Category: world events

Stood in the Fire

Kurn / / achievements, cataclysm, ramblings, world events

I’ve always loved dragons. The idea of slaying them, the idea of fighting them, the idea of befriending them and riding them… all amazing things. Onyxia was the classic raid I wanted to do most because HEY! It’s killing a big freaking dragon!!

Granted, I could probably do without Malygos for the rest of my days, but I genuinely like most dragon encounters in World of Warcraft.

So the idea of Deathwing flying around Azeroth roasting things and people is amazing to me. I LOVE this idea. I also decided I wanted the achievement.

First, I found this thread on the WoW forums.

Second, I found this video that shows you where in the Wetlands the guy is standing.

At about 7:30pm on Saturday, I started hanging out at the hills by the Gnoll camp to the southwest of the windmill. (Northeast of the area in the video.) I was joined by a number of guildies. I took some breaks, slept, logged back in aaaaaaaand nothing. A variety of guildies amused me on Mumble and such or even chilled out with me.

I took time out to fill in an ICC10 heroic raid with the guild on my hunter (my paladin is saving last week’s lockout for next week, since we did 11/12 and want to down LK as a guild this last week pre-Cata), which got me the 49 rep I needed in order to get Exalted with the Ashen Verdict. After the run ended, I cut myself a couple of gems and sent them to my hunter and as I was doing so, BAM, one of my newest guildies got roasted in Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands!

I did a quick MC run with some of the guild, on my shaman, then returned to the Wetlands by about 12:45am ET (server time).

And I waited.

Tia waited with me too and I told her to park Tia there and hop on to another toon, if she wanted, and I would tell her if the sky went red.

So Tia, Darista and myself were chatting amiably in Mumble when… the sky goes red.

I had been in the process of taking a sip of Coke, which I nearly spewed in my excitement.

“TIA!” I managed to choke out.

“OH MY GOD!” she said, realizing my tone could only mean one thing.

I slammed on my Fraps record button (which, sadly, did not record my own voice!). Elapsed time from the sky going red to recording is about five seconds.

Here’s the video. You can watch it in HD on YouTube.

So, let’s see. Exalted with Ashen Verdict. Roasted by Deathwing. It’s been a productive night. :D Thanks to all the members of Apotheosis who kept me company!

Oh, and my achievement shot, which I think is hilariously appropriate…

And 25m heroic modes continue!

Kurn / / facepalm, general, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings, world events

Hope everyone had a good Easter or a good Sunday, whichever applies to you. ;)

For myself, brunch with the family, followed by some horrible 3v3 arenas, followed by a nap, followed by a raid. We had cancelled on Thursday — people were sick, unable to make it, I had something come up… so we cancelled and reconvened tonight.

Heroic Blood Prince Council down.

Heroic Blood Queen Lana’thel down.

Heroic Festergut still wiped the floor with us.

Princes was actually pretty easy. “Don’t move,” is basically the key to the fight, although moving when necessary is also important. ;) Lana’thel was intense. We just clipped enrage, she killed both tanks and then we won. Princes only took two tries and BQL took three.

I don’t understand the issues behind Fester. It’s just all kinds of bad. The malleable goo is beaning people, the tanks are dying, the range are dying and basically, no one is living past two minutes or so. Time to go through the logs and make notes about healers, goo, assignments and the like. Hooray death logs?

And in other news, my brother, on his level 47 (?) paladin is about 8 bunny ears from being the Noble. This involved me running around the damn world with him, while on my mage, to port him from place to place and usually to save his fool ass from mobs trying to rip him apart. Screw Noblegarden; I did it once on Kurn and that was more than enough for me. And my brother is similarly unimpressed with the amount of farming of chocolates he had to do.

Anyways. Logs!

ETA: Oh God, the logs make me want to cry. :( People not casting, ranged not getting any heals, people ignoring Vile Gas entirely… GAH.

Wow.

Kurn / / dungeons, hunters, paladins, ramblings, world events

The mind boggles. I just tanked Heroic Halls of Reflection, not using the wussy LOS strat, with a total pug. My healer was a priest who still had blues.

And we didn’t wipe. No one died. Everyone worked together as a team.

Granted, we then did the wussy ledge strat for the escape bit, but considering how well they’d done on Falric and Marwyn, I didn’t complain too much. They deserved an easy run.

Good to see some people still know how to use their class abilities.

Also, I got BB King on my hunter! Coming soon, a video of the event, because I frapsed it. :)

Updates and Ramblings, as per usual…

Kurn / / general, ramblings, world events

So, first of all the Armory is sucking. It hasn’t updated my pally since July 1st.

As such, I have pictures to share.

mad-flamewarden

This is probably the only title/world event achievement Madrana will get, just because she was so close to getting it after last year. I’d gone through and honored/desecrated all the flames on … probably all three of my characters (hunter, paladin, mage) last year, and killed Ahune at least once on each. Hell, I tanked Ahune on Madrana, which was hilarious.

I honored/desecrated just about all the flames on three characters this year, too, only I didn’t do anything with the mage and did all the flames with my shammy. Got a full bar of experience, too!

mad-bfd

Some people from my old guild, Apotheosis, have come by Bronzebeard and are transferring toons or rolling alts. Alts need run-throughs, of course. And so Madrana got her BFD achievement.

mad-master

While killing things for a friend who was questing in Ashenvale, I took the opportunity to finish out my Unarmed skill, which also got me Master of Arms. Shweet.

Not so shweet: getting tricked into going to an Ulduar 10. Someone in my guild, who has been pestering me to go for WEEKS if not MONTHS at this point, asked me to go “for fun”. So, considering it was pouring rain outside, I went. Turns out it wasn’t “for fun”. It was “for hard modes”. If I weren’t a decent human being, I would have left the group RIGHT THEN AND THERE. But then they couldn’t have done the instance. So I stuck around, at least until my RL plans were going to settle themselves, and got a few achievements.

Flame Leviathan with 4 towers up:

mad-fl-hard

XT-002 after breaking his heart:

mad-xt-hard

Just a note — getting something like four bombs IN A ROW is FTMFL. I got Light Bomb, then Gravity Bomb, then Light Bomb AGAIN, then Gravity Bomb AGAIN. Of course, if I hadn’t spent 30 seconds running around like a moron, I would have been completely out of mana, so I guess it wasn’t too tragic. And we got the kill anyways.

Another friend transferred his druid over and got it in his head that he wanted to get the Guardian of Cenarius title, by getting exalted with the Cenarian Circle and Cenarian Expedition. He ground rep for three days to get exalted with CC and has been steadily working at CE. Of course, after a certain point, one of the best ways to get CE rep is…

mad-heroic-sv

Which Madrana’s done at least a dozen times, but definitely not since 3.0 dropped.

The druid in question is levelling resto (no joke!) and knows that the Idol of the Emerald Queen is basically the best resto idol until Wrath. So we did a quick Shadow Labyrinth boss kill (it dropped) and then cleared a bit of trash so that I could get rep and…

mad-exalted-lc

So that was kind of sweet.

In other news, Yogg down for the third time and still no trinket from Mimiron. I’m beginning to think that Pandora’s Plea doesn’t even exist…

Whew.

Kurn / / general, shamans, world events

Finished all the fires in the old world, Outlands and Northrend on my shammy. Got easily a full level of experience and a whackload of gold. And none too soon, either, since Midsummer ends in 4 hours.

Go me.

The shammy.

Kurn / / general, ramblings, shamans, world events

According to WarCraftRealms.com, my shaman was level 14 on June 16, 2007. Since then, she’s moved from Eldre’Thalas, to Proudmoore, to Bronzebeard and back to Eldre’Thalas (to supposedly level with my brother on his rogue… We ran one Nexus together, did some quests and, after that 3 hours together, over the course of two days, he got bored.). She’s had an interesting existence.

Right now, she’s honoring and desecrating all the fires she can get to because, DUDE, with the 10% experience shoulders, that’s 22k experience for a desecration and 11k experience for honoring a flame.

That’s a ton of XP!

Of course, there’s less than 24 hours to take advantage of it, so I did Outlands and am almost done with Eastern Kingdoms. I’ve gained about half a level of XP from it today. Which, at level 72, is pretty substantial. And since it’s all *quests*, your rested doesn’t vanish. Pretty sweet.

Plus, you get some gold too, which is also nice.

Anyways, of note, I healed Azjol-Nerub on the shammy tonight for the first time. Level 77 prot warrior tanking made things much easier. ;) And you know what ELSE makes that place a CRAPTON easier as a healer? CLEANSING TOTEM. Best frigging totem in the entire UNIVERSE. EVER. Geez. Absolutely disgusting how awesome that is. Imagine — one GCD to drop the totem… instead of spamming Cleanse, at a certain mana cost AND countless GCDs… It was fun.

Best part — got a resto belt upgrade from the last dude, then the quest rewards were great as I got resto gloves from one quest and DPS boots from another. Dual specs are fun. :)

About to ding 73 when I honor/desecrate my next fire, too. Only four more levels ’till I can fly in Northrend. Cannot come soon enough.

A-posting we will go…

Kurn / / facepalm, general, hunters, paladins, raiding, ramblings, ulduar, world events

Haven’t written much here about raiding of late. Or much of anything barring the 3.2 holy paladin changes that will KILL ME. But this isn’t a post about 3.2. It’s a post about recent achievements, recent happenings and the fact that I miss being remotely knowledgeable about hunters.

The big thing… Yogg died on June 18th.

heroic-secrets

Continue reading “A-posting we will go…”

Ulduar Reset 3, Nights 2-3; Noble Garden & Orphan's Week

Kurn / / general, raiding, ramblings, ulduar, world events

Dear Lord, so much to catch up on.

Basically, nothing happened in Ulduar on Wednesday. Except that we died. A lot. On Thorim. What a bitch that guy is.

Thursday, we got Thorim down after about 2 hours, after some practice with a slight change in our strategy that involved me, a holy paladin, being the sole healer in the tunnel. As opposed to Wednesday night. When a holy priest and a resto druid were in there. Or as opposed to earlier Thursday night, when just the one holy priest was in there.

<drums fingers on desk>

Right, so you substitute the LEAST MOBILE healer in the entire game for the two MOST mobile healers in the game for a portion of the fight that includes a lot of running around.

<drums fingers on desk>

I had a couple of hairy moments in general, sure. And one pull, I lost my tunnel tank entirely — looks like it’s because he had two adds on him at once. Maybe a mage screwed up?

Anyways, in the span of 3.5 seconds, he took 45000+ damage and was only healed for 5519 from a non-crit Holy Shock, about halfway through. Nothing I could do, I was still casting.

But apart from that, it worked really well.

So here’s my question: Am I really that awesome or do the TWO healers who did the job on Wednesday truly suck? Because, really, there is no WAY I should have done better in the tunnel than either of them. But I kept the group up pretty much the whole evening. Lost the tank once, lost one mage once. Aaaaaand that was it.

I mean… priests just have way too many tools to not get through that. Prayer of Mending. Renew. Power Word: Shield. Seriously. Just… so many tools. Meanwhile, a druid may have fewer tools, but they have the mobility that I lack. While strafing left and right, they can use Lifebloom, Wild Growth, Rejuvenation… I have Holy Shock followed by an instant Flash of Light IF Holy Shock crits.

So, really. I don’t get it.

Anyways, due to the fact that I was in the tunnel group (and will likely be stuck in the tunnel healing forever, now), I got an achievement.

heroic-takeyouallon

Of course, our Thorim kill was extremely messy. How messy? Four people standing, that’s how messy.

heroic-thorimdead

1 elemental shammy, 1 enhancement shammy, 1 warlock and 1 disc priest.

This is how I died:

Thorim Chain Lightning hits Madrana for 52531 Nature. (23927 Resisted)

Yeah, he kind of enraged, too.

Due to various circumstances, I had to log at that point for over an hour, came back and they just had killed Ignis and then called the raid. No raid Saturday this week or next, so my next raid is Monday.

Which is good, because hi, Noble Garden and Orphan’s Week, you pieces of crap.

Like I said in a previous entry, Kurn gets the world events and their titles, Madrana gets raid stuff.

Thank God, because no WAY was I going to do Noble Garden on Madrana after doing it on Kurn. NO WAY.

Camping/running around for eggs? Dumbest thing in the entire universe.

Laying an egg in Un’Goro when you can only turn into a bunny when a friend casts it on you? Also dumb.

I managed to get it all done, but WOW, did it suck.

kurn-ng

Last achievement was Desert Rose, dropping a flower just across the border from Tanaris in Thousand Needles.

Which meant that I was now free to focus on Orphan’s Week. Oh, the joy.

It’s actually not a hard bunch of achievements… just do some dailies with your orphan, eat some food… and do some battlegrounds. Oh, God, the pain.

First of all, Arathi Basin’s assault a flag is stupidly easy.

1) Get into a fresh AB.

2) Run like hell for Stables, make sure you’re mounted and have your Orphan out.

3) Cap Stables.

Seriously, it was that easy. Not so bad, right? Well, not yet.

WSG’s return the flag sucked. I played like, four games (I know, I know, but remember that I hate to PVP and that four WSG games is equivalent to 100 matches for anyone normal!) and finally got that portion of the achievement while clicking so furiously on the horde PROT WARRIOR with 45k health that I didn’t even realize I’d gotten it when I saw the flag vanish.

kurn-flag-wsg

Woot!

Incidentally, since I don’t BG much (read: at all), I was amused to get:

kurn-damagecontrol

300,000 damage or healing in a single BG on players. Sweet. I always thought I’d get this on Madrana, since I have been known to go in and healbot through things on very rare occasions, but nope, she doesn’t have it yet and Kurn got it tonight.

AV took me three turtles to get the achievement. I did that by miraculously getting Crusader Aura and jumping ahead to Iceblood Tower, hauling out my orphan on the way up and being the first to assult the flag by literally a second. Thank you, goodbye, /afk.

That means all I have left is the flag in EotS (uggggggh, I hate that place, but at least there are many, many flags in the course of one match) and Utgarde Pinnacle. Then I can actually finish the quests with my Draenei Orphan (already did the Human one) and then be done with this accursed holiday.

Probably doing a Naxx 25 tonight (Sunday) for fun — maybe I can actually get an upgraded ring or trinket, maybe my 7.5 chest?