Thursday 26 February 2009

More raiding fun, Plague Quarter

Okay, so the weekend before last was pretty much the same as I've already discussed, VoA, Sarth and Arachnid. We did decide to go poke Noth the Plaguebringer in Plague quarter and took him down easy so when this weekend rolled around it was decided we'd go straight to Plague quarter and see how we get on.

Heading to Noth there are some annoying trash gargoyles. One or two fly around and so are targettable before you get close, but there are some on the stairs which only activate when you get close to them. The key thing about these is that with about 40% of their health left they make an odd sound which gives a warning and you've got 6 seconds to kill them before they completely regain all health. It's best to have two tanks for this, one on each of the two gargoyles either side of the stairs. Tank and kill one while the other is off tanked, then switch and burn down. Shouldn't be too bad but it did surprise us the first time we got to them.

Head down the stairs and you're at Noth. Noth is an easy fight really. You pull him, drag him to a decent spot (we use the corner where there are no skeleton piles, not sure it makes a difference or not. Oh, and just a point to remember, make sure everyone has come inside the doorway or people will get locked out of the encounter. Every now and then Noth teleports to an upper balcony and you need to deal with waves of skeletons. These guys aren't too tough, but one type does AoE so if you're melee heavy your healers will need to be aware. To be honest the damage from them didn't seem to be too high. Noth also does a curse causing AoE damage, which doesn't seem to do a lot of damage but it's advised that dps moves away when they get it to reduce stress on the healers. Our pally healer has said he finds it no problem to heal through this encounter.

Usually Noth goes down by the third teleport, and he does have an ability which acts like an enrage timer which means you do need to try to get him down as quickly as possible.

With Noth dead it was easy to pull through all the next trash on the way to Heigan. The trash here seemed exceptionally easy, not many hp and no abilities we noticed, though maybe we just killed them quickly enough that they never got to use them. Heigan is famous (or should that be infamous?) for the safety dance. Well worth watching it at tankspot because it really helps to see it before you get to him, though I'll do my best to describe it here.

Again get everyone inside the doorway to make sure that when the event starts you get everyone involved. As soon as the tank pulls Heigan everyone can start dps, ranged and healers need to go and stand on the platform he walks around when you initially enter the room. The tank must be able to see the side of the room opposite because fairly quickly green fire is going to shoot up from the floor behind Heigan. When that happens the tank must drag Heigan through to the area where the fire came up. Tank him a bit more while still watching ahead and soon more green fire will erupt upwards and again he needs to be moved. The green fire was doing about 6k damage to me every time I made a mistake, which with 35k raid buffed isn't too bad but it's nasty on the melee dps.

There are four sections that he needs to be dragged to, then turn and take him back the opposite way. When you reach section 2 again he will teleport to his original platform, and everyone needs to move to section 1, because this is where the fun starts. The pattern of the fire from the floor is the same, but the speed is greatly increased, basically you run, stop for about a second then run again, all the way across the room, back then across another section before Heigan teleports back to the party. Tank tags him, takes him back to section 1 and slowly moves him across the room.

It's fun, but difficult. If you're the main tank you need to move him to certain spots, if you're dps you need to move when the tank moves, not when Heigan does, as he'll stand there and cast. This will almost certainly take you a few goes to master, but it's the key to the fight, as Heigan's general damage output is fairly low. The one other ability you need to watch out for is when he puts an effect on anyone up to 30 yards away making spells take 3 seconds to cast. This can seriously stress your healers.

We failed mostly on the speed phase, and mostly because our priest was dying a lot. Once he managed to get it through we managed to down Heigan and get the Safety Dance achievement, which you get for everyone surviving the fight.

Much whooping and hollering at another boss down and we moved on through to Loatheb. The involves running through a room with lots of bugs, which can be aoed down. It's best not to stop much before you get to the end of the room as there are eyestalks which can be dangers, though I barely noticed anything they did.

Loatheb requires your healers to be on their toes and your dps to follow orders. He has a tonne of hit points, something like 10 million in the 10 man version. He doesn't hit too hard, but he does stack raid wide dots which get progressively worse and the hard bit for your healers is that they can only heal for 3 seconds in every 20. So they need to watch for the aura that stops healing going off and time their heals accordingly. Deadly Boss Mobs makes this a lot easier, as you get a bar which shows you how many seconds you have left to heal in. If your healers work well through this, that will never be a problem, even if it sounds bad.

The key for the dps comes in the form of spores. These spawn from certain points around the room at 30 second intervals and give a buff which increases crit chance by 50% but reduces threat by 100%. So you really don't want your tank getting this or he's going to have a tough time holding aggro. As the bear tank wasn't really needed for this fight he changed to cat and whenever a spore appeared it was his job to get the melee group to move to him to get the buff while I moved Loathed away from the spores to avoid getting the 100% threat loss. He was also responsible for dragging one to the ranged group to help them get the 50% crit chance. Basically you need your melee and ranged all critting as much as possible to burn Loatheb's health pool down before his dots wipe everyone. It was easy to be honest, he lasted something like 3 minutes and the healers never had a problem. Grats to the druid for the t7 shoulder token he dropped.

A good night all round, two new bosses down and a quarter we're sure we can soon stick on farm status.

Monday 9 February 2009

Timed CoS and Spider Wing down

A few of us were on early on Friday night and for a challenge we tried to do a timed CoS run. This involves getting to an optional boss within 25 minutes of starting the event at Arthas. We took a def tank (moi), bear druid, pally healer, rogue and enhancement shammy. Not really the ideal group as we were without aoe dps but that never matters to us. For the most part the bear druid tanked, simply because he could get to the mobs in the first section of the run faster than I could.

For those who've never done The Culling of Stratholme the first part involves waves of mobs that spawn in different areas of Strat. The direction appears as an arrow on the minimap and you go where the spawn is and you get groups of elites to kill. On the way there are lots of non-elites that you can pretty much ignore until you get to the big pulls where they can be aoe'd down even by pally consecrate. The hard part of a timed run is moving swiftly through this bit to give yourself plenty of time for the rest. You can try to keep the pulls moving back towards the central area all the time but that makes dps a little tougher. For the most part we fought them when we found them.

The first boss is Meathook, an annoying abomination that occasionally hits the lowest person on the threat list. The easiest way to do this is for someone to sit out the fight as otherwise the healer tends to take the hits and they are stunned for a few seconds after so no healing. I sat the fight out after dropping a set of devestates on him, annoying the pally a bit as he took the first hit. I then moved back out to stand behind him and did nothing else until looting my badge.

The elite spawns get a bit tougher until you get the second boss, a necromancer who is pretty easy to tear down with the high melee dps we have. We then made sure we spoke to Arthas to get him moving. This is one of the keys to a fast run, ensuring you talk to Arthas every time you need to move him on because failing to do so costs you time. We got to the building where you start to fight the dragons and sped through the first couple of sections fairly quickly until we were on the third boss. At this point we were well over halfway through the time and I really didn't think we were going to make it. Having cleared the building we were on to the final gauntlet. This is where having two tanks really helped speed things up. I ran through marking what elites I could, pulling four and then letting the bear move on to pull in some more. This allowed us to move very quickly through the gauntlet, though we did have two very good dps to burn down the elites quickly. We didn't stop in the middle, just carried on past, pulling as quickly as we could until we reached the end with a little over 3 minutes left. Ignoring Arthas we ran past and on to the optional boss, who is to the left of where Arthas stops. The timer was on 3 minutes when we started the fight, me tanking, them spanking. It was a hard, fast fight, and the timer was on 1 minute when the boss dropped and we got the chance to loot the bronze drake. Grats go to the rogue who got it on that run. We were all very pleased with how we'd done it, no deaths and within the time limit. Moved swiftly on to Mal'ganis, killed him with ease and the Royal Crest of Lordaeron dropped. Cue happy tank! Lovely looking shield and a decent upgrade for me once I got a +20 defense enchant put on it.

By this time the guild were starting to get online. It didn't take much longer before we had 2 tanks, 2 healers and 4 other dps and decided to drop into Obsidian Sanctum. Cakewalk. Even with 8 we can do this pretty easily now. We don't even bother with going through the portal on the second boss to worry about his drakes, we let them come through and kill them outside. When it comes to the final boss I've got the hang of moving my mouse around and positioning properly so I didn't get hit by a single wave which makes me absurdly proud of myself. No drops for me but a couple of happy people which is great. We didn't have Wintergrasp so we decided to do Spider Wing in Naxx again.

Cleared our way through the trash easily and took Anub'rekhan down first time, druid tank on him, me on the adds again. Swiftly moving on through the next sets of trash we got to Grand Widow Faerlina. Used our normal tactic of burning down the adds during the enrage phase and we one shotted her which was pretty impressive. Didn't hang around we just moved on to Maexxna where we'd had some problems before. This time we got her steadily down to 33% and I called a halt to dps while we waited out the next web wrap. It went off and we hammered into her but wiped when she was about 18%. Quite rightly the other tank asked me why I hadn't positioned her very well, and I'll explain that a little later on.

At this point we had Wintergrasp and people wanted to go do VoA so reluctantly the two tanks agreed. Both of us wanted to feel the achievement of Maexxna down and the other tank was encouraging people to believe we could do it. Anyway we went to VoA and died on the second trash pull when we got the wanderer. Luckily enough when we tried to go back in Wintergrasp was contested so it wouldn't let us so we went straight back to Naxx and onto Maexxna.

Now positioning Maexxna takes a bit of work if you're fairly new to tanking. She has a huge hitbox which means you can run and strafe and she just doesn't follow you. Trying to get her to the best position is pretty tricky, so for the second attempt, this is what I did. Moved to stand against the left hand wall, where she webs people. This means melee dps can help break them out without having to move too far, which is obviously very useful from their point of view as we're a very heavy melee dps guild at the moment. I then moved forward until I was in range and pulled, before moving back to the wall as she came in. Then I moved through her until she turned. Now this is a bit tricky, as you don't start with a lot of rage without charging, but it seemed to work pretty well. I had her back to the rest of the party and I could concentrate on hitting her as hard as I could. The other key thing to remember in this fight is to time shield block to start just as she web wraps. This helps you take less damage while everyone is webbed.

Again I called a halt to dps at 33% and waited out the web wrap before telling everyone to go as hard as they could. This is because she enrages at 30% and does a fair amount more damage. This time we took her down and got the achievement for finishing Spider Quarter. With 8 people we cleared the easiest wing of Naxx. That was a fine feeling. No drops for me but nice to see others getting some good purples.

It's moments like this that I love. When a group of people, good friends rather than expert raiders, comes together to take down a raid boss. That moment when you want to punch the air and take the credit for good tanking, good healing and good dps. It's what keeps me interested in WoW long after I would have moved on from another game.

Monday 2 February 2009

No raids, just a post about levelling some alts

So this weekend we didn't get to raid at all. To be honest I wasn't too unhappy about that. For some reason on Friday evening I was having a hankering for just relaxing. I turned up online but we were only ever a max of seven players online and that's not quite enough to be sure of doing VoA or OS for us so when 9pm rolled around I decided it was time to head offline and just watch some TV.

I think I've burned out just a little bit on heroics at the moment. I've run quite a lot recently and having to run with a paladin who does amazing dps considering that half the time he's dead is just giving me a bit of a headache. It's a shame he has no sense of self preservation because if he did he'd be the highest dps in the guild by quite some way. As anyone who runs heroics knows, you have to be careful about aggro and if you get it you have to be ready to try to dump it as best you can. Some classes don't really get abilities to do this from what I've seen (could be wrong but our shammy always gets my vigilance) but paladins get bubble. Now bubble is great, it's complete invulnerability but it's also a decent aggro dump. Thing is that pallies can't use it for 30 seconds after they've popped their wings, and this pally pops his wings all the time. I've actually seen those wings sprout out of his back and less than 3 seconds later he's been face down in the dirt. I've tried explaining that he needs to take care of himself because the healer doesn't always get much time to heal him, but nothing I say seems to make much difference. Unfortunately he's one of the first five online most evenings so he runs all the time and I have to be careful not to make it personal when I'm talking over vent, which sometimes I find hard to do after three or four nights of watching him die. So a little break was quite welcome.

Over the weekend apart from my daily cooking quests (six more recipes to go for the Northrend Gourmet achievement) I didn't really have anything to do on my big, bad cow tank. I did a little fishing at the fountain in Dalaran but that got old quickly so I decided I'd take a look at my alts. Before I begin a little bit about me and repetition.

I hate doing the same quests over and over again. Levelling alts is akin to having my teeth pulled out, but for some reason every now and then I feel the need to do it. It started with the problems we had with Maexxna. "If only we'd had a druid who could have cleansed poisons and helped with healing," I thought to myself. Well I have a level 26 druid and though it would take me ages to level it to 80 I thought I'd give it a bit of a go and see how I got on. Over the weekend I got to level 30. It was painful. Druids have some nice abilities, and I've obviously specced Feral for levelling but I find cat druids to be a little squishy. Yes they can dish out good damage, but they also take a lot, and if they get more than a couple of adds they have a real problem. Sure you can switch to bear but I've yet to work out the best times to do this and so I ended up dying quite a lot. So four levels was a bit tedious and as most of it was in Thousand Needles it was made worse by the constant running from place to place and flying to Thunder Bluff and back. I was going to write a quick digression bit about running around during questing here but it's become so long I'm going to post it in another blog post altogether.

Having got to level 30 and got my druid his mount I decided I'd had enough of that playstyle and would go for something a little more 'in your face'. I had a hunter that I'd started with the intention of making him a gathering character. He had mining and skinning and I'd levelled him to 28 before Wrath came out and I thought I'd drag him out again. He too was in Thousand Needles but what the hell, at least the playstyle was very different. This was a lot more like it. Using aspect of the cheetah to move around quickly and switching to hawk to fight, using viper when mana got a bit low. My pet was tougher than my druid, able to easily handle taking on 3 mobs at once while I pew pewed (or twang twanged as I'm using a bow). I hammered through the two levels to get to 30 without breaking a sweat and found I really enjoyed it. I've played a hunter to 70 on the alliance side so I know the playstyle well and I do enjoy pet classes, it's just a shame warlocks are so badly broken at the moment that demonology is really no fun to play. Anyway, level 30 and a quick trip to Orgrimmar and I had two alts with mounts.

I decided I'd also go back and check in with my Blood Elf paladin. She was only level 16 and I'd stopped playing her after getting frustrated at trying to get onto the boat during the quest to collect the three night elf scrolls. I'd been using her to store ore and stone for my Death Knight's blacksmithing but dropped all that off in the bank and decided to take her out for a spin. Obviously for levelling she's retribution specced so I checked what quests I had and ran her out. Damn they have changed paladins, and oh so much for the better. Blessings now last 10 minutes rather than 5 and judgements are no longer based on judging the seal. A quick run around the area of Tranquilien learning the style and I was ready to head off and try the quests again. To be honest it was a joke. Killed all the elves on board the boat with no problem at all and did most of the rest of the quests without any real trouble, though the trolls with the cat pets do tend to do a lot of damage. Even managed to solo Kel'gash the Wicked easily enough. A couple of hours running around and she was level 20 and looking good. I'll be heading her out to the Undead zones soon, can't face another character doing Stonetalon Mountains and Thousand Needles.

Overall it was a pretty relaxed weekend. I'm glad I got the druid levelling done first, as I found the hunter and paladin far more pleasurable to level. I think I'll do that as the pattern to make sure I finish each session on a bit of a high. I'm sure once I've got a few more levels on the druid I'll enjoy it more, as I do like in your face combat more than I do hanging back and dpsing at range. It's a shame I can't get into my mage more at the moment as she's languishing at level 70 and could really do with running up the levels to get some green quest rewards to disenchant and some more cloth to help her tailoring. Still, now I'm levelling again you never know...