Jindi Ysera

Got the world #178 Anub kill, according to wowprogress. It was definitely close… I think we had about 6 people alive at the end, and used no less than 4 battle rezzes on the winning attempt. Missed tribute loot by 1!

http://dreness.com/wow/videos/toc/call-of-the-grand-crusade.mov

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-6H4GB5n3xJ2Nf2Fy/?s=7570&e=8128

This encounter is currently pretty hard. The mechanics are easy, except for the penetrating cold healing in phase 3… that requires very fast reflexes and uh… nerves of steel ;) But the tuning of the fight… the ‘scale’ if you will… is pretty hard for today’s gear.

Figuring out a good strat was important, and certainly I don’t think we would have won without a good one. We tried various things, but ended up with something pretty solid for our group. In particular, the dual ice patches for snaring the incoming burrowers proved to be pretty effective. We had a lot of problems with those mobs getting behind their tank, which is instant death; having two ice patches gave us a little more leeway to position the burrowers better.

This ‘winning’ attempt was far from perfect… in addition to human mistakes, this encounter seems to produce a lot of occasions where the problems play out so quickly, there’s not enough time to react to prevent or mitigate the damage – your only hope is to cope with it as best as you can. In this case, that happened in the form of quick battle rezzes or the occasional Ankh, but while also staying focused on the task at hand. Fun times!

http://dreness.com/wow/videos/ulduar/Alganon25-Supermassive.mov

Battleground Queuing

• Players may now only queue for no more than two Battlegrounds at a time.
• The dialog box for entering a Battleground match has been changed to reflect the following options: “Enter Battle,” “Leave Queue,” and “Minimize.”
• The time a player has to enter a battle when selected has been reduced to 40 seconds when not already in a Battleground and 20 seconds when in a Battleground.
• Players already in a Battleground can now choose “Enter Battle” for a new Battleground under any circumstance (i.e. while dead, in combat, falling, etc.).
• A new Battleground will not launch until the maximum number of players on each side are in the queue (i.e. 40 players per side for Alterac Valley).

One wonders how in the sam hell it took this long for Bliz to make these changes. Seriously. In case it’s not obvious, multi-queing is a problem because most players don’t immediately de-queue for the BG they didn’t enter when accepting a queue pop. This leads to that player’s faction starting with less than a full team, which provides an unfair advantage to the opposition. Having been on the losing side of this effect a lot lately, this is a very welcome change. I honestly do believe that – on average – Horde are slightly more selfish and less team-oriented than Alliance – even if only slightly – and so don’t care as much that they are hurting their faction by multi-queueing. At least, that’s the best I can figure, because recent experience in Isle of Conquest has shown that Horde starts with less than 40 far more often than Alliance starts with less than 40; often the difference is as high as 15 or 20, which is … half the team.

In other news, we’re now working on Anub in ToC 25 H. Our guild’s kill of Twin Val’kyr was around US 150 or so. I looted my first fragment in Ulduar yesterday :) Who knows if I’ll get 29 more (I tend to doubt it, as we have basically no reason to farm Ulduar at this point), but it’s still cool to get the nod… We currently have three legendary hammers on our raid team.

We punked Freya +3 elders for the Knock On Wood achievement the other night, which was the last stage for most of our raiders to get their Ironbound Drakes as part of the Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25) meta-achievement. Personally, I’ll be waiting until next week, as I still need Crazy Cat Lady… over the past month or so, we’ve had a surplus of healers… my theory is that since resto shaman stack more poorly than any other healing class, one of us gets benched more often than somebody from another healing class. Indeed, all our healers got their drakes this week except for me… which is a bit painful given that I show up every night and perform well. In fact, I think the only people who *didn’t* get drakes either have been having connection issues or are new to the guild. But I digress…

Video links:

QuickTime: http://dreness.com/wow/videos/ulduar/freya-3.mov
YouTubez: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1PVqRLnGA

Last night, we got our first looks at Alganon, and it’s a very visually impressive encounter, although pretty light on strategy. Players get a maximum of 1 hour of attempts after the initial engage, so we were definitely using a no-huddle offense. Most of the team had already experienced the encounter in 10-man, but not me… no time for that! For the first week on Alganon 25, we did pretty well, and could have beaten it… definitely had several perfect phases, but they were spread across too many different attempts :) Our DPS has been really rockin lately, so we have tons of time.

Speaking of really rockin, last night I put on a savory deviate pirate costume during the Mimiron trash plow, and still had it after I got subbed out for our other resto shaman to get his Yogg 1-light cheezement. That’s right, we one-shot both Firefighter and Vezax hard – got the immortal for Vezax and just barely missed it for Firefighter. After several Yogg attempts, they realized they were short on decurses, so I got subbed back in… we wiped once when our tank totally spawned like three clouds right after engage, but the next time Yogg died without any drama…

Our guild’s lead raiding priest obtained our first Wrath legendary last night, after we did our first kill of yogg 1 light.

I present to you now two videos. The first is the full length kill attempt and then the trip to the Archivum to see Agony add another Legendary weapon to the list.

http://dreness.com/wow/videos/ulduar/yogg-1-light-legendary.mov
1.2 GB, QuickTime format

For those who don’t want to watch the entire kill (let’s face it, it’s kinda boring up until near the end when people start getting 1 shot :), but who do want to see the legendary antics, I chopped off the last part and am making it available separately. I’m particularly happy with how this turned out, so I will encourage that you make a click :) You can also see other legendaries on display: Veratu’s Sulfuras and Kguku’s Thunderfury. We have glaives and a greatstaff as well but they weren’t there that night…

http://dreness.com/wow/videos/ulduar/rovers-legendary.mov
188 MB, QuickTime format

Iron Council hard mode by Agony of Ysera (raw soure: here)

Thorim Hard Mode

Not bad for a first appearance on the scene, if I do say so myself…

There is also video footage from a different session, captured in Arathi Basin. You can watch the whole battleground from start to finish by clicking below.

Rogue PVP Baby Steps – Arathi Basin

(note: it’s a large file, 1.1 GB, QuickTime Format)

I was still on hiatus through the end of Sunwell, and never did get a KJ kill…

When wrath started getting close, I took a brief look at it via the public test realm, however it was basically unplayable for me since I didn’t have the needed mods to rig up my Nostromo N-52. Once it launched, I was excited enough for the new content that I leveled pretty quickly, even though I ended up being out of town for several days during launch week.

Once Agony started gearing up for raids, it seemed like a good time to jump back into raiding, so I did! We plowed through all the initial content pretty quickly and completed pretty much everything except for those achievements which require precise stellar / planetary alignment (read: luck), such as Immortal.

Regarding Immortal, Bliz has revised this achievement style for Ulduar such that the Immortal equivalent for Ulduar does not require that 25 people stay online without disconnections (or realm problems!) for multiple hours on end; instead, breaking it down into the individual encounters whose requirements can be met across multiple raid lockout periods. Under the updated logic, we would have won Immortal many times over in Naxx, but whatever. I’m not pissed :P

Anyway, as I write this we’re preparing to take another whack at Yogg-Saron at the end of Ulduar. Our best attempt to date brought us to about 40% in phase 2, so we’re close-ish.

There are lots of new videos to look at! I learned a new trick for controlling the camera, and just last night finished the first full-length video utilizing this technique, covering the Freya encounter. Also notable are first-kill videos for both Mimiron and Vezax.

Also started doing 2s now that I’ve got OK PvP gear again. Here’s a video of me and my ret pally partner working our way up during our first week.

Recent loots:

Steamcaller’s Totem
Conquerer’s Worldbreaker Handguards
Conquerer’s Worldbreaker Legguards
Freya’s Choker of Warding

Fun times. I happened to be online while Agony was railing against the Eredar Twins to get the first kill, and so I got a raid invite… it’s a very healing intensive fight! We brought the win!! Here’s the video. 

http://be.imba.hu/