And...we're back! (aka 2 down, 1 to go)

The Gold Team is back. Two weeks ago, after taking two months off due to various scheduling issues, vacations, and general malaise, we reformed and continued on our quest to complete Glory of the Icecrown Raider. Many people had various smaller achievements they needed, but the main reason for raiding was to get down the two last heroic bosses - Sindragosa and Putricide.

After we all re-learned everything we had forgotten over the past two months, we finally took Sindragosa down in heroic mode (we had been working on her for a couple weeks prior to our vacation). The next week Putricide was our target - plus we needed some of the achievements from Rotface and Festergut for some raiders who were absent when we did them the first time. We got to him and gave him a good four attempts before we had to call it a night, ready to reconvene the next week (yesterday).

So we were ready. We all downloaded the Plagued addon which announces via /yell that you have the plague the Professor throws out and how many seconds are left before someone needs to come and get it. This was a huge help to us since that was pretty much the only part of the fight we were having issues with in our earlier attempts. We quickly took him down on our third attempt and made our way over to Valithria Dreamwalker to get the Portal Jockey achievement. It was almost too easy to get this achievement and heal Dreamwalker on easy mode, so we then pushed on to once again face Sindragosa and try and earn All You Can Eat.

For this achievement, it really takes a lot of raid coordination, and we had no problems getting to the second phase (or third phase depending on how you look at it) for the achievement. However, we kept having some poor luck with ice cube positioning and healers getting blocked, but we worked around it, figured out a strategy, and eventually we completed the achievement.

So that left us with just Been Waiting a Long Time For This for our meta achievement. After reading up on a few strategies and figuring out positioning, on our last attempt of the night, we finally got the stack over 30, however, the tank went down at the last second due to the Lich King's stacking buff, and in the scramble to get him up, we lost another player and the chaos was just too much to recover from. Luckily, we'll have all the time in the world next week to work on it and I am certain we can get this fight down. What's tough about this achievement is that the achievement is done right at the start of the fight, so even if you manage to get the stacks to the required amount, you still have to defeat the Lich King (which our group has done only once). So it should be a good challenge for us next week.

While it's nice to be back and amongst friends, I'm still only logging in on our sole raid night. There's just nothing else to be done in the game and I am waiting patiently for Cataclysm to come along. Until then, I'll be content to raid one night a week with my friends and play other games while I wait.

ICC 10 Achievements

Tonight, after a little over an hour working on Sindragosa in 10 man hard mode, we lost one player for a while. So while he was gone, we decided to head over to attempt The Orb Whisperer for the couple of us that had missed it previously. We unfortunately kept having little mistakes crop up, but once our missing player returned, we easily got it. Then, on to Blood Queen to get Once Bitten, Twice Shy. It wasn't my turn this time to get it, so instead I got bitten and just did DPS for the run. But we got 2 more people in our 10 man the achievement and I should get it next week. With just 25 minutes left in our raid time, we almost called it, but then decided to go try the Rotface and Festergut achievements.

First up was Flu Shot Shortage on Festergut. Piece of cake. We actually got really lucky. The first two spores landed on each of the two mages, so we had nothing to do and could just run the rest of the fight as normal. So we quickly one-shot it and headed over to Rotface. We weren't quite sure of the correct strategy to use for Dances with Oozes. We originally were thinking we would use three tanks and just have two large oozes up at all times and just have the small oozes combine with them, but losing a DPS for a third tank just didn't make sense. So what we wound up doing is having our standard one tank on the large ooze but he would only combine that large ooze with another large ooze. When the large ooze combines with another large ooze, it only gains 1 stack of it's buff, so we could continually combine large oozes with the main large ooze until it had 4 stacks. At that point, we did have our boomkin shift to bear and taunt a large ooze while the small oozes just stayed on the individual players and didn't combine with anything until we burned him down.

So, all in all, it was a pretty great night. We still didn't get Sindragosa down in hard mode, but we got a bunch of achievements done and we're that much closer to the Icecrown meta achievement, Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

A Return to ICC 10 (Heroic)

Last night, the intrepid folks from Golden Aegis once again braved the horrors of Icecrown Citadel and defeated the abominations Festergut and Rotface in 10 man heroic.

It started out like any other night, cleared the first four with no problem, doing Lady Deathwhisper on heroic this week instead of going for the hard mode achievement like last week, which in turn rewarded me with Heroic: Storming the Citadel. We then were torn - Dreamwalker or the Plauge Quarter? We chose the Plague Quarter and 2-shot Festergut and 1-shot Rotface during our first time stepping into that quarter on heroic. We then attempted Putricide, made great progress, but decided to instead do Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion so we could then go complete the Crimson Hall on heroic again.

Unfortunately nothing dropped for the mages last night, but the warrior and shaman in our group are now 4/4 sanctified after three more token drops for them. So congrats to Avielronis and Taalani. Next week, I'd like to work on Putricide more, but I think the healers want to try their hand at Dreamwalker. Either way, we're making great progress in 10 man heroics and I'm very proud of the whole team.

ICC Update

Last week, because I wanted to watch something on TV, I missed our usual Thursday night raid. Because of that, I wasn't around as the team worked through the first wing on heroic mode after our first downing of the Lich King. But they couldn't get Saurfang down, so we finished him up after our normal Sunday night 25 run. Well this week, I was ready to go kick some butt, and that we did.

It started with a very easy kill of Lord Marrowgar on heroic, netting me a very nice upgrade in the form of Frost Needle. We then continued on and opted not to do Deathwhisper on heroic, but instead go for her "hard mode," Full House. It took us two tries, but we got it. So on to the Gunship. For this one, we decided to challenge ourselves by doing I'm On a Boat in heroic mode. And it was eaaaaasy. And I got what I craved most of all...Muradin's Spyglass.

So we were three bosses in and I had three huge upgrades. We took two tries on Saurfang heroic mode (we love those tokens that drop) and then continued on to the Crimson Halls. We opted to do the Blood Council in heroic mode and after a couple of wipes using a mage as the Keleseth tank, once we switched to a paladin, we killed them. And wouldn't you know...they drop an upgrade for me too: Cerise Coiled Ring. It replaces my Runed Signet, so I lose my teleport to Dalaran, but I'll just use reagents now and not worry about it. After them, we went to Blood Queen. We wiped once as we learned about the massive damage she does in the new heroic mode and then we killed her (despite me dying with a bite...I got a battle res, continued doing normal damage and we killed her right at the enrage timer). She dropped a nice wand that would be an amazing upgrade from my ilvl 232 wands - Lana'thel's Bloody Nail, but our awesome priest wanted it as well so I passed to him after winning the roll since I had already gotten three huge upgrades.

So I not only finished off The Crimson Hall (because I missed the week that our 10 man downed her originally), but also got Heroic: The Crimson Hall and once we go back and do Deathwhisper on heroic, I'll get Heroic: Storming the Citadel. We also attempted Dreamwalker in heroic mode, but that is a tough fight, so we still have some work to do there. all in all though, it was an amazing night and we completely rocked it and I got some awesome gear.

Slow Week

It's been a slow week on the side of Tiddlywinks. On the other hand, I just power leveled my rogue Tockett from 71-80 in about 2 days. It's almost too easy when you give him flight at level 71. But back to Tiddly, we went into ICC(10) again last night. We took down the 6 bosses we pretty much have on farm, but instead of going after Putricide, we wanted to see what the Blood Princes were like. That's a pretty crazy fight. I think we've got it down now, but we ran out of time without and they live to fight another day.

On the gear front though, I got some nice upgrades - I of course got my Bloodmage Hood right on time and last night found the Ether-Soaked Bracers. They are just the slightest upgrade over the Bejeweled Wizard Bracers, but they provide hit on them which I lost when I replaced my head piece. I now sit just 3 points below the hit cap, which I would rather have than being 7 points over. The other mages in my raid don't like how the Bloodmage Hood looks, but honestly, I think it's pretty damn imposing. And it looks awesome with the robe. Oh yeah, the two piece bonus is amazing as well.

On the achievement front, not much new. Got a couple in our 25 man run of ICC last week, but finally got Got My Mind on My Money (25,000) (which now has me at 54/54 general achievements). Which is good...since I've been saving up lots of gold to buy Primordial Saronite. I almost was able to purchase 5 yesterday for 10.5k gold, but at the last second, the shifty druid decided to keep the saronite for his own boots...oh well. The prices were down to about 2,250 on the auction house earlier this week, but there are none on auction right now, so I expect prices to go back up. I only need 7 more to craft the most awesome leggings...

I've also been meaning to do an update to my UI posts since a lot has chanced since last march. I just keep forgetting to take screenshots while raiding, but I will try my hardest to remember this weekend when we do our 25 man raid. My UI is much cleaner than the previous post and works amazingly.

Rotface Down

After a couple weeks of attempts, our 10 man team finally got Rotface down. A couple of quick observations:

- 2 heal it. We were always overwhelmed when we had three healers. The extra DPS is essential in this fight (especially in the last 30%) so you must find a way to 2-heal the fight if you can.

- Use Heroism within 35%. Again, even though it might be anecdotal evidence, every time we got under 35%, slimes started to spawn much quicker. Reading through all the posts around the net, people are still debating if the slimes get thrown out quicker by Rotface based on time elapsed or based on his HP. We believe it his HP that triggers faster slime generation. If this is the case, it is essential that heroism be saved until the end.

- Pally OTs - use Blessing of Freedom and cleanse the slime people. We had our pally tank who was on the large slime moving around the outer ring of the room - but whenever he would encounter a quadrant with ooze, he would detour close to the boss in the middle of the room. By using Blessing of Freedom, the ooze did not snare him and the damage it does in inconsequential. Similarly, since we were 2-healing the fight, the healers did not have time to cleanse the slimes off of people. The OT makes a perfect cleansing candidate. While he is kiting the large slime, he could easily cleanse us as we ran towards him. Alternatively, if you have a ret pally or shadow priest DPSing, they can cleanse too. Having the healers cleanse is a waste of a global cooldown that should be used for heals.

So there you have it...Festergut and Rotface down - Festergut is a push over once you figure out the extent of his damage once he has inhaled all the mist. Our healers now know what to expect and we one shot him this week. As for Professor Putricide, we still have a ways to go on him. We extended our scheduled raiding time last night to get 9 tries in on him and he's one tough SOB. We got him down to about 50% on our best try, but we lost the abomination at a critical time, so we are learning...and we might get lucky next week, but it'll probably be a couple weeks before we get the Professor down.

Ashen Verdict Rings

Last night, during our run of Icecrown Citadel, I was able to raise my reputation with the Ashen Verdict to friendly. I unfortunately haven't been on any rep runs in Icecrown, so I'll slowly make my way to exalted as we run the 10 mans over these holiday weeks and the 25 man come next year. But with my new friendly reputation, I was able to pick up the Ashen Band of Destruction. A very nice upgrade over the Band of the Invoker.

However, now I'm starting to run into a problem - too much hit. The new rep rings have an insane amount of hit, and prior to picking it up, I was able to get right to the hit cap through gemming. Now, all my gems have been optimized for the insane amount of hit on the T9.25 gear and this new ring - which puts me at almost 800 haste. And boy is it fun. When I get an Icy Veins + Heroism going, those arcane blasts are under 1.1 seconds and the arcane missiles complete in about the same amount of time. With both buffs, I can now put out 9500 to 10000 DPS for a short burst period, and man, it's awesome.

But back to the rings - I believe with the upgraded hit on the rings, as HokieBeeJay pointed out in a recent comment, the next best item for me to aim for is the T9 Bloodmage Robe. I'm getting closer as I am getting the weekly raid quest in each week and I haven't missed a daily heroic. Unfortunately, ICC(10) bugged for us the first week, so I'm 8 behind there and we haven't run any 25 mans yet...but I'm getting closer to 95 Emblems of Frost. I then have to continue to aggressively farm for gold as I'll need to get the Sandals of Consecration next. 5 primordial saronite at 2000 - 2500g is way out of my league right now as I only have about 5000g. But I can get there with some more aggressive farming and doing a few more dailies each day (I do about 8-10 dailies a day when I have time). But I'll get there at some point, and hopefully prices on primordial saronite will come down to a more reasonable level.

Boned?

Quite possibly the worst achievement name ever, at least it has (10 Player) or (25 Player) after it or we'd see [Boned] pop up in trade chat every day. That being said, we did a quick run of ICC last night after running Razorscale for the weekly raid quest (bah, twice in a row). We got Boned and had some issues on Saurfang. He kept targeting a healer with his first application of Mark of the Fallen Champion and for some reason that would always do us in. It probably was because we were 2-healing the raid instead of 3-healing it like we did last week when we cleared it. But our team performed well and I'm sure we'll get it down to a one-shot quite quickly.

In other news, I got my Ironforge Ram yesterday (or maybe it was the day before). Either way, it brings me to 107 mounts. I think I just have one to go with the Argent Tournament tokens.

One Wing Down

Last night, our 10 man formed up again and went back into Icecrown Citadel. After having our asses handed to us - due to some unknown bug (we suspect Marrowgar was doing 25 man damage in our 10 man raid - there are some reports of this bug on the Warcraft forums) - we came back in this week and destroyed the first four bosses. We quickly one-shot Marrowgar and then two-shot the remaining three bosses. Not a bad outing for our team which had not seen any of the last three fights prior to last night. And to top it all off, a "hard-mode" achievement to boot.

A Note on how NOT to run ICC

Just a friendly note on how not to run the Icecrown Citadel raid with 10 people:

Don't set it to 25 man mode.

We went in last week with our normal 10 man team, and after wiping on trash, thought: this is fun! Finally an instance we can't just roll through. Tough trash, and then a hard boss.

After a night of attempts (3 hours), we failed to get Marrowgar down. It seems our healers and tanks could not keep up with the damage he was dealing out, but we kept adjusting our strategy and figured out how to handle him. On multiple attempts, we had him under 30%, but we just couldn't control the massive incoming damage being done to our tanks. We left ICC with a sense of accomplishment, having brought him down under 30% and with good progress made on the night.

But then our healer and tank took alts into a pick up ICC 10 man last night and completely destroyed Marrowgar. What was up? They knew this wasn't the same fight we had faced last week. And then it hit us. We had the dungeon set to 25 man mode. We ALMOST defeated Lord Marrowgar on 25 man difficulty with 10 people. What an amazing feat that would have been. In fact, I'm fairly certain we can do it, however, I don't think we'll have the chance to try any more. I doubt anyone in our group will be willing to attempt 25 man Marrowgar and 25 man trash again with just 10 people. But looking back, it certainly was fun trying.

It Came from the Pug

Welcome to 3.3 :) I know it's been a while since updating, but not much has happened in the past few weeks. Our 10 man continued a bit in ToC(H) and Ulduar working on Firefighter (I subbed in with another 10 man team for the Firefighter completion). Other than that, we were patiently waiting for 3.3 and Icecrown to arrive and now that it has, well...not much has changed.

I'm still logging on periodically to do my dailies, but mostly I'm logging on every day to complete the random heroic and get my two Emblems of Frost. I did the weekly raid last week as well and have done the daily heroic every day except patch day when servers were horribly unstable. I've also done a couple of the new 5 man instances - they don't interest me much since there's no gear in there - I just want the achievements from them.

On the achievements front, I passed 8,000 points, picking up some easy dungeon points, Looking for More, 1,000 Stone Keeper's Shards (finally - now to work on finishing the Wintergrasp meta), and on Saturday, Dylana and Gillen from my wonderful guild finally helped me finish The Burning Crusader by bringing my Lower City rep up to Exalted. I now sit at 36 exalted reps and a couple more should be coming soon. Hopefully I can hit 40 soon.

Other than that, I fished a bunch this weekend and still no turtle, bought two new pets from Breanni in Dalaran (working on the Pug), and no new mounts. Hopefully our forays into Icecrown this week will be fruitful and we can also go back and finish up the Ulduar hard modes and get a shot at the rusted proto-drake.