Meant to post this a few days ago: Dunain hit level 80 while questing!
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(Cross-posted with WoW_Muradin because I’m too primitive to have an editor that’ll post this to both.)
Well, WoW went to v3.0 yesterday.
It’s different. I don’t remember the Burning Crusade engine being quite so big of a shock, character-wise.
Hunters have changed a lot. The fact that Scatter Shot is now a 10-point talent in Surivival makes sense (I always thought it was a little odd in Marksmanship, but it worked well with the ‘utility’ feel that BC Marksmanship had), but it caught me flatfooted. Since I’ve been needing that to survive a trap that breaks early, Dunain is currently invested in a little Survival rather than Beast Master, and won’t be trying Chimera Shot until 71.
Everything else is weird. The reactive abilities have had that stripped out. Mongoose Bite no longer requires a dodge before I use it and Kill Command no longer needs a crit. Instead they’re just on timers.
Aimed Shot has been massively depowered. In fact, it really doesn’t do much more than anything else, and less than Multishot does per shot. It’s pretty much Arcane Shot with a ‘no heal’ debuff now. The good news is it’s now an instant. However, it shares a cooldown with Multishot now. The only shot with a cast time I have now is Steady Shot. I should check if they fiddled with that.
Aspect of the Viper changed, but is still pretty sick. Before it increased mana regeneration, with the effect getting stronger the lower the hunter’s mana was. It meant that it was effectively impossible to run Dunain out of mana for more than a few seconds. Now, it halves damage done, but returns mana per shot (I approve of the idea of making it a real choice). I was getting back ~380 mana per shot, and interestingly, I got mana back on each hit with a Multishot. ~380×3 – ~340 for Multishot = ~700 mana profit. When out of mana, it will get a hunter going again even faster than before.
Lance is very different. I’m noticing the AI seems to have changed, and he *sometimes* charges a target as soon as I attack. (Or else I’m way too used to hitting control-1 now.) Don’t know why sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t. I’m going to have to study this and try to understand what the heck he thinks he’s doing.
The guild managed a quick run through Heroic Steam Vaults Slave Pens last night to see how things were working.
The only way I could tell that it was Heroic is that we got Badges of Justice off the bosses. I know that SV is a really weak Heroic, but… this was a pushover.
Part of it is definitely Blanc. They have really upped the DPS on Protection Warriors.
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. -_-;
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.
Okay… so I haven’t talked about WoW for a bit. The reasons for this are one, I haven’t been playing as much lately, and two, the original point of writing up WoW adventures was to talk about humorous incidents and maybe talk about some of the more impressive things we’d seen.
So, while I have been playing, and there’s been a good number of runs through the BC instances, there hasn’t been as much fresh material of late.
However… this needs to be told. ^_^
Wednesday, after Micca was up and running again, we managed to scrape together a group for Shadow Labyrinth. Blanc and Dunain had a quest item to pick up, and Thermidor had two quests to do.
In general, we have problems with the third boss, Vorpil, who’s a pure annoying fight at the best of times. However, a previous attempt last week stalled at the second boss, Blackheart, who is usually a pushover for us. This week… it got strange.
Blackheart isn’t very tough at all for a boss himself. The problem is that he will regularly mind-control the entire party to fight each other. It’s random and chaotic for who’ll end up fighting who, but the party can do much more damage than he can. Also, what ever random things you do can end up burning a lot of mana. Usually, it ends and we pick up the pieces and go on to finish him off after about the second bout of party mind-control.
This time we got unlucky. Thermidor got finished off during the ‘fun time’, and Dunain barely survived, only to be taken out by a cleave before he could bandage. Down two people early, I thought it was going to be a failed fight… but Blackheart couldn’t finish off Blanc, Jariedthe, and Asclepius. So… we ran back for the instance. Right after arriving, Blackheart randomly targeted Thermidor and ran for the entrance himself! o.o
We ended up bailing out a couple times while Thermi and I tried to get ourselves up and running again, before rejoining everyone in the front hall of the instance to finally finish the fight.
Other than that silliness, everything went very smoothly.