Jail Break and Daily Heroic

What do Jail Break and the daily heroic have in common? I did both today (on different chars) and both took longer than expected.

Jail Break was soloed by Supersoid, it was not hard but a bit slow going. After I finally cleared out both corridors the rest was easy except for the part where he (Windsor) goes into the equipment room. He got a lot of agro and his health went down a lot. Fortunately he didn't die and the escort finished smoothly. However clearing the corridors took much longer than I thought it would.

The daily heroic was Ramparts which I did with Solidstate. We wiped a bit on trash at the beginning and at first boss due to bad pull. But otherwise it went okay. However due to wipes and no warlock for SS, we had to run each time, making the run a bit longer than I thought it would be.

Overall though a good evening :)

Zul'Aman - Was Kinda Hard :(

I joined a guild ZA raid last night with Solidstate, they had previously cleared 3 bosses so we went straight to Jan'alai.

On the way to him we managed to wipe twice on trash. The first time, I didn't sheep the Amani'shi Flame Caster continuosly, as I didn't know I had to. About 2 seconds after I sheeped it the mob broke the sheep and firebombed the raid. It seems you need to continously sheep the mob to keep it sheeped. Anyway between the damage from that and from another caster that was being DPS'd, I died and the raid wiped soon after. The second time a paladin forgot himself and consecrated the ground under the sheep...
After the 2 wipes I noticed the caster had some kind of buff on himself so I tried to spellsteal it. Whoa! 300 haste rating for 20 seconds! That was insane :) Needless to say, I had no more trouble keeping the mob sheeped :)

Throughout the trash on the way to Jan'alai I noticed we lacked healing (was getting healed late, long times below 50% health). The lack of healing was much more felt when we started trying out the boss, with the MT dying try after try and the raid having to reset the boss. To be more precise, we wiped one time due to bad luck - boss teleported us to middle before we could kill the add breaking the eggs, causing us to be swamped with Dragonhawk hatchlings. The other times we mostly wiped due to healing problems. Not that I was perfect, I died 2 times due to the bombs (which shouldn't happen) but a single DPS dying will not wipe the raid, while a MT dying will. In any case we finally got the boss down but the only piece of loot was Arrow-fall Chestguard which no one wanted (we had no hunter and 2 DPS Shamans who both passed on it). So we ended up sharding it :(
Of course we all got 2 Heroic Badges each from the boss.

Next up was Malacrass. On this try we had the following adds: Thurg, Darkheart, Slither and Fenstalker. This was a good mix for us as we could: OT and kill Thurg, shackle Darkheart, sheep Slither and banish Fenstalker. Kill order was Thurg->Fenstalker->Darkheart->Boss->Slither... at least in theory.
In practice, we managed to down the 3 adds but the damage from the boss was so insane the healers never had a chance, especially due to his spell pushback during his shadow bolts. The fact that two of the healers were paladins didn't help as what is really needed in this fight is party/group healing, the paladins had a hard time doing single-target healing when the entire raid was taking damage.
For me this was one fight that my T4 bonus (100% spell interruption resistance) was a blessing as I could case firebolts on him continuously even during the shadow bolts.

We gave up after 3 or 4 wipes, for a total of around 3.5 hours in ZA, 1 boss down, no new gear for anyone and only 2 Heroic Badges to show for our troubles. Oh, and a large repair bill.

Sometime raiding can be a real downer ;p

Heroic Sethekk Halls in Just Under One Hour

How to do Heroic Seth Halls in just under 1 hour?

Take a well equipped prot-Paladin and aoe-tank entire groups at once.
Take 3 very good DPS, no CC needed :)
Take a friendly healer.

Result - 4 heroic badges (2 from bosses, 2 from daily reward) in under 1 hour. Nice :)

Update on Solidstate's Cooking

I now have Dig Rat Stew, thanks to a good Horde-side friend. Yey! :)

Solidstate Does SM

In an attempt to get a low level Tailoring Recipe I don't have which is a random drop (but has a higher drop chance from some SM mobs) I went to SM tonight. I did all 4 wings, took me less than 2 hours in all - so about 30min per wing, not bad for a full clear. I don't need the recipe, just something nice to have (complete my tailoring knowledge as much as possible).

I could have been faster, but I preferred to be careful as a wipe would have meant running and more lost time. For my mage a good number (most time efficient) seemed to be around 5 mobs, 10 max. Anything more and I run the risk of dying (cloth, remember?). A Frost mage could probably have handled more, but as a Fire mage I don't have as much survivability. There were many ranged mobs that I killed one by one, those were annoying.

I got from the run in total several shards and dusts of different types after disenchanting the blue/green items I got. I also got one tailoring recipe but not what I was looking for and I knew it already. I also got an engineering recipe, lots of grey items and I think around 200 silk cloth. I vendored the grey items and I plan to AH the rest, should be interesting to see if they fetch a good price and if I get at least some compensation for the 2 hours I spent. Alas, no BoE blue item.

Over a fun time, I would have preferred to go with someone else, if only for the company. But when I asked in the guild channel, no one was interested in coming with an alt. Maybe next time :)

Solidstate Puts on Cooking Hat

In a manner of speaking...
I stopped with other pursuits for a while and "leveled" something without practical meaning but still fun - my cooking.

To be precise, I didn't level Solidstate's cooking, he's already at max level. What I did do was use a nice little mod that checks your existing profession recipes and tells you what you don't have. It turned out I had some easy-to-get cooking recipes I was missing (from around Exodar and from RFD) and also some harder to get Horde-only recipes. The recipes I could get quickly, I did. The ones from the Horde side, I asked a guild-mate who had a Horde char (level 60 mage) and he was kind enough to get those recipes for me and coordinate with me posting them on the neutral AH so I could buy them as soon as he put them up. It worked like a charm and in 30 minutes I had almost all the recipes in-game. The ones I don't have are: Dig Rat Stew, Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops and the Delicious Chocolate Cake.

The Cake I will get, it is only a matter or time. The Dig Rat Stew will be a bit harder but I'm sure I can get it eventually also. But Dirge's Chops... I need a BWL raid first and to be the one (or one of the poeple) who loots Broodlord's head. So not likely to happen :(

Still having all cooking recipes in the game except for maybe 1 or 2 makes me feel very nice. Next up for completion are Solidstate's Tailoring recipes :)

Supersolid does BRD

I was getting tired of the "WoW Journal" headings, so trying now a subject which says a bit more about the actual post contents...

Aaaanyways, yesterday I decided to start out the Onyxia chain quest, as I wrote in my last post. After doing the first quest I was derailed by an invitation to a guild run to normal SV. Since more rep is always nice and guild runs tend to be fast (at least for normal mode) and fun, I went.

Getting back to the Ony chain after the SV run (which was as predicated fun and wipe-free :)),
I did a few more quests until I got the quest to go to BRD and talk to Marshal Windsor. At this point I was talking to a friend, who was playing an alt, level 53 Shaman. I told him I was off to BRD and offered him to tag along and he was glad to.

We both had a lot of fun inside, me in killing entire packs of mobs without fear of death, he in getting some welcome blues (he was mostly green due to doing almost no instances before), runecloth and lots of vendor trash. He did die a few times due to pulling agro, as a Hunter is not an AOE class so I couldn't pull all the mobs who rushed him back to me in time. But overall we both had fun and the run went smoothly. We did my quest quickly enough and then continued on a rather round-about way until we got to Fineous Darkvire and killed him for the Shadowforge Key quest. So now I have the key to BRD as well having finished another step in the Ony chain, which is a nice extra :)

WoW Journal, 18 Feb 2008

I finally managed to get a group together for a UBRS run. The group was 2 Paladins, a Hunter (myself) a Mage and a Warlock.
Our "strategy" consisted of running, collecting as many mobs at once as we thought we could handle, and using AOE to nuke them down. For example we did something I've never done @60, which is running through the egg room in an attempt to explode every single one of them. We had literally clouds of small dragon whelps flying about, and dying too ;)

Bosses were of course a push-over, with my pet tanking initially but quickly losing agro to the mage and warlock. Not that it mattered to them, both had over 9k life and both paladins were holy... you get the picture :) Even the final boss was not a problem, the mage tanked one add, the warlock another, and I tanked the boss. the Conflagration spell was a bit of a problem but by the time both me and my pet lost agro due to it, the adds were dead and the boss was at 20% :)

The run was fast and fun, but on the minus side The Beast didn't drop Finkel's Skinner :(
On the plus side I got BWL attuned which gives me nothing except if I ever want to go on a retro-run to BWL I'll be able to do so on my hunter.
Still now that I know how fast 5 level 70 chars can do UBRS I hope to convince some friends to do another run in the near future. Also I think I'll start doing the Onyxia attunement quest chain, I'm already attuned to MC and BWL so why not complete the trilogy :)
I'm pretty sure I can solo everything up to the UBRS run (which is the before-last step). I'll do that on my next attempt to get the skinning knife :)

How did you come up with your character names?

I read on Kinless a nice post about how he came up with his characters' names. Lots of Roman/Latin and historical influences.

Nothing so fancy here:
* Solidstate - My first character in WoW. I wanted a mage name and I had always thought of magicians in fantasy as sort of the equivalent of scientists in RL. So I chose "solid-state", a physics related term.
* Solidfaith - My next char to hit 70 was a priest. When I chose his name I wanted it to be clear he was my alt and to reflect his class, so "solid-faith" was born. Also a nice play on words :)
* Supersolid - My latest char to hit 70, I knew when I rolled a hunter I had a problem, nothing relating solid and hunter suggested itself. After a little reflection I thought about how I wanted to roll a hunter because they were so super-good at farming and so "super-solid" was born. Has the added benefit for me of also being a physics term.

I have a bunch of other solid chars waiting in the wings, but I don't feel like talking about them before they hit 70, or at least 60. I rarely if ever play them so they advance very slowly.

WoW Journal, 14-16 Feb 2008

Supersolid did some BGs on the 14th, actually won an AB match and WSG match. Rare enough occurrence that I'll mention it in my blog :)
Supersolid also went to solo UBRS, ambitious considering it was a 10-man instance back at level 60. I cleared up to Pyroguard Emberseer's room (no wipes but it took some time) only to find out you can't activate the room without at least 3 people. So wasted some time, but it felt good to know I can solo 5 level 60-61 elites without any significant problems. I need to get some guild mates to help me out...
Yesterday I took a few minutes with Supersolid to help out a friend who had a quest in Hinterlands, to get the Mallet of Zul'Farrak. When we got to the alter he attacked the horde npc there (which isn't needed) and since I helped him kill it we got both pvp on. He also had the Ancient Egg quest so we went into the cave and in no time got to the egg. At this stage I was asked to come to Kara on my mage so told the friend I was HSing out and relogging to Solidstate. He started to run out of the cave but some Horde who were also questing in the area, including a level 64 warrior (my friend is level 52) attacked him and killed him. So I stopped the HS, ran out, 2-shotted the level 46 or so Horde priest and attacked and killed the level 64 warrior who had killed my friend. That will teach them to pick on low level chars :)

Solidfaith did some farming in The Dead Mire, got a couple of Fel Lotus from plants he harvested and lots of herbs from both plants and giants harvested, as well as a total of around 6 Primal Life.
Solidstate did a daily heroic which got him 5 heroic badges and a partial Kara run which got him another 10, so 15 badges in all over the last 3 days.

Not bad, considering I didn't play all that much :)

WoW Journal, 13-Feb-2008

My first goal today was taking my Unforged Seal of Ascension and doing the quest to forge it. Soloing Emberstrife with my pet tanking was a piece of cake. Alas, when I tried to MC Emberstrife, I got an error that I couldn't control him since I already had a summoned pet, doh!

So I called a couple of guild mates (a tank and priest) and together the three of us did the quest without a problem. FYI the level 70 druid tank probably didn't really need the healer ;p

Tomorrow I'll go back into LBRS and turn in the forged seal to get the UBRS key. Looking forward to that :)

I had to logout after doing the quest and when I logged back in I was asked if I wanted to join an SSC raid as the guild were a few people short. I joined and we went straight to Lurker and downed him on the second try. The good and the bad of the run:
* The good - starting from the trash clears, I made it my goal to maximize my damage as much as possible. With a Shaman using Wrath of Air totem in my group, I was able to make it to 2nd place in the damage meters, 3rd after the Lurker takedown. As a mage, I was *really* happy about this. I was too far from the Shaman during the Lurker take-down to get the totem buff, which is why my damage went down.
* The bad - the first Lurker try saw us wiping at 2%. That's right, only a bit more and we would have done it. What went wrong? People dying due to Sprout which shouldn't happen. Almost entire raid have been in Lurker in the past, that people are still dying due to Sprout is just... noobish... :(

After the Lurker we went back to Hydross to try him out, however it was an almost immediate wipe at the first transition due to the tank dying. We were out of time for another try before respawns and a couple of people had to go or DC'd, leaving us short-handed. We waited for a while at the platform at the beginning before the first trash group but when it became clear we were just wasting our time, one of the rogues, egged on by us, did a Leeory Jenkins and pulled the first trash group, wiping the raid. What I call "going out with a bang" :)

After the raid I did a few of the Valentine's Day quests and collected some SW Pledge Cards etc., but those are frankly a waste of time, I don't think I'll continue with the Darnassus and Ironforge ones.

WoW Journal, 12-Feb-2008

I've decided to keep a steady WoW journal, because I keep thinking "I'll blog when I have something really interesting to write about" and I never seem to find that something interesting. So at that rate I would have had one post per month or something...

Maybe a daily or semi-regular journal of small non-interesting stuff will add up to a real WoW blog :)

Okay so here goes.
Last night I logged in late and of course my guild were already in the middle of a TK run (they managed to take down VR again which is good, both for gear and morale).
So looking for something to do, I decided to go on Solidstate and look for a heroic group.
While hanging around the LFG channel I noticed someone asking for an LBRS group. A quick /who showed me a level 55 paladin from a well known raiding guild, so I figured this was no idiot. I've been wanting to go to UBRS with my hunter to try and solo (or duo) The Beast, so for that I needed LBRS and to get the key for UBRS. I relogged to Supersolid, /w the paladin and joined his group (which was full with me). All the rest were below level 60, I was the only 70.

We started the run and I quickly took over, the rest were new to the place (no idea how strange that is for me, I feel I know the place like the back of my hand :)). Plus, as a level 70 hunter, it was easier to let my pet and me get agro, mobs didn't have a lot of chance against me, even in melee.

Our one wipe was when the warlock we were with didn't watch where he was going and we had 2 groups of mobs on us instead of one. Not being an AOE char I couldn't take them down fast enough to save the rest and when all the mobs attacked me I decided not to FD, so the others wouldn't feel bad about dying :)

Apart from that it went smooth, at the first boss I forgot to ask people not to roll on the gem and lost, afterwards they were nice enough to pass and I got the other two gems.

After the run I reset the instance and went back in with another level 70 hunter and we cleared the mobs and killed the boss without any problem. In retrospect I could have skipped the low level pug. Oh well, live and learn...

So now I have the Unforged Seal of Ascension and I just need to do the quest to forge it. I'll try to solo it and if I can't do it I'll get a guild friend to help, but as a hunter it should be doable. Then, UBRS, here I come! :D

Hmm that was a long post. I'll think I'll make them shorter in the future... ;)