Weekend (16 Mar) - Tall Tales

Weekend (16 Mar) - Tall Tales

Friday First - Wild Talks?

Wild set a new personal record for talking on vent Friday morning. Wild was in game to do the couple of dailies it would take for me to reach Exalted with guild rep. I saw that Od was in game, and sent her a whisper saying hello. We got to talking and she revealed that she's decided to make a resto spec for her cat druid. Od began as a mage, and that is how Wild got to know her. Then she raised a paladin, and now she has a druid. Her cat druid is pretty good, too, but she wanted to add healing as her offspec.

She asked if Wild could give her the rundown on druid healing. I don't think either of us really knew what all that would entail. She had just set up her spec, and had a bunch of gear that added up to a quite nice equipped i384 including the two piece tier set bonus. No problems there. We started talking about stats, and that got so tangled she wished we could talk in vent instead of whispered chat. Well, Wild could do that now, so we switched over to vent.

The conversation wound from gear, to stats, to spells, and to addons. She was pretty overwhelmed. I told her that I had no idea what paladin healing was like so I'm sure I'd have been overwhelmed at learning that. She just laughed and said pallies have three heal spells she spams, and that there wasn't all that much more to it. Druid healing spells take up a whole page.

In all, we were in vent talking shop for about an hour and a half. Repeating every word Wild has ever said in vent before that conversation would take, oh, maybe thirty seconds. Given how much of that information she seemed to have retained, and how excited she was when she started playing with her spells - well, I think she'll be a pretty good druid healer.

By the way, Wild did get his dailies done, and reached Exalted rep with the guild. That changed Wild's title from "Veteran of Meitha" to "Champion of Meitha." 

Weekend - DB, Malodorous King of Awesome Acquisitions

On Saturday morning Happy had finished cheating his customers ... uh, perhaps I should say "making good deals with his customers" ... and thought to check on DB's gear. Happy had been monitoring the Auction House in case a good deal on gear came up. Figuring that DB might have run some dungeons Friday night, Happy checked to see what DB was currently wearing. WOW! DB was a busy boy. Happy counted TEN new pieces of gear acquired. DB's equipped gear score was i368. DB had reached the point where he could enter normal mode Dragon Soul, and was close to the i372 needed to get into the lfr DS.

Happy doesn't have the latest word on DB's conquests, but here are two reports presented late in the week:

DB's Thursday Very Early morning run: "DB got some game time from 330 to 6 this morning before leaving for work. His objective was to run heroics and do some firelands dailies to get a trinket. He ended up getting four heroics in, two of which were new to him and me on heroic mode.

The first heroic was Blackrock Furnace or something like that (the one where you get to fly around on dragons and bomb mobs) and it started very poorly. This was new to him/me on heroic. The group cleared up to the first boss, where the healer died at the start from some fire spray move the boss has that you just need to move aside for and we then wiped. The tank dropped the group right away, and then while waiting for a second tank, the rest of the group dropped. DB was left alone waiting for new recruits and he got a whole new squad to go at the first boss again. This time started poorly too. The tank died very early on and we then wiped and the healer and a dps dropped the group. The tank was cool though (even though she was a blood elf…)and said she just made a mistake and we waited for a new healer and dps and went at it again (As a side note, DB was happy that another arcane mage joined the group so he had someone to compare his dps to. This mage had better gear but had no rotation at all and was just casting random stuff. Her dps wasn’t great, so it wasn’t good for comparisons. DB out dpsed her by 2k dps overall and as much as 6k on boss fights even though her gear was at least 10 ilvls better). It was clear early on that people weren’t sure of the mechanics on the fight and we wiped again. This time the tank explained the fight before we engaged for the second/third/fourth time. Somehow even though the tank explained what we needed to avoid and do both the mage and hunter dps died early and that left just DB, the healer and the tank to kill the boss. There were some nervy moments but the three of us brought him down and it was a ton of fun. DB had to whip out all of his tricks to get through it as did both the healer and the tank (both pallies). We moved on and cleared through the rest of the dungeon without much ado until we got to the last boss. This guy casts this purple hurricane thing that you have to get to the “eye” of or die. He also spawns adds that you have to kill before they get to eggs and birth dragons. We didn’t have much problem with the adds part, but the eye of the hurricane was elusive for some, and we ended up wiping. The tank explained the tactics and we went at it again. The huntard we had was really a fine specimen and was unable to stay alive even through the first hurricane and we ended up four manning the last boss. This again was lots of fun and we had to pull out our bag of tricks to pull it off, but we did it. DB ended up being top dps with the tank being second, so in a way we three manned the whole dungeon. J I think the reason this group was so fun is that it wasn’t massively out gearing the place so it was actually a challenge.

The group broke after that long and taxing run though and we all went our separate ways. DB queued again and really the next three heroics were boring and ordinary with players that massively outgeared the dungeons we were in and they were all just a walk in the park. DB did get to see one of the two troll dungeons for the first time, though he joined a group that was already in progress so only got to see part of the dungeon. It seems like we ended up killing just two bosses; one that summons four “pens” of cats and the final boss that does some spirit thing and gets attached to chains that you have to kill and summons ads. It was fun, but I would like to see more! He finished up his night/morning with a deadmines run that we plowed through. Two warriors were in the group (one tank, one dps) that both had insane gear and just blew out some major deeps. He was with them for both the troll run and the VC run and the dps warrior was doing 30k most of the time with the tank doing 20k. It made the dungeons fast, but not as fun!

On the gear front, he got nothing new from drops and his ilvl is still 349. He logged quickly so I didn’t get to check out new gear available for justice and valor points, but I am pretty sure he will be getting a trinket today with justice and then next week he will be getting a 397 chest with valor, plus probably one or two more pieces with justice. His lowest level gear now are his trinkets (305 & 308) chest and gloves (315) then helm and shoulders are both 333. Everything else he has is 345 or above. He was planning on getting a trinket through firelands dailies, but I discovered this morning (while doing research at work…) that it would take eons to get there. For now he will settle for the one justice ilvl 359 trinket and hope for a nice drop from a dungeon run. Everything else should be replaced over the next few weeks. After getting his new trinket today I think it should push him to ilvl 353 and the new heroics. After that it is all a glamorous ride to the lfr and maybe normal raiding with some ugly BE tank and a really stinky shaman. We shall see. J "

DB's Friday's Very Early morning run: "Last night DB got the chance to check the justice point vendor to see if he could afford the trinket upgrade he was looking for for. He could and he bought it straight away. It brought his ilvl to 352, just one short of the ilvl needed to run the 3 newest heroic dungeons. Not one to take no for an answer though, DB quickly hit the auction house to see if he could find one piece of gear that was enough of an upgrade to upgrade his ilvl. He found a pair of 353 epic bracers on sale for a price low enough to jump at (under 1000 gold). He knew he would be getting upgrades soon so he really didn’t want to spend the money, but he found out he could queue for the ilvl 353 dungeons just by having the new equipment in his bag. His new plan was to hold onto the new bracers in his bags and sell as soon as he got a replacement for free. It turned out to be a good plan.

DB queued up and after a few minutes was invited into a brand new End Time dungeon run, the first of the three “new” ones. People were already in the dungeon and were already sneaking past mobs and hopping onto islands in some lava. Not wanting to be the odd man out DB took off after everyone else but got to close to the mobs he was supposed to be sneaking by and aggroed them. He had a trick up his sleeve for that though and quickly cast disappear. It worked and the mobs reset. If it didn’t work is would have been a rough start. He got through the lava and set-up on an island just one island away from Baine Bloodhoof. The tank started the fight and aside from him breaking my island, it was a super easy fight. Nothing dropped for DB. The group moved onto the next area through a teleporter and had to run around and collect staff fragments for Jaina to summon her or something. It was quick and painless as was the fight with Jaina Proudmore. We moved onto the last fight against Murozond. This fight was a lot of fun with some rewinding of time and some stuff on the ground to avoid. Someone used bloodlust at the right time and we ended up getting it three of four times in the fight as time kept going back and forth. It was awesome. Even with all the dps we were pushing out it still took a long time to kill the dragon, but the fight was a lot of fun. There was a lot of running around to avoid aoe and stuff, but the time changing stuff was really cool. People left the group posthaste as soon as he was dropped and DB ended up in the “dungeon” alone. He got to explore a little bit and got to go turn in a few quests for stuff he finished during the run. He got two quest rewards that were ilvl 378 upgrades to his 333 helm and his 316 bracers. The bracer upgrades were very nice and a huge upgrade for him. The helm was an upgrade, but not that much of an upgrade as it is a healer piece so having the spirit almost made it a wash with the 333 blue helm he already had. Once gemmed and enchanted though it was just a little better than the 333 piece though so he went with it. He also relisted the ilvl 353 epic bracers back on the AH for 500 gold I believe. Charlie, if that seems like too low of a price please feel free to buy and relist! J

DB queued again as soon as he was out of End Time and after a few minutes got into Well of Eternity, the second of the three new dungeons. This one is a lot of fun, though DB never got to finish it as you will see below. It started out well and we mowed through the first trash mob and got to stealth around with Illidan and then mowed through the first boss. The group was doing really well and the pace at which we moved was very fast. Up to and after the first boss DB was first in DPS at just over 22k. We then parted ways with Illidan and made our way up a long staircase up to Quenn Azshara’s chambers. This evil night elf is the one that brought the burning legion into Azeroth the first time and DB was excited to see her for she was rumored to be a special beauty. This is where it all started to go wrong.

When we got up to Queen Azshara’s(QA) chamber and spotted QA, DB was very disappointed with her appearance. She was at least two feet taller than poor DB, had all of her skin, long shiny hair and smelled like flowers. DB found her repulsive and was excited to unleash some arcane blast on her, though he found out he doesn’t get that chance. Before the fight started the healer asked who was on interrupts. Not knowing what he was talking about and assuming he was talking about interrupting something that was cast often from one of the mages that we would end up fighting, DB said he couldn’t do it because of the 24 second cool down on his interrupt, counterspell. No one said anything about that and I guess we all assumed someone else would be doing it. No one else was and we all were quickly controlled by QA as puppets where we were forced to bow to her and she then killed us. It was a wipe. The tank whined and then dropped the group. We all rezzed and got back up to the area and waited for a new tank, which came quickly. This tank was quite lippy though and was complaining, etc for the rest of the time DB was with her. This tank happened to be a druid. It seems like every time DB has had a bear tank, they have been nothing but trouble and hopes to stay away from them all in the future. We started the fight again and this time a hunter volunteered to interrupt, though by this time DB had figured out what needed to be interrupted and decided he would keep a watch on QA as well to make sure we wouldn’t wipe like last time. We went through the fight this time without much trouble, but with all the running around and “hand” killing, etc. the tank ended up being the top DPS. She complained in party chat about it and let everyone know how superior she was. We all hopped on some dragons and DB was enraptured but the cut scene with the Demon Soul and all the dragon aspects. However, no one else took the time to watch the cut scene and as soon as DB got down, turned in his quest and headed to the next area he was kicked from the group. The last comment by the a-hole tank was “Hurry up hunter” before voting to kick me. She thought DB was a huntard. That was the last slap in the face from that stupid bear before unceremoniously getting him kicked from the group. The usurper had turned DBs fellow adventurers (the sheep they are) against him and got him kicked from the group. Sadly he had to sleep at this point anyway, so he never got to finish Well of Eternity. Hopefully DB can get together with his friends sometime over the weekend and run one, two or all three of these dungeons and you guys can let him watch the cut scenes unmolested. We shall see. 

Overall, from what I saw from these newer heroics, they are awesome. Blizz did a stand-up job with them and I look forward to finishing them and seeing if the LFR is as well done. By the way, is anyone up for signing a petition to ban all bear tanks?"