Another night in Ulduar

by Tachyon on Sat. 18. April 2009, 14:05

Filed under: raiding, ulduar

After having defeated the Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and the XT-002 Deconstructor, we tried our luck at Ignis the Furnace Master.
He's definitely one of the harder early bosses in 10man Ulduar, and same can be said about the trash packs that guard his entrance, who wiped us quite a lot.



Dealing with his Iron Construct adds and melting them in the scorched areas is quite challenging, as it takes 20 stacks of the fire debuff to melt a construct. The stack is increased every second the add is exposed to fire, and decrease every second outside.
We ended up with too many constructs in every try, and only in the last try we were able to melt and shatter two of them. Finally we postponed the boss and moved on to another one:

Kologarn

He's huge and likes to scare poor raiders by suddenly popping out from behind the riff he's standing in, really, I almost spilled my coffee when he popped out of nothing and from one second to the other filled the entire 26'' of my screen.

Kologarn has two arms (seriously!). The special thing here is that both of them can be targeted individually. His right arm (that's the one you see on the left as you're facing him) likes to pick a random raid member and squash him until you do a certain amout of damage to the arm. Once the arm falls off, little adds will spawn that have to be killed. His other arm (the left one you see on the right, well, you see with the degree of confusion we had to deal when discussing the tactic on VT) just swings and deals a little damage, nothing to worry about.

The tricky thing about Kologarn is his nasty Eye Beam, but I'm sure we will be able to deal with it a little better next time.
We finally managed to kill him in a rather chaotic fight, but see for yourselves:

• Permalink
• 2 Comments

First steps in Ulduar

by Tachyon on Fri. 17. April 2009, 17:35

Filed under: Ulduar, Raiding, XT-002

Wednesday was patch day, and I quickly got ready for raiding (decided on my specs and bought my glyphs in advance). The entire server (EU-Destromath) was heavily populated, so it was quite laggy for the entire evening.

We first headed into heroic Ulduar, and soon we were cruising on our demolishers, tanks and choppers to devastate hordes of trash mobs. Just as all trash was cleared, the server decided it was a good time to take a nap and left us hanging in the instance for over half an hour. Loggin out was impossible, so all that was left for us was to CTRL-F4 our laggy backs out. The server crashed zone by zone, and it took quite a while for it to come up again.

The first boss, Flame Leviathan, fell in the first attempt. We then went on to Razorscale, where we made a few attempts util the servers crashed again.

Yesterday we built 2 groups for normal mode Ulduar, but decided to try to kill Emalon the Stone Keeper (or Stone Watcher? whatever.) in Lake Wintergrasp first. The boss wasn't as easy as it looked like, and the group didn't seem to be focussed enough to bring down the enraging adds in time, so *boom* and *boom* again we wiped like flees. At 9 pm we gave up and went to Ulduar.

First boss lay in the first try, no big deal. Razorscale was also doable after we adjusted our tactic a few times (stay back, split in two camps, iterrupt the adds that cast chain lightning, and sheep them when the dragon is pulled down).

The last boss we tried was XT-002 Deconstructor. Soon we realized that it wasn't easy killing a boss with 6M HP in 6 min when we had to move often (bombs!) and with 3 interrupt phases where we had to deal with the adds.
It turned out that we misinterpreted the tactic (we only read that killing the heart enters hard mode, but didn't think of just damaging it without killing it at first).
After adjusting the tactic, we brougth it down to 6% and killed it in the next attempt.
I happened to made a video of our XT-002 kill just for the fun of it, so enjoy



All in all, my first impression of Uludar is that it's well tuned and well designed, and it's definitely one of my favourite instances in the game (it kind of reminds me of AQ20 with its vast open areas, I'm already curious what awaits us with the next bosses).

• Permalink
• 2 Comments

Yogg-Saron world first kill by Ensidia

by Tachyon on Thu. 16. April 2009, 13:17

Filed under: ulduar, raiding

Gratz to Ensidia for being the first guild to defeat Yogg-Saron, the end boss in the new Ulduar raid instance.

The US guilds got a head start yesterday (10 bosses in Ulduar down at the time the 3.1 patch went live on the EU realms ), but Ensidia among other EU guilds managed to catch up this night. Seing more than 5 guilds doing attempts on the Ulduar end boss simultaniously was very entertaining, and I almost(!) felt sorry for the poor chaps banging their heads against the encounter.

I also wondered how long it would take them to find out if the boss was even killable at all (reminded me of C'thun in AQ40), and if not, to cancel the raid and get some sleep.

But in the end all ended well, and Ensidia (formerly known as 25th November, formerly known as Nihilum comprised of former members of Nihilum and Curse) can claim yet another world first content clear (though they skipped the optional bosses such as Algalon, so there's still some content left).

• Permalink
• 2 Comments

Patch 3.1 goes live

by Tachyon on Wed. 15. April 2009, 18:30

Filed under: patch, ulduar, spec, mage

Patch 3.1 - The Secrets of Ulduar - went live today in the US and EU.
Not much has changed since my PTR 3.1 post, and the mage class wasn't affected much by the many changes made in class balance.

The complete 3.1 patch notes can be found here:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

Features in Patch 3.1:

Dual Talent specs

Class trainers now offer the ability to have a second talent spec for 1000 gold.
Each talent spec has its own set of mayor and minor glyphs, and its own set of key bindings. The two talent spec windows can be accessed by pressing 'N', that's also where you'll find the glyph sets now. Switching your talent spec is a 5 second cast (affected by haste!) and can be done everywhere when you're out of combat, except in battlegrounds and arenas. No tome of power is required for applying glyphs anymore.

As a mage, you will most probably want to have a raid-oriented spec, and a PvP/solo/trash spec.

My choice of spec is follows:

• Raid PvE: 56/3/12 Arcane
  http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#of0Vfz0IzxGuMtedcZb...
  That's the spec I'm using now, I'm quite content with it. I decided to keep slow, and placed another point in frost to get 3/3 Ice Shards for superb Blizzard DPS.
• PvP / Solo: 20/0/51 Frost-TTW
  http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#of0ic0McZZAc0fRbu0f...
  Yay, finally back to frost! The 20 points into arcane are mandatory for PvP to get Torment The Weak and Improved Counterspell. That leaves too few points left to get all the goodies in frost, so I had to make tradeoff decisions between DPS/utility/cooldowns.

Ulduar / T8

The new raid instance, Ulduar, is the main focus of the 3.1 content patch.

My guild will venture into that place starting tonight, and I'm really looking forward to learning new encounters with my guild mates (unlike the T7 dungeons, where I got piggybacked through more or less, which was rather challenging for me as everyone except me was already quite used to the encounters).

MMO-Champion already reports severaly world first kills of Ulduar bosses by US guilds, seems they managed to use their head start to their advantage (but I'm sure that the EU-Guilds will get the credits for a Yogg-Sharon first kill).

Mage changes

The changes to the mage class are, like, not spectacular. At all.
Despite Blizzard announcing that they intended to make frost viable for raiding again, and fire solid for PvP, neither of that happened.
Frost continues its existance as a pure PvP or trash mob spec for the time being, but thanks to dual speccing, that's not much of an issue.

Out-of-combat mana regeneration was lowered, but that affect more the healing classes, as we mages got compensated for that loss by higher in-combat regeneration, so for us it eves out.

There are only two big changes concerning the mage class:

• Molten Armor and the according glyph now grants its crit chance based on the spirit, and no longer on a fixed value.
  
  Molten Armor used to increase the crit chance by 3% (with the glyph: 5%), and now grants 35% crit rating (55% with glyph) per point in spirit.
  Remember that it takes 45.91 critical strike rating for 1% critical strike chance, so to end up with the same crit chance as before, you'd need to have 394 spirit (without the glyph) or 417 spirit (with the glyph).
  For PvP, this is a huge nerf (for solo play it doesn't matter that much), as you barely got any spirit on your PvP gear. With my current raid gear, I'm at 370 spirit unbuffed, so in a raid scenario my crit chance will be slightly higher than before.
  
  Despite the PvP nerf and despite the fact that spirit is one of the worst stats to get on gear, I think the change is justified, and mages finally scaling with spirit is nice and necessary.
• The Improved Scorch and Winter's Chill crit debuff were lowered to 1/2/3/4/5% (from 2/4/6/8/10%). After a few gazillion sour mage tears, we got compensated with an increased crit chance for Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt (1/2/3% with Improved Scorch) and Frostbolt (1/2/3% with Winter's Chill).

Argent Tournament

To be honest, I couldn't care less for the Argent Tournamentright now, but hey who knows, I'm sure I'll pass by some day anyway.

I never bothered to read into the details, but if I recall correctly it's a horse mount PvP duel thingy which rewards titles and vanity pets. Whatever.

Miscellaneous

• Mounts now can swim (and dive?)
• Flasks only last 1h (before: 2h). The recipies stay the same, but will yield now two flasks at once. Old flasks were migrated to 'mixtures' which can be transformed to 2 new flasks.
• Curse Gaming and WowInterface.com decided to block WoWMatrix requests. I switched to the curse client to keep my addons up-to-date, works quite well.
• A new boss named Emalon The Stonewatcher has been added to Archavon's Keep in Lake Wintergrasp. The new boss dropps the iLvl 226/232 Furious Gladiator PvP gear.

• Permalink
• 4 Comments

Pimp my Ride!

by Tachyon on Wed. 01. April 2009, 18:38

Filed under: april fools, fun, diablo3

Don't miss this year's April Fools prank: Pimping your mount with racing stripes, huge spoilers, a sound system and extra wings!



Like last year, Blizzard hasn't forgotten to add April Fools features for their upcoming games, such as Diablo III:



Diablo III introduces the Archivist class, with awesome abilities like Shush and Quest Bolt!

Don't miss the video footage and the funny Radial Dialogue Tree screenshot!

• Permalink
• 0 Comments

Subscribe to Articles:
Subscribe to Comments: