Lich King 25 back and forth

Mixed feelings on this week of tries. We are now going for the 30th try, and 30 tries later, one can conclude something.

It is not easy !

Best try in two days was around 55%, but:
- 80% of the tries we ended up at 65%, meaning between the 1st and 2nd defile in P2.
- all tries but two we had at least one dead person by the 1st val'kyrs.

P1 is easy, and as long as ppl have no lag or are not oblivious (lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness!) to what they are doing, it's smooth.
- Sometimes the raid has to stop dps on Arthas around 72% and some ppl continue to do it.
- Sometimes ppl want to start dps the second the tank gets aggro, and die.
- Dps is OK, specially with the pala tank we had yesterday, my threat was simply HALF of what I usually get, which allows me to do a bit more, specially on the Raging Spirits. I knew there was space for improvement for threat generation.

Transition phase: Easy part as long as:
- the melee don't dps the second the Raging Spirit pops up. Some of them do, and die.
- the ranged run to the melee to drop the spawning Raging Spirit.
- Dps wise, it seems ok, we always kill 2 spirits and start pwning the 3rd one. We made an improvement, by bringing the Spirit to the LK in P2, so melee can kill it too before the Val'kyrs. It worked. Spirit is 0%-10% when they arrive.

P2: Val'kyr Nightmare.
- raiders have to stack in line behind LK, not 1 yard but 3-5 yards, so that all 3 Val'kyrs run in the same direction. We failed there, so they fly in different directions, making it worse for melee. Result is, 1-3 falling down.
- Defile: first defile is easy, as long as raiders move in the opposite direction the defiled person goes. Some ppl don't do that, they wait for the defiled to run away, and sometimes it's not enough. I learned to move 1-2 secs before it sets the target so I'm already dpsing the val'kyrs in my stationary position when defile shows up. Most times I don't have to move anymore. And that's the reason why I get a good damage on them, 2nd highest both days.
- second defile occurs in the same seconds of the 2nd set of val'kyrs, and that's the pain. All times, when the second defile is a melee, we get a black hole in the middle, and that's game over. So ppl must know the timings for this second set and spread the same second the val'kyrs pickup their targets. 2 secs later, it's too late.
- last but not least, Infest ! Infest kills 3-5 ppl every time we finish killing the first set of val'kyrs. Reason is possibly the lack of a discipline priest and may be a resto shaman for the chain healing.



By the way, what is wrong in this picture ???

All in all not so bad, but raid composition is affecting the progress below 65%, because of the number of dead ppl after the first set of val'kyrs, and that's what's stalling us.

Let's see how it goes tonight.

The Scepter ! I got the Scepter !

After three years or so, tonight I completed the AQ40 quest chain.

Got a bargain on the last Elementium Ores, delivered all the items I've been saving to Narain, who sent me on a fish hunt to Azshara, to kill the great Shark.



Inside him I found the last shard, that I delivered to Anachronos. And so Anachronos gave me the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, the magnificent scepter the mighty heroes of old used to bang a gong and open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

Double trinketing !

Sindragosa 25 down today ! Costed us a few tries under 9%, one at 2% and then, with the right raid setup, it came down with time to spare.

Funny to see that a few so *called* hardcore(r) raiders left our guild to go for heroic modes and ... their progress is just like ours, Sindra down. Ha !

And guess what, a trinket dropped. I forgot to check what loot it dropped, but I had the idea there was no other caster trinket in ICC25. But suddenly... there was. And it was just like [Muradin's Spyglass].

And so I thought in the following 10 secs: "I have killed Gunship and Rotface 24 times and only got 1 trinket on the 24th run... am I going to wait another 24 runs for my luck on Gunship, or am I going to use my dkp ?" So I used it. Some people may have been sad about it, but ffs, I had a lvl 200 trinket, the BiS for lvl 200, but still a lvl 200.

SO I'm now the proud owner of a [Phylactery of the Nameless Lich].

We tried LK but ppl had to go so we're saving it for next week.

I smell blood.

PS: Fucking addon updates just before raid costed me an unforced error. After update, DBM was disabled, LifeTapper was wrongly installed, so on the first iceblocking DBM didn't notify me and .. I blocked 10 ppl or so. Argh, humiliating. Never DO THAT AGAIN !

Slacker trinketing

GZ me ! After 3 months of trying, I finally got my first ICC 25 trinket, the 3rd drop for the guild, the imba [Dislodged Foreign Object].

The funny thing is that I had run a few simcraft tries, and guess what:

It is going to replace my lvl 232 [Nevermelting Ice Crystal], not my lvl 200 Abyssal Rune. The reason, of course, is that I get more boost using the Abyssal rune, loosing some OnUse cooldown of 3 mins but gaining less threat during fight starts (not so many crits), providing a way to engage full dps faster.

Simcraft now says I should be able to pull over 10K dps on a t&s with nearly ideal class distribution, and indeed I did, >10K on Festergut staying outside and again >10K on Putricide (not expected tbh :). WEEEEEEE !

Funny how GS tells so little about effective equipping. Well, GS tells so little about everything.

The best part is that yesterday, finally we got serious raid going. Ppl were focused and knew what to do, so we pwned 9 bosses in ICC25 with lots of pausing times. This means we have a real shot of downing Sindragosa 25 tonight if the raid setup stays the same. Fingers crossed.

I'm on target to get my three final items from ICC25:
- A conqueror emblem to upgrade my shoulders.
- The offhand from Blood Princes.. or the one from Deathwhisper 10HC.
- And the bloody damn Gunship ICC10 trinket that never dropped during 4 months of guild runs. I've been slacking, skipping most weeks when I have to PUG it due to busy weekends (being a father is a full time job..)

A happy lock !

Guess who came for tea ?

Heroic mode made easy

Yesterday I got some spare time, so I decided to try and pug ICC10, for the first time ever. Joined the raid browser and waited.
I got an offer for a guild alt run where they would do some Heroic Modes.
That was weird, but I accepted and joined.

And Heroic Modes we did, 6 of them, and missed Saurfang by an incredible bad luck, as the healer got a double debuff (didnt even know it could happen) with 300K to go !

- Down went HC Marrowgar, staying in the middle while the two tanks spread.
- Down went HC Deathwhisper, with no back tactic, just staying in the middle and focusing on the adds (only 2 casters, me and a Shadowpriest, but we did fine). In P2, I got no aggro problems at all, although I was pushing.
- Down went HC Gunship, too easy to be told. And again, my #$@%& trinket dropped...NOT !
- HC Saurfang, we tried but skipped it after the 300K wipe, ppl were rushing to bed.
Down went HC Rotface, the only difference I noticed is that I had to stay in range to dps and seemed to get frozen every now and then.
- Down went HC Festergut. They pulled the boss to the opposite side of the balcony where Putricide is sending the Goo. Works much better than middle positioning. I got it once :( but we managed fine.
- Down went HC BQ. I was the last to be bitten and had an incredible bad luck, my keyboard got stuck in auto-run when the fight started for about 2 mins... god knows what silly bug happened, so I had to keep pushing the back move button to stop my warlock in place....even so I did pretty good dps. Got two swarming shadows and two Darkfallen, couldn't get worse !
We reached the LK but by then it was too late, so we did two tries, going into the last phase but never got to 10%.

Wow !

The best part is that I wasn't pushing 100%, since I never know what kind of tanks and positions these other guilds have and it was a bit hard to have to learn it in the first 5 secs of the fight, but I did a pretty good dps, staying in the top 3 all the time. The leader was speaking english at 200% with that damn accent they have in the countryside or whatever that was, it was hard to understand at times, but I managed it. "shummashone" = "summon a stone".

Guild name is Respect. They gained mine too.

A new 80 is born

Luxor the Moonprince, my beloved paladin, has tanked and tanked and reached 80 very easily. I'm now liking him much more, although still thinking that mana is more of an issue than rage was for warrior. But anyway, once you start to deal with it, it becomes a blast.

Time to level his engineering a bit more and then park him in Stormwind for Cataclysm.