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.

Pro Finlandia vs. Halfus Heroic

Finally, it is online; our second hard mode kill of Halfus Wyrmbreaker. It is not immediately evident on the video but it took me several days worth of struggling to make edit, compress, and upload to youtube. Had to give it several tries, due to youtube’s convoluted copyright politics.

But anyway, it is now on and with approved music, which is the main thing. Unfortunately it was not as a clean kill as I would have liked, with me personally messing up the use of some cooldowns at the end. I actually considered abandoning the material and wait for this week’s kill, but at the end decided to screw it and just put it online, so I can give you guys another hard mode boss kill, as soon as possible.

So please enjoy and until next time. High Definition version is ofc available.

Return of the Ashbringer II

Anybody who knows me, is aware that I am not a big fan of Machinima and most of the time, even after watching a quite good video, the feeling is, at best, something along the lines “ok, that was kind of cool.” However, I stumbled upon something yesterday that made me rethink, completely the power of creative machinima, when it is brought to bare by talent and creativity.

The project that I am talking about ofc, is titled Return of the Ashbringer II, Raiders of Northrend. It is apparently suppose to be a sequel but no knowledge of the previous story is necessary. It is, by the author’s own words, no about action or combat, although both are pretty good imo, but about characters and drama. Now I was skeptical, to say the least, when I read that in the video description but only few minutes into watching the short version, I had to admit that it was pretty darn good and the director had surely nailed it.

It is actually quite long for a machinima, almost an hour and a half, and took the author over a year to complete, with over a thousand hours of work that he put into it. However, every hour seems worth it to me. I found the story incredibly moving, dramatic and well scripted. The movie has both elements of comedy and tragedy, woven into the storyline and some really good voice acting. In fact, Blizzard entertainment could very well hire some of the same voices to work on their projects, if you ask me. Jesse Cox for example delivers a very good performance in a number of roles in this movie.

The soundtrack is brought together from a many cinematic sources, including World of Warcraft itself, along with the Village, Battlestar Galatica, etc. The music really delivers the mood of each scene, amplifying the drama a hundred fold.

So I definitely recommend, anyone who like machinima and a good story, to have a look at this movie. It is a victory in movie making by any standard. There is a shorter 15 minute long version on youtube, so you don’t feel daunted by the length and you can assertain, a head of time, whether or not to commit for the whole thing.

Full length movie –> Warcraftmovies.com

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.

Fall of Halfus Wyrmbreaker

It is better late than never, they say, but we have finally opened out hard mode count and the first to fall was Halfus Wyrmbreaker. The feeling is satisfactory though, in the knowledge that, while we indeed are late, the kill is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment. Some fights have been nerfed since Cataclysm’s release but most are still the same you can account for most changes as fine-tuning than actual nerfs.

So there we have it, first hard mode kill for our 10-man evening group and hopefully the future still holds a couple more from Blackwing Descent, before we must move on to Firelands.

Go home team! :D

Patch 4.2 PTR: Lord Rhyolith & Beth’tilac

Blizzard has finally opened the first raid bosses in the new Firelands raid instance for PTR testing and so far we have seen two different bosses, drastically dissimilar from each other. I did not have the opportunity to log in myself, and odds are I could not muster the patience to get through all the DC bugs anyway, but I did do some searching and the information has already started to pile in. Wowhead has two amazing amazing articles on the two boss mechanics and overall view of how the fights are current represented.

Youtube has also, naturally, risen to the occasion and there are already some videos of those fights available. On a quick glance, makes me excited as the environments do not just look great but the encounters themselves look interesting. The two bosses I am referring to, are ofc Lord Rhyolith and the spider boss Beth’tilac. Lord Rhyolith is a single tank fight, which consists of phases one and two. In P1, the tank will be on add control, dealing with two different kinds of adds, which spawn individually and in groups. P2 the tank will pick up the boss and he is burned down.

Beth’tilac is very different, although also consisting of two phases. For me, the absolutely coolest part is P1, where she will climb on top of her webs above the raid and a tank & healer pair takes chase. Their responsibility is simply to hold her attention and jump down any time she uses Smoldering Devastation and then get back up. On the ground, the second tank will be dealing with adds, both big and small, all which the raid needs to burn down quickly or they will wipe the group very quickly.

There is ofc a lot more to it than that but all and all, it looks very good and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. For detailed information on the mechanics, look through the linked articles below and also suggest you have a look at the youtube videos even further below.

Wowhead’s Lord Rhyolith article.

Wowhead’s Beth’tilac article.

 

 

Enjoy.

Tanking Primer: Racials

Greetings everyone and apologies for the lack of content on the blog recently. I have been a bit busy for a while, dealing with various real-life issues, as well trying to maintain my in-game presence. One these was a pretty bad period of migraines, which I suffer from regularly, and had to, on one occasion, visit the emergency room. Anyway, I should have it mostly under control now, so without further due, lets kick start this day’s topic. I decided on this particular subject, simply because of the overwhelming number of people who are ask about it. I am not kidding when I say that if I had a dime every time somebody, at mmo-c or other discussion boards, asked this I could buy a cool new iphone instead of paying my rent. Another reason for picking this topic is because boards like mmo-c have a problem with people posting, simply for the purpose of boosting their post count, resulting in that the threads are eventually clogged by people saying every race between earth and heaven is a good alternative.

While it certainly holds true that any race fits the description just fine, as racial benefits are not very earth shattering, there are still choices to be made, particularly if you are interested in truly min-max’ing your character, as I assume most people are.

So what are the best races? To me, survivability is the key element to search for and with that in mind, it brings out the three most prominent alternatives; dwarves and elves on the alliance side, and tauren on the horde side. They are the three most viable choices, hands down. Some people argue for all sort of other attributes, like arcane torrent for blood elves and regeneration for trolls but the simple fact is that for tanks, survivability trumps everything else. This actually favors the Alliance side a lot more because we current have the strongest of the available racials.

Elves gain quickness, 2% extra miss chance to their avoidance, allowing them to reach 100% coverage on the attack table a bit quicker. Dwarves, however, have stoneform which not only removes all poison, disease, bleed effects but also grants a 10% damage reduction from all sources, including physical and magic, for 8 seconds. To me, that is easily the best racial you can get for a tank. For the horde, your options are a lot more limited and quite poor for now. Taurens gain endurance, which increases their base health. This was actually quite powerful back in Wrath of the Lich King expansion, where EH was the undisputed master of all attributes, but now in Cataclysm, EH is probably the poorest attribute that you can increase. It can help a little, for those tanks who still opt to stack stamina, but I do not put much stock in that paradigm.