A Tribute To Skill

Last night, with our 25 man canceled (not sure why - lack of people on maybe?), we decided to form up a ToGC 10 man run. Previously I had run ToGC10 and we couldn't get past the faction champions, but last night, we tore through the place, reaching Anub'arak with 50 attempts remaining. We spent about 15 minutes explaining the fight, working out our strategy, making sure everything went as planned, and it all worked - almost. We got Anub to 2.0% when he wiped us. We were so close...yet still so far away. After having random fails on the next few attempts due to bad luck, people trying to kite too long, random spike damage on the tanks, we finally got him down with 41 attempts remaining. So no Tribute to Mad Skill when we were so close to a Tribute to Insanity. But we plan on going back in next week after our regular Monday night raid and take him down with 50 attempts left. It's definitely doable.

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.

It's been a while...

2 weeks without a post. Well, I have a lame excuse, but the truth is, I haven't been playing much. I've gotten pretty burned out on WoW right now and I've been playing a lot of Torchlight and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. But, with the Harvest Festival coming up this Sunday and Blizzard's anniversary (with the new pet) coming soon, I'll probably be on a bit more in the coming weeks. However, even if I am on, it'll probably be to just do dailies to continue to work on buying the last few mounts I need from the Argent Tournament.

That being said, patch 3.3 started downloading yesterday for me, so Icecrown isn't too far away - though one blue post has slated it as still a month or more away - and with it we'll have some new achievements to work on, some new dungeons to crawl, and a new raid to wipe out. Personally, I think I won't really be interested in WoW on a daily basis again until Cataclysm. There's just too little to do these days.

Back in the old days, there were grinds that took ages, there were pets to shuffle around in your bank, mounts to keep in your bags, and gear upgrades were few and far between. With the dumbing down of the game, you don't really have to worry about bank space, you don't need to care about which mount you carry with you, and every time there's a patch - even minor ones - there's new gear that can be bought with emblems or easily farmed with little time or skill involved.

Sure, I'm still having fun raiding with my 10 and 25 man (well, last night was pretty frustrating as we put in over 20 attempts on the heroic Faction Champions (10 man)). Our 25 man group is making progress as well. We clear the Trial of the Champions in good time each Friday, and though we've been doing VoA and Ony, we'll be skipping those in the future to put in more time clearing the last two bosses in Ulduar or continuing our work on the Trial of the Grand Crusader.

So I apologize for the lack of updates, but recently, there really hasn't been that much to report since I'm usually just logging on for Thursday and Friday raids. And with next week's raids canceled because of Thanksgiving, I might not be on at all for a while after I finish my Harvest Festival achievements. I still love the game, I just miss some of what it used to be. They've taken the grinds out of the game and replaced them with easy reputation gains and easy gear upgrades. At least the heroic modes still challenge us from time to time.

Achievement Whoring

Last week/weekend was a pretty nice week for me and my obsessive compulsive achievement gathering. It started on Thurdsay with our 10 man Gold Team run. We cleared ToC in 45 minutes, then quickly cleared VoA and Ony. After that, we had plenty of time to take up our new venture: Ulduar hard modes.

We skipped Flame Leviathan hard mode and went straight to Ignis. After quickly getting through his hard mode (with about 5 seconds to spare - we could have done it quicker, but I tried helping out by frost nova'ing the adds for the off tank when I should have just focused on Ignis), we went on to XT. We were thinking about doing the hard mode, but for some reason, we just didn't have the DPS to get the heart in the first try so we skipped it for the night and went straight to the Iron Council. We wanted to get a data disc so we could work our way towards Algalon.

After a couple of wipes learning the fight, we managed to get Steelbreaker down and retrieve his data disc. Unfortunately, I completely forgot to use my Iron Boot Flask, so I missed out on But I'm on Your Side (which I have in 25 player mode oddly enough).

After that, we called it for the night and gave our Raid ID up to another run in our guild so they could work on Mim hard mode on Sunday night. Fast-foward to our 25 man run on Friday night which involved yet another quick clear of ToC (Hemnetcher was nice enough to pass the trophy on Anub to me, so I now sport 4 piece Tier 9), and then of course Ony and VoA before we headed back into Ulduar with our raid ID from the previous week. We had skipped Ignis, Razorscale, and the Iron Council as we attempted Thorim the week before, so this week, we went back to clear them out.

We started on Ignis, and even though I didn't think we had the raw DPS to do Stokin' the Furnace, we managed to pull it off in one shot. Go team! We then went on to the Iron Council looking to get a 25 man data disc for our intrepid raid leader, Aravic and after a couple of wipes on Steelbreaker, we decided to switch it up and kill Runemaster Molgeim last. He was a piece of cake and Aravic received his data disc. And with that, we called it a night.

The fun continued on Sunday as I was invited to a Black Temple run. I had previously run Black Temple a couple of times in the past with PUGs, but this was a group I had run Sunwell, Molten Core, and other early instances with, so I was fairly certain we would clear the place out. And despite quite a few deaths on my end (because I like to DPS and pull aggro on large pulls), we quickly cleared BT, I got 7,500 Ashtongue Deathsworn rep, and I finally completed Outland Raider:

Back to our 25 man group, as I stated earlier, I got another trophy, so I bought my second piece of tier 9.25. This goes with my two pieces of tier 9.0, so I now rock the 4 piece bonus: Mage Tier 9. It's pretty amazing to get an extra 5% crit and I can't wait to see how it works out in our next raid this week. Additionally, I have paired it with the new helm I received from our 10 man raid on Onyxia, the Netherwind Hood, and if I do say so myself, I'm looking pretty damn good these days!

10 Hard Modes

Last night I had the pleasure of filling in for another mage for a 10 man Ulduar hard mode run. As they had started earlier in the week, our focus was to be on Thorim and Hodir. I knew we could do Thorim, as back when the Gold Team was running Ulduar, we would occasionally start the hard mode without meaning to. So we went in, and after 3 attempts, we got Thorim down. And, wouldn't you know, a nice neck upgrade dropped for me - Pendant of the Shallow Grave

We then continued on to Hodir, and though we had gotten close one time on accident when running Gold Team raids, I didn't know how we would do to beat the three minute timer. So I put up my stopwatch and went for it. On our first attempt, we had some fails at the Flash Freeze, so we wiped it and tried again, and without any issue, we took him down. We got some fortuitous placements of light beams and fires, so that helped immensely, and when I could get the Storm Power, I did some amazing damage. So down went Hodir...

Speaking of achievements, back on Thursday, we went for a couple during our Gold Team run in 10 man coliseum. I had missed the week prior when most got Salt and Pepper so we did that again without an issue, but the new one we went for prior to that was on Jaraxxus. We attempted to get Three Sixty Pain Spike. And for us with our DPS, it wasn't really a problem. We almost had to slow down at the end of the kill to wait for another maiden to spawn to get the achievement. But we didn't slow down and we easily pulled off the achievement without a problem.

Achievements and Harvest Festival?

Last night, I quickly logged in looking to do the Harvest Festival achievements, only to realize that the Harvest Festival has no achievements and the achievements that were classified as "Harvest Festival" have now been properly updated to read "Pilgrim's Bounty." So that was a let down. However, the one Harvest Festival quest, to honor Uther was pretty cool, I just don't know why it's a week-long event and why no achievement or feat of strength is associated with it. Similarly, why no feat of strength for acquiring the Green Brewfest Stein? I have one for my yellow and blue steins...

Last night, after a quick run of Halls of Stone for a couple of Triumph badges (which also got me to 36 emblems which in turn bought me a new ring - Band of the Invoker), we thought, let's give this damn Less-Rabi achievement another try. In the past, we had spent hours trying to get the interrupts down correctly, and after two tries last night, we finally got it. Basically, it just took a lot of DPS and a little luck.

For our team, we had our warrior tank interrupt the first transformation - but not right away! The first cast time of transformation takes about 3.5 seconds, so we had our tank wait until the last possible moment to interrupt him. By this time, he was already under 50% so we didn't have the usual 50% transformation. Also, right after the interrupt went off, he knocked us all down, stunning us for a second or two. Immediatly after the stun, we used our interrupts and we got lucky because at that very moment, he attempted to transform. He was at about 20% by this time, so we quickly burned him before another 3 or 4 seconds passed and he had no time to do another transformation. So just two interrupts got us what is probably the most difficult part of Glory of the Hero these days.

After that, Aenador had just one achievement left for her Red Drake, so we hit up Ahn'kahet really quick hoping to get Volazj's Quick Demise for her. When I originally got it, we had a perfectly reflected Mind Flay which helped us get him under 33% while he was casting his first insanity, so we only had one insanity to deal with and we killed him in about 1.5 minutes. This time, I'm not sure what exactly happened, or how exactly it happened, but we killed him in 21 seconds. We had some sick DPS, a nice heroism, and in the end, he didn't get any insanity casts off. It's always fun to put out 7,000 DPS in a 5-man. Congrats Aenador on the new mount!

So now all I have left is Split Personality and Zombiefest. Both should be relatively easy to complete, but we just need to get a group together. Hopefully this weekend I'll finish them off and finally get my red proto drake.

As a follow up to yesterday's post, our 25 man cleared the Trial of the Crusader, then we quickly went and cleared VOA for some more T9 gear and then we went to Onyxia. To my surprise, we one shot her (after wiping earlier in the week in a 25 man PUG). We had just a couple people left up at the end, but she went down and we all rejoiced! So here's the most recent achievements:

I think next week, we'll try for Upper Back Pain or Three Sixty Pain Spike. Should be fun.

Missing in Action

A couple things to quickly update.

1. The 10 Man Gold Team cleared Normal Trial in an hour last week. We then attempted the Northrend Beasts on heroic again. This time though, we killed them. We tried Jaraxxus a few times, but just didn't have the time or patience to kill him.

2. The 25 Man Gold Team took down the Faction Champions for the first time last week. I hear it was a one-shot. I was out of town. They then quickly took down the Twins, but didn't have time to get through Anub.

3. Just one week until Brewfest!! With it, a new mount. I'm currently at 96 mounts. I am still hoping to get my Red Proto Drake soon (97) then my Violet Proto Drake with Brewfest (98) and finally an Argent Tourney mount will be 99 in a couple days. Then, my special, super-secret mount will be revealed as #100.

4. We went into Naxx last night to get Undying. And, we did. It was not that hard and it took us just over 2 hours to clear all the way through. Not too shabby. Tiddlywinks the Undying sounds good. I do die quite infrequently (when not in raids - where my cloth armor does little to protect me).

5. I was roaming through Stratholme looking for another new mount. While in there, I found my new weapon to look pretty good. (click to enlarge)

Normal Trial Clear

Last night, in an impressive outing, the 10 man Gold Team defeated Anub'Arak in record time. After quickly dispatching with the Northrend Beasts and Jaraxxus, the Gold Team miraculously one shot the Faction Champions! About half our team was new this week and had not seen the Twin Val'kyrs, so it took us two shots there and Anub'Arak took just three shots. And there it was...

I really enjoyed the Anub'Arak fight - it features many interesting fight mechanics and though the learning curve really isn't that high, the third phase is tons of fun.

On another note, I acquired the Leggings of the Demonic Messenger. I swapped them out with my last piece of tier 7.5. I then also had to take off my Shackles of the Odalisque for the Felspark Bindings I had been saving up. The switch of the two items nets me 22 stamina, 18 intellect, 37 spirit, 37 damage, and 20 crit at the cost of 7 hit, 17 haste, and 1 socket. Not a bad trade at all. Though I am now 5 hit rating short of the cap. But I should be ok nonetheless.

And of course, September 20th marks the start of Brewfest. And I...cannot...wait! With Brewfest, the achievement, What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been will be mine! And with it...the Violet Proto-Drake - a 310% flight speed mount. But with September, even though it isn't Brewfest yet, I got a small taste of it early this year with my newest brew and...

I also managed to get 100 champion seals this past week and picked up a Gnomeregan Mechanostrider giving me 93 mounts. With the Violet Proto Drake and the Red Bearon that will be arriving soon, I'll be at 95. At some point I'll get off my butt and get the Halaa mounts and maybe PvP some more to get to 100. It's coming soon. And I can't wait!

Bullet Point Updates

• The Gold Team went into the Trial of the Crusade last night and after honing our strategy, finally took down the Faction Champions. They certainly are not a pushover. We had the boomkin, disc priest, healy shaman, warlock, rogue, and ret pally. Our original strategy was to take the shaman down first, but we found that bursting down the priest was easier. After him, we switched to the shaman and when he was down, the team was left without heals and could easily be killed. I think it took us about 7 or 8 attempts. Our first 2 resulted in no kills. We killed the priest on our 3rd try, and from there on, it was just a matter of learning the proper way to fear-bomb, CC, silence, and focus down the individual champions.
• After the Faction Champions, we had the Val'kyr Twins. We were a little wary of the fight since we had heard they were easy, but they had just been hotfixed.

  The following bug fixes to Val'kyr Twins were just deployed, and they will increase the overall difficulty of the encounter.

  • Surge of Light and Surge of Darkness were not being cast properly on Normal difficulties.
  • Light Vortex was doing less damage than Dark Vortex.

  Along with those two major bug fixes, we also increased the rate with which the Concentrated Light and Concentrated Darkness spawns.

  But we went on and downed them on our third attempt - our first was used to just learn the encounter. Our second attempt featured a couple of deaths as we still learned the exact way to take them down, and our third was perfect. So next week, we await Anub'Rekan and look forward to then tackling the Trial in heroic mode.
• I received Grunty from my Blizzcon goodie bag - unfortunately, due to a family vacation, I did not attend any of Blizzcon. However, Thursday night it was fun to meet up with many in-game friends at a local sandwich shop. Perhaps more on Blizzcon thoughts later.
• I finally received Snarly's Bucket from Old Man Barlo. This now completes my crocolisk collection!
• I spent countless hours on Monday camping Takk the Leaper. Then I realized my addon was misconfigured, so he probably spawned and I didn't even know it. I have it set up correctly now, so I should not miss a raptor spawn any time soon.
• Achievements have been on hold for the most part - but we might get some tonight in Ulduar as we will most likely be attempting some 10 man hard modes.

Tonight's Gonna be a Good Night

Friday night - 25 man...Started at the Coliseum. And after 2 hours to master the Northrend Beasts last week, our 25 man went in and one shot them this week. An amazing improvement. Then we moved on to Jaraxxus. Again, most of the team hadn't seen the fight, so it took them one or two tries to see how it all worked, and on our third attempt of the night, he went down! I'm still convinced that no cloth items drop in there, but nonetheless, I got myself a Trophy of the Crusade. I currently have 28 emblems of Triumph, so when I get to 45, I know what I'm getting...new shoulders! Khadgar's Shoulderpads of Triumph. I can't wait!

We then moved over to Ulduar, and blew through Flame Leviathan, obtaining Unbroken (25 player). So it was a good night. I had to leave early, but the team continued on through Auriaya and we'll probably extend our raid lockout through next week so we can again work on the Coliseum and then go to work on Hodir, Thorim, and Freya.

On an unrelated note, after two weeks, my Phaelia's Vestments of the Sprouting Seed finally sold. I got a nice 3,500g out of them. So I'm once again above 10,000g. I am debating saving up for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or the Grand Ice Mammoth. I'll probably keep saving for the Tundra Mammoth so on my farmings of Strat or Wailing Caverns, I can easily get rid of my extra loot by breaking him out. Having access to a vendor at all times would be really nice. Just 5,000g to go.

And speaking of mounts, I've switched my mount collection over to WarcraftMounts.com. My 91 mount collection can now be viewed here.

Not Mentioned

Not mentioned last night was our almost one-shot of Jaraxxus. After we quickly blew through the Northrend Loot-Piñatas, Jaraxxus taunted us by killing the poor little warlock, Fizzlebang. So we had the DPS spread out and we prepared to take him on with that stupid Icehowl carcass right in the middle of everything. Unfortunately, one of our melee DPS got the fire-trailing debuff and didn't run away from all the other melee, so we quickly lost a lot of DPS and I alone couldn't handle the Mistress of Pain and the rock constructs. So we had one quick wipe. But we regrouped, got our strategy down - which involved one melee DPS helping me on the adds and we quickly burned Jaraxxus down. Maybe he should be called Jokeraxxus? He is pretty much a joke. And we wait another week for another boss. And at some point, we might be able to set it to heroic and actually have a challenge presented to us.

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!