Wed Kara Run

Wednesday 9th April 2008

EvilBastard got to go to Karazhan again, hopefully he'll do better on the loot front than last time when he managed to pick up this *cough* healing *cough* belt. Of course he got ribbed for it but it was a clear upgrade over the belt he was wearing even with the +healing in the budget.

So as we were about to enter he checks the quest giver outside and he has made honoured with the Violet Eye so can upgrade his ring to ..


I love it when you get epix before even starting an instance!

I can't remember now quite how far we got but we at least managed to do Opera because he got these little beauties, they'll do until I've made both the spellstrike hood and the belt of blasting then I can worry about collecting mats for the spellstrike pants.

We also took Curator out. I have no Arcane Resistance bar my new violet signet (edit: not his one, need the next rep one for that) and any racials that gnomes may have, but it was no problem with guild uber healers on duty.

Time to update my tailoring objectives post or write a new one!

Rage is Down

Updated: 21/04/2008

Yes we finally downed the git.

I still hadn't farmed honour for my 2 minute cooldown trinket so I went in with bubble, 5 min trinket and possibly Blessing of Freedom (to test if it works).

When we actually got to Rage WinterPrat (tedious killing of wave after wave of crap) everyone actually knew to get out the red shit quickly and trinket out of the Ice Block.

TiceNits used up her own Ice Block and her 5 minute trinket and then got killed by something else.

I did not get one single Ice Block so I still don't know whether Blessing of Freedom will work.

Why? Because we ONE -SHOT THE BASTARD!!! WOooooooooooooooHOoooooooo!!!

He dropped a couple of things and a recipe. Of course EvilBastard is now drooling over that gem, will have to work out how to get one now ...



But most importantly for me he dropped the Time-Phased Phylactery which means I can now complete the Black Temple Attunement quest.

I still don't know if this gives me the title Hand of A'Dal, I'll have to check it out later.

We then went onto AnEnema's trash and we had a semi wipe on trash and let it reset, I think we did this by getting vaJaina killed, then tried again. The trash is just a little harder than Rage's trash here's an idea of an "easy" batch of trash...


We gave him a pretty good go but succumbed unsurprisingly to his "reduce all healing dealt by 75%" debuff to the healers; even though we knew to spread out I don't think we did. But we got him down to about 66% so that weren't too bad.

So that was fun and another 2 Badges from Rage brings the badge total up to 121.

But best of all, look at that healing, that's definitely one of my better attempts!

New Tailoring Adventure

As previously mentioned I am now after some more tailored gear for EvilBastard. These require amongst other thing Primal Nethers, Nether Vortices, Spellcloth and Primal Fires so here is another check list for me to keep track of what I need and for you to be amazed at my gathering skills....

Spellstrike Hood
10/10 Spellcloth (needs converting from Shadowcloth)
1/5 Primal Might
1/1 Primal Nether

Materials Required:
10/10 Arcane Dust
90/90 Netherweave Cloth
600/100 Mote of Fire
50/50 Mote of Shadow
10/50 Mote of Earth
10/50 Mote of Air
10/50 Mote of Water
10/50 Mote of Mana
1/1 Primal Nether

Spellstrike Pants
10/10 Spellcloth (needs converting from Shadowcloth)
0/5 Primal Might
1/1 Primal Nether

Materials Required:
10/10 Arcane Dust
90/90 Netherweave Cloth
50/100 Mote of Fire
50/50 Mote of Shadow
0/50 Mote of Earth
0/50 Mote of Air
0/50 Mote of Water
0/50 Mote of Mana
1/1 Primal Nether

Belt of Blasting (mats to bet confirmed)
15 Primal Fire
x Imbued Netherweave
Rune Thread
2 Nether Vortex (buyable)

Materials Required
0/150 Motes of Fire
x/x Arcane Dust
x/x Netherweaver Cloth
Rune Thread
0/2 Nether Vortex

Rogue Slacking

I really haven't put much effort into my rogue recently, too much time spent tailoring on EvilBastard and raiding on HW. He is still level 59, still in the same level 50 blues and still sat logged out by the AB Battlemaster.

I have been considering bringing him over to the same server as EB and HW and dual box levelling him. I really want him to be level 70 before WotLK. But if I do bring him over should I take him to EvilBastard's account or HolyWarrior's? I think probably EB's account so that I can dual box with a healer.

Then there will be even less on the old server, my level 40ish mage, I could take him over as well, then my priest - he has maxed out alchemy but is only in his 30's. Where do I stop?

I can reroll a hunter - he's only level 12 or something. It should also be pretty painless to re-roll the druid, he only made it to level 27 and has no useful professions. But my warrior is in his 30s and I spent a lot of time levelling blacksmithing on him, do I take him. I already have an equivalent warrior on the EB/HW server?

On one hand I already think I want to transfer three characters of levels 35-ish, 43-ish and 59 which will cost quite a bit and on the other hand bringing four characters over will allow me to bring more guild merchandise and mats.

I suppose I could just sell most of the mats and only bring rare stuff over...decisions, decisions.

Warlock Spell Rotation

I read a while ago about the perfect spell rotation for affliction warlock. I forget the exact details but do remember one thing, try to put an instant cast straight after a cast time spell so the GCD is ready for that instant.

I also remember someone saying affliction warlocks should not use immolate as the cast time is better used for a shadowbolt?

Well, Warlock Therapy has just written a post on this and seeing as I have been wondering about this recently I thought I would ask your advice.

So some questions:

1. Should affliction locks use Immolate?
2. Should I include a life tap in my cast sequence or use it ad hoc where necessary?
3. Is the maxDPS rotation that JagoEx quotes a one-off starter rotation or repeat ad-infinitum?
4. What's the best affliction spec for raiding? Deep Affliction, Affliction-Destro or what?
   
5. Are Bears Catholic? (Or my alternative to this which some may find offensive!)
   
6. Should I wear purple and green in the same outfit? (RL question)

Bear in mind I'm at work atm so some of these questions are noobier than they need to be as I could wait till I get home and research specs and compare cast time vs damage vs mana usage. I'm just lazy and impatient - Deal with it!!

Edit: OK, for those searching for warlock spell rotations and arriving here, this is what I do now.

Grinding, run around dotting everything with CoA, Corr and SL. Leaving a trail of dead mobs behind you = win!

Raid trash: Corruption or Immolate (depending on whether I have to move during cast) then Shadowbolt spam.

Raid boss/Hard Trash: CoA, Corr, UA, SL, Immo (once only), Shadowbolt when not refreshing DoTs. What I read (thanks JagoEx) was that always do Corr then UA. There is also discussion about whether to use CoA or CoS. Don't get me started!

Champion of the Naaru

I'll fill out the entire quest line in a post soon (yeah, don't hold your breath!) However, after quite a bit of frigging about you get sent back to A'dal and he wants you to do 4 trials.

Trial of the Naaru: Strength (Steamvaults and Shadow LAbs)
Trial of the Naaru: Tenacity (Shattered Halls)
Trial of the Naaru: Mercy (Arcatraz)

Once you have completed these on heroic difficulty you will get the final trial which I believe has you down Magtheridon, gain the title and be attuned for SSC (OK, attunement obviously doesn't matter anymore).

TiceNits and I got a tank who wanted to DPS last night, so I respecced tank and then we got another DPS and a healer. All guildies. All Mains.

The priest asked if I was Retadin, because we had a guild tank along, I replied that No, I was the tank and the warrior had respecced DPS.

The priest replied that we were all doomed!!! Nothing like getting me nervous!!!

I spent 110 gold putting +strength and +stamina gems in my new T5 tanking shoulders and then off we went to Steamvaults.

I managed to remember the pulls this time and we had a mage(TiceNits) instead of a hunter(TiceNits' alt) for crowd control. We cleared all the way to boss #1 and 1-shot him.

We moved onto Tinkey-What-Eva Boss #2 and one shot him, quicker than we have done in normals too!

We move onto Kalithresais-whateva the last boss and 1-shot him as he is on his second tank. Woot. We loot his trident and I get the second Primal Nether I need for my spellstrike (or whatever) set.

Summary: 50 gold to spec Protection, I tanked Heroic, 1 wipe (right at start - noob), Primal Nether, 3 Badges of Justice, 34 Gold repair bill.

So, onto Shadow Labs for the second part. Boss #1 was 1 shotted, then we cleared through to Blackheart the Inciters room and I nub-pulled on one of the slavemasters and got her and 8 mobs - DOH!

After an 8 mob pull on Heroic where we only have 1 sheeped and I am consecrating like mad I would end up the fight on full mana - Spiritual Attunement FTW. The priest asked me after a 6-pull how I was on full mana at the end of the fight. DOH! "I get mana back from being healed". She said "So its best to have big pulls then?" ... "OH YES!"

By now I was confident enough that 3 mob pulls did not require CC so now CC = Constant Consecration!!

Blackheart gave us some trouble with 2 unlucky initial attempts both of which ended with me and the dps shaman healing me. On attempt 2 he went form 25% to 75% after one of his funny games. Dunno what happened there :(

Attempt 3 wiped the floor with him for no casualties and we moved onto Vorpil.

We discussed whether to nuke or kite him. TiceNits and I both thought that as it was heroic it was probably best to kite him, I know how to kite him. But the dps shammy was saying we should just nuke, there was some discussion which ended with me saying "Sod it, we'll just nuke him and if it fucks up we'll kite him on attempt 2" and then I ran in and pulled, everyone nuked the fuck out of him, when his voidies started coming I inched away and probably only moved 10 yards when he summoned us. I backed out of his rain of fire and he was dead!!! WTF I have never seen him go down so quick, let alone in a heroic. And with the sustained nuking he got I never lost aggro once!!

So onto Murmur, we engaged, got an unlucky sonic boom (I think) and wiped, we re-entered the instance and the message on chat channel said the instance would re-set in 8 minutes!!! WTF? The Raid pane showed 8 hours to reset. Sod it we ran back to murmur and Twatted him good and proper just in case!! I died at 6% right on the perimeter of his sonic boom, I was down to 10% and got hit by a ball of fire before the priest could heal me, but the others nuked him down anyway and we got his Essence for the quest.

Summary: I tanked 2nd heroic, 1 nub-wipe, 2-Blackheart wipes and 1 Murmur wipe, 4 Badges of Justice, 19 gold repair bill, 50 gold re-specc to look forward to tomorrow!

All in all a great night, I got to tank again, I got to tank TWO heroics, I think I may have given 3 guildies an insight into the awesomeness that is Tankadins :)

On top of that is 7 Badges of Justice and the Primal Nether all for 120 gold and 3 hours of my time! Hahaha

119 Badges :)

Need More Rage...

...and I'm not talking about Ratshag, I'm talking about Rage Winterchill.

I got very little done on Friday night due to laptop crashes - seems a fan pointing right at lappy is not as good as I thought! Spent most of Saturday and Saturday in a cute little place called RL and spent Sunday morning doing Netherwing quests on both accounts simultaneously.

Sunday afternoon was SSC. After 1.5 hours and me second on the healing meters we had 1-shot Lurker in 8 minutes for [Ancestral Ring of Conquest], [Velvet Boots of the Guardian] and [Tempest-Strider Boots].

50 minutes later we 1-shot Leo after a dodgy start losing lots of DPS. It was looking like a wipe and I was edging towards the door, but we got him down in around 10 minutes just as he was/had enraging/ed. He dropped [Tsunami Talisman], 2 WPD glove tokens and a HMW glove token.

45 minutes later and Karathress was 1-shotted after 8 minutes yielding [World Breaker ] and 3 - yes THREE - WPD T5 Leg tokens. Gutted I was well up for dropping half my total DKP on those and I could not have been outbid :(

So, 50 minutes and a 15 man trash wipe later we took Morogrim out. I was healing the pally murloc tank again and I kept getting watery graved...ouch. I don't know what I was doing differently, except that I ran out of healing food and elixirs, but I went out of mana very quickly. I was even chugging Super mana potions not just unstable ones. I was judging wisdom on Morogrim between murloc waves as usual and I was getting healing by pally murloc tank as murlocs approached, but still went OOM.

I can't even blame the changes to mana regen and intellect that came in with 2.4 because I'm never really outside the FSR.

Maybe it was just lack of healing food and elixirs, I had to throw more heals out for the same effect. I'll make sure I have some for the next attempt and see what happens.

On the upside, I topped the healing meters on the Karathress fight and was a close second on Lurker and Leo.

Sunday evening we did NOT go to Mount Hyjal. I only really wanted to raid if we went to Hyjal, but I got conned into joining raid before it was announced that it was Lady Vashj. Apparently not enough people had the insignia ... so fucking what?

OK, I've only seen the bitch twice, one of which was a quick 3 wipe looksy. But with patch 2.4 I really don't see the point wasting our effort on her when we could be getting reward-epix from Mount Hyjal and then coming back and farming her.

SCREW YOU Uber Hardcore raiders, we'd have been in there in a few weeks anyway, patch 2.4 just gave us a little boost!!

So we had 7 dis-heartening wipes on her. Yawn.

To show my disgust at this waste of time I body pulled Vashj when most people had hearted out and then bubble-hearthed myself. HAHAHHAHAH. Unfortunately NicePallyClassLeader got caught up in the ensuing wipage!

At least the afternoon raid netted me another 8 Badges of Justice. Total = 112

Boringggggggg

We were supposed to go to Mount Hyjal again last night, but apparently we didn't have enough tanks.

So what did we do instead? Voidy and Solarian.

We did Solarian first as the first bird pull in A'lar's room was on that side. We got there and we 1-shot the bugger for Vambraces of Ending, Worldstorm Gauntlets and Ethereum Life-Staff.

Then we moved onto Lootreaver and wiped early on. The problem with Lootreaver is that Bliz changed him so that he know longer targets you before throwing an Arcane Orb in your direction. Bliz compensated for this by adding in a line to the new combat log to say he has cast the ord on xxx. Well, Bliztards fucked that part up, so no boss mods or even emote to see that you are the target.

2.4.1 fix this? Of course not.

So we 2-shot voidy and I won the T5 shoulders. Didn't I win them last time? Oh yes - I HAVE T5 TANKING SHOULDERS NOW - WOOOOOT!!!

He also dropped another champion token and a hero token and Fel-Steel Warhelm.

Another 4 badges brings me up to 104 Badges I think!

Mags and Gruul

We had a lol-raid on our off-night last night.

Instead of going to Kara we scraped together enough guldies to go to Maggy. We had to involve a couple of non-guildies but after an hour and 10 minutes we got him down after 1 wipe.

He dropped 2 x Chestguard of the Fallen Defender and Chestguard of the Fallen Champion along with Girdle of the Endless Pit, Eredar Wand of Obliteration his head, a bag of gems 3 more badges and 10 gold each!!

With only an hour odd gone we decide to go do Gruul for some more T4 goodness - YAWN!!

35 minutes later and HK is 1 shotted. Very disappointing as we didn't have a lol wipe causing a mass exodus to the door!! He dropped mucho gold, some badges, Pauldrons of the Fallen Hero, 2 x Pauldrons of the Fallen Defender and Maulgars Warhelm.

25 minutes later Gruul was down too giving us more cash, more badges and Gronn-Stitched Girdle, Cowl of Natures Breath and 3 Leggings of the Fallen Champion.

But the best bit - 100 Badges of Justice!

Had to Share