Results tagged “raiding” from Bitter Roots

Short post, I'm off work sick and feel pretty bad.

What's going on at the moment?

- Working on getting my warlock's epic flying.  I'm at about 1500 gold, with maybe 2000g worth of stuff on the AH that may or may not sell.

- Working on some random achievements, I'm hoping to get some more books for Higher Learning after the rolling restarts today.

- Instancing on my druid and my warlock.  Did CoS again a few days ago, managed the timed run for about the 4th or 5th time with some friends, and got my drake!  It helped that three of them already had it.

Obligatory pretty dragon picture:

It's not Sapphriron.  It's not Kel'thuzad.  Nope.  It's not even frogger!

It's lag.

My raiding group started a 25-man Naxx last night.  We went in and started on spider wing with no problem, got to the Grand Widow and we had some lag issues but nothing too too bad.  The priest had a little trouble MC'ing the adds with his lag but we did it.   Maexxna - We had some lag issues but again, not so bad we couldn't do it.  It got a little hairy at times with spells taking too long and such.

On to finish the wing and then hit Patchwerk, who we've downed before. 

WHAM.  Terrible, terrible lag.  My Quartz casting bars were virtually full red for latency.  DPS couldn't use special attacks, healers were just guessing as to when the tanks' health bars went down.  I just alternated between regrowth and nourish, and kept up a rotation of sorts.  We got him to 10% when he enraged.  I snuck back into a corner and shadowmelded.  We tried him again but it was the same thing, so we decided to call it a night.  The only times when the lag cleared up at all was when we had several people dead. 

It was terrible!  According to the forums it's a known issue, so here's hoping it gets cleared up, because we're stuck until it does.

Wow.  From there being not much information about Wrath of the Lich King, it's suddenly exploded into a wealth of it.  I'm not going to respost everything, just talk about some of my favourite things.

Death Knights

I'm really looking forward to making a Death Knight, and it sounds like the class will be a blast to play.  I think my poor warrior is going to get neglected as the DK may replace her as my tank.

This is an interesting snippet, saying you may be able to make a Death Knight of either faction.  This means that if you have all Alliance characters you could potentially have a level 55 Horde without having to reroll.  The question in the post is more for PVP realms, I think, as you can only have characters of one faction on a PVP server, but it opens up all sorts of possibilities.  If you have Horde friends on the same server you could make a Horde Death Knight and play them up to the new level cap with a lot less work than starting over.  Of course, with the limit being one DK per server, you then couldn't have an alliance one.

Factions

Here is the main article with all the snippets.  The most interesting thing for me is that Hemet Nesingwary will have a rival faction.  Wow.  Hemet would have to offer something pretty dang special to avoid me trying to kill him for all of those hunting quests he made me do.  The "Wolvar" sound like they might be a worgen faction, perhaps some that are a little smarter and have broken away from Arugal or whomever is controlling them?

That also brings me nicely to my next topic;

Lore

Wow oh wow is there a lot of stuff to cover.  I love the Azerothian stories.  Don't get me wrong, some of the Outland stuff is entertaining, but after having levelled several characters through Ashenvale and Duskwood I have come to love the Worgen tales and legends, such as those covered in the Scythe of Elune quest.  It sounds like the worgen lore will be developed further and I can't WAIT. 

There's also some dragon lore that I'm looking forward to as well, but I really do have an unhealthy obsession with the Worgen.

Last night, me and some friends joined a group in killing Gruul.  High King Maulgar went down first try, although we lost a lot of the raid.  I ended up helping to heal the main tank while the shaman was throwing lightning bolts at me.  Yay for trees! 

 

It took us three tries for Gruul, but we got him to go splat.  The raid was far from perfect, but it was a LOT of fun and I was impressed with everyone.  Here's hoping it happens again and I get my leggings.  ;)

 

 

I'm the tree in the back.

It's funny how a place goes from being "Absolutely not, ugh, no way *puking sounds*" to "Yeah, okay.  I think we can do it."

 

Zul'Aman is such a place for me.  The first few times I went in their with my guild, we got our collective butts handed to us on wooden troll platters.

 

Last night we downed the first boss for a guild first.  It's such a nice feeling.  Guild first.  Of course, the second boss still got us beat, but I think we'll be able to go back in and whomp his feathered behind.

 

This brings up one of my sore points, though.  I think it's a pretty big jump to go from 10-man to 25-man content.  Of course, not as big a jump as 40-man was back in the day (Insert old man voice - Back in my day, we had to find 40! people and keep them organised and happy and doing the right things, eeeeh!)  but still.  You basically have to have three groups clearing Kara, with no overlap, to have enough people to fill a 25-man raid and have some for backup.  It would be nice if there was a 15 or 20 man raid in-between, to get people used to working with more others.

 

And then... I don't know about other groups but we have the problem that some of our best people fill more than one role.  For example - Two tanks, a healer, two DPSers.  That's me and one of my friends.  Problem is, we can only play one character at a time.  Sometimes alt-itis isn't the best thing ever. 

While drinking my "morning" (mid-afternoon because I was up until 6am tanking BM for a guildie) coffee I browsed the notes from patch 2.4 on the test realm.

 

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/02/08/2-4-patch-notes-up/

 

A lot of the instance notes seem to be aimed towards making the 25-man instances more accessible and easier.  Such as the loss of attunement needed for Hyjal and BT, being able to fight Vashj and Kael'thas without downing the rest of the bosses, and it sounds like Mags is getting whomped with the nerf bat.

 

Is this a good thing?  I think there's two sides to it.  It's a good thing because it should allow more guilds to get through these dungeons quickly and perhaps actually get to experience Hyjal and BT before the WotLK.  It's also obviously designed to help more people along to being able to see the new Sunwell raid. 

 

However, all of those guilds that have been struggling with Vashj and Kael'thas to get their Hyjal attunements are bound to end up feeling a little superfluous.  And along with whenever content is speeded up, some guilds might end up in Hyjal or BT well before they're ready for it, just like how we were seeing >70 characters asking for heroic instance runs.

 

People who did the quest will get a nifty new title, though!  They'll have something different from "Champion of the Naaru" to display.

 

All I know is, I'm going to keep pushing to get our guild geared up in Kara, and then go see how much easier the Mags event is.  Hold onto your tail, mister pit lord.  We're coming for ya.