Alt-aholic

Most people that know me know that I have a lot of alts. Way too many alts. My level 80 characters include a priest, death knight, warlock, rogue (on a second account), and now.. a hunter.

My hunter hit 80 two or three days ago. I immediately began doing some BG’s, Wintergrasp battles, and other things that don’t require a certain gear score. Recently on Spinebreaker (and on many servers), pugs have been utilizing a mod called GearScore to quickly check the iLevel of a person’s gear. This has hindered my ability to get into groups even more than you might think, mainly because my hunter is actually a horde. Yes, I rolled a female blood elf hunter.

On my first day of being 80, I tried to get into a few heroic runs. Unfortunately, I was usually almost immediately kicked for being in pretty terrible gear. Had I been on my alliance, my guild tag would easily allow me to get into almost any group. I would be able to be carried by numerous players in my guild, as well. It’s pretty hard finding a group by yourself when you’re in terrible gear, though.

My first real experience came with trying to get a VoA (Vault of Archavon) group. By this time I knew I was likely to be removed because of my absolutely awful level of gear. However, I still whispered “I’m a hunter” when someone said “LFM VoA  25″ in Wintergrasp general chat. I got invited and the group only had about 10 people in it so far, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t last long. I did end up staying in the group till it had 25 people, when I was randomly removed (almost certainly because someone saw my GearScore, or my 13k unbuffed health). When a mage said in Wintergrasp general “LF5M DPS VoA 25,” I had no idea it was the same group. I was pretty surprised when I got invited back to the group I was just removed from by someone other than the leader, and even more surprised when the leader didn’t notice.

The group eventually filled up and we zoned into VoA. I spent most of my time hiding in tauren models and staying far away from things like soul wells, refreshment tables, and summoning stones. I didn’t want anyone’s mouse accidentally hovering over my character. When the group started pulling trash, I chose not to attack it. I didn’t want the leader to quickly browse his recount and see some bad hunter doing less than 2k DPS on trash. Funny enough, a couple players who were doing badly on the damage meter (but much higher than I would have done) were removed after trash. Sounds like I made the right choice. While waiting to pull the boss, I continued hiding in tauren models (especially the hunter that was there). We ended up two-shotting the boss. I died one attempt because the healers were terrible (or because I had 13k unbuffed health, but it’s always fair to blame the healers for everything). Amazingly enough, I won a pair of relentless boots.

Since then, I’ve bought a couple honor pieces and… “borrowed” a few BoE Ulduar items from my priest’s guild bank. My hunter actually has some pretty decent gear now (enough to get into any heroic group without immediately being removed). I’m still trying to get the weapon to drop off the last boss in H ToC, though. My hunter’s name is Miley Cyrus spelled backwards. If you can figure out how to spell something backwards, you can figure out how to armory my hunter

Last but not least, queueing for Wintergrasp has been… interesting. If I don’t queue up within the first 10-15 seconds that queueing is available during peak hours, I probably will not get into the battle. This is very different from the alliance where Wintergrasp is never full. However, I found out that if it’s full and I still want to get one mark, I can simply wait until someone in my alliance guild’s vent says “ok the main gate’s down” and fly into the zone. The game takes about 15-20 seconds to port me out, and it actually gives me a mark of honor for being in the zone when a team clicks the relic. Pretty nifty trick for someone who’s trying to get gear as fast as possible in any way they can.

Gear Score – Pointless

For those who don’t know, your “gear score” can be calculated through a number of websites and/or addons. It is calculated slightly differently depending on what you use, but it’s entirely based on the “item level” of your gear. With Blizzard adding “item levels” into the default UI, almost everyone is aware what level of gear drops from different instances.

Some people may use gear scores to quickly evaluate the gear of a random player they are inviting to their pickup group. I don’t really have a problem with this, though I do believe manually inspecting the person’s gear would be far more telling.

Here is what gets to me: people who post their gear score on applications to the guild I’m an officer in. Do you really think your gear score is relevant? The armory exists for a reason. If I want to check up on your gear, I’m going to do it myself. I have to look at it anyway to make sure your gems, enchants, and gear selections are on the right track. As much as I respect the more casual guilds, our guild isn’t going to down heroic bosses with retribution paladins gemming for spell power. No matter what your gear score is, merely posting it will make a bad first impression.

Another pretty bad use of gear score is using it to look who the “top” players on a server are. This function of gear scores is so useless that this morning before writing this blog I changed the gear I was wearing and am now ranked 4th on wow heroes for this server (as of the time this post was written). Considering that I’ve only been raiding on this character for a little over a month and that there are many people in my own guild with better gear than I have, I know this is pointless. To raise my gear score, I replaced an amazing priest trinket (Spark of Hope, iLevel 219) and an amazing BoE trinket (Je’Tze’s Bell, iLevel 200) with a terrible Onyxia 25 trinket (Shiny Shard of the Scale, iLevel 245) and a trinket that is very bad for holy but decent for disc (Talisman of Resurgence, iLevel 245). So, I equipped bad gear and raised my gear score. Yay.

Gear score is something that I’m sure most people have looked at the first time they heard about it, but it is not something that should be used to evaluate how good someone’s gear is. WoW, though fairly simple, is too complicated of a game to be able to identify a player’s gear with a number.

In other news…

I replaced a belt off Grand Widow Faerlina with an iLevel 258 best in slot belt last night. Somehow, in the same night, I got a pair of 258 pants. For some reason people are saving up with our loot system and I am reaping the benefits… sort of. I am now dead last in loot priority. Oh well.

Firefighter

I need to go a little into my guild’s background before I begin this blog post. We killed Thorim, Hodir, XT, Flame Leviathan, Iron Council, and General Vezax on hard mode before ToC was released. Since then, we came back one time to kill Freya on hard mode. We’ve wanted to complete the other hard modes but have never really gotten around to going back.

By request of many of the guild members who want their protodrake for completing “Glory of the Ulduar Raider” on 25-man, I scheduled an optional raid this Sunday to do the Firefighter achievement (Mimiron’s hard mode). Though the turnout was much better than I expected, we still had to bring some players from the other good guilds to fill out the raid. After about 3 hours of attempts, we finally killed him. The kill actually felt pretty good.

Mimiron, whether on hard mode or regular mode, is one of the best encounters Blizzard has ever created. You can’t stack too many DPS because of the healing requirements of phase 2. You can’t simply stack healers because most deaths have nothing to do with healing. The amount of personal awareness required on this fight is amazing, especially on hard mode. The randomness of the fire and frost bombs on hard mode requires your guild members to be able to adapt quickly to a situation they have not prepared for. Regardless of how the encounter is tuned (it used to be much harder than it was now, both on regular and hard mode) it is still one of the best fights I’ve ever learned.

On a more negative note, I made two pretty huge mistakes during the hard mode attempts. I died once to a rocket and once to a laser barrage. Since I probably make less than one mistake every few weeks of raiding, messing up twice on the same fight really sucks. I also do most of my leading by example – I would not be able to lead raids if I was not a good player. The rocket death was the most embarrassing. After clearing Mimiron every single week since the first week of Ulduar, I don’t think I’ve ever been killed by a rocket. This is back when they targeted melee and when the tank couldn’t see the target because Mimiron’s body was so big. Anyway, I’ll always be pretty upset over dying to something as simple as a rocket. It’s honestly something nobody should ever get hit by, even if they’ve never done the fight.

Hopefully next week we can down Yogg-Saron on hard mode (1 Light in the Darkness) and complete our protodrake achievement.

A Guide to “Call of the Grand Crusade” – Beasts of Northrend

This is part of a series of guides I will be writing on the various bosses in Trial of the Crusader on heroic difficulty, primarily referring to 25-man strategies. This guide is inspired by a similar guide written by an old high school teacher of mine, which can be found here.

Gormok the Impaler

Many guilds who first attempt this instance on heroic difficulty are overwhelmed by the very first creature they will encounter. Gormok hits like a truck loaded with trains attached to other trucks. To make things worse, each phase of the encounter now has a sort of soft “enrage” timer – the next creature(s) will enter at a set time, regardless of whether or not the previous one is dead. This means if a guild’s DPS is not strong enough, they will be fighting Gormok along with Acidmaw and Dreadscale.

The fire bombs thrown by the snobolds now hit hard. If you stand in one for more than the initial tick, you will most likely die. Both your raid members and healers need to react rather quickly to avoid dying to these fire bombs.  Because of their increased damage, spreading out is even more important. No two people should be close enough to get hit by the same fire bomb.

Snobolds now have significantly more HP. Since your raid is spread out to avoid fire bombs, anyone who gets a snobold on their back should run into melee range until it is killed. If a main tank healer is targeted, other healers should assist on the tanks immediately. Once a raid member’s snobold has been killed, they can return to their original location.

Gormok’s Staggering Stomp will do about 8k damage to all melee and players who are in melee range with snobolds, but the damage is nothing to worry about. Healers have more than enough time to top off the melee. If your healers enjoy padding their healing meters, you may run into a problem of them letting fire bombed people die to heal the melee (who don’t really need to be healed for a few seconds). The stomp also interrupts, so casters must be out of range of it.

As far as tanking is concerned, we use two protection paladin tanks. Paladin tanks are by far the most powerful tanks as of 3.2. If your guild’s tanks are not in the best gear (or you run with warriors/death knights), you may want to consider using 3 tanks. With 3 tanks, each tank will never get more than 2 stacks of Gormok’s “Impale” debuff. Regardless of how many tanks you use, tanks should always be taunting once their debuffs have fallen off. Our paladins bubble off their impale stacks when phase 2 begins, but this is not required. Other tanks may receive hand of protection from any paladin in the raid to achieve the same results.

Healing on Gormok is incredibly simple but requires a rather quick reaction time. Your raid should assign at least 3 healers to heal nothing but the main tanks. We use two holy paladins that are able to heal both at the same time due to beacon of light. The third healer is usually a disc or holy priest, but a druid or shaman would work fine as well. I recommend a priest or shaman due to the damage reduction they provide tanks when scoring critical heals. Raid healers should be spread out around the room so that no ranged is out of range of every healer. Use quick heals to heal people who get fire bombed and use AE heals on the melee if the ranged are ok. Assist on the tanks whenever possible; do not sit around doing nothing.

As a priest specifically, prayer of mending is very powerful for tank healing during this phase. Throw it on one tank once both have impale stacks and it will bounce all 5 (or 6) times rather quickly. If you don’t think you can cast a flash heal fast enough on someone who has been fire bombed, throw them a shield to buy yourself some time. It’s ok to use Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression on the tanks near the end of the phase.

Acidmaw and Dreadscale

The first thing your raid needs to worry about is your tanking situation. How many tanks did you use for Gormok? Is Gormok still alive when the worms first enter? These questions are important when deciding exactly what would be best for your raid. Our guild uses two tanks on Gormok and he is generally pretty close to dead when Acidmaw and Dreadscale enter. Regardless of what is going on, at least one tank will be free to pick up Dreadscale (who starts out as the mobile worm). If you are only using two tanks on Gormok, I strongly recommend using a ranged tank on the stationary worm during this encounter. We use a warlock. This leaves your guild with one tank on Dreadscale, one tank (or ranged dps “tank”) on Acidmaw, and your other tank finishing off Gormok. If you use a ranged tank, he/she must always pick up the stationary worm. Worms must be faced away from the raid, as they have a breath that will kill any non-tank.

To deal with Paralytic Toxin, the tank who was finishing off Gormok must taunt off the tank who picked up Dreadscale. The tank who picks up Dreadscale will always get the first Burning Bile, so it is important to free him so he can cure people of Paralytic Toxin. This tank rotation continues until the worms submerge. When tanks get Paralytic Toxin, whoever gets Burning Bile needs to free the tank as quickly as possible.  Once Acidmaw dies and your raid is fighting an enraged Dreadscale, he should no longer be tanked by a ranged DPS when he is stationary. Melee must spread out to avoid killing each other with a badly placed Burning Bile.

For healing, your guild should once again use 3 tank healers. For raid healing, most deaths generally come from Paralytic Toxin damage. The initial hit is pretty strong, and the poison hits hard. Though people should be spread out, the poison will sometimes hit more than one person. Prayer of Mending, Chain Heal, Circle of Healing, and other powerful AE healing spells are very good for keeping these players alive. Try to stay spread out as healers so there will not be a situation where many of you have to move at once.

For priests specifically, try to leave a Prayer of Mending on the melee in case they get Burning Bile. Assist on tank healing while waiting for Paralytic Toxin to come out. Burning Bile does not usually do anywhere near as much damage as Paralytic Toxin. After the worms have risen back up is usually a good time to blow Hymn of Hope (remember, just channel one tick unless your raid is incredibly starved for mana!) + Shadowfiend.

Though we’re not one of them, many guilds choose to blow heroism during this phase. The enrage for Icehowl is pretty strict and you do not want to have him out for long with the worms still alive. If you go into phase 3 with more than a few people dead, you will probably not beat his enrage timer.

Icehowl

This is by far the easiest phase of the fight. Your most well-geared tank should pick up Icehowl and tank him near a wall. The same healers that have been healing the tank the whole fight should continue to do so.

To deal with Icehowl’s Arctic Breath, your raid should be spread around him fairly evenly. I like to stand almost right next to the tank by the wall (but not close enough to get hit by his whirl attack!) because there are rarely any other ranged in that area. Your raid healers can not get hit by this attack at the same time! An important thing to know about this ability is that it now does over 30k damage to everyone it hits, so it will kill players that do not receive heals. However, if Icehowl’s primary target for the ability becomes immune for any reason (Hand of Freedom, Divine Shield, Human Racial/PvP Trinket) he stops his entire cast! A retribution paladin can make this phase extremely easy for your guild. For hand of freedom to work, a paladin must have points in the retribution talent that allows it to remove stuns.

When Massive Crash occurs, your guild’s hunters should turn on aspect of the pack. There is no longer a movement speed buff when the stun ends, but there is still more than enough time to move out of the way of Icehowl. His enrage is no longer dispellable and has a very good chance of wiping your raid. Tell your raid members not to get hit!

If you’ve saved heroism until this point, blow it when he is stunned against a wall and taking double damage. Icehowl will enrage on his 4th Massive Crash.

To cover healing, just make sure your raid healers are spread out along the room. As a priest, I again like to keep Prayer of Mending on a melee class in case the melee get hit with the arctic breath. Don’t be afraid to use Guardian Spirit on the tank, especially if someone messed up on Massive Crash and enraged Icehowl!

Overall, Beasts of Northrend is significantly harder than any of the bosses on their regular modes. There are many guilds who can one shot every boss on regular but cannot beat this boss. Keep trying at it, and eventually you’ll get it.

First Post!

This is the first post of a blog that will hopefully continue to describe what it’s like to be a raiding-pvping-raidleading priest (who plays many other classes) in World of Warcraft.

Recent Raids

I was very pleased with our progress on heroic Anub’arak 25-man. The fight requires a lot of DPS and before our raid on Thursday, I wasn’t sure if we had enough. We ended up getting him all the way into phase 3 several times before the raid ended. I’m confident we would be able to defeat him on Monday, but we will be missing one of our main holy paladins and will probably not be able to kill him without the perfect makeup. Oh well!

As far as our 10-man group is concerned, we completely failed on Anub’arak after reaching him with 50 attempts remaining (again). I lost the amazing mace to a DPS shaman (again). Hopefully we’ll complete a full tribute run next week.