As time goes by

I've spent the last days dedicated to raiding and arenas and not doing battlegrounds at all, while finishing the Argent Crusade shores, ie, become exalted and get the Crusader title. Far too easy, but a good money.

In the end, I'm still short medals to buy all 5 pets, and I'll need nearly all of them to get the 75 pets from my current 61. Got an Azure whelpling for 800g, and a the Dalaran horde-only kitty for 1000g. Boy that sucks. The rest of the whelplings I hope to farm and get from eggs.

Arenawise, I'be been running with a guildie mage, and learning on what can and not be done, like e.g. that mages can't polymorph druids, and that a dps duo is in general better burning the opponnent dps than killing the healer while the opponent dps is loose. Boy are healers hard these days. 1300 rating, going smoothly up.

Raidwise, a lot of improvement. Got myself a decent Soulfire MH and another Ulduar ring, Naxx HC wand, bringing my average gear to 210, and my spellpower to 1803.


All bosses seen and learned up to Freya, it'll be a walk in the park from now on.
Thorim is our current stall point, and no solution for the arena mobs yet.



I had a misstep on Hodir, where I simply kept getting too much damage, while ppl talked about runes and the need to run away, but I couldn't see any fucking runes, only some falling rain sometimes and then a snowy platform. After some searching, it turns out that Blizzard decided, for 3.1, to add a nice "checkbox" on video settings "Projected Textures", and tooltip it with "disabling this will greatly improve performance". Fuck it, I unchecked it... and guess what.. that shit setting disables rune viewing on Hodir, so I was most time on top of runes, getting screwed :(

It's a pity that we don't have enough geared ppl for 25-Ulduar, our latest tries there was a wipe, after one successful clear of the first 3 bosses. Our leader decided to set class officers, so I've now got the job of making a health checkup and tip list for our fellow and future lockies, so we can help'em improve their dps. It's not possible to see ppl dps'ing below the tank level, it simply won't work.

Zul'Gurubing

This week I decided to look for Zul'Gurub and go towards a solo/dualboxing the whole instance, starting of course with the mount bosses.

And guess what, both down at the first try in PVP spec + PVE gear, dualboxed The'kal and soloed Mandokir.

How ?



On Thekal, my priest keeps mana burning the damn Zealot that likes healing the boss trio. It takes a while to set it up coz the zealot only needs 200 mana to heal. Let felguard get aggro on all of them, pop metamorphosis and pull tiger adds to kill them with fire aura. Then, I do a dance near the wall everytime felguard gets stunned and the trio comes for me. When both are nearly dead (5-10%), remember to 2-dot all 3, because when felguard or you gets stunned the ress timer will elapse when one dies and he gets ressed. On Part2, tank and spank, pop metamorph for the tiger adds, that's all, folks.

Mandokir it's even easier. Set the add on passive by the speaker, make the pet do a white strike on him and go passive again. Mandokir will not aggro until speaker is dead, so you can go up and kiss his ass if you want, and then jump to the little platform, setting a teleport circle. Then kill the speaker. Mandokir and his pet will agro the felguard but will pull you shortly to him. Teleport back to the platform. Shortly after, pet will just ignore you and then it's tank+spank to the end. Felguard can handle it so easily, just health funnel, set curse of weakness, and keep nuking. In my case he actually teleported to my little platform, as well as the felguard (!!!) so I jumped and then went up the stairs and nuked him from the top of the zigurat.

No mounts. But a nice rep farming on trash+boss+coins, so exalted is not a dream now.

Today I'm gonna try other bosses.. may be up to Hakkar.

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Yesterday I went to see Ulduar's Kologarn.
Easy fight for a ranged, but died once on the beams when we killed him, by walking backwards...shame on me.
Prio 1: Get out of the fucking beam, strafing left and right or tbh I like the oval walking better, and on 10-men, there's a lot of space on the right side. Ah, and NEVER walk sideways+backwards. Did it once and died.
Prio 2: Nuke right arm. When arm is dead, aoe adds... giving time for warrior to aggro, or you're dead meat and waste time => Keep soulshatter handy just in case.
Prio 3: When nothing else moves, nuke boss.

Felguard was ok here.. except may be when he died suddenly, I think because of a nearby beam. Passive imp might be better.

Alternative strategy is to kill the left arm instead of the boss, since he looses 15% for every gone arm, making it easier for the healers.
It's a hard fight for the poor melees, coz of the nearby beams, and for the healers, coz of the arm grabbing.

Fun too.

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Last but not least, went to Emalon Heroic and got my first furious item, and as well as top dps as bonus.

PVE
11 x 200 items
6 x 213 items

WTB >213 gear !!!

Old Crafty-ed

4084 fishes later, (OMFG!), I finally hooked Orgrimmar's Old Crafty. It took me a few months, but he came to papa.

With so much time to spare during fishing, I decided to compute what's the chance of NOT getting the fish after N attempts.
It goes like this:
P(getting-the-fish-in-the-next-attempt=P=0.1% according to various sources.
so
P(NOT-getting-it-after-N-attempts)=1-(1-(1-P)^N)).
For the 4084th attempt, the chance of NOT getting it is small, 0.999^4084 = 1.7%.
So 98.3% of the ppl fishing this bastard have it already by the 4084th attempt.
But not me, of course, I had to be within those 1.7%.
My bad luck is a curse from the past.

During the last days, I've built a nice KoS list (VanasKoS is a great addon in deed), so that from now on, I'm gonna pay a visit to everyone, from lvl 1 to lvl 80, that ganked me or yelled in Orgrimmar calling for help to gank me, a poor naked fisherman.

Bastards, you'll pay for it.




On the PVE side, The Guild again surprised me. After a long wait and after I signed-up and wiped once on Thaddius with a no-name guild (remember not to do that again lol), ppl showed up and we went to try Ulduar 25, after having wiped with 18 ppl last try, leaving Leviathan at 30%. This time he easily came down, with me happilly chopping and splashing oil in front the caterpillar bossie.



Then we went for Razorscale, and after a few wipes to learn that priorities are:
1- get the hell away of blue fire
2- dps sentinels if they show up
3- aoe guardians and watchers in ez mode
4- dps boss from the back until he goes 50%
5- dps the boss from the center of the room until he agonizingly dies
we downed him and called it a night.
Pretty good as half the team had never set foot inside Uldie.

All in all, a happily way of discarding some dark clouds that passed over the last days with ppl leaving and the usual confusion about dkp for multiple raids. I remember Portucale solved it by using DKP1 for SSC/TK and DKP2 for MH/BT. Let's see how it goes here.


Now...what to do ? Go rare and pet hunting, may be ? Out of things to do again :)

59 pets, I'll be able to get 65 with Argent rewards, but then...it'll be a nightmare to go up to 75.

Upgrade Kit for Ulduar

I finally got Emalon, the nasty VoA boss, down with the guild, Hurrah !!

And weeee I've set my feet in Ulduar, normal, where we killed Ignis and tried the Iron Council, and heroic, where we tried Leviathan.

Some funny fights, a little different from the no brain single boss tank and spank my dps is higher than yours fight.

It's also rewarding to see that my dps is ok for Ulduar, 10 at least, and probably, also for 25.

After simcraft, I've been doing some funny trials with Rawr, another gear checker and optimizer, finding that my empiric way of selecting the best gear is pretty close to what should be for locks. I finally started an official "gear wish list" for high end PVE.

And luckily, or not so luckily, on my Naxx25 run, all the 3 items on the top list dropped. But, there's always a but, we had a "borrowed" priest that came only if in exchange he could roll on the Life and Death sword from Gothik, a 10% drop, exactly the same I wanted. Oh well, since I had dkp'ed the other two items, it seemed unfair to get the MH, even if it was absolutely the best dps upgrade for me, so I agreed to give him the sword..oh well, another time will come, I didn't want to seem greedy and say "no u can't have it, u're not a guildie, get lost, give it to me". He did help us, we prolly wouldn't have raided coz we needed a priest MC on Razuvious... next time I'll use Tarithel and get the f*cking sword LOL !!!!

Eye of Eternity is on my list... pugging requires the achievement, and guild isn't to keen on doing it, let's see if next week will be the one I'll become champion of the frozen wastes.

PVP.. ahah, this week I did a few arenas with Tarithel in shadow...not bad, I did 6-7, with keyclone doing mostly crap, like resetting shadowform, etc. I think I'll go back to my self-made tool with discipline spec, it seems to work better, and may be I can get to a decent rate.

Next goal is to get a real 3v3/5v5 team and go skyrocket.

Achievementwise, worth mentioning

- got Gurubashi Arena Grand Master.
- got the children's week stuff done in record time.

The to do list is:

-get Old Crafy... FFS 1500 FISH AND THE DAMN THING REFUSES TO SHOW UP!
-start hunting the Northrend rares. Only got Dirkie down so far.

And weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee I've crossed the 6000 achievement mark, 39th on Chromaggus.

Problem is... Blizzard has created a big number of new achievements for Ulduar, and ... I will not be able to do most of them, specially in Heroic mode. So in absolute numbers, I'll soon get bypassed by pro guild idiots... but fuck it.