Black Temple--First Experiences

Tonight we ventured into BT for the first time as a guild. We brought as many veterans as we could. The trash pulls were really easy, especially after handling the overwhelming waves of Mount Hyjal.

We started with High Warlord Naj'entus and downed him on our second attempt. That fight is a flat-out healer check. The amount of damage the raid takes is mind boggling. When you pop that bubble everyone in the raid takes 8500 damage. That's 212,500 worth of damage that needs to be healed up, and fast. If you take the bubble burst followed by his Needle Spine you're toast. The first attempt I ran with a combo of PvE and PvP gear to try and maximize my DPS while still being able to handle the damage. I didn't survive the burst followed by an unlucky splash effect from a local Needle Spine. I didn't follow my own advice: dead dps does no dps. Thus for the second and successful attempt I ran in all PvP gear except trinkets and weapons. We had a clean kill and got some great loots in the guild.

edit to include screenie:


Next we started clearing up to Supremus. His huge courtyard makes it feel like an endless amount of pulls, especially as we couldn't really figure out how to get the flying dudes to land. Eventually we realized they were leashed and moved up into their space. Again, easy trash. Hell the healers were DPSing.

Supremus isn't a complicated fight, just a heads-up fight. It's a ready-check fight. Stay out of the volcanoes. Run if he targets you. DPS as much as you can. It's possible to do this fight without taking any damage, not likely, but possible nonetheless. We downed him on our first attempt and moved on to Shade's trash.

edit to include screenie:


At this point we knew we didn't have time to get to Shade of Akama but decided we could at the very least learn the trash pulls. We killed a few, learned what to kill first, what to CC and what can be ignored until the end. All in all, it was an excellent night. Two bosses down on our first shot.

Dumped

* I started this post and did not complete it, so I'm backdating to the day that I started it *

Dumped. I got dumped from my 3v3. Not for lack of skill, not for lack of cooperation, but simply because our resto druid decided he could get further with a ... a ... I can't even begin to say it. *chokes back tears* a rogue. I got dumped for a rogue.

Damn! At first I thought he wanted the combo that won the recent 3v3 tourney: Resto Druid, Rogue, MS Warr. But a few days later I came to find that he dropped the MS Warr too in favor of a warlock and another rogue. This move didn't make any sense to me. For all my angst of rogues I can understand dropping me in favor of one of Blizzard's favored children. But why drop the Warr? And it was for a warlock that just started PvPing and a rogue that's an alt in our guild. Well, the first rogue is one of our top DPS rogues and a damn fine player, Zorren.

So I got dumped from my 3v3 and I'm in search of a new group, a new team. I'm out on the street trying to make a new life. Wish me luck.

Start of S4 on the 5v5

We kicked off season four last night on our 5v5. We rolled with the Disc Priest, Holy Pally, MS Warr, Hunter, and me. We went 6-6 on the night and ended up with a grand total of 1506 rating.

As I expected there were some sick teams. We got rolled by a few with full S3 gear who must have just started their season as well. There was one 4 dps / 1 healer team that decided to FF me down first. They charged across the bridge in the BEM map and I started dropping totems. By the time they got to me I hit Heroism and as my health was dropping I popped Shamanistic Rage and I was toasted before that GCD was up. It took two GCD--three seconds total--for them to rip me to shreds. ouch.

And then there were some teams trying to make their way like us. As the gates opened on our 2nd battle there was no one to be found. We speculated the possibilities: all rogue, all druid, druid/rogue, or stealthers + Shadowmeld. The priest got sapped so we started beating on that rogue who popped up behind enemy lines, and then our Proximo's lit up: five rogue team. It's both my dream come true and my worst nightmare all rolled into one. If our team was a 4 dps team or if the rogues had their stunlocks down better they probably could have stunned the pally, killed the priest and then made trouble for us. But being rogues they are not required to have skill or strategy so they didn't have their act together and we picked them apart one by one. Mmmmm DELICIOUS. With rogue blood on my blades we looked for the next challenges.

I made two tactical errors that at worst cost us matches or at best made the loss go down faster. The first was on a two healer team I had us going after a dps first. It was a Pally, Disc Priest, SL/SL Lock, Frost Mage, MS Warr team. A pretty vanilla combo for 5v5 and one that makes choosing a target tough. I picked the Lock and chose wrong. Mental note and 5v5 Arena Rule Number 1 for our setup: On two healer teams, take a healer first. We could have very easily attacked the pally, forced the bubble, have the priest dispel it right away and finish him off. Then we are free to dps through the Priest's heals.

The other tactical error I made was choosing a 2nd target on a very unusual team combo: Disc Priest, 2x MS Warr, Resto Druid, Feral Druid. We got the priest down first and fast. Then I called out to go for the Resto Druid because I recognized the Kodohide Spaulders and thought he would be very weak. But he did an amazing job of kiting using Cyclone, roots, cheetah, and pillars to save himself. At that point the three physical DPS had taken down the priest, even after a bubble, and then the hunter. Props to the druid in crappy gear, goes to show skill+spec > gear. Of course it helped the rest of the team had full S3 gear including shoulders and weapons. That resto druid was the natural choice, but he sure had some great people carrying him.

On the whole it was a tough start to the season, but in the end we fared... well, mediocre. Maybe we'll get a crack at it again today or tomorrow.

Farming vs. Buying

I need to get the Aldor rep up on my Warlock which means Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments. If your server is anything like my server, Muradin, then Scryer rep items are cheap and easy because of all the Blood Elf killing quests that came out with patch 2.4, which has led to a flooded market of those items. Whereas the Aldor rep items are less frequently farmed and significantly more expensive. In fact it's kind of ridiculous with the Marks being four times more expensive than the Signets.

Being aghast at the exorbitant prices on the AH and having a bit of time I decided to see what farming would yield. I farmed for 45 minutes making a loop around the bottom part of Legion Hold in SMV. I disenchanted the greens, vendored the greys, and made Heavy Netherweave Bandages our of all the cloth that dropped, then vendored those.

 30 - Gold (from greys and drops)
 24 - Arcane Dust
  1 - Greater Planar Essence
  5 - Super Mana Potions
  2 - Super Healing Potions
124 - Netherweave Cloth
 36 - Marks of Sargeras
  2 - Fel Armaments

The total haul I estimate is worth about 244 gold, or 325 gold per hour. Considering even an afternoon of power-questing can only net 200g per hour at best, I must conclude farming is better than buying.

But then isn't that like anything in life? Everything is a time/money trade-off. Either you have the time or the money, rarely both. No time to travel: take a flight. No money to travel: take a bus. No time to build a deck: pay someone else to do it. No money to pay someone: do it yourself. No time to farm: buy mats. No money to buy: farm 'em. Of course sometimes you have neither which significantly limits your possibilities, whether in real life or in WoW.

One final note: I can't help but paraphrase a great quote I read on the official forums...
Aldor & Scryer are like women--they pretend they want you to go out and do heroic deeds in their name, solve problems on their behalf, and put forth great effort. But really the fastest way to winning their favor is to just go out and buy shiny things to give them.

Dirty Shaman Chants and Cuts!

I logged in for an hour and a half today, joined the trade channel, and started advertising for my professions: "Dirty Shaman Chants & Cuts! Your one-stop shop for all your S4 needs. PST with whatcha need!"

After a flurry of activity I netted 290 gold and called it a day. I didn't set prices for anything and left it up to people what they wanted to tip. I figured I would rely on the good will of people--even of rogues--and was glad to see my trust was rewarded.

Only 1 person didn't tip me at all, when I told him he was the only person to not tip he said he paid enough for the mats that he didn't need to tip. I didn't feel like arguing that he didn't buy the mats from me so I just let it go. Besides at that moment I had a hunter who needed 4 new pieces enchanted and tipped me 100g for the lot.

Astrall Recall is OP for days like these. You want to meet in IF? No problem, brt. SW? done. Shatt. I'm there. I think I'll stay in trade channel for the next few days, and definitely through the weekend to make some more gold the easy way.

The mod Cellular helps a ton too. I don't know how I got by as a guild officer before that mod, and it proved its worth again today.

I'll be back tomorrow with more updates. Did you get your gear? How much did you pay for enchants or gem cuts?

Patch 2.4.3 for Enhance Shamans

For a sub-patch (is that the right term?) there are a significant amount of changes taking place, and not just bug fixes but gameplay improvements, UI changes, nerfs and buffs. Here are a few key pieces for enhance shamans:

Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
This will affect Purge on enemy targets. Currently I do not know if Purge attempts to dispel non-dispellable effects, but I can only assume this is an improvement.

Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue’s health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.
Oh man oh man. Rogues will actually require resil? One calculation I saw was that to achieve the pre-patch level of mitigation a rogue would need well over 430 resilience. Now when we have that damn rogue down to below 3% I know my Stormstrike will waste him and not just bounce off his cheat.

Activated beneficial effects from jewelcrafting trinkets can no longer be dispelled.
If you are a JC and use the trinkets this should be good news. Though Stoney is a JC I don't use the JC trinkets because I have better ones for both PvE and PvP. I'm curious, can you use the trinkets in arena?


Magister's Terrace nerfs listed here.

This seems to be a pattern of Blizzard's: release content erring on the side of difficult then after a few months nerf it for the masses. In some regards I'm disappointed to see what I've earned, most often the hard way and early on, be brought down a notch for the sake of the masses. But on the other hand I suppose it's the nerfing that keeps the semi-casual players interested and thus subscriptions high--so I can see how it is a good decision from a business point of view for Blizzard. But I digress, I posted here about how to get your enhance shaman into an MgT run as most groups were only looking for CC classes. I expect groups will still be looking for CC classes but the nerfs should make it easier for us enhance shammys to get in runs.


Earth Elemental: This pet will now leash back to its totem when pulled beyond 50 yards away.
I've never had a problem with this but again I suppose any bug fix is a worth a fix. Anyone know of any specific cases where this was a problem?

That covers 2.4.3 for Enhance Shammys. Enjoy!

Season 4

Wow I haven't posted in five days. That's a long stretch for me and considering everything that's going on: Season 4, WotLK updates, Summer Fire Festival thing, and Patch 2.4.3. Let's start with Season 4.

I have over 70k honor, enough marks to buy any of the gear, and 3872 arena points. The best rating we had on any of our teams at any point in time was 1635. This means I can get the neck, waist, and wrist pieces very quickly. The ring will be doable with a bit of work and the boots a stretch at 1700. What will be helpful is that I am replacing 2 pieces of PvE gear with the neck and waist. Granted the War-Feathered Loop was a nice cross-over piece with armor ignore and some decent stam, but nothing beats resilience. Those two replacements will give me an additional 39 resilience. The bracer upgrade does not increase my resil but does give additional stats.

For arena gear I am looking at the legs and chest as the first upgrades. Unfortunately my only two pieces of remaining S2 gear are the helm and the shoulders, so I will be replacing all of the S3 gear for starters. The 1550 rating on the legs should be very easy to obtain, with the 1600 doable once all the hardcore teams grind up to their 1900-2000 ratings.

This brings up a point I made to my team: let's not jump into arenas first thing on Tuesday. Considering that every team starts over at 1500 rating the uber groups will be sitting in the lower bracket grinding points off the mid ranks and the scrubs. So a team we would normally lose 6 points to could take us for 15-16 and do so over and over again. They don't seem to share my viewpoint so I told them I'd play a few but if we are getting wasted and losing lots of points we need to cool it until the weekend.

Good luck to you in Season 4 and I'll see you in the arena.

WotLK Shaman Info Part 1

Oh boy, the moment I've been waiting for since the first WotLK leaks hit the street... the shaman talents, spell, and abilities are out. They hit the streets a few days ago, but I've been too busy to do a complete post. Here is the first list with more to come soon.

The master list is here:
http://wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Shaman

The talent tree is here:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=h

(note: links updated 7/12/08)

Let's look at this from an enhance perspective, starting from the bottom and working our way up.

Feral Spirit - Summons two spirit wolves under the command of the shaman, lasting 30 seconds. 2 minute cooldown. 51 point talent in Enhancement tree.
This talent and go either way. It could be one of those super awesomely annoying pets in pvp & arenas like the frost mage's elemental, or it could be the half-joke that is the Moonkin's treant. From what I saw on the video it didn't look like the wolves were all that effective, so they might end up being less Water Elemental and more Treant. Regardless, I will be spending points in this to find out.

Weapon Specialization - Axe - Increases the critical strike damage bonus by 25%. Mace - Has a 5% chance to increase your melee haste by 10% for 15 sec. Fist - Attacks from your fist weapons have a 5% chance to reduce the armor of your target by 20% for 6 sec. (Numbers reflect 5/5 points in the talent.) Requires 45 points in Enhancement talents.
For us theorycrafters this talent will be very interesting for us test and calculate. In fact, I can see how this is going to complicate weapon and gear choices. Personally I refuse to use maces as they are the hallmark weapons of no-skill rogues, but the haste increase makes me salivate. I heart haste. I could start into a long-winded breakdown of these stats but I think I'll hold that until we see what the weapon itemization is like in the next expansion. Until then, no matter how you cut it, this is very nice dps boost.

Improved Shamanistic Rage - While under the effect of Shamanistic Rage, you have a 50/100% chance also cause you to be immune to all stun, snare and movement impairing effects. Requires 40 points in Enhancement Talents. Requires 1 point in Shamanistic Rage.
Very cool. I'm assuming this will not clear current effects but will prevent more. It's only 15 seconds of love, but for my 3v3 burst-damage team that'll rock. Drop some wolves, kick in Imp Sham Rage, and go to town unmolested. I expect that I'll be using Sham Rage every time it comes up, not just when I'm being focused. And I don't think I need to mention how incredibly awesome this will be against rogues. No more chain stunning for you, jerk.


Static Shock - You have a 2/4/6% chance to hit your target with a Lightning Shield Orb charge when you do damage, and increases your spell damage by 1/2/3% when you have Lightning Shield active.
I'm not so excited about this one. I see they are trying to make Lightning Shield more useful. But realistically I don't expect to use this talent. As it stands now in PvP I get beat on enough that LS procs quickly, and then I usually put up water shield after that bc I know I'll need the mana late in the fight. In PvE that 6% could mean a proc per minute (very rough guess) which is only an additional 380 Nature Damage at level 80. And as for increasing my spell damage the 3% is negligible. I don't see myself investing points in this unless I wanted to create a purely PvE spec and had 3 extra talent points. But for a 41 point talent this is pretty weak.

That is all for this morning. More to come in this weekend.

Cheat Death Nerfed!

God bless Blizzard!

Patch 2.4.3 Change to Cheat Death - Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Good explanation of what this means is on WoW Insider:
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/06/18/understanding-the-cheat-death-nerf/

Anything to nerf rogues is fine by me.

Archimonde Fight

Last night we spent three hours working on Archimonde. I must say it is far more fun than the Lady Vashj fight. Though we wiped continuously for three hours it was very easy to see what was causing the wipes: usually the first person to die. Unlike the Vashj fight where there are 6 groups of people, each responsible for 2 or more things and when you wipe it is difficult to know what exactly went wrong, that is not the case with Archi and is a nice change.

Our best attempt was 43% and I think we were all so surprised to have him down that low that we all got excited and took our eye off the ball. Other than that most of our attempts were in the 60-70% range. We tried a few different variations of strategies but decided the best route was to have range stay clustered together around their healer & decurser, but still stay spread out enough to avoid multiple people being Air Burst.

I must say this is a great fight to be a shaman; this is the kind of fight where the utility of the class shines through. With my spells, totems, and talents I was able to support my party as well as keep myself safe and healed.

I had down Tremor Totem for my melee party and it saved me during fears quite a few times. When I got Air Burst after I landed I was able to heal myself up before getting back into the fight. Also, Insta-Ghost Wolf was awesome to get away from the Doomfire.

As for damage, well that doesn't really matter. Archimonde is pretty squishy and goes down fast. The trick is to be sure that NO ONE dies. We did have a few attempts where we lost someone early but were able to hang on and recover. But for the most part one death means two which leads to three, four, five, ten, wipe. And almost that fast.

Once I was the first to die--my mouse froze up and I couldn't click my Tears of the Goddess. It was early on so there was not much chaos and the raid was able to recover nicely from my untimely splat. After that I keybound the tears to prevent further hard landings.

I'm disappointed the raids reset this morning, I would go back in and fight him for another three hours tonight. I guess Archimonde lives to drain the tree another week...

Bow-Stitched Leggings

I knew it. Bow-Stitched Leggings. I knew they would drop. And they did tonight. Being highest on DKP among mail wearers I got them. But I lose 21 hit rating by dropping Cataclysm Legplates.

But I was ready for this and had badges saved up for Belt of the Silent Path to replace Bladeangel's Money Belt, which resulting in picking up 23 hit, or a net gain of 2 hit rating after the switch of the legs & waist items.

Overall it ended up being some sweet upgrades. I gained a whopping 79.20 in enhancement points between the two; 62.96 on the legs and 16.24 on the belt. And now according to my EP calculations there are ZERO leg upgrades left for me until SWP. (I know I know I owe a post about EP and how I run my numbers. I'll get there soon enough, I promise).

Controlling AV

After clearing 3 bosses in Hyjal last night a big group was up for some PvP in order to get their trinkets for the Archimonde fight on Thursday. We had 8 people at one point and let me tell you that was more than enough to completely control the battlefield. It's amazing that only 20% of the total raid can make such a huge impact but having such a well coordinated force (with plenty of healers) makes all the difference between an otherwise ragtag bunch.

We were rolling with:
Enhance Shaman (yours truly)
2x Hunters
Rogue
Holy Pally
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
and after a he leveled his axe skill... a newly minted Enhance Shaman (guildie mentioned here who decided to roll with the true spec of hardcore gamers)

Yes that's 3 healers and 4.5 DPS (sorry Last, but with only 10% crit rating unbuffed you're only getting credit for 1/2 of a dps'er!!) What a difference having multiple healers makes. Here's what we did.

First few matches it was the textbook Alliance AV win strat. We rushed RH because you can count on everyone else going to Galv first. If there was no defense then we split up and capped the flag and the towers. If help was needed at IBT, TP, or FWGY after we capped the southern points then a few of us broke off to help, with the rest staying behind at the flag and the towers to prevent ninja capping. Then after the last or 2nd to last tower capped we'd call for ALL IN and take down Drek with ease.

This went on for maybe 5 matches. All lightning fast victories. It's great... for a while. Then it gets boring so we tried to mix it up. Next match we hopped between Stonehearth and Icewing. We actually went down to IBT first, capped it and chilled out down there until we saw SH get capped by the Horde. Then we rolled en-mass to SH and laid waste to the two defenders there. Of course at that point IW was capped so we went there and took that. We spent the rest of the fight bouncing between SH & IW, holding on to those for the duration of the fight. When Alliance was All In we ran back to Dun Baldar to mess with the Horde in Van's room. It was an outstanding victory with plenty of bonus honor for saving 2 towers.

For the next match we decided to have a bit more fun and defended Belinda. I think though we played our cards wrong and gave away not only that there were Alliance waiting in her room, but A LOT of Alliance. We only met sporadic resistance for a good five minutes in there. So we broadened our defensive strategy, moving between SH, IW, and Belinda. We let the Horde keep the SHGY because it not only gave us a bit of a challenge but also provided us with plenty of fresh HK's. In fact at one point we had both towers safe and decided to just farm people coming out of the GY.

But soon we realized that the Alliance had no forward graveyards... NONE. And the entire Alliance force was on defense. We had forced a turtle. The only ray of sunshine was that IBT & East FW tower were destroyed. Other than that, no other towers were taken by either side. This is where things got fun for us.

We popped back into Belinda's room to thrash the five or so Hordies that were trying to tackle her, recapped SH, then all eight of us rolled straight south. We picked up the Iceblood GY and asked two alliance there to guard it. More alliance were joining the offensive push and some took TP. As for us, we ran down and just completely mauled the resistance at FW. We got split up into two groups in inadvertently with two Hunters, rogue and Pally getting caught between FWGY and the bottleneck. Me, the resto shaman, and the resto druid rolled up into West, capped it and held it against two rogues and a pally. The other half caught up with us and the fighting was intense at this point. Horde had a Warrior, 2 Rogues (you know how I feel about rogues), Mage, Warlock, and Pally. We pushed them back deeper to the RH GY and then capped RH. They still had FW and were making a push on to us, but at this point a few more Alliance joined the fight and kept the horde busy down there.

With towers capped we would have called for the All-In but there was only the eight of us and one more resto Druid. We were feeling bold so the healers told me to strap on a shield and get to tanking! There was some horde resistance inside who we dispatched with ease. Our rogue and hunters pulled the dogs off and killed them. I saw misdirects from the hunters, and constant heals coming in from four different sources. It was brilliant! I had down Stoneskin, Grace of Air, Healing Stream, and Searing totems to help with the defense. I popped Heroism and Sham Rage right from the start to help with the initial chaos and until we got settled into position. I never dropped below 50% health with all the heals, and down went Drek.

Here are two screenshots of me tanking the Frostwolf Clan leader:

and



It was a 26 minute AV with 520 bonus honor and I must say it was the most fun I've had in that BG. I can honestly say in that instance the eight of us controlled the flow of that battle entirely.

Arena Update

I did a good amount of arena between Sunday and Monday nights. Both 3v3 and 5v5 matches. I would say it was a good weekend for arena, not just because we gained points on two teams, but because I got to smash a lot of dirty filthy rogues.

On our 3v3 we climbed 30 more points to 1576. We faced a wide variety of teams and for the most part we did a great job with it. Schlimmy our resto druid pointed out that we had gotten away from our Shock & Awe campaign. Sitting back even for an extra couple of seconds gives the other team a chance to assess and setup. We are a burst DPS team with limited CC and being all melee, we need the element of surprise. We agreed that even if we are attacking the "wrong" target from the beginning that's OK, just get in there and sow chaos. So this week we dropped the defensive stance we'd been taking and got on offense and it had a positive impact.

Riddaren, our MS warrior, was a hamstring maniac. I was giving him WF as much as possible and using my Rank 1 Earth Shock macro to interrupt healers as much as possible. I think if we played a few more we could have gotten back up over 1600. But we called it a night as it was late on Sunday already.

We had 1 heart-breaker of a match. It was an RMP combo, we wasted the rogue as soon as he popped but they took down Ridd a split second later. That left Resto Druid/Enhance Shaman vs Disc Priest/Frost Mage. It was a long long fight with the Priest and Mage both going OOM countless times. Perhaps the most annoying part of it all though was the constant Sheeping by the mage. I thought you were supposed to go immune due to the diminishing returns effect, but there I was, bleating away for 8 seconds throughout the fight. It seemed that after an "immune" to the cast the diminishing returns reset. Then it was 8 seconds of sheep, 4 seconds, 2 seconds, and then it seemed to start all over again. I suppose those 15 seconds went by fast enough to reset the DR effect. Unfortunately it took me away from the priest long enough to let him drink up, and then I made the mistake of going after the mage, who just kited me despite being practically OOM--I guess just enough mana left for Frost Armor and Frost Nova. Ah well, the right play would have been to stay on the Priest, and work him down. In the end we lost but only lost 5 points. I must say I'm pleased we held up so well against such a highly ranked team.

As for 5v5 we once again coordinated a throw-away team for points and then tried to make a "winning" team. The final 7 games were Resto Shaman, Holy Pally, Hunter, MS Warrior, and Enhance Shaman. Again we are limited in CC so we went with another Shock & Awe strategy. Also, Ridd and I are accustomed to running like this so it was an easy transition. We faced this one team 4 times out of 7, beat them the first time and lost the next three. They were: Disc Priest, Holy Pally, MS Warr, Warlock, Feral Druid. The first time we beat them I was left alone and pounded the everliving crap out of them all, doing around 50% of the total damage. Thus the next three times we faced them they FF me down right away. I barely had time to pop Sham Rage between the stuns and fears before I was toast. Ah well, in the end the team went 6-4 on the night and climbed 26 points to 1540.

We decided that we are going to start a consistent 5v5 team and try to bring that rating up as well. The hardest part with that seems to be getting the right 5 people online and able to do arena matches at the same time. We want to go with a 2-healer setup with Awl (Holy Pally) as our anchorman healer. We would love to find a PvP geared Disc Priest to add to the team as well. We will have three healers and four dps to choose from, but the key I think will be to have Ridd on for his MS. Here's what we're looking at right now:
Heals: Holy Pally, Resto Druid, Disc Priest (need to find one)
DPS: MS Warrior, Enhance Shaman, BM/Surv Hunter, Mage, Warlock (depends who's online)

We'll see how it all pans out.

RL > AV ...?

I woke up this morning and logged in to see that it was AV weekend. And here I've spent the majority of my weekend out in the sun enjoying the warm summer weather with my girlfriend. Why can't it be rainy and cold on AV weekend? Why!

Ah, maybe I'll bang out some bg's this morning and before I head out into another sunny 90 degree day. No gf today so I think I'll just grab my laptop and go from coffee bar to real bar to coffee bar back to real bar before settling in for the night to run our 3 hour Karathon tonight... followed inevitable by more AV's.

I hope your weekend was as beautiful as as mine was and that you found a nice balance between AV and RL.

Third Timed Chest in ZA

We did it. We nailed the third timed chest in ZA last night. It was close, I mean real close. We had 60 seconds to spare, maybe less.

Now before I get into the nitty gritty details of it I have a caveat: Stoney wasn't on this run. In fact, there was no enhance shaman on this run. OK, I did bring in Stoney for the Hexx Lord kill, as that is extremely difficult to do without an Enhance Shaman. But as far as the timed loot is concerned I tanked it on my druid, Finnmaccool. I really owed a run to our of our raiding rogues, Zorren, and it does not make sense to have 2 melee dps in the 10 man run. So I gave him the melee spot and tanked it on Finn. Having put that caveat out there (this is after all an enhance shaman blog not a feral druid blog) let's get on with the details.

We do Bear, Eagle, Lynx as our kill order for timed chests. Bear and Eagle both went off without a hitch and we saved both Tanzar and Harkor, who is by no small coincidence a distant relative of our uber-hunter Farkor despite Farkor's protestations otherwise.

For the Lynx boss we cut across the top of the waterfall and go in from the backside, killing one AoE pack, jumping through a hut and in the end skipping 4 pulls versus going in from the main entrance. This takes us directly to the Tamer and his 2 crocolisks on patrol. I must confess at this point I did not think we would make it to the boss in time. Our previous best run was about 3 minutes short of killing Halazzi, and that was with a 7+ minute boss kill. We had a Warrior (our guild's MT) and a Druid (me) tanking this time, versus the Pally tank we had on our previous best attempt. I was not expecting to get there and clear it in time, but I kept quiet about it because I wanted to see how close we could get.

We got to the chamber and the patrol was coming around to the entrance right at that moment. We picked up the pat and the next two pulls, with our Shadow Priest surviving the Mind Controls of the Amani'shi Flame Casters. We got to the boss, assigned healers and tanks and had 6 minutes on the clock. And then the magic began.

We DPS'd him so fast that he only got Fenzy off twice--normally he does it four times, once each time in Phase 1 just before shifting out to Phase 2. We were absolutely crushing him. As he came out of Phase 2 the second time, meaning we were dpsing from 50% to 25%, I called for heroism and I think it was a good use there. We barely even touched that phase and he split out. In the split phase he only got 2 totems down before he was back in combined phase and ready for the final stretch. It was blazing fast DPS. In 5 minutes he was done, and we freed Ashli for the first time in our guild.

The other thing that I think helped us dps him down so hard was that we had 3 leatherworkers in the tank group. Why was that helpful? Drums of Battle rotation!! That means for 75% of the entire fight that group was hastened. Granted that group only had 2 dps'ers, but it was hunter Scuttle and rogue Zorren. However I do believe it helped me and the MT keep a generous threat lead allowing for all of the dps to go all out.

As for loot? Bah. Bear dropped Elunite Imbued Leggings, which were subsequently DE'd. Eagle dropped Tuskbreaker which was given for an off-set. And damned if Ashli didn't give us the crappiest ring ever: the Signet of Eternal Life, which went to our Shaman healer alt for his PvP set. I hate that we DE'd so much, but no worries the real accomplishment was in reaching the timed chest.

Now for the long hard crawl to the 4th chest and the Amani War Bear mount. In case you are not familiar with the timed run, you get 15 minutes added to the clock for killing the bear, 10 minutes for the Eagle, and that's it. You have 45 minutes to kill 4 bosses. As of last night it took 44 minutes for us to kill 3 bosses. Jeez.

My game plan is to keep running that same route and shave 2-4 minutes off the run each week. When we get to the point that we can do 3 bosses in 35 minutes on a consistent basis then I'll change our kill order and we'll start working our way towards MY mount!

Azgalor Down

3 wipes. 4th attempt = kill



The 4th attempt was spot-on. We SS'd the healers that got Doomed. The shaman's used Ankh for self-rez, and the druids brought up those healers that went down and we couldn't get an SS on before they expired.

We did something different than the bosskillers.com playbook. We tanked the boss at Thrall and the Lesser Doomguards at the Tauren Warriors. We had 3 OT's for the dooms, 3 dps, and 2 healers. The Doomguard dps was all melee in an effort to reduce chance of Rain of Fire on the main tank. The ranged and healers we split into two groups and given general areas where to stand then instructed to spread out from those points. Resto druids were reminded to keep the tank HoT'ed at all times, especially as the silence CD is up. A quick reminder that the MT is the main healing priority of ALL the healers and off we went.

The trash was rough, as always. But we made it through, as always. The first Distract was successful, buying us a few more seconds to get HS, top off mana, and get into position. But the 2nd distract was resisted and so we engaged.

The fight was very well executed by the whole raid. Everyone was doing their job: Healing, DPSing, tanking, running out of Rain of Fire, running to the doomguard section when Doomed.

By the end of the fight the Tauren Warriors and the 3 OT's were completely overwhelmed. At that point Azgalor was at 3% so I called for the rogues to sprint over to Az and help finish him off. He went from 3% down to 1% very fast, and like all 1%'s on bosses that lingered for a while, maybe just a few moments longer than it should.

And then he fell.

We got 2 Gloves of the Forgotten Protector and 1 Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher. I was the one taking tells for the Warr/Hunter/Shaman gloves and when that went out my screen lit up with 8 tells from people wanting to spend DKP to be one of the first to get T6 in Unorthodox. As for me, my Gauntlets of Rapidity rate 175.15 EP versus versus a meager 156.92 for the Skyshatter Grips. It's simply not worth it for me to spend the DKP.

We then went and practiced wiping on Archimonde. Fun! Congrats to Dwarfknight, Shawck, and Siobhann for guild-first T6.

Recent Stats

It took me half an hour to crunch the raid numbers from the last few weeks, but here's the results of some recent raids:

ZA Run
938 Overall DPS
19% of total damage, just edged out by a damn good Warlock
Breakdown:
44% Physical (38% Crit)
27% WF (36% Crit)
7% Stormstirke (35% Crit)

Hyjal
We took down Rage (1 shot), Anetheron (3 attempts), and Kaz'rogal (1 shot, guild first kill) this night
1233 Overall DPS
6% of total damage; beat out next nearest melee by 1.2 million damage
Breakdown:
38% Physical (33% Crit)
24% Windfury (32% Crit)
13% Fire Nova Totem
7% Magma Totem
7% Stormstrike (30% Crit)

That was the first run that I started twisting my Fire Nova in with my Magma totem and it had a huge impact on my overall numbers. What is interesting is that the Fire Nova Totem nearly double the damage of the Magma totem. I was cognizant of the Fire Nova cooldown and used it as often as I could--to great effect.

The next night as we took on Azgalor and his trash the numbers were not the same. Earth Shock, Stormstrike, and Fire Nova were all at 8% of my total damage. This is due to the nature of the trash mobs for that clear. More Gargoyles=less AoE on the ground. And more casters=me and the melee team picking up some and trying to bring them into AoE range.

Haste Potions

I woke up early this morning to see the girlfriend off to work, then got to work myself... farming Terocone. The stuff is a pain because it gets over-farmed very quickly. But waking up early and spending 30-40 minutes circling Terokkar nets me about 50, as opposed to the same route in the afternoon gets half of that amount.

I use the cones for Haste Potions. Mmmm, delicious. With haste gear, Heroism, Drums of Battle, dual Mongoose procs, DST proc, and a Haste Pot my weapon speed drops from 2.60 to 0.92 or lower. That 0.92 is the lowest I've seen but I'm not always staring at my character screen as I would like to stay alive in boss fights and stay out of the Rain of Fire/Death & Decay/Infernos/Whirlwinds/et al. I'm sure there's an add-on out there that will display my swing speed, I'll see if I can find one.

If you are not using Haste Potions, give it a shot. Like everything with haste it's important to stack lots of it. I'll see how low my weapon speed can go and report back.

Just a quick post today. I've decided to get a job, so off to do some job hunting.