Twin Valkys: Heroic Mode

In this small series of descriptions on fights in Trial of the Grand Crusader I will assume that you know how to do the fight on normal so I will go through them really rather quickly. I'll deal with all 5 fights separately, this is the fourth one.

• Northrend Beasts
• Jaraxxus
• Faction Champions
• Twin Valkyr
• Anub'Arak
  

Woooot!! Winterspring Frostsaber!!

And I will call him....Bob!

Faction Champions: Heroic Mode

In this small series of descriptions on fights in Trial of the Grand Crusader I will assume that you know how to do the fight on normal so I will go through them really rather quickly. I'll deal with all 5 fights separately, this is the third one. 

• Northrend Beasts
• Jaraxxus
• Faction Champions
• Twin Valkyr
• Anub'Arak 

The Secret of Healing - The Revelation

Are you ready for the big revelation?


No...I mean are you really ready?


...


Seriously?

Jaraxxus: Heroic Mode

In this small series of descriptions on fights in Trial of the Grand Crusader I will assume that you know how to do the fight on normal so I will go through them really rather quickly. I'll deal with all 5 fights separately, this is the second one, the first one, on Northrend Beasts, can be found here.

Group Comp

• 2 tanks
  
• 2 or 3 healers
• 5 or 6 dps

Jaraxxus

• Portals have to be killed otherwise they won't stop spewing mistresses
• Vulcanoes have to be killed as well so they don't keep spewing infernals
• It is very important to kill the portal before you get a second mistress when you're starting out doing this. We handled a second mistress last weekend, but it really makes it a lot harder
• Dispell Jaraxxus, if you do not dispell the spellpower buff the next fireball he gets off is likely an insta kill
• The mistress' kiss is annoying on normal, lethal on heroic. If you get it make sure to have a spell with cast time at hand of a spell school you don't mind getting locked
• Incinerate Flesh will need more healing before it disappears (40k instead of 30k), and it is THE most important debuff to get off during this fight. Failing to heal off the incinerate flesh will most likely result in a wipe
  

Differences with normal

• Portals and Vulcanoes need to be killed so they stop spewing adds
• More healing needed for Incinerate Flesh
• More damage
• More hitpoints

Northrend Beasts: Heroic Mode

In this small series of descriptions on fights in Trial of the Grand Crusader I will assume that you know how to do the fight on normal so I will go through them really rather quickly. I'll deal with all 5 fights separately, this is the first one.

Group Comp

• 2 tanks
• 2 or 3 healers
• 5 or 6 dps

Phase 1: Gormok the Impaler

• Tanks should switch on 2 impales as with normal
• Fires thrown out leave a dot that ticks for quite a bit of damage, move out of them as soon as it's thrown
• With the fire dots it's handy to know that Gormok will always prefer to throw them on ranged, so as long as you have enough people at range he is 99% sure to throw out the fires on a ranged person
  
• Ranged with snobolds should move to the melee to get their snobold taken off with extra speed so the melee doesn't have to move, less melee movement = more dps
  

Phase 2: Acidmaw & Dreadscale

• As normal, 1 tank on Acidmaw, 1 on Dreadscale
• Tank with burning bile frees people with paralytic poison
• Do not stand in front of either of the worms unless you're the tank
• Do not pull agro of the worms so that they can spray all over you and the rest of the raid
• Make sure the raid spreads out so as few people as possible get burning bile at any one time
  

Phase 3: Icehowl

• Tank him facing the wall
• When he does a charge you do NOT get the runspeed increase, but you DO have to make sure to get away from him
• If you fail and he hits you, you're screwed, not only because he enrages and you likely have a dead tank and a dead dps/healer that he hit on his way, but also because you miss out on the extra dps that you get while he is normally stunned

Differences with normal

• Phase 1: fire leaves dots
• Phase 3: no runspeed increase
• More hitpoints on each of the NPCs
• More incoming damage
  

ToGC10 Down

We killed Anub on heroic mode today, wooot!

Started out the evening with clearing normal ToC 10 in 28 minutes, then moved on to the heroic version. Ran into some trouble at Twins (stupid globes) but got them down, and moved on to actually killing Anub!

We had 43 tries or so left as well, so we got the extra weapon in the chest. Next week on to having 45 or more attempts left :)

Moved on to Sarth3d to pick up another black drake. I think we're close to everybody in the group having one. And finally we did Ony, got the more whelps achievement there. Very very satisfying raid night.

I'll do a write up on some of the ToCheroic versions soonish, especially since we went looking for some tips and tricks for Anub and could find none of them. Sure we could find what was different, but nothing really helpful about the tactics in there.

This week I'll also try to post the final post in the Secret of Disc Healing series so busy writing week ahead. Stay tuned!

The Secret of Disc Healing - PartII

Part I can be found, here.

In this part I will speak about spells used, order of importance, hitpoints, and some about UI. 

Spells

All healer classes have a multitude of spells nowadays to be able to react to different situations. As a discipline priest you can pretty much count on the following things to be true:

• Does your target have Weakened Soul? No? You're doing it wrong.
• Penance on cooldown? No? You're doing it wrong.
• PoM on cooldown? No? You're doing it wrong.
• Only when those 3 are down can you go to flash heal, greater heal, prayer of healing, or other spells that the situation requires. There are very, very few situations where you don't cast in that order of importancy.

Take the order above as the first guideline.

About old Poetry and Blar

Been playing my troll shammie a little, and not feeling too woah about WoW. Not sure what it is, it might have to do with the fact that I had a trapped nerf in my shoulder last week that forced me to stay away from the computer a lot. It might also have to do with the fact that I actually went away and did RL stuff this weekend *gasp I know*.

Either way, I poked through some of my old writing. Nono, not old writing here. Older.
I used to write on a writing forum. I come there still...sometimes, but I write different stuff now, and when I do write I write for myself instead of posting it.

I even wrote a book once...well, yeah, I wrote it, but of course it never got published. Anyway, this old poem reflected really well what I was feeling in my head today while I was trying to decide whether I should follow the hallow's end craze or actually do stuff that I wanted to do.

I decided that it was stupid to do stuff that I didn't feel like doing, just because it was there...duh.

Blaaaarrr getting distracted and all over the place...poetry:

Version Mismatch in Raiding

First off, apologies to Tamarind. I didn't mean to suggest that you didn't say anything, but I wasn't aware that you had in fact been, well.. sort of screaming about it.

Really, honestly, I would've left the asshats there and then. Would've saved me the trouble, and them. They obviously had no patience with a newer player whatsoever. Responsibility towards guildies? Where was theirs? Nope, sorry, no responsibility on my side at that point.

Moving on.

This post contains language you might not want to read, and it might be a bit all over the place because I got a bit agitated while writing it.

(Now go read that post first so you know what the rest is about!)

Woah! Enchanting Loot Roles!

Interface Changes
You can now roll to disenchant an item in an instance.

* +LOOT_ROLL_DISENCHANT = "%s has selected Disenchant for: %s"
* +LOOT_ROLL_DISENCHANT_SELF = "You have selected Disenchant for: %s"
* +LOOT_ROLL_ROLLED_DE = "Disenchant Roll - %d for %s by %s";
* +LOOT_ROLL_WON_NO_SPAM_DE = "%1$s won: %3$s |cff818181(Disenchant - %2$d)|r";
* +LOOT_ROLL_YOU_WON_NO_SPAM_DE = "You won: %2$s |cff818181(Disenchant - %1$d)|r";

From MMO Champion.

I have no idea how this plays out, will have to look into it more, but it looks promising!

Oh, and Jaina (amongst others) got an update, about time!

The Secret of Discipline Healing-PartI

Normally I try to not go into specific classes or roles on this blog, especially since I seem to do things just that little bit different than most of the 'specialist' sites tell you to do stuff. However, I was asked to write a post about disc priesting.

The problem is that I DO priesting, I'm not used to talking about it. So I could try to explain how I make things work for me. What works for me might not work for you. I could tell you all about specs, talents, spell rotation, etc

The simple truth is that while I have it all figured out for me, I find it impossible to explain it to someone else in detail. Healing is not about rotation, spec, or talents. Sure, those things count, but they're not the basic idea of healing.

Weekly Raid Quests - continued

Earlier today I posted about weekly raid quests. My first reaction can be read here.

Thinking about it a bit more I still don't like the idea. My problem is not so much that they become a quest my problem stems from a different thought though. On the PTR the quest reward is Emblem of Frost.

The other news coming from the PTR is datamining of items like Leggings of Woven Death.

You see that "Icecrown thing of crafting things" in the materials list of those legs?

Weekly Raid Quests

I had a week off from work last week, so I'm a bit behind on the news, but I just read about weekly raid instance quests on MMO Champion.

My first reaction:

Seriously, do we really need more pressure to repeat stuff, Blizzard? Do we really need more of the feeling "OMG I cannot take a week off since I would run behind everybody else!" ? Why do we have extended lockouts? We can't really not kill bosses, since we have to complete the quests! Right?!

My 10man is currently taking the time to get Firefighter on farm, work on Algalon, and Yogg+1. Can't do that anymore I guess or we'll not get the required items for our progression content. We can kill them easily on normal, so does this mean we should just not extend and get the items that will probably be required for progression content? Bah, Don't like this sort of pressure.

More later when I've thought some about it.

The Pain of Levelling

For Cataclysm we're promised a whole new way of leveling. I've leveled 4 characters to 80, and I have another two in between 70 and 80. Not too many compared to some, but a lot compared to others.

The first ever character you level you have no idea what you're doing. And depending on how fast you pick it up, or not, you'll have a good time levelling or you absolutely hate it. For me it was rather neutral. This was the first MMO I played like this, and I didn't level on my own, I levelled together with Thror. He played a pallie, I played a lock, he healed, and I pewpewed. It went fine together, not too slow, not too fast..it seemed.

We were also lucky enough to already have a friend on the server, who had an epiced out warrior. He ran us through Stocks a couple of times, and boy was it fun to see him whirl around and have everything drop dead at your feet. I was even lucky enough to have a blue drop in there, which sold nicely so I wasn't even out of money.

Where am I? Who am I?

 

When working on the loremaster achievement you do get to the coolest spots...literally. I got some great screenshots along the way, and I figured I would do a where am I. The picture however is not one of my screenshots, Celedhring contributed it, and I'm still looking for this spot myself.

And just for funs...a who am I? Shouldn't be too hard to guess..only few NPCs this ugly in the  game.

More thoughts on Tradeskills

I got to thinking about enchanting more, and the whole comment Mandii made on the post from yesterday, and how people think they have a right to the enchanting mats because it's not a bonus, it's an instead of loot thing.

Unfortunately the only way I can think of to solve this problem is make it so that no gear can be disenchanted anymore, and mats only drop from mobs (there goes the lore reason for disenchanting). I guess until something better is being done I'll just be happy to be in a guild that understands how much of a pain it can be to level this trade skill, and petty the people who have to level this skill all by themselves and through pugs.

More trade skill ideas after the break.