Did Mag Shrink?

Apparently its spring break for several of our core members this week so finding geared raiders was an issue last night. The officers decided to grab pretty much any level 70 that wanted to come and we headed off to go kill Mag. I went back through my blog to see if I had any previous good screen shots of Mag but I couldn’t find one. The reason I was looking is because last night everyone was commenting on how much smaller Mag looked. I wasn’t sure if I totally saw it or not but he did look different to me. Maybe everyone in my guild is just crazy. I don’t think I read anything about Mag’s graphic being “shrunk” since he is less powerful so I’m curious if it was?

Mag Last Night

I tanked Gruul and Mag last night which was kinda fun, I think I kinda missed being in the MT seat. We had very few tanks on last night so I tanked the first warlock and the second warlock which was mis-directed to me. Tab – sunder- cleave – tab – shield slam – cleave – tab – sunder – tab – taunt – cleave. Etc. That was kinda fun since I normally only tank the last one and both were dead before Mag spawned and I easily picked him up and tanked him against the wall. Mag is much easier now since his nerf, especially the cube rotation. Mag also drops a lot of loot now. 3 chest tokens, his random loot, his head, 20 slot bag, and a bag full of gems which had 3 purples and 2 blues. I picked up a gem which will be made into a 15 stam gem as soon as I find a JC online in the guild who has the cut. Mag also dropped 25g / 3 badges for each player which I thanked him for. I don’t see any reason to ever miss out on the free badges, gems, and 25g in the upcoming weeks it seems like he has been turned into the outlands “onyxia”. HKM and Gruul went smooth as well, each dropping an extra armor token , 10g each, and 3 badges. I’m really enjoying the fact that raid bosses drop badges now, doing 3-4 bosses a night plus going into ZA will give me a steady supply of badges and will hopefully keep me out of Kara as much as possible. In this post I’m going to include a few pictures that I forgot to bring the other day pertaining to my previous post about the new patch.

Already the alliance on my server are calling the new zone "Horde Island" since we have no chance of living long enough to quest there.

Here is one of the waves cresting the hill in Hyjal. Notice the Alliance NPC footmen ready to help. Behind them but out of the picture is dwarf gunmen, sorcerers, and knights which will also help

On our second to last wave people started losing connection in groups which eventually lead to 12 dc'd people and ended in a wipe and our only attempt for the night.(The aboms are cool looking)

Server Disconnects pooped on my first Hyjal.

Tuesday, new Patch Day: Downloading wow patch at work, all pumped up to maybe check out some new 2.4 instances, maybe raid Hyjal, or even do a new daily. Get home and see that my ISP is down. I give them a call, it will be down all through the night. Anger…..Skin begins to turn green, muscles bulge and cloths begin to rip and tear. That’s when my girlfriend says “Hey your mom called today to see if we wanted to stop by for dinner so she could hang out with the baby for a while.” Hmmmm my parents have an internet connection through a different provider that is even better than mine…..I begin to shrink away from the incredible hunk back into the bronzed god that I am and pack up my laptop to play wow there ..and get a free dinner out of it. So first off I log on and like most everyone else head off to IF and then to the new island to see what it’s all about. As of my last view of my server its 4 to 1 horde to alliance, after last night I’m pretty sure it’s more like 25 horde to 1 alliance. Upon landing all I saw was a field of red ganking horde. This may have been the roughest alliance ass raping I have ever had. I had a monstrous rez timer and no-where to run. I’d rez and walk a few feet toward the ocean and die, rez walk die, rez walk die. Finally I got far enough out in the water I went under, swam for a while, beached myself, and then hearthed. The beating was so bad I thought about stealing my kids bottle and curling up under a cover and crying myself to sleep. My first hour in the new patch was not enjoyable. I did do the two daily quests in northern hellfire later on and those were pretty quick and painless. I have been grinding primal shadows for a resist set so I’ll probably work those two quests into my pre-raid schedule. After my quests were done I was informed we were going to head into Hyjal just to see it for kicks since everyone was tired of getting ganked or done with their instance. Hell ya im all down for that. The raid forms up and before long I was checking out the inside of Hyjal. I really dig the idea of participating in “The battle of mount Hyjal” since I enjoyed playing the campaigns and beating the Hyjal map in Warcraft Three. We start the event surrounded by alliance footmen, knights, ranged dwarf gunmen, sorcerers and Jaina Proudmoore. We start the event and floods of scourge start flooding at us on two minute timers. I would charge in and grab the cryptfiends, aboms, or necro’s depending on what wave came out and hold onto as many as I could, the rest were held onto by our pally tank and another warrior. The hunters would peel off a mob from the paladin and kite him over into the npc’s then kite it back into the aoe killing field. This would get all the alliance army to help kill the scourge along with us, which I thought was really cool. First attempt were in there kicking ass tearing through wave after wave with time left to eat and drink. Then all of a sudden tweleve people are instantly disconnected on our second to last wave and unable to log back in. With that many people gone (including the pally tank) we couldn’t do anything about the free mobs raging about and it was a wipe. We hung out for a while waiting to see if these guys could log back in but it turned out they couldn’t so the raid was called. I really think we will be able to one shot this boss on our next attempt, from what I read the waves of scourge are harder than the actual boss encounter. I hope instead of jumping right into SSC tonight we go give Hyjal another shot first. I forgot to bring screen shots to work today to post along with this, but I’ll just include Hyjal pics the next time we head in. As far as the ass raping pictures on the new isle just picture horde everywhere you look with scattered alliance bent over in front of them.

Raydz Public Service Announcment!

I think I’m going to start adding Public Service Announcements to my blog that even though they may be non WoW related I think it’s important that you guys know about them.

Puppy vaginitis is a NORMAL mucous production in young bitches.

Read more about it here. Puppy Vaginitis

1 long ass night = ZA cleared

Woot

Because of the Easter holiday we didn’t have very many people on for Vashj attempts Saturday night so 10 of us grouped up together for ZA attempts. Had I known I was going in with progression psycho paths I might not have went, I was expecting maybe to go kill Bear, Eagle and Lynx but it didn’t stop there. I was in ZA from 9:00pm to 6:30am. In our group we had no one who had been past the 3’d boss in ZA so everything after that was all new territory, but that wasn’t stopping these guys. All the time, effort, and lots of gold (flasks and repairs) paid off though with a full ZA clear. I have now successfully Main Tanked all of ZA and that’s a good feeling. Besides feeling good from clearing ZA, Zul’jin dropped a nice little trinket for me!

My new Trinket

We headed in and beat Bear boss on the timer easily enough. We did not have a Pally tank so we wiped once on the eagle trash ramp which blew our shot at a second timer kill. After making it to eagle boss we quickly one shot him as well. Next we headed out to Lynx and again I would have liked a Pally tank here on the trash, not having one makes too much work for me! There were people in the raid who had been present for Lynx kills but I had never actually seen him die. On our second attempt we killed him and I got to check Lynx boss off my list of bosses to see die for the first time.

Lynx Dead

After the Lynx died the other prot warrior OT in our group said he would step out so we could get a pally tank. From what I read about the Dragonhawk boss is that you absolutely need a pally tank to hold onto the spawned dragon hawk adds. We got our Pally tank in the raid and headed off to clear to Dragonhawk. Since none of us had been to him before we didn’t realize you had to kill the scouts first to keep new adds from coming. That was discovered about half way through and made the trash much easier =). It took us four attempts to learn this fight and defeat the boss. I was really rooting for the shield but it didn’t drop.

Tanking DragonHawk (Cool Boss Graphic I thought)

Dead DragonHawk (No Shield for me, GRRR)

“Alright guys good job, we calling it a night?” I said “Well we are right next to Hex Lord we should just go see what he’s like” says some guy. *Everyone voices their agreement* In my head I’m calculating the time I’ll get to sleep before I have to wake up for Easter church service and then head to the family holiday get together. Already I knew I wasn’t going to get enough sleep and should go to bed, but I couldn’t leave these guys hanging. It took like three pulls and were facing Hex Lord. We start talking about strategies on bosskillers website and what we need to do. I think it took about 8 or 9 attempts and we killed him. This boss is pretty damn hard with his insane shadow bolt missiles going all over the place and his ability to steal skills from raid members. Example: He steals the hunters ability to lay down traps. Also at the beginning of this fight you have to deal with the 4 adds he has surrounding him. We ended up killing 3 and leaving one to be shackled the whole fight which seemed to work well for us. As a tank I have to constantly be aware of what abilities he has so I can move the boss away from traps, shaman totems, bash an array of heals, etc. He’s not an easy tank fight like the previous four bosses are. The Hex lord eventually died and again dropped no tank loot. Grrr 5 bosses down and nothing for me! I was a very sad loot whore.

Looking At Hex Lord

Tanking Hex Lord

Dead Hex Lord

After Hex Lord died the same conversation happens with me wanting to go to bed, and everyone else just wanting to have a few shots at Zul’jin. We open the doors to continue and out pours tons and tons of slaves. Thank god for the pally AOE tanking. After that initial rush of slaves there is no trash on the way to him and so a few minutes later were ready to face off against Zul’jin.

Tons of slaves pour through the doors after Hex Lord when opened

Path to Zul'jin has a neat ruins graphic i thought

Facing Zul'Jin I think blizzard was just to lazy to add a second arm to this boss

Zul’jin goes through five different phases so we figured it would be easiest to learn the phases one step at a time. We knew it was going to be a lot of wiping to learn this boss, and by not really explaining the phases up front we were guaranteeing we wiped on every phase but with so much information out there it seemed like people just needed to see it instead of having it read to them from bosskillers. Special Note to tanks: Every Phase Zul’jin except from 2 to 3 he does an agro wipe so you have to pick up massive agro on him right away every time, losing people in this fight before phase 5 means trouble. Phase 1 is simple enough where the tank holds him, melee hangs back to avoid whirlwind, and he does a knife throw that puts a bleed effect on a random person. This bleed effect is only removed by healing that person to full life (much like the big crab boss guy in slave pens, at least I think slave pens it’s been a while since I’ve been in there). On our first attempt we pushed the boss into Phase two where we promptly wiped.

Phase 1

Phase 2 once learned is also very simple. He turns into a bear which will do this special roar that will paralyze everyone for a certain amount of time (can’t remember how long) and will then do about 5k damage per person when it wears off. The first time the pally didn’t remove the roar from me fast enough so I was frozen in front of bear unable to block,parry,dodge, etc. I was smacked down like a bitch in no time. From then on it was decided that the pally would remove roar from himself, me, then the priest who would pick up removing the roar while the paladin kept me alive. That worked well and we were able to push through phase two with no difficulty. Side note: The pally has 6 seconds before the roar paralyzes everyone.

Phase 2:

Phase 3, WHAT A HUGE PAIN IN MY ASS – WORST BOSS IDEA EVER – MAKES ME MADE ENOUGH TO GO KILL SOMEONE. In Phase 3 Zul’jin turns into an eagle and hovers in the middle of the room. As a tank the boss does no direct attacks so you just dps as much as you can. Why is this boss a pain in the ass? He lets loose about 5 tornados that will chase you around the room, randomly switch targets, or they just go float around the floor in a crazy pattern. You have to avoid the tornado’s and the wall because when a tornado hits you it does 1000 damage. I realize this doesn’t seem like a lot but the tornado can throw you against a wall and then you’re stuck and can be picked up and tossed again over and over till your dead. They also can toss you into other tornado’s which does another 1000 damage and that tornado has the possibility of tossing you into ANOTHER tornado. The melee in this fight have to dodge the tornado’s run up and hit the eagle 2 or three times, then run out again to dodge the tornado’s. We have the easiest part of phase 3. Any spell that requires mana will directly cause the caster 1200 (Im pretty sure its 1200) health. So mages/warlocks have to have constant hots on them so they can DPS the boss. A druid is really your only healer in this phase because flash heals damage you for at least half of the heal in general. This is the longest Phase and possibly the biggest pain in the ass I think I have ever come across for a boss fight. The reason this phase is the longest is because it takes the most time to push him through 20% of his life since the melee has to keep running around and the casters have to wait on life before they can cast again. Our highest damage dealer this phase was our warlock who kept up constant dots.

Phase 3: Cool looking tornado graphics with the feathers and stuff, not cool enough to make me like this shit ass phase though

Phase 4, he turns into a mean ass cat. We handled this boss by everyone stacking up on the cat. He will randomly turn around and do these lighting quick cat claw attacks 10x on a person. It took our healers several attempts to react fast enough to keep our clothies from dying. Each hit was doing around 1000-1500 per hit so if the person got no heals they were dead pretty fast. The cat also turns around and does a charge which would sometimes one shot a clothie but there is nothing that can be done to prevent this except having the clothies wear stam gear which is eventually what we had to do. As far as tanking goes this is a pretty easy phase, just turn him away from the raid and do your thing.

Phase 4:

Phase 5, he turns into a huge dragon hawk. If you made it this far you should probably be able to kill him pretty easy. This is one of the easier phases if people pay attention. He will do a spinning whirlwind of fire which our healers just ended up healing through while our melee stayed on him. What you have to watch out for is the pillars of fire which will erupt from the floor. As a tank you also have to watch for these and be dynamic about moving the boss. If you stay in this pillar for longer than 1 tick you will almost always die. Other than watching out for the fire pillar though it’s an easy phase and we tore him down giving us our first Zul’Jin kill.

Phase 5:

Zul'jin Dead!

As mentioned Zul’jin was kind enough to give me a nice tanking trinket. I still need to get a chest piece and tanking axe from him so I’ll be going back as much as possible. Sunday morning the instance actually reset for us so when I got home from my family day I got online and we went and beat eagle and bear on the timer but missed boss 3’s timer. I logged after boss 3 because I was running on 1 hour of sleep and just couldn’t stay up any longer (bastard dragon didn’t drop my shield). I believe they replaced me and kept going so I’m not sure if I’ll get another shot at Hex and Zul’jin tonight or not, hopefully I will though if they are still alive. If those bosses are dead though I’m f*cking going home and going to bed.

Flood water FTL

Sorry it’s been since Monday when I last updated. I live in Missouri and right now we are getting slammed with flood water. My house is located near two rivers which are both about 40 feet above stage level, by the end of day today they are supposed to be around 43 feet. Luckily the house is located on a hill so it will go untouched by water. If it gets to the point i need to start worrying about the flood hitting me i think its time we start constructing floating cities (think water world) because were f*cked. Even though my house is safe right now its still really causing me alot of problems since all the roads around me have been flooded the fire dept has asked us to evacuate, which we did and are now shacking up at my parent’s house (Yes i realize im lucky in that my property is safe from flooding and i feel extremely bad for the hundreds of familys that have been hit, im just talking about my situation). It’s a very odd feeling when you have to take a boat to cross a major highway. So anyways that’s why I have had such a busy week between volunteer sandbagging, packing up cloths to stay at my parents house, and helping other people move furniture to the second level of their houses because they know they will soon get hit with the flood. *Yeah I know I’m a saint, that’s why women find me irresistible.* Here is a quick news bulletin they recorded yesterday on one of the roads I take to work near my house. Quick Video of them evacuating us. My camera phone sucks because i have dropped it about 100x but I took a snapshot of the road that leads directly to my house, which is under at least 10 feet of water now.

And here is a picture of the fire dept boat I had to take during the evacuation of my subdivision.

Besides the insane flooding I still logged onto wow at night. I had a pretty damn good week too. We have yet to attempt vashj yet this week but all of SSC is cleared and she is waiting on us. Void Reaver dropped his T5 shoulders for me that I picked up for a small amount of DKP and the TK trash also dropped a ring that I picked up which also went pretty cheap.

Comparing shoulder graphics (I think i almost prefer the old graphic)

New Shoulder Stats

New Ring

While these are both good upgrades for me what I’m excited about the most is that FINALLY I got a team to hit 1600 rating in arena’s! Woot F*#king A! If you are some awesome pvp guy and you think this is low and shitty well then...you can kiss my sack.

Since we havnt attempted any new bosses this week my post is somewhat short. Even though I have the body of a bronzed greek god I am beat from sand bagging and my brain isn’t working well enough to come up with anything interesting to say. Tonight I think we are trying Vashj and if she doesn’t die tonight we are going to attempt her again Saturday, I also plan to swim to my house Saturday or Sunday just so I can check up on things and make sure no jackasses are messing with my house. *Man that’s weird to say that* I also may take this opportunity of an evacuated subdivision to walk over to the house those kids live in (the snow ball kids who messed with my house over the winter), collect all their toys and toss them into the river.

Alar: Down, Solarian: Down, Vashj: My anus hurts

Friday Night – Alar Dies (and I think Tidewalker also, he’s dead but I can’t remember what day he was killed) Saturday Day – Went and saw “10,000 BC”. It was alright, I’d recommend waiting to watch the DVD if you have been toying with the idea of seeing it. Saturday Night - Solarian Dies Later Saturday Night – Vashj kicks our ass Sunday Night – Vashj Kicks our ass more which then causes guild drama (ugh) Friday night we headed into TK to down Alar. We killed him after a couple of attempts. Besides the nightmare of Vashj or Kael (Have not seen him yet but I hear he’s hard) I have to say that I think Alar is probably the hardest 25 man fight in SSC or TK. I accidently wiped the raid once (I hate hate hate being responsible for a wipe, luckily it happens very rarely). I can honestly say that this wipe even though my fault I had no control over it, and I’m really curious to know if this has ever happened to any other warriors. To tank Alar phase 1 you need a warrior or a druid to charge up the ramp and melee him before he shoots off too many flame buffets. I’m assigned to ramp charge on platform 4, which is not a problem I have been doing it fine all night and the previous weeks attempts. On this particular attempt I see that Alar is flying to platform 4, I start running up the ramp, charge in……and for whatever go right though the boss and proceed to sail right off the edge (looked like my dude was trying to commit suicide). Since there is no one there to be in melee range Alar begins to flame buffet everyone and it causes a wipe, lame. The rest of the attempts I did fine and my charges all worked as they were supposed to. I will say that as far as tanking goes the fight gets easier in phase two because he stays on the ground floor and you just have to swap Alar around between the tanks as you get a debuff which went pretty smoothly. It was good to see him die since he had given us a lot of trouble. It also allowed me to complete the next step of my BT attunement which is now on hold till I can get into Hyjal. Speaking of which I would much rather be one of the ashtongue guys instead of an NE, they make much cooler looking warrior’s (the quest line makes you take on the appearance of an ashtongue before you kill alar).

Alar Dead

Me as an ashtongue. F&ck NE i want to be this race

Saturday night we headed back into TK to learn the Solarian fight. At first it was hard getting a full 25 man raid up and going. We decided to just go to Solarian to “learn” him even though we only had 21 people. What a joke this boss turned out to be. Blizzard should just take out the boss fight and put a free loot chest in the center of the room which will hand out the free loot pieces. We killed him on I believe our 2nd attempt. My job of the fight was to tank the spawning priests and help control the kicks/pummels to interrupt the heals. This turned out to be pretty easy. He dropped the tanking boots but I decided to pass on them since I have the jungle stompers from ZA which I feel are right on par with the TK boots and I also picked up the recipe for the Havoc boots incase I ever wanted to craft those. Solarian is maybe the only 25 man boss that gets easier as he dies. At 20% he turns into a huge blueberry and just gets wrecked from that point on. Solarian is the equivalent or maybe even easier to Lurker as far as “difficulty” in my opinion.

Looking at Solarian

Blueberry EZ Mode

Dead Solarian

Lady Vashj is another story entirely. On this boss fight every person in the 25 man raid has a specific duty and if you fail for any reason you will wipe the raid, no other way around it. Vashj bent our raid over and gave it to us without any foreplay or lube every attempt we tried her (in case you’re an idiot this means she is a very hard boss encounter). We consistently get Vashj down to 60% but that’s when the raid gets wiped as we don’t have enough dps on the spawning Naga’s or Striders which then begin to wipe the raid leaving us with not enough people to kill the tainted elementals for the generators.

To many adds!

Eventually we will get this boss down but in my opinion it’s going to possibly be several more weeks of wiping before everything “clicks” and she dies. On a side note I did get to tank vashj for an attempt and we got her down to 58% because the MT got creamed off the bat with no heals. She is a tuff boss to tank because she is constantly stunning and rooting. I think I held my own though with some awesome heals backing me up. I look forward to the day that I have the gear to be the MT for a guild again because I miss it. On a second side note the guild drama I mentioned was because we keep wiping and people starting bashing on other people not doing thier job which caused our actual raid leader to gquit. That’s not good at all, the officers seem to think he just got frusterated and will rejoin, if he doesn’t that could mean bad news for future progression kills. I’m fine with farming the kills we have learned so far for a few more weeks, but ill eventually want to see Hyjal and BT, if we don’t get progression again I may have to look for another guild or soemthing. Until i know for sure though im going to transform into loot whore mode and make sure to get everything i can out of my dkp just incase.

Tanking the big Vaj

I didn’t pick up any new tanking loot (besides the recipe) over the weekend but I did enjoy the new progression kills. Tonight is an off night for the guild but hopefully I can get a ZA group together. I still have not been in there since my server transfer and there is a lot of nice tanking loot there.

He will feel the wrath of Raydz

Grrrrr Roar Grrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!! *Grabs the small Chinese coder who sits outside my office and smacks him around and then tosses him out the window to let off some steam* Tuesday we Kill Hydross, Lurker, Leo. Lurker dropped the mallet and I’m dying for a weapon upgrade. Because I picked up the T5 gloves I didn’t have enough DKP to beat out the other warrior so the weapon went to him. Alright fine I can live with that, he will use the weapon and was the same upgrade as it would have been for me (Kings Defender to Mallet). I did make sure to run him down on dkp so I can start to get ahead of him. The mallet cost him about 700 dkp so it didn’t go cheap. On a side note about the Mallet, what a retarded ass graphic this thing has.

Comparison.

Last night we killed Fathom-Lord and the raid kinda died after that because we ended up getting started late. It sucked only doing 1 boss last night, but i was really tired so it worked out okay for me. Fathom-Lord has 3 drops I would like. For tanking he has a very nice neckpiece which I would probably spend over 800dkp to get a hold of this. He also drops the T5 leg pieces which are not a huge upgrade over the badge pants I have, but I would still like them but id only spend a minimal amount of dkp on them. Last night they did drop and even though I really didn’t want to spend a lot for them I ran the dkp up on them to over 1000 knowing the other warrior wanted them. He obviously wanted them real bad so he kept bidding over me, which I am happy to see. That way when I really want something I’ll have more dkp than him. The game of DKP is ruff =) As far as the other piece of loot goes; I have talked several times about how much I enjoy doing arena’s, I find it just as fun as participating in raids. Right now I’m using the Axe that drops from Gruul, but what I really want is a 2 handed mace for the stun effect. I have been saving up my arena points to buy a pvp weapon but if I can get a comparable one from a 25 man I choose to do that and spend my arena points on season armor. “The World Breaker” is such a mace that drops from Fathom-Lord. The weapon actually dropped last night. As soon as I saw it linked in raid chat my head was instantly filled with 70’s porn music and I began touching myself.

“Hey there world breaker, how you doing baby? You want to come party with raydz? You do don’t you baby, ohhh ya, grab it like you want it”

I was in key position to pick it up with my dkp and the bidding started. Me and another warrior were going after it at first (he was probably just driving my dkp down like I was doing to him earlier, which is fine and the best way to keep dkp inflation down). My dkp was holding strong when another bidder jumps in to the fray. A resto shaman….. with an ass load of dkp….. he wants this weapon bad…… He caps out my dkp and ends up bidding more than me and getting the weapon. He said he wanted it for grinding. F*C* MotherF*CKING S*IT C@CK $WIOIEFH$&@#($#$()T#*$(HG#HP:ODSIFGSDCNI*THT$@##! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! This shaman is known for just taking random items for off specs and then never using them. Apparently the biggest beef is that he took some T5 shoulders and turned them into an enhancement set but never uses them because the rest of his enhancement set is all blues. I better see him running around with this weapon while grinding or I’m going to find him in Real life, tie him up, lay him in bed next to his mom whom I’m doing while his dad sits crying in the corner with a broken nose forced to watch. Thursday night is an off raid night for the guild, so im not sure if ill be taking the night off or maybe try to form up a ZA group. A hunter transfer buddy of mine is dying to get into ZA so If I get on ill see if I can get something going so he can hopefully pick up his axe. If I can’t get a ZA group going I’m going to log off and go find that f*cking shaman in RL.

Oh on a side note, this week in SSC I realized you can spell reflect the rampant infection. 7-8k relflects Very Cool.

Almost had Alar

Previously in the week we had zoned in and killed Void Reaver (No T5 shoulders for me yet!) and I picked up a pair of tanking bracers. Compared to my current badge bracers I’m not yet sure which ones I like more yet (I still have to slap a stam enchant on the new ones).

Since many in the guild feel we will be stuck at Vashj for a while the officers decided it was time to progress in TK. It was decided it was time to go learn the Alar fight. After the attempts we made I have don’t have a lot to say about him except. Damn you Alar! /shakes fist. You rotten Mot$er F*#ker piece of Sh#$. WHY WONT YOU JUST DIE! Sunday night we went into TK to learn the Alar fight. Several times we had him down to 4% but no luck in getting that killing blow. This is one of the hardest bosses I have yet to see on the 25 man content. When I say “hard” I guess I mean one of the hardest for the tanks, I suppose from a ranged dps point of view this is actually pretty easy for them. I have read several places this fight is all about tank coordination and add control, the rest is cake. As a tank you stand above the room on platforms to tank Alar. There is 4 platforms and he will go from platform to platform around the room. You must have a tank at that platform or he will start doing a fire buffet on the whole raid. The fire buffet is much like Mag’s fire spell and will quickly wipe the raid if left alone. Since we had 5 tanks in the raid (3 prot warriors/2 feral druids) that left us with 3 guys to cover the 4 top platforms and 2 druids to cover the adds on the bottom. That seemed to work out pretty well, with the 3 tanks at the top working in a rotation of covering the platforms. As a platform tank you have to remember to stand on the lip of the platform so the healers below have LOS on you or you will die ( I constantly worry about doing something to accidently fall off).

Me waiting at platform 4 ready to dodge quills or to tank him at my platform.

Me tanking standing on the "Lip" to get raid heals.

I myself caused one wipe which sucks, I hate doing that but it was my first time attempting Alar and even though I had watched the video it really didn’t prepare me enough for working the “quills”. In phase 1 Alar will fly up to the ceiling and start spinning in a circle raining down quills of fire. If you are hit by one of these its instant death. The good news is that they will only fall as far as the upper platforms. When he does this all the tanks have to jump down to the floor to avoid the quill death, which I did just fine and was never hit. The problem is that after he is shooting the quills he instantly flies to platform 1 or 4. The reason that sucks is that he gets to the platform and finds no tank there to tank him, since all the tanks are back down on the bottom level to avoid the quills. As soon as Alar is done with the quills the tank has to immediately begin running up the ramp toward his platform and then charge the rest of the way to get to alar to stop the fire buffet. One the wipe I caused I didn’t reach alar fast enough letting him get about 3 flame buffets off. Mistake quickly learned and I can now get back up to alar with only 1 flame buffet getting out (1 is good , 2 is normal). As a guild we have phase 1 down to a science now, no problems, no deaths. Tanks know their rotations, druid tanks handle their adds (we did have a problem with druid tanks for a while but that has also been fixed). Phase 2 is where we still have a problem losing people, which causes us to hit the enrage timer (usually around 4% left, which happened about 4 times Sunday night). Alar has several abilities which I won’t really explain here since this isn’t a “how to” post, but it seems like our dps had problems avoiding the fire and running away from the exploding mobs. Tank wise Phase 2 is easier than phase 1 and you just have to keep up a steady tank rotation on alar to avoid “molten armor” which gets your tanks 2 shot. Also while tanking Alar prot warriors can do what is termed “sweeping” which I found to be quite fun. Pop Spell reflect and go stand in a fire patch. You reflect the fire back onto itself which then puts out the flames. Your reflect does not wear off since the fire patch is technically a channeled spell and is what a prot warrior should be during while you have the “molten armor” debuff on you. Once we can get the dps to be a little more coordinated in handling phase 2 instead of running around screaming like their dick is on fire I think we will stop having people die and have more dps output allowing us to beat the timer.

Alar phase 2 ground phase

Alar's adds which have to be killed. (I shoudlnt have been tanking these but they were loose. Killing these adds takes off 3% of Alar's life and dps should focus on burning these guys down)

I am looking forward to this weeks raid schedule, im hoping we down a massive amount of farm bosses then leading to progession kills in TK and maybe some shots at vashj.

Warrior Threat Macro

I used to often have times where I felt my lag affects my ability to produce high amounts of threat. I found a macro on www.tankspot.com in the forums that I thought I would share with you in case anyone out there has the same problems. Before I found this macro I would find myself tanking and not being able to spend my rage fast enough. I couldn’t spend it fast enough because I was just a little bit laggy which ment that my threat per second was consistently hovering around 600-700, which bothered because i always knew i could produce more. Having a full rage bar means that any rage I was producing while having 95% or more was pretty much wasted because of the cap. This macro is not to be used except as a rage dump or threat boost. Smart tanking and manually using your skills is always the correct way to go, but if you lag like me sometimes you might need to spam this to get your rage down to an acceptable level and hike up your threat. After establishing agro on bosses (obviously it takes a few seconds to build up to this, you cant just run in spamming the macro right away) I can keep 900-1100 TPS consistently and 800-1000 on trash pulls. If I find my rage getting too high, I can mash spam the macro which can give me burst TPS up to 1500 which is pretty cool to see. This macro does not include shield block or revenge which I use along-side this macro, NEVER let your shield block go unused it’s too important to miss. You also have to be careful to not spam the macro to much fully draining your rage bar in case you need to spell reflect or shield bash a spell. This macro is supposed to help you with threat and rage management due to lag, you cannot tank off this alone. No-body likes a lazy tank, unless your incredibly sexy like me and then allowances are made in exchange for nude photo's.

The Macro (I apologize you cant copy paste it atm, ill add that back in later)

Normal Threat on mobs (800-1000'sh)

Burst Threat when rage gets to high (1100-1500 tps)

Fathom Lord Dead - Onto Vashj

Lady Vashj INC!

(Very Cool Medusa Graphic kicking)

Friday night the raid formed up and we headed in to take on Fathom-Lord. Three attempts later he was dead. I was surprised at how “easy” this boss is compared to some of the other bosses in SSC. He has a very “High King Mulgar” feel such as having a coordinated pull and adds with special abilities that need to be controlled. My job on this pull was the same as last time which was to tank the priest and kick the heals, which is easy enough. The priest will start to heal the other adds when they hit 65% and will randomly keep trying until that add is dead or back above 65%. I had a rogue to help me kick heals incase I was ice tombed, a warlock to use curse of tongues, and our healer was a shaman who could earthshock the heal if me and the rogue were ice tombed. On the attempt he died we did have one heal get through but thankfully he only healed the Hunter Add’s pet. I was ice tombed so was the rogue and the shaman was standing a little to close and ended up ice tombed as well which is why the heal got through. If I can recall correctly it was the only heal that got through the whole night. I did not bid dkp on the T5 pants because I find that my badge reward pants are pretty on par with these so I will save my dkp for a different piece for now. I have to say that after Lurker the Fathom Lord is probably the next easiest boss in SSC. I was actually kind of disappointed in the encounter as it is actually somewhat boring.

Dead Fathom-Lord

After killing Fathom Lord several people went and completed a section of their BT attunement, which I hadn’t done yet so yesterday me and a hunter buddy of mine went and got caught up on all the quests, so this week when we kill fathom I’ll be able to get one step closer on the BT attunement. Yes I know that soon it will not be required but I think it will be cool to say I was attuned before the restrictions were dropped. After Fathom just for fun we all wanted to see the bridge drop to vashj, which had a really cool graphic as it came sloshing up out of the water. It had a sort of "epic" feel to unlock the bridge as a guild first and im extreamly happy i could be there for that. We pulled her just for fun without any real fight explanation because it wasn’t a real attempt and people had to log. I ended up tanking her for a short time, and that chick can dish out some pretty hard core damage between melee and her spells.

My Grim Reaper after she killed me

Pre-Bridge

Bridge Building

Bridge Built (very cool)

Vashj about to whomp me one

This week after reset we plan to do as fast of a clear as possible so that we can get in some hardcore vashj attempts. I have read that many guilds get stuck on this boss for weeks or months at a time so I don’t expect a vashj kill this week but hopefully we can get her close.