Lo-Quality WoW

Getting really lazy on posting these things aren’t I? Then again there’s been mainly minor things going on. I finally scrounged up enough tokens to get the last piece of Brewfest attire to get my Disturbing the Peace achievement, which of course also netted me the Brewmaster achievement. The things I go through for a dinky achievement…

I did manage to get into a couple of Heroic dailies. Utgarde Pinnacle is pretty much the same as always, except since everyone is more powerful, I’m getting some really interesting record times on those runs. I remember when to get Skadi, you almost had to use some sort of pre-arranged strategy. Us? We just ran in and whomever happened to grab a harpoon would use it when appropriate. And he only whirlwind once then he was down, when I remember in the past he would whirlwind 5 or 6 times before he’d drop.

Also did another Culling of Stratholme run. A little harder than the last one but we still bullied our way through. I do wish they implemented a fast forward in the beginning though. I’m getting a bit tired of hearing Arthas argue with his people. The spawns also weren’t as conveniently placed. But we made it in time to hit the timed boss and that was nice.

Then later in the week, the Agency dragged me along for a 25-man Trial of the Crusader. Beasts of Northrend was no problem this time. Everyone focus fired on snobolds, with the extra healers it was easier to survive the debuffs during Acidmaw and Dreadscale, and Icehowl only managed to run over one person. Lord Jaraxxus was also relatively easy, a lot of focus fire and heals brought him down fast.

Fighting the Faction Champions was where we started running into major road bumps. Since it’s basically a PvP fight, it’s fairly chaotic. First try, we took down two healers and was working on the third when we started to drop. We figured out that again, with the melee running free, they were taking out our healers, and that was with myself and the other hunters helping out by dropping traps all over the place. I even used my wyvern sting and scatter shot but those don’t last all that long.

Second time, we decided to alternate healer, melee, healer, melee, and then whatever was handy. Fortunately, someone started marking whatever the main target was with a skull. Even then, we lost quite a bit of the raid. But at least we killed them and I got my 1000 Dungeon & Raid Emblems That’s a lot of killing I’ve done…

Twin Valk’yr, we decided to do our “zerg the heck out of one” method. Same deal, we all went white except for the healers who stayed on black. However, people just weren’t fast enough when they needed to switch colors and we tended to lose a few each and every time their special abilities were ready. We tried a few more times but it was getting late and we called it a night.

Which led to last night. This time we did a slightly altered strategy. Everyone was balled up near the entrance, where the two bosses would be tanked. 4 of us, would stay the opposite color and range in a semi circle around the group, of which I was one of them. Our job was to intercept certain balls, the white ones in this case, letting the black ones through to hit the group and to hopefully give multiple people the buffs.

Two things during that setup. They decided it would be a warlock, who could portal across the room when he needed to change color would be a “ball-catcher” and then 3 of our 4 hunters. Now we knew our dps would suffer, but for some dumb reason we had the three highest dps hunters running as “ball-catchers” and our lowest dps one still doing dps. I guess it would even out but I would have put the lowest dps on “catcher” duty.

Second, I and another hunter, Rodman, took up positions on the “middle”. We were responsible for practically everything between the arc bound by the two portals. (Kinda hard to explain without a diagram.) The warlock and other hunter generally had everything from the walls to the portals. So we had more ground to cover but we also had more room to maneuver. However, we stood at our spots when the guy giving us directions for this strategy ran over to me and then says “let’s have Rod over here.” Rodman and I glanced at each other then switched places. Then the guy runs over to me and says “uh, let’s have…Key over here.” I have no idea why he suddenly decided to switch the two of us around.

Anyway, we start and shortly into the fight, Rodman dies. The only thing I can think of is that he got hit by multiple balls of the opposite color at the same time and went down well before the healers could cover him. Which left me covering a very wide arc of space. Fortunately, the other two “catchers” adjusted to help cover some of it. We ended up wiping but in this case, I don’t think it was the “catchers” fault, it more had to do with people not switching colors fast enough to break through a shield and stop the heals from getting off during the fight.

On our second try we succeeded. But again, running around trying to intercept those balls were a pain. You can go grab a white ball and then get hit by a black ball a moment later. This time, all the “catchers” stayed up so it wasn’t too bad. (Or at least I think we all stayed up, I was too busy running around like a lunatic.)

Then it was on to Anub’arak and we just fell apart here. Some of it was just confusion on what particular strategy we were running at a given time. Some of unreal expectations, for instance when on one try they decided that the hunters would take out the scarabs and everyone else focus on the other adds. The problem was, at one point I saw around 10 scarabs and there were only 4 hunters. I know it took me a bit to kill one of them and even if we somehow had the attention of two at the same time, there were still ones running around loose on the raid.

Also, as far as I could tell, Rodman and I were the only ones shooting down the little frost orbs to create the permafrost. Especially in phase 2 when the permafrost gets destroyed and needs to get replaced, we can’t exactly dps anything while we’re shooting them down. Either way, after several tries we decided to call it a night since people were getting tired, including myself.

Except then they decide for a quick Obsidian Sanctum. The funniest moment I thought during it was when we were gathering and they said “hmm, you think we can do this with only 20 men?” This was mainly the same group that I did it with with only 15 people and we had a lot better gear now then we did then. So yeah, we blew through the whole instance relatively quickly. At this point, I’m just doing it for the heck of it.

That’s it. Tonight is the Destinis runs, but I’ll try and see if they’ll let me go as my warrior. Less dps than my hunter, however there’s nothing in the instances for the most part that would interest my hunter and I’d love for my warrior to start getting some gear. We’ll just have to see how that goes.