Am I the only one disappointed with the Toravon fight... and, well, most of what Blizzard has done lately?
Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might. The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.
When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep. As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves. Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.
Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep. By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places. The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock. Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock. I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.
I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not. Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup. We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:
"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."
... and that's really all it took. Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.
VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one. IT'S A JOKE! I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!
Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Showing posts with label Vault of Archavon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vault of Archavon. Show all posts
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Cue the Final Fantasy "Win!" Music
I had a great night last night, and I'm gonna tell you about it. If you don't want to know, be a grinch and go away.
It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily. Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared. We churned through it in under 30 minutes. Piece of cake.
Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid. Let me back up a little before I get into it.
So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about. The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity. One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts. Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.
So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before. Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.
Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up. We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids. Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.
We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.
The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):
Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK
Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)
DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid
We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly. We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.
Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue. I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked. The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed. Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.
Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us. The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).
We moved on to the Twins. I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel. So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.
We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready. Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad. The second try was flawless.
I was extremely excited at this point. We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.
I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.
Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down. It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.
Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10... The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing. Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end. I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off. Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.
Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata. Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.
As always, thanks for reading. I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....
See you all on the flip side!
It all started off with a super powered run through Halls of Lightning for the Heroic Daily. Three pallys and two druids, all overgeared. We churned through it in under 30 minutes. Piece of cake.
Then I moved on to my guild 10-man raid. Let me back up a little before I get into it.
So I made a raid report a couple of weeks ago with the intention of making it a kind of ongoing thing, something I could write about on (at least) a semi-regular basis, probably because failure is not something people like to write about. The trips that followed my last post about it were rife with issues and mired in mediocrity. One night we downed only the Northrend Beasts after wipes on both Onyxia and the Beasts. Another we got through Ony and Lord Jaraxxus, but could only throw ourselves at the faction champions a couple of times before we ran out of time.
So after the last run, I asked if a schedule change would help, and with some responses in the affirmative, we decided to move the next one to a Tuesday night, after the raid reset instead of before. Little did I know how much this would work to our advantage.
Several folks who had been mostly bringing alts were able to bring their mains, and some who weren't able to go on Mondays showed up. We had a whole Epic Adventurers raid for pretty much the first time since three of us decided to start running our own guild raids. Ok, we started out with one former EA member in the raid, but he was replaced after Jaraxxus due to power failure, and he counts anyway.
We also changed the raid order - more than a couple of us need upgrades primarily from the second half of ToC, anymore, so we went with that first instead of Onyxia, with the plan to go get her if and when we churned through Anub.
The raid composition broke down like this (both before and after the character switch; we replaced a feral druid dps with another feral druid dps!):
Tanks (2)
Bear Druid (ME!) and a DK
Heals (3)
2 Holy Paladins and a Priest (Disc I believe, but may be Holy)
DPS (5)
2 Hunters, 1 each Mage, Warrior, and Cat Druid
We one-shotted both the Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus - our crew had been through all of these enough times that all we needed was a little communication amongst the tanks and healers and everybody else filled in perfectly. We had a good showing the first time out against the Faction Champs but couldn't do it, decided to change our strategy a little bit and failed miserably, went back to the first method and powered through.
Against those champions, we were facing the tree druid, the disc priest, the enhancement shaman, the mage, the warlock and the rogue. I stayed in bear form; I am not convinced that I shouldn't have gone cat, or traded out to resto and let one of the healers DPS, but it worked. The DK pestered the shaman the whole fight, our hunters put their interrupting pets on the priest to start, our mage did his best to keep the lock and/or mage polymorphed. Our kill order was druid, priest, rogue, warlock, mage, shaman.
Not sure if that's the best order but it worked for us. The reason we had an issue the first time around was that our priest got rogued 3 times (2 battle resurrections).
We moved on to the Twins. I was a little nervous - the only time I had ever even seen the Twins I was on sub-par hardware that was video lagging to the point that I couldn't do anything about the orbs, and ended up disconnected most of the fight, on top of having a bad connection because I was in a hotel. So I let my co-leader, who has cleared ToC10 several times on non-guild runs, describe the fight.
We wiped once, because I'm a Fail Druid and started before everyone was ready. Really, my OT said "start it up" and I brought them out and ran in, and pallys were still trying to get buffs up, healers were on the wrong side... it was just plain bad. The second try was flawless.
I was extremely excited at this point. We had started late and had barely been going for even an hour and a half and had cleared more than I'd ever really seen in ToC10.
I actually did a reasonable job explaining the Anub fight myself, although my DK reminded me that I'd left out one of the most important things - RUN AWAY from the little adds.
Our first attempt met with failure after a healer went down at the beginning of one of Anub's above-ground phases... the other druid battle rezzed but I mistimed my OS button and went down. It didn't help that I hadn't done a good job of running away and had more than a couple stacks of the debuff from the little adds.
Our second attempt saw my first ever clear of ToC10... The phase 3 damage/survival race was a little rough - we lost 6 of our 10 people and ended with a healer, both tanks, and one dps standing. Pally healers aren't the best bet for that phase, but it worked out in the end. I properly timed my emergency button that run, and we pulled it off. Only a little over two hours on the entire run, and time for Onyxia.
Then we went and beat her down, and even had time at that point to go whack the VoA10 loot pinata. Two hours and 45 minutes, 20 Emblems of Triumph and a few Conquest, a whole pile of loot, and a very satisfying night for all involved.
As always, thanks for reading. I know this isn't the most useful of posts but success is fun to write about....
See you all on the flip side!
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