Druid of the Moon

Archive for the ‘Achievements’ Category

This Thursday our 10 man raid is finally getting back to LK 10 Hero attempts. It’s only going to be about 2 hours worth but hopefully it will be all we need.

We look forward to our 10 man raiding for more than just achievements and downing difficult content but because of the fun we have playing together.

Hopefully we can shake the rust off quickly but we have not done anything as our complete 10 man since sometime in early June… Woof.

Server First!

Thanks to the GM (Selmak) of my guild Dsylxeic (Well, not my guild but the guild to which I belong),  for standing in with his DK for our fallen Warrior (his motherboard was fried).

So just an FYI to everyone out there, EW&F is not terrible at all. With current ICC gear most likely the largest problem you will have is not killing bosses too quickly. The hardest part of the encounter is timing the death and that is about it.

We went with 3 tanks, Pally, DK, and Myself (Yes, I still bear it from time to time), 3 healers (Pally, Disc Priest, Tree), and 4 DPS.

We start on Fire Dude, Misdirect him to the hallway entrance to his wing, DPS him while moving him to Stone dude. When Fire dude hits about 30% we go in on Stone Dude. When both are at about 25% I run along with 2 DPS and 1 healer to Storm dude and tank him and all the adds in the middle. 2 things I have to do…

1. Don’t stand in Fire.
2. Pull spawned adds of my healer.

Basically the rest is just talking in vent and coordinating their demise.

After that we moved on to Hero LK, we are now making solid progress and finally saw phase 3? The room with all the spirits… well at least 1 person did… progress none the less.

So my new guild home on Drenden provided me with an opportunity to play a couple of boss encounters in Heroic ICC 25 (as one can tell from my latest achievements) and I have some tips for you.

Valithria Dreamwalker was silly easy on Heroic. DPS gets assigned a side, just run around on your side killing mobs that appear. Make sure if a blazing skeleton appears you prioritize getting it down first. Archmages might need to be stunned, but usually another class is assigned to that duty. Suppressors are the next real important targets and then the rest. I am sure it seemed easy cause we had a lot of healers in the raid and I am sure some really good ones at that.

Sindragosa was a little tougher on Heroic, but not horrible. I believe it took just 3 attempts to down her and only 1 attempt once hitting phase 3. This fight is actually pretty fun for physical dps. This is what I/we did and some tips…

1. DPS her but watch your Chilled to the Bone stacks as they will get high pretty quickly. I make sure to get in a full rotation and that she has a rake and rip up before I run out of Blistering Cold. Keep in mind the use of barkskin at this time to mitigate damage and help your healers when the stacks get high. I try to disengage at around 7 stacks. Also, burn Berserk right at the pull.
2. We stacked people getting tombed in the air phase in 2′s. 2 people on the left, 2 center, and 2 on the right at the base of the stairs. Tuck in behind as to line of sight Frost Bomb. DPS the snot out of people in the tombs but be careful and make sure you break people out according to how the raid is directing you. We broke 1 person out and then the second right after the last bomb. Shred works on people tombed, just go through the regular rotation and maximize DPS.
3. I personally burned my 2nd Berserk to make sure we got her to transition into phase 3 before the 3rd air phase and to be honest holding it for phase 3 most likely will not optimize it’s use as you will be spending time bouncing between tombs and Sindy.
4. In phase 3 make sure you know where to go if you get tombed. If you are not tombed keep an eye on your stacks of Mystic Buffet and make sure you are running out of LOS using tombs to clear stacks at about 2. Not much time to DPS boss but every little bit helps here, try to get in a rip and rake every time you get to hit her.
5. Be prepared to run away and sacrifice yourself at the end. With about 5% of her health left I believe we stopped breaking people from tombs and just burned her. I was one of the lucky ones that had to run out and stay tombed… I still managed 7th on DPS with ZERO 25 man heroic gear so I was pretty happy. (WTB Legendary Druid Staff)

No neck dropped (and I would not have bid on it or won it anyway) but I was able to upgrade my last T10 to Sanctified.

I do have the gear now to hard cap ArP but at the loss of a massive amount of hit and having to use the crappy 5 man normal TOC trinket… so that plan has been put on hold. What would be nice would be to get a 264 or 277 weapon with ArP and then gem for hit but so far no such luck.

I am referring to the retaking of Gnomer of course.

I can’t help that my blog has become somewhat stagnant as I am no longer really in the position to be getting upgrades or challenging the meters as I get outgeared by people still running 25′s… or better yet running 25 ICC Heroics. No way I pug a 25 man Heroic ICC fight… ok, maybe ship but what good would that do?

I am sitting on over 200 Frost Emblems and I don’t really want to bother with the DPS cloak or the Tanking trinket… short of Heroic 25 the upgrades are just not that earth shattering.

I am looking forward to Ruby Sanctum and it’s new and shiny… hopefully mount… but I don’t really know.

Our 10 man LK Hero tries although fun, have been infrequent and progression has been slow. This fight is VERY unforgiving and having the majority of our 10 in <264 gear isn’t helping matters… I SO look forward to Cataclysm and the same gear dropping in both 10 and 25, hopefully they can get the balance right on the encounters to match the new loot ideologies.

Well, that is all for now… I will try and drum up the interest for a 10 man Hero ICC full on guide… ugh.

So back when 3.3.3 hit I wrote a short what not on why the change to the Mangle glyph did not warrant a mangle spam build.

One tool at everyone’s disposal is WOL. This is where people post parses of combat logs from actual gameplay and raids to analyze later for checking on their own in game performance, or what others are doing during a raid.

A look at the parse HERE will show you that the 2nd highest DPSing Kitty on Heroic Saurfang (the first highest was a Russian kitty which made the parse hard to read) is obviously not using a mangle spam build. Just hover your mouse over his name and take a look at the breakdown… that is right folks, no mangle there.

Click on his name, and then the damage by spell tab and you will notice he mangled…. 4 times.

Feel free to go through the rankings for any given boss in ICC, find the ferals, and see what they are doing… pretty sure it’s not mangle spam. Just go to the main WOL page, then rankings, then DPS, then ICC. Pick your size and difficulty raid tab, then click more to get past all the warriors with Shadowmourne.

Another way to use WOL to your benefit is to look up some of these high DPSing ferals on the armory. Make sure to use the EU armory when looking up EU players, and US for US. Now you can take a look at the builds, glyphs, and gear choices of some of the highest DPSing kitties in game.

I was up there for a short point in time but players and gear have passed me by with my focus on mounts and achievements and 10 man raiding.

Frankly, I am no longer motivated by gear and high DPS numbers but progression, achievements, mounts, and titles. I get the best I can to contribute as much as possible but in the end sound game play, good strategy, and a good connection is usually enough…. of course that could be the 15% buff talking.