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Megalis, Champion of the Naaru
So I’ve had the Trial of the Naaru quests in my log for ages now, I just haven’t wanted to do them. I see Heroic Shattered halls is a huge pain in the ass. And apparently nobody else in the world ever wants to do Heroic Shadow Labyrinth or The Arcatraz.
Our guild has been killing Magtheridon for a while now (and I happen to know that after the three previously mentioned quests, there is a follow up to kill Magtheridon), so I figured it was high time to get them out of the way.
Sunday afternoon I managed to scrape together a group of guildies who also had the same quests waiting to be completed. We set out for Steamvault first since we all agreed it was probably the easiest one. Mekgineer Steamrigger dropped Schematic: Rocket Boots Xtreme. I greeded on it with the other engineer in the group and I won it! (Patch 2.4.3 disabled those boots in Arena play by the way).
We all flew over to Shadow Labyrinth next. Pretty much breezed through the entire instance right up until Murmur. I believe I was the only one in the party who had fought Murmur on heroic mode previously. I explained the fight, and then we wiped. We tried it again and we wiped again. Then I remembered one tiny little detail about the heroic mode fight. Everyone has to stand in his circle with him and run out when he starts to draw in energy. Another try with that detail in mind and we wiped again, but I think everyone got the hang of it and we got him down on our next try.
Ok, so Strength completed. It was almost raid time so we decided to reconvene later and finish up the other two quests.
Monday night’s raid was canceled when not enough people logged in, so we took advantage of the situation and went off to finish up our other two quests. We decided to hit Shattered Halls first. Our only crowd control was a hunter (without any of the talented trap improvements). Nevertheless we fought our way through, suffering only a few deaths and no wipes. Mercy completed.
The Arcatraz was all that stood between us and Magtheridon, our last trial. Then we find out that our hunter had already completed an Arcatraz run earlier in the day while the rest of us were at work! She drops out and we pick up a boomkin who needed the rep/badges/etc.
So Heroic Arcatraz with no crowd control. Amazingly enough we breezed through it. I only let our Enhancement Shaman die twice and our Boomkin ate it once. Tenacity completed.
At this point I’m really glad our raid got canceled and we were able to complete those quests because we had a Magtheridon raid scheduled for the very next evening.
An amazing week for The Asylum
It’s been an awesome week for the asylum. In the span of seven days we have taken down three new bosses.
It started last Tuesday when we did our now typical ‘kill Gruul, then go kill Magtheridon, then do some Hyjal trash’ run. That day ended with us actually killing Rage Winterchill.
Bracers of the Pathfinder
Stillwater Boots
Thursday was the usual ‘kill Lurker then head for Leo’ night and ended with Leo dead for the second time. We went back to SSC on Sunday and floored Morogrim Tidewalker for the first time on the second attempt.
Girdle of the Tidal Call
Mantle of the Tireless Tracker
Talon of Azshara
Our main Paladin tank (to whom our plate nature resist set is soulbound) and our main Warrior tank were both online. So the Warrior grabbed the unused frost resist set from the guild bank and equipped it all and we tried Hydross.
Unfortunately we had quite the issue with Hydross gunning down DPS classes on the phase switches. I think our best attempt was somewhere right above 40%.
Last night we decided to have a stab at Hydross again, but our Warrior with the frost resist set was not able to raid so I had to try and tank the frost form. Having a grand total of 70 frost resist, I ended up taking repeated 12k hits by the time Hydross’ debuff was stacked to 100%. Time to move on to something else.
With no clear strategy having been discussed for Fathom-Lord Karathress or Lady Vashj, we decide it’s best if we just go to Tempest Keep and have a go at Void Reaver.
We went with a simple strategy. Everyone except for 2 hunters piles up under Void Reaver’s feet. The two hunters will kite the Arcane Orbs. Two tanks fight for aggro and everyone else just blasts away. Four tanks is recommended, but we only had 2 viable tanks in the raid.
I think we had a good number of people who didn’t quite understand that when Void Reaver knocks a tank back, they drop about 10-20% of their threat on him. We had two failed attempts due to DPS classes getting destroyed after Knock Away, but I was able to walk him to the door and reset the event without it being a total wipe.
On the winning try, what I did was call out for all DPS to stop when the Paladin tank got hit with Knock Away to give him time to get up to #2 on the threat list. That way when I took a Knock Away, he would be the #1 threat target and not 5 or 6 of our DPSers.
We cut it close though. At about 15% I got knocked away while the Paladin tank was still #4 on threat. At that point Void Reaver moved to pick up his #1 threat target, a DPSer. The key to our strategy was having Void Reaver stay in one spot for the entire encounter. If everyone is in melee range they won’t get targeted by Arcane Orbs (hence the two hunters kiting them from range).
When Void Reaver adjusted his position to destroy that DPSer, suddenly we had a bunch of people out of melee range. We took at least one Arcane Orb and lost about 10 people, but our healers stepped up and kept enough people alive to beat the enrage timer by 5 seconds!
Pauldrons of the Fallen Defender
Pauldrons of the Fallen Defender
Pauldrons of the Fallen Hero
Girdle of Zaetar
It might have gone smoother with another Druid or a Warrior tanking, since it’s easier for those two classes to gain threat than it is for a Paladin. Sometimes you have to just make due with what you got though.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I finally got my Wildfury Greatstaff from the trash about three pulls before Leotheras when we killed him on Thursday.
Kill Strategy: Ahune
If you hadn’t already heard, from June 21st until July 5th is the Midsummer Fire Festival. During this time there will be a seasonal boss awaiting you in the Slave Pens of Coilfang Resevoir. He is know as Ahune <The Frost Lord>.
I have noticed a lot of people complaining on the forums and in the chat channels in-game that this boss is simply too hard. So I’d like to share the strategy I’ve used for downing him numerous times now.
It’s a short run to Ahune. Two packs of Bogstroks and two single Naga Slavehandlers in the first room. A two-naga patrol in the hallway. Then the infamous four-pull right after the hallway (the one that usually lets you know if your PUG is going to make it or not). A three-naga patrol, one Slavehandler and a last group of Bogstroks on the right and you’re ready to fight Ahune.
Here’s what it boils down to.
Throughout the fight there will be ice spikes forming under random players. You will see a trailing white swirl around yourself, circling towards the ground. When the swirl reaches the ground an ice spike will shoot up and throw you into the air if you are still standing on it. Aside from that, Ahune has two phases.
Phase One
Ahune is immobile and his only damaging ability is melee so he doesn’t need to be tanked. Just don’t get near him. During this phase Ahune will have a shield which reduces all damage taken by 75%.
He will immediately summon an elite elemental - Ahunite Hailstone - which casts Chilling Aura on everyone nearby. Chilling Aura causes a stacking DoT which does 300 damage per tick per application. It stacks up to 10 times which results in 3,000 damage per tick.
Throughout phase one Ahune will be summoning two Ahunite Coldwaves. He will sometimes summon a single Ahunite Frostwind with them. These elementals have about 2,000 hit points. He summons them every 5 seconds or so at first, and progressively faster with each phase switch.
I’m not sure what the exact time is, but after what seems to be about 60 seconds, phase two begins.
Phase Two
During phase two Ahune retreats, exposing his Frozen Core. This is the time to blow all of your damage cooldowns. Any remaining elementals will not despawn and must be killed. This phase seems to last about 15-20 seconds, after which Ahune returns to phase one.
My first attempt at Ahune was on heroic for a guildie who wanted the Deathfrost enchant. It was day one of the festival and not much was known about Ahune’s loot tables and whether or not there was a better chance of the enchant dropping on heroic or not. Rather than risk it by taking the easy route, we simply did it on heroic mode with the hopes that we’d have a better chance of seeing it. Plus I had Wanted: The Heart of Quagmirran in my quest log from a few days prior.
Our group consisted of a Warlock, Rogue, Boomkin, Holy Priest (who wanted the enchant) and your’s truly.
I tanked the elite elemental between the boss and the plateau in the middle. The Warlock and the Boomkin helped me kill the elite from a distance. This meant that I was the only one with the stacking DoT.
The Rogue killed the weaker adds to keep them off of the healer since that is almost invariable who they will end up targeting due to heal aggro. When the elite was down all DPS goes to the small adds until phase two begins.
I threw out a swipe whenever I could to grab the small add that spawns near my tanking spot.
Ahune will let you know when he is about to retreat and expose his core. All of the DPS needs to ignore any adds that might remain and let the tank pick them all up. It’s vital that you do as much damage as you can during phase two.
The more phase swaps you have to endure the harder things get. The adds come faster with each phase swap and people start running out of mana. On normal mode you should be getting him down on the second Frozen Core phase. On heroic it may take three. Chances are you won’t survive longer than that.
Remember to not stand still at all if you can help it. The ice spikes not only damage you directly, but you take falling damage and it leaves you out of commission for 4 seconds or so while you sail through the air. Healers getting hit with the spikes are especially troublesome.
After two wipes while we tuned our strategy, we got him down and our Priest got his Deathfrost enchant!
It appears that the only distinct difference between regular mode and heroic mode is that Ahune has more hit points on heroic.
This seasonal boss is certainly not easy. In fact, he doesn’t seem to fit with the relative ease of the rest of Slave Pens. It’s not impossible though and it makes for a very interesting challenge.
On heroic mode you get as many chances as you need to kill him. But when you have killed him, that is your only shot for the day. On regular mode, you accept a quest to summon Ahune. You can only accept this quest once whether you win or lose, but everyone in your party can do it separately.
Since that first kill I’ve gone back with several guildies on regular mode, including a level 65 Mage and a level 62 Hunter. In one single instance I was involved in 7 separate kills. We just kept swapping people out as they used their quest to summon him. I’ve still only seen Deathfrost that one time on heroic, but I’ve seen Frostscythe of Lord Ahune four times now.
Leotheras the Blind Down
On our third time clearing to and attempting Leotheras, he has finally been relieved.
We’ve been to see him twice before and gave him a few shots both times with no luck. One of those was a 6% wipe. Last night we made our way there and got his loots on our first shot.
Gloves of the Vanquished Defender
Gloves of the Vanquished Defender
Gloves of the Vanquished Hero
Coral-Barbed Shoulderpads
Pattern: Hurricane Boots
I was lucky enough to receive one of the T5 glove tokens.
After that we swung over to say hello to Morogrim Tidewalker. Most of us had never seen him before and very few had done any reading about him. Nevertheless there was a quick explanation, I was going to main tank him while two paladins picked up the Murlocs. We only had time for one shot and although we didn’t kill him I feel we did pretty well, getting him to 52%.
Guide to Threat Part I: What is Threat?
I mentioned recently that I wanted to write a series of posts on threat, what it is, how it works, etc. I should say again that I didn’t decide to do this because I think I’m uber or that I understand anything in WoW better than anyone else. I just think that if I take the time to do the research and write it all down for others to read in an easy to understand manner, I will understand it much better myself. So here goes nothin’.
What is threat?
Wowwiki.com says:
Threat is a measure of an NPC’s aggression towards a player.
That pretty elegantly sums it up I think.
More specifically, threat is the mechanism in the World of Warcraft which helps an enemy decide who or what to attack. When you’re out questing with other players or romping through dungeons with a full group, the enemies you encounter need to decide who they will be focused on and threat is what controls this.
Each enemy you encounter in WoW maintains a list of all players it is aware of and how threatening they are. The player who is highest on a given enemy’s threat list is going to be the one getting attacked (with some notable exceptions).
Without the threat system, enemy encounters would be wildly out of control and players would spend more time running back to their corpses than actually enjoying the game. Especially Mages and Warlocks.
Threat is created by damage done to enemies and beneficial effects to players. Beneficial effects include healing (from spells or items including bandages, potions and health stones), buffs (such as a Warrior’s shouts), and regaining mana or rage from spells or items.
Threat from damage is applied directly to the enemy the damage was dealt to. You blast an enemy with Fireball or whack him with Mortal Strike, he gains the amount of damage you dealt as that many points of threat towards you.
Threat from beneficial effects is generated on ALL enemies that are aware of the player that caused the effect and is divided evenly amongst each of those enemies. So there’s a group of three mobs being tanked by a player in your group. When you heal that tank, the amount of health he regained (not including any extra overhealed amount) is divided in half. One half is thrown away and the other half is divided evenly among those three mobs as points of threat towards you, the healer.
And that is just the base threat system. Most classes have talents that increase or decrease the amount of threat they generate (ex. Feral Instinct). There are pieces of gear that come with threat modifiers (ex. Muck-Covered Drape). Some abilities even have innate threat modifiers built into them (ex. Searing Pain).
Now trying to do all this math on the fly is impossible. Even if you are some sort of computer-brained math wizard AND you could actually SEE what everyone in your group was doing at the same time AND you knew every threat modifier they had equipped, talented and enchanted, trying to keep up with it would be exhausting.
That’s why there are AddOns that keep track of and allow players to monitor their threat. Arguably the most popular is Omen. A popular alternative is KLHThreatMeter. I personally use Omen so that is the one I’ll be referring to throughout my guide.
And speaking of math, I think this is a good place to stop and wait for the next installment. Be on the lookout for Guide to Threat Part II: Math.
I’m still here
Just a quick update to say that I am still playing WoW and that I am actually still playing on Shandris with Vishyna and the rest of The Asylum. It looks as though I’ll be staying for good after all.
Still raiding. Got some new gears. Tanking Zul’Aman. Had a go at Hyjal Summit and the Battle for Mount Hyjal.
Will post more later. Bai.
Real life strikes again
I know that posts like this usually signal the end of a WoW blog. In my searches for other WoW blogs I’ve seen more posts like this than I care to count and they are usually the last post on the blog. I can’t promise that this one won’t suffer the same fate, but I will say that I do enjoy blogging and I hope I can make it back here to carry on soon.
To avoid being completely vague, I will say that Vishyna has decided she is moving out of our house. She’ll be leaving this weekend.
I will not be staying in The Asylum or even on Shandris. The Asylum was founded and is lead by several of her coworkers so it doesn’t make sense for me to stick around there. And I won’t feel comfortable playing on the same realm with her.
With that being said…
T4 geared Feral Druid (Horde) with some experience in SSC looking for guild. Willing to transfer realms.
We really get around
On Friday night I crafted myself a pair of Boots of Natural Grace (bought the pattern on the auction house). I also crafted the Primalstrike Vest and Primalstrike Bracers for my Kitty set. Immediately after crafting my Primalstrike stuff I went on a Heroic Black Morass run for the daily and guess what? I had enough badges for the Band of the Swift Paw. I had intended for them to replace my Umberhowl’s Collar for my tanking set, but they also replaced the Primalstrike Bracers from my DPS set. What an incredible waste of 3 Primal Mights.
With some of my new gear I’ve lost a considerable amount of defense rating and resilience. I’ve had to supplement it with enchants here and there to keep myself uncrittable. I’m currently rolling with Enchant Chest - Major Resiliance and Vindicator’s Armor Kit on my gloves and boots to keep myself over the limit.
Ok on to the raid details.
As much as the majority of folks in my guild would love to stop running a weekly Karazhan raid and focus more on 25-man content, it’s just not practical right now. There are too many people (myself included) who still need gear from there. Not to mention the 22 Badges of Justice you get for a full clear.
I’m 3/5 for T4 now, but only one of those is an item that I will continue to use for any length of time (the Mantle of Malorne), and I still need the helm from Prince. Megalis has seen that dude die about seven times now and still no helm.
And speaking of badges, I need to save up 100 of them for Embrace of Everlasting Prowess which makes the T4 chest obsolete. Not that I have the T4 chest. I’m still rocking the Heavy Clefthoof Vest. That chest piece, plus a ring, a cloak, an optional necklace and some other odds and ends add up to quite a few badges that I still need. And 3-5 badges here and there from heroics just isn’t going to cut it. I need those weekly Kara runs.
So anyway, the guild ran two Kara raids on Saturday. My raid finished a full clear in about 4.5 hours. Not quite as quickly as the raid a couple weeks ago (3.5 hours) but we had several people on the bench that had to get swapped in and out as well as two or three wipes. I sat out for Chess and Opera. The Curator finally coughed up his damn gloves for me. Still no staff from Illhoof, helm from Prince or tank ring from Shade. The gloves do make me happy though. I was using one of those crappy PvP pieces you can buy at honored rep with all the outlands factions.
Sunday was a quick clear of Gruul’s and then over to SSC. Gruul dropped the Aldori Legacy Defender for the main Warrior and he had it gemmed and enchanted before we even got to SSC.
SSC was really fun. Lurker went down first try. As usual the new people were dead almost right away. Remembering that Lurker whirls after each spout as well as on a regularly scheduled basis is key and I see a lot of people who either don’t care about it or forget about it standing right up next to Lurker pounding away on him as he whirls.
We headed straight for Leotheras after that. We had one wipe on the two bog giants. It was supposed to be one, then the other but while we were fighting the first one the second one was aggroed.
Then there were the two trash pulls just outside of Leo’s chamber. We planned on sapping one but something went wrong and the Rogue was spotted. That would have been fine but someone pulled the other trash right next to the group we were fighting and it went downhill quickly. I didn’t stick around to even try and salvage it. I ran back up the ramp and jumped down to the previous level. The mobs had to run a long ways around to try and catch me and they gave up before that happened. One of the priests got bubbled so it wasn’t a full wipe and we were back in action a couple minutes later.
Once inside Leo’s chamber there are five or six more trash pulls before him. Incredibly, we had the Boots of Unending Courage drop on two of these trash pulls. Still no greatstaff for this Druid :(
The rest of the trash before Leo was cleared and we were ready. The fight was laid out for those that hadn’t researched it or done it before. Our Warlock put on his fire resist set to tank Leo’s demon form. Myself and a Paladin were chosen to tank the human form.
We lost a huge portion of our DPS on the first whirlwind, but I think some of them got a better idea of how to avoid it next time. The human form tanking part is rather easy. I just have to grab aggro before anyone else does, then let the Paladin take the aggro from me. If I get a demon summoned on me I can kill it very easily and get back to swatting at Leo.
We only had enough time for the one try, but we gained some insight into the fight that just can’t be gained from reading about it or watching videos of it. Next time we’ll give ourselves a better window and have time for several shots at Leo. Hopefully we won’t need them all though.
Three different raids this weekend. I had a great time and I think everyone else did too. Making that progress at the end was super nice too. We’ve killed Lurker several times now and we always just left after that. I’m glad we were finally able to press on.
Raid night cancelled
I’m not sure if it was yesterday’s patch or an update to the addon itself, but EP/GP - our raid loot system - failed horribly and we weren’t able to raid. We didn’t learn this until we were already standing in front of Gruul’s Lair though. Bayre and Docblood, our guild leaders, spent almost two hours trying to fix it while the rest of us dueled each other and members from a few other guilds who were gearing up to head into Gruul’s.
Finally the raid was called off and I went about finishing my SSO dailies.
The first two I turned in were the ones in Shattrath that give Shattered Sun Supplies and I got two Badges of Justice!
As of patch 2.4.2, The Multiphase Survey no longer rewards a Shattered Sun Supplies :(
I finished all of the SSO dailies aside from Rediscovering your Roots and finished out the night with only 2k more rep to go until exalted. If I can get half of the dailies done tonight I’ll be exalted and I can buy my Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve.
After I am exalted with SSO and the only thing I want from dailies is money (and the rare drops from fishing/cooking dailies of course), I’m going to focus on clearing out my quest log. It’s full of dungeon quests that I have put off. Seer Udalo, Auchindoun…, The Warlord’s Hideout, How to Break Into the Arcatraz, and many others.
I’ve got plenty to keep me busy on non raid nights.
Thanks for the reminder
Just wanted to thank Phae for the link in her recent Community Spotlight post and reminding me that I needed to update my character images from the guildlaunch signature creator. The old one was from when Meg was level 67 and questing in Nagrand so the stats were far from where they are now.
Old
New
It’s funny, many of the gear upgrades we get as we play seem to be so frustratingly small, but they really do compound over time to make for huge changes in a character.
I still need to log in my old Warrior and put some actual gear on him - rather than the Tuxedo set he’s wearing now - and get a new character image for him too.
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