Mend Pet

Did he ever lose it?  I’m not sure.  But when I initially hit 80, I was a bit lost about what to do.

But now I’ve realized my mistakes:

1. Just because I’m 80 doesn’t mean I’m ready to run Heroics.
2. No one runs regular 78-80 dungeons.
3. I don’t need to gear for both of my specs at once.

So I’ve decided to focus on rep grinds and getting some Titansteel gear together.  I’ve already replaced his Ingvar’s Monolithic Cleaver with a Titansteel Destroyer, and after tonight, I’ll also have a Spiked Titansteel Helm to replace his Helm of Brutal Slaughter.  My goal is to get Ghugh’s retribution set (his main spec) Heroic-worthy, and then start running Heroics as DPS (hopefully with a bear-tank so I can steal all the plate tanking gear that drops!)

So for now, Ghugh has made his home in Icecrown.  It’s not a very pretty place to hang out, but it’s got everything I need:

If I’m not questing in Icecrown, I’m doing my Argent Tournament & Knights of the Ebon Blade dailies.  If I’m not doing dailies in Icecrown, I’m mining a buttload of Saronite and hoping to pick up some Titanium.  If I’m not mining in Icecrown, I’m at the closest mailbox/forge making Titansteel and taking advantage of my mage’s Transmute: Titanium skill!

It’s going to be pretty slow going, but I don’t mind.  If Ghugh has to wait til 3.2 to start running Heroics… well, that’s ok!  Better gear then, anyway!

I just have one thing to say - HOW do people do it? Maintain multiple 80s?  I’ve got just two now, and it’s difficult to keep up!  Sheesh.

Let me get right to it… we’ve been working on Mimiron for several weeks now.  Our first week, we got so close we could taste it!  But haven’t seen anything quite that close for a while.

Well, it finally happened.  We took him down!  After battling with disconnects and bad storms and silly mistakes… we finally pushed through.  Vent exploded with cheers and laughter!  I love that feeling after finally achieving something so big.  And while this might not seem like such a big deal to some… it was very important for us to finally get that fight down.  Of course, this doesn’t mean we won’t have issues with him next week, but at least we know we can do it!

This week was also quite the gear fest for me!  I picked up my BIS pants, Saronite Mesh Leggings off of Razorscale, and FINALLY got my hands on some of that oh so desirable tier 8.  Picked up the chest from Hodir, and bought the helm with my saved up Emblems.  It breaks my T7 bonus, but the T8 one is so much better!

In fact, I was so excited after picking up the gear that I proceeded to run the wrong way and aggro several Jormungers onto the raid, and keep Aspect of the Pack up for at least one trash pull.  Yeah, that’s how I earn my tier pieces. 

Unfortunately, Thursday night didn’t go quite as well.  We found ourselves stuck on Thorim.  So very, very stuck.  I still don’t really know why it was so different from the other times we got him down… but it was a very sad ending to a raid week.

Hopefully next week we’ll be able to get to General Vezax!  I hear that fight is a lot of fun!

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!

I’m not one for whining about Blizzard’s changes, generally.  I actually hate it when people complain that other people are going to have an easier time getting the same stuff as them.  I don’t care how easy or hard others have it, what I care about is my own gameplay, and how it will be affected by the changes.

So I’ve taken some time to figure out how I really feel about these upcoming Emblem changes.

My overall opinion is that when you’re running Heroics you don’t need T8.  When you’re running Naxx you don’t need T8.  When a dungeon or raid gets too easy then you should move on to the next level.  Not before, not after.

But I can understand some people just want to get their alts to the same level as their mains.  Maybe they want to switch and don’t want to put in the overtime to catch up… I am not sure.

For my main, my Hunter, I don’t really care much about the Emblem stuff.  When 3.2 comes out, chances are we will have cleared the non-hard modes of Ulduar 25 and will be working on hard modes, maybe even have a few of them down.  It’s likely we’ll be moving on to the new raid when it comes out.  We aren’t going to be forced to go back and farm Naxx for Emblems, although I can see this making our off-night raids a bit more popular.

The strange thing is, this patch is supposed to be aimed at ‘casuals’ and alts.  Look!  You can get the 2nd highest shinies by running Heroics!  However, these changes make me quite sad when I think about my Paladin, who is just about to hit 80.

Will Ghugh ever get to see Ulduar?  Doubt it.  Because why would you run Ulduar when you can run Heroics and get the same gear?  Which means if I wanted to raid with him, I’d have to jump from Heroics to T9 raiding.

And that scares me.  What I like is progression, challenge.  Doing Ulduar again on a new character in a different role will make it a whole new challenge for me, but I don’t think anyone will bother running it much when you can get half of your epics from doing Naxx Emblem runs.

All in all, I’m not pleased by these changes.  I can’t know for sure what will happen, but if for some reason I decide to start raiding on my off-nights with my Paladin, he’ll be forced to skip content.  And that is just not cool.

Tuesday’s roster was… interesting.  We’ve recently come in to a whole slew of new recruits, which bumped out signups from having about 23 signed up as available to having closer to 33.  Quite nice to have a selection to choose from, and backups in case someone can’t stay!

And the raid itself went great!  We took out Flame Leviathan, XT and Kologarn in 1 shot each.  We also took out Auriaya, and she saw fit to hand over her Siren’s Cry!  Luckily the loot distribution was such that I was next up for gear among the present Hunters, so it’s mine!

It’s a very different feeling, being the first to get a shiny new Hunter weapon from Ulduar.  I was last of our raiding Hunters to get a Naxx ranged weapon, as well as last to get Journey’s End.  I am glad I don’t have to be last again!

We also took down The Iron Council with only a few tries, clearing out the Antechamber on Heroic for the fist time.   I think we can improve on that fight – specifically, next time I will move over to the Stormcaller after the big guy goes down so it’ll be easier for me to interrupt.  It’s nice to have me on interrupts there since I can stay out of range of his Overcharge ability but still get him easily.

Wednesday night we found ourselves face to face with Freya again.  We spent nearly 2 nights on her last week with only once passing into Phase 2… it was a bit discouraging.  But this week went much better!  After 3 attempts, we got her down.  What did we do differently?  Well, not much.  But we learned that Shockwave is the most effective way to freeze the explodey flowers in place, and that for us, the best way to deal with phase to is to have everyone loosely stack, and then alternate between two spots with Freya whenever she drops her seeds.

Thorim… not so nice.  We were having serious issues in the tunnel, and are yet to find the perfect balance of DPS to bring along.  I think we’ll do better next time if we bring one or two more.

Thursday we decided to finally suck it up and finish that darn Siege Quarter.  In only about 2-3 attempts each, we managed to take down Ignis and Razorscale, the bane of Unemployed!  Huzzah!  Rejoice!

We spent the rest of the evening working on Hodir.  We basically got him down… less than 8% left on one of our attempts, so we KNOW we can do it.  And we will next time!  I think everyone was just a bit too tired and losing their coordination nearing the end of the night.

SERVER FIRST!

So that’s 4 new bosses, and 7 achievements in 3 nights of raiding!  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself!

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!

After nearly 2 weeks away from the raid scene, I got back into the swing of things with Unemployed.  we had a big influx of new recruits, and not only have we got enough to run 25-mans, but we have enough to have people waitlisted!

Tuesday night we did a quick no-tower run through of Flame Leviathan, picking up Heroic: Shutout along the way.  We headed straight to XT-002 for playtime afterwards – no messing about with Ingnis or especially Razorscale, our eternal foe.

Unfortunately Pilsner was attacked by GIGANTIC FLYING ANTS and who took over her computer, forcing her to abandon our raiding to do some Raiding of her own (har har).  But thanks to all those extra people we’ve got, we were able to find a suitable substitute.

After making quick work of XT, we proceeded to Kologarn.  We had some issues… one of our new tanks wasn’t having the best ‘luck’ when trying to pick up the rubble, and they continued to lay the smackdown on our healers.  We swapped in a 4th tank and that seemed to do the job.

Auriaya went down pretty nicely on our second attempt, considering it was our first kill of her on 25-man.  It’s a bit of a hectic fight, lots of running and lots of cats.

It was quite a productive day for Unemployed… although I swear there is absolutely NO Hunter gear in Ulduar-25.  The closest thing that we had drop was some staff, but everything else is Plate or Spell Power (or both!)

Wednesday night was not so productive in terms of number of bosses down, but the attempts we had were progressively better as we went.

We hung out with Freya for the better part of the evening, and a couple of times made it -almost- to the second phase.  I’m sure we would have got it the next attempt if trash hadn’t started respawning.

We spent the last hour or so working on Razorscale.  I swear, if there is one boss we will never get down in Uld-25, it’s HER.  We rarely get more than 15% per ground phase, we just don’t have the pure DPS output needed.  It didn’t help that we were missing a shadow priest at that point, either.  I didn’t feel we made any progress on her that night, to be honest.

Thursday night was almost identical to Wednesday.  Freya attemps, Razorscale attempts.  We managed to get Freya to phase 2 once, but it wasn’t the “easy-mode” everyone claimed it to be, at least not on 25-man.

We tried a ‘new strategy’ onRazorscale.  I didn’t think it would work – and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it did.  What I said would happen did – if we stick a few people at the back where the adds spawn, they will pull healing/ proximity aggro on everything, not just the Sentinel.

We decided to end the night by taking out VOA-25.  I’d never gotten Emalon down, and I’d only seen Archivon once.  Two emblems each?!  We totally need to do this EVERY WEEK.  It’s like, mandatory.  And not at all difficult.

Here’s hoping next week is better!

This Week in Raiding… is my weekly Saturday post where I allow myself to brag about new gear, bosses, achievements, and such.

Come back next week for another dose of epeen and QQ!