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?