Ulduar Achievements

A couple of weeks ago, Ashielle decided to put together some 25 man Ulduar achievement runs. I missed out due to other engagements, but was able to make it this last Friday and Sunday.

So on Friday, we started with a fresh instance, and because they had done Orbituary the week before, we instead tried for Dwarfageddon and Shutout. I already had Shutout, but it was nice to get Dwarfageddon. We then went to Razorscale for one of the more tedious achievements, Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare. We got 18 dwarves on our first run through and quickly got the other 7 on our second try with the kill.

So we went on to XT-002 and got Must Deconstruct Faster, Nerf Gravity Bombs (already had), and Nerf Engineering (already had). We then went to Kologarn and after a few attempts, got With Open Arms. That was certainly interesting since you can't kill his hand, you can't break out more than 3 or 4 groups when he picks them up and it turns into a DPS race against those that die in the hand.

We then back-tracked a bit to the Iron Council and did the hardest of the three kill modes (and the only one I still needed): I Choose You, Steelbreaker. And with that awesome run done, we called it for the night.

We gathered up late Sunday after everyone had celebrated Father's Day and started on Auriaya. We quickly got Crazy Cat Lady after an accidental pull/wipe and then we went over to Hodir. After a few attempts with people learning the fight (yes, we've been doing this with people who have never seen Ulduar), we got I Could Say that This Cache Was Rare and I put out 18,000 DPS for the fight. Woo.

Last up for the night were some attempts at Thorim. On our first one, we got Siffed since that one is pretty easy to accomplish. Beating him with Sif down is another thing. But on our last attempt of the night, past our scheduled quit time, we got Lose Your Illusion. So another hard mode down. And not only that, we had our little mind controlled Dark Rune Warbringer, we all got Who Needs Bloodlust?

I'm looking forward to the 25 man run again this weekend as we'll get Orbituary (another 40 points as I have not done Flame Leviathan with any towers up) and hopefully the Ignis speed kill (skipped since they did it the week prior). Then we'll move on and hopefully get to Freya and maybe (gasp), the hardest of them all, Firefighter...

So I'm a happy gnome sitting on 8820 achievement points. I really need to get back into the BG's and get some more points there, but I've just been taking a break from Warcraft so no BG's for me as of now. Ashielle is also putting together a 10 man Ulduar group with people that have the drakes, so we'll be going for the other achievements that aren't part of the meta which makes me happy too.

Lastly, it's the Midsummer Fire Festival right now, so I'm working on getting another pet, the Frost Chip. Unfortunately, you only have one shot at him per day, so I will be really upset if he doesn't drop from the bag in the 14 attempts I have at him over the next two weeks. Yesterday, in my first bag though, I got the Frostscythe of Lord Ahune which is really cool, but ultimately, just takes up another spot in my bank.

Master Cook

It's been a while since my last update, but in the mean time, I've completed Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10), Gurubashi Arena Grand Master, and done a couple PvP achievements, but I finally did the 8 or so hours of grinding necessary to get my Brood of Nozdormu rep up to Neutral. Which means...Scepter of the Shifting Sands questlines.

Which also means...Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops! I now know every recipe in the game for cooking (except the rogue-only Thistle Tea). So I'm a happy gnome.

Current stats:
Achievement Points: 8,615
Mounts: 117
Pets: 141/144

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.

Firefighter!

Battling server outages, we were able to gather for long enough to battle Mimiron for yet another attempt at Firefighter. We had been working on it for weeks now, and with 3 hours on Sunday of attempts, we gathered again and finally got him down. It took just a couple of minutes past one hour as my flask wore out during the last fight. So I now sit with just a couple of achievements left for the Iron-Bound Proto Drake. And our group is moving forward quite nicely and it's actually been great fun to work on these achievements and hard modes.

More screenshots here and here.

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.

2 Week Update

So, as you might have figured out, I'm one of the many suffering from WoW burnout. I log on every so often to check some auctions and maybe run some dailies, but for the most part, I've been logging on only on Thursdays and Fridays for raids and then spending the rest of my days playing different games like Civilization III (yeah, old school fun) or Torchlight (yay for Diablo clones).

So, with that being said, there has been very little progress on my character. Mount upgrades are not going to happen because I'm not running the Argent Tournament dailies. Pet upgrades are not going to happen because I'm not camping spawn points. Achievements are not going to happen because I'm not grinding anything or even online to attempt different achievements with guildmates.

However, logging on for Thursday nights has afforded me a great many new achievements. We've scrapped our Trial of the Champions runs on Thursdays and instead, we're focusing on Glory of the Ulduar Raider. In our last two weeks, we've made significant progress.

Last week, we started with a new raid ID, so we of course started on Flame Leviathan. It took us some time and some luck (just as to which vehicle he picked to target first) and we got him down with all four towers up. We then continued on to Razorscale and, though the fight was insanely long, we got Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare. We then continued on to the Assembly of Iron, and since we had done Steelbreaker the week before, we did Molegeim this week. And, luckily, I remembered to use my Iron Boot Flask for But I'm on Your Side.

Continuing on last week, we then skipped past Auriaya and went to Hodir who we absoultely destroyed. I think I did another 8 or 9k dps and we got Aravic his first sigil. We called it at that point and were ready to return this week.

To start this week's attempts last night, we went straight to Ignis for a couple of people who had not done the achievement the first time we did it. The first time we attempted Ignis, we got him down with just a couple of seconds to spare. This time, we got him down in under 3 minutes. We then moved on to Auriaya, quickly one-shot her with both her guardians up and then moved on to Thorim. We then moved to Freya.

We had never attempted Freya with any guardians up, so it was a new fight for all involved. We knew the basics - she'd have more powers, hit harder, the adds do more damage, etc. It took us a good hour to learn the fight, but we did it. She went down and gave us tons of flasks and other good gear. With just an hour left, we had Mimiron to go. After a few attempts at the hard mode, we gave up for the night and opted instead to go get Koralon and Onyxia.

And you'd think we'd one shot Koralon, but due to a healing mix-up, we wiped once and had to come back in to get him down. He dropped nothing of consequence, so we quickly headed over to Onyxia. On our first attempt (yes, it took us 2), we were absolutely destroying her. So much so that our healers and tanks weren't ready when she landed for phase 3. We burned her in Phase 2 so quickly that she didn't have a chance to deep breath at all. Unfortunately, she landed quickly, did a fear and we got some extra whelps, and the healers and tanks weren't ready to transition.

So, try 2 went much smoother, unfortunately, one person got hit in the one deep breath we had, so we didn't get the achievement, and we probably missed the 5 minute timer by just a few seconds (unfortunately, a DPS went down in phase 2). But a new cloak did drop for me - Fluttering Sapphiron Drape which is a significant upgrade at the one slot I was still using an ilvl 219 piece.

So in the past few weeks, we've made great progress on our proto drakes. I expect us to get Mimiron down next week and hopefully Vezax. Yogg will be tough for us, as we've only gotten him down one time in the past. With one less keeper (probably Freya), we should be able to do it with our better gear, but it could still be a week or two until we can see Algalon. So that's it for Ulduar...

Pets! Two new pets were released at the Blizzard Store this week. I of course bought them both as soon as I could and I love my little Pandaren Monk and Lil' K.T.. That brings me to 124 of 131. I'm still looking for some cheap raptors on the auction house, but I haven't seen any recently. Maybe I'll camp out in Un'goro Crater this weekend looking for a new one.

On the subject of microtransactions, I have absolutely no problem with the way Blizzard is handling the matter. I don't mind paying $10 for a pet or $20 for a mount. In fact, I welcome these transactions over the trading card game. The cards from the trading card game are extremely rare and, if bought on eBay, cost much more than $10 or $20 or even a $50 mount that Blizzard might offer (though at some point, you've moved away from microtransactions).

As long as they steer clear of offering gear or other items that directly benefit your character for cash, I don't see how anyone can complain. Pets, mounts, and tabards are all purely cosmetic. Offering these items for cash is a logical extension of their business plan and perfectly acceptable within the way the game is played.

Even though I have been on a break of late, I did log in for Day of the Dead. It was easy to quickly power through the one achievement and get the Macabre Marionette (which still works today even though it isn't Day of the Dead any more). And with the Ulduar achievements and the Day of the Dead achievement, I've quickly made progress and I am now at 7,865 points.

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.

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

7,000 Done

Earlier today, after all dailies had been completed, I figured, let's go have some fun in the Eye of the Storm and try and get a few achievements. A few disappointing games later, I gave up there and decided, maybe Alterac Valley would treat me a bit nicer. I got into a nice fresh game, rode to the Snowfall graveyard, capped it, dropped down to the field of strife, found a poor little hordie there just ready to be destroyed and then moved ahead to Tower Point to cap that tower. That left me with defending a graveyard and defending a tower to complete Alterac Valley All-Star. I moved north a bit, tried to re-cap a tower the horde had taken, but another ally took it before I could hit the flag. I went south for a while, looking for a graveyard to defend, but found nothing there. After a while, the horde made their push north, capping graveyards, towers, and everything as they moved, but leaving them without defenders. It was my chance to strike! Quick, take the graveyard...easy. Now the tower - who knows what could be lurking inside...I had all my cooldowns ready to use, but ran into no resistance except for other allies following behind me ready to try and take the cap from me. But it was not to be! I would be the all-star on this day!

And with those 20 precious points...where am I now??

The only reason I made it to 7,000 with AV All-Star was because during last week's 10-man Ulduar run, we made some amazing time on our way to Thorim and we were able to engage him before Sif left him. I thought I would just get a nice little achievement and that would be it. We had no idea that Sif would then join the battle and make it a living hell for us. However, knowing that we could easily start the hard-mode, we gave it many more shots, but something little always went wrong - we'd lose a player in the arena for no good reason, I'd make a mistake on the gauntlet and die, or Sif would just cause us too much havoc. So unfortunately, we gave up on hard mode for the week so we could move on to Yogg, but I'm certain we can add Hodir hard-mode to our XT hard mode kill list.

The Push for 7,000

Last week, we accidentally got a couple achievements while doing heroic Ulduar, so my push towards 7,000 achievement points is going strong. It started on Ignis - I was on construct duty, so it was my job to blow up the constructs when they became brittle. However, one of them got out of my line of sight behind a fire pillar (I just lost track of it), so when the call was made, it was too late for me to go shatter it. Our awesome offtanks quickly picked it up again, made it brittle, and before you knew it, when I shattered one construct, the other one that had been awoken by Ignis was shattered as well. So there we had Heroic: Shattered.

We continued on and we reached Kologarn who refused to let us pass. Normally, we focus all DPS on the right arm and down him that way, but recently we've found that just as he's about to die, his left arm has been DPS'ed enough via incidental damage (swipes, consecrates, death and decays, etc.) that if we just add a bit of DPS to kill the arm, all that damage is transferred to Kologarn and he goes down quicker. So when I saw we were close to killing Kolo and I saw that his left arm was getting low, even when the right arm popped up, I focused DPS on the left arm, knowing the call to kill the left arm would come when the right arm went down. With the extra damage I was able to provide to the left arm before the right arm went down, we were able to get Heroic: Disarmed.

Then, last night, while fighting for control of Wintergrasp, I realized after all was said and done that I was just 8 honorable kills away from 5,000. So this morning, I headed out a little early to the Strand of the Ancients and quickly dispatched of 8 hordies to pick up 5,000 Honorable Kills

Of course, while striving for achievements, I'm still doing my Crusader dailies each and every day (actually, Saturday was the first time since the patch that I didn't get my dailies done - ale comes first). A day before though, while out there, I found my evil twin! Finneal (achievement comparison) was there and he looked almost exactly like me! Just with more achievement points! I can't let that stand. But we did have some fun and we both popped our mirror images just to confuse some people and seeing eight little dopplegangers running around was a sight to be seen.

Lastly, last night, I went into a quick VOA since I really didn't have anything else to do and even though I don't need any items from there, it was fun to do single target DPS. Usually in Ulduar, I have to do crowd control, DPS some bomb bots, or just do things that don't allow me to go all out. Well, on both Emalon and Archavon I was pretty much free to do as much DPS as I could and it showed. I easily topped the damage meters and was quite happy with my performance. And all of this was done without an enchant on my purty new Runescribed Blade.

Emalon:

Archavon:

Yogg...again

Not much happening these days. We did our normal Wednesday pre-clear getting all the way through Auriaya and Hodir. Then last night, we went in, experienced quite a few odd happenings, but pushed through and got to Yogg again with an hour left in our raid. After taking quite a bit of time re-learning Phase 1 (too many people coming and going each week), we got it down pretty well. We used to use 2 tanks in 10 man which left us quite a bit DPS short in Phase 2, so we've transitioned to just one tank in the center holding the guardians there while we all DPS around him.

The nice thing about last night is we got quite a bit of practice in on Phase 2. When we were running two tanks, it was just me as the only ranged DPS so I had to take down the 400k HP crusher tentacles all by myself and it just wasn't working at all. So we swapped Eleazarjr out for Comador and got more ranged DPS at the cost of a tank. However, the issue remained that the melee DPS didn't have much to do until the portals opened, and as such, they roamed away from the ranged DPS to take down tentacles, exposing us to mind link issues.

I think we learned quite a bit last week and we're getting closer to taking him down and clearing Ulduar before the Coliseum comes out. Plus, we're having fun doing it.

Tonight we venture back into 25 Ulduar. Hopefully Hodir goes down quickly and we can either go to Freya or attempt to work on Thorim again.

One Down, One to Go

Last night, following up on a very successful Wednesday night pre-clear (which saw us get all the way to the Keepers of Ulduar, and Thorim down), we continued with a strong push on time to clear Ulduar. We quickly one shot Hodir, Freya, and Mimiron (yes, our first Mimiron one-shot) and we had plenty of time to work on General Vezax. We had previously reached him twice. With just one try the first time and just two tries the second time. Well last night, we reached him with 2 hours to work on him. Luckily, we didn't need all that time.

After a first failed attempt as we got him to 40%, but the healers didn't conserve mana, we had to wipe it and try again. Attempts two through four featured little issues that caused wipes - try three I believe was started off with our pally DPS dying within 10 seconds of the pull due to threat, after which Vezax quickly turned to me after a few crits without my images up and we were immediately down two DPS. So we wiped it again.

But on our fifth try, he went down. I think we got him just as he was about to enrage, so we cut it close, but we did it. He dropped a couple of nice items, including an amazing chest piece for Xenoxa, our new priest healer. The whole night, just one tier piece dropped for me, but it was the helm which I already had. Luckily, almost all the pieces dropping last night went to main specs, so I'm happy to see the raid getting geared up further. And though some may say it was our practice, our awesome healers, and good movement that took down Vezax, I'm convinced it was the power of the Emerald Whelplings...

So we continued on with a couple tries at Yogg'Saron. After a lengthy explanation of phases one and two, we decided to focus just on phase one's explanation, gave that again, and went on in. We had 4 tries or so I think on Sara, and almost got her down, but we never did get to Phase 2. Luckily, we got some practice and I'm certain we'll see Phase 2 next week (as long as we have another good Wednesday run).

Heartbreaker

So there we were, ready to begin our conquest of Ulduar, just looking to down a few bosses before we get some good attempts in at General Vezax and maybe even Yogg'Saron tomorrow. When out of the blue, our raid leader, Aravic asks, "XT-002 Hard Mode?" A few of us (me included) answered no, let's power through and dominate this place so we have more time tomorrow. But I was outnumbered and we gave it a shot. And it looked like we would do it in just one attempt when a void zone popped up in the middle of everyone during a tantrum. Oh well, we knew we had it. We had the DPS, we had the skill. We had it.

Try two, no problems. And there it was, Heartbreaker. Our first Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievement. But not the last. I think, given the time, we could master each and every fight on the list. However, it seems like 3.2 is coming soon (a bit too soon in my opinion) and Ulduar will be left in the dust with the Argent Coliseum calling us in.

All of our DPS on that fight was above 3,000. Our three healers all did an amazing job, and our offtank did a great job picking up the pummelers and the sparks while doing a fair amount of damage himself. All around, a great job by all involved, and our shaman healer got a nice new Breastplate of the Stoneshaper.

Quick Raid Recap

We entered into Ulduar last week with our ten man group ready to tear things up in preparation for our Thursday run. We quickly cleared Flame Leviathan with one tower up, XT-002, Kolo, and Auriaya within our two hour time limit and had a couple of attempts on Thorim. We were ready on Thursday to head back in when a freak electrical outage meant the loss of our main tank and a healer, so the run was called. Hopefully this week we'll get through those four and have time to work on Vezax and Yogg.

Friday, our twenty five man team formed up and made our way through Kologarn again and up to Auriaya who had given us issues the week before. This week, it took us just two tries to get her down. We had little time left, but moved on to Thorim, and he again gave us issues (though for most people it was their first time there). This week, I think we can do it.

The strange thing is, on this run, I picked up Constructor's Handwraps, quickly enchanted them on the go and used them for the rest of the run. They replaced my TIER 8 gloves...

The problem I'm facing right now as a Frostfire mage is too much hit rating. Maybe I need to give Fireball a chance since the extra hit will allow me to drop Precision and hopefully do more DPS. But as it stands, I'll be using the handwraps over the gauntlets as they add 6 spellpower, 58 crit, some stamina and spirit at the cost of 44 haste and a socket. Perhaps some more theorycrafting needs to be done on specs and gear...

Raids Last Week

So I didn't post much last week because it was a fairly quiet week. I did my dailies each and every day, but that's about it. On Thursday, I was set to go to Ulduar, but our fearless raid leader invited 11 instead of 10 to the run. It was no problem for me really so I stepped out (to watch the Lakers of course). You would figure though that they'd finally get down Mimiron (either we had enough practice on him or the nerfs that were in the minor patch made him easier or both).

So, as you can see, our progress has been updated. On to Vezax and Yogg this week hopefully.

And wouldn't you know, that luck would carry over into our 25 man raid on Friday. Not only did I get the boots I've been eying for a loooong time, the Sandals of Rash Temperament (oh geez, more hit rating - I have no hit in any socket, so I can't get rid of it right now...), but we also took down Kologarn for our first time ever, but then we went over and took out the Iron Council! At the end, there were just ten of us left standing, but I was one of them and I had my Iron Boot Flask ready and I got But I'm On Your Side. We had a few shots at Auriaya, but that pull is tough and most people were learning the fight having not seen it on 10 man. In addition to the previously mentioned achievement, I also picked up 25 Emblems of Conquest, Epic (from the boots - finally!), and I Choose You, Stormcaller Brundir.

Randomness

1. Thursday, since we were unable to clear early bosses in Ulduar (10) on Wednesday, we cleared Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Kologarn, Freya, Thorim and Hodir. No drops for me (I need that 2pcT8!).

2. Friday, Ulduar (25) made it to Kolo again, but still having healing issues and problems with beams (naturally, healing issues drive from extra healing of people hit by beams).

3. Tailoring is going well. On to mageweave now. Still a long way to go though. Silk was pretty easy to come by in the Armory of the monastery.



4. Marcia continues to deny me my strand crawler. I've done the fishing day EVERY day and nothing. However, fishing up the bloodtooths is fun when you get to be all read and piss off D.E.H.T.A.



5. Finally got my Chef's Hat. Been fun toting that around with my Chef title.

6. Farming mageweave from the pirates in Tanaris. I tried the ogres, but found the pirates have a slightly less drop rate but give nice rep (12.5 per kill). So it'll be the pirates for all my mageweave. While farming them, I had to go find Cuergo's treasure and on the way to his hiding spot, I found my new best friend, Winkey.



7. Finished off the 400g+5 seal mounts today from the Argent Tournament. Up to 82 mounts now (link will be outdated once I update it again - for the current listing, check the side panel -->).

A Busy Day

After spending most of the day running around various locations such as Tanaris, the Hinterlands, Winterspring, and Hellfire Peninsula, I had the ore and bars necessary I thought to power level engineering to 375. Unfortunately, I underestimated the materials necessary to build a couple of items I wanted, so I did end up spending about 150g on the auction house, but in the end, I got to 375 engineering and I have my Flying Machine and my Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, mounts #78 and #79.


I then quickly ran into Gnomeregan, got the Pet Bombling schematic on my first kill and quickly made my very own Pet Bombling, for pet #103.

Not content to sit at 79 mounts, I made my way back up to the Argent Tournament, spent my last gold and 5 champions seals, and bought a Swift Brown Steed for mount #80! 20 to go. 8 more Argent Tourney mounts, 2 tailoring mounts (I'm taking up tailoring when I drop engineering), and 5 PvP mounts (who knows when I'll ever have time to get all those marks), and I'm still 5 mounts short of 100. 100 is still probably pretty unobtainable for me at the current time. Kudos to those that have their 100 mounts. That's quite an achievement.


Speaking of achievements, I got one last night during our 25 man Ulduar run. Even though we only took down three bosses (we were down a main tank, an off-tank, and healing was a bit on the weak side), I managed to sneak in Take Out Those Turrets. I was hoping to make it back to a demolisher to get Three Car Garage, but even though a chopper was there to pick me up, I was covered in siege engines and couldn't make the transition. Oh well, next week!

Another One Bites the Dust

Well, after a frustrating start to the night running into massive issues with Hodir, finally switching to four! healers on our tenth! attempt, we got him down. After Hodir, we quickly transitioned to Thorim and proceeded to take three attempts to learn his trash and take him down on the fourth try. I was actually a little disappointed with Thorim. Yes, it took us three attempts to learn his gauntlet and arena, but once you get that down, he's a pushover. Well, on to Mimiron next week! We'll get him.

P.S. Pushing the Mimiron button doesn't just activate a timer as we found out as we were about to leave Ulduar for the night. At least it provided a bit of levity as we all were annoyed with the repeated Hodir attempts (especially after we three-shotted him last week with three healers).

On a bright note, I am getting really good at picking up Hodir buffs as I earned Staying Buffed All Winter and as we took down Thorim, we all got I'll Take You All On. Last night, on the third of the Freya elders, I also earned (finally) Got My Mind on My Money (10,000). Just 15,000 more gold to go.

100 Pets and Hodir Down

Just a quick update...last night, I received word in game that there was a member of the horde who wished to trade Argent Tournament pets. In exchange for a low listing of the Mechanopeep on the neutral auction house, I would have a chance to buy the Sen'jin Fetish. And thus, I received my 100th "official" pet (I still like to count Don Carlos' Famous Hat and the Bloodsail Admiral's Hat as "pets"). Many thanks to Taranwayward for the trade!

After that was finished, I headed up to Ulduar for our run. The night before, we cleared Flame Leviathan with one tower up, XT-002, Kologarn, and Freya in an abbreviated two hour run time. I was lucky enough to outroll Brellis by just one point and won my T8 gloves, Valorous Kirin Tor Gauntlets, and now I have more hit rating than I know what to do with (I resocketed some gems and now have no +hit gems...).

So last night, we went straight to Hodir and had little trouble with him. He dropped a couple of tanking items and we received Cheese the Freeze and I Have the Coolest Friends. We then went back to our nemesis, Mimiron. We spent the next 2+ hours wiping on him. We consistently got him to phase 4, but ran into issues each time. Learning how the P3Wx2 Laser worked exactly, how his ranged attacks work, etc. The problem also was, while we could consistently get him to phase 4, we had issues in phases 1-3 occasionally which would end up forcing us to wipe the raid so we could start over and wasting more of our time. During our best attempt, we got each section to about 20%, which is good, but not that good. I know we can do better, but our massive amounts of melee DPS on this fight make it very tough to master. We forced Vetarra to go respec boomkin, but still, that left 5 melee players as we had 2 ranged and 3 healers. With the rockets, proximity mines, and AOE effects, that's a lot to heal and avoid. I'm pretty sure next week, we'll do the same - clear through Freya or Hodir on night one, then hit up Thorim and Hodir/Freya and finally Mimiron on the next night.

That stupid bot will go down!