Northrend Beasts Tamed - Again!

And...they're down on 25 man now. Took us quite a while, but we got them. And some nice new loots (nothing mage-y though).

Northrend Beasts Tamed

On Wednesday, our ten man group formed up and headed off to the new Coliseum, ready for some fun. We were ready for whatever fearsome opponent would face us on the coliseum floor. After quickly dispatching Gormok and his snobolds, we ran into quite a bit of resistance with the twin Jormungers, Acidmaw and Dreadscale. The first issue was deciding which tank would handle each worm and how they would switch each time the worms. It was decided that Jr, our pally tank would always be on the worm that was grounded, while Aravic, our warrior, would be on the worm that was moving (and being kited the whole time).

After sorting that out, the biggest issue that remains is how to cleanse the poison with the fires. After thinking that maybe we could spin the grounded worm around to always be facing the tank and melee, we decided against it as ranged would be caught in the middle and the worms don't always pop up in the same place, complicating positioning. What finally worked is we had Magnidur and/or Santorum, our DPS DKs stand with Aravic infront of the the worm, gathering up the fire debuff and they would then go out and burn the poison off the ranged if they got hit by the grounded worm. On our one good attempt, we had some issues, and we even needed Aravic to go cleanse at one point, but we got them down. Also, of note is the fact that when one worm dies, the other enrages. However, the enrage is only 50% more damage to whomever is tanking the worm. So it wasn't that hard to heal through. The issue remains that there is no downtime between the three stages of the beasts, so very little regen time, but with proper conservation, our healers did a great job.

The final Northrend Beast is Icehowl, and he's pretty much a joke. Once you get past the worms, you shouldn't have any issues. In fact, we lost two players during the worms and Icehowl was just a pushover. He does some AOE raid damage that the healers must deal with, but nothing too huge and as long as people know that when he knocks you back, he'll pick someone to charge, and you just need to move out of the way, you won't have issues. So even down a healer and a DPS (we run 3 healers on new content usually - and even some late Ulduar content), we easily beat Icehowl.

So down they went. And we'll have to wait until next week to fight the next boss. We got two DPS DK items that both went to Santorum, and that was it for the night. I unfortunately missed last night's Ulduar run, but another Super Simian Sphere dropped and went to Dylana. So now Aravic, myself, and Dy can be the monkey ball trio!

What a Patch

So..let's talk 3.2.

First off, all these people back at the Argent Tournament? What the hell? I know there's some new dailies, and I understand people being there for the new instance, but why was there a 4 group deep line at Chillmaw? Why were there tons of people battling over Commanders at the Citadel? It's not like these quests all of a sudden grant special powers for the instance. They've been around for ages and they've been ignored the past couple months leading up to the patch. And now they're hot again? It makes no sense to me. Sure, there's some new heirloom items you can buy with Champions Seals, but other than that, why are people running these again?

I know I ran them every day (except 2 or 3) since the patch and I have almost every Argent Tournament pet (still waiting to trade one more) and I've saved the rest of my Seals. So I had plenty saved up when the patch hit which allowed me to immediately buy my Argent Pony Bridle. I'm not quite sure why, but even though my Squire has a pony, he refuses to mount up with me. But he does give me access to a vendor, the bank, or my mailbox every few hours. Plus...

Speaking of achievements, I was pleasantly surprised to see I still had over 7,000 achievement points when logging in yesterday. The nice folks at Blizzard decided to count up all the badges I had earned and apply them towards the 2,500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems achievement. So I'm currently sitting at 925/1000. But because of the emblem and badge changes, people wanted to run heroics last night. So we first went into the Oculus because it was the daily and would reward two Emblems of Triumph. While we were there, on the final boss, we figured, why not go for an achievement? So that we did. We had one person die, but we got Amber Void. I also rode an Emerald Drake, so I'm one drake away from Experienced Drake Rider. After the Oculus, we headed down into the Nexus. On the first split of Telestra, we got all the images down in the right amount of time, but on the second one, one got away from us and we just barely must have missed the timer for Split Personality. But, on the bright side, we did get Chaos Theory later on.

So while looking through my achievements, scanning for new, easy achievements (there aren't any), I did see I got three new feats of strength. They're a little overdue, but I'll take them.

I continued on after the two instances to do more of the Argent quests (the new ones are pretty fun - and...easy) and then went to search out some pets. I picked up the new Shimmering Wyrmling up at the Argent Tournament for 40 seals. I also picked up a Obsidian Hatchling from Breanni in Dalaran and then I did the new orphan quests and ended up with my own little Gorloc. I would have preferred the Frenzyheart, but I chose wrong, so I'll be happy with a Gorloc until the next Children's week. With the new pet additions, I now sit at 112/126 pets collected.

3.2 is Here

So patch 3.2 arrives today. There's a new 5/10/25 man raid instance, new Argent Tournament dailies, new mounts, and new pets. I'll probably farm the pets this weekend and maybe do some extra dailies each day, but other than that...probably just continue in 25 man Ulduar and step it up to 10 man Coliseum (since we finally got Yogg down - yay!).

The only thing I'm upset about is they're going to drop me about 150 achievement points and I'll be back under 7,000. I think with the new Coliseum achievements, it should be easy to get back over 7,000. We'll see when I log in tonight! Can't wait!

Yogg Down

With the team expecting the patch this Tuesday, we knew Sunday would be our only shot at getting Yogg'Saron down without having to do another full clear of Ulduar when we'd rather be in the Coliseum, so we gathered up at 5pm, found our trusty PUG who had helped us on Thursday, and quickly went after Yogg. On our first attempt, our tank had a fatal error, on our second, we had some issues with clouds, on the third, I think we had problems with people getting into the portals on time due to constrictors, but on the fourth...it was perfection. We had the minimum number of Guardians spawn during Phase 1, we we able to get almost every tentacle down during Phase 2 (one corruptor tentacle remained for Phase 3) and our DPS split perfectly during Phase 3 with myself, Grenchlok (our trusty mage PUG), and Comador on the Immortal Guardians and all of our melee DPS on Yogg - Vetarra, Magnidur, Weser. Our healers, Dylana, Xenoxa and Jizo performed perfectly, and the amazing tank, Aravic skillfully held the immortal guardians, DPSed Yogg'Saron, and managed to keep his sanity about him throughout the whole fight. In fact, everyone stayed sane, enabling us to not only down Yogg and clear Ulduar, but also to receive Drive me Crazy (not pictured)

Afterwards, we went over to try doing Sartharion with 3 drakes via the zerg method. We had one near perfect attempt, but all the other attempts fell just a bit short as we would have someone die in one way or another from not paying attention or not knowing positioning. But on that one near perfect attempt, we had him down to about 160k health, so I think with just a little bit of increased DPS, we'll get OS3D down. But until then, we'll have the wonderful Yogg'Saron victory to revel in.

Woohoo!

Some achievement updates and notes from Ulduar...

Thursday, the 10 man Gold Team ventured back into Ulduar after some clearing on Wednesday (including an XT hard mode kill) and we ended up with 6 tries on Yogg. Unfortunately, we had to 9 man a couple of those due to an unfortunate power outage somewhere in Texas I think. But we had some good shots at him, got him to Phase 3 a few times and I also had the chance to blow a kiss to Sara.

On Friday, our 25 man went in, and I was ready to get through Hodir once again, but we did one better, getting our fist Thorim kill! And boy did we deserve it. After our first flawless arena+gauntlet attempt, we were stoked to get a chance at Thorim himself when what happens? He evades and disappears! Oh no, how'd that happen? Ok, regroup, take 2. An almost flawless gauntlet and a perfect arena team and he does it again!? Ok, that's upsetting. Time to research. We found two possibilities:

1. We were losing someone to a disconnect upon starting the event. Just a random disconnect of a random person. There are posts suggesting that you have to wait for the disconnected person to come back before starting the gauntlet. So we did that.

2. A few other posts suggest that he can evade if you DPS him while falling down from the gauntlet run. So we made absolute certain that no one hit him other than the tank (I always pull him in the 10 man and we've never had an evade bug - so I'm thinking the strange disconnects were giving us the issue).

Either way, we kept him in check and didn't let him evade and quickly took him down. A great job done by all!

So with Thorim going down, my calculations on the 30th needed to be updated, as I could now get 100 Emblems of Conquest. So into Wintergrasp I went. We took Wintergrasp back from the Horde yesterday, but there weren't enough people to get a team going. So luckily I was able to be in a winning Wintergrasp again this morning and we found a team of 25 and took down Emalon. And what's this!? He drops 2 emblems of conquest?? Well crap, I could have gotten my 100 all along. So here I sit with 101 Emblems. Yeah, the achievement will become a feat of strength. But I wanted the 100 Emblem Feat instead of the 50 Emblem Feat!

I also forced some fellow friends to go into a couple of heroics just before the patch comes out so I could get another worthless achievement, but it's all about the feats!! So there it is:

Yesterday, before Wintergrasp, I saw that Halls of Stone was the daily and since I am still working on Proof of Demise, I dragged Aravic in with me, and we quickly cleared, and to top it all off, I got Brann Spankin' New which clears the Halls of Stone of all achievements for me. Yay!

And back to my Vault of Archavon attempts this morning, I had a lot of fun in there putting out some awesome DPS. A hunter did some awesome DPS on Emalon, but I was able to pass him somehow on Archavon.

Emalon


Archavon