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We really get around

Posted on May 19, 2008 by Megalis | No Comments

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.

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Done with Gruul’s

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Megalis | No Comments

We started our Wednesday raid night off with right at 20 people, so we formed two Kara raids and went to town.

My gear has improved a good bit over the past two weeks so I was given the MT spot this run.

Unfortunately for me and the rest of my raid, I am having a hard time keeping up with the threat that our DPSers can put out there. They are (most of them) horribly ahead of me in gear progression at this point. Not to mention that our Pally gave them all kings/might since they are used to not having to hold back at all.

The Attumen trash went down mostly fine. Had a few deaths from Attumen himself. Cleared our way into the dining hall without a problem. Then it got bad. A death on the AoE pulls. 4 or 5 deaths on one of the 2-pulls from against the wall. A couple more deaths from the 2-pull on the other side.

I need to take a good look at my gear. I think I’m far too heavy on the mitigation side of things right now. I don’t hit hard enough and I miss WAY too much. Even having the DPS give me 3 or 4 seconds to get threat on a pull isn’t a guarantee that they won’t pull threat immediately because my initial swings miss so much. And when I do miss, the healers pull aggro in a split second.

Right after we took down Moroes and his crew Vish and I took a quick AFK and when we got back, everyone was gone! It seems that a few more people had logged in and we had enough for a 25-man, so we were off to Gruul’s.

We wiped right away on Maulgar due to bad positioning of Firehand. We regrouped and took them all down no problems the second time.

Gruul also wiped us on our first shot there. Too many people got hit with cave in I assume. The healers went down, so the tanks went down, then the rest of us one by one. Then during rezzing, one healer got too close to Gruul and aggroed him. One person who had been rezzed started heading for the door. Gruul took out everyone who had been rezzed and went to chase down the runner. I was laying dead in Gruul’s chamber, but Gruul had been marked, so I could see him running through the caves.

After the runner was dead Gruul’s door opened and someone proclaimed that he had reset. But I could still see his mark running back through the caves. The same healer that had aggroed Gruul self-rezzed and started rezzing someone else. Then Gruul - on his way back to his chamber - showed up and stomped him again!

Does that count as three wipes or still just one? Either way, we killed Gruul without a problem on our next *official* attempt.

I got the Greaves of Malorne, making me 2/5 for T4. Oddly enough, those two are both from Gruul’s lair. I thought for sure I would have the two from Kara first. Oh well. I’m personally done with gear from Gruul’s now. It’s nice to know that I don’t have to compete with anyone for the drops there anymore.

The two T4 pieces I’m wearing now make it a bit hard to stay uncrittable (415 Defense for a Druid). Luckily I have recently made revered status with SSO and they have the Glyph of the Gladiator for sale. It’s pretty expensive at 85g (at revered anyway), but that 20 resilience put me over the mark for uncrittableness so I gladly payed it.

I’d rather have the defense and dodge from the Glyph of the Defender, but I’m not yet revered with the Keepers of Time. Five more Black Morass runs though and that bad boy is mine.

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On Saturday my raid group got back together and finished the remaining three bosses in Karazhan; Nightbane, Illhoof and Netherspite.

I got a Gilded Thorium Cloak from Illhoof, my first piece of real raid loot with my guild, The Asylum. My new cloak is only surpassed in bear-tank goodness by two other cloaks in the game according to Emmerald’s feral tanking gear list.

On Sunday we strolled on into Gruul’s lair and knocked some faces in the dirt and I picked up the Mantle of Malorne from High King Maulgar. These are also pretty high on Emmerald’s list, only surpassed by the T5 and T6 shoulders, two PvP shoulders and an upgraded Sunwell drop (Shoulderpads of Vehemence + Sunmote = Demontooth Shoulderpads).

After Gruul was down we regrouped at Coilfang Reservoir and had another stab at The Lurker Below. We had given him a shot last weekend but couldn’t make it happen.

This time we gave it three tries before we had to call it. On our second try we got Lurker down to 2% but we had too many dead folks to make it through the Naga phase.

After our third attempt we did a ready check to see if we’d have enough people to make Monday an official raid night for this week and give it another shot. We had enough, so it was settled: be here and ready to go on Monday night for another go at Lurker.

After two full nights of failures on Lurker, Vishyna and I started looking up as much information as we could about the encounter to help mitigate any errors that had occurred or might occur.

Here are some important facts we found:

On Monday, we made sure that the entire raid understood these things along with what we had already learned, and then we had at him. We had a couple people who hadn’t been in on the previous attempts and we lost them early during our first two tries. After those two tries though, everyone seemed to finally get it.

On our third try we only ended up with four or five dead players and Lurker went down quite easily in just over 10 minutes. Grats to the Asylum for now being 1/6 in SSC.

After three full nights of trying to kill The Lurker Below it has become apparent to me that he is not actually a difficult boss. He is a test of attention span. Each individual in the raid must stay focused the entire time. There is a lot going on in this encounter and you can’t just sit back and repeatedly fire off your favorite spell or ranged attack while occasionally moving out of the way of a cave-in or black hole.

If everyone pays attention and survives, which is very easy to do, then The Lurker Below will be happy to cough up his T5 loots for you.

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