Hunting High and Low

Now, it's not an A-Ha revisitation. Yesterday, once again, a part of our ICC25 chickened out and didn't bother to show up. I have an idea why: On the first day, we down 6 bosses, so plenty of loot. On the 2nd and 3rd days, it's wipe night for Putricide and Blood Queen, with only Blood Princes coming down easily. So ppl simply don't bother. That sucks.

Instead, we tried ICC10 HC, since one of our guildies has a Kingslayer main.
Tbh, I had no idea we could only go for HC after downing the LK, or at least, that was Blizzard idea.


So, we went in , and downed Marrowgar and the Gunship in Heroic mode !!!

Marrowgar is easy, provided everyone except the two tanks gather near the gate, and dps those that get spiked during the blade storm. Oh, the frost paths are way more damaging, there are more of them, the blade storm takes much more time and the spikes have a lot more HP.
We finished just in time, but we did 99% of the fight with 1 dps dead and with no melee, just ranged, including a hunter.
So, all in all, it's easy !

And, my high.. I got my HEROIC FROST NEEDLE !!! That's nearly +200 dps more, so now my GS raised to 5.7 <=> ~6700 dps on a dummy.

Lady Deathwhisper... was barely doable, because we had only 1 melee for the adherents. We still reached P2, but then adds came down the stairs and that was it.

So, next, we tried Gunship, and tbh, I didn't notice the difference. Great healing, probably, and I smashed the portal ones like usual.

Pity the heroic trinket didn't show up, but that's just the usual.. it never ever drops :)

Finally, we tried Saurfang, and although adds were coming down fast, they also seem to move faster and hit like mad. Most problematic is the fact that Saurfang heals 300% more or so, so he was stil with 100% HP after 2 or 3 waves...meaning, we have to avoid blood healing at all costs. There is a stricter dps requirement, it seems, and one of our dps was doing 3k dps or so... no way.

All in all, it was good to see some raiders getting Heroic loot, and it was even better to finally have fun again in ICC10. Heroic mode *is* less error/slack forgiving.

High and Low, as I said.

Some LOTRO for a change

My adventures in the land of JRR Tolkien have been peaceful. Me and two IRL friends have been leveling about 1 hour/day, when all the kids (and wives) are in bed, and while far east stock exchanges are not trembling :)

This means I'm now a proud level 38 minstrel elf girl, named Janariel, collecting a few achievements.. or should I say deeds.
The big advantage of deeds over achievements is that you can use the deeds to enhance specific traits that might be good for your class. Instead, in WoW, you do all those achievements for.. the insanity of doing them and feeling well :)
So, you do deeds, enhance traits, equip them, use them in sets when appropriate, and therefore you become allmighty.



Another nice thing that LOTRO has is the bunch of different quests with elite mobs you can do, which is what we three wanted, when we decided to skip DDO for LOTRO.

In comparison, WoW is much more soloable than LOTRO. And easier too. As a minstrel, with healing and CC(fear), I can attack 2 mobs, 3 if I'm pushing my luck, but more means I'm dead meat. In WoW, I remember as a warlock, pulling 5-6 mobs and happily getting away with it.

But back to elite'ing, you've got:
- Skirmishes, ie, closed instances that you can do solo, in a small(3x) or large (6x) fellowship, that reward XP and medals for gear. Instead, WoW has only closed instances for fixed 5 ppl. If you can't find a healer, or a tank, you cannot do them. In LOTRO, you can adjust the skirmish to your party.
- Closed instances, with specific quests inside, just like WoW, but a tank is not mandatory (at least, doesnt look like that to me) although a healer.. indeed is.
- Open instances (as I call them), caves and such things with elite mobs where you are inside but can suddenly find other ppl too. And they are *huge*.
- A lot, and I mean, a lot of out-in-the-wild elite quests/chain quests, that require a small fellowship to do them. I'd say, 5-10 times more than WoW, which sometimes feature an elite at the end of chain, and that's it.

We'll see when it gets to raiding, how it will be.



This week we killed our first rare named elite, a huge dragon that was patrolling near the Mother Drake (another elite dragon) in the North Downs. It took a while for us 3 to control the drake breathing and to position myself between both the drake and her kin, while my fellow comrades smashed one.

One is a guardian, with the tanking role, the other is a champion with the AoE role, so the only ranged is myself, when not healing. But we're bound to get a Rune Keeper to play with us soon.

Next stop is Rivendell ! Aragorn, will you please wait for us!!!!!!!

Oh well, back to WoW :)

PS: This week I finally got Sartharion down + 3D in 25', so I'm a Twilight Vanquisher!

Up the ladder...painfully slow

Long time no write. Not much to write, as I've been doing some sparse achievements, and having fun with LOTRO.

Last night, we *finally* started our wipe fest learning the Lich King fight, in a good mood, after doing 11/12 ICC10 in <4 hours the day before.

Saw a lot of videos, a lot of different strategies for the different phases, and tbh, it seems easy on video, but until everyone sticks to a strategy and knows it, it's not. Really. The reason is simple: 1 mistake = wipe.

Phase 1 is not a dps race, so they say, but it is. The reason is that the LK must come down to 72% very fast, so that ppl can finish the Shambling Horrors at will. And the nuking, imho, shouldn't be done with dpsing them, but simply moving the Necrotic Plague up the stack ladder, by *NOT* dispelling them until the affected person is behind the mob, or that will decrease the effect of the plague. If the plagued mob is one of the ghouls, that's best, as it will be killed and the plague will stack, nearly 1-shotting the horror(s). But for this to work, there can't be many ghouls, as the plague will move between them but there must be at least 1-2, so it can stack before moving to the horror. That means some AoE must be done to speed up the killing of plagued ghouls. Single-targetting the Horrors seems like a total waste of time until the LK is at 71-72%.
Btw, we had our OT and MT spread apart, ie, MT AoE didnt seem to dps the mobs near the OT and vice-versa. On the videos I've seen, MT and OT seemed to be close enough so that the melee dps and MT AoE would damage the mobs around the OT too, although far enough so that the incoming plagued person leaving the plague near the Horror would not cause the jumping of the plague to anyone in the MT area. Have to check that.

We managed to move to the transition with 3 Horrors killed, and most times we actually had to wait 10s before the 3rd horror would spawn so I think it's feasible to have only 2 Horrors and then nuke the LK, a sitting duck at 72%.

Then we have the transition phase, or Phase 1.5.

Theoretically, ppl split in 2 or 3 groups. We did it with 2 groups, 1 group with both tanks and the melee dps and the other with ranged+healers. We had only 1-melee so it was not balanced. I've seen several videos where the person being raging-spirited would move to the tanks for an easier taunt, and to avoid that he silenced other players. We didn't to it that way, we kept dpsing Raging Spirits and the tanks would taunt the Spirits to them.
This *is* a dps race, but it has its problems, because the Spirits silenced our tank (dunno if that should happen), meaning, sunders/taunts delayed, meaning aggroing dps. I myself had that problem once, when the mob was at 52% (weird, ha?). We had one mostly(?) idle ranged (hunter) nuking the 6K hp (?) ice spheres.
So that left 4 dps to kill 3 Raging Spirits in 60 secs (and the 1st one does NOT spawn at t=0, it spawns at t=5 or so, that was my feeling but lets consider t=0)

Each Raging Spirit has 752k, meaning we need 37600 dps to get all 3 down in 60 secs.
Lets assume 4 dps + 0.2 dps for each tank + 0.1 dps (for the sphere dps)

So, requirement is about 8.3k dps for the poor 4 dpsers. That's a bit too much. Of course, if the sphere dps helps, that will help a lot. That might have been one of our probs, as we came out of the transition always with the 3rd Raging Spirit at 90% HP or so, so that was crap.

And now... Phase 2.

Absolutely first thing to do, when going in, do *NOT* go towards any incoming sphere that might have popped up at the last second. Kill it from the edge and *THEN* go in. We never had a problem with that, but..
First thing to do, and we failed several times: *MOVE* to near the middle, and *STACK* while waiting for the Val'kyr.
Second thing to do, do *NOT* dps the LK until the raging spirit is down.
Second thing to do, when the Valkyr shows up (it takes a bit of time to pickup the target), start nuking it, forget about the Spirit, and slow it down.
Third thing to do, start spreading (in my case, teleport out of the middle <= Create a portal near the edge, and that edge better be the way you go when you(lock) are picked up, so you can save yourself from falling by teleporting, which means, Portal must be in range).
IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WETHER TWO VALKYRS MAY COME UP WITHOUT A DEFILE. CHECK LK CASTS.

We utterly failed at spreading. DMB bars do not help, as it is only a guide. It shouts that "LK is casting Defile". By then you better be moving out of the middle and spreading. It seems easy. Dunno if it is or not, because I never got Defiled. But I saw ppl being defiled in the middle and then, because others were in the vicinity, the pool immediately extended to about 90% of the available area. Brutal !

I think this failure has to do with our dps being a bit low on the Valkyrs, lots of time they send us through the edge, meaning something was wrong. It's weird as we had 4 ranged dpsers. Still.. as we spend too much time with the Valkyrs, our focus waned and .. defeat.

A good solution (so they say) seems to be to have the LK as /focus , so you can see its target bar while you are nuking the Val'kyr.

The best we got in 10 tries was LK at 57% (?).

Not bad.

WTB ICC 10 HC to get a damn decent weapon and trinket....Muradin's Spyglass is cursed for me... 10+ runs and no drop :(

Bitch down, ICC10 11/12 !!!

After 6 weeks of perfecting, we downed Sindragosa today.
I was away for 2 weeks, but this week, I came with a killer instinct. And nothing like a bottle of wine for lunch to relax the muscles and prepare for the pwnage.

That P3 is a sh*t, when instability is combined with Mystic buffed. But we did it.

Lich King is next.

We did a single try on Arthas before finishing the weekend on a high, and it seems fun, much more my kind of fight, with multiple targets, target switching, fast reflexes needed, but not that "pay attention to multiple (3) debuffs at the same time" thing.

Valithria 25 down ! ICC25 8/12 , ICC10 10/12

After nearly two weeks of pause, Easter and all, I went back to raiding, and helped RGC down Valithria in 25 men. That was fun.



Then we went to ICC10 for our late-night clear and we did a funny achievement, the Gunship 10 I'm on a boat !

April Fools and Sartharion twilight

Years later, I finally downed Sartharion 10 with 3 drakes alive, also completing the Volcano achievement.

No it's not an April Fools joke.
But this one is :)



On the dark side, yesterday there was an ICC25 run that I couldn't attend, since I wont be available the whole 3 days, and guess what, of course, the two items I've been searching, boots and trinket, dropped.

And then ppl ask me why do I have so much DKP... because I have nothing to spend it on ARRGGH !