95 and counting...

The morning started with a successful Wintergrasp battle with a 25 man Vault of Archavon group immediately afterwards. After 3 wipes on Koralon, we kicked two DPS that were unable to break 1300 DPS, replaced a healer that liked standing in fires, and we downed him. Though I ended up 4th on damage done due to a fire under my feet while he was spinning around doing his flame breath, but I was third on DPS done through the fight. A nice PvP piece dropped, but I lost the roll, however, getting my achievement was well worth the wipes.

After that, we quickly did Emalon and Archavon. On Emalon, my DPS was pretty amazing, putting out 1.42m damage and averaging 4909.1 DPS. On Archavon, not quite the same DPS, but still #1 atop the meters with 845k damage and 4695.1 DPS.

Later though, I found a bored guildie who had a level 80 horde priest and in exchange for a few gold, he let me kill him over and over again in Halaa. After I had enough Halaa Battle Tokens, I went off and farmed my last Halaa Research Token and then went back and was forced to bomb Halaa over and over again to take Halaa back for the Alliance. And with the battle and research tokens, Reins of the Dark Riding Talbuk and Reins of the Dark War Talbuk are mine, bringing my mount total to 95.

I expect to get the Red Proto Drake soon from the achievements, I'll get the Violet Proto Drake when Brewfest starts, and I'll be getting the Red Bearon soon as well. That brings me to 98 mounts. I also have 24 champion's seals right now so in 8 (or 7 days if I run the Trial of the Crusader a few times) days, I'll have another mount from the Argent Tournament. Then, 9-10 days later, my 100th mount. But I'm off to farm Rivendare's mount, so perhaps it will be sooner if I get lucky...

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!

What a Morning!

It started out boring enough...just out doing my dailies, working on my Champion's Seals for more mounts when a couple guildies decided they wanted to go to normal Trial of the Champion to try and obtain a trinket. So we formed up, but decided, rather than Trial first, we'd do the daily heroic and daily normal at the same time in the Oculus. So off we went. And when we formed up, it was decided we'd go for the 20 minute timer for Make it Count. After quickly downing the first boss, I started the stopwatch and I never had a doubt that we'd make it. We tried a new strategy which I had never tried before and it worked wonders. Here's a quick overview:

• Make sure you know which drakes you want beforehand. We had 2 amber, 2 emerald, and a ruby. It doesn't really matter which you pick, but having 2 amber drakes makes it really easy switching back and forth on the channeled spell and high damage spells. Of course you want the ruby to keep aggro and the emeralds to heal.
• Once you know what drakes you want, immediately go up to the center platform. Previously, I had always been in groups that want to clear the outer platforms first. But no! Go to the middle. By clearing the middle, it gives you an easy way to go from outer platform to outer platform.
• Once you have the center platform clear, go back and then fly straight out to a platform with constructs. By flying straight out to it, you can then fly straight back after you have cleared the platform. Kill as few drakes as necessary to get to the edge of the platform, clear it by pulling the mobs to the edge, and then go back to the middle.
• Repeat for the second platform. Once you're back in the middle, fly around to the second boss and fly straight out to him. Clear most of the drakes above his platform so he doesn't call on them to help during the fight. Quickly kill him and then immediately fly up to the next section.
• Once you are on the next section, land directly on top of the image. He won't aggro until you hit him, so make sure everyone gets there, hit him, and clear the adds. Rince and repeat all around.
• Once you're ready for the third boss, again, land right on top of him and when you're ready, hit him and start DPS. When he lays down his first frost bomb, kite him behind the pillar closest to you. Now, if he lays more frost bombs, ignore them. Heal through them. When he teleports, you're already behind the pillar - wait for him to return and kill him.
• With the boss down, start killing the whelps. You need to get most of them down before engaging the boss as they can do stacking damage. Get ready to engage the boss and then go! You should have about 4-6 minutes left at this point. I think we had 5 minutes left and it took us 2.5 minutes to kill him. So down he went with 2.5 minutes to spare.
• When you're working your way up to the boss, don't worry about loot. Just have someone need it all and then distribute at the end. Every second counts (kind of - you have some leeway, but not much).

So after we quickly rolled through the Oculus, we headed over to the Trial to try and get Eleazarjr a new trinket. Of course, it didn't drop, but we steamrolled that instance as well and then went outside to try it on heroic. One quick run later, I ended up getting both Needy and I've Had Worse. Needy was a long time coming as since the patch, I've been "needing" everything. Since we can now trade soulbound items for 2 hours, I just need everything and trade it or disenchant it. A couple hundred items later, Needy was mine.

As for "I've Had Worse", here's a couple hints - during phase 1, kill the add right away. He only has like 50 or 60k health - so he goes down quickly. Phase 2 is where you'll most likely lose this achievement. It was pretty easy with two mages and two pallies, but this strategy should work for most - right away, start AOE. That's the only way to take all the ghouls down before he can have one explode. Both pallies immediately had consecrate down and both of us mages popped mirror image, dropped a flamestrike on the Black Knight and then used a Blizzard. Once the tank had to move to get out of a death and decay, I switched to arcane explosion to give greater mobile AOE. So all the ghouls went down and it was ours!

So after that, I quickly finished up the dailies I had started, turned in my daily dungeon quests, and was done for a bit. A very good morning. Plus, I got this nice achievement last night (it's pretty easy):

To get The Faceroller, take Eadric down to about 30k health. Make sure there's no DOTs on him and then stop DPS when you get under 20k. The tank shouldn't even be hitting him. Now wait for him to target someone to throw the hammer at. Dispel/trinket out of/spell reflect/grounding totem when Eadric starts to channel and the player targeted will be able to catch the hammer. Your action bar will change and you just need to hit "1" to throw the hammer back at him. This should finish him off and "The Faceroller" is yours!

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.

What's This?

What is this?

But how?

3 Drakes? Awesome. So?

Sweet, but did I win the roll? No. But Comador did, and passed them to me!

And is that it?

So how many points is that?

But how? Did I get more achievements tonight? Why yes!

And?

Is that it?

And thus ends a great night.

Heroic Achievements Left

Courtesy the amazing Quick Armory.com, these are the heroic achievements I have remaining:



These achievements are:

3 in Drak'Tharon - but all three easy - I just haven't been in ages, or haven't been in a group that wanted to do achievements.

Consumption Junction - Quite easy if you know what you're doing - just have to hide behind pillars to prevent his stacks from reaching 10.

Oh Novos! - Even easier. Just really no skill involved. Just keep the stairs clear.

Better off Dred - Heard it's easy, I've just never even attempted it. I should be able to get these three in one simple run.

1 in Gun'drak - Less-Rabi. Takes a lot of luck and some perfect timing to get those last transforms from going off. Hopefully we'll have an attempt tonight at it. He's quite easy to get to in the instance.

1 in Culling of Stratholme - Zombiefest! Another one that I heard is easy, but just takes time and most groups want to plow through for a bronze drake. I think we all have the drakes now, so it shouldn't be hard to convince a group to do this one in the future.

1 in the Nexus - Split Personality. Another one that just takes luck. The last time we attempted it, we easily did the first split on time, but on the second one, one of the images was just barely outside of our AOE and she didn't go down fast enough. Shouldn't be too hard to get.

1 in the Oculus - Make it Count. According to the comments, it's not too hard to get - just have to have a focused group that won't wipe and can quickly move from platform to platform without having to kill too many drakes in between.

1 in Violet Hold - Dehydration. Figgy says this one is easy to get - I've tried to time the pulling of the levers to kill the blobs before they can merge at all. I think I'll just have to go with her and leave it up to her to pull the levers at the right time.

And then I'll be done! (well, except for the new Trial of the Crusader ones - but those will just take time)