|
|
The next raiding memory I wanted to post about is something we worked for a long time in my old guild (Imperium of Terokkar).
This path basically starts from the day Trial of the Crusader was released some day of August in 2009 and ends on the second to last day of year 2009. It can be debated if this memory is good or bad…. as it is kinda both, but mostly I would count it as a good one. We had no problem clearing the instance in regular mode in both 10 and 25 mans and as far as I remember we got Anub’arak down on the same night he was available for a kill. Well, there was lots of other guilds who did this too so nothing special here. In 10 mans, the guild was able to score a server first Anub kill in heroic 10 mans and that lasted as the only kill for about a week until others caught up. I wasn’t part of the group who did it the first time, but thought to mention about it anyway.
This is where the Path of Glory ends and blood, sweat and tears emerge. We started having major issues with raiding attendance and had just very very difficult time getting anything done in heroic 25 man ToC. For the most part we just didn’t have the dps to down either Gormok or the worms on time… or Gormok would just get a tank nailed to the floor. Fortunately much better times started when another top guild joined to us. They had also major attendance issues and I believe something like half the guild left to make another one. But lot of the good raiders came to us. The first night raiding together, we were able to down Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus and Faction Champions with little problems. That was awesome!
Well, that lasted only for a bit as well. Pain and agony continued on countless wipes on Anub’arak. I really wouldn’t want to think how many times we wiped, but I think it was somewhere in 500 range. Lots of repair money indeed  .
So finally, after working so hard on this boss we were able to score the kill on December 30th, a full month before anyone else on the server managed the same. I know there was more than 1000 guilds who did this before us… but it just felt so awesome to get this boss down 
I think lots of people felt the same as I did….it was awesome. But the hard work had a cost in it too. Again we lost a bunch of raiders due to various reasons and were therefore only able to repeat the kill once. I was on vacation at the time so my kill count is only one. Too bad as the caster trinket dropped on the 2nd kill and I think I would have been next on line to get it. Oh well, can’t get everything. Obviously ICC was already out at this time so major raiding efforts were pushed towards that and so ToC was left behind. Kinda sad to only score a kill once after so much work.
Wrath of the Lich King was all about Arthas and the Scourge. There was undead this and that all over Northrend and Arthas was giving us brief appearances through leveling from 70 to 80. We all knew he was going to be THE boss to get down in the Icecrown Citadel raid which would be the last major raid of the expansion. Also, as 25 man raids were generally considered to be harder than 10s, the 25 man Arthas would be the pinnacle of raiding. Now, we have all kinds of hard modes and easy modes going so people will say their opinions about what is the correct difficulty to down him. I say that for majority of players, normal mode 25 man Arthas is the boss. A lot of people will get their 10 man Arthas kill first and then follow with a possible 25 man kill. I know we just got Ruby Sanctum and Halion up a couple of weeks ago…. but really, who is Halion? I never heard a word about him during leveling nor saw his name mentioned anywhere in the questing lore so for me he is just another loot vending machine waiting to be killed. Arthas was the man. Period.
So… I was able to reach my pinnacle of WotLK raiding a few weeks ago with a Lich King 25 man kill.
I’m not sure how it happened though. It felt like everyone in the raid brought their A-game in and we just made it happen. If I remember right, this was 4th pull of the night (after clearing the instance up to LK in 2.5 hours) and everything just went really really well. There was some people dead but I would say we had more than 15 people still up when Arthas decided to aoe-instagib everyone at 9.4%. It was just awesome feeling when it happened .
I don’t remember exactly what dropped.. there was a hunter polearm for sure and no tank/dps warrior stuff dropped. Maybe a caster weapon of some sort? Who knows..
I did like the RP part on the afterkill video. It puts the story to a point where rather than finishing up a random book, you actually finish the first episode of a series even though you didn’t know there is a next episode available. Well, there is no next episode available here either, but it leaves the door open what may happen at some point of the Warcraft storyline
Who knows, maybe the New Guy will make an appearance in Cataclysm? We’ll have to wait and see..
Thursday morning and time to continue the ICC 10 run we started the day before. It was time to give it a new shot on hard mode Blood Princes. Our group composition was different though – two tanks (warrior, DK), two melee (warrior, rogue), three ranged (hunter, mage x 2) and three healers (disc priest, shaman, pally) – so I wasn’t so sure how it would work. The problem wasn’t between the distribution of melee and ranged, but rather the quality of the characters because a couple of people were on their alts who are not so well geared. We spent probably 4 or 5 pulls trying make it happen but it just wasn’t getting anywhere. I think the second pull went down to 25%, but it was still a big mess. Then our rogue swapped to his elemental shaman and that ended up making a huge difference. Not only does the shaman buff the raid with his Totem of Wrath, but we were also able to give Windfury Totem for the remaining melee and tanks. Plus… ranged just seems simply better on that fight. More people who can shoot Kinetic Bombs and just less people who need to move. One of the issues we had before that melee would blow up each other and the tank when they were(n’t) moving out of Empowered Shock Vortex. I know, a fairly simple mechanic were we failed at, but at least it wouldn’t happen again.
Ok, so two pulls later we get the kill with no problem whatsoever. No one even died which is surprising knowing the fight. This meant that we had officially cleared the heroic mode of 10 man Crimson Halls
We had about and hour and a half left on raid time and people wanted to down Arthas again so we didn’t want to try any other new hard mode bosses. We wiped on heroic Blood Queen a couple of times due to simple mistakes and then one shot both Valithria and Sindragosa regular modes. We actually did surprisingly well on Arthas as we got him down on the second pull. The sucky part was that no one really needed the gear what dropped from any boss (except a wand from Princes). Not that we don’t anything from those bosses anymore or the loot we saw today was bad, but they just seem to drop the same pieces of gear week after a week. Like for example we’ve killed heroic BQL now 4 times but have not seen Stakethrower drop once. Well, maybe next week..
Next time there is a chance for receiving fat lewtz and juicy achievements is this Sunday when we have our 25 man ICC raid. We are shooting to clear everything up to Lich King in 2.5 hours and then have a solid 5 to 6 six pulls on Arthas himself. There is a good chance we don’t need all the attempts as most of the raid has already killed him on 10 man so the mechanics should be familiar to everyone. At least that is what I’m hoping for
I was talking to my SO today and explaining how hard the heroic mode Blood Princes actually was when something struck my mind. It was the image that got stuck there when we did a pug 10 man ICC a couple of months ago. Well, let’s talk about that one in a few sentences, but first about this post in general. This is something I wanted to do before and this one memory actually made me to do it. So I would like to turn this single post into a series of posts regarding small memories from raids I’ve done within the past…hmm…years . It will likely be one or two posts per week and they will all be under the same title, just the running number changes. Just wait…
The first post is about ICC10 and Blood Princes as I mentioned. I’m pretty sure I was there with my warrior even though that is not the important part. The point is that my SO was there with her lovely Night Elf hunter, Galena. We all remember how the Kinetic Bombs work on that fight right? Ok, so they are those semi big orange glowing orbs floating towards ground. If they happen to hit the ground, they explode and shoot stuff towards everyone knocking every raid member back by 15 or so yards. Well, she was on the orb shooting duty but one of them hit the ground anyway. Not sure if it was hers or someone else’s orb, but not a big deal. Well, what happened afterwards is the legendary part. I have this image in my head seeing her fly back those 15 yards, then as she is well known for her engineering skills, she wants to be a good hunter and hits her rocket boots button to get back to her position fast. It would have all worked well unless there was a Shock Vortex spawning on her path to the boss…. so flying goes the hunter forward with flames shooting from her boots….straight into a Shock Vortex…and flying back she goes….still shooting flames from her boots… At this point I was cracking up . Good thing that I had big enough aggro lead on the boss already as it wasn’t easy to hit the right buttons with all the giggling going. And of course I got THE look from her afterwards….’why are you laughing, I’m just trying!’…. I know I know, it just looked so funny seeing the hunter fly backwards with the rocket boots ignited
I’ve been holding off from posting for over a week now, so figured I should say something about our 10 man ICC raid earlier today. Well, when it feels like ‘should’ maybe I should do something else… but writing something every now and then is actually fun! Besides this short update, I’m working on a more complex post regarding tanking glyphs. That will probably be done tomorrow.
So, back to today. It was time for some ICC 10 hard mode action again. The awesome thing that happened today was that once we set the raid difficulty to heroic at Marrowgar, we didn’t need to turn it back to normal until Professor Putricide. That means we got heroic Deathbringer Saurfang down the first time! Woooo
We wiped on him the week before maybe 5 or so times and again 3 times today. Last week’s raid was kinda shortened because of the 24 hour maintenance that Silver Hand went through and thus eating our time slot for the raid. Our raid comp was fairly good this time with 2 melee (frost DK, fury warrior), 4 ranged (spriest, boomkin, 2 mages), 2 healers (disc priest, pally) and 2 tanks (warrior, bear). As not all the dps are pulling over 10k, it was definitely needed to have 4 ranged. I’m not saying it cannot be done with 3 or maybe even with 2, but having 4 makes it way easier. We had two Marks of the Fallen Champion appear where the second one came right after Saurfang hit 30% thus making him hit the tanks a little bit less. No tanky loot though  . WTB a pair of bracers. And a dps ring.
Well, I wasn’t left without anything…that’s why I didn’t remember the bracers at all until we were already done with the instance. I finally saw the tanking mace drop from Marrowgar and the shield drop from Gunship. Me is a happy tank now .
 
Don’t pay too much attention to the gems and enchants… That was all what I had with me/in the mailbox waiting. The mace got the proper Blood Draining enchant and the shield +18 stamina + epic gem after the raid was done.
Swapping from the sword dropped by Putricide to the new mace was ok as I also managed to snap up the expertise tanking boots from Valithria Dreamwalker last week from our 25 man raid. Therefore I’m still swimming in expertise…. now only if the necklace would drop from Rotface . Or at this point I would even be happy if Marrowgar would drop his hard mode neck piece from 10 man.
So, to sum it up, we got Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship, Saurfang, Rotface and Festergut down in heroic mode today and Professor in normal mode. We had a couple of attempts on Blood Princes again, but that wasn’t pretty. Just for some reason stuff seems to hit the fan around 50% and spread all over the place. We got them down to 25% today so there was some progress made. I’m pretty sure we can down them tomorrow during day 2 though.
ps. My fury set got 5 upgrades within the last week and a half as well. Got 2 more T10 pieces, emblem cloak, Rotface necklace, crafted plate boots and two Protector tokens. Also, my Shadow’s Edge has feasted upon 700 poor souls so far. GoGo my dps set!
Damnit… hit my tab too many times and targeted the wrong mob… while the correct mob went and squished the juices out of my healer…
That’s the line you don’t want to think when you’re tanking. But that’s what is for sure going to happen if you are playing like I did for a year and a half straight. That is, both my hands on keyboard and not using the mouse at all. Or well, when you absolutely need to click something then mouse is in the game.
There are three combinations what I can think of how one can utilize mouse and keyboard while playing WoW. Some of them are better than others so I thought to gather up a list how I think these work.
1. Clicker + Keyboard Turning
In this case the person playing uses his mouse to click on the spells on their action bar, to target stuff….and well, pretty much everything else but moving around. To move their toon, they have their other hand on keyboard arrow keys to make it happen.
- It is quite slow to move from one ability to another if you need to do something on reaction basis. One example would be using Shield Bash to interrupt a caster while doing other rotation.
- Keyboard turning is even slower than clicking stuff. It seriously takes forever to turn the character 180 degrees. Sometimes there is time, but mostly it would be better to utilize the time for something else.
- Cannot move camera while tanking stuff…or cannot tank stuff while moving camera angle
+ Mouse can still be used for targeting which is faster than tabbing through 10 trash mobs. On the other hand, the tank cannot use his/her abilities while targeting something else.
2. Keyboard Keybinds + Keyboard Turning
This is what I used to do for 1.5 years. So basically I had my left hand on actionbar keybinds and right hand on arrow keys.
- Keyboard turning is butt slow!
- Changing camera angle is not happening. At least I never figured out how to move my camera angle other than with the mouse. Camera zooming can work on just keyboard, but is definitely easier with mouse.
-/+ One has to use tabulator to target anything. It can be fast at times, but when there is lots of mobs, it can be slow and error of margin becomes pretty big. In groups of 2 or 3 mobs this is faster way.
+ Using different abilities is quicker than clicking. You can even smash the buttons and use multiple ones almost at the same time.
3. Keyboard Keybinds + Mouse Turning
This is how I make it happen now. Left hand on keyboard and right hand on mouse.
- Can’t really think any downsides?
+ Can use both tab targeting and mouse targeting depending on situation. For tanks, it is really important to be able to target stuff as fast as possible. You don’t want ugly bosses go hug your healer.
+ Camera angle and zoom is easy to change when needed and normal tanking rotation can still be kept up while doing this.
+ Obviously has the advantage of button smashing fast
+ Moving the character is very fast, but normal rotation can be used while moving around.
Ok, I know there must still be people who do keyboard turning. Let me give you another example. This happened to my shaman’s 25 man ICC raid a few of months ago when regular mode Professor Putricide was still hard. An orange ooze spawns on the left side of the room and ranged dps turns to it and starts nuking. Our loverly arcane mage is standing a bit close to the ooze but should still have a chance of running away in case of getting targeted. Well. Should have. This happened two pulls in a row. The last two pulls of that night.
First time she starts backpeddling and immediately gets yelled at by the raid leader. She stops, and starts keyboard turning while standing still and gets eaten by the ooze halfway through the rotating motion. We wipe. Lots of not-so-happy faces. We start the next pull and halfway phase 2 the same situation happens again. This time she knows not to backpeddle and instead she hits the forward and right turn buttons on her keyboard and starts making it happen. Well. Sort of. As she is quite close to the ooze again, she basically runs straight into the ooze while trying to turn around. And we wipe. At this point we had wiped a good 10 times on him already so the raid leader just decides to call it….1.5 hours before scheduled end.
Don’t be that mage.
A Couple of Pieces of Advice for Prot Warrior Keybinds
Just a small things but what people may not think about. First one is more important and is about Heroic Strike. We know that this is an end-of-swing attack and replaces a white melee swing attack. It consumes our rage pretty fast, but this shouldn’t be an issue in ICC currently as bosses hit pretty damn hard and keep our rage bars filled all the time. So, as rage usually is not an issue, we want to use heroic strike on just about every melee swing if possible. With a 1.5s weapon this means a lot of button smashing if HS is bound to a normal keyboard key. In order to save your keyboard from wearing it out in one night at ICC, I would highly recommend binding HS to the mouse wheel. Either wheel up or down is fine. This will make your wrist and keyboard a lot happier, but it should also make your balls-to-the-walls dps friends happy because your threat will be a good chunk higher than before. I’ve been able to reach 95% HS rate at Patchwerk type bosses with mouse wheel bound HS.
Then, as we are already at it, let’s add Cleave into the picture. We don’t typically need Cleave for raid bosses but it is good for trash. Cleave works in the same way as heroic strike where it replaces our white melee swing attack. Therefore, I have bound my Heroic Strike to mouse wheel up and cleave to mouse wheel down. Both are easy to use and it is also easy to swap from one to another.
And finally I thought to throw here a picture about my keybinds while tanking. I’m using Dominos addon to move around my action bars and was therefore able to configure two rows of buttons
The buttons I use mostly are on the first row and the ones which are used maybe a couple of times a fight if that (such as Shield Wall) are on the bottom. The abilities are more or less in random order…or that’s probably how it looks… but that’s how my fingers have memorized them. I pretty much use 5-finger smashing strategy so it doesn’t make much difference where each ability is as long as I remember it correctly.
As of course every warrior sees here, there is no shouts on these bars. First of all, it would be good if they would actually fit it, but they don’t so I added a 3rd bar near the character on the screen where I can click them when needed. I should need to refresh commanding/battle shout only once a fight and most groups have a ret paladin with vindication so demo shout is covered as well. Clicking something once a fight isn’t bad. Right?!
Uhh… I found a surprise when I typed in Hausen’s name in WoW Armory the other day. Someone took his name on Terokkar! It’s been more than a month since we transferred as the names should be reserved for that time. So legitimately the name belongs now to this troll mage. I guess I’m not transferring back anymore…. well, wasn’t really looking into it anyway…. but it still feels weird to see your name taken. I did have it for over 2.5 years. So let this troll treat it good!
Midweek and time for 10 man ICC again. We started doing some hard mode bosses two weeks ago and now were supposed to do more. Slowly but surely… I actually wouldn’t mind trying to down more of them, but on the other hand it is nice to see Arthas go down each week as well. He still isn’t a cakewalk boss for us so we need to spare usually a couple of hours for him. So far our record on hard modes was Marrowgar, Gunship and Rotface.
This week the goal was to try Lady Deathwhisper and Festergut on Tuesday and depending on how far we got then Blood Wing on Wednesday. Well, Lady was easier than I could remember. I thought the adds would spawn on both sides of the room, but I guess that was not the case. We ended up one shotting her really without a blink. The exciting part was to watch if our drunk hunter would fall asleep during the fight or not… . A few more bosses down then it was time for Festergut. We had to figure out the flying malleable goo in the first couple of pulls but then people learned not to stand in the green stuff and we were fine. At this point we had quite a bit more time on our hands than what was planned so we wanted to go try how hard Valithria Dreamwalker was on heroic mode.
She was not as simple. Maybe it was the healers not used to getting up their stacks or what, but we just couldn’t down her in those few pulls we made. Granted, I do remember spending a couple of hours on this with my shaman and I do think we could have downed her with that much time now as well. But, we only had like 25 minutes left so we decided to go for easy mode Valithria and Sindragosa.
Wednesday was reserved for heroic Blood Wing. Blood Princes is definitely not as easy on heroic mode and we ended up wiping there for a good hour. Also, as we started a little late it was time to go for hard mode Blood Queen. Damn…. that was easy. One of the easiest heroic bosses for sure. Ok, not on the same level with the Lootship, but just a step above. We still had about an hour left so it was time to go get Arthas. We had a new feral tank with us this week so it was time for me to take the adds on first phase. Our co-operation with the new tank wasn’t as seamless as it should be so we ended up wiping a few times on the first transition phase or right after it.
Then it happened what we were fearing of the whole raid…. the drunk hunter did fall asleep . The raid was then called half an hour early and Arthas was left to rule his throne until next week. But all in all, it was a pretty good week with three new heroic bosses down.
And… I got some phat leewtz too. A new tanking weapon for heroics came off of Rotface and new tanky boots from Sindragosa (finally!).
 
And yes, if you are wondering…. I am cheap when it comes to my heroics tanking weapon gems and enchants ….. Ok, my actual tanking weapon has the same enchant too…but oh well…
After seeing the roster for my 25 man ICC raid I got pretty excited. ….Well, seeing my SO not getting slotted wasn’t nice… But other than that, the people I did see there looked pretty damn good. The week before we had some rough time especially on Blood Queen, but this week we ended up one shotting every boss up to Sindragosa. That took less than 3 hours in total which I think is pretty good. Two weeks prior we got a few tries on the frost queen, but didn’t quite get the fight down yet. This time we went with same strategy except we had two tanks only. That was me and a DK both wearing full frost resistance gear. I’m sure every group goes through a phase where just stuff hits the fan and spreads out everywhere. I got a good screenshot when this happened to us in Sindragosa fight phase 3.
There was somewhere between 10 to 15 ice blocks on the stairs as someone forgot to run out of the group (that little puddle on the ground near the totem is me..). I think this was the second pull of the day on her and the funny part is that it was a mispull made by our awesome fury warrior who was trying to show where the boss is going to be tanked…. Well, let’s say that we got the point through
Anyway, we were able to put it together pretty fast as the 4th pull on her resulted in a kill. It’s been a while since I downed Sindragosa on 25 man, but this was especially sweet as the group learned the fight so fast. Only 7 or 8 pulls in total combining the two weeks and it was done!
And yes….when it comes to textbook kills, you can see my raid frames under the achievement thingy… not so textbook . I’m sure this happens to most guilds getting their first Sindragosa kill
And our poor DK main tank didn’t get the achievement as he released before she went down
I had killed Arthas before on my shaman, but that was a while ago and only once. That is the reason it felt pretty nice to be able to down him again!
So, this was on my 10 man group and second week when I was running with them. The week before we had some issues and were not able get this kill even though we had a couple of good attempts (among with a few not so great ones). We got the kill on maybe 4th or 5th pull, but it was the first pull after our resto shaman swapped to her disc priest and started making it happen. I’m not saying that resto shamans are bad, but rather that every group should run with a disc priest if anyhow possible. The bubble is just so awesome!
Arthas dropped a caster dagger and a two-handed mace. I did roll on the mace but it ended up going to our arms warrior. The sad part is that now he has two good two-handers and he went and respecced to fury for our 25 mans. Therefore we lost some good melee buffs. Oh well… can’t win every time ha..
About the fight itself… I gotta say that I like the mechanics on it. It’s definitely not one of those tank and spank fights where people go pew pew, boss drops and we collect loot. The top end raiding guild(s) say that this fight is easy, but I gotta say that from a more casual perspective it is not an easy fight. Now we can talk all day what is “casual”. Often it can be translated into “we suck”, but it is not that simple. Yea, there is some people who plainly suck at this game for various reasons, but there is also people who are fairly good at it but just not quite there. One big thing is gear. On the same post at Paragon’s website they talk about trying the bosses with their alt run but didn’t quite have the gear to do them. In other words, they had an alt run who was all geared up from hard mode ToC and with some Icecrown gear included didn’t have enough dps to get thru the hard mode encounters. Well, casuals don’t get much in a form of hard mode loot to begin with so they wouldn’t stand a chance in next tier hard modes for sure. But that is not the point. The point is that casuals have loot from regular mode instances (in this case ToC) and usually they don’t have the Best-in-Slot stuff either. So I’m saying that if a top guild has trouble in next tier hard modes when they are all hard mode geared from previous tier, then casual guilds will have trouble in next tier regular modes as they have the previous tier regular mode gear. Of course at this point the level of each guilds player base comes into play. Top guilds will and for sure have better players for the most part. So combining these I can safely say that Arthas is a hard boss in regular mode for casual players.
A kill is not a kill without a screenshot, right? So here it is…Tirion Fordring, Hausen and dead Arthas Menethil.
|
|
Recent Comments