Life As A Healer: Week Two

It’s been an odd kind of week; my time has been split roughly between WoW, D&D Online, and catching up on my backlog of Criminal Minds, Warehouse 13 and Eli Stone.

I’ve had my first experience with real raid healing, having spent an evening working on the hard-hard mode of 25-man Iron Council last night (which we didn’t get down in the end, but we were getting close).  Now that’s what I’d call a challenge: being one of the designated healers for the Steelbreaker tank.  Apart from a failed attempt at ToC10 Heroic earlier in the week, it’s just been normal ToC25 and Ulduar25 which, while challenging, didn’t really require me to stretch my abilities.

You see, while I’m a competent healer at this stage (helped by my relatively high-level gear), I’m still working on picking up the little things that I can do to keep a tank alive (and the pressure in hard modes encourage growth – along with the desire to throw things at the screen).  Growth in this sense means picking up things like how to time my cast of PW:S to get Borrowed Time at the right moment to then be able to cast a 1.6 second Greater Heal that lands right after Fusion Punch hits the tank instead of a Flash Heal that lands for maybe 2/3 as much.  (Maybe that’s not the best way to react to it, but it’s proving effective for me to use in that situation, especially if Penance is on cooldown at that moment)

It’s tricky, as I don’t really have anyone in-guild I can get to mentor me; our priests are all either main-specced Holy or Shadow, and our leading healer priest wasn’t able to offer much advice when I did try to get some advice.  Looking at WWS logs for other guilds are only effective in showing what spells they cast; it doesn’t give me tips on how they cast them, such as the Borrowed Time thing I described above.

One thing that has proven effective has been improving my visual alerts with the new version of Power Auras Classic, which now has support for dual-specs and more options that make it more flexible.  I’ve replaced Inner Fire Helper with a simple aura, changed my Flask aura to alert me when I don’t have either Flask of the Frost Wyrm or Flask of Pure Mojo active, and implemented another that displays when Penance is off cooldown and ready to cast.

I’m also having some success having dropped Bartender4 in favour of the default Blizzard action bars, and relocating Vuhdo’s raidframes closer to the centre of the screen so it’s easier to glance up at my toon to check if there’s something happening that I need to react to (such as patches of fire on the ground in which my character may be standing).

Sadly, the downside to being so reliant on mouseover healing is an equally growing reliance on keyboard-turning due to my mouse being unusable for turning while it’s over the raidframes; I think working out some way to get around that will have to be my next move.

Other than my healing, things have been pretty quiet.  I’ve been investing in Eternal Life for darkmoon cards in preparation for the next faire, along with my other usual AH investments.  I’m back down at 50k from my high of 70k, but I’m still ahead considering just how much I’ve invested in card mats (I’ve cards enough for three nobles decks already).

For now, though, I think I might go do some research on the possibilities of Prot Warrior PvP.

/wave

Life As A Healer: Week One

Well, I’ve a week of raid-tank-healing on Mingle under my belt, and I think I’m off to a good start.  (Translated: when the tank died, it wasn’t my fault)

I suspect the situation would be different for someone in a guild that isn’t one of the better-known progression guilds on their server, but it’s fun being able to enjoy fights that left me gritting my teeth as shadow.

In the week past I’ve healed 10-man and 25-man Ulduar, along with 10-man normal, 10-man hard-mode and 25-man normal ToC.  Admittedly the 10-man Ulduar only consisted of doing Razorscale, XT, Kologarn and Auriaya while the main raid did the first three bosses in 25-man ToC (and I was the raidleader for it – talk about stressful).  And on 25-man Ulduar I sat out for Yogg-Saron+3, but I’m proud to have successfully tank-healed up to and including General Vezax.

The way we tank-heal on General, we rotate through three healers who each heal the tank until they’re down to 50% mana, at which the next in the series takes over and continues until they reach half mana.  When the third person in the sequence starts healing, the previous two go stand in a saronite pool to regain their mana and get ready for the first person to take over from #3.  Anyway, I was #3 in the sequence, and was quite surprised when the boss died just after I hit 50%, and before I got to engage the saronite-boss.  Bear in mind that I’m still pretty inexperienced; enough so that I don’t know how much of the time I spent healing (which felt like I was in there for ages) was due to very-well-geared and skilled DPS, how much is due to well-geared and skilled healers, and how much is me not screwing up.

While I was only in for the last 25-man ToC boss, Anub’arak, I was in for the full 10-man normal clear, and the first two 10-man heroic bosses that were downed.  No pretty loot for Mingle, but some other new raiders got some upgrades and one of our priests finished making Val’anyr.  (Why yes, I am just a little jealous)

The Heroic Beasts encounter was pretty full-on to heal; the tweaks between normal and heroic change the substance of the fights quite a bit, especially that change to Icehowl that changed the fight the most, namely removing the speed-buff you gain after everyone is stunned and knocked back to the wall, right before he charges someone.  (The tank wiped us twice by not running out quite fast enough; she’ll probably be very happy to hear that they’ve added an extra half-second before he charges)

The Faction Champions are even harder on heroic than I expected, and they’re such a hard fight on normal that it’s already (sometimes) remarkably difficult – it’s probably the most unpredictably difficult encounter I’ve come across, with the difficulty of the fight being almost completely reliant on their group makeup.

Still, I’ve managed to pick up one piece of nice badge loot (the non-tier badge shoulders, not to be confused with the horde equivalent), and I’ll probably be looking for the badge ring next.

It’s the start of Week #2 though, so hopefully it’s more of the same, but better this time.

Oh, and I’ve managed to reach another personal milestone.

Ding 50k.

/wave

Ding 80! (Again)

Kringle has finally reached the hallowed heights of level 80, which leaves Pringle, Bingle, and Tingle to go.  (Having said that, I’m considering replacing Tingle, the underplayed druid in my lineup, with a new character on the Horde side – at least it would be something different to do)

25-man raiding has progressed yet again, with General Vezax falling before us after a single (surprisingly focused) session.  It was actually quite a fun fight from my perspective, and it’s been a long time since I’ve used my wand so much.  However, we were having lots of issues with interrupt-capable players failing to, well, interrupt (even our raid leader, a very capable prot warrior, was having trouble with that for some reason).

With this in mind, I’ve finally purchased dual-spec for Mingle, and have put together two slightly newer shadow specs to play with.  The first one has 3 points in Shadow Affinity (for those painful times I’m called to do AOE, and am paranoid about fatal aggro-pulls), and is closest to the one I’ve been raiding with until now.  The second one is mostly the same, but drops the threat reduction for Silence (and its useless prerequisite, Improved Psychic Scream), for ranged interrupts in a pinch.  Admittedly the silence spec is a bit of a reach, especially with the 45-second cooldown on it, but I’m curious to see if it’s actually useful (especially when we’re having issues as we did last night).

Previous build: link
Shadow Affinity build (13/0/58): link
Silence build (13/0/58): link

It’s actually a little embarrassing to go back and look at my current spec, and to see the holes in it (such as only one point in Improved Shadow Word: Pain)…  Well, hopefully I can learn from it.

Hopefully we can get our act together next week, and reach Yogg-Saron again for more frantic wiping at the end of the first phase.  (Seriously, that transition is insane – which is quite appropriate, considering where you are)

I’m getting Kringle a little more geared up (mostly with crafted epics), after which I’ll either work on leveling Pringle or see about rolling this mythical Horde character I’m considering.  I just wish we had playable goblins.  Or murlocs.

/wave

Contemplating Change, Leveling, And A Meme

Well, 25-man raiding is slow and…  not really fun, to be quite honest.  I’ve had a chat with an officer about my dissatisfaction raiding on Mingle, and have decided to take a couple of weeks (while I continue to raid) to think about what I want to do next.  (I’ll be passing on loot in Ulduar as well, as it wouldn’t be right to take loot that other people can use if there’s a chance I may be not raiding on that character)

Unfortunately there’s no openings for another tank, with one of our old guildmates returning his gnome warrior to the game.  (He’s a far better tank than I am, and a nice guy, so I’m not complaining about it)  I’m trying to come up with ways I can get raid time (in some capacity, probably outside of the guild) on my warrior, but options are pretty limited.  I might have to go raid-hunting, and see if there are any guilds who’d be willing to take a tank from outside their guild, and who raid on nights I’m not raiding on Mingle.  Possibly a bit of a reach, but I’ll see what I can find.

Speaking of Dingle, she has ventured into 10-man Ulduar again, and has another boss kill under her belt.  Most of the raid members are from another guild, and we managed to kill FL, Razorscale and XT-002, but Ignis and the Iron Council proved too much for us.  Sadly, Dingle has no shiny tank loot to show for it (although she did pick up a dps helm that would otherwise have been sharded – I really need to gem and enchant it at some stage).

My tanking inexperience showed itself with two bosses during the raid, both bosses we couldn’t get past.  First was Ignis, where I finally realised my taunts were ineffective if I hadn’t first damaged the target – I was on construct duty, and at the start had trouble keeping aggro on the constructs long enough to get them into the scorches.  I also caused one wipe when I wasn’t tanking the construct far enough into the scorch, so it wasn’t picking up the debuff that turned it molten.  By the end, though, I’d worked out what I had to do (and was doing it correctly, as best I can tell).

With both of these issues worked out (to my satisfaction, at least), we were left with issues with dps (we only had one character capable of enough burst damage to kill the molten constructs, who was unfortunately very attractive to Ignis, and kept getting hot-pocketed) and main-tanking (a DK who was having problems getting positioned correctly, and kept getting the scorches positioned either too far from the pools needed when killing the constructs, or positioned too close to the healers/dps who died pretty rapidly when accidentally scorched).  Eventually the raidleader threw his hands up in despair and we moved on to XT (who we one-shot).

I had a brief positioning issue with the Iron Council, where I was tasked with tanking Steelbreaker at the start, and didn’t pull him out of his damage-amplifying rune quick enough on one attempt, but in general the group just didn’t perform well enough get any further (although it was getting pretty late at that stage).

Other than that, I’ve been putting some time (and gold) into leveling Kringle over the last few days.  He’s currently about a third of the way through 79, and should be 80 today if I don’t get distracted (which is pretty likely).

Some time fishing on Kringle yesterday means he’s now officially a fisherman – which by my standards means he has the 200 points of fishing skill required to equip and use his Fishing Pole.  That gives me 6 characters I can do the fishing daily on, which is about the only daily I’m doing regularly currently (apart from the cooking daily for Fingle and Kringle, who are both working towards the 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards achievement – they’ve both passed the 50 awards part, and are on the home stretch now).

But before I get back to my leveling, here’s a meme that caught my eye.  (Snagged from Mend Pet)

The instructions:

1. Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More”
   or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to “Random quotations”
   or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
   or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
   Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

And what did I end up with?

The first album from BNS Turag.  Brought to you by random wikipedia links, a quote from Socrates, and a photo that felt surprisingly appropriate (well, to me it did).  I’m not going to do the ‘name people to continue this meme’ thing, as I’m just not really into that, but if anyone reading this wants to give it a try, put a link to your results in the comments.  (I’d love to see what other people come up with)

Time’s passing, so I guess I should log on and get Kringle to 80.  (That Nesingwary 4000 he has in the bank is waiting to get brought out and equipped)

/wave

Meet The New Staff

Following yet more nerfs to Ulduar, last night our 25-man raid managed to down Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT-002 and Kologarn, and had time left over for a couple of attempts on Assembly of Iron.  And Mingle has (for the first time) added a staff (Intensity, which was most generously dropped by Ignis) to her raiding gear.

It’s such an odd look, seeing her with staff in hand (or strapped to her back).  I mean, she’s only ever equipped one in order to train her weapon skill up, and that wasn’t even an afternoon’s work.  Admittedly the shadowform effect does tend to limit the effect of any new gear she gets (even new shoulder armour, which are usually one of the most noticeable pieces of gear from an aesthetic perspective), but a staff…  It’s just a whole new look for her.

It surprised me that no-one else in the raid rolled on it.  I mean, it has the most +hit for any weapon I’ve come across so far, and having so much on one item means you have a lot more flexibility when you’re readjusting your gear to get the hit you need without nerfing your other stats too much.

(As an aside, quite a lot of items have been going off-spec, so I guess that really puts the normal 25-man Ulduar gear into the correct perspective, especially when so many raiders had best-in-slot items pre-Ulduar.  If we can get our act together enough to start doing hard-mode bosses, then the loot circus will probably kick into gear.)

Mingle is currently just a little bit over the hit cap: the cap for a non-Draenei with 3 points in Misery and 3 points in Shadow Focus is 290, and Mingle has 305 without any buffs.  This is after re-gemming and fiddling with gear as best I could, so she’s stuck with those extra points for the foreseeable future.  But she did pick up almost 100 extra spellpower from it all, so the WWS for tonight could be interesting.

In other news, there’s not really any other news.  Nothing exciting from the fishing dailies, nor from the Tournament dailies, nor from…  well, you get the idea.

And speaking of dailies…

/wave

Eggs: Spawn-Camp Or Run Circuits?

As someone who spent a couple of hours running in circles while shape-shifted into rabbit-form, picking up eggs around Azure Watch, I’ve been surprised at the number of people who’ve spent their time camping at a spawn-point for several eggs (quite a few I picked up from in front of them as I travelled past at near-supersonic speed).

If I wanted to sit in one place and click on an egg when it spawns after however many minutes, I’d probably be missing the old 30-second duration of fishing.  Actually, even the old fishing system would be more fun than egg-camping, for me at least.  I just don’t get it. 

But I’ve completed the meta-achievement on Mingle, so I don’t have to stress over it any more (until this time next year, maybe).

Mingle’s endeavours with rod in hand have been rewarded with another fishing item, the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat.  Besides giving her a certain stereotypical-adventurer-chic, the on-use lure ability is very convenient.

In 25-man raiding news, Auriaya came to a sticky end last night (and I was dead for most of the fight, just like I was for the 10-man kill of her I was party to).  We then moved on to wipe all night on Thorim and Hodir – it…  really wasn’t pretty.

Also, I’m the guildmember responsible for logging the fights to put WWS and WMO reports on the forums for the guild after raid, but after replacing the logging addon I’d been using when 3.1 broke LoggerHead (which has been updated, finally) I forgot to enable it for Ulduar.  Thankfully another raider was able to log the fight (thanks Tame), so my poor performance wasn’t lost to the ages.

Last of all for today, I stumbled across a couple of interesting links that I thought I’d share.

• An enlightening article by Matticus entitled “Frustrated by Ulduar? Here’s Why.”  (And I’m certainly frustrated with it lately)
• And on an entertaining, Noblegarden-related note:  Hannelore.

Back to my dailies (and fishing), anyway.

(I’m beginning to wonder if I should rename the blog to “One Of These Fishermen”)

/wave

Perseverance. We Has It.

It took 15 tries, but we finally got Kologarn down last night.  (Personally, I think he died because he felt sorry for us)

I’ve also come across some wonderful daily news – you remember how I thought the cooking and jewelcrafting dailies had been changed to require level 80?  Well, it turns out it was a bug.

The level requirement for the following quests has been appropriately set to level 65: Shipment: Wicked Sun Brooch, Infused Mushroom Meatloaf, Mustard Dogs!, and Cheese for Glowergold.

Kringle and Pringle can go back to earning their keep.  (Hurrah!)

Did anyone ever play the Bejeweled addon for WoW?  I introduced it to my guild while we were progressing through Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, and it was entertaining to get the achievement messages from the most unlikely players while we raided (and sometimes at the most unexpected moments).  Anyway, they (PopCap Games) have released a new one:  Peggle.  (I can’t wait to see my guilds response to this one)

Three more days of Tournament dailies, and both Mingle and Dingle will have their second faction raised to Champion (Stormwind for Mingle, due to her choice to only ride horses, and Gnomeregan for Dingle because an engineer will only ride a Mechanostrider – until you can joust on a chopper).  Incidentally, I’m getting quite good at the mounted combat now – defeating the four champions is almost a one-shot thing.  I’m also able to down the Boneguard Commander for Battle Before The Citadel single-handedly (provided I don’t pick up any scouts when I pull, or while I kite him).

Hopefully I’ll find out if we’re running a second Ulduar 10-man group tonight – signups for it haven’t been very comforting so far, so it’s still up in the air.  On a related note, I took Dingle in for 10-man Vault of Archavon last night, and we managed to one-shot Emalon this time – my performance was a lot better, apart from some hiccups taunting the replacement adds off a paladin who picked them up to kite towards me after we downed each charged one.  No T8 for me, although I did pick up the PvP chest from Archavon (which I can’t see myself using, to be honest).

For now though, ‘tis time to get a-dailying!

/wave

Yawn. No, Really.

I couldn’t get back to sleep (woke up at about 6am, after going to bed at 2am), so I figured I might as well get some dailies out of the way.  And guess what?  The fourth day of Blood Is Thicker in a row.

Ah well, you get that sometimes.  (But it would be nice to get something else for a change – I’ve done the dailies every day since 3.1 went live, and I’ve still only seen two of them)  I’ve started leveling fishing on Fingle as well, which gives me four characters to fish with.  Fortunately you’re able to do the fishing daily in Shattrath in addition to the Dalaran one, so I can keep myself in Sharpened Fish Hooks.

Ulduar-25 went better last night; after defeating the loot piñata that is Flame Leviathan (well, we downed him despite all the raiders who still don’t know how to do that fight – apparently we’re going to be organised when we do it next week), we then downed Razorscale (eventually – it took a few attempts), and I sat out for XT-002 Deconstructor.  We finished with Ignis (barely downing him before we over-ran our scheduled raid times).  Razorscale was generous, and gave me the Collar of the Wyrmhunter, which has allowed me to drop Haunting Call in favour of The Impossible Dream – the new +hit pieces are making it a lot easier to juggle that particular stat.  (The stats on it are nice, but some of these helms make me really glad I can set them to not display on my characters)

I’m hoping to get Dingle into the second guild 10-man group for Ulduar this week, but her comparative lack of gear may put her out of the running – Ulduar is really quite demanding of raiders, in that they need to be pretty solidly geared before it’s worth taking them in.  While she’s geared enough for Naxx25, Ulduar10 may be beyond her – or at least, her lack of gear may make her impossible to keep up.  I’ll have to see what happens come Friday.

For now, though, I’m going to finish the fishing dailies and see if I can get another couple of hours sleep – raiding and sleep deprivation aren’t a very successful combination.

/wave

Time Flies When You’re Having Wipes

Well, after our first week raiding Ulduar, we’ve managed to down Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, and last night we (finally) got down XT-002 Deconstructor.  The night was finished off with Emalon in 25-man Vault of Archavon, to give some people a piece of T8.5.  In 10-man progression we also managed to kill Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Assembly of Iron, Kologarn, Auriaya, Freya, Thorim and Hodir.  A pretty full-on week for everyone involved.

Oh, and we might not have a screenshot of our XT-002 kill, due to an over-zealous engineer mining his body.  Whoops.

I have to say, the adjustment in 25-mans from Naxx to Ulduar is proving pretty painful.  This is especially evident after spending time in Ulduar in both 10-man and 25-man, as demonstrated by the differing progressions listed above.  I’m really hoping we get it together for 25-man a bit more when we start again next week, but I’m a bit ambivalent about it for now.

On a more positive note, today should be the day that Mingle and Dingle become my first champions of the Tournament, which means acquiring squires and starting to collect the Champion badges for fun and profit.  Well, for profit anyway.  (The pets are BoE, and I suspect the AH will be a popular destination for them)

But it’s time to get dailying, and Kringle won’t level himself (unfortunately).

/wave

As Busy As A Dog With Fleas

Between the sudden need to level Kringle and Pringle (Kringle due to cooking dailies requiring lvl80, and Pringle due to cooking dailies and jewelcrafting dailies requiring lvl80), the travel-intensive Tournament (and frequently, fishing) dailies, and the on-going guild exploratory mission into 10-man Ulduar, I’m finding myself with no shortage of things to do in-game.

The addition of a level requirement to the jewelcrafting feels like Blizzard is just keeping it up with the cooking daily change, but it’s pretty effective motivation to keep leveling.

I took Kringle and his shiny new turtletank out for a spin, and was invited to participate in a guild Drak’Tharon Keep alt run – apart from when I accidentally pulled the first group of mobs with my pet (can’t beat a start like that) it went surprisingly smoothly, and Kringle picked up his first gear upgrade, the Helmet of Living Flesh, to replace his T4 helm.  I really need to get used to switching in and out of Aspect of the Viper, though – I’m finding an embarrassing tendency to switch into Viper and forget to switch back.  (Note to self: have a look on WoWInterface)

Both Mingle and Dingle have reached the rank of Valiant in the Tournament, and Ringle completed the first day.  The quests themselves aren’t that bad, but the travel time is a bit annoying and adds up pretty quickly if you have multiple characters trying to work through the dailies.  (Additional travel for the fishing daily doesn’t help)

Mingle also went back into Ulduar for the guild 10-man run, after missing out last night.  When I joined, they had managed to down both Razorscale and the XT-002 Deconstructor.  By the time we called it a night, we’d taken down Kologarn, the Assembly of Iron, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim and Freya.  Only Ignis (who’s apparently still bugged), General Vezax and Yogg-Saron remain.

The best way to sum it my experience is that you have to plan the trash, and the bosses aren’t friendly towards errors in execution.  Personally, I think Auriaya was the hardest, due to the tricky nature of the pull when you engage her.  Freya and her adds of doom were pretty unpleasant as well (and I failed miserably, dying from pulling aggro on one of the adds, leaving the group to successfully 9-man her down, ressing me as a ghoul a little before she died).

Kologarn was kind of fun, provided you were able to run out from the eye-beams without dying or kiting it over someone else.  The Assembly of Iron was entertaining – stand on the blue stuff on the ground unless it’s covered by green stuff on the ground and watch for when you have to run away.  We also picked up the I Choose You, Stormcaller Brundir achievement – two more to go, for having each of the other bosses killed last.

The trash before Auriaya was pretty brutal – they come in pairs which you have to keep to tank separately, and occasionally one will fire a slow-moving spark to the other which has to be killed before it reaches the other mob to prevent it from giving the mob a tank-killing buff.  Then, after one is dead, the other receives a powerful buff which means you’d better kill it before it flattens the tank.

Auriaya herself isn’t that hard, but her cat adds are rather unpleasant – when they’re together they gain something like 100% extra damage.  They didn’t one-shot the tank, but the tank didn’t last more than a second.  After several mishaps, we sorted out the pull and managed to get her down, gaining The Antechamber of Ulduar.

Next up were the four keepers (who I guess are now the one keeper, Mimiron being the only one remaining).  Thorim was first, and turned out to be a two-group fight.  The first group of players remains in the arena below Thorim (which is where I was), and fights waves of adds until the second group is able to fight through to Thorim and engage him.  Once engaged, he leaped down into the arena (followed by the second group) and it became a simple tank-and-spank.  Simple, but quite satisfying.  I’ll Take You All On was picked up upon completion.

Hodir was next, and was a tricky combination of Keristrasza from The Nexus and Sapphiron from Naxxramas.  You have to keep moving (or finding safe areas to stand) to prevent yourself from being frozen to the floor, and patches on the floor where icicles fall from the ceiling, and find safe places to stand when he casts Flash Freeze.  I failed on this one frequently and comprehensively, but the rest of the group managed to do pretty well.  (I accidentally picked up Staying Buffed All Winter during one attempt, while we were at it)

Freya was the last of the night, and it was pretty rough.  We cleared the trash from the area (which was especially exciting with the groups of lashers), then took down the three elders (the hard mode is where you leave one or more elder up for when you engage Freya, much like Sartharion).

When you start, Freya has 150 stacks of a healing buff which can only be removed by killed the various waves of adds she summons.  The adds I really hated (and frequently were killed by) were the trio of the Storm Lasher, Ancient Water Elemental and Snaplasher; these three have to be killed at about the same time, otherwise they resurrect and pwnage ensues.

We had a quick look at the trash before Mimiron, but decided to call it after we were mercilessly crushed by it.  And that was about 9 hours of raiding completed.  I didn’t pick up any loot, just a bunch of fairly useless Emblems of Valor – the few caster items that dropped weren’t upgrades for my majority of best-in-slot 25-man items.

I’ve got some fishing to do today, as I’m down from 87 to 20 fish feasts from all these attempts.  Hopefully I’ll get an invite to the raid this afternoon, but if not we’re back to the 25-man version tonight (and again tomorrow night).  I’m thinking of respeccing as well, and dropping the points I used to pick up Silence for the Razorscale trash; Shadow Affinity might keep me alive a little bit longer…  (I’m thinking of something like this)

But on the subject of things to do, these dailies won’t wait forever!

/wave

No raid tonight? What to do?

So far I’m enjoying 3.1.  Ulduar is great, fishing is fun, new dailies are something different to do.  They’ve even added a direct flight route from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin.

I’ve had a play with the new boss in the 10-man Vault of Archavon on Dingle, and I’m sure it’s more fun to dps than it was to tank - I was designated add-tank, and it really was a tough fight for me; keeping aggro on the mobs I had was easy, but a very restricted camera angle made targeting respawned adds something of a challenge.  But we did manage to down the boss, and one of the druid’s in the group became the first in the guild to pick up a piece of T8.

We had another bash at Razorscale last night, and between the hotfixes (increasing the enrage timer to 10 minutes, and making the iron dwarf casters only do their chain lightning when stationary) and our increasing competence, we managed to get the boss down to 9% on our best attempt.  Admittedly we were caught off-guard by the enrage several times, as it’s not in the Deadly Boss Mods timers just yet, but it’s nice to be able to consistently get that far.

Out of curiosity I decided to put the fishing changes to the test, and picked up the fishing daily on Dingle, who was a fishing virgin at the time (with 0 points of fishing skill).  It took about 50 minutes (not including travel time back to Dalaran to train), but she caught the Ghostfish and had leveled to 142 fishing in the process.

The changes to the tailoring mount, the flying carpet, have made it as useful as a traditional mount now (they’ve removed the mount and dismount animations), so it’s been set as Mingle’s default mount – I’ve been waiting for this change, as I loved the look of it but the delay in mounting/dismounting grew very annoying, very quickly.  On a related note, if I can ever save up enough I’d love to get the Chopper for Dingle – what better mount for an engineer, after all?

One change that has disappointed me is that the Dalaran cooking dailies are now only available for level 80 characters; bankrogue Pringle and hunter Kringle will have to finish leveling before they can continue doing them.  (Curiously enough, the jewelcrafting dailies are still available for Pringle, who’s only level 75)

So I guess it’s time to put a little effort into leveling those two – I’ve respecced Kringle (beastmaster again, my favourite spec), and replaced his pet gorilladin with a turtle (now that Thunderstomp, which made the gorilla so useful, has been made available to all Tenacity pets).  I’ll fire up Jame’s Leveling Guide later and see how we do – Kringle is level 74, and is about half-way through Howling Fjord so far.

No more raids until Sunday, so I’ve plenty of time to play with my alts.  Should gain access to the next tier of Tournament quests with Dingle and Mingle today as well, so I’m getting closer to the shiny new mounts.  For now, though?  ‘Tis dailies time!

/wave

Ulduar Hurts

The guild eventually managed to get some time in Ulduar (after the 6-hour delay to the servers coming back up this morning), and Mingle has been in for a little play in both the 10-man and 25-man versions.

We got pounded into the ground.  Repeatedly.  Just like the good old days of Burning Crusade progression raiding.

We only managed to try two bosses (and the trash to two more) in 10-man, and three bosses in 25-man.  I think we’re going to have to up our game substantially before we’ll get much further.

First up this afternoon in 10-man was the Flame Leviathan.  Now, I was quite concerned that this might end up being a disaster right up there with Oculus, but they pulled a hat out of a rabbit with this one.  I was given a turret on one of the siege engines and had a blast, well, blasting things.  It was pretty entertaining.

After a false start where we failed to take down the towers (and were trounced by Leviathan, adds and bombardment by orbital lasers), we cleared the towers and then took the Leviathan down, picking up a couple of level-219 items along with an Emblem of Valor.

The neck was of no interest to me, and after checking the stats on the cloth head, I passed on that as well (it being lower in stats than Mingle’s Helm of Rationality).  We followed that with a few attempts on Razorscale (which ended in mass cases of various death-by-fire), and tried to visit XT-002 Deconstructor but were thwarted by a couple of packs of rather nasty mechanical adds. Before calling it for the afternoon we tried pulling the two giant elementals outside Ignis’s room, but they very quickly pounded us into a fine paste.

Cue end of raid, for us to take a break and lick our wounds (which were mostly psychological, but still fairly debilitating).

This evening lead to the 25-man raid team entering Ulduar for the first time.  After some quick directions about the vehicles, we romped through the pre-Leviathan trash (making sure to kill the towers this time) and one-shot the Leviathan.  Admittedly, we did kind of fail miserably at getting the turrets on Leviathan down (I think we’ll need to organise that a bit better next time round), but that did lead to us completing our first heroic achievement, closely followed by a second achievement for looting our first Emblems of Conquest.

Things didn’t go that well afterwards as we found ourselves failing to perform against Razorscale, and a visit to the XT-002 Deconstructor (who was oddly trash-free in 25-man) proved equally fatal (although far more amusing – the voice for the boss was quite unexpected).

The server was taken down for emergency maintenance a couple of minutes after that, so the raid was called and everyone has limped away to recover.  Still, we have our first heroic Ulduar loot, so I guess we can call this round a draw.

Sadly I didn’t get the caster ring (which was slightly worse than the ring from Kel’Thuzad, but still better than the two Mingle is wearing), but at least it went to a good home.

And I’ve managed to finish my first one of the new fishing dailies on Mingle, and one round of the Tournament dailies on both Mingle and Dingle, so I guess it’s been a productive day all round.  Exhausting, but productive.

And speaking of exhausting…

/wave