Apologies for not being around much this weekend. Apart from anything else, it’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada, so there’s been that to deal with.
I took some Apotheosis guildies to ICC10 on Friday to work on the Lich King. We had fun, but we had some issues with various mechanics, including Valks and Defiles, the few times we dealt with them.
Stupidly, I scheduled a continuation for Sunday night, unaware, at the time, that my parents were inviting guests (ie: people who weren’t family members) to Thanksgiving dinner, which extended dinner from an average 2.5 hour affair to one that lasted 4.5 hours. So my brother and I were very, very, very late for our raid. We scrounged some people up, we waited around for a bit, but, in the end, we got 8 attempts in on him and got him to 59%.
True, we didn’t actually kill a Val’kyr, but we came close! And we did learn to dodge defiles and the tanks SEEMED to be doing well with taunting for Soul Reaper. We even went into transition without a Shambling a few times and had this one BEAUTIFUL attempt where we had nothing but one Raging Spirit half-dead when we ran back in for P2. Gorgeous!
What I learned about organizing and leading this fight:
– Drudge Ghouls help out immensely with the Necrotic Plague bounces and stacks and can help get that high enough to 2-shot a Shambling Horror.
– You can lose a Raging Spirit if you leave them on the collapsing part of the ledge, which can make your life a TON easier. ;)
– Warlocks can actually be out of range of their teleporters. Or, you know, their teleporters can be covered by Defile. I guess the solution here is to stand at range, on top of your teleporter and then you won’t be OOR?
– That bloody enrage on the Shamblings sucks, but I don’t think we lost my brother to a single one. He was stunning them whenever he could, so that was pretty sweet.
– Why the Valks ALWAYS seemed to choose our freaking disc priest to carry away, I do not know. Hilarious, though.
– It feels good to say “Let’s get Football back up, please” again. Battle-rezzing our resident fury warrior was kind of a staple of our BC raids, while we would leave the resident enhancement shaman dead on the floor. ;D
– I’m still super rusty at this thing called “raid leading”. Totally forgot to actually assign healing until after the first wipe, I think it was. I’m looking forward to Cata raiding where I’ll do healing and a brief (stop laughing, it’s possible!) overview and other role leads will deal with other crap!
– Leading a raid that is comprised primarily of friends can still be considered “work”, but it’s fun work.
– Going through the logs of a raid that is comprised primarily of friends, most of whom you know for a fact are great players, can still result in /facepalms. ;)
I need to do a variety of things, including respond to comments here, making sure I have the glyphs I want for tomorrow, given the great chance that 4.0.1 drops, and then maybe I can actually play the game a bit today.
– Drudge Ghouls help out immensely with the Necrotic Plague bounces and stacks and can help get that high enough to 2-shot a Shambling Horror.
Warrior + any other tank = best combo for phase 1, because Vigilance on the other tank (who tanks LK) = INFINITE COSMIC POWER TAUNTS.
Plus, a DK can solo-tank every Soul Reaper all by him/herself. God bless Antimagic Shell. :]
I told you the ghouls would help stack the plague and make our transitions easier. ;)
And it’s not my fault Defile covered my Demonic Circle! I wanted to be back on that platform as much as anyone else! /sob
Yup ghouls on the tank who is not tanking the lk helps out a lot. We had in our setup a fury warrior who the ghouls just seemed to love, our pally just had to use Righteous defence. Boom good to go. A resto druid healed the hell out of infest in our 10 man attempt when downed him in my horde guild for the 2nd time.
Prot Pally,
Blood DK
Hunter (marks)
Fury Warrior
Shadow Priest
Ret Pally
Destro Lock
Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
Holy Pally (my fail pally lol)
Phase 2 is the most annoying part IMO – defiles and Valks not fun.
Good to hear you had fun RL. I have to admit as well, its quite fun.
Rilgon – Yeah, gotta work with what I’ve got since most of my Apotheosis folks are either in another run or haven’t transferred back, yet. So I get my brother on his paladin and another member on his bear. We’re probably being a little overly cautious for Soul Reaper given the buff and the excellent healers we’ve had with us, but that’s how I learned the fight back before the buff. Believe me, I’d love to have some Vigilance hax or a tank geared enough to eat Soul Reaper the way my current guild has on 25-man.
Xmolder – The ghouls are helpful and I like that we were using some on both tanks. It helped allay my fears regarding the eventual one-shotting of the LK tank. I’ve done Been Waiting a Long Time for This and good GOD, that’s a lot of damage.
I laughed my ass off about you two being out of range and stuff and the other odd events. :)
slice – Yeah, my brother (pally tank) loved using Righteous Defense on our fury warrior who was, obviously, grabbing aggro. Oestrus (on her priest) was like “By the way, [that warrior] is taking a lot of damage…” I laughed, because that’s just what he DOES.
We had…
Prot pally
Bear druid
Marks hunter (me)
Fury warrior
Enhance shaman
Destro warlock
Destro warlock
Disc priest
Holy priest
Resto druid
Crazy stuff!
Phase 2 sucks. It always will. I welcome P3…
I used to RL all the time in Vanilla and BC. I’ve done very little of it in Wrath, though. I enjoyed it, but it’s going to be an adjustment for me to get back into the swing of things, which is why I’m doing some 10s (though I LOATHE 10s!!) with some of my old crew. Practice makes perfect. :)
lol evil fury warriors. I know ours we had to alter our tactics a bit cause he is a beast. We had the hunter misdirect once so threat is firmly on the LK tank (the DK). All i gotta say is thank god for Hammer of Justice for p2. We need a stun…go go holy pally stun lol.
@Kurn – Out of curiosity, what were your healing assignments? Who was tank healing?
slice – Holy Wrath, Hammer of Justice, both happy things! Although they do share the diminishing returns. :)
Fannon – It wasn’t my preferred classes, that’s for sure. I would have preferred a holy paladin on tanks, but we had the resto druid on tanks, with the other healers spot-healing them as needed. It actually worked really well.
The disc priest was on bubble spam duty and kicked some ass. The holy priest was on “raid” but also was the dispeller for Necrotic Plague, which she pretty much rocked.
I tell you what, I felt SO helpless and kept wanting to heal, but my three healers rocked it. :)
>< doh lol i forgot about holy wrath. It does kind of suck about the whole dimnishing returns, but if they were not in place, that phase would be too easy.
Patch day! Has me worried. Even as Disc now…I am going to have to get more haste to make up the loss of Enlightenment, and the changes to Borrowed time.
But my little paladin i am really worried about. Your comments last night in raid got me worried lol.
slice – There are still a lot of combinations to use to keep them slowed, which is pretty excellent. Just have to know what to hit and when. Holy Wrath + Hamstring.. etc.
Don’t forget another 3% haste that we’re all lacking from the removal of it from improved moonkin form and swift retribution aura. Anyone who’s haste dependent is about to be even MORE haste dependent.
Well, in raid, I was hoping for the boots to drop for Walks ’cause he has 245 and I have 258 (we’re both wearing mail boots atm) and I really do believe we’re going to need every bit of help we can get. Upgrades are still upgrades until they can be easily replaced. Either we go with sub-par boots and all plate or we go with decent boots that aren’t plate and lose 5% bonus intellect. I mean, it’s a no brainer — crappier boots + 5% bonus intellect. But it’d be nicer to have BETTER boots + 5% bonus intellect.
Can’t wait to see how rude some people’s awakenings are going to be with regards to their abilities. If I logged on today and didn’t know Holy Light was changing, I would be like “OMGWTFBBQPOLARBEARS?!” and probably cry. ;) Anyone who hasn’t done some reading on their class and their role is in for an ugly surprise. I hope that we’re not ALL in for ugly surprises, but I suspect we will be.
Hulrok, If you read this (not sure if he does), I love you man, but you gotta macro Barkskin to swipe or something. For serious. That is all.
Also, I hope I didn’t suck.
Hestiah – You didn’t suck. You did pretty darn well. :) Not sure if Hul reads it, but I did address that in a forum post. :)