Archive for the ‘Instances’ Category

If you remember the last time I ran Drak’Tharon Keep, I was pushed into my first tanking role to fill in for a short time.  It was successful, but not something I wanted to repeat often.

I ended up back in DTK the other night and after the first room or so, our healer left. The group kinda turned to me (we had a Death Knight, a mage and hunter left, plus myself), and collectively asked if I could heal. I sadly had to say no, since I’d long dropped my Holy spec. If I could have, that would have been funny as hell – one time filling in as tank on the spot, the next trip impromptu healing. At least I wasn’t all alone this time.

DTK has strange memories for me.

In my continuing efforts to increase my DPS and therefore my usefulness to groups, I ran a series of Heroics again this morning. First came Hall of Stone, which was uneventful up to and after the Tribunal of Ages part, where we had to hold out against wave after wave of baddies. I nearly died, and was down to 4.7 HP (with my bubble on cool down from earlier in the fight) and had to chug a runic healing potion to stay alive, but stay alive I did. In fact, it wasn’t until the chaos was over that I learned that only the tank and I had survived. I rezzed everyone else and we completed the rest of dungeon with little fanfare.

As you can see above, I also made it into Culling of Stratholme. This run sticks in my craw and makes me mad thinking about it. The run itself was extremely fast and smooth, but when we killed the Infinite Corruptor, he dropped the Reins of the Bronze Drake. We all greeded on it, except for one jerk  who needed and got it. No one seemed to care but me. I’m still pissed that I didn’t even get a shot at that cool mount.

Finally I landed in the Trial of the Crusader with another good group. We had a little trouble with the Grand Champion jousting portion (we lost track of downed baddies and they each hopped back on a mount at least once). I lost my mount twice, but was wise enough to do so near a new horse so I was back in the saddle – so to speak – in no time. We then killed the Grand Champions on foot with little effort. The rest of the dungeon was a cakewalk. When we defeated Eadric the Pure, he dropped the Legplates of Relentless Onslaught. I wanted to need them because they were better then what I had, but I greeded when it dawned on me that I was getting a new, better piece of leg armor once I left the dungeon. When we were done, I finally had the Emblems of Triumph I needed to buy myself Turalyon’s Legplates of Conquest. I socketed it with a Bold Cardinal Ruby for strength and a Smooth Kings Amber for crit rating. Finally I bought some Icescale Leg Armor to complete the piece. Now I’m ready to work on my next part. Let’s get it on!

I wound up in Gundrak again tonight, and I have to say that with a decent group, it’s not a bad instance. I was with three members from one same guild and a boomkin druid with an odd play style. We quickly blitzed the first boss of two, but when we killed Eck the Ferocious, we had two problems. For one, one of our DPS – one of the trio from the same guild – dropped group. We found out later that he thought that Eck was the final boss (for whatever reason), and once he learned otherwise he joined back up. The bigger problem was that our dumb-bunny druid decided to go sightseeing on his own and got himself killed. I actually noticed him go off on his own and was debating who to follow, the healer and the tank or the druid before opting for the safety of the healer/tank combo. Once we were all back together, we quickly swept through Gal’Darah and finished the run. I say quickly, but between waiting for the one DPS to rejoin, the druid to rez, and the druid constantly making us wait for his cool downs to be up (“oh no, I need three minutes to get my cool downs up. Lets just stand here and wait!”), it took us close to a half an hour to clear the place, and we clearly out-geared it. I had fun though, and I wouldn’t mind running with that bunch again.

As I was flying about Northrend, running dailies, a guildie was getting achievement in Ulduar. I congratulated him, of course, which set off a chain reaction that was fun and educational. You see, he was trying to kill Ignis the Furnace Master for the weekly raid quest. As fate would have it, his 25-man raid had a DPS spot open, so I was invited. I was unsure about how much help I could be, but I joined in anyway.

This is about where I found everybody, right at Ignis’ doorstep. We got our act together and – after some random arguing over engineering loot –  we set forth to slay the beast.

We did it, obviously, and I got an achievement, to boot. I thanked my guildie for inviting me, and then a weird thing happened. We got talking about my DPS and my gear, and he started lending me advice on how to improve them. I paid attention as best I could and he helped me set an upgrade path via emblems. I found out that for my first upgrade, I need 50 Emblems of Triumph, and – at that point – I had 12. I ran a string of heroics to try and get some more, and it was interesting to say the least.

First up was Azjol-Nerub, which progressed as one would expect a dungeon to go – steady and uneventful. The second one I ran was wild. A pair of players from the same guild were heading up the run and they were trying to break some kind of world speed record, it seemed. They were blitzing through mobs, gathering a ton in one place before turning to fight. This caught the rest of us off guard, but we kept up. Once Keristrasza was dead, I had was up to 27 total Emblems of Triumph, only 23 short of my goal. I queued up again, this time with the server due to go down for Tuesday maintenance in about half an hour. I ended up in Gundrak for the first time, and died on the first set of mobs. Our tank wasn’t very good, our healer had lag issues and our mage went AFK right at the start. We killed the first boss (with the healer and the mage dead), but then the server announced it was going down in 15 minutes. Soon, everybody began bailing and left me alone in the dungeon.

I ‘ported out and logged off as well, with 28 Emblems of Triumph, plus an achievement from the first Gundrak boss. Tonight I hope to get the lost 22 emblems for my new gear. Onwards and upwards!

After a guildie and I ran Azjol’Nerub with a pickup group, we rounded up two more guildies and a guildy’s alt to tackle another dungeon, and wound up in the Heroic Trial of the Crusader.

As you can see, we kicked it’s butt. I not only led in DPS with 2.82k to 2.02 (the next highest), but I managed to upgrade my sword. Yes, the Claymore of the Prophet that I’ve been toting for months is now going into retirement for the Edge of Ruin. I couldn’t be much giddier. It was allot of fun (it’s always more fun to run with your friends) and I got a gear upgrade. What a way to spend an evening!

I learned something tonight, something wholly unexpected – I can tank for short periods with my current gear. lol I went into Drak’Tharon Keep tonight – more on why in a minute – but after the second boss, our tank bailed. The healer asked me to tank for a while, so I switched to my prot spec, fired off Righteous Fury, pulled out my Teldrassil Protector and my Titansteel Shield Wall and we were off. I had no real problems and we got to King Dred in short order. I’d have done better without my PvP-based setup, like Glyph of Avenger’s Shield, but we had no trouble at all. By the time we got to King Dred, a new tank showed up but he didn’t give me time to go back to ret prior to pulling Dred, so we two-tanked him. After that I went back to ret but then another player dropped, this time our hunter. Something about not running with some certain guild name… we weren’t sure who he was talking about.

Oh, and as for why I was running another dungeon tonight, it’s because I was just a few Emblems of Triumph from getting Turalyon’s Shoulderguards of Conquest.

Yes! I’ve finally upgraded from my stupid Spaulders of the Giant Lords. Nice, huh?

Well I got into WoW tonight, and ended up teaching Ley-Guardian Eregos what-for. Unlike the last two times I’ve gone, I did not die in the climatic battle. I don’t know what the difference was, but no one was terribly injured in the last battle, either. Oh and we seemed to be quick about it, too.

I wound up in Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom last night with another interesting group. We had a tank in partial PvP gear (like I can talk about people wearing PvP gear), a decent hunter, a well-geared restoration shaman and a fresh-to-80 feral druid in cat form. The cat let us know it was his first time here, so it became a learning run.

The first boss or two were pushovers, but when it came time to fight Jedoga Shadowseeker, we hit a problem. The first problem was that I was putting out way more threat then our tank, so I was constantly having to stop attacking and back peddle while he refocused the boss. Worse was that the tank and our hunter died, leaving the healer, the newbie cat and me to fight her. While the cat and I kept the boss busy, the healer did a battle resurrection on the tank to get him back in the fight. We didn’t wipe, which was impressive to me – I needed my lay-on-hands spell once during the fight, but we lived. I actually needed my divine shield spell three times this run, plus lay-on-hands. It was a touch-and-go run to be sure.

The final boss, Herald Volazj, was no big deal, not even with him driving us ‘insane,’ making us fight each other’s spirits. I like this pic I got from that fight.

Gav! I mean, the other Gav, the bad one – stop dropping judgment hammers on people! This pic just happened to catch my doppelganger judging one of my party members, in particular our shaman. Hey, Other Gav – We need her for the boss! Dumbass.

This is mostly a follow-up of the last post, covering points I missed and discussing what’s happened since those events.

I forgot to cover a couple things I wanted to share about my Halls of Stone run while on my Leviathan-killing high. For one, I spent most of the run at the top of the DPS meters before settling into a happy second behind a rogue, trailing him by less then 200 DPS. When Sjonnir the Ironshaper – the final boss we fought – ultimately fell, the rogue and I were dead. We died just before the boss succumbed, and I was about a half a second away from casting my bubble when I died. The rogue ended the run with 2.42k DPS, and I was close behind with 2.29k. At least the tank – doing a respectable 2.11 DPS herself  lived. She couldn’t hold aggro well, though, which accounts for why my DPS dropped from the start of the run to the end – I got paranoid about pulling mobs off the tank again and again.

After I helped killed the Leviathan later that night and got the Jeeves schematic, I looked up what was involved in making it, and holy moly is it going to be a long and expensive build. Step one for me was to get the Field Repair Bot 74A schematic from Blackrock Depths, when meant I had to find Blackrock Depths.

 

I was there once before, running a low level dude around, but I found it that time by total accident. Seriously – I wasn’t looking where I was going and I walked right off the upper level into the lava below. One bubble later and I’m safe on the bottom floor, following the lower-level guy into the instance. This time I had to find it the old-fashioned way and it took me about 15 minutes. Once in, I read instructions I found on Wowhead.com to try and find the schematics, but they weren’t too detailed and I got turned around again and again. Fortunately I had grabbed – by advice – a surplus of Powerful Seaforium Charges before heading out, and was able to blast open doors and some hanging gear-thing to get to the plans.

The next plans needed were for the Field Repair Bot 110G, which took me about 25 minutes of spawn-camping Gan’arg Analyzers in Blade’s Edge Mountains. Finally, I needed to get the Scrapbot Construction Kit by turning the quest from the SCRAP-E card in Storm Peaks. Fortunately, I’ve long had the card and just needed the parts to go turn in. I happened to get five overcharged capacitors from looting the Leviathan, and I had the requisite cobalt bolts in the bank. Now I’ve got the plans, but this brings up the expensive part of the process. I can either farm parts for days or pay out the nose for them. Some options, huh?

Well, that’s about all I wanted to cover today. A last point of note is that I finally got an Argent Crusader’s Tabard today, which is something I’ve worked on now and again for quite some time now.

Finally!

I ran a quick random heroic tonight and ended up in the Hall of Stone. We cleared it pretty quick, but that was to be far from the last of the Ulduar area I’d see tonight.

A guildie reached out to see if any of us needed the weekly raid kill, Flame Leviathan Must Die!. I did, and he talked me in to going. We gathered a group of 10 and set forth.

I was invited to be a gunner, but by the time we got there, somehow that was lost in the discussion and I ended up on a motorcycle. I did pretty good and my bike never fell below 78% health, but it was a learning curve to start. For one, I had no idea what my bike’s powers did. Some screwing around finally taught me that my sonic horn did damage, and my ‘tar’ ability was like Gav’s consecration power. We rolled through the courtyards, and blasted the hell out of… something blue falling from the sky. Sorry, no idea what it was and no one had time to explain. Finally, the Flame Leviathan came out to play.

We killed him too, in short order. I kinda sucked, but I was never in danger, so that was nice. Oh, and I got an achievement for it to boot.

Now all this would be nice enough, but as an engineer I scavenged the Leviathan’s wreckage and came away with 18 saronite bars, 3 eternal shadows, 2 eternal fire, 5 overcharged capacitors, plus the schematics for Jeeves. Nice.