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!

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.

Another Crazy Night

It all started out innocently enough. I picked up my fishing and cooking daily quests in Dalaran and headed up to Icecrown for the Argent Tournament Dailies. They were quickly completed and I went back to Dalaran to fish in the sewers for some Corroded Jewelry. It wasn't fun as there's usually 10 to 20 other people fishing down there so you can't just listen for your own bobber. So after about 10 casts I was getting antsy and annoyed with the whole process when finally I fished up the jewelry. But what came along with the jewelry?? A Giant Sewer Rat! Finally. After spending countless hours fishing by myself down there in the sewers without any luck whatsoever, I get the rat after spending just a few minutes while looking for Jewelry! Old Ironjaw, I'm coming for you next!!

So that left me with just a cooking daily to do. I sent some cooked rhino dogs over from my banker, only to find out they were Mighty Rhino Dogs. But time had run out. It was time for Ulduar. Luckily, on the way up to the Ulduar entrance, there's quite a few rhinos out there so I quickly picked up my four rhino meat and got ready to start a new ten man raiding week.

The plan for the night was to attempt Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on hard modes. So we got assembled, got into our vehicles, and headed out. We left just one tower up and proceeded to one-shot the Flame Leviathan earning us some nice Emblems of Conquest along with some nice loot, including Firesoul for my nice new main hand weapon.

After the Flame Leviathan, it was time to start working on XT-002 in hard mode. We were able to break his heart each time when trying, but his resulting "Heartbroken" mode is quite taxing. First you have adds to finish off before you can focus on XT, then you also have to worry about void zones left by gravity bombs and light sparks left by light bombs. On top of this, his tantrum hits for more damage and he also has a short enrage timer. After a lot of attempts (probably 8-10), we were really getting the fight down - knowing when to use cooldowns, where to drop void zones, if we should kill the light sparks or not (I think you have to, but focusing DPS on them makes it tougher to get the XT-002 down before his hard enrage timer). Eventually, we abandoned the hard mode. We might not have the gear at the current time to do it or we just need a lot more practice healing through all of his various attacks. We did learn one important thing though. And welcome to Tiddly's first boss fight explanation with drawing...


So here we have XT-002's room. You enter from the south where it says "Entrance" and have four scrap piles around the room. He usually stays near the stairs at the north side of the room. What we found is that if you pull him over and tank him between two scrap piles on the side of the room, he will only spawn adds from the two scrap piles furthest away from him (denoted by the incoming red arrows). During our multiple attempts, he spawned various levels of trash. During one attempt, he spawned one group of small bots (easily killed with one Blizzard). During another attempt, all he spawned was one bomb bot. But then during one of our last attempts, he spawned 2 sets of small bots, one bomb bot, and one pummeler. So your spawns will vary from fight to fight, but he will only spawn them from the two scrap piles with arrows. Never from the two piles right next to him.

So with this information in hand, and knowing we could take the heart down to almost killing it, we set out to see if we could get Must Deconstruct Faster. And the short answer is, yes, yes you can. We killed him in 173 seconds, well under the 205 required by the achievement. With adds spawning from only two scrap piles, I was easily able to take them down on each pass with our offtank picking up the pummelers and since we were able to do so much damage to the heart, we basically chained heart spawns. If you manage to do enough damage to his heart, it will immediately take him from 75% to 50% and spawn the heart again. You can then take him from 50% to 25% and so on. So yeah, 173 seconds. Not too shabby. But unfortunately, not hard mode.

We continued on, one shot Kologarn, headed to the Iron Council and two-shot them and then went over to Auriaya where we quickly one shot her. We had about 30 minutes left so we decided against going for Mimiron's trash and went back to take on Razorscale and try and get A Quick Shave. So yeah, one shot that. Not a problem there. We got him down to 67% on his first landing and easily got him under 50% on the second landing and destroyed him after he landed. So that didn't take the 30 minutes we had left. So let's go over to Ignis.

The first time we killed Ignis we zerged him. It's not a quick zerg, but you can do it - ignore the adds and just focus fire Ignis down. This time though, we thought it'd be a good idea to kill him the correct way. And...one shot. So that pretty much ended a great Wednesday "pre-clear" night. Our Wednesday night group is new and the sole purpose is to clear out the early bosses in Ulduar so our Thursday night Gold Team run can work on new content. For example, we have everything down right now up to the Tier 8 bosses. So tonight we'll probably work on Freya and then Mimiron with Thorim or Hodir coming next week. But even though we were done in Ulduar, we weren't done for the night. Not with the Alliance controlling Wintergrasp.

Let's go get some Tier 8! So we headed over, lost one player, picked up a pug mage (drats! competition on Tier 8), and quickly one shot Emalon. Tier 8 dropped for our healy druid, Dylana and he becomes the first in the team with any pieces of Tier 8. We then played around with Archavon who is a joke these days, got an offspec piece of Tier 7 for our pug mage, and I got a PvP cloak (because you know how much I PvP...).

And thus ended our fun night of raiding. In the end, I got a few great achievements, including Three Car Garage on our Flame Leviathan Hard Mode take down and I'm sitting at 6,420 points. Tonight, Freya and Mimiron are on notice and tomorrow the 25 man Gold Team makes our first foray into Ulduar. And then Saturday, Crusader Tiddlywinks. A fun few days coming up.

The (Almost) Undying

Last night, the Gold Team 10 man group had a couple of people running late, so we went into Sartharion before Naxxramas and attempted to 8 man Sarth + 1 drake. We probably could do it, but after one attempt, the two late parties came online, but instead of getting them into the instance, we quickly downed the drake and then 8 manned Sartharion getting us the awesome Less is More achievement.

We then formed up for our 10 man Naxxramas run and blew through the four rings. While doing so, we we able to get Momma Said Knock You Out, Arachnophobia, Shocking, The Safety Dance, and of course all quarters cleared, Sapphiron Down, and we were at Kel'Thuzad with NO DEATHS.

So we all knew what was on the line. Due to our abundance of melee DPSers this night, we had a paladin, Dantis, step out and help heal so we could have extra help on the ice blocks. It was just Jizo (our shaman) and me on the banshees in the first phase and we did a good job, we transitioned to the second phase and all was going well. We had a couple of double ice blocks in the melee area as we still had four melee DPS standing in there jockyeing for position. Then, at 40%, it happened. Our second pally healer, Eleazarjr, got ice blocked. The attempt to call it out on vent was made, but perhaps just a split second too late. Hemnetcher's heal went off a split second too late and with Dantis out of range, Dylana wasn't able to switch off of the tank to cross heal Jr (or so I'm assuming). Either way, we were so very close to The Undying.

Being that close really hurts. Just that one little mistake after a night of perfect one-shots. A night where on almost every boss we not only beat our own record, but shattered it. However, being this close, I know we can do it. There's no question that we have the DPS, the healing, and the coordination. Our team is set. And next week, with the Undying, I know we can get Make Quick Werk of Him. We were just 5 seconds over the timer this last time through and with our other heavy-hitting mage coming back next week and some improved DPS from our shammy, we should easily be able to get him down in time.

Tonight we hit up heroic Naxxramas. Should be fun. Hopefully we'll get our full clear tonight now that we have all four wings down pat.

Given a full clear, that would give me my 500th achievement. Who knows what it will be. I should get Heroic: Arachnophobia early in the raid and then hopefully Heroic: Sapphiron's Demise towards the end, and then Heroic: Kel'Thuzad's Defeat would be #500 and Heroic: The Fall of Naxxramas would be #501. But if we don't get Arachnophobia, it would be quite fitting to have The Fall of Naxxramas be #500.

Naxx 25: Take 2

Last Friday, the Gold Team ventured into Heroic Naxxramas for our second attempt at the instance. We had some different healers, some different DPS, and some last minute pick ups from the looking for group channel.

In the end, we managed to clear up to Thaddius, a nice improvement over our first attempt. However, even though we had the DPS to take down Patchwerk (which now seems to be a tank/healer check), we didn't have the DPS for Thaddius (a pure DPS check). In our first attempt, we had too many people not knowing what to do with their charges which wiped too much of the group to continue. During our second attempt (mostly) everyone figured it out, but there were a couple that thought you switched sides every time, so they died promptly, but won't make that mistake again.

In the end, I averaged 4200 DPS on boss fights which is a respectable number and we had a few under 2000 - which is not acceptable. I know the one shaman under 2000 DPS is a new 80, and we're working on gearing him up, but the others that were down there were from looking for group and unless they can improve by next week, I doubt they'll be reinvited.

On my favorite (or maybe second favorite behind Heigan) fight, Loatheb, I was able to keep the crit buff (which everyone should be able to do), and I put out 6,000 DPS. Now that's fun stuff. Next closest: 4500 DPS.

On Patchwerk, a straight single target DPS race, I was able to do 4371 sustained DPS, #1 over the hunter (4165 DPS) and the ret pally (4065 DPS). It's good to see mages on top of the DPS charts, but I know that in certain situations, there are others with similar gear that can out DPS me which I still feel is an issue. We're the glass cannons and should be doing the most DPS with the optimal spec.

With regards to loot, it seemed as if a lot of tank / pally items were dropping as I didn't see anything to roll on until Loatheb who dropped both Boots of Impetuous Ideals and Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher. I lost both those rolls, but I lost them to core members of our group, so I was very happy to see them get much-needed upgrades (the boots were only a slight upgrade for me).

However, my patience paid off as Gluth dropped another pair of Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher which I finally won after the wonderful Dylana refused to take them (so I didn't really win them, I was given them out of pity :).

So I'm now rocking purple pineapple shoulders and love them. They're my first best-in-slot item, so no more possible shoulder upgrades. Though my T7.5 leggings are very close to being best-in-slot and might be. (The boots Loatheb dropped are also best-in-slot for me).

Next week I'm really hoping to see the Military Quarter as we haven't stepped inside yet. I don't really know how it stacks up difficulty-wise when compared to the Construct Quarter, but hopefully we can spend some time in there, perhaps instead of the Arachnid Quarter.

About Last Friday...

So last Friday, I've just awoken (wow, that's an odd word), and I have my flasks, my food, and my gear repaired, ready to take on Malygos and get my new necklace. But we usually start with Sartharion so I flew down to Wyrmrest Temple to start summoning players in once our group was formed. Then I'm told...we'll be doing Malygos first. Oh good! I have the blue gem for my neck piece (which reminds me, I need to put a +19 spell damage gem in there) and I can equip it for a Sartharion raid. So I hop on the nearest red drake and fly over to Coldarra. Upon arriving there, I'm told, nope - Sartharion first because Aravic is specced for tanking so I hopped on my own Armored Snowy Griffon and flew back.

But then...Aravic is going to spec DPS and let's go to Malygos first so we can down him and spend the rest of the night on Sartharion with one drake. WHAT? Fine. Red Drake, take me back to Coldarra. I arrive, and we quickly explain the fight to Dylana, our third healer for the night, and a new hunter we have picked up from the looking for group channel. After one wipe due to everyone getting used to healing assignments, picking up discs, and using the domes, we assemble once again and quickly take him down just as he's about to enrage (actually, I think he did enrage, but our DOTs killed him just in time). So I get the lovely new neck piece, Weser picks up Black Ice, and we head back to the Wyrmrest Temple.

So here we are now, ready to tackle Sartharion with one drake up - Tenebron this time around. Our first attempt, we decide to have Weser tank Tenebron, EleazarJr will pick up the lava blazes and the whelps, and Aravic will tank Sartharion himself. This doesn't work due to an equipment malfunction and Weser gets crushed by Tenebron leading to a wipe. We then try to have Eleazar tank both Tenebron and the adds, but this just takes too much work running all over the place picking up the blazes and then having to round up all the whelps. So we try another new strategy - Eleazar will pick up all the adds and tank them and Aravic will tank BOTH Sartharion AND Tenebron.

Yes, he's one crazy tank. But it works. Everything is going smoothly - DPS is able to focus on bringing Tenebron down without having to worry about stray lava blazes or whelps from the portal. All we need to do is DPS Tenebron and avoid the fire walls. So Tenebron is in the process of being defeated when...a healer and DPS disconnect. In the chaos of new healing assignments and working on keeping the tank up as he's getting hit by Sartharion and Tenebron, we lose two more DPS - not sure what they were hit by - maybe a stray lava blaze, a whelp, or a lava wall - but we're down to 2 healers, 2 tanks, and 2 DPS. Both tanks have their hands full with Sartharion, Tenebron, and the adds while the healers are both squarely focused on the tanks. Occasionally I would aggro a blaze and have to drag it over to Jr, our pally tank, then hope a heal came in before I got hit by a meteor or another add.

So here we are, with just 2 DPS. Tenebron goes down. I do a little bit of AOE on the adds that Jr has stacked up, but focus mainly on Sartharion. Every time any cooldown is up, I use it. Then, as I see him getting closer to 10% health, I hold my cooldowns in preparation for the quasi-enrage. I knew we wouldn't have the DPS to blow through him in this stage, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that once his initial enrage happens, he calms back down again. So we just had Jr pick up all the extra blazes that spawned, Ivan and I tried to dodge the meteors and DPS all out on Sartharion, and eventually, he went down.

In all, it took us 11 minutes to bring him down. I used my three mana gem charges, conjured a new one, and used two charges on that. I used mirror image a few times and think I even threw in an evocate and an invisibility. It was, quite simply, one of the best fights I've been a part of. The fun in knowing that if I got in trouble, I essentially had to fend for myself, the excitement in knowing that it's just me and Ivan who need to knock down Sartharion and his 7.7 million HP, and the fun in just having to be on top of our games for the full 11 minutes to make this thing work. So we now have the awesome Twilight Assist achievement and though I doubt we'll be doing two drakes this week, I do look forward to the challenge in upcoming weeks.

Silver Team Naxx

The Gold Team has apparently been rechristened the Silver Team and last week, we took our first steps inside of Naxxramas. Our goal was to clear the Spider Wing, hit up Patchwerk and then try Grobbulus on Wednesday. We quickly cleared the Spider Wing and took down Patchwerk after a couple tries (we had to learn those hateful strikes) and we went on to Grobbulus. We had just one try on him before our healer had to bail, so we were stuck trying to 9 man the place and it just wouldn't work. So we thought we could go hit up Instructor Razuvious, but we had issues with just two healers and we eventually called it a night.

We reconvened at 4pm on Sunday, ready to go. First things first though, the Obsidian Sanctum had to be cleared. Easy peasy, one shot Sartharion. Maybe next time we can leave a drake up. Who knows?

So after the Sanctum, we headed back to Naxx with an eye on the Military Quarter, Razuvious was a pushover with three healers, and we went on to Gothik. The weekend before, I had joined a quasi-guild/PUG team in Naxx and we were unable to get anywhere on Gothik. This time, with two awesome tanks and amazing healers, we one shot Gothik and had absolutely no issues. We decided to save the Four Horsemen for another time and went back to the Plague Wing.

Noth was pretty damn easy and we made quick work of him and went on to Vetarra's favorite fight in the game, Heigan the Unclean. We took a shot at him to let the team learn the Heigan dance and then had to take another shot at him after losing some healers before we finally got him down. However, we did it in a very unconventional way. After losing two healers to the dance, along with our two hunters, it was just me and a healer up on the platform, a shaman, pally, druid, and warrior down on Heigan. So yeah, we 6 manned him. Not that tough really, the only issue we had was people lagging and getting stuck during the dance. I'm really not sure how that happens, it's a fairly simple dance, but it did happen, though we managed to bring him down.

After that, we lost a couple of players and had to call it a night. We did a quick Utgarde Keep run afterward, and now I stand just 5 emblems short of my Heroes Frostfire Robe. My gloves didn't drop in the Sanctum, but we'll be doing that weekly and hopefully I can pick them up in there. I really need that two piece set bonus, it's just too sweet to not utilize - Improved Mana Gems.

For our first week in Naxxramas, we did pretty well. I believe next week we are not raiding due to the Holidays, but after that, I believe we're getting our DPS Pally and our Death Knight to join in. Then we will be bringing Dylana in for heals and we should have a pretty solid team and we should be getting close to clearing the place sometime soon in the new year. Then it's just a matter of finding another team to join up with for some fun 25 man raids.

All in all, a great start and even though there's really not that much gear in there for me to upgrade to, I love running the place and learning the new fights that I didn't get a chance to run even though I had hit up Naxx a couple of times in the Burning Crusade.

On a side note, Saturday, I hit exalted with both the Argent Crusade and the Oracles. Bringing my exalted factions up to 29 and also earning me the title 'The Argent Champion.' Right now I'm wearing my Wyrmrest Accord tabard in the heroics and I'm looking forward to some Sandals of Crimson Fury and a nice new mount - Reins of the Red Drake.

Hex Lord Vanquished!

Last night, in a triumphant return to Zul'Aman, the Gold Team was able to obtain the third timed chest for the first time ever (with 2 minutes to spare) and we then went on to kill the dreaded Hex Lord Malacrass! Congratulations to my good friend Dylana who won the Tiny Voodoo Mask and Mercreus who got his Trollbane. I also obtained these Footpads of Madness which I'm still unsure about. I love my Boots of Blasting, but another 25 haste could get my Fireball down to 2.7 seconds potentially.

I also just discovered that last night I was running the whole night with the wrong pair of gloves on. My Spellfire Gloves were sitting in my bank the whole night, basically gimping my damage by 7% and also putting me under the hit cap, resulting in another damage loss. I did enjoy running last night with my two pieces of Tier 4. Sporting the Collar of the Aldor and Pauldrons of the Aldor allowed me to cast straight through any bird interruptions on Akil'zon and also during the spirit bolts on Malacrass. And while the tooltip mentions just uninterruptable fireballs, it seemed like my scorches were going off without interruptions as well. So next time in (a.k.a. tonight), I'll be going in with the correct gloves and my two pieces of Tier 4.

So we've finally got another boss off of our Gold Team list and Zul'jin is the last left. On our very first attempt, we got to the lynx stage - which I thought was quite good since 7 of us were seeing him for the first time. Our best attempt was our last (of probably 4 or 5) where we once again made it to the lynx stage with 7 or so people up, but we lost our priest early in the stage and without the group heals, we were done. But it was a great learning experience and I hope we can get him down soon.

I still a bit skeptical that we can get the bear mounts, but we are now able to get three timed chests which is a great advancement. We also are doing much better on Akil'zon which is great progress for us. We are able to hatch one whole side each time eggs are hatched which greatly cuts down on time required to kill him.

On a side note, I have added another pet to my collection, however, I think my screenshots were not properly kept over the past few sessions, so until I can get screenshots, I am not announcing him here.

Three Hour Kara

Last night, the Gold Team ventured into Karazhan after the informative Darklight Resolution guild meeting in Stormwind Park and we completely tore the place up.

Our previous record was just under 4 hours for a full clear. First pull last night:
3/5 18:54:03.586 Aracely's Shoot hits Spectral Stallion for 113.
3/5 21:53:05.093 Prince Malchezaar dies.

We just made it in under 3 hours. It was close after a partial wipe and a full wipe on Prince due to some horrific infernal drops. But we did it. We were all awarded 22 badges for our time and effort, Dylana got some new gear. Hemnetcher also got a couple of pieces, and we got a lot of void crystals.

In the end, it just goes to show what some insane DPS will do for you when combined with teamwork and fun. Congrats Gold Team!