Druid of the Moon

So we ventured into some… ok a lot… of Heroic 10 man ICC fights this week.

Let me give a short recap and maybe some tips.

Heroic Deathwhisper and Gunship are not bad at all. We downed both, a couple tries on Deathwhisper which required working on the shield down timing a little, getting better at interrupting her casts in phase 2, knowing when to switch DPS on the add in phase 2 while the tanks handle the threat drop, and managing the mind controls through the whole fight.The big change in 10 hero is she MC’s like in 25 and adds continue to spawn in the 2nd phase but just 1 at a time… oh yeah, she is also untauntable.

Gunship we one shot and that took longer than it needed to because I forgot to equip my rocket shirt and was stuck on the wrong side the whole fight. The big change is that the mages have more health, the ship has more health, and the adds hit a lot harder.

Heroic Marrowgar is a cluster ^*%$ of Epic proportions. No pro tips yet. Fire everywhere, spikes are out when he is whirling, he hits harder… yadda, yadda.

Heroic Saurfang seemed doable with a little more practice. The beasts are a major concern as they have a lot more health, slow players they get close to, 1 shot just about anyone, and move very fast. No pro tips yet but hopefully soon.

Heroic Festergut seems doable with practice the only big change is PP tossing goo from above during the encounter that everyone needs to avoid… that and Pungent Blight hits a lot harder just about requiring 3 stacks of spore.

Heroic Rotface we didn’t try much so no news there. Big difference right off the bat is that PP drops bile gas bombs on the raid during the fight.

To sum up, all the bosses hit harder and have more health. Then on top of that there are added mechanics in each one as well… so basically Ulduar hard modes on crack.

Let me properly thank the guys that make my raid nights and successes possible.

The amount of work that goes into being successful at this level of play and in the timely manner we are defeating content does not go unappreciated. Our 10 man group spends at least some time researching fights and communicating about possible strategy and tweaks constantly. We communicate well and we don’t point fingers or lose our cool because we trust in one another that we will improve with each wipe and learn from our mistakes.

In our 10 man group we without a doubt have 2 of the best main healers on our server in Zabery and Tildäiner. Frathlight is our 3rd healer that switches roles as needed and is amazing in his own right as there is no drop in performance when he makes the switch. Needless to say if I had to heal anything we would not get very far. Keep in mind, the success we are having is without the benefit of having a healer with Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.

We have 2 of the best tanks on the server with Celliana and Jefferson. I never pull agro and mobs are controlled to the nth degree. They know the fights, the positions, and know a lot about all the classes and game play to make sure we are successful. I doubt there are 2 other tanks on our server that are as good at communicating during a fight and chaining cooldowns at the right times. Both are tanks are incredible at not only tanking but watching the entire raid at the same time trying to make sure the rest of us avoid silly mistakes as well… they are the den mothers of our raid.

Our ranged DPS is crazy good. Kiya, Frathlight, and Alpacaa all know how to stay out of the proverbial fire while keeping strong DPS on bosses and handling things like balls and adds when needed. Another thing to note is our caster DPS is without any ICC trinket drops and poor Frathlight is still rocking Abyssal Rune.

Lastly, our melee DPS (Justeroo, Thionia, and myself)  is constantly tweaking with gear and specs to try to get out that last ounce of DPS or utility. We use every trick in the book to not be a liability on melee unfriendly fights and we support the raid in a lot of ways completely irrelevant to doing DPS. A HUGE thanks goes out to Thionia who just a short time ago was a hunter before switching mains to the Shammy he is now. This change is what made it possible for our 10 man group to continue to have success as a previous member left the game and we had to shift things around. He has learned the class very quickly and is now doing large chucks of DPS.

Bottom line, I feel lucky to have found myself playing with gamers of this caliber that also have personalities that make playing the game so enjoyable.

Thanks a bunch guys, on to getting our Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher!

Gratz to my fellow 10 man players as tonight we finally downed the Lich King.

• Celliana – “Can you taunt this spirit off me now”
• Jefferson – “Argent Defender proc’d so I can keep him a little longer”
• Justeroo – “Let me tweak my spec to handle that”
• Jacemora – “Let me respec for a PvP/tanking talent just in case”
• Kiya – “Damn it, one of these specs will do the trick”
• Thionia – “Why when Arthas sneezes do I die”
• Tildainer – “I will rez Jace as soon as I get out”
• Frathlight – “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, repeat”
• Alpacaa – “You want me to bother tranc shotting that?”
• Zabery – “Jace, can you farm some Flame Cap I want to see something”

Not bad, all in all we had about 5 hours of work on him across 3 days. A couple keys to the kill…

1. Practice, Practice, Practice… we were able to get to phase 3 on every attempt once we got the first 2 down and it was from all the experience and practice.
2. Tweaking to get every last ounce of DPS… still had 1:30 on the enrage though so not too bad.
3. The Alpha update of DBM… a big help as less talking needed to go in vent about the cast timers which freed up for more important info.
4. Reading lots of strats… a big initial help from Vallen and then some tweaking from some other strats out there to handle phase 3

I still need to do a full on kitty post on the whole of ICC, will try to get to that this week in between starting our heroic modes campaign.

So every now and again I write a post about something unrelated to World of Warcraft, not as often as BRK used to with his coffee ramblings, but once in a blue moon… this is one of those posts.

I can’t tell you how excited I am that Windows will be releasing a competitor to the Apple IPhone. Take a look HERE.

Most people know that many years ago in the infancy of personal computing Windows was made popular by taking ideas from the Apple OS, just as Apple did from Xerox and since then it has gone on and on and back and forth.

My beef is with Apple making the absolute horrible choice to tie their product down to one phone carrier (a bad one at that). Many of us are tied to certain carriers through our jobs, multiple year agreements, or area availability. Apple has always relished in turning it’s nose up to the masses and I can fully appreciate how it is going to bite them in the rear once again.

Microsoft failed with Zune, no one can argue that but it was due to Apple putting the Ipod product out there in mass at all price points, colors, sizes, and with a wonderful software product to make using them easy (Itunes).

Make no doubt Microsoft is about to borrow another idea from Apple and do the same thing with the Windows phone they did with the Ipod… I can just hear all the nerd squeals as people think about the apps they are going to be able to make for the Windows phone using Silverlight (just a guess as dev’s don’t know yet how apps will be made.)

Check out THIS slick Silverlight App out there now for ferals (ok, I had to slip in a Warcraft reference somewhere in the post.)

Bottom line, since I have Verizon as my carrier and have been 100% satisfied with my service and coverage, I am praying that the Windows 7 phone does not let me down this Holiday season… I believe my wait for an IPhone will soon be ended… and I can just point and laugh at my Iphone buddies and their continuously dropped calls and bad reception… muhahahahaha.

Disclaimer – I am in no way getting a free early Windows phone for this post and I will still have the Iphone wordpress plugin for my readers… psssst, if you work for Microsoft I would take one though and write awesome things about it.

My funny story is from just last night.

I go into Heroic HoS for the daily random as Boomkin (don’t laugh).

From the very first pull it was evident (warrior tank nub) that I couldn’t use AoE without getting agro… even with a delay. I then noticed when switching my DPS strategy to a single target (assisting off the warrior) that I still got agro, albeit only 1 mob instead of 2-3. Then I noticed the healer was getting agro quite a bit as well.

So here I am certain that everyone recognizes this as a fail group but no one has said anything.

So I decide I might as well AoE, agro and keep mobs off the healer and kill what I can while barkskinning and then melding if I need to… this is on just about every pull mind you… so I am having fun and we a moving along and the healer is doing a fine job keeping his feathery tank alive.

Still, no one is saying anything… everyone is keeping their composure as we quickly mow through dwarfs and bosses.

Then we get to the adds room (Tribunal) and it’s a complete clusterf*%$. Brahn dies from all the adds that get through the warrior like Dalaran Swiss. So I whisper the Ret pally…

Me – “Hey, can you do what you can to grab the adds with concecrate?”
Him – “lol”
Him – “he is pretty bad huh”
Me – “Yes, he is terribad”
Him – “lol”
Him – “Oh, we didn’t finish it”
Me – “no, Brahn died”
Him – “lol”
Him – “yeah, I was thinking I could go prot to help out”
Terribad tank – “can someone tell me what I could do differently that would help”
Me still whispering the Pally – “f%$@ it, I am going bear”

So I respec to kitty (I no longer have a bear spec) and change into my kitty gear and we start it back up.

I tank the whole place, burn cooldowns when I get close to dying, and the healer at some point figures out the warrior is standing in the entryway doing nothing as the Pally and I kill everything and starts making sure I don’t die.

We win, the healer thanks us for helping out and the warrior makes some snide comment about helping ourselves that made no sense…. so on to the final boss.

I switch back to Boomkin, the Pally switches back to Ret and we engage the last boss… well no surprise not only can the warrior not hold agro on the boss but he lets all the little adds run around freely as well… so we wipe.

So this time I tell the Pally, go Prot and tank the boss… please build as much agro as you can. We tell the warrior to pick up the little adds that the Pally is going to tank the boss… I switch to kitty thinking as long as the Pally can hold agro on the boss I will kill it myself pretty quickly.

So we engage, and the pally can’t hold agro over me either (in their defense I am guessing I out geared them in both boomkin and kitty) so I do as much as I can in kitty form while using barkskin, I meld, switch back to cat and kill about 5-6 adds real fast that the nub warrior isn’t tanking, then get back on boss… I pull agro again but I find a way to switch on and off the boss until the end where I just let the healer heal me through the last 10% or so I need to get him down.

He dies, I get many thanks from the healer and others… except the warrior, I think that felt pretty inconsequential to the whole operation I assume.

Managed to get through HoS in probably 45 minutes in a fail group that stuck together… I am guessing I could have 2 manned the place with the healer in all honesty.

Alot of people will look at a run like this as a waste of time, I find runs like this a ton of fun with a value much more than the 2 frost badges.