World of Warcraft

[Weak With The Dawn]

Most of this all is like a foreign language to me. :)

I'm just lugging through the 30's right now in Stranglethorn Vale. It's like a weird purgatory that most players just have to choke down.

Unless someone else has some cool suggestions for leveling in the mid 30's. For a shadow cleric.

Personally I hate STV. I Usually level 30-40 running all the quests in Arathi Highlands and then grinding until I hit 40 then I go to Feralas, but that's just me. Also I have no idea if Feralas or Arathi are good for Alliance, I can only speak from a Horde perspective (and I don't know what you are lol).

[RaceBannon42]

I actually like STV. I think its much better for Horde though as Gromgol has a ton of quests, and the alliance hub has almost none.

Dustwallow was updated it patch 2.3 or something like that to be a good place to level in your mid 30-40 range

[strangerones]

So I got to run my first raid last night. OS 10. I was surprised at how easy it was considering most of the raid had never been there before and one of the two healers was in mostly blues. We did wipe twice on the last boss, and I'm not really sure why.

My main spec is a bear tank, but I had to go kitty dps as the two people leading the raid were tanks themselves. I made third on the dps meters with close to 2200, which I thought wasn't bad considering I was in my tanking gear and have only done dps in a group maybe one or two other times.

Didn't get any gear, but I am 4 emblems closer to the chestpiece. :)

Hopefully the guild will keep the Tuesday night thing going and I'll get a chance to do some raid tanking...

[RaceBannon42]

So I got to run my first raid last night. OS 10. I was surprised at how easy it was considering most of the raid had never been there before and one of the two healers was in mostly blues. We did wipe twice on the last boss, and I'm not really sure why.

Isn't there only the one boss there?

Grats on your first raid!

[strangerones]

There were three other named drakes we had to down before we downed the last guy. Do those qualify?

And thanks. :)

[Weak With The Dawn]

There were three other named drakes we had to down before we downed the last guy. Do those qualify?

And thanks. :)

They drop emblems, so technically they're bosses, but most people just consider them big trash.

[strangerones]

They drop emblems, so technically they're bosses, but most people just consider them big trash.

I see. That makes since, especially considering how incredibly easy they were.

[Starkimus]

Well, my healer finally got into 10 man TOC. Not the heroic yet. Taking the few raiders I have left, and some alts of the folks who left the guild to continue 25 man content with another guild.

Going pretty well. We have cleared it 2 weeks in a row now and going again tonight. 10 man TOC seems alot easier than 10 man Ulduar (and a whole hell of a lot shorter). My mage continues to get no raiding love lately though :(. Of course, with my current schedule, I have not exactly reached out to get her into anything.

The Druid is looking pretty good though. Got a few of the Triumph badge pieces, and have 2200 unbuffed bonus healing now. Was able to 2 heal a 10 man Vault the other day (which I have never done before), so things for the Druid are looking up. Maybe I can get into an Ony run later this week. Have yet to step in there...

Have fun out there!

Hasta!

Stark Out!

[JungianQueen]

I'm horde, what else is there? (yawns at all the alliance members.) Hahaha.

I forgot about Arathi and Hillsbrad, etc. Didn't know about Dustwallow as well. See? Many options for me! Bye bye tigers, panthers, monkeys, raptors and stupid-arse trolls.

[Weak With The Dawn]

I'm horde, what else is there? (yawns at all the alliance members.) Hahaha.

I forgot about Arathi and Hillsbrad, etc. Didn't know about Dustwallow as well. See? Many options for me! Bye bye tigers, panthers, monkeys, raptors and stupid-arse trolls.

If you're tired of Trolls then I wouldn't go to Arathi. There aren't as many as STV but there are still plenty to kill.

Personally I'm tired of killing my brethren too.

[Fenryng]

Fen what is your toon's name again?

The one I consider to be my primary is Bevroren, an alliance frost mage, on Blackhand.

On Quel'Dorai (or however it is spelled) I have two - Blackavar, an undead warlock whose level I forget because I have not played him in forever; and Samildanach, a blood elf paladin of 16th level, ditto on forever.

I decided that I could either make slow progress with one toon, or microscopic progress with multiple. I decided to focus on one for now, for the sake of my sanity, and because I promised my wife she would never become a WoW widow. :-)

[Inigima]

Successful jaunt through VoA 10 tonight with a 100% PUG, making it my first complete raid. No significant issues -- MT died on Koralon, we did fine after that. I was 3rd in damage and DPS overall (2.08 million dmg, 3570 DPS), and 2nd on some bosses (super-DPS mage beat me by a country mile).

Next on my hitlist is OS 10. And EoE if I can rustle up some people... I want that Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. Most important though was that I could hop into a PUG raid and do myself proud, especially since I'd never fought Emalon or Archavon (had them explained to me by someone a while back though).

[Poobah]

Oneshotted Ony 25 and all of TotC 25 except Anub which we took 3 tries at because some of our healers hadn't been to the instance and kept people full in Phase 3.

I got me a shiny new helmet from Ony 25 :)

[Mack Kilimaro]

So, without having Bloodlust, cleared Hodir's hard mode with 16 seconds to spare. We finally got our prot paladin to get a ret off-spec and he did like 4000 DPS - and we were able to drop to two healers. Then, we went in to Freya, and I was like, "Fuck it, let's just leave up three elders" (having never left up any elders before) and we two-shotted Knock Knock Knock.

This leaves us with needing Firefighter and then it's time for Algalon. I don't know if our raid has suddenly clicked or if it's just a sign that the gear we got from ToC and triumph emblems really made it that much easier. Maybe some of both, but damn. I never thought we would have such an easy time steamrolling the Ulduar hard modes and we've smoked through shit.

[Poobah]

I wish we could do some Ulduar hardmodes :(

Unfortunately our guild leadership is convinced that we must not do anything else in Ulduar until we get Yogg down, so they keep extending the 25 man instance timer thing. Tonight we take another go at the Yogg.

I'm pretty certain we could steamroll most of the hardmodes with our TotC gear. If we can get our coordination right Yogg should be going down soon though, providing we get enough of what we need signed up.

[TrueMetis]

I haven't played in a long time but I'm getting back on my mains name is Gnork he's a 46 lvl Gnome rogue. I'm on Twisting Nether. I may or may not continue to play it depends on what I hear about the new expansion that's coming out, It's supposed to fix some of the major problems but I'm skeptical to say the least.

[Mack Kilimaro]

I wish we could do some Ulduar hardmodes :(

Unfortunately our guild leadership is convinced that we must not do anything else in Ulduar until we get Yogg down, so they keep extending the 25 man instance timer thing. Tonight we take another go at the Yogg.

I'm pretty certain we could steamroll most of the hardmodes with our TotC gear. If we can get our coordination right Yogg should be going down soon though, providing we get enough of what we need signed up.

"Yogg or bust" served my 10 man Ulduar team pretty well. I don't know that we would have been up to the task of handling any of the Keeper hard modes before we were capable of coordinating the Yogg-Saron kill. I don't know if it would be any different for your 25 man team. It does feel pretty frustrating when you're stuck banging your head against Yogg-Saron, but when it all comes together, it comes together in a hurry.

In the meantime, it's not like you need the hard modes to still gear up, since people will be getting better gear thanks to emblems of triumph and ToC anyway.

[Mentat]

How are you doing the brain room?

How we did it was send 8-9 melee and one resto druid. We'd bloodlust about 15 seconds into the first phase, blowing the rest of out cooldowns once we were on the brain. We'd split the melee in half sending one group left and one group right to kill the tentacles.

once madness had about 10 seconds left we'd run out. Usually that would get us a nice lead going into the 2nd brain room phase. The 3rd brain phase c/ds would be back up so we'd use tham all and we'd just dps him down to 30%. We had determined that it had to be done in 3 phases, so we'd not run out, giving us an extra 8-10 seconds to dps if absolutely needed. The thought being that if we didnt get it in the third phase it would be a wipe anyways.

Well, we more or less do the same thing. We have some problems, though:

- Problem 1: people getting into the portals with due haste. We don't assign portals to people and the 10 people who go into the brain rooms are fixed. So if someone dies or goes crazy, gets grabbed by a constrictor tentacle or is debuffed with slowness we lose that DPS (or heal, which inevitably leads to a wipe).

- Problem 2: in our raid there are 6 melee DPS slots, which means a maximum of 6 melee DPS get to come to the raid, regardless of the boss. Some of these melee DPS are new people who haven't got the hang of the fight (hell, I've only been at it three days...) and are undergeared.

- Problem 3: we still lack organization and lose time with those tentacles. The fastest we've gotten to the brain was, I think, 25 seconds into the minute.

Yogg is a fight that I love and hate. Its a fun interesting fight, but very easy for people to screw up, especially while learning it, so I got pretty damn sick of it. Epecially when doing it w/o sanity wells. Let me tell you trying to dps yogg down while only have 4 sanity left is pretty frickin' tense!

Fortunately we're doing it in the easiest way possible... It is a very challenging, fun fight. Lots of difficult things to do and all of it going on at the same time. It's definitely the best boss in the expansion as far as I'm concerned (haven't seen Algalon, though). That said... we're still wiping on it like there's no tomorrow.

Today we took a rest from Yogg to do VoA and TotC. Got it all down except for Anub'arak. We wiped three times on Valkyrs, all three of them pretty stupidly, if you ask me. Got them down just as our raid time was over.

I didn't get any drops, or my tier, so I decided to buy the triumph badge helmet anyway, since I had enough badges to spare for when I get it and I like the skin so much. I'll probably get the pants or the plate. On one hand I already have the Frostwolf Hero plate from faction champions, while my pants are the 8.5, on the other hand I need to get rid of part of my excessive hit rate. We'll see.

[RaceBannon42]

Well all of our practice wiping on Herioc Anub hundreds of times this last month paid off. Yes, we wiped on Normal Anub last night, It was AWESOME! /sigh

[PhelanArcetus]

That's sad.

Then again, I wiped us on Eadric trash last night because I got bored, overconfident, and greedy.

World Series cost us a shot at ToC10H this week, though more did as well. So our resto druid was out. Ok, we can 2-healer it, though it was the priest's turn to bring a dps. We'll be ok, we just need a 10th.

Oh god raid leader why are you bringing her? I know she's in the guild but she has 5 epics and doesn't actually know much about dpsing.

Then our resto shaman has a sudden family emergency (no details, even when he signed back on hours later, except "my wife is crazy, and not just she's a woman crazy"). So ok, our ret pally goes holy and we dig up a hunter who is on someone's friends list.

Here goes Ony. Sloppiest kill I've ever seen.

Our mage dies on the pull, having been too far back I guess? Someone (probably the newbie rogue) gets swiped into whelps. The paladin dies to a deep breath, leaving the priest to solo heal phase 3. We did get her down, despite all this, and I picked up a Gleaming Quel'serrar. Goodbye, Stoneguard, rot in hell. (There are no longer any faces on my gear.)

Now the hunter swaps to her paladin to heal so our ret can go back to ret, and we go to ToC. Bunched up and hosed ourselves on the worms with Burn, so we did Icehowl with 2 healers, a prot pally, and a hunter. 13 minute boss fight.

The rest were smoother, but the newbie rogue didn't survive a fight until Anub'arak. Then we won WG so we headed to Vault. (Newbie rogue died on Emalon.) At the end, I hadn't reset my damage meters. The newbie rogue had done less overall damage across Ony, ToC, and VoA, than the hunter had on Ony alone, before switching to healing.

On the plus side, in addition to my Quel, we finally saw the ring off Twin Valks (I passed to the protadin in return for my sword, and he picked up the Anub chest as well). That leaves only three tanking items that we've never seen.

Tonight should be hard-moding Ulduar again, probably just Thorim & Freya. I'm not keen on doing Mimiron hard, and then of course back to HToC yet again because now that I've passed on the axe several times, I want it, and it's going to behave the way the tank ring did (which I still haven't seen on my warrior in 20+ runs).