The Vale of Eternal Sorrow

The Vale of Eternal Sorrow

Wild has a bit of news, but this post mostly belongs to Lao, who had a very busy couple of days.

First up is Wild. Wild is leveling to 90 via pet battles, and while he isn't actively chasing achievements, it's nice when one pops up, such as the "Pro Pet Crew," awarded for getting 30 unique pets to level 25. Wild also DINGED! his way to level 87.

Wild may have to alter his gearing approach, though. He's aiming at a minimum ilevel of i460 in order to get into the beginning Looking for Raid (LFR) groups once he's at level 90. However, he needs i490, I believe, to get into normal raids. Based on Unbleach's i496 for flex raiding (see below), Wild will have his work cut out for him. From what I'm hearing about the Patch 5.4 Timeless Isle, a new area of exploration, it's a lot of fun. Wild's guildies are all over it earning great gear, some of it Bind on Account (BoA) so that it can shared by all my characters.

Now for the news from Lao:

The last 24 hours has been eventful for Lao.

I can be an impulsive creature, which usually costs me money. I want to kill Hellscream – this means I need to raid. I laid out the options in the last email: stay put and work it out, or move to another server and join my raid group there. I chose the latter.

So Lao ($55 later) is now Unbleached, a taller goat version of herself, poor lass.

Lao, before the switch, was able to check out the new Isle that popped out of the clouds, as they are want to do. She ran around and got several account bound cloth purples: cloak, gloves, shoulders (2), chest, and pants. She decided to give all the gear, minus the extra gloves and the chest, to Narcissus. Narcissus is in need of gear in a bad way.

*Note: Be sure to “open” the gear while in the spec you want it to complement

Lao then packed up her bags and went on her whirlwind switch. The guild invite was easy, no wait like Wild had to suffer, and she was almost ready for the raid.

Unbleached decided to do healing for the raid. She has only pvp gear for heals, which is fine, but the trinkets (at least impair-movement-remover one) really do not belong in a raid. So she hit the AH and plopped down 12k on a new trinket. This may not have been as painful had it occurred 3 hours before, when she still had 125k in gold, but you are only allowed to transfer toons with a max of 50k gold, and it had to be done.

So, with her new shiny trinket she went off to the Vale of Eternal Sorrows, which is the prelude to the Siege Orgrimmar.

First Boss up: Immerseus. This is a boss who has a corruption bar, at 100. Once he hits 0 health becomes unstable and explodes out in slime balls. These balls need to be either healed to remove corruption (the blue ones) or killed (the black ones). For each ball healed or killed it removes 1 point of corruption and health to his reformed self. This is repeated until he is at 0 corruption and health.

We divided the room up into pie wedges and randomly spread out. It was a wipe. Next we decided to be a bit more logical about it. We did a better distribution of heals and damage. Immerseus went down. 

Next up were The Fallen Protectors. These were the Golden Lotus quest givers that became corrupted when Hellscream did his thing. The mechanics of the fight are simple but busy. Each protector at 66% and 33% does a Desperate Measure. You want to avoid having more than one Desperate Measure going on at the same time. Once they are below 33% you want to bring them down about at the same rate. At 1%, if the others are in combat, they will heal up the one at 1% to 20%. The goal is to get them all at 1% at the same time (within 15 seconds). If you are able to bring them down to 1% at the same time they will have Clarity and snap out of it.  We were able to, surprisingly, one shot this and Bleach got new 540 bracers.

Next boss is Norushen. This is a boss to prove you cannot be corrupted before moving on. When engaged you start out at 75% corrupted. There are orbs that appear around the boss that you can click on and enter a different realm where you prove your skill. Meaning healers heal ppl, tanks tank, and dps kill things. When you are done you return to the main fight and are fully cleansed of your corruption.  The boss spawns adds that need to be killed but when killed they create pools of corruption that damage everyone. To stop the pools from spreading and doing aoe damage someone needs to stand in them and “soak” up the corruption. Once you get too heavy on the corruption you do the orb thing again.

After about 6-7 tries we got him down.

The last boss is the Sha of Pride. Even just clearing out the trash in this area killed a few of us off.  This is basically a tank and spank but you have to be quick about it. As you take damage you get 5 Pride. At 100% pride you give massive aoe damage and it triggers other levels of pride to do damage as well; which means pretty much a wipe, as we found. Also, cleanse cannot be cast without getting pride unless you get a Titan buff. We did one attempt and found that 100% pride is deadly quickly. Raid time was up and we will start again tonight on the guy.

Since the patch Lao/Unbleached has gotten a lot of new pve gear: Bracers (from the raid), gloves, chest, trinkets (one bought), chest, and pants (the latter gear from the Isle).

Like I said, it has been a busy 24 hours.

The Second Night:

Last night we started on the fourth and final boss, The Sha Of Pride.

We did several attempts, however many fits in 2 hours, 3 of which were pretty good. We were getting some of the mechanics but had two possible issues, either not enough dps (just guessing this since I have not gotten recount yet) or missing enough of the buffs (falling in if you have the titan buff to get the additional buff it gives) that we kept just missing the mark.

At the last two fights two of the heals, myself included, switched to dps. We finally got him down. No new loot for me but another healing priest in the guild got a very nice staff.

I will have to look at the dungeon breakup. The guild raids Tu, W, Th. Thursday I cannot do because I volunteer at the hospital those evenings. My concern is that they will clear up to Hellscream on Tu, and W, and kill him on Th. I am going to check to see how many bosses will need to be cleared to get to him. If we get close to him I will have to see about maybe swapping my shift if we run into an issue.