Druid of the Moon

Posts Tagged ‘IceCrown Citadel’

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.

A/S/RealID?

So I was inspired to write about my UI button layout.

Our resident 10 man Pally Tank had switched up to Ret and was having some issues with button presses. It occurred to me at that moment I could break down my button layout in my UI and maybe help some ferals out there new to either spec maybe layout their buttons better.

First, get Bartender addon.

Here is my Kitty map…

Lets start with the most important row… the bottom row is keybound to my number keys. I play with 4 fingers (pinky on 7, fingers running to the right 8, 9, 0.). I can reach over and mash – and = or 5 and 6… sometimes I stretch and reach 4. 1 I have 7 on my Naga mouse keybound to the 1 key just for Vamp biting, otherwise I never hit 1.

So lets look at my layout for the bottom row…

1. Autoattack
2. Moonfire – This is for pesky horde that try to run with 100HP left after a beat down.
3. Ravage – Just cause
4. Maim – Valks or trash/Horde caster interrupts.
5. Feral Charge (Cat) – comes in handy on lots of fights, in particular Heroic Prince ICC… a Feral game changer.
6. Rake – in the rotation
7. Savage Roar – in the rotation
8. Shred – in the rotation
9. Mangle – in the rotation… sometimes… when I am unlucky… or stuck in front
10. 0 on the bar, Rip – in the rotation
11. - on the bar, Prowl
12. = on the bar, Dash

So I use my right hand on the mouse for movement, and my left mostly for 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 the meat of kitty DPS rotation. Lets look at bottom bar when Prowling.

So Bartender changes my buttons when I am in Prowl mode. My favorite combo is on boss opening I mash 7 for FF and quickly hit 8 for kitty charge before bartender makes the button corrections for coming out of Prowl. I have Dash, this is for PvP purposes, pounce and the usual other Prowl openers you would expect.

Ok, lets take a look at the middle row. FYI, I mouse click anything on the top 2 rows.  I spend the bulk of my time from Cower over to barkskin. FF, Swipe, FB, TF, Berserk, and barkskin get used quite often. FR is right there on the far right in case I go bear and need some self heals (PVP or trash pulling). To the left of Cower you can see decurse which I use when needed on myself, then a macro labeled MIGHT… this is a fun macro for asking Pallies for might… we will leave it at that. Next is Abolish poison (PVP) and Challenging Roar (This should be Demo Roar, for PVP, I need to fix my bars.)

Finally the top row, from left to right…

1. Rebirth – This gets liberal use.
2. Hurricane – Just cause I can.
3. Meld – Cause I like to live.
4. NG – PVP
5. Macro – Shift out and back into Cat (This is to break snares)

The next 5 are all healing, keeping myself or others alive in a pinch. Note that Tranquility is right above Barkskin, this is because 10/10 times you are going to Bark then Tranq.  The last is the Rocket Pack for ICC Ship.

Next post I will break down my bear bars, most importantly I change very little in the top 2 bars when in bear form or spec which makes it worlds easier to find spells when I need them regardless of form or spec. Main attacks like Mangle also don’t change so 9 in any spec of feral form is mangle.

Anyway, maybe this can benefit some people… if anyone sees a way I could be doing it better let me know… though old habits are hard to break.

Ruby Sanctum was released, I plan on doing it in 10 man Thursday night, I missed it in 25 last night.
After I run it Thursday night I will post up some feral strats and thoughts (Yay for something new to write about)

I have to update my gear list, I am running all Sanc T10 264 now and was lucky enough to get Heroic hurt stick Distant Land. Incredible how good this staff is that it essentially unbeatable until a Heroic LK weapon. I think someone messed up when they let this drop off a boss not LK, Sindy, or Putricide.

The closed beta has started… I am hoping to get invited. If I do, expect ALOT of posting as I am VERY excited about the changes in Azeroth.

Please Blizzard, don’t hold it against me that last time the invite ended up in my junk mail bin… by the way, watching my junk mail bin is not fun but I am watching it hard core this time.

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.