4 Down, 1 To Go

Last night, I got my Exalted Champion of Darnassus title and luckily, for the fifth and final faction (Exodar - just because it's last in the row of NPCs), I will finish in 4 days. The key here is there are three random daily quests you can get from the factions - A Blade Fit for a Champion, A Worthy Weapon, and The Edge of Winter. Theoretically, you can earn 5 Valiant's Seals a day. However, when you turn in your 25 seals for The Valiant's Charge, you can then immediately pick which faction you are going to champion next. As long as that faction has a different quest of the three random daily quests, you can do it, allowing you to earn 2 extra seals on the day you switch factions.

The problem I ran into is that after finishing my first faction (the gnomes, of course!) I didn't get that extra quest, so I've been 2 behind people who got lucky that time. But just 2 seals back doesn't save you a day of quests. Luckily, when switching the next three times, I got the extra quest, so I'm 6 seals up right now and will be able to complete the last leg in just 4 days! So even if people got lucky each time they switched, they will be on the same timetable as me. All I know right now though is that I'm going to be up early Saturday morning to get my Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance achievement and become...Crusader Tiddlywinks!

((And when I do get that, think of the achievement spam in Guild chat...Champion of Exodar, Exalted Champion of Exodar, Champion of the Alliance, Exalted Champion of the Alliance, and Exalted Argent Champion of the Alliance))

Also, this weekend, a grouping of the Gold Team and Group 2 went into 25 man Vault of Archavon and took down Emalon with ease. Unfortunately, no T8.5 for mages, but we had just one wipe due to a priest mistake within the first 15 seconds of the fight. We regrouped and essentially one-shot him.


In that Emalon fight, I was quite happy with my DPS. I've been experimenting with arcane and just haven't been able to figure out how to sustain high DPS with it. I ran arcane through the first half of our 25 man Naxx run last weekend and it just wasn't doing the damage I expected. I was using the right rotation and though it was tough to time my evocations properly, I did have minimal down time to regen mana. Yet each fight, my DPS seemed to be lower than what I could have gotten with Frostfire Bolt.

So I'm back to Frostfire Bolt because A) I think it does more DPS and B) I know the spec and rotations and know how to maximize my DPS with the spec. So here's where I ended on the Emalon fight.

What to do with No Progress?

Last night, I joined a raid that is a hodge-podge of groups and we went to Malygos with the intention of bringing down Sartharion with two drakes afterward. So after we took down Malygos in a few tries, we went over to Sartharion. We had a couple of players that hadn't seen the fight with one drake, let alone two, so we introduced them in the easiest way possible - threw them into the fire - quite literally. After multiple wipes with healers dying in blue circles or flame walls, we almost got the first drake down. But it never happened. That first drake never went down. We kept having a tank get thrown into the lava or a healer get hit by a tail swipe or the whelps would go crazy and take out DPS.

After a while, what are you to do? How many shots do you take at two drakes without any improvement before moving on and just doing one drake?

On one hand, I understand the raid leader wanting to do two drakes. We can do one without an issue it seems, so two should be a good challenge. However, when you have a healer who dies in the following manner: blue circle, flame wall, blue circle, flame wall, sartharion, flame wall, how can you continue? I think at some point you have to tell that person to shape up or not come. There's no room for error on two drakes, let alone three drakes. So if you have players who consistently make mistakes, they need to leave the raid for the rest of the raid to progress.

At one point though, you just need to call it. We spent two hours banging our heads against a wall, making no progress. I guess that's the limit of most sane people. I'm not sure how much more I could have taken. This after an hour spent on forming up for Malygos, killing Malygos, and then forming up for Sartharion. Three hours for Malygos and Sartharion + 1 drake is insane. However, good came of it.

First, I got achievement #499. Due to people not picking up the hover disks properly, I hopped on one and picked up Heroic: Denyin' the Scion. But the best part of the night was finally taking down Sartharion and getting the Illustration of the Dragon Soul. It's the best in slot trinket for us mages, and after seeing the first three go to healers (who benefit from it, but not nearly as much as DPS benefit from it), I was happy to finally get my hands on it. I now have the top two trinkets for mages in the Illustration and Embrace of the Spider. One day I'll get my T7.5 gloves from Sarth...