welcome to Ulduar

And welcome to Tora's indecisive mind.

Yeah, I said I'd quit, but after posting so much about 3.1 I guess I couldn't help but take a peek.

And what a peek it was! I ran with a casual guild's Ulduar10. We only managed to get the first three bosses down (Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and XT) with attempts on two subsequent bosses - Ignis and Kologarn.

What I've seen so far is... satisfying, I suppose. I did this run on Tora healing, with barely any mods at all (as you can see in the screencap), since I'd deleted my WoW folder two months ago, but it was alright.

Still though, running through Stormwind at 1am leaves me with a hollow feeling in my chest. Raiding is really never going to be the same.

Grats on Malygos!

Our guild Renaissance downed Malygos on 25man tonight! Congratulations, and good work everyone.

I also finally got my Favor of the Dragon Queen, of course socketed with a 16agi gem. However, this brings me below the hit cap once again... Seriously, WTB Black Ice.

Incidentally, I have also been running around as BM lately. Toshi didn't see much raiding action this week, as I was on Tora a lot of the time. I mainly respecced to farm ZG for that raptor, and to see how Spirit Beast dps is doing.

I'm quite happy to say that BM dps is good again. Not quite restored to its former glory, but competing quite well with Survival. It's taking me a while to get used to having to manage my pet again, heh.

Raiding as a druid

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. ^^; I've been busy and such.

Tonight I went to Naxx25 as a Resto druid, instead of on my hunter. To be honest, I was getting mind numbingly bored of Naxx. Each week it's the same old thing. So I thought I'd shake things up a bit.

In an ideal world, I would have gone as Feral and tanked my happy bear butt off. But no, we always have enough tanks. So I respecced Resto and went raid healing. I'm not a huge expert on it, but I figured, it can't be too hard right? Just watch some health bars. My experience healing Outland dungeons to level at least taught me as much.

Regardless, my noobish-ness and undergeared ass did fairly well. My best fight was Heigan, where I think I performed admirably. Being used to dps on the run already, it was a simple matter of spamming heals on the raid instead of instants on Heigan. So I'm pretty happy with how that turned out.

I got two pieces of loot tonight, Robes of Mutation and Shawl of the Old Maid. Well, not exactly Tora's first ever epics, as a few days ago I'd gotten her Bands of the Great Tree from Emblems of Valor, seeing as they're BoE. I also had Trollwoven shoulders crafted for her tanking set, which I will unfortunately now put in the bank, much to my disappointment. Well, at least they got to see some action tanking a few heroics and Sartharion. I guess the next time they'll come out is when dual specs are rolled out.

Overall though, my druid has been going fine. And Toshi, on the other hand, has been working on Elder. I got Elders of Eastern Kingdoms about an hour ago, gonna try and hit Orgrimmar early to finish up the Horde elders, and then we'll be running heroics the rest of the afternoon for the remaining dungeon elders as well as heroic dungeon achievements.

We're so close to the Red Proto Drake! I can smell it!

How to: Thaddius (heroic) video

We finally downed Thaddius on 25-man tonight, along with Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad.

Sadly, no Envoy of Mortality for me yet. :( Also lost a roll on Drape of the Deadly Foe, le sigh.

Anyways, the video shows how I do things as Surv... because yeah, I stayed Surv for 25s this week, hehe. I wanted to see how it'd hold up against BM/Readiness, and surprisingly, it's pretty good. Notice the trap dancing on the adds. It would have been impossible to trap dance safely with the charges though, so the only time I can proc LnL from traps is to drop a trap when running from negative to positive side.

More experimenting with Surv

As mentioned in a previous post, I thought I'd save 10mans for Survival testing. Well, tonight was the guild's weekly 10man Naxx, and I thought I'd try out a different spec from last week.

This week, I put in that one point in Go for the Throat (which in my haste last week I forgot to do) which was suggested on the EJ Surv hunter thread.

Instead of putting full points into Sniper Training and 1 in Imp. Feign Death, I decided to go Trap Mastery and Resourcefulness this time. Because this was a clean run of Naxx (as opposed to just two bosses like last week), I had more opportunities to use Explosive Shot's AoE capability.

My main rotation on trash would be to wait for tank to pick up and establish aggro, run in and drop an Explosive Trap, wait for Lock and Load to proc, use up L&L's charges, and then Volley until Explosive Shot is off cooldown.

Usually, after proccing L&L, you can just sit back and literally listen to the fireworks. It's like music.

What surprised me though, is that I topped dps for most bosses. (Of course discounting the fact that we'd taken a few undergeared people in to get some loots for them...) There were a few fights were our Fury TG Warrior out dpsed me, but that was by a rather small margin and so I don't really mind.

Since there is no WWS report tonight, I can't really tell how well Replenishment went for the raid.

See that Explosive Shot three in a row crit? Oh yeah baby...

Thoughts on Survival

Against my better judgement, I respecced Survival for our guild's 10man Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad kills tonight. One of the new healers who'd just dinged - a CoH priest - was complaining of going oom halfway through the fight because we didn't have a Replenishment class. So I decided to take a dive into the deep end and throw dps out the window while I did so.

So I dragged my ass down to IF, respecced, and banged on the Heroic Training Dummy for a while, figuring out a good rotation. Right after that, I got asked on a heroic Halls of Lightning run, where I was mildly surprised by the dps output it was doing, especially on boss fights. (Hello, 10k Kill Shot crit!) Funny story... we actually killed Loken 5 minutes before the instance reset and I didn't manage to loot my badges, Stone Keeper's Shards or the quest item... boo!

Anyway, I rock up to Sapph, and we down him on the first try. I'd read some surv hunter reports that they'd run up to the boss and drop an Explosive Trap on their heads to proc Lock and Load. While it's not one of the most dignified things to be seen doing, especially on Sapph, it does result in a chain of Explosive Shots, and hey, more crits mean more uptime on Replenishment, right? Absolutely!

I even have a WWS report! It's my first time actually seeing one of these things in action, so bear with me if I'm a bit excited. According to WWS, my Replenishment buff caused our healers to gain an average of 14k mana. It's not stellar as far as mana replenishment goes, but I guess it's not bad? Forgive me if I have no clue how this works for healers...

I came 4th on damage, and 6th on dps for that fight. Not too shabby for damage, but a little lackluster for dps... but I was expecting that.

On to Kel'Thuzad. We wiped the first time due to an unlucky number of mana explosions on one of our druid healers, and an unlucky ice block on the add tank right before the adds came up, but we did get him down to 10%.

Anyways, second attempt went better. Here's the report for those interested. On this fight, Replenishment restored about 15k of healers' mana. I also switched aspects 5 times on the fight, something which is also interesting. As with Sapph, I was periodically running up to KT and dropping a trap. It was actually pretty amusing to hear our DK tank - who is formerly a hunter - ask if he should be doing anything, because he thought it was something the boss did.

Came 3rd on damage and 4th on dps, slightly better than Sapphiron. (It's the not having to move out of blizzards... I swear)

I wasn't feeling on top at the end of the raid, but after our resto druid posted the WWS reports and told me that Replenishment was actually helpful to him on those fights, I kinda feel better now. It is nice to actually have some utility other than just bring the huge numbers in, and I think I will be respeccing for guild 10s to Survival from now on. :)

Special thanks to the guild's resident grumpy resto druid for posting that WWS report!

Guide to Aces High! daily

aka Practice for Malygos dragon phase!

How to unlock the daily:

1. Go to Librarian Serrah (33.5 , 34.4) in Coldarra
2. Obtain the quest [Corastrasza]
3. Deliver it to Corastrasza (29.5 , 24.8), she is on top of a platform -you need to fly
4. Get the daily quest [Aces High!] (first time you even get a blue item) and repeat it until you only dream about flying around doing this daily when you sleep!

Basically, you get a red drake with the exact same abilities as the drakes you ride in the Malygos encounter. The basic strategy to completing this daily is to HoT yourself up with Revivify, and then engage a blue drake. (Scalesworn Elite) When your health gets knocked down a bit, target yourself (this is important) and use Life Burst.


Here's some handy macros:
/target Scalesworn Elite
/castsequence reset=target Flame Spike, Flame Spike, Engulf in Flames
For the Malygos fight, just change /target Scalesworn Elite to /target Malygos.

The damage part of this is fairly straightfoward. You can spam that macro to victory (much like a hunter would be used to... but I digress) and just focus on healing yourself periodically.

Although the tooltips for the abilities say that they require combo points, they aren't really "combo points" as such. They're more like stacks of the ability. So 5 stacks of Revivify is the same as 5 combo points on yourself. 5 stacks of Flame Spike is the same as 5 combo points on the target.


The blue drakes also do a burst move called Arcane Surge which you have to shield yourself from. As long as you have one or more stacks of Flame Spike, and 25 energy, you can put up a Flame Shield. I've found that you can actually survive that without putting up the shield (it all came down to me being sloppy, but whatever) just make sure you HoT yourself up after you've taken the spike damage. Typically, it deals about 60-70% of your total health, so watch your drake's health closely.

Before you start, make sure you can see your pet bar. This is no problem if you use WoW's default interface, but if you have Pitbull or any other unitframe mod, make sure to double check. It is especially important that you are able to keep an eye on your energy.

For hunters and warlocks (classes which already have pets), dismiss your pets to prevent any sort of weird bugging which might happen. You may also want to have a separate unitframe mod to display the pet bar, because if you're anything like me, having to change Pitbull around is a pain in the ass. For example, I use Pitbull for my usual frames, and turn on ag unit frames for this daily/raid.

The raid encounter will pretty much be the same, perhaps with the exception that you don't need to watch your health as much, due to the presence of healer assignments. However, since you can heal yourself, it is always a good idea to keep an eye on the health bar anyway.

Another general tip for healers in this raid is to turn on pet frames for this fight. The dragons everyone gets are considered pets and it might be hard to heal the raid without this turned on.

Also, if your target's debuffs/auras are filtered, make sure you turn them off so you can see how many stacks of Flame Spike is on the target as there is no traditional "combo point" display as such. This might be a bit hard to identify in a raid situation, but you can always play guess! Anyway, I think Pitbull often places your debuffs first.

I know it might seem like a pain, but a few goes at this daily and it might actually be fun!

Raiding on a new pc

I got a shiny new pc for Christmas, so I was pretty excited to be raiding tonight. I'd previously been using my bf's laptop to play WoW, and usually in raids it'd be chugging with under 10 frames per second with all the settings on minimum.

There were a few issues with Error #132 and overclocking of the RAM, but I seemed to have solved that problem, thank god. WoW ran perfectly fine for about 5 hours. :)

We went ahead and tried for Less Is More on heroic Sartharion, and it went perfectly. Wiped once due to a mistake on positioning and aggro, and the flame adds overwhelming the dps a little bit. He was on 5% and everything! I was lucky enough to get Fury of the Five Flights to replace my Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood. Thankfully I'd gotten Fool's Trial earlier from Naxx25 to make up for the hit! So right now I'm sitting just under the hit cap and not missing.

I took the shiny new trinket down to IF to test it out on the training dummies, and it's probably one of the best trinkets I've ever had. The proc is up pretty much 100% of the time, because a new stack refreshes the duration on the buff. So pretty much the only time when you'd lose the buff is when you're not attacking anything. Holy crap!

And as of today I am fully epic'd out... except for a stat stick. =.=