Magtheridon - How The Mighty Have Fallen

Well on Friday, we went and paid Magtheridon a visit for the first time in months. Since we started focussing on TK and SSC, we really haven't paid the big guy much attention. His loot table wasn't that amazing and the fight was annoying enough that we'd spend an hour or so wiping each week before it all clicked (pun unintended) and we took him down. It also required 4-5 decent tanks and 4-5 Warlocks for a smooth attempt, which wasn't always a viable or available raid set-up.

In Patch 2.4, the following announcement was made:

Hellfire Citadel: Magtheridon's Lair

* Many gameplay elements of the encounters in Magtheridon's Lair have been changed to decrease their overall complexity and difficulty.

On top of this, they buffed his loot in a few ways and I think we were curious to see how it went.

It took us half an hour from the first trash pull to standing over his corpse.

The changes appear to be as follows:

* There's a hard cap of one Infernal per Channeller.
* The Channellers hit for much less damage
* The Mind Exhaustion debuff now only lasts for 30 secs. No need to rotate clickers if things go well.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the Cave-in damage has been reduced as well. The overall effect has been to change Magtheridon from a "Retard Check" in the words of some to just plain Retarded. He does everything but lie down for you and give epics.

That said, CD will probably go an farm him once a week just because. I'm curious about how it'll go with a bunch of T4/Kara-level alts as opposed to the T5-level mains who went there this week.

State of the Gear 28-03-08

Well Ulu is shaping up nicely. He's currently sitting at 508 Defense and 104.8% uncrushable with Holy Shield. This means I should be able to switch out the Scarab of Displacement for a Stamina trinket in certain fights and still retain both uncrushability and uncrittability.

Next things on the agenda:

Get Revered with Shattered Sun Offensive so I can acquire Enchant Chest - Defense.
Find Jewelcrafter who's Revered with SSO and get him to make me two Regal Nightseye's and an Eternal Earthstorm Diamond to further pimp out my tanking gear.

After that, it's just a matter of gathering what epic-quality gems I can from Gruul/Magtheridon and hoping it's not too long until the Sunwell Armory becomes available.

Into Mount Hyjal

Since 2.4 there just isn't enough hours in the night. Been running around slotting daily quests around instance runs. Wasn't able to get into Magister's Terrace last night as I opted instead to eat before our inuagral run to Mount Hyjal. (I know, where are my priorities?!)

I never played Warcraft III, so I never played through the Battle of Mount Hyjal. Therefore I have no idea how the encounter plays compared to the RTS version.

That said, it's the most fun I've had in a 25-man in a long time.

The mobs come in waves of 10-12 every 2 minutes. To burn them down, you ideally need to AoE them. To AoE them, you need an AoE tank. This means happyfuntimes for our hero.

Ulushnar's Pro-tips for AoE-tanking Mount Hyjal:

1. Get a Shadow Priest in your group if at all possible.
2. Get another two tanks to drag a couple of the more dangerous mobs off you.
3. Bind one half of your keyboard to Consecrate and the other half to Holy Shield. Randomly mash keys.
4. Profit.


We ran with three tanks, Ulushnar, a Prot Warrior and a Feral Druid. Normally, Ulu would drop a Consecrate at the entrance to the Alliance camp and then back down the hill with the wave hitting him. The other tanks would grab a couple of the more dangerous single mobs off me and I would proceed to AoE tank the rest of them (with ~840 Block Value).

It was a pretty boring kinda fun. I'd aggro them, and then spend my time hitting Consecrate and Holy Shield in sequence. I had mana problems at first, but they put a Shadow Priest in with me and they cleared right up.

First boss, Rage Winterchill was easy. we wiped once on him because people didn't dodge his Death and Decay AoE and our Healers didn't react fast enough to the Frostbolt attack he did. Second time around, he went down. I played pseudo DPS on both attempts until I died from not noticing the Death & Decay. (IR nub, hear me rawr!)

After Rage, it was another eight trash waves and we came to Anetheron. Our best attempt on him was 23%, but I think our tactic's flawed and I'm confident we'll get him next time. There was some sloppiness on the trash waves before him which lead to us wiping a few times and we called it after the second go. Can't wait to go back.

Tonight we're going to go to the newly-nerfed Magtheridon to see if they've finally managed to dumb him down to our level. Once he's dead, we're gonna take a potshot at Gruul.

Into Magister's Terrace!

As yesterday's post (and the later subtitles for the hard of thinking) indicated, I went on last night with an agenda.

First things first, I went up to see G'eras to divest myself of badges. I bought the full set of plate Fire Resist gear as mentioned in yesterday's post, two Nether Vortices and on a whim, the Libram of Divine Purpose. I've been considering it for a while as a decent single-target threat libram for fights where I don't need the good-old Libram of Repentance (ie Heroics and Resistance fights). I'm not especially worried.

Then I grabbed the start of the quest chain from Aldor Rise, took a portal from Shattrah to Ironforge and flew from there to the Isle of Quel'doras.

Once there, I assembled my posse and charged into Magister's Terrace. As normal instances go, it's up there with the easier heroics (Mechanar, Slave Pens) in terms of difficulty. Entirely Aoe-tankable but there's a lot of caster mobs in every pull, so be prepared to use Line-of-Sight pulling, and make sure your healers position themselves so they can maintain LoS on you if you have to move with the mobs.

After we cleared it, we were attuned to Heroic mode, so it was time to go back in for another try. As Heroics go, the individual pulls aren't that much harder. I started the run in my Raid-tanking gear, but quickly downgraded into my "threat set". The bosses are tougher though.

The first boss is a pushover in either mode. He's basically the last boss in Steamvaults repackaged. The second boss isn't too hard in normal (DPS switches between killing him and the arcane sparks he generates, like the Curator), but on Heroic he generates two at a time and things can get a little fraught. Paladin Healers will have a nightmare here, since they don't have any HoTs or group heals, and this is very much a group-healing fight.

As for the third boss... well the metaphor thrown around is that it's like a 5V5 Arena fight. She has four adds, much like Moroes or Hexlord Malcross, and each of these adds has an array of annoying abilities. Also there doesn't seem to be much in the way of traditional aggro, since the adds will run around trying to kill the clothies, CC the dangerous people and generally act like a bunch of PVP players (without the /spit macros). For someone who's used to brute-forcing his way through heroics with aoe Aggro and good healers, this is a complete change of philosophy. I may actually have to start utilising crowd controllers on this fight. *gulp*

After that, we're onto Kael. He's a tricky fight to master. We two-shotted him on normal, but failed to kill him on Heroic (we gave up after two tries since our main healer wanted to go to bed). I've since found out you can bubble out of the Pyroblast he does in Heroic and that he only does it once per fight, so it should be manageable in the future. Gravity Lapse is fun though!

All in all MT is a fun normal-mode instance and a challenging (but rewarding) heroic.

After the rest of my group went to bed, I applied myself to the new Sunwell dailies. And I found myself running around a lot annoyed with no Mana. :-/ There's a lot of mana-draining mobs running around and I'm afraid I may have to invest in the new rare-quality Retribution set as a grinding set for the dailies. I just wish I hadn't sharded my Hammer of the Naaru now! ><

Ah well, tonight is CD's first run at Mount Hyjal! I can't wait!

A clarification.

Ok, a few folks are confused about my last post.

I know full well that the T6-level badge goodies won't be available until Sunwell Isle's in phase three. Look over my last post and tell me where I claimed otherwise!

I intend to blow some of my hard-earned badges Fire Resistance gear (which has been available from the original badge vendor since TBC opened) and Nether Vortices, which were added to the original badge vendor in 2.4.

That'll still leave me with about 160 saved badges for when the Sunwell badge vendor appears.

Clearer now?

Two Point Four Ho!

Ok, When I get home tonight, Patch 2.4 will be in effect. What's the plan?

First things first, I'm going to go grab two Nether Vortexes from the Badge Vendor to make a Belt of the Guardian. Whilst I'm there, I'm going to blow the badges I had saved for the Chestplate of Stocism to get my hands on the rest of the Fire Resistance Plate that's available for Badges. It looks like we're gonna take a peak at Mount Hyjal tomorrow night, and it seems the second boss needs a tank with good Fire Resistance gear to off-tank the Demons he summons. Sounds like a Job for me!

After I've done the shopping and got my belt made, I'm going to then go run Magister's Terrace with some friends to get a feel for it. I'm really looking forward to this, since it'll be the first "fresh" five-man instance I've done with Ulu. With all the other instances, I had some experience of them with Wulfsblood. I've heard the normal instance is almost as hard as a Heroic, and the Heroic mode is one of the harder ones. It should prove a challenge.

Only three hours to go!

The last night of 2.3 is upon us!

Well it's been confirmed that patch 2.4 arrives tomorrow (today for the barstewards on the US servers).

Guess this means if I don't get the Vortices on tonight's Al'ar run for my belt then I can just buy em tomorrow for Badges.

Tomorrow night, Ulu shall assault the Magister's Terrace!

Another weekend...

...Another bunch of instances cleared.

Friday we went to Tempest Keep and downed Void Reaver and High Astromancer Solarian. Both went down first-time, but I had to leave after the kills to meet some friends and it seems the raid was called without any attempts on Al'ar. Shame, but on the plus side, the trash to Solarian dropped CD's first Seventh Ring of the Tirisfalen which went to Ulu for a not-inconsiderable amount of DKP.

Saturday saw us go and farm Gruul again. The pull for High King Maulgar is always the hardest part and it saw us wipe 3 times (Mage tank kept dying) before we killed him. After that it was on to Gruul, where we wiped for the first time in ages. To be fair, most of our healers were either alts or new, slightly-undergeared applicants, so they had to learn a new role. We killed him on the second attempt, but once again, the Pink Disco Shield failed to drop. After that, I did a Botanica Heroic run for the Daily quest and netted Ulu another seven badges.

Sunday morning, I woke up to do my dailies and saw to my joy that Shattered Halls was the daily Heroic for that day. First up was another Karazhan badge-farming run though. I gathered a group of T5 raiders and we proceeded to lay waste to the instance in two-and-a-half hours. After that, I grabbed four mates from the raid and proceeded to charge through Heroic Shattered Halls, clearing it with 30 minutes still on the timer. These two runs brought Ulu's badge count to 260, which means I can currently afford all of the items I want to get as soon as the Heroic Badge vendor becomes available in 2.4.

After that, had a couple of hours break and then went to Serpentshrine Cavern to kill Karathress and train Vashj. Karathress took a few attempts. Having only one Hunter in the raid meant Ulu had to pull his target solo with the aid of The Decaptitator. Getting my add under control before he spawned his pet was tricky, but we got there in the end. He died eventually, and although his Tanking Neck didn't drop, he did drop the pattern for the Belt of the Guardian. Now all I need to do is win the bid on a couple of Nether Vortices and I'll save myself 30 Badges next patch.

On Talents.

I've seen lots of posts over on Maintankadin about variations on the standard 0/49/12 cookie-cutter talent spec.

These tend to come in two camps:

1. The "Divine Intellect/Improved Seal of Righteousness" spec. People seem to think the solution to going out of mana is to have more of it. Seems like a good idea right? Wrong. In my Boss-tanking gear, I have 119 Intellect. Raid-buffed, that hits about 190. Divine Intellect is therefore worth 19 Intellect to me, or 285 mana. That's barely enough for one Holy Shield.

Tankadins just don't stack enough Intellect in the normal run of things to make Divine Intellect worth the points. And as for Improved Seal of Righteousness, meh, it's ok I guess, but it's not worth speccing ten points away from the Prot/Ret Trees for, especially when we have Improved Seal of the Crusader and One-Handed spec in easy reach of the necessary talents if we need a threat boost.

2. Then we have the "Sanctity Aura" lovers. These people believe it's worth sacrificing some of the Higher-tier talents in the Protection tree to spend 21 points in Retribution for Sanctity Aura. It's impossible to get this talent without sacrificing Avenger's Sheild (the Paladin's only ranged aggro maneouver) and some points from either One-handed Specialisation, Combat Expertise, Improved Holy Shield or Ardent Defender. This will weaken your survivability and threat generation in return for an Aura that gives you +10% Holy Damage when you have the chance to use me. Don't get me wrong, Sanctity Aura's nice, but it's not worth what you currently have to give up.

The sad fact of the matter is, to be a raid level main tank, there are certain talents that are pretty much essential:

Protection (43 points)
5/5 Redoubt
5/5 Toughness
3/3 Improved Righteous Fury
3/3 Shield Specialization
5/5 Anticipation
1/1 Blessing of Sanctuary
2/2 Sacred Duty
5/5 One-Handed Weapon Specialization
2/2 Improved Holy Shield
1/1 Holy Shield
5/5 Ardent Defender
5/5 Combat Expertise
1/1 Avenger's Shield

Retribution (10 points)
5/5 Benediction
5/5 Deflection

(List courtesy of Kalbear on Maintankadin)

That's 53 out of a possible 61 Talent points in order to do the job of tanking big nasties, with the other eight points down to a matter of choice. As it stands, this side of Wrath of the Lich King and Wow 3.0, There really isn't that much chance for variation.

My own spec pretty much hits all the beats described above, swapping one point in One-Handed Specialization for Blessing of Kings and adding Precision, Improved Judgement and Improved Seal of the Crusader to the mix.

The long and short of this is simple. Smarter people than you have explored the extent of content with a Protection Paladin and found the best combination of talents to do the job. There really isn't enough wiggle room to substantially mess with the formula if you want to do a good job.

Raiding Report - 17 March 08

Raiding's going routinely atm.

Thursday saw us take down Hydross, Lurker and Leo in Serpentshrine. All the bosses were one-shotted, but some sloppiness on the trash before Leo saw us wipe three times and pretty much killed any chance of taking on Morogrin or Karathress.

Friday was supposed to be Tempest Keep, but we couldn't get enough people, so the raid was cancelled. Some folks went to Zul'Aman, I did some dailies and logged out early.

Saturday afternoon saw us go back and kill Gruul for the first time in a few weeks. It took about an hour all things told because people kept on stuffing up the initial pull on High King Maulgar. No Disco Shield for Ulu, but it looks like we're doing him as a regular casual raid on Saturday afternoons, so there's still hope. After that, went and did a Black Morass/Old Hillsbrad Heroics run for fun. Saturday evening saw me lead a two-and-a-half hour clear of Karazhan for badges. No complaints there, the whole thing went pretty smooth.

Last night should have been back to SSC to kill Karathress/Morogrim and train Vashj. However we didn't have enough Main Tank-level tanks to do the job, so we went to Tempest Keep and killed Void Reaver and High Astromancer Solarian for a short, if rewarding raid. Tonight we'll hopefully be able to go finish off Moro and Kara in SSC. As it stands, the Frayed Tether of the Drowned is the last T5 drop I'm actually chasing.


In other news, after using Enchant Ring - Spellpower on all his rings, Ulushnar is sitting at 367 Enchanting. I'll get him to 375 sooner or later, but I'm not overly bothered with it.

Update 14-03-08

Well I've been on holiday the past week, and not being stuck at work and bored over my coffee and lunch breaks has led to a steep downturn in my blogging. Hope nobody's missed me too much.

Well what's been going on? Well the Tankadin community has been reeling from some blogger at Wowinsider.com and his claims that Paladins are essentially the third choice as a tank. I would normally link the articles, but I refuse to boost WoWinsider's page rank further by listing them. There's a lengthy thread here if anyone cares.

Why should we care? Well for one thing, Wowinsider is a reasonably respected source of wow news and info, and a poorly coloured view of them could close the minds of raid leaders who might have been willing to give tankadins a chance as anything other than a gimmick tank. But meh, damage done, time for damage limitation.

In other news, not much. I've dropped mining with Ulushnar and instead levelled Enchanting. It was partially out of boredom and partially out of a desire to get two crafting professions going on my main raiding toon.

Haven't done many heroics this week, since the heroic dailies were uniformly sucky (had Sethekk Halls three days in a row and then it was Auchenai Crypts today). Did set a new record for a Karazhan clear on Monday though, of two and a quarter hours. Going to try for better tomorrow.

The 2.4 patch downloader's appeared now, so I guess it's 2-4 weeks until it arrives. I'm hoping this gives the game a bit more of a kick in the arse, because I just haven't been feeling much love for it recently.

Happenings

I haven't been on WoW much since the weekend through a mixture of apathy and circumstance. This weekend I'm off to see friends, so I won't be playing much then either.

The weather's starting to get nice, exams are starting to loom and we're starting to see the results of both on the raiding scene. People are leaving the main groups, and as a result, people are being poached from the less-advanced groups. I completely understand why people would wanna go to a more-advanced group, but I'm tired of the mixed messages and outright lies they sow in their wake.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a Resto Shaman tell us she'd be cutting back her raiding because she didn't want to be too hardcore. Then last week she said she was leaving to trial with a more-hardcore group.

This week we had a Shadow Priest claim we were too hardcore for him and that our raid days are incompatible with his availability. A couple of days later, an ex-CD friend of ours points out he'd applied to a more hardcore group stating he is willing to be flexible about raid days.

In other news, I dunno. This game feels like a second job sometimes, particularly raiding. I kinda need something to shake stuff up and make it fun again.

Gary Gygax 1938-2008 RIP

Well I'm sure those of you connected in any way to the internet have heard of the death of E. Gary Gygax co-designer of Dungeons and Dragons, the first and arguably most popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

It's been nearly 20 years now since I first discovered roleplaying games by accident when i picked up a Fighting Fantasy book in an airport bookstore, mistaking it for a novel. From there it was a slipperly slope that led me inexorably to the work of Gygax and the red-boxed Dungeons and Dragons "Basic Set".

I don't think it's an exaggeration that I wouldn't have been playing WoW had I not discovered at an impressionable age the fun of getting together with friends to beat up monsters and steal their stuff.

D&D is about to enter it's fourth edition, and whilst GG has had no real creative input to this, or the prior two editions, it's still sad to think he won't be around to see it.

"This Item is Busy" - My new nemesis.

Friday night was Tempest Keep, much like last week. Unlike last week we decided to start the run with attempts on Void Reaver rather than head to him after Al'ar training. This may have been a mistake in retrospect, since we were completely atrocious on the trash leading up to him. Ignorance wasn't an issue, just sloppiness, but it led to a few wipes and cost us a lot of time. Void Reaver died, of course, but after all that, we only had a few shots on Al'ar before respawns. Those shots were pretty much wasted by tanks not moving off platforms before the quills, dying and forcing us to reset.

Saturday afternoon was "Badgeazhan" where we proceeded to clear all bosses in two and a half hours. After we killed Nightbane, I noticed I only had five badges rather than the usual nine at this point. Turns out I'd tried to loot the badges from Moroes and Maiden at the same time as someone else, got the "this item is busy" message (which I probably missed since I was readying /raid) and then left them there. Sadly by the time I realised this, both the bodies had despawned. So annoyingly I ended a full clear with only 18/22 Badges. Must pay closer attention next time, since now I have two idioms named after me. "Doing an Ulushnar" is the act of failing to pick up a badge off a now-despawned boss. There's also an "Ulu-Pull" where additional mobs are pulled making an easily-handled pull into a marginally-successful one or an outright wipe.

Sunday saw us back into SSC to kill Karathress and train Vashj. I was used to Ulu being used to tank the Hunter Add and his pet, but this time I was asked to tank the main boss. I was somewhat underwhelmed, however, to find that Karathress hits like a girl. (Well ok, let me retract that because if one thing growing up with a twin sister's taught me, it's that girls can be vicious little bitches.) Karathress however hits the tank for an underwhelming 4-5k per hit with a fairly normal attack speed, which goes up to 6.5k when he gets the Beast Within power from the dead Hunter. The only real wrinkle to him is the Cataclysm Bolt which will hit a random mana user for half their health. Who's the only mana-using tank in the raid? Yours truly. That said, it's never more than a tree druid and holy priest can keep up with. Even when he's got The Beast Within up, his melee's never enough to leapfrog Ardent Defender, which means I'm in no real danger tanking him.

There were a few problems coordinating the rest of the raid, so we wiped/reset him about 3-4 times before killing him. After that, I swapped out for a healer who'd logged in late. Vashj is a 2-tank fight and it was more useful to have a spare healer in the learning phase.