« Archives in September, 2011

Lord Rhyolith 10 Man Heroic

For heroic Rhyolith we ended up running 1 Tank, 2 Healers, 4 Melee and 3 Ranged. Four melee DPS wasn’t planned, but worked really well in the end. Kalus, our regular discipline priest went shadow, and I finally got to test out my new 2H Mace fresh from the previous week’s Ragnaros kill. I really enjoyed being so melee heavy, because i got to hang out at the back of Rhyolith’s legs and AoE everything I could find, ably assisted by Velletara’s traps and some additional ranged AoE when they got the chance.

From the action shot (UI and all) above, we were dropping like flies at the end of the fight as superheated stacked up. Our kill was 5m39s, which given how quickly superheated stacks up (the tooltip suggests 1 stack per 10 seconds, when in reality it’s twice that speed) is probably the outside limit. We hit phase 2 about 7 seconds before our first stack of superheated, and were up to 8 when Rhyolith went down.

Steering Rhyolith on heroic is a lot tougher, since there is a lot more DPS going into the legs throughout the whole fight, and he turns a lot quicker as well. Missing active volcanoes and stepping on inactive volcanoes are far more punishing, particularly when you are relying on only two healers.

Omnitron 10 Man Heroic

Heroic Omnitron was a fun fight, and nice to escape back to a colour scheme that’s not completely orange over red after finishing off Ragnaros. The highlight for me (which I’m not sure the rest of the guild fully got to appreciate) was the laughter of delight when Jondy saw that [Passive Resistor Spaulders] had dropped. As seen in the shot above, they are the Druid shoulder piece to end all Druid shoulders.

Shannox 10 Man Heroic

Heroic Shannox is an interesting exercise in group composition for a 10 man guild. When you pair an eternally respeccing Mage with an Affliction Warlock and a BM / Survival Hunter, breaking facerage off a mage gets a little exciting. Velletara respecced back to MM to bring another facerage busting ability and tamed a Fox, so we could plant him on RageFace for Tailspin. It’s nice to see Vellefox dancing in the screenshot above.

Overall, the art of getting the frenzy stacks regularly dropping off each dog while managing jagged tear stacks on the tanks was a nice step up, and more involved than the default normal mode strat of zerg Rageface, kill Riplimb at 30-ish% (on Shannox) and zerg Shannox. Learning to share crystal traps is best described as a “growing experience” for the guild. We ended up utilising quite a large area, concentrating positioning on the roads to avoid issues with line of sight due to our old friends the “near invisible” rocks scattered in the zone. I didn’t think I’d need to estimate 90 yards in game, since it seems like a long, long way… but I guess I can put that in the “something new I learned” column too.

Magmaw 10 Man Heroic

After killing Ragnaros on Thursday, Sunday was a relaxing night back in Tier 11. We gave heroic Magmaw a damn good thrashing, and while we didn’t stop for a screen shot, Jondy found an action shot from our attempts pre patch 4.2. Some may assume she’s dead for this photo, but I have it on good authority that she was just lying down for the artistic angle and to prevent camera shake.

We romped through the remaining bosses on normal mode, some of which died surprisingly quickly, even post Nerf. For Nefarian, we wound up our sleeves and grabbed Keeping It In The Family for good measure. One of the (unintended?) side effects of post-patch nerfs is that unfortunately some of the achivements for boss kills become exponentially less challenging when you multiply a gear reset with the magnitude of the nerfs. Was great fun to experience the fight again on our mains, and even pick up an upgrade in the form of a useful token for a tier helm.

Ragnaros 10 Man Normal

We have been working Ragnaros a while now, quickly getting stuck on a frustrating plateau of unforgiving mechanics, and inconsistency in transition phases. While we powered through and made progress each session with the boss, last week we put it all together and got our first serious attempts into phase 3. We started this week with our first raid night hitting 7 bosses, and having time left over to force Raneros to 23%.

For the night of our kill, we were consistently getting into the third phase and having fun dodging meteors (I know melee enjoying spending a burn phase running around looking after gigantic balls of pain). The last burn phase quickly turned from chaos into a dance of inevitable destruction, and when Ragneros fell the relief and joy were palpable.

As an added bonus, we grabbed Ragnar-O’s too.