...and you'll never be disappointed.

I suppose I should begin with the continuance of the Karazhan run I began last blog.

Friday, January 18, 2008 – Night 3

A few new faces this time around, and a very different line-up. When pulling this group together, I really just had to go with what I could find at the time, and this is what we had.

1 Prot Warrior (Me)*
1 Prot Paladin OT*
1 Holy Priest*
1 Holy Paladin*
1 Resto Druid
1 Rogue*
2 Warlocks**
1 Hunter*
1 Shaman

(* - denotes a Guild member)
Sadly enough, it took 80 minutes to pull this motley crew together, and only because most of them were personal friends, not guildies. I knew the raid would overall be undergear’d, but hopefully we could out-skill the encounters ahead.

THE CURATOR

All I’ve ever heard about Curator is how much of a “gear check” he is, meaning if you don’t have the gear, you’re not going to progress past this point. I wanted to take full advantage of this and turn this enormous hurdle into a lesson in coordination and teamwork – something the guild wasn’t exactly zoned-in on yet.

First Attempt: Slow but steady loses this race. I realize now how difficult this fight can be with 2 warlocks in the party – one Affliction and one Demonology. I have to admit tho… that Felguard kicks ass for a melee DPSer. Being an NPC, they never really lose their target due to lag, facing, or incompetence, meaning it’s constant burst DPS on the flares. The affliction lock struggled to maintain his mana levels since DoTs are really worthless on the flares, and shadowbolt spamming isn’t exactly the most efficient damaging spell. Hell, I think Searing Pain is actually good for this fight, since it’s instant cast and the flares really don’t have much of an aggro table. In any case, the DPS was a little unfocused and the Flares began to stack uncontrollably. We got through the first evocation, but the DPS had to stay on the Flares the whole time. Curator was just above 90% when we wiped.

A quick chat about focus-firing and marking the flare to be DPS’d, and we reattempt.

Second Attempt: A little better, but not much. Prety much the same thing as the 1st attempt, with slightly less flare-stacking. In any case, it was still a wipe.

Third Attempt: Still no luck. The DPS can’t seem to get together on focus-firing. However, instead of flare-stacks killing us, I actually dropped. “Where’s my heals, guys?” Apparently, someone DC’d at a very bad time… but it’s ok. It would have been a wipe anyway.

Oh great. Now we have to reclear. Oh, and we lose the shamy cause he’s tired of wiping. Whatever.

-1 Shaman
+1 Rogue (guildy)

Fourth Attempt: Now, I’m fairly sure the Shaman that left had higher DPS than the rogue substitute, but for some reason, everything seemed to fall into place. During the first wave, the flares never stacked, and we had a full 10 seconds of burst DPS on Curator during Evocation, which got him down to about 67%. During the second wave, there were two flares up at one point, but they’d finally learned how to focus-fire, and the flares were quick to fall. Second evocation hits, and Curator falls to 28%. Third wave was rough, and they started to stack when casters started going OoM, but they managed well and burst Curator down to 15% during the 3rd Evocation. Berserk mode kicks in, and it’s easy street from that point on. I can take the damage, and despite being very undergear’d, the healers fared quite well, and Curator falls.

Lesson Learned: This fight is all about Burst DPS and Focus-firing, so bring a mage that excels at single-target burst damage. One moment of distraction will wipe the raid, too. Stay on the flares. If you’re melee DPS, you’re pretty much screwed. However, if you must, Warriors do well here since they feed off the Chain Lightning to gain rage.

At this point, I was so proud of the guild raiders.


SHADE OF ARAN
Anyone who’s done this fight knows how much of a pain in the ass it can be, especially when a raidgroup is low on the DPS. Tanks are useless here (except for spamming Shield Bash/Pummel), and with 4 melee DPS (Me, OT, and 2 rogues), it wasn’t going to be easy.

Or was it?

First Attempt: I strap on my DPS gear (full S1 Arena gear, plus a few other DPS epics I’d picked up along the way) and we start the fight after a quick review of the pull. Things go fairly well at first, but as the fight progresses I see the difference between Shade’s health and mana growing greater. Oh yeah, we were definitely going to get poly’d and pyroblasted. On top of that, the wrong spells kept getting interrupted. (Even I managed to misread the text on Shade’s cast bar and interrupted an arcane missile instead of the frostbolts.) And, for some strange reason, I pop’d my Healthstone WAY too early into the fight (hit the wrong button, damnitall), so I had absolutely no expectations.

But somehow, we managed to stay alive. I think the credit goes to the healers here cause it was such a poorly-executed fight, but we were alive. The elementals spawned, and the 2 warlocks banished them while we DPSed the others down, then back to Shade. He finally throws out Polymorph, and I watch the last few seconds count down on my 2nd healthstone CD, but it wasn’t fast enough. Poly breaks, everyone gets pyroblasted, and I’m at 2% health.

Then, I’m back to 100% in less than a second. Critical Flash of Light FTW! Everyone’s still alive!!!

Once the elementals despawn, it was just a matter of time before Shade finally falls, and we collect our loot. (Shamy gear, I believe… I don’t remember)

Up to 62 [item]Badge of Justice[/item] now… only 13 more to go. /sigh

Since it was so late (yes, it took us nearly 4 hours to get to this point… progress is still amazingly slow), we decided to call it a night and pick up to head to Prince tomorrow. (The truth here is… I kenw this group didn’t have what it takes to beat Prince, so I saved everyone the unnecessary repair bill and broke up the raid.)


Saturday, January 19th, 2008 – Night 4

We begin assembling on-time for a change, and we’ve got a group ready to go within 30 minutes. I was stoked. We teleport to the Guardian’s Library and begin pulling the trash.

We wiped 3 times in the first room due to AFKs, breaking CC, and other general nonsensical buggery. I was not pleased one bit, but as long as we kill at least one mob with each wipe, each attempt will be subsequently easier.

At least, that’s what I kept telling the raid. I knew we’d never down Prince as we were. The group makeup was very similar, but a lot of different people.

1 Prot Warrior (me)
1 Prot Paladin (OT)
1 Holy Paladin
1 Resto Druid
2 Rogue
2 Affliction Warlock
1 Hunter
1 Fury Warrior

Phail.

NETHERSPITE

So, we get to the “fork in the road” – one way leading to Prince, one leading to Netherspite. We opt’d for Netherspite – it’s ultimately an easier fight, but requires more coordination. Since it was 100% Guild, I figured we could at least attempt NS to work on coordination

First Attempt: This was hilarious. We were reading the strat for NS and I was watching a video showing how to run in and out of the hallway when he begins his Banish Phase. “Looks easy enough”, I thought. Then we begin to micromanage who’s going to be standing in what beam, and the order got completely screwed up. My GM decided to put his two cents in (he wasn’t even in the raid, and couldn’t see what we were doing… I honestly don’t think he’s ever even seen Netherspite, but w/e). After sorting through the mixed instructions, we decide to let the OT take the red beam first, then me, etc and so on until he’s dead.

Well, me and the OT step into the room while everyone’s still in the hallway. Now, bear in mind the video I watched did NOT show a door that closes once the fight starts, so when the OT went to pull, it was just me and him in the room with NS.

Second Attempt: Everyone’s at least in the room this time to get wiped by NS. People kept running in and out of the beams because they didn’t realize that once you run out, you can’t run back in! DUR! Nether Exhaustion FTL. The beams kept hitting Netherspite, who in turn started one-shotting everyone and healing back to 100%.

Third Attempt: Our best effort. We managed to keep the red beam blocked, but the green beam people couldn’t get coordinated. It was chaos, but we at least saw a Banish Phase this time. Suddenly it struck us “Oh, we can’t run back out the hallway”, so we ran to the far side of the room behind the telescope, but not in time. Half the raid got blasted, the other half wiped when NS came out of banish. It was embarrassing.

By this time, people were already ready to leave. We didn’t even attempt Prince this week, and Chess STILL refuses to drop [item]King’s Defender[/item] for me.

Afterwards, I respec’d MS, strapped on my S1 gear and my [item]Gorehowl[/item] and farmed AV honor for 2 days, for a total of 15k honor in roughly 6 hours playtime.

God, I love AV weekends.


In summary, the guild is doing well. We’re talking about raids and how to min/max our characters a lot more these days, and I find myself giving a lot more advice on character builds and gearing up in Heroics before setting foot in Karazhan. We have 475 people in guild atm, 57 70’s with roughly 20 people KZ attuned now, so that’s a damn good start. Maybe we’ll have enough to start running two groups through soon, but it’ll be a while before we move on to ZA as a guild.