slash moo

Grinding frost emblems for bear gear is at an end

yrkoonia — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:09:31 +0000

Last week my grinding of frost emblems is at an end at last. I got the 50 badges for the stamina tanking trinket at last and thus finsihed my grinding for bear gear.

In other words, I bought:

ilvl 264 – Belt
ilvl 264 – Gloves
ilvl 264 – Back
ilvl 251 – T10 Shoulders
ilvl 251 – T10 Helm
ilvl 264 – Trinket

Time to look at cat gear now then… hmm where to begin

Skill > gear, but gear is needed too

yrkoonia — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:14:55 +0000

Was very disappointed yesterday as I pugged ICC 10 lower spire with a rather ok geared pug. The players had a gearscore at about 5050-5400 and that should, on paper, be quite enough for the lower spire in my opinion.

But the three healers had problems healing, and with three healers instead of two nobody should die from bladestorm and such as I see it. But the biggest problem was the lack of good dps. With only 5 dps we couldn’t handle the adds on Lady Deathwhisper and after 4 wipes I prioritized other stuff than wow and logged off.

Bah! Very frustrating.

On a more uplifting subject, the Mind Flayers guild have recieved a few (1-2) new players as a old work colleague and his wife has transfered server and faction to join us. A warrior and a priest. This will probably make it a lot easier to get people to enlist for the raids and hopefully we can get raids going both more often (perhaps not really needed) and on time. Good with a few more options on tanks and healers as well.

Toskks Maximized BiS Bracers won

yrkoonia — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:49:48 +0000

Did a pug ICC 25 the other day.

I main tanked the lower spire and was awarded the BiS bracers from Saurfang.

The RL/ML was a rogue and I was a little worried that there would be some sort of discussion regarding my right to the gear. But he was from one of the more prominent guilds on the server so I wasnt overly wooried. Cred to him, he looted the gear to me w/o discussion even if he was the one who lost.

My gear is now very to close to as good as it can be as I bought the T10 helm and got a pair of non-tier ilvl51 leggings of Festergut the last guild run.

Mind Flayers downed Rotface

yrkoonia — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:36:13 +0000

On saturday our guild downed Rotface at last.

We first downed the weekly malygos on eight players for some emblems and the achievement before heading to ICC for a late start (about 22:30) with the aid of two pug players. One 5100 gs alt (shammy enhanc./resto) to a competent heroic mode ICC player and a random 4950 gs shadow priest.

No clinical kills this week either, but one shots of all lower spire bosses as well as festergut. Fielding duo druids gives a raid some room for failure as combat rezzes are quite powerful tools when hickups occur.

We then had a very good 1st try on Rotface but wiping on about 40% or something on some obscure reason when the blob tank died for some reason.

Just as we stood ready for our 2nd pull on Rotface we noticed that our mage had used invisibility to save some repair costs on the wipe a few minutes earlier he had manage to have gotten both the orange and green slime stains and thus elegible for completion of the weekly ICC raid quest which did consist of “one-shotting” either festergut or rotface after each other. When the mage talked to the quest giver NPC the whole raid got the quest completed and was awarded five extra emblems and one was lucky enough to gain the ilvl264 plate dps shoulders that were given to our retribution pala “for dkp”.

On the fourth (or fifth) try when then downed Rotface with a two tank (warr + pala) and two healer (druid + shammy) strategy. The loot was a bit booring though as it went to off spec and even to our pug guest dps.

We now need to decide on where to head on the next raid into ICC. Should we go for Putricide who seems to be very hard, at least if you look at the success rate on the top guilds in the the heroic ICC race. Perhaps it will be easier to go for any of the other wings instead.

A few days off WoW in the mountains

yrkoonia — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:43:29 +0000

I had a few days off the grind in WoW and went to Sälen Lindvallen in the swedish mountains. 3 days away from home and work and 2 days skiing.

The first day was quite windy with a lot of snow pouring down, the next day was much better with no wind at all with sun and clear blue skies as seen on the picture here.

In the end, no broken bones , aching muscles and a lot of good wine and great food in the evenings. It was a good trip

On the verge of a break-through

yrkoonia — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:36:04 +0000

Last week the Mind Flayers fielded a quite alt-ish raid. We did miss our MT warrior who were out flying and a star druid tree had parents visiting and thus we had shift a lot of people to unfamiliar roles. I main tanked on the druid and our holy paladin was forced into his mere 4900-isg gearscore prot gear. Our old healer the new born shadow priest was back on healing as well as our reluctant hybrid the elemental shammy who only been healing sporadically in the past and with little success.

Therefore I was happily surprised as we down boss after boss with almost no effort. We started a bit late with some Ulduar action to get the weekly raid boss as well as a few dps-race achievements, went in and one shotted the new VoA-boss Toravon (yiipeee, I got the T10 leggings) and the went into ICC.

A few scruffy kills and a few wipes but quick and concentrated execution led us up to and past Festergut once more and we had our best try so far on Rotface were we had him down to about 25%. I was truely amazed and very glad. This is most promising for the future when we dare ICC once more with an even better raid set up. A lot of praise should go to the two rusty healers who saved the raid and led us onwards.

Wow, keep up the good work.

Mind Flayers a bit stuck on ICC progress (5/9)

yrkoonia — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:02:28 +0000

We raided once more last friday (we have been able to get amazingly many raids going these last weeks) and we had a great raid setup. The average DPS was very high, the best healers and tanks were online etc. We hade more or less the best raid setup we can field.

We had a rather late start and used about 30min to clear out Naxx spider wing for the weekly raid boss as well as some achievements. We then headed to ICC and quickly dispatched the bosses even if there were some hickups such as a wipe on Lady Deathwhisper and a quite ugly success on Gunship encounter as you can see on this youtube clip.

But at least we downed the bad guys up to Festergut and got the opportunity to wipe some and learn the ropes on Rotface. Third raid we came to this boss and still no success and even if we at least could see some improvments this time a best try were only at about 39%. It feels like there is quite some way too go before we can down him.

The combat logs can be seen here and the disappointing loot is found here.

My tank gear-plan

yrkoonia — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:11:54 +0000

I made some efforts to list my “end gear plan”. It looks like the following;



slot ilvl item status note

__________________________________________________________________________________

Head              :  251  T10 Frost Emblems           prio 1 (~20/95)

Neck              :  264  BoE World Drop       DONE

Shoulders         :  251  T10 Frost Emblems           prio 2

Back              :  264  Frost Emblems        DONE

Chest             :  264  BoE from AH          DONE

Wrist             :  251  Sindragosa                  only marginal upgrade

Wrist alt.        :  264  Saurfang (25man)            BiS

Hands             :  264  Frost Emblems        DONE    

Waist             :  264  Frost Emblems        DONE     

Legs              :  264  Crafted                        

Feet              :  264  Crafted                        

Ring 1a           :  251  Gunship              DONE       

Ring 1b           :  245  Triumph Emblems      DONE   (Armor set)

Ring 2            :  277  Ashen Verdict        omw    Almost Revered

Trinket 1a        :  264  Frost Emblems               prio 3

Trinket 1b        :  245  Triumph Emblems      DONE   (Armor set)

Trinket 2         :  251  Prof. Putricide

Weapon            :  251  Battered Hilt quest

offhand           :  n/a  n/a

wand/idol/ranged  :  245  Triumph Emblems      DONE

Im a bit stunned as I feel that I have already gotten very far on my road to my own version of BiS (ie. gear that I have access to)

Yrkoonia the cat

yrkoonia — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:11:36 +0000

Meow!

Last night I got the opportunity to join a ICC 25 run of the lower spire. The most prominent horde guild on my server, Evil Eye, was launching a alt raid and there were a few empty spots left that I was lucky enough to squeze into.

I went cat as tanks and healers was already sorted. I quickly ported to Moonglade and dumped my healing spec for an optimized cat spec. Thanks to the Talented addon it’s very easy to swap talent spec etc. and I was quickly summoned into ICC and the first trash started to go down.

I was not too bad, even if I wasnt one of the most prominent damage dealers. I think I had a place around 10:th on damage done after all trash up to Marrowgar. We wiped a few times on a two tank strategy when bone spike hit. The healing outage was enough to doom the tanks as saber lash damage was too high with only two tanks.

I looked on the damage meter after the second try and was a bit downstruck with my rather poor performance. Then it hit me. I hadnt changed glyphs yet. Oops, dps:ing as cat with glyphs of wild growth, swiftmend and nourish. Bah! bad kitty.

I stoned back to Dalaran, took a portal to UC and went to the AH and quickly bought a savage roar and rip glyph, I already had shred and mangle glyphs as backup in my inventory and was packing correct glyphs in the next pull. We downed him after about 4 wipes. Damage on spikes were too low on a bit too many people and we switched to a three tank strat eventually.

We then oneshotted Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship and Deathbringer Saurfang and all in all eight new frost emblems for my happy druid as well as the 25man version of [Storming the Citadel] and [I've Gone and Made a Mess].

No loot for me though, but I was happy for the achievements and the extra emblems. I rolled 95 on the imba DPS-trinket from Saurfang but it went as reserved to one of the Evil Eye mains in the raid.

As the Saurfang encounter more or less is a the new Patchwerk benchmark I was able to note a new DPS record with 7056 (I placed 6th on damage done on the saurfang encounter as I could focus solely on the boss instead of adds). It can of course be better with properly socketed gear. I used 3 tanking items (sack on chest, noose on belt and burglar’s grips on hands) with stamina gems in them.

I was surprised on how big difference in dps:ing with the cat rotation in this raid environment it was compared to when I’m being my own mangle-bot in my usual 10-man enviornment. A fully ArP-gemmed gear would be better as I had almost no problems in keeping my rotation optimal and intact in this 25-man raid environment with trauma warriors onboard. The shred glyph was quite nice as I added ~6 secs to my rip damage debuff. Now I often had a lot of opportunities to even fire a off a ferocious bite quite often instead of struggeling with keeping up rip and savage roar.

I only sport about 550-600 ArP in my semi-bear-cat gear and it are more focused on agility in the pure cat items, if I would raid more often as cat with trauma warriors as partners I would probably once more switch to ArP-gems.

pimp my toon 2

yrkoonia — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:51:39 +0000

As we raided up to and past festergut the other day I was awarded with yet some gear. I got the tanking ring from the gunship and I took a fantastic neck drop from the world drop table as well as I bought the tanking cloak with emblems. Thus;
Ring ilvl 245 ---> ilvl 251 = + 6 Neck ilvl 200 --> ilvl 264 = + 64 Cloak ilvl 200 --> ilvl 264 = + 64 ______________________________________________ Total + 134

That is a quite significant improvement once again, dont you say
Raid buffed I had 57 272 HPs on festergut, time to gem a bit more for agility once more.