Lo-Quality WoW

Yup, the new arena season is up but since I don’t really do arena anymore and I haven’t gotten into a trial of the crusader, the big thing this brings up is the new Vault of Archavon boss – Koralon. But before we get to him, here’s a few other things that happened.

Since I’ve been saving for my 4th 8.25 tier item, I managed to get into another Trial of the Champion. Again, nothing in the way of loot drops that I wanted. But I did finally net myself the Heroic: Trial of the Champion achievement. I know it came just after we defeated the horde champions, so there must have been one I hadn’t faced before but between doing this on regular or on my warrior, I’m not sure which one I had needed.

Then because it was the daily, we took a trip into the Halls of Stone. I don’t really mind the fights for this one, although I really dislike the Tribunal of Ages fight. We actually almost pulled off the Brann Spankin’ New achievement but a couple of our guys died near the end and the three of us left let one through. One of the guys we had picked up hadn’t done it before and I have the suspicion that he didn’t realize the laser does a bit of aoe “splash” damage at the point of impact and he might have died from it. But other than that, we had no problems with that run.

Then the gang from the Agency wanted to try the new Vault boss, Koralon. So we gather, run to Wintergrasp, and then realize the next battle was in 15 minutes. Well, I guess it’s time for some PvP. And it really wasn’t. Instead of doing defense as I normally do, I went with the groups attacking the workshops and southern towers. And for pretty much the whole battle, I didn’t see a single horde player. Considering some of the others were reporting that the horde players had 20 stacks of tenacity on them, I’m guessing they were just a teensy bit outnumbered. In fact I didn’t even get to shoot at a horde until well after the battle and a rogue or two tried to slip past us for some reason.

Anyway, on to the new boss. We gathered up 25 people and since none of us had fought him, all we had to go on was what was said in wowwiki for the fight. So we rush in and naturally, we wipe. Several times.

But since it was a new boss and practically new to everyone, we realized this would happen from the start. Now Koralon, being flame based, has some interesting attacks. One is some sort of debuff that stacks on you which increases damage by 5% every 20 seconds or so. So there’s no hard enrage timer but a certain point where the increased damage will overwhelm the healers.

There’s two other things that make it fun. One is this general aoe attack that pretty much hits everyone in the room. And another is a single target attack but it leaves a little spot of fire on the ground that causes damage. There’s also some sort of meteor fist attack which hit a bit hard on the target, which was a tank as far as I could tell. But it definitely made it harder for the melee dps people to stay in close.

Being a ranged person, the main thing I had to watch for was those fires on the ground. Which leads into the annoying thing we realized about it. In the center of the room there’s sort of a bright yellow, glowing area. And it’s very hard to see the flames against that backdrop. At one point one of the melee, or maybe the tank, asked why all the ranged dps and healers weren’t standing in the middle of the room and we had to point out there were several fires going on in there. He just couldn’t see them from where he was. So, you either had to keep an eye for the debuff icon to pop on you, do as my druid guildmate did and move whenever you start taking periodic damage, or what I did which was to stand on the vary edge of the glowing area, which made it easier to see the ground fires.

Now I personally ran into this next annoyance with it. When Koralon does is general room attack, he spins around and jets of flames fire out. And if you have those flames covering your screen, it makes it hard to spot the flames on the ground. Which happened to me twice, he went into the spinning motion and as soon as it ended, I saw I was standing in one of the ground fire and died before I could move.

Otherwise, I did pretty decently dps wise. Hunters generally dominated the top of the total damage charts. (And I think there were 4 of us in this run.) I wasn’t the top dps but I tend to survive a bit longer than others which allows me to rack up quite a bit of total damage done usually. The only time I didn’t was when the tank decided to tank Koralon around the edge of the room rather quickly and kept going out of range of my shots.

Of course some other things affected the multiple wipes. People didn’t have much in the way of fire resistance since Northrend generally has you working on frost resistance. We had to send someone to go make up some resistance flasks and even then we didn’t have enough for everyone. Tanks and healers got priority and I didn’t even try since for the most part I usually wouldn’t die until the very end anyway.

Since we really didn’t know what to expect heal-wise, we didn’t do healing assignments until after a couple of wipes. Even then, it seemed that whomever was assigned to the tank heals usually died for one reason or another. We had the druid healers on raid healing and they generally all right through the fight. Or at least I know they were up and able to do battle resurrections to get fallen healers back into the game.

And there was one guy who I swear was the first casualty most of the time, and usually rather early into the fight. I have no idea what he was doing. All I can think of was that he was either to the side or slight to the front of Koralon and was taking some of the damage that was usually isolated to the tanks. I know near the end he was lasting longer although he did generally die at some point.

A few of the tries we did get Koralon down pretty far, but it usually was just a bit short. When we did finally take him down, I think we were down to 20 minutes until the next wintergrasp battle was about to start but we were all overjoyed. There wasn’t any hunter loot drops but I did get my Heroic: Koralon the Flame Watcher achievement. Not sure when I’ll get the chance to go get the 10-man version though. We were all pretty wiped after the 25-man to even try.

After that, Emalon and Archavon were cakewalks. I still remember when Archavon was such a pain and Emalon was next to impossible. Of course it helps when you’re in a group who knows what they are doing. I still look forward to getting to the point that the Koralon fight is something I look forward to rather than slightly cringe.

But the best thing about that run? I finally had the emblems to buy the 8.25 helm token. So now I have the 4-piece 8.25 hunter tier set bonus. And unlike a few other set bonuses, it’s pretty nice. A chance for my steady shot to proc and give me an extra 600 attack power for 15 seconds? Between that and a few new gems I put in, I was managing to run my dps up to 3k or so on the targeting dummy unbuffed, I can’t wait to try it out for real.

My only real concern is that the next couple of upgrades I want reduce my hit rating and I may actually fall below the 8% ideal hit percentage. I can’t always count of having a draenai with me, so I need to think my next few pieces through. Of course, that may be awhile so I have time to work things out on paper. Just something to keep in mind. Now to see if there’s an Ulduar run or not I can sneak into.