Mend Pet

This week was our first real week of 3.1 raiding, and it was quite the mixed bag of emotions for me.

On Tuesday we pulled together 25 people and headed in to Ulduar.  We managed to get Flame Leviathan down last week after a few messy starts, so this week the plan was to try it with one tower up.  I got to try out the Chopper this week!  It was fun.  So far I’ve tried everything but driving the Siege Engine… and I don’t know what I like the best!  They’re all pretty fun.

We got Leviathan down really quickly… but it turns out no one actually turned hard mode on, and we didn’t get the achievement.  Oh well!  We’ll try next time.  I did manage to pick up Gloves of the Fiery Behemoth – FINALLY netting me the Epic Achievement!  I had to respec and regem to allow for the loss of hit… but it’s completely worth it.

We hammered away at Razorscale most of the remainder of the night.  We had a couple of good attempts, but the best we did was getting her to about 57% at which point she enraged.  From what I can see, we have two major problems right now:  People are dying in crap, which should NOT be happening.  The solution to that is simple – just don’t do it.  The second issue is that our DPS is not up to par.  We are carrying far too many people.

We’ve got some people who are trying out DPSing for the first time.  Personally, I think Ulduar is not a good place to learn a new role.  Spend some time in a few Heroics first, or at least with a test dummy… but Ulduar isn’t Naxx – we can’t carry 5 DPS doing less than 2k, it’s just not going to get us anywhere.  These people either need to practice, get better gear, or get replaced if we want to make any progress.

XT’s trash?  Ridiculous!  I’ve been told it’s been nerfed since, but we really weren’t expecting it to be so hard, and it kicked our butts thoroughly on Tuesday night.  I got to do some trapping, but it’s difficult to trap a mob that pounces and stuns you!

Wednesday night we went in with another strategy for trash:  we kited them back to Razorscales room and ran around in circles taking them down.  It was messy, but it got the job done.

We didn’t have a full 25 at any point on Wednesday.  That was not a good start to things.  We still haven’t solidified a strategy for Razorscale, and we haven’t gotten her down.  We made some halfhearted attempts at XT, but again, no really solid strategy.

In the end, we split into two 10-man groups.  My group ended up taking down Flame Leviathan, and the other got Orbital Bombardment and a couple of XT’s achievements.

To be honest, I think we should be doing 10-mans regularly.  And I know the gear isn’t AMAZING, but we wouldn’t be doing it for the gear.  What we need is focus and practice.  I’m sure the people who were in the other 10-man and got XT down have a better feel for the fight now, and I wish I could have been there.  If we could all get a chance to try it without the chaos of 25 people running around, I think we’d do a LOT better stepping into 25-man.

But this has been discussed and the leaders have stated that we are a 25-man guild, not a 10-man guild (although I’m sure they didn’t mind getting those achievements and boss kills).

We spent Thursday night in 10-mans again.  I had so much fun, and I learned a lot… in fact, I wrote about it all yesterday.

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!

It was a busy weekend for me!  Even though I spent it out of town, I still got some major things accomplished.

On Wednesday or Thursday I decided to start buying Nobles cards.  I added up the cost of all the ones on the AH and it was only about 7600 (full decks were going for about 7800-7900).  I managed to pick up my first 5 cards for only 4056g… not bad!

Unfortunately by Saturday I started freaking out.  There had been no Threes on the AH all day Friday… what if I couldn’t get one?  What if Sunday night came around and I only had 7 cards?

So I ended up paying a little extra for my last 3 cards, for a grand total of 7753g.  Still, not too shabby.  Left me with just over 150g to my name, but it was totally worth it!

Unfortunately, I had to switch out my Mirror of Truth for my Darkmoon Card: Greatness, leaving it paired with Grim Toll for the time being.  Yeah, having 1000AP and 300 Agility procs at the same time would be amazing… but without Grim Toll I’m down to 189 hit.

Once 3.1 hits and I’ve got to respec, I’ll probably toss a few points into Focused Aim, since it’ll apply to pet hit.  But right now I don’t mind waiting it out with Grim Toll.

When I got back into town on Sunday night, I sat down to finish off my dailies before bed.  Now that I’m poor, I feel more motivated to do my dailies, so I suppose that’s a good thing!

After I finished up, someone piped in guild chat asking if anyone wanted to run some heroics.  Sure, I was a bit sleepy, but… what the heck!  I almost never run heroics.  A few people wanted to work on their alts, so we pulled a group together and I volunteered us for Heroic Gundrak because I’d never done Gundrak before.  Managed to pick up 4 achievements as well:

• Heroic: Gundrak
  
• What the Eck?
  
• Gundrak
  
• Snakes. Why’d It Have To Be Snakes?

One thing I realized right away was that I’ve never done any regular instances or heroics since I respecced to Marksmanship.  It was different than raiding is.  mobs stay alive barely long enough for a Serpent Sting, but there aren’t really enough of them to justify Volley spam like I’m used to in Naxx.  It took a bit but I finally got back into the swing of things and had a really great time!

We also did Drak’tharon Keep afterward, which was kinda more of the same.  They’re quite similar instances and I am sure I’ll get them mixed up almost every time.

I should run more heroics.

Tuesday night can be pretty much summed up by this achievement:

Patch was our first fight of the evening and we got him down without much effort – with 16 seconds to spare!  It was a good sign, and the rest of the night went equally fast.

In fact, for once we managed to get all four wings cleared in one raid night – we went over our scheduled time by about 10 minutes, but 3 hours is pretty good, I’d say!

I finally picked up Grim Toll.  After much self debate, I decided to trade in my Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood for Grim Toll, and replace the +16 hit gem in my belt buckle to a +32 AP gem.  it’s a bit of a shuffle around, not a huge DPS increase… but it gives me more room to mess around with my hit.  I’m 9 points over now, so it’s not so bad.  And now I’m just a glove slot away from Epic!

Wednesday we didn’t have a very full roster, so we decided to hit up the last 2 bosses in Naxx and finish getting…

We had 2 volunteers sit out, since we actually had 22 people present.

We got our full 22 back together and took out Malygos in 1 shot afterwards!  It was a good couple of days.

Thursday wasn’t so good.  We had only 22 again, but all we had left for the week was Sarth.  Clearly not enough people to bother any 3D attempts… we decided to just do 2 drakes.  It was decided that the tanks needed to be switched up – our add tank and Sarth tank switched places.  I don’t know what the problem was, but we wiped several times.

Personally, I was a bit confused about why we were switching the tanks around in the first place.  We’ve spent the last few months with the same people doing the same roles and getting good at it.  I was told it was because they need to learn to do it.  Alright, I understand if we lose someone, they’ll need to learn to do it.  But that isn’t the case yet!  Why wouldn’t we play to our strengths while we still can?  Then in the event of a major change… we can force ourselves into an evening of wipes.  It just felt very… masochistic.  We didn’t even have a full 25 people to start with.  It just didn’t make sense to me.

We eventually switched back to our normal set up, brought in an extra DPS and switched one DPS for an additional healer.

Afterward we went and had our hand at TK: The Eye again, see if we could pick up another mount.  No luck!  But we did use more of a strategy this time than we did last, which made it less hectic and more interesting!

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!

Click to see the full screenshot!

My dear little Dwarf Paladin hit level 40 last night!  This makes him my 3rd character ever to make it to this point.  While it’s not quite what it used to be, now that we get mounts at 30… I still get some new shinies!

I managed to buy 4 pieces of level 40 plate gear for only 18 gold on the AH… pretty sweet deal.

I like to keep Ghugh happy with a shiny new weapon every 10 or so levels, so I replaced his Viscous Hammer with a pretty nice little gem… Darkmoon Executioner!  It comes from the Demons deck, which I picked up for just 20 gold.  I splurged when Gadgets offered to enchant it with Crusader if I only provided the Righteous Orbs… so for another 40 gold (for 2 Orbs) I’ve now got a pretty darn awesome level 40 weapon.

Plus, I think it looks really cool.  It certainly has an appropriate name!

I also replaced my… Soldier’s Wristguards of the Bear.  That’s right, I was still wearing a level 10 BoE +1 stam, +1 str.  Why?  Apparently there is a serious lack of Mail wrist armour for paladins in the quests I did.

One thing that’s nice about Ghugh not having been transferred to the new account yet… If I’m feeling particularly ludic, I can continue playing him while I am getting ready for the raid on Brajana.  Dualboxing FTW!

I forgot to post this yesterday… probably because I’m getting tired of writing this same thing over and over each week.  Naxx. Sarth+3 attempts.  No success.

Tuesday – Naxx.  No attempt at immortal, had deaths on the very first boss.  Went pretty smoothly, got everything but 4H, Sapph and Kel down.

Wednesday – Bit of guild drama, followed by about 12 Sarth+3 attempts.  The attempts were good, but we’re just missing… something.  I think a couple of our healers need some help.  We have some great ones, but one in particular died to many fissures.  Other than him though, we really had almost no fissure or flame wall deaths, which is a huge improvement!  I really think we can get this down if we get lucky and things just go our way.  Eventually, the DC monster aggro’d and we had to switch to Naxx.  [Journey's End]!  I’m the 4th and last hunter to grab it in our raid.  Horsey!  Tigerfeet, it’s all yours now!

Thursday – Started with Malygos, which took us a couple of attempts… we lost a ton of people in phase 2, which was strange… but after that, we got him down.  BTW, I recommend the mod MalygosCP for helping out with that fight.  It helps track your energy, combo points and stacks.  Finally, after 2 weeks of the quest burning a whole in my quest log, I picked up my [Favor of the Dragon Queen]!

We then had enough people to make a few more attempts on 3D.  More of the same… very good, but just not good enough.  We took down 2D and called it a night.

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!