Ulduar – XT-002 Deconstructor DOWN and explained!

By alex

Hey guys’n'gals! Hope all of you have managed to get your Noblegarden acheivements done in quite time as we all know childrens week starts on Friday!

Anyways on Rage’s 2nd night of tries we managed to clear the Deconstructor – and pretty early on last night it has to be said! We almost had him the night before but had a few people DC in Greece – on of their ISP’s dropped out for 20 minutes which pretty much ended the raid as it was late anyway.

Its quite a fun fight, and Deconstructor’s voice is pretty funny, with 2 phases:

Phase 1 – The tank positions the boss with his back to the raid right infront of the stairs and after a few seconds to allow him time to get sufficient aggro the DPS set off and we’re full swing into the fight. During the fight random people will be afflicted with either;

- Gravity Bomb – This nasty debuff doesnt have a DOT effect, but if you get it – move away from the raid as after a few seconds it pulls everyone within 10/15 feet of you to where you are – just intime for you to explode causing a lot of damage to you and them.

- Light Bomb – This even more nasty debuff does i think about 3.5k damage per tick to you and anyone within range of you. MOVE FAST—->

Phase 2 – Deconstructor decides to have a sleep and his heart pops out of his chest. His heart has 10 million HP and your damage is increased by 100% against the heart. Whatever health you take off the heart is removed directly from Deconstructor, so this is a really good time to pop all trinkets/cool downs and heroism etc. During this phase various robots come to attack the raid and have to be tanked – or they move to the boss and if they get to range they heal him for 60,000 HP. There are also Bomb Bots – ranged dps need to deal with these and stay at max range as they explode causing 16-20k damage on plate. Phase 1 then starts again.

We got deconstructor down with 3 phase 2′s last night – obviously as our gear increases it will get quicker and quicker. We were popping heroism on the 3rd phase 2.

Something interesting happened as well – have any of you noticed how much Judgement of Light is healing for? On the try when we downed deconstructor I was 3rd dps overall and 1st on the healing meters!!! WTF? I guess blizzard got something right! (ok most of it was over healing, but hey its better than nothing) my Judgement was ticking for 850-1000 on everyone in the raid when they hit the boss! Crazy!

So as a reward the boss was kind enough to drop these for me:

Clockwork Legplates
Binds when picked up
Legs Plate
2054 Armor
+106 Strength
+169 Stamina
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Strength
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves hit rating by 57.
Equip: Increases your armor penetration rating by 76.

So that’s a nice bonus for me! Cost me though! 550 DKP! Damn those Death Knights!!

So far I’ve really enjoyed 3.1 – the Tournament is fun and I cant wait for the next phase to start, although from what I’ve read it wont be starting till the next major content patch. Ulduar is new and fresh, and feels way more of a challenge.

For me this is the first time we’ve had to work hard on downing any bosses since the pre-wrath patch came out and nerfed all the tier 6 raid content.

Firelight the Noble

By alex

Hey guys! You’re all loving the Noblegarden today!! Isn’t it cool!!

LOL!

Here’s a couple of pics of me on my epic journey across Tanaris and Un’goro!

It only took me a few hours to get the meta achievement done – I’m glad it was pretty easy I was sweating quite a lot that I wouldn’t get the Love is Around meta due to terrible RNG achievements. The only thing plaguing me this time around is the tuxedo pants! I’m sure they’ll come!

Are all of you peeps having fun? What really gets my goat is people are supposed run around looking but instead they seem set on just camping spawn spots. Boring! I’ve been keeping with the run around as a rabbit nabbing eggs from the campers wherever possible!

Ok about the last post I made – I guess my idea of what they should have done with Death Knights was a bit more or less what people expected. That’s how I wish they’d done it! Like it or loath it – it was just a bit of fun!

The Argent Tournament presses on also! I’m now championed with Stormwind and Exodar! Darnassus next.

So bring on Children’s Week!!

Happy Egg Hunting!

Next Hero Class: Unholy Paladins.

By alex

Hey guys – Just been reading all the blog posts about the nerf we’ve received to Exorcism as of 3.1.1 that went live yesterday/today (US/EU)

Now in the week since 3.1 came out I’ve not done any pvp. Not a sausage! (not including jousting!!) But we all knew this was going to come – a day or so after looking at my exorcism damage i said to one of our prot-a-dins “Watch them nerf it next week…”

Low and behold its done. Thankfully not in PvE phew!

Anyway I read a comment on Tim’s latest post over at Suicidal Zebra from Dallana:

“Ever consider that it’s more often than not, Holy’s fault that Ret gets
hurt?”

Well that got me thinking to the future…something that blizzard could offer us Ret Paladins…

No-one wants to switch mains – not really – you loose all that hard work you put in to get your achievement’s done, and all that awesome collectible loot and fun stuff.

So I came up with an alternative. This will stop all the game breaking nerf’s and bring something new to the game that people will love:

Unholy Paladins.

An optional quest chain would be opened up by paladins wishing to turn their backs on the light and move away from that which was held so dear for so long.

This quest line would take you on a journey of discovery….from one end of Azeroth to another – bringing you back to your ultimate decision to become a paladin. This is a far throw from what happened to Death Knights…this is something different.

Quest by quest each of your main abilities would be corrupted from what we know it as now to their new versions – the dark twisting magic that begins to envelop you the deeper you go on your journey slowly changing the very way you perceive the world – things appear darker, more uninviting.

Your veins begin to pulsate with the hatred for all things holy – the mana burns from your body and a new power system call Unholy Power starts to take over…

The culmination of this quest line is an epic battle between you and your Unholy brothers in arms and the Priests and Paladins that are fighting to battle the corruption from within their very souls.

There would only be 1 talent tree – this is a pure DPS class with raid utilities similar to regular paladins, but wholly different at the same time.

Lets look at some of our new/changed abilities:

Curse of Blood. This 1 hour buff grants you with something similar to combining Seal of
the Martyr and Blessing of Might and Kings – All stats are increased by 15% and all direct melee attacks have a chance to do damage based on a percentage of attack power multiplied by weapon dps.

Damned Crusader Strike. Our old Crusader Strike’s powers are taken and twisted. An instant attack that causes 115% weapon damage + 33% Attack Power and silences the target for 2 seconds. 6 Second Cool Down.

Unholy Storm. Divine Storm has a new ability – As well as hitting 4 targets around the Unholy Paladin for 110% weapon damage it also does this as unholy damage and is not resistible. 10 Second Cool Down.

The old seals and judgement system is gone. Curse of Blood above folds our only useful seal into its blessing and no long does any damage to the user.

Unholy Damnation. This is an instant cast ability that hits the target for 200% weapon damage. This ability also heals you for 10% of the damage dealt – 8 second Cool Down.

Desecration. Like Consecration, but better – this ability does not stay where you pop it – instead it follows the Unholy Paladin – 8 second duration/cooldown.

Our heals have changed as well – Flash of Light becomes Flash of Darkness and Holy Light becomes Unholy Darkness. Core abilities stay the same, but add a HoT affect upon critical which heals for 33% of the amount healed over 5 seconds.

As mentioned earlier the mana bar is gone – its been replaced with an Unholy Power bar. (sounds like some sort of chocolate snack!) This starts empty like a rage/runic power bar and increases depending on how many abilities are used in a certain period of time. Once at 100% your damage is increased for 15 seconds by 30% at the end of this time your bar returns to 0 and you have to work your spells again. Filling your bar to 100% should take about 2 minutes creating a kind of auto avenging wrath every 2 minutes but is controlable by not doing certain abilities that grant Unholy Power.

It just an idea, a fantasy I’ve had – something I’d love to see implemented as a viable option for Paladins who truly want to dish out some retribution.

It kinda all sounds a bit Death Knightish, but with a twist – there’s not tanking nonsense here – its pure dps with some raid utility added in to make us useful in raids.

Can you think of any more interesting new spells to add or change?

Dual Spec’d Up & Argent Tournament

By alex

Hey Guys’n'Gals (are there really any girls reading this?)

So just wanted to touch base with a few things I’ve been doing in-game recently.

So I’ve been beavering away at the Argent Tournament and this morning I made it to Champion of Stormwind and I’m now “Firelight of Stormwind” Another title to add to the long list of titles in my repartee! (over 20 now I think!)

I’m now going to have to start the arduous task of saving up tokens for the mounts/pets. I think I need to save up 140 per faction and 250 for the flyer.

I think I’m going to switch factions and champion each of them as it only seems to take 8 days to do that and you get a bonus 10 tokens – unless its more profitable to do the dailys (5 tokens per day?)

I only just managed to get the champion beaten before I had to leave for work, so I’ve not had a proper chance to weigh up the options and make a proper decision. I’ll have a play tonight and see whats what!

Also over the weekend I finally got round to picking up the dual spec and last night I got my chance to put it to practise!

I’ve gone protection for my alternate spec. I’ve got mostly all 25-man tanking gear so I’m over the defense cap.

So late last night one of the guildies is “Looking for a tank for heroic” I whisper him that I’ll come – I need the practise!

Thinking it was going to be Halls of Stone – somewhere nice and relatively easy we ended up going to Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom. One of the harder instances.
Bearing in mind I’ve not properly tanked an instance since I was level 70 and even then I was only tanking 5-mans and not heroics, I did well. (so i was told anyway!)

There were some difficult pulls in there – and my rotation seems to wipe my mana pool pretty darn quickly – need to talk to the other pally tanks in there to see whats what with regards to that – cos I was blowing mana pots like there was no tomorrow, but we didn’t wipe and only once or twice did a couple of the dps get killed (although not my fault thankfully!!)

I tell you what – doing that insanity bit in there as a protection paladin was really painful.

I was able to stay alive for each of the splits but it was impossible for me to kill anyone due to the 2 priests that were constantly healing each other and the rest of the team. Thankfully the rest of the team came to my aid when they’d cleared their mobs.

I was glad of the practise to be honest because I’ve kinda put my name down as a possible tank for tonight’s 25-man raid in Ulduar (razorscale) to our GM, Kuta. He said it would be good due to the lack of tanks we have signed. The Pressure is ON!

Ulduar First Impressions

By alex

Hey peeps – wow did I have a fantastic night last night!