Wow.

We did it. We actually did it. We downed Vashj and cleared SSC on Monday, June 2nd, 2008.

http://files.filefront.com/apotheosis+vs+vashjavi/;10483306;/fileinfo.html

I HIGHLY recommend you download the full movie to your HD and watch it full-screen.

Notable moments:

4:40ish – Dayden (whose POV this is from) takes a second from tanking a Naga and hammer of wraths the leaked elemental.

East side had the first tainted, but I believe all three others were on the west. Go Toga and Mass and Kam!

7:00 – Phase 3 – enrage in 4 minutes. You’ll note the length of the video is 11:12. Hehe.

The pallies do a good job of keeping Blessing of Freedom up on the tanks, too!

8:50ish – You can start seeing sporebats, oh dear.

9:05ish – Warthon starts getting beat on and eventually goes down. In the span of three seconds: static charge from a nearby raid member, a swing, a shock blast… with very few heals because we were all chasing them around.

He gets a battle rez about 10 seconds after he dies… and the druid who rezzed him had static charge. 3 hits of that, bam, dead Warthon.

10:40ish – 15865 heal from Madrana. That’s me. Lay on Hands. It crit. And, according to the logs, only overhealed for 7%. Ahahaha! This is my favourite moment and makes up for me dying in the green goo shortly thereafter. Like, 12 seconds after. Popped my SS, jumped out of the goo… and died in the goo again.

Vashj down.

Over 70 wipes, over 35 different raiders, way too many hours to count…

But Vashj down. SSC cleared. WOOT.

For anyone curious as to our raid makeup:

Druids: 1 (Resto)

Hunters: 3 (2 BM, 1 MM)

Mages: 2 (2 Arc/Frost)

Paladins: 4 (3 Holy, 1 Prot)

Priests: 4 (1 Imp DS, 1 CoH, 2 Shadow.)

Rogues: 2 (2 Combat/Swords)

Shaman: 5 (! 2 Enh, 1 Ele, 2 Resto)

Warriors: 2 (1 prot, 1 fury)

Warlocks: 2 (2 0/21/40, Destro/Demo)

How we laid it out for Phase 2:

West side: 1 BM Hunter, 1 paladin healing. 1 warlock going over to help with spawns whenever a tainted spawned.

East side: 1 BM Hunter, 1 MM Hunter, 1 paladin healing.

North side: 1 Enh shammy (w/ poison cleansing totem down), 1 priest (Imp DS) healing.

South side: 1 fury warrior, 1 paladin healing.

NW Generator: Resto druid

NE Generator: Resto shammy

SW Generator: Resto shammy

SE Generator: CoH Priest

Center: 2 Tanks (1 warrior, 1 pally), 2 rogues, 1 enh shammy

Striders: 1 ele shammy (kiting), 2 mages, 2 warlocks (one peeling off for west if needed), 2 shadow priests (for blackout, mindflay)

Here’s the anonymous report from WWS:

http://wowwebstats.com/pk445h5rn1uv1?s=7673-8333

JC Vendor on PM, Rage Winterchill, Vashj.

So, my 70 priest is on Proudmoore, which is the first of all servers to finish Phase 4 and open up the JC vendor.

First of all, I respect the majority of players on Proudmoore as smart, good players. But dude, what pricks most of them seem to be. Alliance ninjaing nodes of everything from other Alliance, the vile Trade chat… It makes me miss Eldre’Thalas, even with its noobs. But the opening of the JC vendor on Proudmoore was… I can’t even express how loathesome it was. There was the usual flagged, mounted Horde, of course, but it was the behaviour of the Alliance that boggled me. People in General were complaining and they’d get told to shut up, to hit Ctrl-V and click on the quest giver’s bar to turn in the quest, told that it’s not a big deal, that they’re noobs… How is this any way to treat the people of your own faction? World PVP, isn’t that supposed to rally people of the same faction together against the opposing?

Instead, Proudmoore’s Alliance was rude, obnoxious and, frankly, it was embarassing.

I hope other servers will show a little more respect in the insanity that is the inn when their JC vendors open up.

And speaking of the vendor… 15 badges a gem. Seems like the official armory is wrong. And yep, at neutral, each pattern is 50g a pop. That’s 47.50 at friendly, 45 at honored, 42.50 at revered and 40g a pop at exalted.

Which is a lot of money. It’s over 1500g for all the patterns at exalted.

Which is why I’m really glad my guild went to play with Hyjal trash last night. I wasn’t able to be there on time, due to RL stuff, and wasn’t even supposed to be there, but they were short people, so they went to Hyjal instead of TK. Which is fine. ’cause I logged on, got a ninja-invite, a ninja-summon (in between Rage waves) and an hour and a half later, Rage Winterchill is dead and everyone in the raid is friendly, even me.

Woot, woot, 74g spent for all the friendly recipes (5g70s apiece instead of 40g!) and some unexpected progression. It was a good night for the guild. :)

Tonight: Vashj. must. die. We got her to 1% last week. 40,000 health. We put 2 DPS on east and west, 1 DPS on north and south, 5 DPS on the striders and melee on naga/leaked elementals. It worked out really damn well, to be honest.

Vashj to 49%!

Ooooooooh, so close. I can feel it!

We’re really getting the hang of tossing cores around, alternating/splitting DPS on striders and naga and kiting the striders.

Dying isn’t usually our problem; usually one thing goes horribly awry (a netted/frozen strider eats the faces of three raiders, the server lags, someone doesn’t run away from a static charge) and then we’re screwed. But we’re getting there! I’m really excited to have gotten her to Phase 3 (technically, anyways).

We did 10 attempts on Vashj tonight and the 9th one was when the server lagged out horribly. We were all frozen in place and next thing you know, six people are down. More lag… and another 8 people are dead.

It was during this laggy time that one of our raiders said, quite astutely, “Vashj doesn’t lag,” which led to uproarious laughter on my part. One of the last people up was our resident elemental shammy who, due to server lag, appeared to be standing directly in front of Vashj, Vashj looking at her, aiming her bow at her and about ready to kill her. For about thirty seconds. It’s kind of funny, ’cause you KNOW the shammy’s going to die and, in fact, is probably already dead, because, after all, Vashj doesn’t lag, but we all waited with baited breath to see what would happen.

In the span of .8 seconds, once the lag spike ended, our beloved elemental shammy toppled over and Vashj reset and we all burst into laughter.

Sometimes… I really enjoy this game. :)

Lady Vashj.

My guild, Apotheosis, had its first few attempts on Lady Vashj last Thursday and I am up at this obscene hour (6:17am) trying to take the raiders who signed up and organize them into some sort of awesome killing machine by trying to figure out raid placement about 13.5 hours before the raid even starts.

We got her to 60% on two of our four attempts on Thursday and found that very encouraging. Elementals died quickly, but I’d allocated way too much DPS for them, so we were more than a little screwed on the nagas and no one really paid much attention to the Striders.

Without a warlock with Curse of Exhaustion, I’ve pretty much decided that our best hunter will be the kiter. I’m pretty sure he thinks I’ve been joking when I’ve mentioned this, but oh no, I’m not. Distracting Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting and misdirects from our other hunter… well, we can definitely cross our fingers, can’t we? Given that we should have 7 tailors able to throw a net, 4-5 pallies to HoJ and a shadow priest mindflaying and (hopefully) blackouting, the hunter should do okay. With actual DPS assigned to the nagas, they shouldn’t be an issue either, and I’m hoping to see the start of Phase 3 during Sunday’s raid.

It’d be nice to have a fully-cleared SSC.