Hibernation

Looks like I haven’t posted in a long while. Been busy with a fair amount of work, other non-work related work, and also a declining interest in WoW as well.

Ulduar
My guild has been progressing decently in Ulduar-10, but have been stuck on Mimiron for a couple of weeks. We raid Ulduar only 3 nights a week, and the earlier bosses pretty much take up 2 full nights (especially Freya’s trash….) This leaves only 1 night for attempts, and the fight is quiet complicated so it is difficult to bring new people in if the regulars aren’t able to make it for some reason.

Since the last Ulduar update, we have cleared a few more bosses.

Hodir is just extremely annoying as a healer. It’s simply a long, drawn out fight that leaves me feeling tired. My friend’s description of “Indian dancing” around lights was pretty much spot on. The last time we downed him, we wiped a few times due to us bringing in a guest resto druid who had never seen the fight before, together with another resto druid who was just a weak healer (consistently about 30% lower healing than me and the usual holy priest). It’s ridiculous that on a fight where there is constant movement a resto shaman can outheal 2 resto druids. The whole fight is just about constantly jiggling left and right, avoiding icicles, standing near the snow piles so you can get on to avoid flash freeze, and preparing to spam chainhealzorz when he gains frozen blows… over and over and over again until he dies. Mana isn’t even an issue for a resto shaman since the constant raid damage means water shield charges keep proccing.

I did Thorim gauntlet the previous week as well. This seems easy enough, except it took me a while to realise what the miniboss shooting animation was like. The first miniboss does a skadi breath like attack, where a wave of force comes down either the left or right side of the corridor depending on which arm is firing. I expected a bit glowier animation or at least a visible wave of damage, but instead you just get hit depending on which arm is smoking. I got hit a couple of times until I figured it out but even then, on 10-man I just healed myself through it. The rest of the gauntlet seemed to be just tank and spank.

Ignis… is also another annoying fight. Somehow we don’t really seem to have a strat, unlike what I see other guilds use. Our main pally tank just seems to tank Ignis near the pool, and our boomkin and dk tank just handle the adds by themselves. The only things to look out for are to avoid casting during his flame vent, otherwise you get silenced, and to heal the person in the vibrating crotch pot.

Currently we can get through Mimiron phase 1-3 flawlessly, after about a night of serious practice tries. Phase 1 is all about using cooldowns to survive plasma blast, and spamming heals on the main tank.

Phase 2 is just a healing extravaganza since there is a ton of unavoidable random damage. I was running myself low in this phase until I figured out that I should just stand close to the melee and run rings around him to avoid the missile strike while spamming chain heals instead of standing far away and being forced to use lesser healing wave on single targets getting spewed on by lasers. I keep telling the ranged dps and the other 2 healers to come close too, but for some reason they are shy folks and love standing by their lonesome where they can’t be aoe healed.

Phase 3 is quite easy, a ranged dps tanks the flying head easily with earth shield on them. Assault bots are picked up and dpsed down, with the dk handling the bombbots using that freeze move. I use a macro to target bombbot and /cast Frost Shock to help slow them down when they spawn. Overall this is just a mana regen phase for me.

Phase 4 is pure chaos. Our problem right now is the pally tank getting instagibbed by either a missile or a laser barrage. It just takes time to practice since dps seems up to the job of coordinating to take the separate parts down together.

Argent Tournament
I don’t even know why I bother doing these dailies, but it just seems a waste not to. I’ve sold 2 mechanopeeps so far, for 3.5k and 2.6k gold respectively. Since it takes 8 days of dailies to get 40 seals, this is about 325-437g per day in addition to the 150g from dailies. I’ve been getting Scourge Curio as the JC daily a lot too, which means I can knock it off together with the killing Icecrown Scourge dailies. At this point Pockie my ret pally has gotten Ambassador of the Alliance and has enough seals to buy another pet, being a Champion for 4 factions. I saw a guildie using the Darnassus pet treant, and it’s so adorable. It sleeps and dances just like a real resto druid haha, reminded me of my wife’s resto druid sleeping in SSC and wiggling that tree root tail.

Death Knight
For some reason I’ve picked up levelling my Death Knight again. I pretty much abandoned him a while back since I couldn’t get into how the Death Knight played. I also had to spend time levelling up his mining and blacksmithing, which was annoying and probably contributed to his being tossed. Now that I’m actually playing him, it doesn’t seem so bad. Though they are still really overpowered. I soloed Araj the Summoner, along with 6 random buddies that I aggroed accidentally, to get my Scholomance key. With no talent points and no glyphs. I had forgotten that there was a talent reset, and my glyphs were for Unholy abilities. In one weekend he got from 60 to 63 and is now chugging away in Hellfire Peninsula. At least the feeling of /facerolling has been reduced slightly, though what I’ll do as yet another tank/melee dps at 80 hasn’t been decided yet. I’ll probably try to splurge some gold on him, though I don’t think he can put a dent in my 122k.