Bloodfurnace

by on November 27, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Posted In: MMO

Been a while since I’ve had a fun WoW story… even though there’s been plenty of runs.

Dunain is doing well. The little curmudgeon has pretty good gear, and his damage is darn frightening. (So is his crit rate–I’m aiming at a pure DPS build to keep from drawing aggro with huge threat spikes from critical hits, and he’s running about 18% crit chance without party buffs. I think that’s at least as high as before I decided to forgo crits for steady damage, lo those many moons ago.)

We had lost one of our regular better players to job woes a while back. He’s back (at least on weekends) now, but we’re still loosing Grumbly. He’s switched his main to a Dranei Shaman who just hit 70. Blanc and Dunain helped outfit Khaaleen with brand-new gear when she hit 70, and should be doing fairly well equipment-wise.

We also ended up helping her and Kris (another high-level alt) go through Bloodfurnace, the second Outlands dungeon. In fact, we were all on high-level alts, with Khaaleen, Kris, Farmishi and Dracovii. We only had four, but two of us were seriously over-level, and Draco was moderately so.

It… was different as all of us were in different roles than our normal ones, but we were all on characters we really liked. As a protection Pallie, I was main tank, and occasionally backup healing for Khaaleen (who was also backup tank by virtue of having more damage output than I can tank for).

Everything considered, it went reasonably well. I was leading/marking, another job I’m not used to. We wiped a few times, but generally held it together through the tough fights. I also proved that I know what I’m doing as a prot pallie; I just have to figure out how to get the rest of the party to live through it.

The second boss encounter is very demanding, with four rooms opening up in sequence, keeping you in battle through the entire thing, and then springing Broggok on you as your fifth straight fight. We got through the first two waves fine, and then things started getting out of control. We had the main fight, and a single guy separated, and I’m not good enough yet to judge what really needed my attention and deal with it reliably. We got through it, but the fourth wave started doing us in. I just missed putting a shield on Khaaleen, and desperate, had to shield myself with the plan of immediately shielding Dracovii before they could get to him.

Good theory, poor execution, I just missed Draco as well, leaving me alone (Kris had been the first to die). My shield lasted long enough to heal myself, and I defeated the remaining orcs. Leaving me with 1/3 health, 1/4 mana, big abilities on cooldowns from a previous fight and wondering what to do about the boss.

The answer was, of course, take everything he could dish out while slowly wearing him down and staying out of the poison gas. Boggrok isn’t a heavy hitting boss, the main threat is these rings of poison gas that slowly expand from where he is. So I slowly backed around the room, leaving a bright green highway in front of me, and desperately kept my health healed up as best as possible.

He eventually made a very satisfying thump on the floor. He was grey on me, but he’s still a boss, and I had soloed him. And then I went and walked off the adrenalin for a couple minutes. -_-;

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The Stasis Box (redux)

by on November 18, 2007 at 11:38 am
Posted In: SFB

We were scheduled for a two-team SFB battle on Saturday, but Paul developed car trouble and couldn’t make it. That left us with three people and no plan B. After a fair bit of hunting around we decided to play “The Stasis Box” again, with the third player option.

Mark and I swapped roles, and Patch took the Klingons. I was a little aggressive in the first turn’s surveys, zooming off to the second closest asteroid cluster, and dropping off a shuttle to check the closest. Once again, I rolled poorly and took a fair amount of asteroid damage on the way in. Worse, the asteroid patch I explored turned out to conceal a mine, and I couldn’t come to a stop before moving again and detonating the mine, losing the rear shield and taking a good number of internals.

The next several turns were peaceful as everyone explored, I repaired what I could, and all the explorations turned up just more rocks. Patch eventually found a second mine, but was able to halt and creep out of its detection radius. Possible locations were running out, and it was looking like there weren’t any stasis boxes at all.

And then Mark found one. He was torn between sitting the two turns to collect it, or staying at speed and seeing who else might go for it. He chose the former, and unsurprisingly soon had a Klingon F5 in front of him, with a Fed DD further behind and to the side. The good news for him was that the asteroids were protecting him fairly well, and he only needed to get about 5 hexes to disengage.

And then as the Kzinti was getting battered to pieces, and it was becoming sure that he wouldn’t make it off, one of my shuttles found the second stasis box in the last unexplored cluster. Which meant Patch and I wanted to keep the Kzinti from getting away and beat up the other fellow to keep him from getting a win by grabbing the last one.

If I hadn’t taken that mine early on, I might have had a chance. My pass at the tractored Kzinti became a point blank pass at the Klingon. Sadly, he had phasers and disruptors, while my photons were rearming. Actually, I did have one standard load torpedo, but was too close to use it, and the mine had taken out the batteries, so I couldn’t emergency overload it so it could fire.

And once the pass was done, I had my still-crippled rear shield to the Klingon. I didn’t last much longer.

So… next time we should be doing the 2-on-2 team battle. Barring broken cars.

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The big shake up

by on October 31, 2007 at 8:23 am
Posted In: Life

Having lived in southern California for much of my life, I’m used to the ground not always entirely being steady under my feet.

After moving to the Bay Area, not so much. The steady stream of small single-jolt earthquakes I grew up with doesn’t really happen around here. But there are occasional more notable ones.

Like last night. Just about eight o’clock the house started swaying about, and continued to do so for some time, it took us a while to be sure it had stopped. Not too bad, but definitely long, and the power never flickered. I’d say by feel it’s the second most powerful earthquake I’ve felt (the biggest being Northridge).

Modern communications is a wonderful thing. Blondiewood popped onto WoW right afterwards, and we talked about the quake. Dave got a call on his cell phone from where some friends were at a restaurant and said everything was all right. The USGS site took maybe a quarter hour to come up with all the details: it was a 5.6 centered near Alum Rock, and there were a number of magnitude-1 aftershocks in the area.

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Deadfall

by on October 7, 2007 at 9:36 am
Posted In: SFB

In Y143, the Klingon Empire successfully rooted out and destroyed a Jindarian caravan operating in the asteroid belt of the Selnar system. Unfortunately, the Klingons did not know that they had missed one Jindarian ship, although they had badly damaged it in the campaign. Deprived of the support of their caravan, and with a virtually inactive warp drive, the Jindarian crew decided on a hideous act of revenge. They placed their crippled ship on a collision course with the main Klingon colony in the system. The Klingon governor called for assistance, and the nearest imperial units responded.

Me, Patch and Paul played this scenario from module F1 yesterday. I recently got it and wanted to see what the Jindarians (the new race presented in the module) are like, and this scenario was pretty easy to split up into three players.

The Jindarians have been in space for thousands of years, and are adapted to life inside of asteroids that have been converted into warp-capable spaceships. This scenario pits their largest class (with an intimidating amount of armor) against three Klingon ships, a D7, F5C and F5.

Since I was the one who had gotten to read the rules ahead of time, I got the Jindarian, while Paul took the D7 and Patch took the two F5s. Patch was very worried about the Klingon’s ability to take on the rock, but I don’t think he was really giving enough weight to the scenario restrictions on the Jindarian: all power was available, but only one point of movement could be generated. So it could either move one hex or do one tactical maneuver per turn. This extreme lack of maneuverability plays to the strong points of Klingon ships, which an maneuver to battle passes fairly well. Also, while the Jindarian heavy weapons are fairly fearsome, they’re spread out for better coverage and have a two-turn arming cycle.

And indeed… I made it a little over halfway to the planet before blowing up. The thing is very sturdy, but really needs just a bit of maneuverability to keep one shield arc losing armor from becoming a major problem, which is precisely what happened. And while it does deserve to be called a DN, it has 43 power, which is less than the amount of warp power on most DNs. Once internals started happening the relative lack of power and weapons told very quickly.

I did turn aside at one point to get some temporary relief and put other weapons in arc, but was impatient to close the range with the planet and turned back the next turn. It worked, especially as put the other side’s weapons in arc as I turned back. But the real thing to do at that point was probably do an impulse Tac right after the turn, to put even more distance between them and the down arc, and then go into reverse the following turn. (The ‘backing into the planet’ idea is mentioned in the scenario tactics, but stopping for three turns and tacing around didn’t appeal, and this method didn’t occur to me until now.)

After the initial volley from the heavy weapons, the Klingons closed in and got most of the way through the armor on a good volley of overloaded disruptors that hit 8/8. I could have grabbed one of the F5s in a range two tractor (and in hind-sight should have), but I wanted to grab three drones in tractors and didn’t have the power to do that and grab a ship at range 2.

As it was, the F5s presented themselves as a target first so early fire was concentrated on the F5C (and the only Klingon ph-1s present), switching to the D7 later. The F5C was crippled, and lost all of its weapons at one point (I believe some were repaired), the D7 took some serious damage, but there just wasn’t enough left to seriously hurt it by the time I started working on it.

So, another loss for me. But, a very fun one, and at least I don’t have wiping out an entire colony on my conscience. Looks like the next meeting will be in about 6 weeks, and I need start figuring out what we’re going to do.

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The Minions go to Kharazan

by on September 17, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Posted In: MMO

There’s been a few small and big things to talk about recently.

A couple weeks ago, Drew gave me some RAM for Haruhi (in fact, he was somewhat forceful). I had supposed much of my problems with WoW were from an anemic graphics card. After going from 512 MB to 2 GB, I have found out that isn’t the case at all. It’s still not going to do anything fancy in the game, but at least I can switch out to the browser (for WoWiki or Thottbot), and I can turn my settings up from the bare minimum.

Dunain has collected keys for all five Heroic instances. This has allowed me some time to work on Farmishi again, and last Tuesday it finally happened:

Farmishi hit level 70 in the middle of a Shattered Halls run (much like Dunain, now that I think of it). She was able to buy all her skills and flying mount immediately. (It seemed very strange to buy a mount for her.) Now I just need a way to get epic flying mounts on two characters….

Along with gearing up for some Heroic runs, we’ve been getting ready for Kharazan. This last week featured a push to get more characters keyed, with a Shadow Labyrinth run on Sun, a double-header of Steamvaults and Arcatraz on Wed and the Black Morass on Friday. Jariedthe needed to finish up the chain, and while Smudge and I already had our mains keyed, we were wanting to get Shrimpette and Farmishi keyed as well.

Most of the runs I’ve been on as Farmishi lately have been very smooth, to my surprise. Sadly, the Black Morass run did not follow. We were plagued by two problems, one, knocking down an elite was taking long enough that it was being a problem for Thermidor to keep burning down the non-elites coming through the portal long enough. Second, Farmishi was playing main tank, and really relies on someone hitting her to generate threat. The mage-types were very hard for her to hang on to. That said, the second run nearly got through the second boss (the toughest part) even after Farmishi died early on in the battle. For some reason, we just couldn’t get it that good again, and I eventually swapped over to Dunain to repair the group’s biggest problem: damage. Jariedthe tanked, and everything went very well. Farmishi will just have to get her key later; I’m planning on using Dunain in Kharazan for quite a while, so it’s not a big deal. Ironically, the last boss dropped an item for Dunain, and an item for Farmishi, so I would have been fine either way.

The next day, Fickle Muse turned out most of the A-team for the first trip into Kharazan. Sadly, we haven’t seen Noxlux lately, and Asclepius turned out to be kidnapped by a sushi dinner that went for 8 hours…. This not only left us at only six people (Blanc, Dunain, Grumbly, Blondiewood, Thermidor, and Jariedthe), but no actual priest. We knew we’d need to PUG for the last few slots, but we were hoping to bring all the essentials, and not have to be too picky. It took about an hour to fill the group, with three slots (including a priest) coming from the guild TrollBraggers (a very nice group), and a fourth being someone that a couple of us had known for a bit, Marabella.

We had all been coached (especially by Grumbly and Blanc, who’d been there before) that Kharazan is a very tough place, and that our goal that night was just to get to the first boss (Attumen – technically optional) and defeat him. Not that it was a long epic struggle, it’s just that the monsters in his area respawn after 25 minutes (!), so a failed attempt probably means clearing the way to him again.

We actually did fairly well. Some deaths on the way, but we made good progress, kept moving, and reached Attumen. And we wiped. We got back, found nobody had respawned yet, and tried again. It went much better, and we got him down. Blanc got the Vambraces of Courage, our first Khara gear!

After recovering/repairing from that, we turned around to go after the first true/required boss of the instance, Moroes. Fighting up through the ball room to the banquet hall, where he is, was interesting. Moroes, however….

He comes with four elites standing next to him that would be nasty enough as a non-boss fight group. Moroes is a nasty customer on his own – he needs two tanks to control as he’ll periodically incapacitate one. Which left us really short on ways to deal with the other four. Crowd control is the generally preferred method, but as they’re undead, mages (what we have plenty of) don’t do as much.

We tried twice, getting two of the adds down the second time, before people had to start going to bed. We arranged to try again Sunday, with much the same group. Our healer from TrollBraggers turned out to be unavailable, but Asclepius was here this time.

Moroes didn’t really go any better. As part of the secondary control, I get to ice trap and kite one of secondaries, not something I’m used to trying to do.

The fight itself (at least so far) is wild. There’s insane amounts of damage flying around and a desperate attempt by the non-tank, non-healing parts of the party to burn through the four secondaries before all the control fails. So far it hasn’t happened. There was one time I was particularly happy with where I did a good job of keeping my guy down, but we lost healing early, and it all flew apart just as it was getting somewhere.

Instead of beating ourselves up all night, we went over to the servant’s quarters, the easiest part of Kharazan, but generally only worth reputation. We cleared the area (the spiders are particularly nasty, make sure to use stealth detection around the visible spiders), but didn’t see the mini-boss appear, so we went upstairs to the guest chambers. I’m afraid I blew that one, and got too close to a group that wiped us.

We ended up the night by going after the ‘beast boss’ when he appeared as we started re-clearing our way through. The conventional wisdom is that the items they drop are mostly just worth disenchanting, but the Shaman in our group from TrollBraggers was very happy with the bracers that dropped.

So, overall, a little better than we’d been warned, and we’ll be back next weekend.

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