On downing and shouting...

On Wednesday, Chaotic Divinity took down Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, the second (and arguably most difficult) boss in Blackwing Lair.

This (sound required, not worksafe) is what an overexcited raidgroup finally defeating a boss after 2-3 weeks of work looks and sounds like, from the perspective of Candi, one of our Priest(esse)s.

Those of you who know me IRL might recognise my dulcet tones in there.

I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds...

Another weekend passed, but sadly, I have no dead more demons to show for it. Wulf does have a couple of shiney new toys though, so lets focus on the positive.

First up, on Sunday's Zul'Gurub run, we took down the priests and Hakkar in record time without a wipe. Hakkar dropped a sword which I'd previously stated wasn't worth me getting. However, in the last patch, they introduced a new enchant for two-handed weapons, which when applied to this weapon made it a worth substitue for my two hatchets, with the added advantages that:

• It's better for Player-versus-Player confrontations due to it's insane damage and massive stamina buff.
  
• I looks frigging cool!
  

So, flush from the success there, I headed down to Molten Core with the intent of getting some more of Wulf's Gianstalker Armour. Sadly, the loot gods saw fit not to drop any of the peices I needed, but Ragnaros did drop an amazing Cloak which I won the auction for. Another Hunter also got their Leaf, so I really need to push on now and get my last two demons killed.

Woot! Pix!

Thanks to Valyir, another Hunter in CD, I now have a shiney new signature banner:

Now all I need to do is kill my demons, so I have a nice leafy bow like the one in the picture!

On Profiling.

Well, no more progress on the Demon front since my last post, just a slight geek-out. I've been playing around a fair bit with CT Profiles as an alternative to my Allakhazam profile.

CT Profiles is slower and clunkier, requiring you to put each item manually, however, this also allows you to set up different profiles with different sets of gear. For example, I've set up profiles with my normal gear, Molten Core gear, full Fire Resistance gear (really only used in BWL) and PVP gear.

It also allows me to be really Geeky and set up a wishlist of my ultimate gear. I can also set up different talent specs and see how the talent choices affect my stats. It's good fun if you wanna do some idle min/maxing in your tea break at work.

And another one down...

Finally managed to take down Kilnfran last night. Demon count now stands at two out of four. Solenor still managed to defeat me and Artorius still eludes me however. Much distance to go before I get my bow, but it feels do-able at least.

A less-than-epic week.

Well, it's been over a week since I got my Leaf, and I wish that I had more progress to report. One Demon is dead, three to go.

First we'll talk about my success: Simone The Seductress in Un'Goro. This comes down to a pretty straight-forward melee fight. She has a pet that does four times the damage she does, but I was able to take him out of the fight for 30 seconds with a freezing trap, and by the time he rejoined the fight, his mistress was half-dead and I was able to take his blows until she fell. Not the cleanest death, but it worked.

Now the three that "got away" thusfar:

I can't say anything about Artorius the Doombringer in Winterspring. Everytime I've been there looking for him, he hasn't been around. I'll need a group of four friends with me when I do him anyway, since the area he spawns in is teeming with hostile beasties.

As for Kinfran the Crazed (Burning Steppes), well he's the fellow I've tried the most. I've started to get used to the fight, and I'm sure I'll get him soon, but the area he's spawned in is also home to several Elite Dragonkin, so having friends there to nuke them seems to be the key.

Which brings us to Solenor the Slayer (Silithus), and my biggest problem with the quest. I've died against him about six to eight times thusfar, but I think I'm getting the rythmn of the fight down. The biggest problem is that his spawn area is right outside the gates to the newest endgame instance, Ahn'Qiraj, so all it takes is one bored level 60 deciding to "help" me, and bam! Solenor runs back to the nether realms for a 2-3 period.

And this is the issue. If anyone aggros the demons once I've engaged them (by attacking them or by healing/buffing me) then the demon immediately despawns for 2-3 hours. It's particularly been a problem in the Solenor fight, but it's also happened with my Simone and Kilfran attempts, and it unerringly seems to happen just as an attempt is going well. Strangely enough though, the problem doesn't seem to be the Horde players (two Horde hunters actually watched my last Solenor attempt respectfully), but the Alliance players. I just wish Blizzard could tweak the quest so that it punishes the "helpers", not the quester for each interruption on what is already a challenging and taxing quest.

Loot and the beginnings of an epic task...

OK, so yesterday afternoon, I agreed to go on a run through Dire Maul East with some friends from Chaotic Divinity, looking for, but not expecting to get, a Libram of Rapidity for the Hunter's Zul'Gurub Enchant. I really should learn to have more faith, since one dropped off the third mob we pulled in there. Now all I need is one more Blood of Heroes and I can run off to ZG to enhance Wulf's helm further.

After the run, it was Chaotic Divinity's second attempt at running Molten Core in one night. Our first had been on Friday and was cut short by an unscheduled server reset. This did mean, however, that we were able to kill and loot the first six bosses again. *grin*

We pretty much rocked the instance. First pull was at 19.15 server time, and we downed Ragnaros at around 23.45. There were deaths along the way, but we never wiped, despite some occasionally sloppy boss kills. The Highlight for me was after downing Majordomo Executus, when I finally got my Ancient Petrified Leaf, which started the quest to get Wulf's epic Bow and Staff, two of the best weapons he can presently obtain.

Portalled to Darnassuss after Ragnaros went down and handed in the Leaf quest, which netted me a cool 5G 97s (I love that change in 1.10!). I then got my three quests, kill the four demons for the staff, hand in the black sinew for the bow string and hand in the blue sinew for the quiver. Since I had the Black Sinew already, I handed that in for anothe 5G 97s!!!

First headed up to Winterspring, but there was no sign of Artorius on his normal patrol route. Was semi-relieved since I didn't feel 100% confident to take him without some peeps on crowd control (he spawns near Frostsaber Rock).

A fellow CD Hunter offerred to join me at that point, so we headed down to Un'Goro, where, once again, there was no demon. He stayed there to grind whilst I went for a look in Silithus. The demon Solenor was there, sure enough, but proved to be every bit as hard as everyone said he was. I made about three or four attempts against him, but I don't think I got him below 75% on any of them.

After that, I hearthed back to Stormwind, decided to look into Burning Steppes then go to bed. There was no sign of Kilnfran, so I logged and went to sleep.

Got up early this morning with a bad case of insomnia and decided to log in and try my luck. Kilnfran was there and I managed four attempts with corpse runs before he despawned. I kept on thinking I had more time on the Scorpid Sting debuff than I actually did, and he kept owning me. I had a thought that chain-trapping might work, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Just been over to Un'goro, and still no sign of Simone. I'm gonna be offline most of the day as well, so no more attempts this weekend I think.