TankSpot - Blogs - Rak

Trying Deep Wounds at 80 Raid 2

Rak — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:31:31 GMT

We went and cleared Naxx 25 tonight. Here's the parse from Patchwerk: http://wowwebstats.com/lgs6cmw5h6e3w...015&a=x1e9ab80

I was MTing, and I had to keep up my own shouts and debuffs, which held back my overall damage for sure. I also have a 2.5 speed weapon which reduces the possible damage on Patchwerk. However, you can still see from that parse that Deep Wounds is a huge amount of damage.

If you browse around the parse for the raid a bit, it holds up consistently. Deep Wounds was 10% of my damage for the entire night, definitely worth the three talent points.

Gear Wishlist

Rak — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:58:16 GMT

My guild is required to post a wishlist of the top items they want for each slot to help loot council decisions. Many people keep asking where items on my list drop from when I mention them in the shoutbox, so I thought I'd copy my wishlist over to this site.

Head: Helm of Vital Protection - Gothik25 [best overall for damage reduction]
Valorous Dreadnaught Greathelm [best for threat, small downgrade in damage reduction]

Neck: Nexus War Champion Beads - Malygos25 quest reward

Shoulders: Pauldrons of Unnatural Death - Anub25
Valorous Dreadnaught Pauldrons

Cloak: Cloak of the Shadowed Sun - low drop rate off Grobbulus, Gothik, Heigan, and Maexxna in Naxx25

Chest: Dragonstorm Breastplate - Sartharion25 w/ drake

Wrist: Bracers of the Unholy Knight - Razuvious25

Gloves: Valorous Dreadnaught Handguards
Callous-Hearted Gauntlets - Faerlina25

Belt: Ablative Chitin Girdle - Maexxna25

Pants: Legplates of Sovereignty - Malygos25

Boots: Sabatons of Endurance - Thaddius25

Weapon: Last Laugh - Kel'Thuzad25

Shield: Hero's Surrender - Patchwerk25

Trying Deep Wounds at 80

Rak — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:42:26 GMT

So Cider convinced me to try out a Deep Wounds spec since he said it was such a large percentage of his damage. We didn't have any content left for the week except Malygos so that's all I had to test it on, more to come next week hopefully.

The results are pretty amazing to me.

Deep Wounds did about the same amount of damage as Devastate, and half as much as Shield Slam. Blows my mind.

I'd post the WWS but... WWS totally doesn't work on Malygos. The phases screw up everything apparently.

Beta 5 Man Instances: Violet Hold (Major Spoilers)

Rak — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:43:47 GMT

As usual, we did this with a resto druid, rogue, and myself - a protection warrior.

The Violet Hold is a level 75-77 instance found in the city of Dalaran. Similar to The Stockades in Stormwind, it has several guards at the ready outside, and the prisoners inside the hold are trying to break free and attack Dalaran.

You find the instance next to the quest givers that give you the daily heroic quests. First you have to visit the Violet Citadel and receive a quest to talk to one of the guards outside the Hold to get the key which lets you open the door into the instance.

The instance itself is very similar to Black Morass. When you enter, you will find a group of guards holding back small waves of enemies (big screenshot). There is one NPC behind the guards who you speak to when you wish to start the event.

Now, I checked this instance again before writing this and it seems to have changed from when I did it. When I did the instance, the NPC who begins the event would give you a Defense Control Crystal, similar to the Chrono Beacon from Black Morass, which you used if you were in trouble. She no longer gives these to your party, and instead there is some sort of fixed version of it on a wall or something. I don't have a group around to actually see how it works, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave it up to you.

[FLOATRIGHT]http://www.tankspot.com/photoplog/images/765/large/1_VH1.jpg[/FLOATRIGHT]
When you start the event, the small waves of flavor NPCs stop attacking and all the guards leave. A big blue portal will open just like in Black Morass (Portal), and a counter will display at the top of the screen. Portals spawn just like in Black Morass, with either a melee or caster guardian that you must kill to close the portal. Different flavors of small mobs will spawn from the portal and run for the door, which they damage over time just like Medivh's shield.

When I checked the instance again today, it seems they added something new. Sometimes a portal will spawn and be normal and a text warning will let you know ("A Guardian Keeper emerges from the portal!"). But sometimes a portal opens and there is an alert that a small elite group has spawned. The small elite group is a small group of mobs with lots of health, and no portal guardian. So the portal doesn't need to be closed - it closes itself, and instead some high health mobs will go for the door and need to be picked up.

On the 6th and 12th waves, an invincible mob will show up and open one of the prison cells, similar to in Arcatraz. The cell which opens is random and chooses which boss you face.

The cells containing 3 arrakoa all come at once as one boss. I was able to easily tank the three of them and don't remember them doing anything difficult. One of them is a healer and should probably be killed first.

The ethereal boss summons little orbs that you have to run away from, similar to when Kael'Thas in Magister's Terrace uses his gravity lapse ability. The orbs can also teleport you to them, and then begin casting arcane explosion which you must run from.

The core hound boss was very simple. I just tanked him facing away from the group due to past horrible core hound experiences that I'm sure we've all had. I don't even remember him doing anything interesting.

The big voidwalker looking guy was pretty annoying. He puts a debuff on someone (I think it's only the tank, I think it's related to his melee attacks), which is just like the debuff you get when fighting Jin'Do in ZG. It lets you see little mobs that he constantly spawns. The spawns will AoE your whole party throughout the fight and the tank (or whoever has the debuff) has to kill them. They die in pretty much one shot, but it's rather annoying to run around killing them while tanking.

The water revenant boss isn't in one of the cells, but behind the bars that block a sewer area. He will give himself a shield which makes all your attacks hit for like 5 damage. The shield breaks after he has been hit 50 times, so have people downrank and whatnot to spam him (similar to Viscidus breaking after a number of frost attacks). Also similar to Viscidus, after the shield breaks, it seems to explode into a bunch of little globs that will run toward the boss. If they reach him, they heal him, so kill as many as you can and DPS him hard because he puts the shield up again very quickly. Personally I tanked him on the very thin ledge above the stairs in the little nook leading to the sewer area he comes from, so the globs had to come down a very narrow path to reach him and were easy to AoE.

In the several times I've done this instance, I haven't seen the giant eyeball boss.

On the 18th wave, you will fight Cyanigosa, a large blue dragon. She is a lot like Azuregos. Tank her facing away from the group of course. She constantly casts blizzard and will teleport the party into her front, so they must run. She also casts a dispellable debuff that does damage over time.

Overall, this instance is pretty entertaining. I always enjoy Black Morass so this is right up my alley. The adds that come from the portals will all die to prot warrior AoE damage in non-heroic, so you can have the rest of the group just focus on the guardian.

Of note, the instance was very buggy for us and we had to run it many times as a result. They seem to have updated it since then so hopefully they fixed the bugs. One fun bug was when portals would spawn in groups of two and no bosses would spawn. It was actually more fun than normal that way, because I <3 the new warrior AoE capabilities.

Beta 5 Man Instances: Utgarde Keep (Major Spoilers

Rak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:34:24 GMT

As usual, this was done with just a resto druid, a rogue, and myself - a protection warrior.

Utgarde Keep (70-72): When you first enter Utgarde Keep, you will get to see the new fire effects that blizzard uses in large scale for the first time unless you've done Brutallus. It's pretty nice looking.

The best thing about this instance is the large amount of non-elites. There are tons of opportunities to pull whole rooms of mobs and just go crazy with the new protection warrior AoE abilities. It was the first instance I did in beta, and it is a great initiation to our new abilities.

The first boss is rather uneventful. The best part of the fight was that when I did it, he would summon little adds that didn't have a model. So we spent most of the fight battling very tiny white and blue checkered boxes that show up for NPCs with no model.

The second bosses is actually two mobs. You fight them both at once, and one is a caster. The only interesting part is that the first one to die is ressed as a ghost that can't be hurt. So you must kill the second NPCs while the ghost of the first one is still attacking you. When we killed them, they didn't drop any loot, so hopefully that's fixed by now.

The final boss is just a tank and spank with some really loud, funny sounding roars. When you kill him, one of the battle maidens from the death knight starting area comes down and resses him, and you have to kill him again. Pretty boring fight.

The instance is rather boring, but it serves it's purpose as an entry level 5 man very well. I'll always hold it dearly in my heart as the first place I got to mess around with Shockwave in.

Utgarde Pinnacle (80): During our run through this instance I got some pretty serious Shattered Halls deja vu. It was really challenging. Out of all the 5 mans, this one was the hardest for our little group by far.

The first boss has an excellent little event before you engage her where a very big Lich King/Arthas talks with her for a bit. My memory is a little fuzzy on what exactly happened during their talk but I believe he turned her into one of the awesome looking battle maiden NPCs, and you fight her like that.

When you actually fight her she's pretty much a pushover. Tank and spank with her making a couple torches shoot fireballs at you. Every once in a while she puts someone on her altar and a big sword slowly descends toward the person. You kill three orbs to release the person. I imagine that if the sword reaches the person they die, but never saw it happen. The instance starts off deceptively easy.

The second boss is similar to the last boss in Arcatraz. You start an event in a room with six really big animals trapped in stasis, and it releases two of them at random, one by one, followed by a third who is always the same. It was very easy and nothing notable stands out in my memory from the encounter.

The third boss is where things start to get fun. You walk into a long empty hallway and he is standing at the beginning next to his proto drake. When you approach him, he mounts the drake and takes off. A bunch of mobs fill the hallway in rows just like in Shattered Halls, and mobs will constantly spawn at the back and charge you.

So you fight your way up the gauntlet constantly killing the spawns and the rows of immobile mobs. It's rather annoying because of the large amount of casters, which will constantly run out of melee range. During all this, the boss will fly over your head and his drake deep breaths on you. The breath does a bunch of initial damage in sequential ticks similar to Ony's deep breath, and leaves a trail of ice on the ground for about 10 seconds that will hurt anyone that walks on it.

The drake's positioning varies each deep breath so you have to adjust where you tank everything on the fly. There are harpooner mobs which will throw harpoons at you, and they stick in the ground and are lootable like the spines from Naj'entus.

When you get to the end of the gauntlet, you still have to keep picking up newly spawned mobs while using the harpoons you collected in a row of harpoon guns when the boss on his drake is in range of them. After a few volleys, the drake will be killed and the boss lands on you.

The boss will do a whirlwind just like the Arms talent where he moves following someone while whirlwinding. It does a lot of damage to low armor people - it killed our rogue very quickly when the boss first landed on us. I was able to stay in for the entire whirlwind if he stayed on me with it no problem.

What I did was bring him to the middle of the long hall so that when he whirlwinds my healer could run to the end of the hall, and then the boss will come back to me when it's over. We didn't have a battle res so this was another really long fight that I basically solo DPSed.

The hardest part was the gauntlet.

I haven't actually done the final boss yet because we were right in front of him last night when the server went down. If he turns out to be interesting I'll comment on him later.

The trash pulls leading up to the final boss were very interesting. Lots of casters, lots of patrols. We're all impatient and just pull several groups + pats at once and it was really very difficult in those circumstances, but incredibly fun.

There's lots of trash you can skip in this instance, and I recommend it since mobs like the abominations have an annoyingly high amount of health.

Overall, both of these instances are very fun. The second one is challenging and I definitely see it turning into the Shattered Halls of the expansion.

Beta 5 Man Instances: Ulduar (Major Spoilers)

Rak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:26:49 GMT

Ulduar is extremely impressive. The look and feel of the instances is amazing. The entire zone (Storm Peaks) is the most impressive zone I've seen in this game, by far. I can't wait to see what the raid zone that is not yet implemented in Ulduar will hold for us.

As usual, we did this with just a resto druid, a rogue, and myself - a protection warrior.

Halls of Stone (77-79): Halls of stone is non-linear. You can go to any boss you wish first.

We will start with the Maiden of Grief. She constantly makes really large void zones on the ground below her, so you have to kite her out of them. She also uses a disorient effect on everyone in the party at once. The logical thing to do is have everyone always stand right next to a void zone, and the disorient will walk you into it and the tick of damage will break the effect. However, this boss can't be tuned right, because we didn't bother doing that and just stayed out of void zones the entire time.

The fact that we could easily kill her with just a rogue and myself (while tanking!) dpsing her, and not even using the void zones to break disorient, tells me this boss is way too easy.

The next boss we did is Krystallus. You reach him by going through a series of caverns inside a large cave. The area is very fun for prot warriors because there are tons of non-elite adds that you can round up and aoe down all at once.

The actual boss is like a mini-Gruul. He will do a ground slam and shatter combo just like Gruul. Also quite an easy boss.

The final boss... well, I never saw the final boss. You have to do an NPC escort and then protect the NPC for a long time against waves of enemies and lasers shooting you from the wall before you get into the bosses room. The problem is that it was overtuned and with only three people and no true AoE, we had no chance.

The NPC does some sort of aggro pulse I think, since he never attacked but mobs would constantly come off me to go after him. He doesn't have much health, so died about three minutes into the encounter. He also doesn't respawn when he dies, which I really hope is a bug, since you can't get past the door to the last boss without doing the event.

A developer has posted that they will retune this to be easier because apparently many full groups were having big trouble with this event as well.

Halls of Lightning (80): Another excellent looking instance. This place is pretty interesting the whole way through.

The first boss patrols around a large area with trash throughout it. When he walks by trash, he energizes them with a damage buff. You have to clear a section of the trash when he patrols away then fight him there.

The boss himself is a warrior. He uses several warrior abilities and even changes stances. His ability list on WoWhead contains 16 entries, so there's a lot of variety in his arsenal.

He can spell reflect, has his own Stone Form to remove bleeds and poisons, intercepts your healer, whirlwinds, cleaves... and some other things. He gets damage and attack speed bonuses at some points in the fight, and the damage actually got really intense towards the end. This may be because our rogue disconnected so as usual I had to solo-dps this while tanking. A pretty fun fight for a warrior.

After that boss, you have a suppression-room type area. There are a bunch of non-elites in a big room, and a couple elites by the stairs leading out of the room. The mobs will respawn after a short while (really a long time compared to, say, the RoS hallway). I just ran around and collected every single mob then aoed them down on the stairs.

The second boss has a giant anvil. He uses the anvil to spawn little golems. They seemed to drop aggro for me, constantly getting on my healer. As you damage them they slow down, and when they are almost dead they freeze. After freezing, the boss will shatter them which causes AoE damage. This fight is pretty fun because fighting a giant using a forge and anvil is always entertaining.

The third boss wasn't very difficult except, as usual, our rogue was useless. His computer rebooted when we engaged the boss. The boss applies a debuff to people that damages them and people around them. He got the debuff while offline, making me and my healer have to run, and the rogue died.

After he booted up and reconnected, we were still fighting the boss. So he logs in and gets a battle res. I say on vent, 'the healer has the AoE debuff, don't take the res or it'll kill you'. So, logically, he takes the res and instantly dies. Basically, this boss is so easy we also killed it with just the tank DPSing.

The final boss is in a beautiful room. He reminded me of Murmur, doing a sonic boom type spell. We all actually stacked on him and ate them all and it was still an easy fight. Pretty lacking in normal mode.

Overall, Ulduar instances are awesome. Hopefully Blizzard plans to tune the boss fights some more. I can't wait to see the raid.

Beta 5 Man Instances: Zul'Drak (Major Spoilers)

Rak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:00:50 GMT

Zul'Drak is a zone, not a set of instances. The first zone, Drak'Tharon Keep, is technically actually in the Grizzly Foothills zone. However, since it clearly is themed around Zul'Drak, and the story behind you even venturing into the instance revolves around Zul'Drak, I am going to lump it into the Zul'Drak grouping for the purposes of this blog.

As usual, we did this with just a resto druid, a rogue, and myself - a protection warrior.

Drak'Tharon Keep (74-76): This instance is unsurprisingly very trollish. It feels like a mix of ZA and ZG. A lot of things in both the instances in this blog entry will feel very ZG inspired to you.

The first boss wasn't very exciting. The only thing to really even note is that adds will run at you, and then they die, the boss will use the bodies to cast corpse explosion. So moving him away from corpses is a logical idea.

The second boss reminded me very slightly of the M'uru encounter. He starts off immune to damage with some pillars protecting him similar to Lady Vashj. Waves of adds will constantly come down the stairs. Very fun little encounter that lets you play with Shockwave quite nicely.

Every once in a while a Crystal Handler will spawn and attack. When it dies, one of the pillars is deactivated. After all the pillars are down, the boss becomes active. He isn't very interesting so I won't go into details about him.

The third boss, King Dred, has a pretty sweet name. He is a giant dinosaur, which is also pretty sweet. I predict this boss will be quite interesting with subpar healers.

He does a bellowing roar type fear, which you can stance dance easily enough. He also applies a debuff that reduces your armor by 75%. He does some bleed effect which stays on you until you get to 100% health like the boss in Slave Pens. He also has an ability that increases damage you take from bleeds. It all synergizes so if your healer gets feared or just isn't up to snuff, he can hurt real bad.

The final boss has a mechanic that I haven't seen before. If you want to be surprised by something new and unique, you probably shouldn't read this!

The boss will constantly melt everyone's flesh, turning you all into skeletons. While you're a skeleton, you get certain abilities and cannot use your normal ones. The interesting thing is that healers can't heal like this. The downside is that... well... there isn't any healing required.

It's a really cool mechanic but it also makes the actual fight a complete joke. It's virtually impossible to die in this fight.

Overall this was a pretty quick instance without much unique appeal besides the last boss, but it's not bad.

Gun'drak (76-78): Another very trollish instance. This one has two entrances. You can zone in on either side of the instance, so you can start with either of the two periphery bosses. The entrances reminded me of BFD, with a long drop down to water and a spiral ramp leading back up.

We started with the snake boss. He isn't very interesting. However, he makes small snakes fall from the roof and attack the party. They are quite weak... but they aggro the first pack of elites from the next room! I couldn't understand why, the pack isn't even close to the boss room. But after two wipes from the elites joining the fun, we decided to just clear half of the next room before engaging the boss.

The next boss we did starts with a bunch of little stone guys around him. When you engage him, the stone adds merge with him. During the fight the boss will become immune and summon a stone add that you kill before getting back on the boss. Pretty boring.

The third boss was so uninteresting that I don't remember anything about him except that he turned into a wooly mammoth or something during the fight, which was pretty surprising at the time.

The final boss was also boring. He throws spears around and has some ability that makes a little white rhino charge a person and stun them, but it instantly disappears so you don't even fight it.

This instance was unspectacular to me. It wasn't a bad instance, it just had nothing unique that stands out in my memory. The coolest part of the whole place was the little altars that you use when you kill a boss, which causes a beam of light to burn a rope and make a giant animal head land in a hole in some gearwork. After all the altars are used, it rotates a bridge to the rhino boss.

Maybe I'm just sick of troll instances.

Beta 5 Man Instances: Azjol-Nerub (Major Spoilers)

Rak — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:33:48 GMT

So last night, after struggling to make it into an instance with the world server going down every ten seconds, I finally completed the last beta 5 man to finish my quest to see them all. I decided that the new 5 mans are so fun that I would make a list of them all to say what's been on my mind for each of them. I won't give strategies per se, but bosses that offer something I felt noteworthy when compared to previous 5 mans I will give a little detail on, because I find them interesting.

Of note, I did these all on normal difficulty. Why? Because I did them all with only 3 people - a resto druid, an assassination (and later combat) rogue, and myself a protection warrior. I streamed all of them live so there's a few people that have popped in to see them that way. Hopefully I find more ideas of stuff to run and stream, since right now I don't know what to do with myself on the beta. Suggestions would be very welcomed.

Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom (73-75): This instance is pretty breath taking when you first zone in. I wish AQ40 had looked like this, because it's gorgeous. The actual instance, however, is rather long and annoying to navigate. Getting lost was pretty easy. The plus side is that you can take many shortcuts to avoid lots of trash.

The instance looks like tuned for about level 72 or 73 players, so I think it being labeled up to 75 is a bit much. The bosses were harder than I would expect in a simple non-heroic five man for the average WoW player, though. At level 72 with leveling gear I imagine this place is quite the challenge.

The first boss had a pretty interesting mechanic. He will hatch adds from eggs, and rather frequently he hatches a guardian add. When the guardian spawns, every other add and the boss becomes immune to damage... but still runs around attacking. It's interesting because other adds hatch at the same time as the guardian. So while you are killing the guardian, the new adds will likely just beat on your healer and you can't do anything about it.

Overall, a very fun place to use Shockwave... I pretty much love any boss with lots of adds nowadays. There is an achievement for this guy, "Defeat Elder Nadox in Ahn'kahet on Heroic Difficulty without killing any Ahn'kahar Guardians." I have no idea how you do that, since I couldn't see a way to damage him at all with a guardian alive.

The second boss was not very interesting except that it may just be the most annoying boss I've even had to deal with. He paralyzes someone and I am not sure if it's always the tank, but he did it to me every single time. I would only have about 5 seconds of time to hit the boss and then I'd be paralyzed for 10 seconds again. VERY annoying. The other mechanics aren't worth mentioning.

The third boss, I think, will be very hard at level 72. She will make an add walk to her and if it reaches her she enrages similar to Gluth. You can't stun or hamstring or anything, so it was a pain in the butt with only myself and one dps on them. After the first we killed them all at least so we don't look too terrible. She does an annoying knockback so I tanked her against the wall right by her... but after the add phase she ran into the wall and up the ledge and totally borked the encounter - so don't do that.

The final boss had a pretty funny trick. It seems to involve the new phasing deal. At first I thought he mind controlled my two allies. So I of course instantly killed the rogue in my party but left the healer alive, kiting him in circles, since me and the healer have killed many bosses while the rogue lay around dead and useless. But it turns out the same thing happened to them - everyone saw the other two party members as enemies. So it's some trick with phasing, and everyone just has to kill off the other party members they see. Other than that, he was uninteresting.

Overall a damned gorgeous instance with tons of trash and somewhat annoying bosses. But it was still pretty fun. I wouldn't put it on my 'yuck' list just because of the AQ-ish style.

Azjol-Nerub (72-74): This instance had a pretty cool feel to it. A theme throughout WotLK 5 mans is that they actually make the instances truly follow a theme, rather than boring BC instance looks. The instance starts off with you running through tunnels in caves and over giant cobwebs and eventually there's an awesome huge, HUGE drop you take that you'll have to see yourself to really grasp.

The first boss was so uninteresting I don't even remember his abilities, but he had a sort of mini-General Rajaxx event as part of the fight.

The second boss was something quite cool. He is a giant spider in a web, and you start on a web above him so you can just look down and watch him. There are constant swarms of other spiders that pour out of tunnels and attack him, but he's quite the badass and consistently obliterates them all. You run alongside the swarm on your way to engage him.

The downside of that cool part is that the swarm stays on him while you fight him, doing incredible damage due to their huge numbers. The boss died in under 10 seconds. After he died the swarm of spiders was still there so it was quite interesting to handle them, at least.

The third boss also goes on my 'most annoying bosses' list like in the previous instance. He summons little adds that are really pathetic and basically die to aoe, and they come in packs of one or two. But he constantly burrows underground and becomes unattackable. Probably 80% of the encounter is spent standing around waiting for him to unburrow.