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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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2.4.2 Patch Notes

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Megalis | No Comments

I was digging around on WoWWiki.com yesterday and found some early notes about Patch 2.4.2. Today however I see that the full notes have been posted to the official patch notes page at worldofwarcraft.com. Here are some of the points that I found interesting.

Greatly reduced the reagent cost for Glove Reinforcements. Also reduced the skill gain range slightly.

Although the required mats for the Glove Reinforcements are absolutely ridiculous, I was pondering using them to get a few more points past 365 (I’m at 363 right now) once Heavy Knothide Armor Kits turn grey. Beyond skilling up my leatherworking though, that glove enchant might actually be useful to me as a bear tank and with reduced mats it will be even more appealing.

All 23-hour profession cooldowns are now 20-hour cooldowns.
All 4-day cooldowns are now 3 days, 20 hours.

I’ve never had a tradeskill that had any of these cooldowns so I don’t personally know the agony of waiting weeks (or spending lots of gold) to completed a frozen shadoweave set, but I do get to hear about it all the time.

Most Main-Hand weapons are now One-Hand weapons.

That means dual wielders now have more options. Useless to me as a druid, but still cool.

Creature versions of the Polymorph spell no longer heal the affected target.

Fighting Shade in Karazhan will be a bit tougher now for those that can’t down him before he gets under 20% mana. In case you haven’t fought Shade and don’t know what I’m talking about, here it is: When Shade gets to the 20% mana mark, he polymorphs everyone and sits down to drink and get his mana back. When he’s done drinking he does a huge pyroblast that hits everyone for about 7k. Normally you would be back to, or close to full health due to the healing effect of polymorph and you would be able to survive that. After this patch, you’re probably just going to die.

Priest Spell: Power Word: Shield now has the correct sound associated with it and can no longer be heard from large distances.

Having grouped with Vishyna every day for the last month, let me tell you, that gets annoying. I’m glad they fixed it.

The dragons in Blade’s Edge Mountains will no longer instantly knock you off your mount.

That has always annoyed the piss out of me. I don’t know how many times I’ve died from hitting the ground while trying to do the bombing daily in Blade’s Edge and getting slapped down by one of those dragons. Good riddance to that.

Tauren weapons while sheathed have had their graphic readjusted to their pre-patch (2.4.0) state.

This one doesn’t really affect gameplay, but I wasn’t very happy about the decision to shrink Tauren weapons, so it’s cool with me. Blizzard said that Tauren weapons were shrunk to fix some clipping issues. If they want to fix clipping in their game there are plenty of other places to start that job then on Tauren weapons. How about the boat that docks at Booty Bay? You know, the one that drives right through the walkway that comes down off the dock. Or what about the Zeppelins that severely clip the docking towers?

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