Work and life caught up with me about 10 days ago - I'll get back to updating when I figure out what that big yellow thing in the sky is doing there and why I only see it for a few minutes in the morning.
Type rest of the post here
Feb 28, 2008
hard to post now
Feb 12, 2008
Kara - Chess Event
Last time I blogged a bit about Kara bosses I touched on the Chess Event and I mentioned I’d cover the that and perhaps Prince Malchezzar. Well here ya go.
Chess is easy peasy. After you leave the Shade’s room you go down the ramp then up to the left. Your locks need to pop Detect Invis on everyone (locks, get in the habit of doing so without being asked – you’ll find it’s a huge time saver) and your tank will mark up the first of two, 4-mob pulls. These are ghosts, without DI you’ll risk losing LOS on them in the middle of combat unless they are hitting you.
Clear these mobs, then the ones that follow them – pick up the books lying around and move on up the next ramp at the far end of the room. More ghosts here, and once cleared you’re gonna see a new mob – they look like the dudes up in Netherstorm and they are linked to Netherspite, who is actually very close to you now.
These guys can be taken one at a time – there aren’t too many here and they have an agil debuff, but they go down easy enough.
Moving through this room and down the right side ramp (up the left side one leads to Nether) and you’ll have one final room to clear before heading down into a room with a repair guy. You need friendly rep with the Violet Eye to use him, and he also sells reagents – so get em while you can!
After topping off you go through the double doors and down a small ramp into the Gamesman’s Hall – where you see a large chess board and two sets of chess pieces – horde and alliance.
Your side is whatever faction you are aligned with – makes sense eh? Since I’m an alliance player I head to the right side and pick a piece to stand behind. You get the option here of Elemental (rook), Horse (knight) Healer (bishop), Mage (queen), King Lane (King) or one of the pawns. The pieces move as one would expect with some slight cheating as compared to real chess. Once someone talks to the King all players can then talk to their piece and you ‘enter’ them as a player. This means you are now controlling a chess piece on the board and you have a ‘pet bar’ your action bar icons should now reflect a few new choices (check the lower left side of the screen where your attack button and your hot bar items 1-4 are located).
Knights can move I think 3 spaces, everything else is limited to 1 at a time. You’ll want someone to move the pawn in front of the king so he can get out on the board – everyone else should be able to make their own way.The way to win is to kill the king on the opposing team, some folks try to take down the casters or healers first – I’ve done both and have never lost at chess. Seriously, if you lose at chess then you need to rework your strategy because it’s simply the easiest epics you’ll ever get.
Once you win DO NOT, under any circumstances, talk to anyone in the room – not Medivh or the chess pieces. If you do you’ll place a silence debuff on the raid that lasts a very long time. You can let your raid leader or loot master open the chest at the end of the hall, let them dish the goods then everyone takes a turn opening it for their badges – Free Lootz.
Once done gather on the center of the chess board. I’ll take you up to Prince then we’ll halt for the day – but in reality – you’d want to drive on to Prince and clear that fight, if you can.
At the far end of the hall is a double stair similar to the one you entered through, there are a total of 5 mobs in there, have your MT pull the single pat back to the board – you all DPS him down – MT and OT get the next two, same drill, then you all move on up and into the room they were in to pull the last two from what should be the right side, as you entered the room.
Once cleared there’s a spiral stairs leading up – your choice here – the raid goes all the way up, hugging the inside of the stairs to avoid the hidden mob that’s near the door on one of the landings OR
To be completely safe you can have your tank run up the stairs a bit and get that mob and bring him all the way down into the main room so you can work with some space.
If you elected to pull the odd add, you can stand at the top of the stairs and let your tank take the guy at the very top while you do stand-off attacks, or you can have the tank take him in the top central room and the raid can bum-rush him. Your call, if you didn’t kill the extra add then you have to bring the entire raid into the top room or you’ll pull the loner from below.
Once they are down/bypassed go out the next hall and stop by the door. Your opponent is now Prince Malchezzar – and he’s tied with Nightbane as the hardest boss in Kara.
Cogitations on Cat Gear/Stats for Kara
One of the readers of this blog posited a question for me regarding my interpretation of the table I posted on Karazhan minimum requirements. He asked why I didn’t post a set of stats for feral kitty and since I’ve seen this question a few times I thought I’d write up a formal post in lieu of replying directly in the comments.
There are a number of good items you can get for feral cats and I think when I see this question posed, most people tend to answer it in terms of what gear to get, not what stats you should have. To that end I’ll post a couple of links I ran across from the forums, but later on I’m going to digress deeply into my thoughts on cat gear.
Here are a couple of links I’ve found that can perhaps help out Link 1 & Link 2 .
I’ve read 2.2k AP with 30% Crit is a good target starting place for cats. The basic gear choices for kitty are (one bear’s opinion here) – epic crafted chest from LW, hourglass trinket from BM, Abacus trinket from Arc, The clefthoof hide leggings, the elekk leggings or the x-52 pilot leggings from a quest in Netherstorm, the staff from Bot regular OR the Staff of Beasts from Nagrand, which is easier to get. Some folks like the hammer from PVP better than the staff Illhoof drops – but I hate PVP. I only did it to get my bear shoulders. The rogue gloves from Shattered Halls, Helm of the Claw was my DPS hat for a while (with the +12 agil meta), any decent DPS leather bracers – any of the nice DPS capes – there are several in the dungeon sets. I think I had cloak of the inciter but that wasn’t highly recommended for cats.
Mmm, If you don’t want to waste a lot of time getting gear – get the assassination set – rogue dungeon set 3a. That’s not a bad set to start with you could prob get one in a week or two. Other people will wax philosophically on the virtues of various gearing choices as a start, but I was always more focused on the tanking aspects. I gambled on picking up kitty gear as I went along, and I did.
My Digression
The KZ table I published was based on one I found on TenTonHammer, I freely admit I absconded with their table and I even noted why, because I was annoyed that I couldn’t deep link you directly to it, which in my opinion made their version all but useless – since it was hard to tell people how to find it, Go to this site, search for these words, click the third link, sacrifice a small mammal at the dark of the moon … BAH!
In all fairness I’ve even updated their chart, added color to make it easier to read and a few tweaks of my own and have since altered it based on suggestions from readers, friends and knowledgeable guild mates.
The KZ minimums table is lacking in two notable areas, Survival Hunters and Feral Kitties. I think there’s a reason for the lack of each. I know the survival hunter is a neat spec, you get exposed weakness which is a really nice boss debuff, and you get a solid trap option for CC, but in my experience, the overall consistent DPS output for BM hunters is more desirable than better traps. I know very little of MM, other than it is still a viable spec for KZ.
For feral cats, most of the time I’m in Kara, even when in cat form, I tend to stay in my tanking gear. The reason for this is that I can easily pick up a mob if the tank gets in trouble or if someone decides to pew pew the wrong target by accident. This sort of thing happens a lot to new groups – hell it happens a lot to me and both the KZ groups I run with are experienced raids.
I think the reason it's not on this chart is that you're not going to get into Kara as a kitty - you're going to go as a bear, who happens to have a cat set. A limited point of view to be sure, but perhaps the original was written by someone who wasn't into cats. However, we can correct this through a few modifications to our chart. (ohhhh, my first use of the Royal 'We')
A feral’s strength is “versatility” – it's hard to replace a rogue or lock that knows the job and does it well, but you are perhaps the most versatile class in the game. So yes, I think it's a vaild point to raise and I should make some changes.
But let’s get back to the issue of stats – as I‘ve said, I’ve read 2.2k AP with 30% Crit is the target to start. I don’t know about health pools but I’m guessing if you get the other two, the health pool your left with will be on the order of a geared pre-kara rogue. If anyone has solid info lemme know and I'll tweak it.
From what I’ve seen you’re looking to make your cat set similar to a rogues set – which only makes sense now doesn’t it? I mean, you’re a melee DPSer wearing leather … so sure, rogue sets are among your friends.
Mine wasn’t even close to that when I started, but my tank set was the best a raider could start with – and I had all the right gems and enchants. Both sets improved drastically since I was picking up both cat and bear gear as I went through the first month. I had to wait (and you may have to as well) on some of the kitty gear because our rogue got dibs on DPS leathers. Perhaps this explains the shortcomings on the chart - I was able to run kara in bear gear - almost all the time, perhaps the authors did as well, but that's still no excuse for not doing better.
We’ve all seen a lot of people with narrow minds in this game. So it will be no surprise if someone comes along and trashes my opinion, but I’d like to point out that this is simply that – my opinion. And in “My Opinion” there is no “set in stone” answer to the choice of gear/stats, only a set of guidelines and some general knowledge you can use to improve yourself.
Raiding is more about knowing your class and spec well than it is about what your gear will allow you to do. Any good raider will tell you that good raiders can make up for shortcomings in gear through skill and spec choices – at least until the gear they need drops.
I hope that helps.
Feb 11, 2008
Weekend Raider – Kara, the Shade
Well, it turns out I ended up doing a Kara raid this weekend on my bear, though not with my regular group since I was busy with my son during our regular raid. I managed to pick up a couple of items – new cat shoes, belt from badges etc, which was nice because it means no more green items. (yes you can raid KZ with one or two green items depending on what they are – bears get Manimal’s Belt as a quest reward that should last them until they get enough badges of justice to replace it or run heroic Ramparts for the belt off the last guy.)
But, the real winner this weekend was my hunter. We hit Kara last night and I was practically falling asleep. My little boy spent the weekend running around my house getting into absolutely everything so I was somewhat drained by the time I got back from dropping him off at his mom’s.
But I pressed on, by this time our fights are easy because our gear lets us plow through boss after boss. We soon found ourselves outside Netherspite’s hall. Nether is the only boss in the place that hadn’t fallen to us yet. It took several tries to get everyone in their groove, but we managed to get him down after several attempts. And low and behold what should drop but hunter pants – literally 2/3 of the bosses dropped something I could use or needed, including my T4 helm. That’s going to really make a huge difference when it comes to next week’s run. Now I need to spend some time making money so I can afford to gem those out nicely. If only work would cooperate.
Last time we talked I owed you a run down on the Shade of Aran. You can find a good explanation of the fight over at Wowwiki, which should give you the basics of Shade. I’ve mentioned this in the past but it’s worth repeating. Your Raid leader or assist needs Deadly Boss Mods and/or Bigwigs. Shade has a few different phases and both of those mods can help.
The other noteworthy item to know about the Shade is he likes taking down your weakest player – so your healers need to try to keep everyone topped off. Since it’s not an aggro fight it’s a sort of loosely controlled chaos the MT/OT are mostly DPS/Stunning through the fight. As mentioned, there are a number of phases Shade likes to pull, he alternates fire and frost bolts – which you need to constantly interrupt, as well as arcane missiles (which you don’t interrupt) and an arcance explosion which will one-shot you if you’re within it’s detonation radius. There’s a blizzard affect that roams the room, some elementals that come out at one point and the most significant of all – Flame Wreath. FW is a big pain because due to a number of factors, your graphics card, latency etc – you may not even see it. But if anyone in the raid moves, even so much as turns in place (even if you don’t think it’s affecting you) the entire raid will wipe. When it hits you’re stuck in place. You can auto attack, i.e. shoot, wands, bows, guns, melle can auto attack, casters auto cast, but you cannot change your position in any way or the raid will literally get burned. Melee – if you’re out on the edges, then you need to hold in position until it passes.
Other than that the only thing to clearly watch for is that his mana pool stays above his HP – if it goes under his HP at about 10% or so he’ll polymorph the raid (even those immune to it) and when you come out he’ll blast you. The only way to survive is to have everyone topped off and to use healthstones, pots, bandages etc. as soon as you come out of sheep form.
My last word on Shade is that it’s not that hard of a fight, but it is yet another gear check – your DPS really needs to shine here and your raid leader needs complete command and control throughout the fight. It’s not uncommon for well geared raids to wipe a few times on him, it’s definitely one of those encounters that you need to practice a few times before mastering it.
Next time: we’ll move on to the easiest fight of all – Chess and perhaps discuss the Prince event and the last bosses, Terestrian, Nether and the skeletal dragon, Nightbane.
Feb 7, 2008
Sic transit gloria mundi
It is a Latin phrase that means "Thus passes the glory of the world". It has been interpreted as "Fame is fleeting." One of the more famous versions exists at the end of the film "Patton" and was attributed to the famous WWII general.
"For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting."- Gen. George C. Patton
Teacher says she’s just tired of tryin….
That’s one of my favorite Ralph Wiggum quotes. For today, rather than go into a boring diatribe on the Shade of Aran, I’d like to talk about my experiences with casual players and how I think they could fit in a raid structure.
Let’s start with my RP guild. I call it that for lack of a better term but they really aren’t into role playing, they are simply casual players who log in when they have time to kill – like every night. Most of the guild have 70 mains and at least one 70 alt – several of them are working toward their third and fourth 70. There are a variety of players among them, teenagers, college students, mothers, fathers from all walks of life, cops, professionals, students, retirees etc.
It’s an interesting mix and a fun one, but after a while I got bored with just leveling my alts. So I started raiding a bit, found I liked it, then found it was very time consuming and very expensive. So I got an idea, casual raiding? I've heard it can work if you're not into progression, if you like gear and seeing new sights but aren't worried about full clears. So I gave it some cogitation.
But taking the casual player and getting them to understand the needs of a raid isn’t so easy. I have a warrior friend who thought playing his warrior was the coolest thing – though he always said he found it really hard to level up.
I was amazed. I have a 51 fury warrior and I buzz through mobs my own level constantly. About the only breaks I ever take are to wrap a band-aid around my owies and drive on. Then I looked over his spec. UGH. He had points in all three talent trees, and nothing heavily invested in any of them. So I pulled a good DPS spec off the web and sent it to him, along with a list of gearing options for DPS warriors. A week later I checked him again and found he was protection – with all the wrong talents chosen. I mean, if a guy could pick every talent incorrectly – he did it. Instinctively I think. He said he wanted to try tanking and had read up on uncritability, but he was still getting mauled in 5-mans – non heroics. Gosh, I wonder why.
HE’s playing a mage now and says it’s so much easier to level, but he can’t do 5-mans, because he runs out of mana in the boss fights ….
I asked what his mp5 was, (mana regen per 5 secs) he hadn’t heard of it. I asked what his bonus spell dmg was at lvl 70 – it was 289, ‘why, isn’t that good?’
/sigh
Now to be fair, he’s tried. But he just doesn’t “get it.” He’s read some things, he’s tried gearing a little, but he has some blues and some just silly choices for gear, stats and spec and he can’t figure out why he’s not doing better. I’ve done what I can to help him, but I’m done trying
But I’ve gone from the idea of casual players in raid settings to harping on one gearing and talent choice. There are many like this guy, they aren’t theorycrafters and don’t get the game – but it’s really not that hard and you don’t have to get into the details of theorycrafting in order to start something like kara. You just need someone who knows raids, and the bosses to be the leader, someone who can help out to be the assist and someone who can follow the basics of loot rules to parcel out the good stuff. The leader simply needs to be someone who understands what each class does, and how to use the talents available.
I used to think leading a raid would be hard. And admittedly it can be difficult, but it doesn’t HAVE to be. It’s like so many other choices in life, it is what you make of it. Be a hard case and you’ll have to deal with resentment issues, be too lax and you’ll have a rowdy unruly bunch who wipe a bit more. Be of even keel and keep your mind in the middle and you might just get by.
I think if my self imposed breaks extend for any real length of time I’ll look forward to pulling together my own KZ raid, just to see if I can get a group of casual players to work out or not. I’ve tried this with the legacy raids, it’s not the same. There’s no incentive for them, no real reward. Maybe KZ is the place to test this out. I’ll let you know.
Burned out by the real world
Man, have I been lazy this week. I’ve been busy with the real world so I haven’t been giving this as much attention lately. I owe you a run down of the bosses following Curator but to tell you the truth, I’m a little burned out this week. :-)
My son and I started early childhood development classes on Wednesday of last week (organized playtime with other dad’s and their kids) and I’m also shifting my weekends around so I’m able to spend more time with him than with WoW and my raid buddies.
Given how irritating and chatty our Friday night raid has gotten lately I’m not all that sorry to be taking a break. If they find themselves in dire need of a Dire Bear I can join them next week, but we’ve had an abundance of people willing to come so I think they’ll be fine.
I talked it over with my raid leader last week and mentioned that as my son grows up I’ll be shifting my schedule to meet his needs. And let’s be honest – a boy needs his dad more than this dad needs World of Warcraft.
But make no mistake, this is a break, a well deserved one I think for all the nonsense I’ve managed with this group over the course of the last two months. I also intend to resume my work here – even if no one reads it I can’t leave a project unfinished.
Feb 4, 2008
Weekend Recap
I got a bit lazy this weekend. I don’t know if it was lack of sleep (dang neighbors) or the sloth of a Sunday induced football game but I didn’t get a lot done. I hardly bothered watching the ‘big game’ either. Maybe it’s the weather that causes this apathy.
I did manage to get my Tier 4 gear for my bear on Friday, but the run was tough. I hate chatty vent servers – it’s annoying. Of course we have a lot of chatty people and after 4 hours it’s beyond annoying. I usually turn the volume down completely.
But we did manage to clear KZ in 4 hours – so that’s something.
I got an in-game note from my hunter’s raid that Sunday’s KZ run was being moved to today, apparently the raid leader is a Pats fan. I thought it was a lame excuse for moving a raid, but eh – I liked the break.
So this weekend, instead of running up to 58 on my pally, which I should have done, I instead got on my lock. He was 51 on Sat and is sitting nicely at 54 this morning. Three toons headed to the outlands at the same time? Huh, I guess I could do it easily enough.
I really need to work on better gear though. My paladin in particular needs better armor and spell dmg. I had forgotten how much fun a lock can be … DoTs ftw. I was busting down tons of mobs a lot higher than I was too. The fights tend to be a bit mana intensive, but for all that it’s not so hard. Life tap works well when you have a tank, but my healer buddy kept trying to heal me, even after I announced I was life tapping /sigh.
As for the rest, I spent a lot of time going through mailboxes and bags, putting stuff up for AH and trying to clear some space. After a couple of months my bags get so disorganized and I have to spend a day cleaning house. I still have a ton of items to DE and sell. Need to get back to work on that.
I’ll put the next Kara boss up soon, but it may not be today. I wrote everything up but I need to spend some tweak time on it yet.
Feb 1, 2008
Kara Part 5
The Curator
When we last parted ways I left you working your way toward the first boss that drops a Tier 4 token, the Curator. Every Kara raider will let you know that the big machine is a gear check, meaning that if your group can bring him down, you stand a reasonable chance at downing the rest of the bosses in Karazhan. The exceptions are Prince Malchezzar and Nightbane. The rest should be doable.
Should be doable … well, you will most likely wipe a few times while you figure out the fights but lets see if I can help when we get that far.
For now what you need to do is what I mentioned last time, either clear the mobs on the far side of the Opera Hall or run back out the front door and cross the river to the side entrance.
Going to the side entrance presents you with an additional opportunity, since Nightbane is summoned on the master’s terrace and if you go in the side door you’re about 50 yds from the place. But it also presents a small challenge. There are ghost mobs sitting on the other side of the door. They aren’t too close, but if you run in and move to either side of the door you can pull one or both. Since your raid is likely setting up at this time it’s usually a wipe – at minimum it’s a few deaths. So the trick here is to open the inner door and run straight ahead to the far wall – all raiders stack on top of each other. You shouldn’t pull anything that way. Alternatively you can assemble between the entrance and the door before opening it.
Once you get set up – crack the door if you chose that option and run to the left, tanks out in front. Take out the ghost mob (only one) and make sure your mage decurses the affected party members. This first mob is purple. Later ones are green. The green ones cannot be taunted so keep that in mind when pulling.
Now you begin a long climb up to the back entrance to the Menagerie. There’s a bunch of ghosts along the way and when you reach the top there’s 2 arcane protectors inside the first room. They should be taken at the same time – MT/OT with attention paid to the debuff one of them tosses out. It affects one party member and while it’s active – that person discharges an arcane blast for 1-2k every couple of seconds – so make the person who has it run away from the raid.
After these are down move up the stairs into the small ante-chamber and gather. Through the only other door is the Menagerie and Curator, and about 7 groups of mobs. These smaller groups have to be taken out first – MT pulls one into the antechamber while curator is on the far side of his patrol. The raid focuses on the giant arcane anomaly first. It will look as if you’re doing no dmg to him but he has a mana shield and your shots deplete his mana – once it’s gone he goes down like a .,. well you get the idea.
Drop his mana worm palls, rinse and repeat for the other mobs. Pull them all into the antechamber. I know raids that do the last 1-2 in Curator’s room but that is a huge risk for a new raid as Curator has a massive aggro range. Use your hunters and mages to pull the mobs, MD, blink etc.
The boss fight can be done two ways. Both ways require the raid to assemble in the boss’ room on the far right wall, line abreast and don’t get off the wall while he’s nearby. Once he moves away you can set up.
The tank will take the boss (boss’ back to raid) at the third diamond shaped pattern on the carpet. In the first method all raiders will spread out in a U shape, with the base of the U on the wall right of the door you came through. Ranged DPS can deal with his add (astral flares) and have to get them down fast. In the second method your melee can help the ranged by following them around.
The first method is less damage intensive as the flares can cast chain lightning for arcane dmg. But if your healers are good you can do it the other way. See the strategy notes on fighting Curator. If your gear is good and your team is well prepped, he can go down in about 4-5 mins.
Outlands Bound … this time on a paladin
Last night I was helping one of my guild leaders level his paladin. He had a series of quests in Maraudon and was having trouble finding a team. Sheesh I wonder why – it’s only a freakin nightmare of an instance. I have only done parts of Mara a few times in the past, I’d forgotten how screwy that place is. An entire clear would take a level appropriate team a long time.
So, Chirax and I hit Mara for some ‘fun.’ I guess it wasn’t all that long – maybe 90 mins or so, but even on my 70 hunter it was a pain. Those stupid knockdown effects from the Thrashers got on my nerves.
While underground one of our feral buddies got on and said he was bored and could he please run us through something.
Never one to turn down such an offer Chirax and I both said we’d be happy with a BRD run.
So I jumped on my tankadin, dumped my bags and headed for Burning Steppes. PL runs are fun once in a while, so long as you don’t beg for them or get constantly asked to run someone. An open invitation is too good to pass up. The funny thing is, I never really enjoyed playing a paladin. I was a horrible healer and I could not figure out the ret combos. Everything seemed to take forever when comparing it to my mage or druid. So I had left this toon parked for a long time. But not so long ago I started taking an interest in him again and recently spent some time leveling him up a bit more.
In this case I was sitting at 55 on my pally and I’ve been trying to hurry up to 58 so I can use him as a teammate with Cam – my shadow priest friend from TSS. That mana regen is awesome for tankadins. I really should have thought ahead when I chose my mage instead of my pally.
The end result of our little excursion was a full level and a half of xp – I’m sitting nicely on the positive side of 57 and have the first set of quests done for BRD. I need to hit Burning Steppes quick to start my Ony attunement chain, but I’m not too worried and besides, I love killing dragons. Our main tank from Kara even showed up on her mage for a bit, though she DC’d after the bar and never came back. Sad, she missed a ton of good cloth gear.
I totally hosed up a quest for the shadow key, I forgot you have to talk to the dead guy twice. Oh well, I can always do it the hard way. The good news is I’m attuned for MC this weekend. Can you say epic pally gear?
The only downside from last night was that I ran out of rested XP. Since my mage has only been parked for a week he hasn’t save up enough of his own yet, so I’m left with a choice.
Chirax and Mageblast (MT’s mage) are both at 47-49. Mageblast has 251 spell damage, un-freakin-real. She farmed up two epic rings in Winterspring on her own and you can’t believe the DPS that girl puts out. But since they are sitting under 50 I suppose I could grab my own shadow priest and bust him up from 44 to meet them. That would give Chirax a nice mana pool to tank with while us clothies pound the mobs. Alternatively I could pull out my warlock. I love playing him in groups but I pull so dang much aggro I was getting frustrated playing him.
Decisions, decisions.
Wouldn’t that be a trip, three characters sitting in Honor Hold awaiting my free time? I’d be beside myself. I think I’d have to give up sleeping for a while.
Tonight is Kara, so no PLing for me. Our tank is coming back (if she doesn’t DC) and we’ll get yet another chance to see the same T4 tokens drop. Maybe my boots will drop tonight.
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