Shannox Heroic

So we finally decided to start our hard mode progress, after farming for normal modes several weeks in a row, just so that we would have better gear when we began. Shannox turned out to be almost identical to the normal mode and kind of a pushover. It is absolutely undoable unless you can communicate well and coordinate the way the dogs are pinned in the crystal traps but after you’ve solved that the fight almost takes care of itself.

On normal mode you can basically ignore resetting the jagged tears debuff stacks on the tanks but on hard mode, it is essential. The dogs are not killed on hard mode, just trapped in crystal traps as often as possible to reset rageface’s feeding frenzy stacks, as well the jagged tear stacks on the tanks. It is made a little bit tricky by the fact that both dogs become immune to crystal traps if they run over immolate traps. Riplimb also runs faster and the jagged tears take longer to reset. The way we solved it was keep Riplimb close to max distance from the boss and a short distance from a crystal trap. When the boss hurls the spear, I would quickly kite the dog the extra distance to the trap and lock him in before he goes back to fetch the spear.

This maximizes the distance Riplimb needs to run and gave us just enough time to reset the stacks. Beyond that, just nuke the boss and rejoice in victory :)

Slaying the Fiery Lords

This is a fairly simple achievement to do, but requires some bit of background knowledge, as well a lot of patience. The idea is to slay four different elite mobs on the Sethria’s Roost; Searris, Kelbnar, Andrazor, and Fah Jarakk. The root itself is made out of several platforms, where you also complete the daily quest The Protectors of Hyjal, although most people actually only stick to the first platform and rarely venture on the second and third.

The mobs always spawn in order, starting with Kelbnar, Fah Jarakk, Searris, and finally Andrazor and should only spawn one at a time, although I have witnessed seeing two spawned at the same time. I am unsure if this is currently a bug but watch out for them. They can also spawn in rapid succession or take as long as over half an hour between spawns. When I did these, I saw Fah Jarrakk spawn literally within seconds after Kelbnar had been killed, and again Searris spawn faster than I could travel to him, at max speed, from Fah Jarrakk.

The best way to do these elites is to have a friend with you. If you are a DPS, bring a healer and visa versa. You will not need an actual tank, because as a damage dealer, you can actually solo some of these mobs, albeit being quite difficult. You also need to as quick as possible because you need to tag the mob in order to get the credit for its kill. A lot of people assume they will get credit but this is a fallacy.

Kelbnar

Kelbnar looks like an ancient hellhound, like the ones you see on the Molten Front, as well in Firelands. He spawns at the southern end of the first platform, so is the most prone to be tagged very quickly. His main abilities include charging on your allies and leaving behind him a trail of flame. So just stay out of it and you will be ready to face Fah Jarakk.

Fah Jarakk

Fah looks like slightly smaller and greenish version of Fiery Behemoth and spawns at the northern corner of the second platform. The platform itself is rather small and Fah’s biggest problem is that he keeps casting fire nova, just like Fiery Behemoth, except his deals a lot more damage and he casts them a lot more often. On top of that, he will cast high damage meteors from the sky and occasionally enrage, which makes him literally spam fire nova.

You need to absolutely avoid every meteor, because they really take a big chunk of health off you and, when he is not enraging, interrupt fire nova. If he enrages, Fah will grow in size and the best strat is to simply run away from him. The fire nova is uninterruptable, as he casts it so fast and often in this phase. If you can avoid all the above damage, you should be fine, but I would opt to bring help  on this fight. Even with the druid allies from the daily quest, Fah is a real challenge to solo, even in descent gear.

Searris

Searris is a fire elemental, like the ones we’re used to seeing from Twilight Highlands, as well as Firelands, except he is bigger. Regardless, he is one of the easier lords and is completely soloable, particularly for warriors because he keeps summoning tiny fire elemental adds and we can easily get a victory rush proc from them. The only troublesome ability he has is a fear and fire dot debuff. The debuff deals pretty good damage so, if you intend to solo him, bring a pvp trinket with you and always make sure you have a VR proc available, as well your finger on your enraged regen button.

Andrazor

Like Fah, Andrazor is difficult to solo. I got some help from other people killing mobs on the area and yet only barely survived by dropping aggro and using every defensive cooldown in my arsenal. Had I been alone, I have no doubt I would have failed. Andrazor uses the same model as Alysrazor, the Firelands boss, and spawns at the farthest corner of the last platform, literally on top of where Seassir spawns.

The exact spawn point is in the air and you need dismount and instant attack him from the air to pull him as soon as possible. If left unattended, Andrazor will simply start flying around the Sethria’s Roost and will so an 8-loop until someone pulls him.

His abilities include a breath and a knockback, so you will need to get some healing and absolutely make sure you are not between him and the edge. You can, and will, be thrown off the edge and that will effectively ruin the pull for you. Same goes for being thrown on enemy mobs. If you’re top aggro holder, point him away from the rest of your allies and just hit him as hard as possible to take him down fast.

At the end, you will be rewarded with a shiny achievement, but, depending on the RNG gods, might take a few tries and just general, boring waiting.

Magmaw Defeated!

Summer has arrived and people are laying it back on a river boat or the beach, where life is good but still, to my sincerest delight, we still managed to get people together to kill a new boss. Magmaw went down after we got the ranged groups sorted out, although the fight seems really plagued by all kinds of weird problems. I died on during mangle simple because the chains refused to stick on the darn spike. Luckily, our second tank, Trencavel managed to stay alive long enough to tank rest of the bone warriors and the boss until the DPS took him down.

All in all, a fight I really enjoyed. Has a lot to offer to us tanks; boss taunts, add control, movement and cooldown timing, and so forth. A lot of fun :D

Chimaeron Defeated!

Another hard mode boss is behind us, as we move on from Chimaeron and onto Maloriak. I confess that I never liked this fight very much and has a lot to do with the fact that it depends a lot on just pure RNG. We wiped several times during the night and although we had some test drives on Maloriak’s hard mode, many of the wipes were simply caused by events that we could do nothing about. The last phase especially, the tanks need to get pretty lucky with their strings of avoided hits or DPS do not have enough time to kill him. In many ways, the entire fight is a gimmick and I’m pleased it done with.

Maloriak sure looks like a lot of fun, with less RNG elements.

Heroic: Atramedes

This fight went down pretty easily for us and Atramedes fell only after approx. hour and a half after we entered the instance. It also did not need any major brainstorming for good strategies, as our raid leader had come up with something quite good already and it soon came apparent that it was the best way to do it.

The most important thing on this fight is simply, controlling sound and the most obvious source of sound are the sonic bursts; glowing discs that spawn under the boss and begin sliding across the floor. We stacked all the ranged in one spot and all the melee in one spot, except the tank, which effectively meant that the discs were always choose very predictable routes. The ranged group alternated between two spots, changes every time the discs appeared and the melee simply side stepped and return to their position, at Atramedes’ foot.

The night was young so we actually got in some good tries at Chimaeron’s hard mode, and we still have one full raiding night left this week. So ofc the goal for monday is a dead two headed dragon.

Ohh, and one more thing. A guild mate pointed out that my screenshots are too small, so I added couple of hundred pixels to my standard. So Fury, this one is for you. Let me know what you think :D

I have also installed custom fonts for my achievements, so should look more stylish. I will have them also on my names and titles, by the time of my next screenshot.

Nefarian’s End

It was a very pleasant feeling last night, after couple of long raid nights of practicing the fight, to finally see the last of the normal mode bosses, Nefarian go down. We almost called off the raid actually, since the initial attempts were plagued by disconnections as the world server was having a hiccup but we figured that lets try for another 15-20 minutes and if there is a disconnection, then we will call it. Thankfully there wasn’t and after only a couple of tries we managed to kill Nefarian.

Next stop, some hard modes while we still have the time.

Go home team!

Ruby Sanctum Explored

Time to breath a little bit of more life into this blog and no better time than, when you have a lot of thoughts to comment with. I will begin with this look into the finished product that is the Ruby Sanctum, last raid instance to be published in this expansion. I wrote a lot about before during the PTR so I will not bother going through all of that again.

Rather, I decided to provide a look through a new medium that I am exploring, which is video capture. With the LK down on 25-man, we are feeling good about our guild. Makes you comfortable that as a group, you have helped the guild build back up from the deep gutter that we were in, only couple of months ago. With that knowledge giving us a big boost of confidence, we are coming up with a few new projects and my favorite pet is the video capture of our encounters.

It has already started and through a lot of trial and error I have released two video captures. They are both from Ruby Sanctum, as it provided a perfect testing ground for a new editor. The two videos are our first 10-man and 25-man kills. No heroic tries yet, but chances are we will be going for those in the near future. Depends how we divide our raiding time between the ICC hard modes and the Ruby Sanctum.

Personally, I did not find the normal modes that difficult. Naturally, he hits a lot harder on 25-man difficulty and the challenge is primarily on surviving, especially in the Twilight realm where everyone is moving and healers have a lot to deal with. But any decent group will not have a lot trouble with this encounter. As of fact, most of us in the group agreed that the trash mobs in Ruby Sanctum are a lot more annoying than the bosses themselves.

Anyway, here are the links to my two vids, first the 10-man Halion and then the 25-man version. Hope you enjoy.

25-man Lich King

The atmosphere is almost tangible, when finally all the hard work and effort pays off, as the encounter is defeated and the Lich King falls to the ground. It validates all the decisions and paths that we have taken as a guild, letting us know that we did it right. The right people were at the right place and at the right time.

Now it is time to look for future the horizon, raise the par even more and begin tackling the hard modes of Icecrown Citadel, while at the same time bring in those who couldn't fit into last night's kill, so we can all enjoy it.

Heroes of the Alliance, I salute you.

Sindragosa Down

This has truly been a good week, progression wise. First we get the Lich King down on 10-man and now the path has been cleared in 25-man, all the way to the top of the Icecrown Citadel. The only thing between us and the completion of the whole normal modes content is the Lich King himself.

The battle is set and we will reign victorious!

Fall of the Lich King

I was suppose to report our latest Sindragosa kill last night, but held off the news in the event that our Lich Kings would be successful before the next reset. To all of our great delight, the Lord of the Scourge finally fell, after many attempts and tactical refinements, and when he hit the much anticipated 10% the joy was tangible in our local vent channel.

 

To a great misfortune, our paladin tank had to endure bad connections throughout the night, which eventually cost him his lich king kill, with achievements and loot when he dropped offline right at the very last moments and did not resurface until we were all staring at the loot boxes. Hopefully the GMs can fix this for us, giving him the credit he deserves along with the rest of us.

Loot included nice pieces, such as Windrunner’s Heartseeker and Troggbane, Axe of the Frostborne King, both eagerly received. Now we can finally get to work on the heroic modes and I dare say, next week’s lockdown will be very exciting.

Thanks for all nine who were with us. Nice work.

Reliving the 60s

The love is in the air festival has crossed over its peek and is now slowly declining, as fewer and fewer people keep hunting achievements. As a personal observation, this time around, the world event was much easier, even compared to the few previous ones this year, like brewfest. Compared to the same festival last year, there is almost no relation.

Last year’s love fool festival was about random chance and mindless grind to roll together all the achievements – one of the big reasons I did not attend it much. It is one thing to make a task challenging, but when it takes dumb luck instead of skill, just puts me off immediately.

What was your experience from this year? I found it relaxing and something that was pleasant to go along with, on the side while still attending all other daily activities. Although, I would perhaps ask Blizzard to re-visualize their concept of what is a “lovely dress.” I bought the box of clothing for both male and female chars and when I dared to preview them on my banker, almost had my eyes jump out of their sockets and run away screaming.

So what is next? Naturally the Lunar Festival, starting tomorrow, 13th of February. Unlike the many festivals that have come before, this will be mainly a grind run; to acquire all the ancestor coins, sprinkled literally every corner of the known world. But at least it will give an excuse to get the Explorer title, to those who have not yet done so.

Toravon the Icewatcher

Battle for Wintergrasp sure did not lack excitement this evening, when literally half the realm descended onto the snowy plains and attacked the horde fortification. Lag was so bad that no one could possibly even think of any proper strategies or tactics. Got our 2 2nd lieutenant ranks before we had even finished taking all the quests.

The lieu of sieges machines that left the first workshop was just staggering and breaking the walls was just simply about driving up the hill and bashing on the fortress. Targeting, much less actually killing anything was a gamble of cards due to the sick lag, with the game mostly just yelling that your target was not in LOS or range, although to your eyes, seemed like the blood elf paladin-kind-of-thing was still standing calmly in front of you.

Getting a VoA group afterwards took exactly two microseconds and the general consensus was to immediately go for Toravon, the new boss of the instance. The mechanics themselves are extremely simple, but at least during my 25-man group, seemed like the dps could not focus on the simple matter of killing the adds quick enough.

As a tank, your job is extremely simple; stand on top of the other tank and you switch between three stacks of Frostbite debuff. This is essentially just a debuff from the boss’s Frozen Mallet strike that deals periodic frost damage. The latest DBM has already been updated for the fight and each time a stack is applied to a tank, the addon notifies you of it. Occasionally, since the debuff is a Chance-on-hit ability for the boss, the stacks appear irregularly; they may come quickly or slow, but just make sure that your old stacks have faded, before you taunt or you will most certainly die. If you notice that you are building stacks and your partner cannot taunt yet, blow a useful cooldown.

The boss also has a soft enrage timer, in the form of another stacking debuff, Whiteout that is cast over the entire raid every 45 seconds. Each stack increases all frost damage taken by 25%. Eventually, becomes impossible to heal through.

The real tick of the encounter is dealing with the Frozen Orbs that the boss summons every 30 seconds. There are always three at a time and each deals periodic frost damage to everyone within 8 yard radius. It is imperative that all DPS switch to quickly kill the orbs, though might be enough if you just have all your ranged switch. Again, latest DBM has a timer that shows when the orbs are about to spawn.

The only other mechanic is Freezing Ground that freezes and roots the target and those close to him on the floor. This needs to be dispelled away and a sharp disc priest is very good for this job.

The fight is really about controlling the orbs and the debuff on the tanks. If your group can master both tasks, you will likely not have a problem with the encounter.

Tribute to Insanity

It was a rather happy and proud moment for us all that evening, when the achievement finally glowed on all our screens; the Tribute to Insanity. It took us a bit by surprise, as none of us were really aiming for it, at first. On the contrary, I was pessimistic about our run when I foolishly died tanking Gormok in the beginning, however, it turned out to be the best run we have had.

That makes it the third 10-man group, within the Pro Finlandia guild that has reached the achievement and none of us can but feel proud because of it. It was nice timing as well, since patch 3.3 is arriving shortly and seems like a good way to end one chapter, and start a new one.

Thanks for the photoshop-enchanced image goes to Heidi, my partner and love, a.k.a Atheqa.

Tribute to Skill

There are moments when you are allowed to feel good about yourself and this is definitely one of mine; having completed the Tribute to Skill achievement on 10-man totgc instance this evening, with an awesome crew. It was particularly satisfying after having endlessly farmed both 10- and 25-man normal modes with little to no challenge of feeling of accomplishment.

Grand crusader however, was quite a struggle. The encounters we found the hardest were the Faction Champions and Anub'arak. The first severely more than the last, where the champions just simply kept wiping the floor with us. Anub'arak proved mainly a performance challenge, as it has a lot more in-built difficulty than the normal modes.

Firstly, you only have six grounds of frost to use, the burrowers now cast Shadow Strike that needs to be interrupted, and the damage is a lot more severe. The two primary obstacles are performing successful interrupts and keeping them from burrowing. We used a shaman, though a rogue would probably be a lot more optimal, with a focus kick macro as the adds and boss are tanked side by side.

It also comes to a bit of luck, when Anub'arak himself burrows, the OT will most likely still have two adds on his hands. Because the proximity to the boss, the spikes will probably hit the ice he is standing, breaking it, possibly even killing the OT if he is not maxed out. The OT must vacate the patch of ice before the spikes hit it and kite the adds to a new one without letting them burrow themselves. Since this ability is on a timer, it is has a lot to do with luck.

However, if you can master these two aspects, the fight should go through fairly easily. The only crunch is when phase 3 starts and the OT is not only taking the constant aoe damage from the boss but also melee hits from the adds.

But the fight is well worth it, even if you have to struggle. I had the luck of getting Lothar's Edge, hitch hiking my stats up a notch once more. So for now, I could not be happier but am already looking for the next peak to climb.