas in September. Which it is, actually, given that we consider the phones to be early Christmas gifts to each other.
I'd go over some more features, but this is surely old news as everyone seems to have a smartphone these days. Now we know why. I was also at a store on Wednesday that happened to have a T-Mobile kiosk. I thought they might have accessories that would fit/work with the new smartphone. I asked about that, and the salesgirl I talked to kind of sighed and said that no, accessories generally shipped to stores around the same time as the phones. She paused a second, and then asked, "Do you, ah, have an S II?" I pulled out the phone, and I thought she was going to pounce on it. "Can I see it?" I handed it over. There were four people at the kiosk, and they all had to get a look at it. None of them had seen the phone before. They asked a few questions, and it took about ten seconds for them to realize ... "This is your first smartphone, isn't it?" Yea, I'm still a smartphone dummy.
PS - I just downloaded the Warcraft Remote Auction House. Oh my ...
Wednesday Night - There were nine guildies signed up for Lady Hunter's raid. Lady Hunter could not make it, but we knew that in advance and her backup, the tank Fn, was in game and handling the invites. Tuesday, Fn had contacted most of the guildies that had signed up and all had said they would make the raid. But, the start time came and went, and after thirty minutes waiting we still had only six raiders, only four of them from the sign up.
A very frustrated Fn could not understand why guildies would tell him they would be here and then not show up. Wild summed up our conundrum: "It seems we now have only one functional raid in our guild." That would be the Mf raid, which had 13 sign up and spent two nights doing BWD. In one sense this might not be surprising. BWD is safe and good for VPs, guild rep, and the occasional shiny new toy. The Firelands have been nerfed now, sure, but our guild has not downed boss one in there - it's still a progression raid, and the interest is limited. The one person in the guild that has the confidence of the guild to make a Firelands raid work is Bd, but he may never be back from his hiatus from the game for all I know. It's a tough stretch we are in, but Wild hasn't totally given up yet.
In fact, we did get a raid going, cobbled together as best we could. We cleared trash to the spider Beth'tilac, and the mobs did seem easier to take down (not that they were hard before). This is Wild's third visit to Beth, and like the prior two visits we had as many raiders who hadn't seen the fight as had. We made five attempts, getting close to phase two a couple of times but not quite making it. Even with the nerf, we don't have enough practice to overcome the lack of DPS. Our makeup wasn't very good, either. We had just one ranged DPS, which made taking down the spinners a real challenge. Wild led in healing, averaging about 14k hps, with apologies to the pally healer who had to go topside into the web. The third healer, another pally who stayed on the ground with Wild, averaged around 9k hps. It wasn't really healing that was the issue, though, we just couldn't manage the spinners. With twenty minutes left of our raid time the raid leader asked for a vote on whether to pound on Beth some more or go back to trash killing for rep and maybe a BoE. Only two of us (the raid leader and Wild) wanted to keep at Beth, so we spent the last of our time clearing more trash. We did have some fun when our leader blundered into some small turtles. We were laughing at him and running away, but running away didn't help, and we wound up trying to kill them. We might have done it, too, except we managed to aggro a pack of scorpions as well. It was keystone cops time, and we wiped, but it was entertaining.
After the raid it was Hunter Fortress time. The goblin couple of Shevils and Pong got a quick start with an opening battleground of Arathi Basin. Normally we get Warsong Gulch virtually every time on these forays, so it was a nice change of pace. It was a spirited fight, but we held the upper hand throughout the battle and won it. Shevils led in damage and in killing blows (24). Pong was astounding at healing, pouring out more than 36k heals (2nd place in healing had only 15k). We had so much fun we signed up for AB specifically for our second BG. We won that one, too, with Shevils getting more than 10k damage over the 2nd place player and getting 32 KBs while dying only once. Shevils tends to die a lot since she'd rather get off that last killing shot than escape an attacker, so this was a quite unusual situation and Pong deserves a lot of credit for keeping suicide bound Shevils alive. Pong did 44k healing with #2 at 19k.
We again selected AB, but the queueing got screwed up (as it sometimes does; issues with that still persist) and Shevils wound up in AB without Pong. Shevils again led in KBs and damage, but the team we fielded this time was terrible. Two players did ZERO damage and healing, which I didn't see until the end of game stats were checked - it's hard to catch things like that in a wide ranging battle like AB. We lost.
After that it was all Warsong Gulch. Pong continued his dominance in healing with Shevils placing usually in the top 3 or so in damage. We lost our first battle 0-3, which was frustrating, particularly because of one alliance level 29 hunter who sat defending his base for the whole fight. Shevils lost one on one fights with that guy three times and was near exploding in frustration. He was very good, but Shevils was also a bit gimped since she had forgotten to pick up her ice trap ability when she hit level 28 - the alliance hunter sure knew how to use that trap, as well as a web ability that kept Shevils pinned down so his pet could have his way with her until she died. Sigh.
But after that ...
3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... etc ...
At the end of the night we had a 2-1 AB record and a 6-1 record in WSG for an 8-2 overall record. Pong and Shevils both made it to level 29 and picked up some new gear and abilities.
Bean and See sure missed out on some great fun ...
As I write this I don't know if there will be a raid Wednesday night or not. So, just to make sure I have something to report, I'm going to talk about a recent technology upgrade Judi and I made. Judi and I are pretty up to date on most things - We have three desktop computers and two laptops. Judi has her Kindle eReader and I have my Kobo eReader. We have two HD TVs, his and her IPODs, TomTom GPS, Netflix, Skype, gmail, facebook, and any number of other online resources for education, news, and fun. We're old, but we're hip (or whatever "hip" is these days) - sort of, anyway.
We also have cell phones, of course. The kind of cell phones that you flip up. The kind that can't text, get online, take pictures to send to someone, or do anything else other than make and receive phone calls. Ok, so Judi's phone can text and take pictures - but those features aren't activated.
On Tuesday we went to the Sprint store. The store clerk was very nice, even though I think he swallowed his gum when he saw how old our Sprint service contract was. He was smart enough not to ask if we were Sprint's first customer. We have a family plan that is very inexpensive and has served us well. We might have stayed that way indefinitely if it hadn't been for a couple of things. One was that traveling around in an RV gives us a better appreciation of the things we have that we either have to do without or have to pack to go with us when we are on the go. A plain cell phone doesn't offer much, so we need other devices to do those other things. Second, friends and relatives (some who are older than I am) have moved beyond plain cell phones and they couldn't text us, send pictures to our phones, etc. The real reason? - there was a jazzy new phone that had just hit the market, and we both got that "I want that!" feeling.
No, we didn't get an iphone. What we were looking at was the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. You T-Mobile folks have to know all about this phone. It rolled out last week for Sprint customers, and I just heard that AT&T will get their version of it in October. T-Mobile is supposed to get it, too, at some point.
Now, knowing what we were starting with, ANY smartphone would have been a huge upgrade for us. But I have to say we love our new phones, even if using it is a whole new world of exploration. The rep at the store walked us through a lot of things, most of which we'll forget and have to learn again as we go along. Probably the funniest thing that happened not long after we left the store with our new toys was trying to call each other. Who knew that we had to do a finger swipe on the little phone icon to pick up the call? We managed to figure that out ourselves. So far we've figured out texting (everyone we've ever had a phone number for has probably gotten a text from us by now), voice mail, GPS mapping, getting online, contact lists ... it's like Christmas in September. Which it is, actually, given that we consider the phones to be early Christmas gifts to each other.
I'd go over some more features, but this is surely old news as everyone seems to have a smartphone these days. Now we know why. I was also at a store on Wednesday that happened to have a T-Mobile kiosk. I thought they might have accessories that would fit/work with the new smartphone. I asked about that, and the salesgirl I talked to kind of sighed and said that no, accessories generally shipped to stores around the same time as the phones. She paused a second, and then asked, "Do you, ah, have an S II?" I pulled out the phone, and I thought she was going to pounce on it. "Can I see it?" I handed it over. There were four people at the kiosk, and they all had to get a look at it. None of them had seen the phone before. They asked a few questions, and it took about ten seconds for them to realize ... "This is your first smartphone, isn't it?" Yea, I'm still a smartphone dummy.
PS - I just downloaded the Warcraft Remote Auction House. Oh my ...
Wednesday Night - There were nine guildies signed up for Lady Hunter's raid. Lady Hunter could not make it, but we knew that in advance and her backup, the tank Fn, was in game and handling the invites. Tuesday, Fn had contacted most of the guildies that had signed up and all had said they would make the raid. But, the start time came and went, and after thirty minutes waiting we still had only six raiders, only four of them from the sign up.
A very frustrated Fn could not understand why guildies would tell him they would be here and then not show up. Wild summed up our conundrum: "It seems we now have only one functional raid in our guild." That would be the Mf raid, which had 13 sign up and spent two nights doing BWD. In one sense this might not be surprising. BWD is safe and good for VPs, guild rep, and the occasional shiny new toy. The Firelands have been nerfed now, sure, but our guild has not downed boss one in there - it's still a progression raid, and the interest is limited. The one person in the guild that has the confidence of the guild to make a Firelands raid work is Bd, but he may never be back from his hiatus from the game for all I know. It's a tough stretch we are in, but Wild hasn't totally given up yet.
In fact, we did get a raid going, cobbled together as best we could. We cleared trash to the spider Beth'tilac, and the mobs did seem easier to take down (not that they were hard before). This is Wild's third visit to Beth, and like the prior two visits we had as many raiders who hadn't seen the fight as had. We made five attempts, getting close to phase two a couple of times but not quite making it. Even with the nerf, we don't have enough practice to overcome the lack of DPS. Our makeup wasn't very good, either. We had just one ranged DPS, which made taking down the spinners a real challenge. Wild led in healing, averaging about 14k hps, with apologies to the pally healer who had to go topside into the web. The third healer, another pally who stayed on the ground with Wild, averaged around 9k hps. It wasn't really healing that was the issue, though, we just couldn't manage the spinners. With twenty minutes left of our raid time the raid leader asked for a vote on whether to pound on Beth some more or go back to trash killing for rep and maybe a BoE. Only two of us (the raid leader and Wild) wanted to keep at Beth, so we spent the last of our time clearing more trash. We did have some fun when our leader blundered into some small turtles. We were laughing at him and running away, but running away didn't help, and we wound up trying to kill them. We might have done it, too, except we managed to aggro a pack of scorpions as well. It was keystone cops time, and we wiped, but it was entertaining.
After the raid it was Hunter Fortress time. The goblin couple of Shevils and Pong got a quick start with an opening battleground of Arathi Basin. Normally we get Warsong Gulch virtually every time on these forays, so it was a nice change of pace. It was a spirited fight, but we held the upper hand throughout the battle and won it. Shevils led in damage and in killing blows (24). Pong was astounding at healing, pouring out more than 36k heals (2nd place in healing had only 15k). We had so much fun we signed up for AB specifically for our second BG. We won that one, too, with Shevils getting more than 10k damage over the 2nd place player and getting 32 KBs while dying only once. Shevils tends to die a lot since she'd rather get off that last killing shot than escape an attacker, so this was a quite unusual situation and Pong deserves a lot of credit for keeping suicide bound Shevils alive. Pong did 44k healing with #2 at 19k.
We again selected AB, but the queueing got screwed up (as it sometimes does; issues with that still persist) and Shevils wound up in AB without Pong. Shevils again led in KBs and damage, but the team we fielded this time was terrible. Two players did ZERO damage and healing, which I didn't see until the end of game stats were checked - it's hard to catch things like that in a wide ranging battle like AB. We lost.
After that it was all Warsong Gulch. Pong continued his dominance in healing with Shevils placing usually in the top 3 or so in damage. We lost our first battle 0-3, which was frustrating, particularly because of one alliance level 29 hunter who sat defending his base for the whole fight. Shevils lost one on one fights with that guy three times and was near exploding in frustration. He was very good, but Shevils was also a bit gimped since she had forgotten to pick up her ice trap ability when she hit level 28 - the alliance hunter sure knew how to use that trap, as well as a web ability that kept Shevils pinned down so his pet could have his way with her until she died. Sigh.
But after that ...
3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... 3-0 win ... etc ...
At the end of the night we had a 2-1 AB record and a 6-1 record in WSG for an 8-2 overall record. Pong and Shevils both made it to level 29 and picked up some new gear and abilities.
Bean and See sure missed out on some great fun ...
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Monday (20 Sep) - Bruiserbabe Fun
Monday (20 Sep) - Bruiserbabe Fun
It was after 7pm when Wild logged in, and the Mf raid was already in progress. They were in BWD, not Firelands. Wild also noted who was NOT in that raid, which included many of Lady Hunter's more or less regulars. Although few had signed up for her raid, it appeared there would be a good core of raiders available for Tuesday night. Wild signed up.
BB got in some battlegrounds work as well. The random BG finder was a little quirky and twice BB had to log out and log back in to clear the Finder so it would let BB queue. BB got to see a lot of different BGs, starting with Arathi Basin and moving through Eye of the Storm, Warsong gulch, and then Eye of the Storm again. BB's alliance team lost three of the four matches and they weren't really that close. BB isn't very good at one on one pvp and she had her clock cleaned over and over. She did better harrassing the healers, and staying in the faces of a priest and a druid in the final Eye match helped alliance win that one match. BB has just over 1800 honor now and is 64% of the way to level 64.
Tuesday - Nerf Day
There was a long maintenance period on Tuesday (3am - 11am), but nothing that required resetting the TOA or re-checking the "Allow Expired Addons" in the addons. It will be interesting to see if our raid group can even tell that the Boss encounters have been nerfed or not. However, per the notes on wowhead the following has changed:
Firelands: Shannox, Beth'tilac, Lord Rhyolith - health and damage reduced by 15%; Other bosses - health and damage reduced by 25%. All of the trash mobs/adds are nerfed by about the same amount and things will tend to do less damage and move slower than before.
The three new five man dungeons coming in Patch 4.3 has been fully unveiled. They are called Endtime, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight. The three dungeons will be required to move into the eventual 10/25 man raid, simialr to how Lich King worked, I suspect. Instead of the Lich King, we'll be chasing Deathwing. Here is the summary of the three dungeons:
The first instance is called "Endtime" and it sends players into the future to see what Deathwing's victory means. "And so you go into this grim vision of the future," says Chilton, "and essentially demonstrate to Nozdormu that this is what's going to happen if you don't send us back to the Well of Eternity after the Demon Soul to be able to have a chance against Deathwing."
The second instance is called "Well of Eternity," where players go back in time to see Thrall grab an item called the Demon Soul in order to use it against Deathwing himself. "You [will] fight bosses like Azshara and Mannoroth." (Source: Eurogamer)
The third and final instance is called "Hour of Twilight," where players escort Thrall to Wyrmrest Temple and the battle begins. "So at that point, you get to Wyrmrest Temple, and that's where the raid essentially starts. You take on six different bosses, they're all Deathwing's minions, and eventually, you take on Deathwing himself."
From there, the battle changes drastically--to a format World of Warcraft has never since seen. Players chase Deathwing across the world and end up landing on his back.
Sounds like fun!
Tuesday Night - So much for raiding Firelands after the nerf. Mf's second day raid stayed in BWD. Lady Hunter's first day raid never got off the ground. At least we knew relatively early that several raiders were going to be out. We had four raiders, and called it off at 6:45pm, just 15 minutes after the raid start time. We "think" Lady Tala will have enough raiders to run on Wednesday night. We'll see.
It was after 7pm when Wild logged in, and the Mf raid was already in progress. They were in BWD, not Firelands. Wild also noted who was NOT in that raid, which included many of Lady Hunter's more or less regulars. Although few had signed up for her raid, it appeared there would be a good core of raiders available for Tuesday night. Wild signed up.
BB got in some battlegrounds work as well. The random BG finder was a little quirky and twice BB had to log out and log back in to clear the Finder so it would let BB queue. BB got to see a lot of different BGs, starting with Arathi Basin and moving through Eye of the Storm, Warsong gulch, and then Eye of the Storm again. BB's alliance team lost three of the four matches and they weren't really that close. BB isn't very good at one on one pvp and she had her clock cleaned over and over. She did better harrassing the healers, and staying in the faces of a priest and a druid in the final Eye match helped alliance win that one match. BB has just over 1800 honor now and is 64% of the way to level 64.
Tuesday - Nerf Day
There was a long maintenance period on Tuesday (3am - 11am), but nothing that required resetting the TOA or re-checking the "Allow Expired Addons" in the addons. It will be interesting to see if our raid group can even tell that the Boss encounters have been nerfed or not. However, per the notes on wowhead the following has changed:
Firelands: Shannox, Beth'tilac, Lord Rhyolith - health and damage reduced by 15%; Other bosses - health and damage reduced by 25%. All of the trash mobs/adds are nerfed by about the same amount and things will tend to do less damage and move slower than before.
The three new five man dungeons coming in Patch 4.3 has been fully unveiled. They are called Endtime, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight. The three dungeons will be required to move into the eventual 10/25 man raid, simialr to how Lich King worked, I suspect. Instead of the Lich King, we'll be chasing Deathwing. Here is the summary of the three dungeons:
The first instance is called "Endtime" and it sends players into the future to see what Deathwing's victory means. "And so you go into this grim vision of the future," says Chilton, "and essentially demonstrate to Nozdormu that this is what's going to happen if you don't send us back to the Well of Eternity after the Demon Soul to be able to have a chance against Deathwing."
The second instance is called "Well of Eternity," where players go back in time to see Thrall grab an item called the Demon Soul in order to use it against Deathwing himself. "You [will] fight bosses like Azshara and Mannoroth." (Source: Eurogamer)
The third and final instance is called "Hour of Twilight," where players escort Thrall to Wyrmrest Temple and the battle begins. "So at that point, you get to Wyrmrest Temple, and that's where the raid essentially starts. You take on six different bosses, they're all Deathwing's minions, and eventually, you take on Deathwing himself."
From there, the battle changes drastically--to a format World of Warcraft has never since seen. Players chase Deathwing across the world and end up landing on his back.
Sounds like fun!
Tuesday Night - So much for raiding Firelands after the nerf. Mf's second day raid stayed in BWD. Lady Hunter's first day raid never got off the ground. At least we knew relatively early that several raiders were going to be out. We had four raiders, and called it off at 6:45pm, just 15 minutes after the raid start time. We "think" Lady Tala will have enough raiders to run on Wednesday night. We'll see.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Wednesday - (14 Sep) Cows Can't Fly
Wednesday - (14 Sep) Cows Can't Fly
Lady Hunter snagged Wild on Wednesday night for her raid. Wild had gotten in game kind of hoping he would get snagged, and wasn't disappointed. She was leading us into the Firelands. Oh? Thinking they had changed their mind on Tuesday about their targeted raid (Heroic BWD), I asked if they'd gotten any shots at a Firelands boss? No, she explained, they did go to Heroic BWD on Tuesday, but decided to go to Firelands on Wednesday. Things didn't seem to have gone well on Tuesday, or they would have been back at it again on the second night. Wild was happy for the change, though.
Wild's two favorite healers are both paladins. One, Pl, runs with the Mf group, and the other, Fl, runs with Lady Hunter. Wild was happy to see that Pl was in the raid tonight. We were overloaded with tanks on this night and one had to switch to his warlock alt while another (Da, who is Wild's favorite tank next to Bd) switched from feral to resto druid to be the third healer. Da is well geared for healing but rarely heals in raids, so Wild fielded a lot of healing questions over the course of the evening as Da got to see the raid from a new perspective.
Lady Hunter also had her impatient tank in the raid (Mk, a death knight) who Wild likes because he doesn't waste time, starting pulls quickly and not slowing down unless Lady Hunter calls for a pause. This was Lady Hunter's first foray into Firelands with her own raid (she's been in Firelands with other groups, though), and several raiders were seeing it for the first time. They were excited, and it showed. This group is a lot more talkative, as well, and the comments, barbs, and innuendo was non-stop. No matter whether we get anywhere in the raid or not, running with a Lady Hunter led group is FUN. For the first time this week, Wild did not feel at all like complaining.
We made good progress through the trash mobs. We hadn't released Shannox, yet, and Lady Hunter asked if we wanted to try the mobs on the path that leads to the boss Beth'tilac. Why not? So off we went in that direction. I don't think anyone in the raid other than Wild and the impatient tank had actually attempted these mobs before. The tank explained the mechanics of the pull, and we engaged. No problems with the first set of mobs and we moved to the second clutch of spiders. Wild miss-placed his tank (Wild was healing Mk) and almost got him killed before I found him, but other than that all went smoothly. Another big bunch of mobs followed that needed crowd control. That got a little crazy and one of the tanks (not Wild's charge) died. He was quickly rezzed and we finished off the mobs.
Now we were at the most difficult set of mobs. One group stood in our way, and behind them was another group that could Shield themselves. It takes coordination to manage both sets of mobs without tanks getting cut off from healers, or DPS caught inside or outside the Shield at the wrong moments. We wiped on our first try.
As we were rezzing and getting back Lady Hunter, famous for wandering where she shouldn't (the joke is that her feet and her mouth are always in motion, and usually going in different directions), did just that, galloping down the hill from the instance portal - and right off the edge of the drop off. She's a tauren, and when she struck bottom and died, she said "Dammit! Why didn't someone tell me cows can't fly!"
We finished clearing the rest of the way to Beth'tilac. Wild and Mk were the only two in the raid who had ever taken a shot at this boss.
It was clear that Mk was going to be the tank that climbed the spider thread up to web where Beth'tilac would slither up to once the fight started. Wild was Mk's healer, but Wild had seen how difficult that web climbing process can actually be, and wanted no part of that.
Wild whispered his druid friend, Da. "I REALLY don't want to be the healer that has to climb that thread." Just setting up my play.
Wild then whispered the other tank healer, Fn. "I volunteer YOU to go up that web with Mk. :P" Fn laughed. Mk was going over the mechanics of the fight while this was going on.
Mk suggested that he, plus our top DPS rogue, and Wild should climb up into the web. Oh no. Both Da and Fn sent Wild "Ha Ha's" but Wild wasn't going to be outmaneuvered. Wild suggested in raid chat that the paladin healer was better suited for that role, with the two druids being the best choice for the AoE healing that was essential to the combat on the floor.
Da jumped in and agreed with Wild, ganging up on Fn. Lady Hunter liked Wild's logic and that became the assignment. Yes!
Seriously, I really did think that was the best arrangement. Wild wasn't excited about having to climb that thread (which has to be done several times) but Wild would do that if that was his assigned role. I'm not unhappy Wild didn't have to, though. I'm also certain Fn will get back at me at some point. :-)
We made a few spirited attempts, just learning the fight. I recalled that the first time Wild saw this fight the raiders on the floor spread out. I forgot why. So, this time, we grouped up so that the raid could take better advantage of having Efflorescence from two druid healers. It wasn't until our third attempt I realized that all that damaging stuff falling down on us from above could largely be avoided! I thought it fell everywhere, but no, spreading out and moving away mitigated a lot of the damage. In those first few attempts Wild and Da both were averaging around 18k hps, a new high for Wild. Once we realized the mistake things started to get a little more sane down on the floor.
The really hard part belongs to the three raiders who have to get up into the web with Beth'tilac. There are spiders that hang down from that web that must be taunted to drop down to the floor so they can be killed. The thread of web they drop down on stays put once the spider is dead, and it's those threads that are used to climb up. The raider clicks on the thread, and it then automatically pulls the raider up into the web. The tank must go first, immediately followed (on a different thread) by the healer, and then the single DPSer. It's a lot of coordination, and Beth'tilac doesn't wait for us to sort it all out. The icky stuff starts falling immediately, and the big spider starts attacking the tank the instant he gets up into the web.
Down on the floor, drones are spawning, and so are large packs of tiny spiders that are more dangerous than the bigger drones. It's chaotic, but as we learned and practiced it did become more manageable. Da whispered Wild at one point, worried because our hps had dropped, and I explained that we didn't need to operate at that 18k hps level since raiders were being more careful about avoiding the stuff we had to heal through before. All was good, or at least improving, on the floor, but there were still difficulties with the ups and downs in the web.
There are two phases to the fight, and in the first phase raiders have to climb up into the web and then drop down three times in order to trigger phase 2. The key ability of Beth'tilac that determines when the raiders in the web drop down is called Smoldering Devastation. You definitely don't want to be up in the web when the spider does that.
Over the course of the evening we were able to get through two smoldering devastations on two of our attempts. Total attempts? 13.
So, no, we did not make it to phase 2. But we played and fought hard, and did not waste a lot of time in between attempts, so raiders stayed sharp. I believe our DPS is still not quite there, and it just takes practice for the group of web climbers to get proficient at it... but we can take this boss.
After the raid Wild made a decision to sign up specifically for Lady Hunter's raid. If Mf needs Wild on Monday's, that's fine, but Tuesday and Wednesday will be with Lady Hunter. Wild had a lot of fun.
After the raid Hunter Fortress, in the persons of Speak and Shevils, ran three WSGs, winning two of them rather easily. Speak DINGED to level 30 (Gratz!).
Here is Speak's report on our night: "Just to give a little more info on the bgs Speak and Shevils did, the first one was rough. We had a poor horde group that just wanted to fight mid and they couldn’t even do that well. Speak and Shevils teamed up to try to cap the flag a few times and each time we would get assaulted by waves of enemies. These two can deal a ton of damage and have a bevy of CC, but we can’t heal and the more enemies we face alone the less health we will have and that always got us killed. We lost 3-0. For the second and third WSG, the horde teams dominated the alliance. We finished the two games with 6 caps to 0 or they may have capped one flag. Between the two bgs Speak had 45+ killing blows, 120+ honorable kills, no deaths, 3 flag returns and a flag cap. Shevils had great games as well, but it was a little easier for the alliance to kill her as she was only a level 26 compared to Speak’s 29 and 600 extra health. The two were always at the top of the list for damage, honorable kills and flag returns and had a lot of fun pwning alliance. We missed See though."
After that Sin and Wild decided to visit Molten Core. More on that in the next post.
Lady Hunter snagged Wild on Wednesday night for her raid. Wild had gotten in game kind of hoping he would get snagged, and wasn't disappointed. She was leading us into the Firelands. Oh? Thinking they had changed their mind on Tuesday about their targeted raid (Heroic BWD), I asked if they'd gotten any shots at a Firelands boss? No, she explained, they did go to Heroic BWD on Tuesday, but decided to go to Firelands on Wednesday. Things didn't seem to have gone well on Tuesday, or they would have been back at it again on the second night. Wild was happy for the change, though.
Wild's two favorite healers are both paladins. One, Pl, runs with the Mf group, and the other, Fl, runs with Lady Hunter. Wild was happy to see that Pl was in the raid tonight. We were overloaded with tanks on this night and one had to switch to his warlock alt while another (Da, who is Wild's favorite tank next to Bd) switched from feral to resto druid to be the third healer. Da is well geared for healing but rarely heals in raids, so Wild fielded a lot of healing questions over the course of the evening as Da got to see the raid from a new perspective.
Lady Hunter also had her impatient tank in the raid (Mk, a death knight) who Wild likes because he doesn't waste time, starting pulls quickly and not slowing down unless Lady Hunter calls for a pause. This was Lady Hunter's first foray into Firelands with her own raid (she's been in Firelands with other groups, though), and several raiders were seeing it for the first time. They were excited, and it showed. This group is a lot more talkative, as well, and the comments, barbs, and innuendo was non-stop. No matter whether we get anywhere in the raid or not, running with a Lady Hunter led group is FUN. For the first time this week, Wild did not feel at all like complaining.
We made good progress through the trash mobs. We hadn't released Shannox, yet, and Lady Hunter asked if we wanted to try the mobs on the path that leads to the boss Beth'tilac. Why not? So off we went in that direction. I don't think anyone in the raid other than Wild and the impatient tank had actually attempted these mobs before. The tank explained the mechanics of the pull, and we engaged. No problems with the first set of mobs and we moved to the second clutch of spiders. Wild miss-placed his tank (Wild was healing Mk) and almost got him killed before I found him, but other than that all went smoothly. Another big bunch of mobs followed that needed crowd control. That got a little crazy and one of the tanks (not Wild's charge) died. He was quickly rezzed and we finished off the mobs.
Now we were at the most difficult set of mobs. One group stood in our way, and behind them was another group that could Shield themselves. It takes coordination to manage both sets of mobs without tanks getting cut off from healers, or DPS caught inside or outside the Shield at the wrong moments. We wiped on our first try.
As we were rezzing and getting back Lady Hunter, famous for wandering where she shouldn't (the joke is that her feet and her mouth are always in motion, and usually going in different directions), did just that, galloping down the hill from the instance portal - and right off the edge of the drop off. She's a tauren, and when she struck bottom and died, she said "Dammit! Why didn't someone tell me cows can't fly!"
We finished clearing the rest of the way to Beth'tilac. Wild and Mk were the only two in the raid who had ever taken a shot at this boss.
It was clear that Mk was going to be the tank that climbed the spider thread up to web where Beth'tilac would slither up to once the fight started. Wild was Mk's healer, but Wild had seen how difficult that web climbing process can actually be, and wanted no part of that.
Wild whispered his druid friend, Da. "I REALLY don't want to be the healer that has to climb that thread." Just setting up my play.
Wild then whispered the other tank healer, Fn. "I volunteer YOU to go up that web with Mk. :P" Fn laughed. Mk was going over the mechanics of the fight while this was going on.
Mk suggested that he, plus our top DPS rogue, and Wild should climb up into the web. Oh no. Both Da and Fn sent Wild "Ha Ha's" but Wild wasn't going to be outmaneuvered. Wild suggested in raid chat that the paladin healer was better suited for that role, with the two druids being the best choice for the AoE healing that was essential to the combat on the floor.
Da jumped in and agreed with Wild, ganging up on Fn. Lady Hunter liked Wild's logic and that became the assignment. Yes!
Seriously, I really did think that was the best arrangement. Wild wasn't excited about having to climb that thread (which has to be done several times) but Wild would do that if that was his assigned role. I'm not unhappy Wild didn't have to, though. I'm also certain Fn will get back at me at some point. :-)
We made a few spirited attempts, just learning the fight. I recalled that the first time Wild saw this fight the raiders on the floor spread out. I forgot why. So, this time, we grouped up so that the raid could take better advantage of having Efflorescence from two druid healers. It wasn't until our third attempt I realized that all that damaging stuff falling down on us from above could largely be avoided! I thought it fell everywhere, but no, spreading out and moving away mitigated a lot of the damage. In those first few attempts Wild and Da both were averaging around 18k hps, a new high for Wild. Once we realized the mistake things started to get a little more sane down on the floor.
The really hard part belongs to the three raiders who have to get up into the web with Beth'tilac. There are spiders that hang down from that web that must be taunted to drop down to the floor so they can be killed. The thread of web they drop down on stays put once the spider is dead, and it's those threads that are used to climb up. The raider clicks on the thread, and it then automatically pulls the raider up into the web. The tank must go first, immediately followed (on a different thread) by the healer, and then the single DPSer. It's a lot of coordination, and Beth'tilac doesn't wait for us to sort it all out. The icky stuff starts falling immediately, and the big spider starts attacking the tank the instant he gets up into the web.
Down on the floor, drones are spawning, and so are large packs of tiny spiders that are more dangerous than the bigger drones. It's chaotic, but as we learned and practiced it did become more manageable. Da whispered Wild at one point, worried because our hps had dropped, and I explained that we didn't need to operate at that 18k hps level since raiders were being more careful about avoiding the stuff we had to heal through before. All was good, or at least improving, on the floor, but there were still difficulties with the ups and downs in the web.
There are two phases to the fight, and in the first phase raiders have to climb up into the web and then drop down three times in order to trigger phase 2. The key ability of Beth'tilac that determines when the raiders in the web drop down is called Smoldering Devastation. You definitely don't want to be up in the web when the spider does that.
Over the course of the evening we were able to get through two smoldering devastations on two of our attempts. Total attempts? 13.
So, no, we did not make it to phase 2. But we played and fought hard, and did not waste a lot of time in between attempts, so raiders stayed sharp. I believe our DPS is still not quite there, and it just takes practice for the group of web climbers to get proficient at it... but we can take this boss.
After the raid Wild made a decision to sign up specifically for Lady Hunter's raid. If Mf needs Wild on Monday's, that's fine, but Tuesday and Wednesday will be with Lady Hunter. Wild had a lot of fun.
After the raid Hunter Fortress, in the persons of Speak and Shevils, ran three WSGs, winning two of them rather easily. Speak DINGED to level 30 (Gratz!).
Here is Speak's report on our night: "Just to give a little more info on the bgs Speak and Shevils did, the first one was rough. We had a poor horde group that just wanted to fight mid and they couldn’t even do that well. Speak and Shevils teamed up to try to cap the flag a few times and each time we would get assaulted by waves of enemies. These two can deal a ton of damage and have a bevy of CC, but we can’t heal and the more enemies we face alone the less health we will have and that always got us killed. We lost 3-0. For the second and third WSG, the horde teams dominated the alliance. We finished the two games with 6 caps to 0 or they may have capped one flag. Between the two bgs Speak had 45+ killing blows, 120+ honorable kills, no deaths, 3 flag returns and a flag cap. Shevils had great games as well, but it was a little easier for the alliance to kill her as she was only a level 26 compared to Speak’s 29 and 600 extra health. The two were always at the top of the list for damage, honorable kills and flag returns and had a lot of fun pwning alliance. We missed See though."
After that Sin and Wild decided to visit Molten Core. More on that in the next post.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tuesday (13 Sep) - One Step out of the Box
Tuesday (13 Sep) - One Step out of the Box
Tuesday Afternoon -
Happy was busy at the Auction House Tuesday afternoon. He always keeps an eye on Trade chat in case something interesting turned up. Interesting things on Trade chat is a rarity. Today a post caught Happy's attention: "LF raiders, 25m BWD, Tues night 730pm start, i346 min, will explain each encounter, send PST or check guild website for details."
I took a look at their website and in the Armory. Decent looking guild, level 19, who (per their website) got tired of 10m raiding and has been having some success with 25m. They have some good resto druids, too, although only one was better geared than Wild. Happy responded, gave Wild's details, waited long enough to feel like the poster actually checked Wild out, and got a response back. "An in game calendar invite has been sent. Start time is promptly at 7:30pm. Please read our Raid and Loot rules on our website. Welcome."
This was looking more and more promising. I pulled up their website again and went through their rules. Raid rules were like every other I've seen; nothing to worry about there. Then I read the loot rules. Again, everything was as expected until it came to Tier gear - their guild had a special designation for their top raiders, and those raiders had priority on Tier gear. Wild understands such policies, and guilds can distribute loot any way they want to. However, I had two reasons to raid with this guild - one, because 25m raiding is FUN, and two, because I was after a helm, which included the Tier helm, which if it dropped Wild would not be allowed to compete for.
Happy gave way to Wild so I could have a direct conversation with the guy. It was a pleasant, informative conversation, and he tried to recruit Wild - twice. He wasn't about to make an exception to his loot rules, though. They also run 10m Firelands, but that raid isn't open to non-guildies. They have downed Shannox and Beth'tilac.
In the end Wild declined the invite, but on good terms. The guild offer remained open. Wild would have had to back out of his guild raid to attend their raid, which I would have done if the loot rules had not excluded the one item Wild cared the most about getting.
Home in his own guild, Wild is expecting to see Firelands Tuesday night; so said our raid leader at the end of Monday's BWD run. There's that one step, though ...
Tuesday Night -
We almost didn't have a raid Tuesday night, which would really have been annoying since Wild could have been raiding in a 25 man BWD raid. But we did get a raid. Our 6pm raid made it into the Firelands at 7:20pm. Wild used the time in between wisely, fishing. Lavascale catfish and fathom eel were needed for the Seafood Magnifique recipe.
We had eight guildies and two others from a guild we often coordinate with. One of them, Mzp, was a pally tank who had some experience with Firelands, although her guild had yet to actually kill a Firelands boss, no more than we had. We got lucky on the first set of trash by getting a BoE tank trinket that our tank won. We burned some more trash, and two guildies reached Revered rep with Firelands and got their nice cloaks. If nothing else, we improved some gear for raiders.
We made our first attempt on Shannox. Wild had been assigned to heal Mzp, who was tanking Shannox. Wild knows this fight, knows to avoid the traps, and the lines of fire, and the spear, but there wasn't anything Wild could do about Rageface when the dog decided to chomp on Wild. Let Wild read to you what Rageface does: "Rageface cannot be controlled, and darts about from enemy to enemy, changing targets periodically. Rageface leaps at a random player, stunning and knocking them to the ground. Rageface begins to viciously maul the player, inflicting 6000 Physical damage every 0.5 sec. and the damage dealt increases over time. While Rageface mauls the player, he is 1000% more susceptible to critical strikes. Rageface will continue the mauling until his target is dead, or he receives a single attack that deals at least 30000 damage. " While Rageface was having his fun, Wild was stunned and unable to heal or to move. It takes very few seconds to die. Wild died as the DPS was not able to deal the needed blow.
With Wild down we still had two healers up, one healing the tank on Riplimb and the other raid healing. The shaman raid healer was not able to keep Mzp up and she died. We wiped soon after that.
After the wipe Wild and Mzp had a bit of a difference of opinion. "Who's healing me?" she wanted to know, even though that had been assigned prior to the pull. "Wildshard," said the raid leader. "Yep," Wild said in raid chat, while she was still talking. "Is he in vent? Is he miked?" she continued. "in vent, no mike" Wild chatted helpfully. If she coulda she woulda stamped her foot. "What happened?" she kept on with the questions. "Rageface ate me," and I almost added, "at least that's what recount tells me happened," but I decided not to be too cute, she sounded pretty annoyed.
"Not that I'm accusing anyone of anything, but anyone who gets targeted by Rageface should call out in vent so DPS can target him," was her advice and council. Not having a mike is definitely bad, was her unspoken assessment. Yes, Wild would agree that it would be helpful to do that. But Wild also offered that the DPS should be focused on Rageface anyway, since the plan is to target that dog first, and it ought to be obvious the dog had taken someone down, and irrelevant in regard to who is at the bottom of the dog pile. No shouting is really necessary. Wild would find himself in that situation three times (Rageface has a special fondness for beef), and those last two times I hollered "Rageface on Wildshard" into my non-mike and by the time the last syllable in the name "Wildshard" was uttered, Wild was already dead. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though - Was Wild a bad boy?
Wild did his best to keep Mzp alive through the five attempts we made on Shannox. We did have one pretty good shot by getting Rageface to 2% and Riplimb to 25%. We were trying to bring them down together. Two strats to this fight - one where the dogs die at the same time and the other where Rageface is killed first (which buffs Shannox DPS).
I also need to back up a bit. After the first wipe on Shannox, the other non-guildie in the raid went offline and never came back. While we were waiting to replace him, we moved up into the path which leads to another boss, Beth'tilac. By this time Mzp was getting pretty free with her advice. We arrived at the first set of mobs - the large molten lord being eaten by the spider with a lot of little spiders all around. The Bd raid Wild usually raided with has successfully cleared this path all the way to the Boss in the past, but once we got past that first set of trash no one in the current raid had seen the rest of the mobs - except Wild. It was very satisfying helping explain how "our group" handled those mobs. The nine of us had no trouble clearing as far as where the Shielded mobs were. By then we had our tenth and headed back for the rest of the attempts on Shannox.
The good news is that we got in some practice and I think we are capable of getting those dogs down. Whether we can survive Shannox after that I'm not sure. We won't get another shot until next week. Wild did 45% of all the healing, the rest shared among the other two healers. Wild didn't have his usual pally healer partner - she had been pressed into service as DPS.
Oh, Tuesday night is also Lady Hunter's raid night. She was headed into Heroic BWD 10 man. She got started around 7pm, twenty minutes before we did even though her raid start time is a half hour later than ours. I forgot to ask how she did. Will have to check on that. Maybe she'll have a spot available for Wild on Wednesday night.
Tuesday Afternoon -
Happy was busy at the Auction House Tuesday afternoon. He always keeps an eye on Trade chat in case something interesting turned up. Interesting things on Trade chat is a rarity. Today a post caught Happy's attention: "LF raiders, 25m BWD, Tues night 730pm start, i346 min, will explain each encounter, send PST or check guild website for details."
I took a look at their website and in the Armory. Decent looking guild, level 19, who (per their website) got tired of 10m raiding and has been having some success with 25m. They have some good resto druids, too, although only one was better geared than Wild. Happy responded, gave Wild's details, waited long enough to feel like the poster actually checked Wild out, and got a response back. "An in game calendar invite has been sent. Start time is promptly at 7:30pm. Please read our Raid and Loot rules on our website. Welcome."
This was looking more and more promising. I pulled up their website again and went through their rules. Raid rules were like every other I've seen; nothing to worry about there. Then I read the loot rules. Again, everything was as expected until it came to Tier gear - their guild had a special designation for their top raiders, and those raiders had priority on Tier gear. Wild understands such policies, and guilds can distribute loot any way they want to. However, I had two reasons to raid with this guild - one, because 25m raiding is FUN, and two, because I was after a helm, which included the Tier helm, which if it dropped Wild would not be allowed to compete for.
Happy gave way to Wild so I could have a direct conversation with the guy. It was a pleasant, informative conversation, and he tried to recruit Wild - twice. He wasn't about to make an exception to his loot rules, though. They also run 10m Firelands, but that raid isn't open to non-guildies. They have downed Shannox and Beth'tilac.
In the end Wild declined the invite, but on good terms. The guild offer remained open. Wild would have had to back out of his guild raid to attend their raid, which I would have done if the loot rules had not excluded the one item Wild cared the most about getting.
Home in his own guild, Wild is expecting to see Firelands Tuesday night; so said our raid leader at the end of Monday's BWD run. There's that one step, though ...
Tuesday Night -
We almost didn't have a raid Tuesday night, which would really have been annoying since Wild could have been raiding in a 25 man BWD raid. But we did get a raid. Our 6pm raid made it into the Firelands at 7:20pm. Wild used the time in between wisely, fishing. Lavascale catfish and fathom eel were needed for the Seafood Magnifique recipe.
We had eight guildies and two others from a guild we often coordinate with. One of them, Mzp, was a pally tank who had some experience with Firelands, although her guild had yet to actually kill a Firelands boss, no more than we had. We got lucky on the first set of trash by getting a BoE tank trinket that our tank won. We burned some more trash, and two guildies reached Revered rep with Firelands and got their nice cloaks. If nothing else, we improved some gear for raiders.
We made our first attempt on Shannox. Wild had been assigned to heal Mzp, who was tanking Shannox. Wild knows this fight, knows to avoid the traps, and the lines of fire, and the spear, but there wasn't anything Wild could do about Rageface when the dog decided to chomp on Wild. Let Wild read to you what Rageface does: "Rageface cannot be controlled, and darts about from enemy to enemy, changing targets periodically. Rageface leaps at a random player, stunning and knocking them to the ground. Rageface begins to viciously maul the player, inflicting 6000 Physical damage every 0.5 sec. and the damage dealt increases over time. While Rageface mauls the player, he is 1000% more susceptible to critical strikes. Rageface will continue the mauling until his target is dead, or he receives a single attack that deals at least 30000 damage. " While Rageface was having his fun, Wild was stunned and unable to heal or to move. It takes very few seconds to die. Wild died as the DPS was not able to deal the needed blow.
With Wild down we still had two healers up, one healing the tank on Riplimb and the other raid healing. The shaman raid healer was not able to keep Mzp up and she died. We wiped soon after that.
After the wipe Wild and Mzp had a bit of a difference of opinion. "Who's healing me?" she wanted to know, even though that had been assigned prior to the pull. "Wildshard," said the raid leader. "Yep," Wild said in raid chat, while she was still talking. "Is he in vent? Is he miked?" she continued. "in vent, no mike" Wild chatted helpfully. If she coulda she woulda stamped her foot. "What happened?" she kept on with the questions. "Rageface ate me," and I almost added, "at least that's what recount tells me happened," but I decided not to be too cute, she sounded pretty annoyed.
"Not that I'm accusing anyone of anything, but anyone who gets targeted by Rageface should call out in vent so DPS can target him," was her advice and council. Not having a mike is definitely bad, was her unspoken assessment. Yes, Wild would agree that it would be helpful to do that. But Wild also offered that the DPS should be focused on Rageface anyway, since the plan is to target that dog first, and it ought to be obvious the dog had taken someone down, and irrelevant in regard to who is at the bottom of the dog pile. No shouting is really necessary. Wild would find himself in that situation three times (Rageface has a special fondness for beef), and those last two times I hollered "Rageface on Wildshard" into my non-mike and by the time the last syllable in the name "Wildshard" was uttered, Wild was already dead. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though - Was Wild a bad boy?
Wild did his best to keep Mzp alive through the five attempts we made on Shannox. We did have one pretty good shot by getting Rageface to 2% and Riplimb to 25%. We were trying to bring them down together. Two strats to this fight - one where the dogs die at the same time and the other where Rageface is killed first (which buffs Shannox DPS).
I also need to back up a bit. After the first wipe on Shannox, the other non-guildie in the raid went offline and never came back. While we were waiting to replace him, we moved up into the path which leads to another boss, Beth'tilac. By this time Mzp was getting pretty free with her advice. We arrived at the first set of mobs - the large molten lord being eaten by the spider with a lot of little spiders all around. The Bd raid Wild usually raided with has successfully cleared this path all the way to the Boss in the past, but once we got past that first set of trash no one in the current raid had seen the rest of the mobs - except Wild. It was very satisfying helping explain how "our group" handled those mobs. The nine of us had no trouble clearing as far as where the Shielded mobs were. By then we had our tenth and headed back for the rest of the attempts on Shannox.
The good news is that we got in some practice and I think we are capable of getting those dogs down. Whether we can survive Shannox after that I'm not sure. We won't get another shot until next week. Wild did 45% of all the healing, the rest shared among the other two healers. Wild didn't have his usual pally healer partner - she had been pressed into service as DPS.
Oh, Tuesday night is also Lady Hunter's raid night. She was headed into Heroic BWD 10 man. She got started around 7pm, twenty minutes before we did even though her raid start time is a half hour later than ours. I forgot to ask how she did. Will have to check on that. Maybe she'll have a spot available for Wild on Wednesday night.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Monday - (12 Sep) The Ole Switcheroo
Monday - (12 Sep) The Ole Switcheroo
The Mf led and new, full on Firelands raid started on Monday night - well now, hold there pardner ... About ten minutes before invites were scheduled to go out, the raid leader whispered Wild: "We are going to run BWD tonight to help a feral druid guildie get some healing gear. Cool w/that?"
Hmm, personally, not really, Wild was thinking, but heck, Wild is the only raiding resto druid in the guild, at least until Bd can buy another game card. Wouldn't hurt to grow another. But don't expect Wild to pass on resto druid gear if it happens to be a helm. Wild said Ok. At least we'll down a few bosses and Wild will pick up some valor points. Once we zoned in Wild realized that Mf had saved the raid from last week. Ok so no farming the first three bosses, we were starting with Boss #4, Chimaeron. Still a good thing, since Wild wants a helm and the last two bosses, Atramedes and Nefarian, might drop one.
The night was typical of our raids. Lots of time sinks when not a lot got done. We seemed to have entered a "klutz" phase with raiders not paying close attention to where they were going. We wiped four times during the course of the evening on TRASH, simply because raiders weren't watching where they were going. It's not like those mobs were hiding from us or jumping out from behind pillars or something. They are clearly visible and patrol very well worn paths. After awhile it got kind of funny, in a "what else can ya do but laugh" kind of way. Anyway, we killed two bosses, Chimaeron and Atramedes, on six total attempts. And no, Atramedes did not drop a helm. We had more than a half hour to tackle Nefarian, but several raiders had not seen this fight yet. They were sent off to watch the ten minute video of the fight, and when that was done there was a ten minute explanation of the fight. Then another few minutes re-explaining tactics to raiders who HAD seen the fight but still had questions. With five minutes left of our raid time, we made one attempt that failed in the first phase and we then went home.
The raid leader thanked everyone for coming, congratulated us on getting two bosses down, and was glad some more raiders got to see the Nefarian fight. I'm glad I'm not a raid leader.
Wild did have some fun whispering with our pally healer, and we kept up a conversation about healing, and Firelands, and whatever else came to mind. She was a pretty deadly warlock back when we first started raiding together, but she likes healing and once she switched to her pally she's stayed with it.
Speaking of the Firelands, Blizzard has announced that the Nerf Stick is going to start hitting the Firelands on 19 Sep. They are looking at Patch 4.3 (which will come with three more five man raids, I think) arriving perhaps in November, so they are looking to get more players a chance at Ragnaros. They will be nerfing both normal and Heroic modes, so those who want credit for an un-nerfed Heroic Rag kill had better get busy.
Even Wild is disappointed at the nerf news. It's possible Wild's guild will not even have one Firelands boss down before the first nerf. That would make Wild a sad cow.
The Mf led and new, full on Firelands raid started on Monday night - well now, hold there pardner ... About ten minutes before invites were scheduled to go out, the raid leader whispered Wild: "We are going to run BWD tonight to help a feral druid guildie get some healing gear. Cool w/that?"
Hmm, personally, not really, Wild was thinking, but heck, Wild is the only raiding resto druid in the guild, at least until Bd can buy another game card. Wouldn't hurt to grow another. But don't expect Wild to pass on resto druid gear if it happens to be a helm. Wild said Ok. At least we'll down a few bosses and Wild will pick up some valor points. Once we zoned in Wild realized that Mf had saved the raid from last week. Ok so no farming the first three bosses, we were starting with Boss #4, Chimaeron. Still a good thing, since Wild wants a helm and the last two bosses, Atramedes and Nefarian, might drop one.
The night was typical of our raids. Lots of time sinks when not a lot got done. We seemed to have entered a "klutz" phase with raiders not paying close attention to where they were going. We wiped four times during the course of the evening on TRASH, simply because raiders weren't watching where they were going. It's not like those mobs were hiding from us or jumping out from behind pillars or something. They are clearly visible and patrol very well worn paths. After awhile it got kind of funny, in a "what else can ya do but laugh" kind of way. Anyway, we killed two bosses, Chimaeron and Atramedes, on six total attempts. And no, Atramedes did not drop a helm. We had more than a half hour to tackle Nefarian, but several raiders had not seen this fight yet. They were sent off to watch the ten minute video of the fight, and when that was done there was a ten minute explanation of the fight. Then another few minutes re-explaining tactics to raiders who HAD seen the fight but still had questions. With five minutes left of our raid time, we made one attempt that failed in the first phase and we then went home.
The raid leader thanked everyone for coming, congratulated us on getting two bosses down, and was glad some more raiders got to see the Nefarian fight. I'm glad I'm not a raid leader.
Wild did have some fun whispering with our pally healer, and we kept up a conversation about healing, and Firelands, and whatever else came to mind. She was a pretty deadly warlock back when we first started raiding together, but she likes healing and once she switched to her pally she's stayed with it.
Speaking of the Firelands, Blizzard has announced that the Nerf Stick is going to start hitting the Firelands on 19 Sep. They are looking at Patch 4.3 (which will come with three more five man raids, I think) arriving perhaps in November, so they are looking to get more players a chance at Ragnaros. They will be nerfing both normal and Heroic modes, so those who want credit for an un-nerfed Heroic Rag kill had better get busy.
Even Wild is disappointed at the nerf news. It's possible Wild's guild will not even have one Firelands boss down before the first nerf. That would make Wild a sad cow.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Weekend (11 Sep) - All Quiet and Boring
Weekend (11 Sep) - All Quiet and Boring
The weekend was a big yawn in the WoW world. Happy and Lost, of course, kept up with the Auction Houses. Bean wanted more freedom. Judi plays Bean on the second computer in my room, but she also wanted to be able to play when she wanted to on her own computer in her room. WoW is now locked and loaded on her own computer. That way Bean can practice without Shevils looking over her shoulder.
BB got in a few Battlegrounds over the weekend. There was no Call to Arms BG to focus on, so BB just did randoms. They were mostly wins, in Warsong Gulch, Aterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Eye of the Storm. BB kinda knows what she is doing, now, but she still dies a lot. Rogues with Fan of Knives do her in all the time. BB dinged to level 63 and now has over 1500 honor. She's not leveling at Eowyn speed but she's making steady progress. BB has also kept working on her two professions, Inscription and Herbalism.
Monday night is the debut of Mf's Firelands raid with the focus on the Bosses instead of rep grinding the trash mobs. As of Monday morning only six guildies have signed up for the raid.
Addendum - Part of the process of getting Bean ready to go on Judi's computer was working it out so that we both didn't try to use the same account at the same time. When an account is logged into, it will automatically close an account already active. Bean lives on Wild's account, and it wouldn't be good if in the middle of a Boss encounter Wild found himself bounced off the server by Bean.
Why does Bean live on Wild's account? I had an answer for that somewhere, but it escapes me. It was long ago. Can't be changed now, without some effort and expense, since Shevils - and Jocy - would also have to move if Bean moved. So, if Wild (or anyone in Wild's account) was in game, and Judi wanted to play, she couldn't play Bean, but she could login to Happy's account and play Chaitee. Remember Chaitee? She's a level 21 alliance hunter. The poor girl has really been neglected, too. Do you know what I found in her bags? Ammo. How long has it been since ammo went out of use? She was also stripped of all her heirloom gear, so there was some emergency rations and AH buys to get her to a survivable state. She's in decent shape, now, except for a really terrible bow that I can't fix at this moment. Shevils will certainly lend her heirloom gear when she wants, though. Provided Shevils isn't using it at the moment.
The weekend was a big yawn in the WoW world. Happy and Lost, of course, kept up with the Auction Houses. Bean wanted more freedom. Judi plays Bean on the second computer in my room, but she also wanted to be able to play when she wanted to on her own computer in her room. WoW is now locked and loaded on her own computer. That way Bean can practice without Shevils looking over her shoulder.
BB got in a few Battlegrounds over the weekend. There was no Call to Arms BG to focus on, so BB just did randoms. They were mostly wins, in Warsong Gulch, Aterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Eye of the Storm. BB kinda knows what she is doing, now, but she still dies a lot. Rogues with Fan of Knives do her in all the time. BB dinged to level 63 and now has over 1500 honor. She's not leveling at Eowyn speed but she's making steady progress. BB has also kept working on her two professions, Inscription and Herbalism.
Monday night is the debut of Mf's Firelands raid with the focus on the Bosses instead of rep grinding the trash mobs. As of Monday morning only six guildies have signed up for the raid.
Addendum - Part of the process of getting Bean ready to go on Judi's computer was working it out so that we both didn't try to use the same account at the same time. When an account is logged into, it will automatically close an account already active. Bean lives on Wild's account, and it wouldn't be good if in the middle of a Boss encounter Wild found himself bounced off the server by Bean.
Why does Bean live on Wild's account? I had an answer for that somewhere, but it escapes me. It was long ago. Can't be changed now, without some effort and expense, since Shevils - and Jocy - would also have to move if Bean moved. So, if Wild (or anyone in Wild's account) was in game, and Judi wanted to play, she couldn't play Bean, but she could login to Happy's account and play Chaitee. Remember Chaitee? She's a level 21 alliance hunter. The poor girl has really been neglected, too. Do you know what I found in her bags? Ammo. How long has it been since ammo went out of use? She was also stripped of all her heirloom gear, so there was some emergency rations and AH buys to get her to a survivable state. She's in decent shape, now, except for a really terrible bow that I can't fix at this moment. Shevils will certainly lend her heirloom gear when she wants, though. Provided Shevils isn't using it at the moment.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Wednesday (7 Sep) - A General AH Malaise
Wednesday (7 Sep) - A General AH Malaise
Hunter Fortress was (sort of) out in force on Wednesday night. Bean and Shevils missed an opportunity to run with Speak and See at an earlier starting time than usual (we blame the internetz for not getting the word), but fate conspired against us all being in a battlegroup at the same time. The four of us did start a Warsong Gulch BG shortly after all of us got in game, but poor Shevils and Bean experienced Disconnects (like what had happened with Wild earlier in the week) soon after getting into the BG. Bean recovered and rejoined the BG, but Shevils was knocked totally out of the BG and had to sit it out.
Speak had to leave soon after, but the three of us gamely jumped into an Alterac Valley battle. It started well, but again we were DCed, and again Shevils found herself back in Orgrimmar and not in Alterac Valley. See had to leave after that truncated fight.
Bean and Shevils got in two more WSGs where luckily there were no DC's, and we won one of them.
I believe the DC problem is the heat wave we are having out here right now. We've had all time record temps up to 97 degrees (compared to our usual pleasant low 70s) with much higher humidity than typical due to some sparse showers that have hung around (our first "rain" since February, I think). I think the heat is causing problems either with our internet connection itself or with our router. We don't have A/C, and it's HOT with that temp and with two computers running.
There is no raid scheduled for Thursday night. Wild finally learned what happened with our Thurs/Fri raid leader, Bd. Bd is having some real life issues and when his WoW game card expired he decided not to get another. He recently passed along word that he will probably be out of action for another month. Wild is going to start signing up for Mf's Mon/Tues raid hoping to get with them on a regular basis instead of as a fill in. They plan to work on the Firelands full time. Lady Hunter's group on Tues/Wed has decided to start running Heroic BWD. Maybe Heroic raids are a better plan than Firelands - the Heroic gear is i372 vs the Firelands i378, and both are better than some of the gear Wild has now. I love progression, though, and I'd rather Wild be learning the Firelands encounters than plodding through BWD in Heroic mode at the meandering pace of Lady Hunter's raid. But that might change if we discover that we simply aren't ready for Firelands.
The Horde AH is going through an interesting cycle the past few days. There has been some massive dumping of stuff at crazy low prices. It started with just a few sellers, but it has taken on a life of it's own. This happens periodically, but I don't recall it ever being this large or last this long. Happy was in heaven at first, buying and buying and buying. But there's a limit even for Happy, and he began sitting out some of the sell offs to take stock and to see if prices would continue to drop.
Happy has spent more than 10% of all his gold on mats he hopes will eventually be worth selling. He has had to pass a lot of that stock to other family members as Happy has no room for it all. Some items are practically worthless right now and Happy is reluctant to keep buying up that stuff, but then he thinks about Dream Shards.
Not too long ago dream shards were a junk item. Prior to that, Happy typically sold them at 5g apiece or better, and sales were good. Prices kept dropping, though, and Happy kept buying until things reached a point where Happy couldn't sell any of it back. Happy stopped buying when prices dropped below 50 silver each with no end in sight. A little more than a week ago, though, dream shard prices started going up. Happy sold out his stock too fast, and now you can almost name your price on dream shards, they are so hard to come by and at high demand. Lost opportunity. So, Happy keeps buying, and we'll see how that all turns out.
By the way, the Alliance AH has not gone through that, at least not yet. That AH has it's own peculiarities, but so far Lost hasn't seen the kind of dumping that happened and is still happening on the Horde AH.
Hunter Fortress was (sort of) out in force on Wednesday night. Bean and Shevils missed an opportunity to run with Speak and See at an earlier starting time than usual (we blame the internetz for not getting the word), but fate conspired against us all being in a battlegroup at the same time. The four of us did start a Warsong Gulch BG shortly after all of us got in game, but poor Shevils and Bean experienced Disconnects (like what had happened with Wild earlier in the week) soon after getting into the BG. Bean recovered and rejoined the BG, but Shevils was knocked totally out of the BG and had to sit it out.
Speak had to leave soon after, but the three of us gamely jumped into an Alterac Valley battle. It started well, but again we were DCed, and again Shevils found herself back in Orgrimmar and not in Alterac Valley. See had to leave after that truncated fight.
Bean and Shevils got in two more WSGs where luckily there were no DC's, and we won one of them.
Our one success of the night
I believe the DC problem is the heat wave we are having out here right now. We've had all time record temps up to 97 degrees (compared to our usual pleasant low 70s) with much higher humidity than typical due to some sparse showers that have hung around (our first "rain" since February, I think). I think the heat is causing problems either with our internet connection itself or with our router. We don't have A/C, and it's HOT with that temp and with two computers running.
There is no raid scheduled for Thursday night. Wild finally learned what happened with our Thurs/Fri raid leader, Bd. Bd is having some real life issues and when his WoW game card expired he decided not to get another. He recently passed along word that he will probably be out of action for another month. Wild is going to start signing up for Mf's Mon/Tues raid hoping to get with them on a regular basis instead of as a fill in. They plan to work on the Firelands full time. Lady Hunter's group on Tues/Wed has decided to start running Heroic BWD. Maybe Heroic raids are a better plan than Firelands - the Heroic gear is i372 vs the Firelands i378, and both are better than some of the gear Wild has now. I love progression, though, and I'd rather Wild be learning the Firelands encounters than plodding through BWD in Heroic mode at the meandering pace of Lady Hunter's raid. But that might change if we discover that we simply aren't ready for Firelands.
The Horde AH is going through an interesting cycle the past few days. There has been some massive dumping of stuff at crazy low prices. It started with just a few sellers, but it has taken on a life of it's own. This happens periodically, but I don't recall it ever being this large or last this long. Happy was in heaven at first, buying and buying and buying. But there's a limit even for Happy, and he began sitting out some of the sell offs to take stock and to see if prices would continue to drop.
Happy has spent more than 10% of all his gold on mats he hopes will eventually be worth selling. He has had to pass a lot of that stock to other family members as Happy has no room for it all. Some items are practically worthless right now and Happy is reluctant to keep buying up that stuff, but then he thinks about Dream Shards.
Not too long ago dream shards were a junk item. Prior to that, Happy typically sold them at 5g apiece or better, and sales were good. Prices kept dropping, though, and Happy kept buying until things reached a point where Happy couldn't sell any of it back. Happy stopped buying when prices dropped below 50 silver each with no end in sight. A little more than a week ago, though, dream shard prices started going up. Happy sold out his stock too fast, and now you can almost name your price on dream shards, they are so hard to come by and at high demand. Lost opportunity. So, Happy keeps buying, and we'll see how that all turns out.
By the way, the Alliance AH has not gone through that, at least not yet. That AH has it's own peculiarities, but so far Lost hasn't seen the kind of dumping that happened and is still happening on the Horde AH.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Tuesday (6 Sep) - BWD 25
Tuesday (6 Sep) - BWD 25
On Tuesday night we ran our second 25 man guild raid. This is a monthly venture for one night only. The guild doesn't have enough interest in 25 man raiding to do it any more often than that. We had 24 guildies signed up for the raid, which was to get underway at 6:30pm.
Invites were started at 6:30pm by Lady Hunter, who set aside her weekly 10 man raid to run it. Thirteen guildies were in game on time. Things looked a little better at 7pm, with 20 spots filled. We had our two tanks and plenty of healers with 7, so all we needed was 5 more DPS. Four of those spots were filled by friends from another guild. The final spot was filled by a guildie who had signed up for the raid, but showed up at 7:15pm asking "Anything going on tonight?" He'd forgotten all about it, but he got his invite and we were ready to go. Of the 24 that had signed up originally, only 18 showed up.
Even so, by the time we were actually in front of Magmaw, the first boss in BWD, we were down to 22 raiders with two having DC problems and a third - who knows where. We killed Magmaw with the 22 raiders we had.
We moved like molasses in winter, though. It was 7:50pm before we were in front of the second boss, 80 minutes after our supposed start time and with only one boss down. Note that the second boss (Omnotron) is just across the corridor from the first boss, and we had killed the small number of trash mobs in the way while loot was being distributed from Magmaw. When we did finally engage the robots of Omnotron they went down as well.
There was more waiting around in between the second and third boss, Maloriak. We cleared some trash, we stood around, and time passed. Once we eventually engaged, it took us two tries to take down the dragon. During the first engagement Wild was DCed (disconnected from WoW). It actually happened right before the pull. Wild had just cast his Mark of the Wild buff on the raid, but nothing seemed to happen. Thinking I might have miss-clicked, Wild tried again, and again no buff appeared. I had time to say "oh crap!" when Wild dropped out of the game. I relogged quickly, but once back in game my raid screen was blank. Wild had nothing to clicky clicky on to heal anyone. Wild sent a quick chat to the raid that I was having a UI problem and not to start. Luckily, I caught the tank before the pull and they waited on Wild. I was the main tank healer, after all.
It happened again in the middle of the Maloriak first attempt. Wild was healing away, keeping his tank safe and warm, when Wild DCed. Again, I relogged quickly, but again I had no raid screen. Healing without a raid screen was hell. Wild could heal himself but healing others was something of a crapshoot. In the press of combat, in the frustration of losing my raid screen, with 25 raiders running about in a confined space, and all kinds of lights and explosions and movement going on, Wild could not find his tank. In the end Wild died and so did his tank and we wiped.
Wild apologized to his tank afterward, but the tank was more annoyed with the other healers. Wild had let the raid know twice that he was having UI troubles and the backup healers needed to take care of the main tank. With 7 healers and the first priority being the main tank, that should have happened instantly. The tank told Wild that once Wild DCed he got almost no healing. Very sad and frustrating.
We did kill Maloriak on our second attempt and Wild didn't have any further DC problems, but what a mess.
We moved on to Chimareon, made two attempts, both failures, and ran out of time.
Just doing a 25 man raid has to be counted a success, and Lady Hunter reminded us that the last time we did this we downed only two bosses - so three bosses down was an improvement. Of sorts.
We had nine loot drops, seven of which went to upgrade raider gear. On that basis alone we should be doing 25 man more often. But the guild has no stomach for it. If Wild sounds a little frustrated, he is. I really didn't think we'd actually clear BWD in one night (although honestly we are certainly capable of it), but I did think we would get to Atramedes and get Wild a chance at a helm. Not even close.
Here's the numbers on the night as well:
Healing
#1: Wild, 9924 hps, 22.2% of all healing (even with two DC's)
#2: shaman #1, 10321/16.6%
#3: shaman #2, 8793/8.9%
#4: shaman #3, 8556/8.1%
#5: pally, 7933/7.9%
#6: priest, 8070/7.7%
#7: shaman #4, 8757/7.5%
The DPS
17k+ 2 raiders
16k+ 2 raiders
15k+ 2 raiders
14k+ 2 raiders
13k+ 3 raiders
12k+ 5 raiders
The Wild Family is really looking forward to some entertainment and relaxation with Hunter Fortress Wednesday night.
On Tuesday night we ran our second 25 man guild raid. This is a monthly venture for one night only. The guild doesn't have enough interest in 25 man raiding to do it any more often than that. We had 24 guildies signed up for the raid, which was to get underway at 6:30pm.
Invites were started at 6:30pm by Lady Hunter, who set aside her weekly 10 man raid to run it. Thirteen guildies were in game on time. Things looked a little better at 7pm, with 20 spots filled. We had our two tanks and plenty of healers with 7, so all we needed was 5 more DPS. Four of those spots were filled by friends from another guild. The final spot was filled by a guildie who had signed up for the raid, but showed up at 7:15pm asking "Anything going on tonight?" He'd forgotten all about it, but he got his invite and we were ready to go. Of the 24 that had signed up originally, only 18 showed up.
Even so, by the time we were actually in front of Magmaw, the first boss in BWD, we were down to 22 raiders with two having DC problems and a third - who knows where. We killed Magmaw with the 22 raiders we had.
We moved like molasses in winter, though. It was 7:50pm before we were in front of the second boss, 80 minutes after our supposed start time and with only one boss down. Note that the second boss (Omnotron) is just across the corridor from the first boss, and we had killed the small number of trash mobs in the way while loot was being distributed from Magmaw. When we did finally engage the robots of Omnotron they went down as well.
There was more waiting around in between the second and third boss, Maloriak. We cleared some trash, we stood around, and time passed. Once we eventually engaged, it took us two tries to take down the dragon. During the first engagement Wild was DCed (disconnected from WoW). It actually happened right before the pull. Wild had just cast his Mark of the Wild buff on the raid, but nothing seemed to happen. Thinking I might have miss-clicked, Wild tried again, and again no buff appeared. I had time to say "oh crap!" when Wild dropped out of the game. I relogged quickly, but once back in game my raid screen was blank. Wild had nothing to clicky clicky on to heal anyone. Wild sent a quick chat to the raid that I was having a UI problem and not to start. Luckily, I caught the tank before the pull and they waited on Wild. I was the main tank healer, after all.
It happened again in the middle of the Maloriak first attempt. Wild was healing away, keeping his tank safe and warm, when Wild DCed. Again, I relogged quickly, but again I had no raid screen. Healing without a raid screen was hell. Wild could heal himself but healing others was something of a crapshoot. In the press of combat, in the frustration of losing my raid screen, with 25 raiders running about in a confined space, and all kinds of lights and explosions and movement going on, Wild could not find his tank. In the end Wild died and so did his tank and we wiped.
Wild apologized to his tank afterward, but the tank was more annoyed with the other healers. Wild had let the raid know twice that he was having UI troubles and the backup healers needed to take care of the main tank. With 7 healers and the first priority being the main tank, that should have happened instantly. The tank told Wild that once Wild DCed he got almost no healing. Very sad and frustrating.
We did kill Maloriak on our second attempt and Wild didn't have any further DC problems, but what a mess.
We moved on to Chimareon, made two attempts, both failures, and ran out of time.
Just doing a 25 man raid has to be counted a success, and Lady Hunter reminded us that the last time we did this we downed only two bosses - so three bosses down was an improvement. Of sorts.
We had nine loot drops, seven of which went to upgrade raider gear. On that basis alone we should be doing 25 man more often. But the guild has no stomach for it. If Wild sounds a little frustrated, he is. I really didn't think we'd actually clear BWD in one night (although honestly we are certainly capable of it), but I did think we would get to Atramedes and get Wild a chance at a helm. Not even close.
Here's the numbers on the night as well:
Healing
#1: Wild, 9924 hps, 22.2% of all healing (even with two DC's)
#2: shaman #1, 10321/16.6%
#3: shaman #2, 8793/8.9%
#4: shaman #3, 8556/8.1%
#5: pally, 7933/7.9%
#6: priest, 8070/7.7%
#7: shaman #4, 8757/7.5%
The DPS
17k+ 2 raiders
16k+ 2 raiders
15k+ 2 raiders
14k+ 2 raiders
13k+ 3 raiders
12k+ 5 raiders
The Wild Family is really looking forward to some entertainment and relaxation with Hunter Fortress Wednesday night.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Monday (5 Sep) - Raid Group Eenie Meanie Minie Mo
Monday (5 Sep) - Raid Group Eenie Meanie Minie Mo
Now that the guild's various raid groups have cleared all of Bastion of Twilight (BoT) and Blackwing Descent (BWD) they seem to have entered a twilight zone where no one knows what to do next. For Wild, it would seem to make sense to combine the three groups into two groups, which should curtail the endless waiting around to fill a raid each night, and establish a regular group where we are not always having to explain things to newcomers. I honestly don't think anyone would be left out, either, since a fair number of our raiders raid with two toons. I doubt if we have any more than 25 guildies total who raid.
Of course, that won't happen, because we have three people who want to run raids and a group of guildies who can't agree to or commit to specific days of the week to raid.
Wild's regular group (using the word "regular" very loosely here) is run by Bd, who is having real life interference again. I love Bd. He's the best raid leader I've ever raided with. However, since Cho'gall went down he has simply not been around. There is no sign up for the Thurs/Fri raid, and raiders are going to make other plans if he or his secondary don't get the raid on the schedule and state where it is headed.
Wild wasn't really expecting to raid Monday night, and didn't even get in game until close to 6:30pm. Mf's Mon/Tues raid starts at 6pm. But they were still short on raiders and asked Wild to come along, which I was happy to do. They had saved their BWD raid from last week, and they were starting on the fourth boss. More on the raid below. The issue, though, is that Mf's raid had been looking the most stable, but now seems to be having attendance trouble again. It's troubling. Mf announced after the Monday raid that starting next week they will be raiding full time in Firelands. Wild is strongly considering asking Mf if Wild could become a regular with his raid. The Firelands is where Wild wants to be.
Lady Hunter's raid group is slightly more stable, although her raid nights are Tues/Wed which would butt up against Hunter Fortress. She has been considering Thrones as her raid target, since the guild hasn't bothered to kill the final boss in Thrones, Al'akir. Wild would be up for that, but so far that has only been talk.
In fact, tonight's raid is going to be our monthly 25 man raid in BWD. Wild is really looking forward to it. Twenty guildies have signed up, and there will almost certainly be unfilled slots that will need PUGs and could take in lesser geared players. Too bad Sinstar isn't quite ready for that yet. If we take this even half-way seriously we should tear this place apart in 25 man. Wild wants his T11 Helm and Nefarian has it. It's the last under i359 gear slot Wild needs to replace.
The bottom line is that Wild is still mixing and matching his raid nights depending on availability and where the raid is headed. That's sometimes a good thing, since Wild is getting 3-4 nights of raiding each week. Wild would really like a permanent, dependable raid home, though.
So, the BWD raid Monday night was pretty forgettable. The bosses that they had already downed last week were Magmaw, the robots, and Maloriak.
We started on Chimaeron. Wild no longer needed to have any of the fights explained, but there were couple of others who had not seen the fight yet. It should have been an easy romp, but it took us three tries to kill the two-headed dragon. Atramedes was next, and Wild had particular interest in this fight since Atramedes might drop an i359 helm. We were terrible, there is no other way to put it. We got the dragon down to 2.5% on one attempt, and down to a gut wrenching 0.8% on another without killing him. We finally killed him on our 7th attempt. It was like we had never seen this boss before. It could have been the third attempt if we'd finished him on that 0.8% try. We had three healers and frankly I think we'd have been better with just two and gotten the extra DPS. Our third healer, a very good paladin, was well below Wild and the shaman healer in hps not because she wasn't good, but because the two of us sucked up most of the healing. By the way, Atramedes did NOT drop the helm.
We didn't even have enough time left to tackle Nefarian, so Wild finished another raid without his helm. Ah well. If things go really, really well Tuesday night, Wild could get two more chances at a helm.
On the topic of Hunter Fortress, Wild earned enough honor points to buy holy paladin Jocy an heirloom weapon, [The Blessed Hammer of Grace]. Wild doesn't have the +22 int enchant, so he had to buy it off the AH at a price of 1300 gold. Jocy had better appreciate that. The WSG's Wild had to endure were absolutely brutal. In level 85 BGs healers are mercilessly stalked and focus fired on, and there are few players who bother to defend them. Wild could almost hear the Alliance BG commander sending word to his DPS - Kill the druid, kill the druid! Matter of fact, in one match with only two healers, the Horde DPS complained constantly about not getting heals, when they could look and see that both of us were dead.
Wild actually made a mistake on the weapon enchant buy, accidentally buying a +50 int bracer enchant for 750g (which would have been a really good deal if it had been the weapon enchant). Wild was initially furious at the mistake. Then he realized he'd never upgraded the enchant on his i378 bracers, which was still set with a +50 spi enchant. The +50 int is a huge upgrade over the +spi, so it all worked out for the best.
Now that the guild's various raid groups have cleared all of Bastion of Twilight (BoT) and Blackwing Descent (BWD) they seem to have entered a twilight zone where no one knows what to do next. For Wild, it would seem to make sense to combine the three groups into two groups, which should curtail the endless waiting around to fill a raid each night, and establish a regular group where we are not always having to explain things to newcomers. I honestly don't think anyone would be left out, either, since a fair number of our raiders raid with two toons. I doubt if we have any more than 25 guildies total who raid.
Of course, that won't happen, because we have three people who want to run raids and a group of guildies who can't agree to or commit to specific days of the week to raid.
Wild's regular group (using the word "regular" very loosely here) is run by Bd, who is having real life interference again. I love Bd. He's the best raid leader I've ever raided with. However, since Cho'gall went down he has simply not been around. There is no sign up for the Thurs/Fri raid, and raiders are going to make other plans if he or his secondary don't get the raid on the schedule and state where it is headed.
Wild wasn't really expecting to raid Monday night, and didn't even get in game until close to 6:30pm. Mf's Mon/Tues raid starts at 6pm. But they were still short on raiders and asked Wild to come along, which I was happy to do. They had saved their BWD raid from last week, and they were starting on the fourth boss. More on the raid below. The issue, though, is that Mf's raid had been looking the most stable, but now seems to be having attendance trouble again. It's troubling. Mf announced after the Monday raid that starting next week they will be raiding full time in Firelands. Wild is strongly considering asking Mf if Wild could become a regular with his raid. The Firelands is where Wild wants to be.
Lady Hunter's raid group is slightly more stable, although her raid nights are Tues/Wed which would butt up against Hunter Fortress. She has been considering Thrones as her raid target, since the guild hasn't bothered to kill the final boss in Thrones, Al'akir. Wild would be up for that, but so far that has only been talk.
In fact, tonight's raid is going to be our monthly 25 man raid in BWD. Wild is really looking forward to it. Twenty guildies have signed up, and there will almost certainly be unfilled slots that will need PUGs and could take in lesser geared players. Too bad Sinstar isn't quite ready for that yet. If we take this even half-way seriously we should tear this place apart in 25 man. Wild wants his T11 Helm and Nefarian has it. It's the last under i359 gear slot Wild needs to replace.
The bottom line is that Wild is still mixing and matching his raid nights depending on availability and where the raid is headed. That's sometimes a good thing, since Wild is getting 3-4 nights of raiding each week. Wild would really like a permanent, dependable raid home, though.
So, the BWD raid Monday night was pretty forgettable. The bosses that they had already downed last week were Magmaw, the robots, and Maloriak.
We started on Chimaeron. Wild no longer needed to have any of the fights explained, but there were couple of others who had not seen the fight yet. It should have been an easy romp, but it took us three tries to kill the two-headed dragon. Atramedes was next, and Wild had particular interest in this fight since Atramedes might drop an i359 helm. We were terrible, there is no other way to put it. We got the dragon down to 2.5% on one attempt, and down to a gut wrenching 0.8% on another without killing him. We finally killed him on our 7th attempt. It was like we had never seen this boss before. It could have been the third attempt if we'd finished him on that 0.8% try. We had three healers and frankly I think we'd have been better with just two and gotten the extra DPS. Our third healer, a very good paladin, was well below Wild and the shaman healer in hps not because she wasn't good, but because the two of us sucked up most of the healing. By the way, Atramedes did NOT drop the helm.
We didn't even have enough time left to tackle Nefarian, so Wild finished another raid without his helm. Ah well. If things go really, really well Tuesday night, Wild could get two more chances at a helm.
On the topic of Hunter Fortress, Wild earned enough honor points to buy holy paladin Jocy an heirloom weapon, [The Blessed Hammer of Grace]. Wild doesn't have the +22 int enchant, so he had to buy it off the AH at a price of 1300 gold. Jocy had better appreciate that. The WSG's Wild had to endure were absolutely brutal. In level 85 BGs healers are mercilessly stalked and focus fired on, and there are few players who bother to defend them. Wild could almost hear the Alliance BG commander sending word to his DPS - Kill the druid, kill the druid! Matter of fact, in one match with only two healers, the Horde DPS complained constantly about not getting heals, when they could look and see that both of us were dead.
Wild actually made a mistake on the weapon enchant buy, accidentally buying a +50 int bracer enchant for 750g (which would have been a really good deal if it had been the weapon enchant). Wild was initially furious at the mistake. Then he realized he'd never upgraded the enchant on his i378 bracers, which was still set with a +50 spi enchant. The +50 int is a huge upgrade over the +spi, so it all worked out for the best.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Weekend (4 Sep) - A Visit From a Game Master
Weekend (4 Sep) - A Visit From a Game Master
Happy was plying his trade on the Auction House Saturday morning when he got a whisper. Happy gets whispers frequently, mostly asking for cash, favors, or advice. Happy ignores the beggars most of the time - unless they tickle his interest or Happy just feels like talking. If the whisper seems genuine, though, Happy answers back. Why not? He can talk and make money at the same time.
Here is the whisper Happy received on this lovely Saturday morning:
"Good morning, Mr. Happy. I don't suppose you could answer a question for me, could you?"
Well, Happy doesn't get called "Mr. Happy" very often, ie, never. This could be interesting.
Happy, in the middle of counting profits from his latest sale, whispered back "fire away." There was a delay in his response long enough for Happy to consider sending him a second whisper explaining what "fire away" meant. Maybe he thought Happy wanted to duel and I'd scared the poor gentleman away. Of course he was a "he". If he were a woman she'd have called Happy "Hun".
He answered back, though. "I noticed that you always have a very large number of items for sale on the AH. Do you perhaps farm all these hundreds of items?"
With a name like Happyface, I guess Happy could get that kind of notice on the AH listings. Happy is not the biggest seller, though, not really even close to a half dozen other sellers who blanket the AH with page after page of their crap. Oops, you'll have to excuse Happy, professional disdain for his competitors, ya know.
Happy likes talking about his work, though, and explained to the nice fellow his market strategy, business plan, stock portfolio, and that account in the Cayman's (ok, he didn't mention that), all summed up with buy low and sell high.
"Well," he responded, impressed (Happy could hear the adoration in that single syllable). "You are very good at it, Mr. Happy, I can see."
Happy felt compelled to explain a little further, since there have been players who looked down on Happy's little business. Happy mentioned that he was quite excited about what he was doing, loved his job, and all his other toons appreciated his efforts.
"I'm sure they do, Mr. Happy. Thank you for being so kind as to respond to my question. You have a nice day."
We said our polite goodbyes, and that was that. Happy, of course, looked the gentleman up. "He" was in reality a "she" and was a level 68 blood elf protection paladin (the thought suddenly occurred to Happy that he should have tidied up the place). She was a guild master and there were only three other toons in her guild, all very low level, who were all likely alts. She was decently geared for a level 68. She has a world drop weapon (Crystalblade of the Draenei), but the rest of her gear was clearly from questing and dungeon runs. Was she a Game Master (GM) checking on us large scale marketers on the AH? Happy thinks so. Who else talks like that in World of Warcraft?
Wild's guild did not raid on Friday night. There was a last minute "can we get one together" kind of thing, but without the presence of the raid leader it was doomed. There was no sign up, so a raid wasn't expected, but Wild had still hoped one might come together. Didn't happen.
That gave some of the evening to BB, who went stalking in Warsong Gulch, which was this weekend's Call to Arms. WSG is a much different place than last week's Alterac Valley "five minutes and we're done" zerging. WSG is ten on ten pvp combat and those battles take a little time.
BB had taken the advice of Eowyn, revising his attack rotation. BB had also changed his talent spec from Blood spec to Frost spec. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was simply a personal choice. BB wanted the "On a Pale Horse" talent which greatly speeded up his mount speed, which made farming herbs a little faster. It also made him a candidate for flag carrier in WSG, but at level 60 in a 60-64 bracket, BB didn't get much chance to grab a flag. What he got in that first WSG was a whole lot of dying, and we lost 1-3.
The alliance team got better, though, and BB got better, too. Not good, but better. Tea was in game banging away in her own WSG bracket, and cheered BB as he got his first WSG achievements. BB's WSG record after that first loss went like this: 3-2, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0. Five straight wins. The 60-64 bracket probably has more death knights in them than any bracket other than the 55-59 bracket, and there were always 3-5 DKs in BB's matches. As always with a Wild DPS toon, targeting was a problem. Being left handed meant a stretch to hit the "Target Nearest Enemy" buttons (TAB or HOME). I tried setting up a macro on the keypad to make that easier, but could not get it to work. I think I will hard code the Keybinding next time. The attack rotation worked very well. At level 60, though, there is a lot of dead time where all BB was doing was white damage. Staying in melee range of a target was also a pain, but that just takes years of practice (years for me, anyway). I want a spell called "Stick to Target".
BB did have some fun and tried to be useful. BB liked to suicide attack the initial incoming run for the opponent's flag when the battle first starts. BB slowed down their run and sometimes distracted a bunch of them for the several seconds it took them to kill BB, giving the alliance team some crucial extra seconds to capture and return the horde flag. BB also learned to love Death and Decay, the AoE DoT that even horde DKs never seemed to notice in the heat of battle. BB helped so many horde pvpers to the graveyard that way, lol.
Being a gnome, and quite miniature, led to some fun battles, too. BB's weapon is twice as long as she is, and she was soloing a horde level 64 tauren warrior in one match. The huge cow was laughing so hard BB got him to half health before he finished BB off. BB waved at him and hoped all those diseases BB had smeared him with would eventually finish him off.
The most fun BB had all night was with a horde shaman. We were up 2-0 and weren't trying very hard to finish (ie, farming kills). BB was running around and spied the shaman in ghost wolf form making for our base. BB Death Gripped him, Chained him, and started swatting him. He shifted form, broke Chains, and, already DoTed up with diseases, tried to escape. BB re-Chained the fleeing shaman multiple times, until he became immune to it. BB couldn't get into melee range, though, and could only use his ranged spells. BB Death Gripped again just when the shaman thought he'd escaped. The shaman could have turned and likely killed BB at any time, but he was so focused on escape by the time he'd realized it the DoTs had done their work and the shaman died. BB can be a real bulldog sometimes.
BB made level 61 Friday night and now has her Obliterate spell. She's looking forward to trying that out over the weekend.
BB and Eowyn later got in some dungeon work, heading into the Outlands and Coilfang Reservoir. We did the Slave Pens and the Underbog (one of them twice), BB picked up some new gear (including a second resilience piece) and made level 62.
Happy was plying his trade on the Auction House Saturday morning when he got a whisper. Happy gets whispers frequently, mostly asking for cash, favors, or advice. Happy ignores the beggars most of the time - unless they tickle his interest or Happy just feels like talking. If the whisper seems genuine, though, Happy answers back. Why not? He can talk and make money at the same time.
Here is the whisper Happy received on this lovely Saturday morning:
"Good morning, Mr. Happy. I don't suppose you could answer a question for me, could you?"
Well, Happy doesn't get called "Mr. Happy" very often, ie, never. This could be interesting.
Happy, in the middle of counting profits from his latest sale, whispered back "fire away." There was a delay in his response long enough for Happy to consider sending him a second whisper explaining what "fire away" meant. Maybe he thought Happy wanted to duel and I'd scared the poor gentleman away. Of course he was a "he". If he were a woman she'd have called Happy "Hun".
He answered back, though. "I noticed that you always have a very large number of items for sale on the AH. Do you perhaps farm all these hundreds of items?"
With a name like Happyface, I guess Happy could get that kind of notice on the AH listings. Happy is not the biggest seller, though, not really even close to a half dozen other sellers who blanket the AH with page after page of their crap. Oops, you'll have to excuse Happy, professional disdain for his competitors, ya know.
Happy likes talking about his work, though, and explained to the nice fellow his market strategy, business plan, stock portfolio, and that account in the Cayman's (ok, he didn't mention that), all summed up with buy low and sell high.
"Well," he responded, impressed (Happy could hear the adoration in that single syllable). "You are very good at it, Mr. Happy, I can see."
Happy felt compelled to explain a little further, since there have been players who looked down on Happy's little business. Happy mentioned that he was quite excited about what he was doing, loved his job, and all his other toons appreciated his efforts.
"I'm sure they do, Mr. Happy. Thank you for being so kind as to respond to my question. You have a nice day."
We said our polite goodbyes, and that was that. Happy, of course, looked the gentleman up. "He" was in reality a "she" and was a level 68 blood elf protection paladin (the thought suddenly occurred to Happy that he should have tidied up the place). She was a guild master and there were only three other toons in her guild, all very low level, who were all likely alts. She was decently geared for a level 68. She has a world drop weapon (Crystalblade of the Draenei), but the rest of her gear was clearly from questing and dungeon runs. Was she a Game Master (GM) checking on us large scale marketers on the AH? Happy thinks so. Who else talks like that in World of Warcraft?
Wild's guild did not raid on Friday night. There was a last minute "can we get one together" kind of thing, but without the presence of the raid leader it was doomed. There was no sign up, so a raid wasn't expected, but Wild had still hoped one might come together. Didn't happen.
That gave some of the evening to BB, who went stalking in Warsong Gulch, which was this weekend's Call to Arms. WSG is a much different place than last week's Alterac Valley "five minutes and we're done" zerging. WSG is ten on ten pvp combat and those battles take a little time.
BB had taken the advice of Eowyn, revising his attack rotation. BB had also changed his talent spec from Blood spec to Frost spec. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was simply a personal choice. BB wanted the "On a Pale Horse" talent which greatly speeded up his mount speed, which made farming herbs a little faster. It also made him a candidate for flag carrier in WSG, but at level 60 in a 60-64 bracket, BB didn't get much chance to grab a flag. What he got in that first WSG was a whole lot of dying, and we lost 1-3.
The alliance team got better, though, and BB got better, too. Not good, but better. Tea was in game banging away in her own WSG bracket, and cheered BB as he got his first WSG achievements. BB's WSG record after that first loss went like this: 3-2, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0, 3-0. Five straight wins. The 60-64 bracket probably has more death knights in them than any bracket other than the 55-59 bracket, and there were always 3-5 DKs in BB's matches. As always with a Wild DPS toon, targeting was a problem. Being left handed meant a stretch to hit the "Target Nearest Enemy" buttons (TAB or HOME). I tried setting up a macro on the keypad to make that easier, but could not get it to work. I think I will hard code the Keybinding next time. The attack rotation worked very well. At level 60, though, there is a lot of dead time where all BB was doing was white damage. Staying in melee range of a target was also a pain, but that just takes years of practice (years for me, anyway). I want a spell called "Stick to Target".
BB did have some fun and tried to be useful. BB liked to suicide attack the initial incoming run for the opponent's flag when the battle first starts. BB slowed down their run and sometimes distracted a bunch of them for the several seconds it took them to kill BB, giving the alliance team some crucial extra seconds to capture and return the horde flag. BB also learned to love Death and Decay, the AoE DoT that even horde DKs never seemed to notice in the heat of battle. BB helped so many horde pvpers to the graveyard that way, lol.
Being a gnome, and quite miniature, led to some fun battles, too. BB's weapon is twice as long as she is, and she was soloing a horde level 64 tauren warrior in one match. The huge cow was laughing so hard BB got him to half health before he finished BB off. BB waved at him and hoped all those diseases BB had smeared him with would eventually finish him off.
The most fun BB had all night was with a horde shaman. We were up 2-0 and weren't trying very hard to finish (ie, farming kills). BB was running around and spied the shaman in ghost wolf form making for our base. BB Death Gripped him, Chained him, and started swatting him. He shifted form, broke Chains, and, already DoTed up with diseases, tried to escape. BB re-Chained the fleeing shaman multiple times, until he became immune to it. BB couldn't get into melee range, though, and could only use his ranged spells. BB Death Gripped again just when the shaman thought he'd escaped. The shaman could have turned and likely killed BB at any time, but he was so focused on escape by the time he'd realized it the DoTs had done their work and the shaman died. BB can be a real bulldog sometimes.
BB made level 61 Friday night and now has her Obliterate spell. She's looking forward to trying that out over the weekend.
BB and Eowyn later got in some dungeon work, heading into the Outlands and Coilfang Reservoir. We did the Slave Pens and the Underbog (one of them twice), BB picked up some new gear (including a second resilience piece) and made level 62.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Wednesday (31 Aug) - Cho'gall is DONE
Wednesday (31 Aug) - Cho'gall is DONE
At the prelims of the fight the two heads of Cho'gall both talk at the same time. When the tank attacks:
Head 1 - Enough!
Head 2 - To His will all flesh succumbs. From his Kingdom, chaos comes!
Head 1 - Yes - what he says.
After a practice run and a pretty good 2nd attempt, pushing into the final phase but failing at 21%:
Raider: Beam of Butt Sucking got me right up the rear! (we understand that he means Debilitating Beam, which looks like an eyeball on a stalk and shoots a slithering purple beam).
We get Cho'gall to 17% on our third attempt:
Wild: STOP Polymorphing me when I get Converted! I can't heal if I'm a penguin! (some raiders never figured out that raiders who are Converted have to be stunned or interrupted - instead, they use polymorph, which works but leaves Wild unable to heal until I can break the poly - they did it to me twice! I think it was on purpose. ;-) )
On our fourth attempt Cho'gall slipped to 7%.
Incredulous Off Tank: Are we doing Cho'gall with just two healers?
Lady Hunter: Sure. Seems to be working just fine.
Wild and Pl stare at each other and think to ourselves: He just now noticed? Then we both grin. Cool!
On our fifth attempt we took him down. As he died Cho'gall said:
Head 1 - Brother...we are shattered..
Head 2 - But the Master...I still hear...so angry...Master...
Wild has now completed all of the Bastion of Twilight and all of Blackwing Descent. That leaves Throne of the Four Winds (T4W or just Thrones). Wild has defeated the encounter Conclave of the Winds, but we never attempted the second/final boss, Al'Akir, back when we were doing T4W. With an hour still left of raid time we tried to get everyone to go straight to T4W. Nothing ever happens fast in this raid, though, and after this and that and those and these we wound up calling it without going anywhere.
Wild did 11.5k hps and the pally 11.1k on that final run. No one in the DPS cracked 15k and two of the six DPSers did less than 11k dps. We did it, though. Nice to have Cho'gall down.
At the prelims of the fight the two heads of Cho'gall both talk at the same time. When the tank attacks:
Head 1 - Enough!
Head 2 - To His will all flesh succumbs. From his Kingdom, chaos comes!
Head 1 - Yes - what he says.
After a practice run and a pretty good 2nd attempt, pushing into the final phase but failing at 21%:
Raider: Beam of Butt Sucking got me right up the rear! (we understand that he means Debilitating Beam, which looks like an eyeball on a stalk and shoots a slithering purple beam).
We get Cho'gall to 17% on our third attempt:
Wild: STOP Polymorphing me when I get Converted! I can't heal if I'm a penguin! (some raiders never figured out that raiders who are Converted have to be stunned or interrupted - instead, they use polymorph, which works but leaves Wild unable to heal until I can break the poly - they did it to me twice! I think it was on purpose. ;-) )
On our fourth attempt Cho'gall slipped to 7%.
Incredulous Off Tank: Are we doing Cho'gall with just two healers?
Lady Hunter: Sure. Seems to be working just fine.
Wild and Pl stare at each other and think to ourselves: He just now noticed? Then we both grin. Cool!
On our fifth attempt we took him down. As he died Cho'gall said:
Head 1 - Brother...we are shattered..
Head 2 - But the Master...I still hear...so angry...Master...
Cho'gall DEAD
Wild has now completed all of the Bastion of Twilight and all of Blackwing Descent. That leaves Throne of the Four Winds (T4W or just Thrones). Wild has defeated the encounter Conclave of the Winds, but we never attempted the second/final boss, Al'Akir, back when we were doing T4W. With an hour still left of raid time we tried to get everyone to go straight to T4W. Nothing ever happens fast in this raid, though, and after this and that and those and these we wound up calling it without going anywhere.
Wild did 11.5k hps and the pally 11.1k on that final run. No one in the DPS cracked 15k and two of the six DPSers did less than 11k dps. We did it, though. Nice to have Cho'gall down.
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