Weekend Updates - Armageddon

Hey Peeps! Its been a busy weekend in Azeroth more than usual as I was able to get some good time in playing! Man I hate the cold weather in this country!!

Anyway What did I get up to? Well quite a lot I managed to get done:

Sons of Hodir - Exalted! Now I gotta save up for my Grand Ice Mammoth

Sholozar Basin - all quests cleared and I've started my rep grind with The Oracles.
(leaving me with 10-15 quests left in Icecrown to get the Loremaster of Northrend Achievement)

Finally decided which toon to level to 80 next, the switfly changed my mind;

I got my mage to level 70 (from 68) in Northrend really REALLY fast. Only to then run out of rested bonus. What I've decided to do is level each toon in the same area (Borean Tundra) to start off with till I run out of rested bonus, then switch to the next toon.

This will maximise XP received for killing mobs all the way to 80. Well that's what I think anyway! HA!

Rage started our domination of the 25 man content Yesterday! Starting with Archavon (man that dude is cake!) and we cleared out the Spider Wing and the Death Knight Wing.

The encounters were a little harder, but having more DPS, more Tanks, more Healers meant that we either took the various bosses down first time, or on the 2nd try. The hardest to co-ordinate was Instructor Razuvious. Getting 4 priests to time their Mind Controlling was a real challenge the first time, and even then we got him down to 30/40% before the wipe was called and we got him 2nd time. The night ended on a high for me when the 4 horsemen chest contained:

Armageddon
Two Hand Sword
554-831 Dmg Speed 3.40
(203.7 damage per second)
+101 Strength
+108 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 58.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 100.

Wow! I nearly fell off my chair! I've gone for the Berserker enchant on it (Damn that cost me a lot - those Abyss Crystals cost too much, and I only had to buy 6!!) which has a chance to increase Attack Power by 400 at the cost of 25% of your armour.

I'll get a proper test of that sword tonight in Naxx as we clear our the other 2 wings.
I also got these from A Noob! (Anub'Rekhan)

Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal
Feet Plate
1580 Armor
+67 Strength
+82 Stamina
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Strength
Equip: Improves Critical Strike Rating by 66.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 43.

I've put some random purple gem in there, and Icewalker to keep my Hit rating capped(its dropped to 290 now)

I just need to find a nice new trinket and some rings!

Look at that thing! ITS HUGE!!!!

(its so big, whilst on my back, the tip of it scrapes along the ground!)

Quickie.

OK I've updated my gear and picked out all the haste gems and replaced them with Strength Gems.

Cost me a fair bit. The quicker the epic gems come in, the quicker the blue quality gems will drop in price!

Oh I know what i mean to ask - I read somewhere that there was going to be a glyph that converts 10% of the AP bonus from Blessing of Might into Spell Power?

Did I dream that? Cos I cant seem to find it anywhere yet....?

Changes...

OK so thanks to all of you that commented on my last post. Great info there and I'm going to make some changes to my gear tonight. Such a shame you cant remove gems and re-use them later.

I was under the impression that haste was the way to go for Ret due to what I'd read about horde Pallies in TBC, but it appears I was slightly wrong about that. (thanks Tim!)

So I'm gonna swap out all the Haste gems for Strength gems or crit gems.

I'm just over my hit cap so I don't have a problem there are the moment. (no hit gems but 1 hit enchant on my boots)

I'm still unsure about a few things:

1 - Should I swap the 2/2 Improved Retribution Aura (increases damage done by my ret-aura by 50%) for 2/2 Vindication (reduces targets attributes by 20% for 15sec)

2 - What weapon enchant should I go for? (Josh says Berserking - and is what I'm going to try - Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes increase your attack power by 400, but at the cost of reduced armor. - 20 Infinite Dust, 15 Greater Cosmic Essence, and 10 Abyss Crystal's DAMN!)

3 - Where have the +Strength Enchants for Bracers and Gloves that I thought we'd see in Wrath? Or am I just stuck with AP enchants now?

4 - Should I pick a slower weapon over a faster one? If either what speed is good?

I'm kinda doing my gord in about this at the moment! Did you guess?

Question That I Have..

Just a quick one - 2nd post today - I was talking to a fellow Raiding Ret last night and he asked how my DPS was in raids and to be honest overall its been 2-2.5k. He was shocked about this and said he was putting out 3.2k dps.

I was a little shocked - looking at his gear he has more or less the same as me, and I'd go out on a limb and say I was better geared than him.

Check out his armory link (if its working....) and compare it to mine.

I cant see what I'm doing wrong. I've tried reading what I could get my head around here. (Great site for Ret btw)

Can anyone find a spell rotation for me? something that will get me to improve my dps by 1k? Does that even seem possible?

I still have upgrades to come as well - I'm almost exalted with Sons of Hodir - should have that by next week and I'm saving up mats to get the +115 AP weapon enchant unless you recommend I go for something different? (using +85 AP at the mo)

I'm WAY over my hit cap I think (142 is the cap still?) I'm running with 296 (9.03%) Around 4-5k AP in raids 35% odd crit in raids, with 200 odd Haste Rating. (cant remember off hand)

Into The Obsidian Sanctum...

Hey guys! More raid news from a quick raid we had last night.

Our 10-man team formed up and we were told to head to the Chamber of Aspects.

"What?"

"Where's that?"

Were most of the replies - including myself in that! Ha Ha!

The Chamber of Aspects, if you've not discovered it yet, is a large room at the bottom of the dragon tower in Dragonblight. It has 5 "doors" that least to 5 caves for each of the dragonflight factions (Red, Green, Blue, Bronze and Obsidian)

The only one that is open at the moment is The Obsidian Sanctum.

In here lives 4 dragons; Sartharion, and his 3 buddies, Shadron - Tenebron and Vesperon.

Basically you get more loot if you can defeat Sartharion with either 1, 2 or 3 drakes still alive and in the fight.

We just cleared all 3 drakes tonight and the trash then killed Sartharion.

The 3 drakes are basic tank and spank, with a special ability that needs to be followed.

Each of them with spawn a portal that the whole group will need to go into apart from the Main Tank and his Primary healer.

Once inside the portal there will be a mob inside that needs to be killed asap. (Or in one of the portals a bunch of eggs that need to be nuked down or when you pop back to the "real world" each of the eggs will turn into a whelp than needs to be killed before you can start DPS on the mini-boss again.

Sartharion himself is a fairly straight-forward fight - the usual dragon thing - watch the tail and dps don't stand in front of him or be cleaved. Every now-and-again an emote will pop up saying "The lava surrounding Sartharion churns" and some lava waves will spawn from the sides and sweep across the area you're standing. These waves MUST be avoided or upon contact a fire elemental will spawn and you have kill that before returning dps to Sartharion. Elementals also spawn that have to be off tanked.

Our first try on this guy was a success with 2 people dead very early on so he's not difficult really you just need to make sure you stay out of the way of the waves.

Here is a pic of his corpse!

After we went and had 1 shot at Malygos just to see what it was all about and to prepare for the future when we're geared up a bit more. Wow that seemed like a slap in the face! Cant wait to down this dude!

Naxx 10 Man Cleared! Kel'Thuzad Explained.

So as the title suggests we cleared Kel'thuzad in Naxx last night in 10 man.

It felt really good to defeat a proper challenge again after the level 70 stuff was nerfed.

I know its not the 25 man content, but its still an achievement in itself for a casual raid guild.

The fight itself is a really interesting one, but very straight forward.

Phase 1 - The group run into the centre of the room and the fight starts. The room itself is a large circular room with seven or eight alcoves dug out into the walls with portals in the ends of them.
In these alcoves undead mobs spawn:
Skeletons - these have really low health and can be one-shotted with any of my abilities
Abominations - these need to be tanked and nuked down.
Soul Reavers - these banshee's move really really slowly towards the raid and do 8k damage to anyone who gets into melee range. These need to be nuked down by that ranged DPS classes.

These mobs will come randomly and attack the group - its not hard - you should not be wiping in phase one!

Phase 2 - After 2/3 mins of the undead mobs attacking Kel'thuzad stops channelling his portals and the undeads stop spawning and he joins the fight.

At this point the raid should spread out - and be more than 10 yards apart if possible. This is a MUST!

Kel'thuzad has 3 abilities during this phase:
1 - single shot shadow bolt - hits 1 random target for a reasonable amount of damage.

2 - Multi shot shadow bolt - his most, if not all, of the raid for a few thousand health.

3 - Iceblock thing - This will wipe the raid if you're not careful and is the single most important reason why the raid need to spread out. The affected target will be encased in a tomb of ice which will do 105% of the players health as damage over 3/4 seconds. It cannot be bubbled out of, or ice-blocked out of. Anyone who is with 10 yards of the affected player will ALSO get this. So its really bad if you have your healers all stood together and all 3 of them are affected - Yep thats a wipe!

Your healers really need to be on-top of their game to keep the affected player alive. As a ret-paladin I was helping out a lot with the healing where i could - if I got an instant cast heal i would top up the health of anyone who had low health - bearing in mind that my Flash of Light can crit for 3/4k while raid buffed. So that's quite a lot of healing for a dps to do. It really helped us out last night.

Phase 3 - at 40% Kel'Thuzad will cry out for help from the Lich King who kindly obliges the lich with 2 big nasty bugs. Each of these should be tanked by the off tank. You cannot kill these dudes as they have the same health as Kel'Thuzad. (2.5 million if I remember correctly)
These guys have a buff that increases there damage by 15% each stack - this can stack 99 times.
Both our tanks last night were Paladins, so when Kel was down to about 5/10% our off tank went down as he just couldn't stand up to the damage those things were putting out.
When phase 3 starts - its a dps race - pure and simple. Kill Kel'thuzad as quick as you can or your tanks are going to get killed by the bugs.

Phase 3 isn't all that difficult - we had more problems getting through phase 2 without loosing a healer from the ice-block.

Prior to the Naxx raid we went and helped out in Wintergrasp so we could do the 10-man boss in there Archavon. Wow is he easy in 10 man. Having seen the 25-man and that being one shotted - its really free epixx!! If you've not been yet i suggest you group up and go there as soon as you can - its really fun.

Anyway here are a couple pics from after we owned Kel'Thuzad!

Latest Achievements.

Hey Guys!

Just thought I'd make a post about the latest achievements I'd gotten, or been involved in getting!

Its been a busy weekend - and I had planned on posting about my latest gear upgrades and some other bits, but I don't have any of my pictures here at work so I cant. Maybe tonight or tomorrow!

Anyway I've been involved in some pretty cool stuff over the weekend so lets break it down:

PvP Achievements:

1 - Black War Bear! Yes that's right, I joined a group of 30/35 people and after a bit of waiting for everyone to gather oh a hill just north of Thunderbluff. Its about 12am server time and we're hoping its quiet as the last thing we wanted was Horde interference.

There were about 3/4 hordies in TB who didn't get involved, and one poor soul who just happened to be passing and flagged lol SPLAT!

Cairne Blooodhoof went down in a few mins and with in the glory of our battle we decided to move to Silvermoon to take down Lor'themar Theron. He was cake.
Next we went to Undercity. Travelling via the sewer it seems if you've not completed the quest chain in Dragonblight then you cant enter with your comrades.

Sylvanas has a few interesting abilities including the ability to vanish, ice block everyone then appear ranged and start taking potshots at the group. As we got her down a shaman turned up flagged just as we were running out of the room. Ha Ha! he went down so fast! 33 vs 1 is a bit unfair!

That left Thrall. We quickly over crowded one of the Zeppelins to Ogrimmar and flew across the sea. We re-grouped outside the west entrance to Orgrimmar. Once we were ready and buffed we rode in - killing guards on the way.

Finally we met some resistance, the last 3 bosses had been cake with only 1 or 2 horde turning up.

We were mid fight and suddenly 20/30 horde came in and wiped the raid. But all was not lost. During the scuffle I manged to complete another 2 achievements:

10,000 Honorable Kills.
That Takes Class (got the DK kill I was waiting for!)

After about 10 minutes of waiting as ghost the horde finally cleared off and we got back to work.

What I and a few others were surprised about is that the Troll leader is in Thralls chambers and has to be tanked/defeated as well, and annoyingly there is no achievement for killing him.

Thrall went down eventually, followed by Vul'jin or whatever his name is (Who has an annoying ability that turns everyone into a frog!)

So that snagged me "For The Alliance" and I got my Black War Bear!

I also managed to get 300 Shard things from instance bosses and some pvp in Wintergrasp and snagged myself a Black War Mammoth!

PvE:

I've cleared all the instances in Wrath on heroic now (5-man) and our guild have cleared all 4 wings in Naxx and took down Sathiron in 10 man last night (spell check pls!) although I wasn't present.

I joined a 25-man group for Archivron in Wintergrasp - man is that guy cake! we hit the enrage timer though but still managed to get him down with only 4 people left standing! Cant wait to get him down with the guild so we can get some proper loot from him - was a bit of a farce at the weekend - people needing when they shouldn't have - stupid master looter released during the fight so missed out on the kill. So I got my first Emblem of Valor as well.

I've gotten my t7 gloves from badges, and now I'm saving up for other bits - like neck/rings/trinkets.

I've managed to replace pretty much all my gear now with epics from heroics or naxx. leaving me with just 2 blue quest-trinkets/heroic drops and 2 level 70 rings from Black Temple.

I also leveled my Blacksmithing on Saturday and crafted myself a new epic helm - cost me a small fortune though! 6,000g or there abouts all in to get to 440 B/S and including the mats for the helm.

Crazy business! There goes my plan to get a Grand Mammoth from Sons of Hodir rep.

Anyway that's enough for now!

Edit: Added the pics!