it's pretty pUgly in here.

I don’t like the new 5-mans, because they are pug killers. And when all I’m after are my 2 frost badges, they can be endless montages of humiliation and shame.

Case in point, the Pit of Saron pug Caliban got yesterday.

We smashed the instance, up to the gauntlet. Then we had problems.

The tree healer was not right on top of the tank,and the pally tank wasn’t dropping consecrate as often as I’d expect. Therefore, the tree was getting aggro and was lagging behind, and the tank wasn’t looking backwards.

We got through the first half of the gauntlet, but wiped at the end. The tree got dazed, stuck back in the tunnel with a pack of mobs, and splatted. He was unfortunately not close enough to the end of the gauntlet to use the soulstone and survive.

On the run back, I picked up one of the skeletons the tank had skipped and got splatted. We managed to get through the gauntlet in one piece that time, but Tyrannus took us down. Much bitching about fight mechanics (and I hate that fight anyway. It and the Souls guy deserve their own post).

On the way back in, the TANK aggroed the mob she’d skipped and I ended up getting close enough I got in combat, pulling aggro when I tried to help them kill it (sans healer) and died.

4th death in the instance. I thanked the healer for being good, and left.

I’m placing the blame for this one squarely on the tank. I did not see many consecrates while running through the gauntlet. Didn’t see many Avenger shield toss thingies.  I do not think she was doing all she could to make sure the gauntlet mobs were focused squarely on her.

The Tyrannus fight was mechanics and bad luck, I think. And I’m going to review that fight so it’s right in my head.

Timov also got Pit for his daily (I swear they run in streaks), but we rick rolled it, with only one death on Ick & Krick.

The new LFG is great. It can also be really frustrating when I have limited time, just want my badges, and having already spent 15 minutes waiting for a group, get in one that can’t do the instance.

I had a similar bout of stupid in a Culling of Strat instance last week, also on Cali. That group we could have done it if everyone had stuck it out for one more attempt. But half the people dropped, and I wasn’t going to waste time getting a group for a half cleared instance.

I think my new rule is going to be:

• Unless you absolutely can’t, make sure you go with at least 2 people you know.
• After 3 deaths that aren’t my fault, drop group.
• If you are frustrated and it’s past the 15 minute mark, don’t feel bad about leaving.

I play the game for fun. And my time is just as valuable as that of the other folks in the instance. I’m not going to be rude about it, and I’m usually more than willing to give it a chance, but I’m not going to beat my head on the wall repeatedly for the benefit of 4 strangers.

If I determine that the group is not capable of accomplishing what I need accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, I will leave.

*Image from WoWHead, not hotlinked.

ETA: Okay, I feel silly. I don’t pull out the pug pet because I found the butt scooting behavior disgusting. But I just got it. It’s a pug, and it’s wiping. Someone at Blizzard has a twisted sense of humor. Still not going to pull the pet out much, but I think that’s hilarious.

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Lich King! Get in the Van!

Look, Groups, if you have enough DPS to get TO the chase in Halls of Reflection… you have enough DPS to do the chase CORRECTLY.

So stop being idiots and just do it right, mmkay?

*Shaggy is copyright Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros’ Animation.

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So, not much from the gnome lately. Sad, I know.

My instance guides died after the first one (Nexus is half written, but don’t have the interest to go back to it at the moment.)

Raiding is okay, we’re stuck in plague and blood wings. I was not present for my guilds kills on either Festergut or Rotface or the Blood Princes, (or the associated ball jokes).

I was present for the 3 hour wipe-a-ron for Blood Queen and Putricide last night. (10 man)

Blood Queen’s AoE hurts like a son of a bitch. That was killing us more than anything. I don’t think we ever got to the point where the first person bitten passed the bite on.

We did make some progress on Putricide, but things still fall apart pretty quickly after the Phase2 transition.

So, a little disheartened. And now that school is starting, my raid time will be diminished. I’m sure the winter weather isn’t helping, either. We need the rain badly, but it gets depressing after a while.

I am off to learn stuffs. Hope you’re having a spiffy day. ^_^

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As with many guilds, we got our first encounter with Festergut and Rotface this past week. Some of this will probably be repetition from Friday’s post, but I’m sure you can deal.

For reference, this is all on 10-man.

Stinky & Precious

Stinky is definately the easier of the two. He summons no zombies, and just does his AOE Fart of Doom and Decimate. Other than that, straightforward tank-n-spank.

Precious is a bitch w/ her Zombie Summon. Our strat so far has been to stand there, burn the zombies when they spawn, then get back on Precious. As the fight goes on, she seems to summon them more and more frequently, so you can’t spend all your time on the Zombies, or you get no DPS on the boss. So far we’re using a “stand there and take it like a man” approach. We get her down, so it works, I suppose.

Festergut

Festergut is about a bajillion times easier than his “brother”, and I definately recommend that your raid start with him.

You can watch the vids on tankspot for yourself, but what we did is have all melee standing on him, all ranged spread out on one side of the room. Range collapsed on the person who got spored to get the inoculation.

Otherwise, DPS the shit out of him. I think we got lucky and didn’t have any 2-spores in the ranged. It only took us 1, maybe 2 attempts to get him down.

JerkRotface

This fight is a bitch. There is SO much going on. Each person needs to be situationally aware, and on top of their own shit.

Unfortunately there are some folks in my guild for whom this is a challenge.

Caliban’s Things To Know about Rotface:

• There is a lot of DBM text spam during this fight. Turning on the “special warning” for slime spray adds the little “alert sound”.  Since I’ve already got a lot of visual things to watch with dot timers, etc, the sound makes me look up, see where Rotface is facing and make sure I’m out of the line of spray.
• Slime Spray will hit you across the room. If you are kiting slimes, check your position when the slime spray cast warning goes off.
• Dont’ stand in the green stuff (duh). Slime pools hit for 2-4k every second.
• Don’t stand near the slimes. All slimes have a 10-yard aoe tick that HURTS. You have to get your baby slime w/in 10 yards of the other slime to merge them, but don’t hang out to party.
• The DBM warning for the ooze explosion comes early. Someone needs to watch the ooze until it actually shoots the oozes out and THEN everyone needs to move. It’s targeted at where the 3 players were standing when the oozes are “fired” and not when the actual warning goes off. We’ve lost folks because people moved early and folks ran into a slime bomb.

This is a busy fight, and absolutely everyone needs to be aware of their surroundings.

One thing we haven’t tried (because it seems as if folks don’t have attention to spare at the moment) is having the Infected person call out when they’re away from the group and can have their debuff removed. Although the damage from the ooze AOE is the same as the damage from the infection, so the healers would have to heal it either way, so I guess that’s not anything to worry about.

One other mechanic that I can’t find proof on is what happens to the little slimes when the person they’re attached to dies. Anecdotaly, I saw what looked like them “fixating” on someone else, but they never did it to me explicitly, so I can’t be sure.

Saurfang 25

We made some good progress on this on Sunday, getting him down under 14% a couple times. Unfortunately by that point he was gaining so much power that he was marking another person every few seconds and we just couldn’t muscle through.

I think we’re having problems with folks getting hit by the blood beasts, so we’re going to have to work on that.

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So, we ran ICC10 last night.

We were just inside the first doorway AoEing down trash when I saw … a horse run in. It kicked a couple times, then ran back out again.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to snap a screenshot, because it was hilarious. I’m sure my reaction was probably MORE hilarious than the horse show: “WTF is that HORSE doing there?”

It appears it was Fury, and he just decided to run in and help the other NPCs.

Good News! The Slime is Flowing!

So, we took our first look at Rotface last night, and let me tell you, it’s a look that will linger.

A quick note here on Stinky and Precious. Stinky was easy, and died pretty quickly. Precious took us two attempts because WTF Zombies. They seemed to spawn more quickly as the fight went on, and we just got nickle and dimed to death.

Rotface is an interesting fight. We got him (I’m assuming it’s a him, and I’m not getting any closer to check, TYVM) down to 30% a couple times, but we’d usually lost either a healer or a tank by that point, and the rest of us fell like dominoes in a hurricane.

Some important things:

• Don’t dispell the debuff, trigger happy decursers. It makes the mini-slime spawn immediately.
• Rotface likes healers. Or the RNG hates us. Or both. It seemed like nearly every attempt, the first person slimed was a healer.
• DBM’s warning for the Slime Explosion seems to happen a little early. You don’t actually need to move until he starts casting it, but it seemed like DBM Warned a good few seconds ahead of time.
• DBM’s warning for the Slime Spray from Rotface didn’t catch my attention much. I probably need to make it flash my screen. It happens a lot, and you need to keep an eye out for it.

We switched to 3 healers for our last attempt, but I think we lost a tank to bad timing or something and that was it. Having a druid for this fight will probably help, because there is a LOT going on, and with the insta-casts they can kite their slime and still heal.

I’m pretty sure we’ll get him down tonight. And then it’s onto his buddy, Festergut.

Whee!

The models are REALLY cool … in a gross kind of way.

*Image from WoWHead

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Heroic Anub is a pain in the ass. It didn’t help that at the phase 3 transition, our Dorf priest would die if the adds so much as looked at him funny. It was close, half of us were dead but we did it. (I need to check, I think a lot of my raid achievement posts contain the phrase “half of us were dead”…)

LOLOculus

So of course, right after I write up my guide to it, they nerf Oculus. I was well timed, or something.

They’re also nerfing Lady Deathstrike>whisper in terms of lowering her mana, and changing up the adds a smidge. Since we were … a little close when we got her down on Sunday, that should pretty much make her a guaranteed kill this next week.

Dammit, I can’t find the link for that one. Ah well, I’m sure it’s been linked by far more visible blogs than mine by now.

Happy Thursday, true believers.

[ETA]: Oh right. New bosses this week. Suppose I should go read up on them before I have to pretend to know what I’m doing. Or something.
Look! Something shiny! *runs off*

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The Oculus is probably the dungeon that gives me the most apprehension. Mainly because back when I was the level to actually run it, it was HARD and people hated it and stayed away.

This unfortunately has left us with a lot of players who don’t know what the heck they’re doing with the instance. (Or, how many bosses there are. >_<)

So, here is

Caliban’s Guide to : The Oculus

(intro post to guides here)

General Zone Info

The Oculus lies in the western part of Borean Tundra, and the intance itself encompasses the floating rings and platforms suspended above the Nexus. It has a bad rap because it used to be REALLY hard, and about 2/3rd’s of the instance requires vehicle combat in the form of flying drakes.

In 3.2 and 3.3, the health of many mobs was reduced, and the drakes were made to scale with the rider’s Item level.

There are 4 bosses, and you need to kill all of them to progress.

Continue Reading »

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I’ve got a great idea! (Wouldn’t you like to know…)

So, like most of you, I’ve been running WAY more heroic instances than I ever have before. Some of these (Oculus, Gundrak) I only ever ran once or twice before the coming of the great LFG. So I am, to put it mildly, a bit shaky on some of the boss mechanics.

This usually isn’t a huge issue on the druid (whack-a-mole) or the Gnome (just need to watch casting interrupts) but on my DK it’s led to more than a few “…oops, he whirlwinds” moments where I get insta-gibbed.

So, since one of my original purposes of this blog was to have a place where I could “think out loud” to help myself play the game better, and hopefully help others along the way, I’m going to do just that.

I’m going to run a series of guides on the Heroic Instances of Northrend. Because I’m sure I”m not the only person who hasn’t run these in FOREVER and who needs a refresher on boss/instance mechanics. (I’m looking at you, everyone who bails from Oculus.)

So, here are my goals:

• Cover the basics of each instance (where to go, required & skippable bosses, etc)
• Important boss mechanics
• Instance Achievements, including the hard ones.

Resources

Deadly Boss Mods - Not really a reference, but this includes a package for 5-man bosses. Why are you running with out it?

And the ever-popular WowHead and WoWWiki.

The Guides

The Nexus:

• The Oculus
• The Nexus

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Happy New Year!

I hope y’all had a safe and happy turn of the year. I spent most of it playing WoW, which was fine.

It was a pretty awesome WoW Weekend, all in all.

HoR-ror

I have been less than eager to do Halls of Reflection on the druid.

I still feel uncertain of my ability to heal at times, and having heard some horror stories, and having been through one myself (with one of the most awesomest healers I know), I have frankly been avoiding it like the plague.

Saturday I think it was, HoR was the random I got for my frost badges. I was nervous, but decided to just suck it up and give it a shot. The worst would be we’d wipe a few times, I’d politely excuse myself and that would be that.

We tore it up.

The hunter disconnected right around Falric.

We tore it up.

We didn’t get a replacement until after Marwyn

WE TORE IT UP.

I couldn’t believe it. I know there are a lot of factors that combine into making that instance doable, or a pain in the ass. Among them are crowd control, high dps, and a good tank. I’m not putting all the success on my shoulders.  So props to Ophelia – Aman’thul, Niellex – Sen’jin, and Cherriblosom – Proudmoore. And I’m sorry, original hunter, I didn’t note your name down. Sorry you DC’d/dropped group. Cause we tore the shit out of that place.

Your ICC Little Heart

Gears

Tim has his first piece of tier 10: Lasherweave Gauntlets.

As he was still rocking Touch of the Occult for his healing set, this is a pretty decent upgrade.

Caliban is sitting at 45 Badges right now, and is only about Halfway through Neutral. He did get some upgrades from the 10 man run we did on Friday:

Sliver of Pure Ice, Icecrown Spire Sandals, Bracers of Dark Blessings.

Both toons are actually rocking the Sliver now, which is a nice piece.

In o

Progression

I’ve run ICC so much the past couple weeks, I’m having trouble remembering which group got to where.

Our Sunday 25 man run got Lady Death-wipe down for the first time yesterday. YAY! It still felt really messy, and about half the raid was dead, but we’ll take it!

The good ship Free Loot went quite smoothly, other than a couple deaths.

Saurfang … was a poop-head. We got him down under 10mill a couple times, but at that point we had too many people marked and he was regaining health and power at astonishing rates and it was pretty much a wipe. Going to have to read up on that fight again before next week.

My guild has shrunk to where we’re running 10 mans now, instead of 25’s, which is actually okay. I like the 10 man size a lot. I honestly don’t remember if we got Saurfang down on the guild run (I think we did …) but we tore through it. We went on to TotGC10 after, and got everything but Anub down. We just can’t muscle through that transition into his final phase. Our priest healer likes to eat it right at the transition and then we’re toast.

I think we might try and tackle that clean up tonight.

Self Reflection

It was a little under a year ago that I first picked up the healing mantle. I want to write up a “year of healing” review, but that’s going to take more concentration than work is affording me this morning.

So, in lieu of that, some goals for 2010:

• Get a site design (really, it’s been a year now, you lazy gnome.)
• Lose weight (really, it’s the classic, it had to be said.)
• Write some more text comics.
• Post more regularly, and with more than “i got this gear, blah blah”
• Don’t let WoW rule All.
• ???
• Take over the world.

Have a Happy New Year.

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I’ve been tagged!

Littlebark over at The Tree Unleashed tagged me on 12/18 with a 2009 Review Meme. I unfortunately did not see it until today.

So here goes.

(See what happens when finals are over? You get posts every day!)

What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

Heal! No really. I’d done DPS, I’d done tanking, but I’d never healed seriously before. So 2009 was the year of learning how to heal. I’m still not sure I’ve got it down, but I’ve actually had in-game folks asking me for advice.

Are you scared? I know I am…

What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Hard one. The WoW dev team did an AWESOME job with Northrend. I remember being blown away by so much. The visuals, the music. I think the thing that absolutely blew me away the first time I saw it was the planetarium room in Halls of Lightning. It’s just beautiful. The constellation statues, the planets, it’s gorgeous. I just wanted to wander around and LOOK at it all.

What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Affliction DPS be a viable spec! No wait, Santa brought that one early … hmm. More time to raid? Unfortunately that’s not realistic with school. You know, 2009 was really cool.

I’m gonna say: Violet Proto Drake. I’m only one achievement away (unfortunately it requires PVP…)

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Getting Sarth+3d down. That was awesome.

And everything under “what did you get really excited about.”

What was your biggest failure?

I think I documented that one pretty well.

That was more of a personal failure than a game failure.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?

1) The night I topped the healing meters in TotC25. I know healing meters are only what you make of them, but when I still wonder if I’m doing this healing thing “rite” some times, it was a nice little reinforcement that yeah, I am.

2) When doing Utgarde Pinnacle and we butt-pulled all 3 packs in the room before Ymiron .. and no one died. THAT felt good.

3) Getting the last of the Outland Crocodiles.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Whine? I don’t know. I can’t really think of anything. I always cringe when I look at /played, but if I wasn’t doing this, I’d just be watching television. Or writing the next Great American Novel. Piddly little stuff like that so… yeah.

What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

I don’t really listen to pod casts : \

I appreciated the Ulduar boss posts that Averna had up, I like Keeva’s blog for her good math’s and insight, and Littlebark for a good mix of wow how to and wow life.

Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

Slow down and breathe. There is SO much to do, especially when you’re juggling two characters. And school. And work.

This is a game. We play it for fun. (Well, I do, at least.) Let it be fun once in a while.

Raiding and getting bosses down and getting loot is fun, in one way, but it’s also stressful.

Go run instances in your pirate hat.

Jump around naked at the start of the raid.

Soulstone yourself and jump off the top of Naxx.

WoW is srs bzns. Srsly. That doesn’t mean they can make you wear pants. ^_^

In other news:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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