Vox Immortalis

So I was bored last night and started pondering devious methods to gear up my recently-level-80 Death Knight.  I tried running some instances, healing my Death Knight with my Druid who is on a secondary account, but it’s mind-numbingly boring.

Then I remembered the recent two-man video of Flame Leviathan and started wondering how much of a difference shitty gear would make for vehicle strength, so last night I headed over into a fresh Ulduar instance with my Druid and Death Knight and tested things out.

The bad news first: Item Level matters way more than I ever realized.  Like me, most people are used to everyone in the raid having similar gear, but I quickly found out, as a fresh level 80, my Death Knight in a vehicle had less than ten percent of the health pool and damage output as my Druid, who is in Naxx-25 quality equipment!  Ugh, worse than I thought!

However, I pressed on and let my Death Knight ride shotgun while I went after some trash.  My initial tactic was brilliant in its simplicity: Rush in on a fast-moving Chopper and activate the teleport pad so I didn’t have to kill anything!

Turns out, the pad wasn’t activating, and I realized I’d not seen this before, but it must not activate until Flame Leviathan is spawned for the first time.  Fuck.

Well, I knew it was just a matter of killing the pack in front of Flame Leviathan’s door to spawn him, so I tried a fast-attack Chopper of Doom method again to rush back and kite them to death.  I’m confident that I got one of the large giants down to 87% health… maybe 86.

Next I went for beef, hopping in my 1.4 million HP Siege Engine and barreled down toward the end, towing a huge train behind me, using my dash ability every chance.  Meanwhile, I used my Death Knight to pewpew from the passenger seat and I proceeded to kite around the three pillars near the outside of the Flame Leviathan room, slowly killing the larger giants and spider that was chasing me.  Every 60 seconds, kite into a repair pad and keep going.  After nearly 10 minutes, the trash was dead and I was free to kill off the remaining pack in the room to spawn Leviathan.  I didn’t want to use a Siege Engine for the fight, so I simply died so I could take the portal back and pick up a Demolisher, my vehicle of choice.

Now the real pain began.

At first it didn’t seem so bad.  My basic strategy was to knock down a bunch of Pyrite onto the ground before the fight, since there’s no way I’d be able to knock any down mid-battle (aiming would be near impossible, and beyond that, my Death Knight’s damage was so low it takes 6-8 direct hits to knock a barrel down).  So, before the fight began, I’d ride my Druid shotgun for the higher damage on rockets and knock down Pyrites, ideally getting a good number in each of corner.  Once I was satisfied in how many I had (since they despawn after 3 minutes, eventually I’d be waiting too long and simply be “recycling” my stash, so to speak), I’d swap my Druid back to the driver seat and start up the fight.

From there, it was simple in theory: stack pyrite quickly and use the sprint ability with my Death Knight to keep distance, as each melee hit from Flame Leviathan deals about 10% of the total health of my Demolisher.

However, in practice, it was proving difficult.  I’d frequently die with Flame Leviathan around 50%, with a few really good tries near 30-35%, but I couldn’t get over the hump.  I realized I needed a breakthrough, and I remembered the 2-man video used the turret kills to stun and reset Flame Leviathan’s movement speed buff so kiting was easier, so I tried that out.  Since the Demolisher has barely 100,000 HP with my Death Knight driving, I knew I still had to use the Druid to drive and launch the Death Knight, so that’s what I did.

It was easy enough to kill the one turret, but the second was of course out of reach except to a few ranged attacks, which were not going to do nearly enough DPS to kill the turret before Leviathan caught my Druid and raped him from behind.

So it was back to the original strategy, but still something had to be improved.  Using one computer, alt-tabbed between screens, one issues was targeting Pyrite quickly on the DK passenger while not spending so much time that I lost my Pyrite stack for the Druid who was driving, so I tried out a quick macro:

/target Liquid Pyrite

/cast Grab Crate

This turned out to be what I really needed.  I could quickly tab over to the Death Knight and hit a single key to target and grab the nearest crate without worrying about manually targeting it, which saved a great deal of time in the scheme of things.  Next attempt, Flame Leviathan got to nearly 10% health before I died, but immediately after my death, the trash fully respawned!  Fuck.

Still, I could taste blood, so I plundered back through all the trash.  Having learned my lessons before, I used a Demolisher the whole time, using Pyrite for all non-dwarf adds and refilling Pyrite on the way.  Still died once just from eventual damage to the Demolisher, but it was much easier this time around.

Back to Flame Leviathan, started things out again.  I found my starting position mattered quite a bit, as instinct told me to start in a corner (thus max range), but this actually caused my kite path to cut closer to Flame Leviathan than when I started at the front center and kited toward a corner at the beginning.

Further, the key seemed to be learning a good pattern of when to turn around to refresh Pyrite, when to actually fire the Pyrite, when to grab a crate, and when to use the speed boost.  Since the boost uses 25 Pyrite, and keeping a stack up requires 5 Pyrite ever 7-8 seconds at best, I had to try to spread out my usage of speed with refreshes, and it took hours of wiping to perfect.  Even then, perfect really isn’t the word.  A lot is just luck of which pyrite crates are going to despawn first and where they remain.  Many times, I’d have the distance and my 10-stack going just fine but a particular corner would be out of Pyrite crates due to despawn and I wouldn’t have enough pyrite left to refresh my stack twice more plus the 25 to use the speed boost, that would allow me to reach the next corner where more crates might be waiting.

At any rate, after much trial and error plus a fair bit a luck, the stars finally aligned and I got the kill, which made me laugh out loud to myself at 3AM in the morning — bizarre to be sure.  Got myself a very nice +hit DPS trinket and a wasted caster DPS sword.  Next week, maybe the two-handed mace!

Our patience finally paid off and Ulduar Day 8 brought us our first full 10-man Vox-only night in Ulduar, and my oh my what a difference.

We first stopped by Thorim and after one quick learning attempt for those that were new to the fight altogether, we promptly downed him on attempt #2 of the evening.  What’s even more telling is the timeframe — our longest fight against Thorim on Day 7 lasted 8 minutes and 43 seconds, while our eventual kill here on Day 8 took just under 5 minutes.  It’s easy to imagine how few actual stacks of Lightning Charge he was able to muster up by shaving off nearly four minutes of time.

Next up we decided to take another stab at The Assembly of Iron, which at first presented a number of problems annihilating our tank, but we quickly remedied the situation and once Steelbreaker died, we simply smashed on Molgeim and followed that up with a quick raping of Brundir (lubed, of course).  It was one of those, “Oh, well shit, I think we… yep, we won” moments, which are nice to have.  I suck at remembering though, so no screenshot, but oh well.

Then came what appeared to be the daunting room of trash that is Freya’s lair.  Luckily, it turned out to all be fairly easy albeit time-consuming (’pro’-tip: near everything is CCable if you desire).  After clearing things out, we gathered ourselves and went after Freya herself, quickly getting the feel for the fight and each various add phase presented to us.  A few things we quickly found were not going well: Trees were not dying fast enough, the Detonating Lasher packs had to be handled better so no one exploded when a bunch died nearby, and, what do you know, the triple-spawn pack needs to die at the same time or they revive!

Tree killing was simple enough to resolve by having people call in vent when and where one spawned.

The Detonating Lasher packs exploding faces off was resolved when a great idea was presented — we had the whole raid collapse onto each other (since they have funky, abnormal agro) and all AE.  When they start to reach 20-30% health or so, we call for a full stop on all damage, AE or otherwise, but instead of moving, the raid stays clumped.  We then had Kilwenn our Mage Frost Nova them all and the whole raid immediately spreads out in random directions, away from the now-rooted plants.  Then we quickly start a countdown in vent to begin AEing, and we unleash our destruction at once, finishing them all off in one pack where they were rooted before they can move far enough to get near anyone.

The triple-pack was simple enough.  We had Ugra our Elemental Shaman and Anranius our Priest DPS and kite the Snaplasher as it’s stacking snare made it unable to move after a short while.  The rest of the DPS grabbed the other adds and a simple matter of lowering them all down to 10% or so then calling for death over Vent made the difference.

Having resolved those main issues, Freya kindly dropped for us on our third or fourth attempt against her ever, which was extremely satisfying to say the least.

Last up, we experienced some of the craziest trash ever created — that leading to Mimiron.  It’s hard to describe exactly, but suffice to say there are near infinite ways for even your beefiest raid members (tanks) to die near instantly on any given pull.   Clearly, the raid is meant to utilize the spider-esque vehicles you take over from the filthy gnomes, which we did as best we could, but the first run through this hallway of doom was painful to be sure.  Next time we’re most likely to simply try letting our vehicle drivers “tank” everything and make our regular tanks stand in the back jerking off (or healing if applicable).

We eventually reached the tram and engaged the glorious mechanism that is Mimiron.  What a freaking crazy fight.  Our biggest issue was dealing with the sheer damage output from Plasma Blast on the main tank.  That combined with near-constant Napalm Shell meant our three healers were extremely taxed during the first phase of the fight.

Eventually though we figured out some methods to deal with the damage spikes: namely cooldown usage.  We had Khrashdin our Paladin use Hand of Sacrifice on me as the tank for the first Blast, then I’d use Last Stand/Trinket/Self-Heal for the second Blast, then Shield Wall for the third, and by then we basically had the phase over.  However, we may opt for a less cooldown-centric tactic in future attempts as that still leaves 3 phases where the tank has no oh-shit buttons to speak of.

Phase 2 seems simpler overall, but a few people had a lot of issue keeping track of red-runes underfoot, indicating an incoming Rocket Strike but that’s mostly a practice issue, of which we had little as the raid was winding to a close.

Still, we managed to enter Phase 3 on our best attempt so we’re certainly making progress even if the repair bills are significant for this encounter.  It’s definitely got a high skill tolerance requirement compared to some of the other fights we’ve seen, but we’ll get him soon, so stay tuned for more!

“Mama’s Miraculously Melancholy Magician”

That’s what his mother used to call him as a young boy, tickling him and laughing all the while.  He languished in her adoration, her loving words were a crystalline-blue lake, on which he casually floated with ease, his dark brown eyes closed, drawing in the sun’s radiance as it caressed his cheeks and warmed his eyelids.  Once a pillar of strength in his village, breaking waves of turmoil and angst across his broad back like so many wisps of dust, Kilwenn now felt disgust at his weak mind and even weaker form.

It felt like a lifetime ago that The Plague shattered his former self into a thousand shards of hope and prosperity, cascading toward the dark, damp earth which seemed to swallow each shard in a ravenous fervor.  In many respects, it had been a lifetime ago, back in a time when futures were bright for Kilwenn and his brethren alike.  He had been a mere 20 years old on that fateful day when the seemingly insuppressible hand of despair washed through his home, caressing every surface like a soft summer breeze.  This phantasmal force wafted under the doors into every crevice of the house, infecting every dish and utensil his sisters would later eat from, corrupting his little brother’s favorite stuffed murloc toy which he would later squeeze tight against his brow as he slept.  The blight seeped through every crack and crevice of the once glorious dwelling he called home and, in so doing, poached everyone and everything that mattered to him in life.

In one life anyway…

One past life.

*CRACK*

Kilwenn strained to keep his mind focused on reality — on the present and what he knew to be the physical beings around him, what some might even call comrades.  A sharp pain shattered through his right arm and as he angled his head down toward the source of this agony, his lucidity wavered, drawing him back into his daydreams of the past, of his true self and the man he once was, not the wretched undeath he had become.

A violent jolt of searing white struck him just behind his left jaw, or more precisely, the facial feature that had once been his left jaw.  A guttural moan reverberated from his chest and just as suddenly as the bolt had hit him, he quickly focused the dispersion of dancing elements in his mind, visualizing the pathway through his spine, into his shoulder, down his right arm, and as he fixed his eyes on a nearby dwarven barbarian, a stream of energies burst out from his fingertips and struck the fiend in a shower of molten debris and frigid spray.

The consequence was instantaneous.  The dwarven creature collapsed into a heap so rapidly it was as if a Titan itself had stomped on top of the helpless minion.  The wicked reality was not as omnipotent, but gruesomely satisfying to Kilwenn all the same — the small stubs that passed for legs to this dwarf had been sheered off just below the waist, in a violent spray of elemental destruction and gore, spattering a large, voluminous crystalline orb behind with speckles of dark maroon blood.

This sight pushed Kilwenn fully into being and the reality of the battle that raged all around him.  Whatever or whomever he had been in the past was all for naught.  Now, in this moment, he is and forever will be a master of the arcane, a pedagogue of prestidigitation, a champion of carnage.

He is.. a Mage.

---

Well it’s been a few days and Ulduar Day 5 & 6 were fairly normal; a sub-full roster but reclearing previously downed bosses made for some good farming and a few more attempts got us our first Hodir kill on one of these days as well.  We also tried a handful of attempts on Assembly of Iron which proved moderately difficult.

However, all pales in comparison to what easily became simultaneously my most hated and favorite encounter of Ulduar: Thorim.  Day 6 lent us a small number of attempts to try things out against Thorim’s minions, but Day 7 really opened the doors.  Our WWS showed our progress over the course of some seventeen attempts in the evening, getting as close as Thorim to 6% health on a couple occasions.

The great thing about learning this fight was watching the clear progression every single person made after every attempt, learning exactly where to move, when to run, what to attack, when to cast, etc.  For example, our Arena group was five players (Resto Druid, Mage, Warlock, DPS Shaman, Prot Warrior) and we quickly learned that trying to spread the DPS and healer out was futile as controlling the adds became too difficult when elites could and would one- or two-shot our healer immediately upon spawning.

Instead, we found we could stack up our DPS and healer on the edge of the inner circle to avoid the lightning from the orbs around the room, and while the stuns and Stormhammer damage was much higher, always hitting 4 people when any of the DPS were targeted, it became much easier to intercept the adds as they ran toward the dps/healer group.

Meanwhile, with only 3 people in the Gauntlet group, it was particularly important every member of the group (Prot Paladin, Holy Priest, DPS Shaman) knew exactly how to DPS through the adds properly to beat the timer, though we’re quite certain we agroed Thorim after the “timer” expired but saw no apparent change or enrage of any kind, so our info may be off.

In any event, we eventually perfected both the Gauntlet and Arena phases respectively and facing Thorim himself is quite easy in comparison, but with our 8-man raid (only 4 of which were DPS), we had a very hard time downing him before his Lightning Charge buff stacked too high for tanks to survive once he streaked the -defense debuff and a few normal melee swings.  In fact, on our best attempt of just under 6% health Thorim had 12 stacks of Lightning Charge, which causes him to deal 51,813 damage to me as one of the tanks in 1.63 seconds, which was both retardedly unlucky and insane.

It was clear to everyone that adding two more DPS would make all the difference and turn a difficult challenge into a relative breeze, but what a joy to learn this encounter, especially with such an integral role requirement from every single person involved — a claim 25-man and 40-man raids of yore just cannot compete with.

Genesis 2:3v2.0
And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, but not because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done, but in fact because while he intended to go a full ten days, just to make shit simple and all that, he found himself missing four days somewhere and was too embarassed to say anything.  So God said, “Fucketh it!” and stopped on the seventh.  Turns out, they were hidden between the cushions of his couch the whole time.

It brings me such joy when I can relate my WoW experience, demonesses and false idol worship aside (I’m looking at you Tigole!), to the beloved scripture.  Unfortunately, the above passage represents our Ulduar Day 4 experience all too vividly.

We found ourselves 20 minutes past raid time with only six people online but, determined to throw gold at the nearest repair vendor no matter what, we managed to find two friends to join our festivities to round us out to a nice eight-man crew, but having just dropped Auriyaiyaiyaiyya on Day 3, we were looking at facing something new no matter which direction we opted for and had only 90 minutes of raid time to do it.

So, upon careful consideration by all involved (”Let’s see if Hodir has a bigger blue schlong than Dr. Manhattan.”), we trundled off toward the frozen caverns to meet our fate.

Luckily, Hodir’s trash proved quite easy albeit slow and the hiding worms are a nice surprise the first time, though not especially dangerous to anyone except themselves.

Then came Hodir himself and my oh my how daunting it was.  We spend the majority of our in-combat time trying to figure out what all the various buffs and debuffs were doing and which, if any, of the helper NPCs were worth keeping alive and unfrozen.  On top of that, we had one or two people who seemingly have no jump button and thus stacked Biting Cold to astronomical levels every fight and others who get distacted by the “oooh shiney” hard drive activity light on the side of their computer and therefore saw more snow on their faces than Robert Downey Jr.  Although we only got seven attempts in during the raid time, we easily spent four of those learning how to side step every 5 seconds while facerolling our normal rotations.

Still, considering we have huge room for improvement, we managed a 63% attempt (when we tried letting the NPCs die consequently) so our next 9 or 10 man raid will see his corpse for sure — then we can lift that massive kilt and see what he’s packin, fo realz yo!

What a night!  Day 3 of Ulduar proved as successful as I’d imagined and then some.  Our first night with a full 10 player raid in a fresh reset landed us some six new achievements along with six boss kills (three we’d not defeated prior and one we hadn’t even faced)!

To begin, we threw our initial nine into our tanks of doom and tore through the dwarves and Flame Leviathan with such ease it was silly — Kilwenn our Mage came up with a strategy back for our first Flame Leviathan kill to only have him launched onto Flame Leviathan to deal with turrets, rather than using two people.  This lets our other Demo passenger keep DPSing and igniting Oil and works our great.

We went after XT-002 next and got to try out the recently reintroduced trash, which proved pretty anticlimactic, though it took way too long to kill (Note to Blizzard: A single trash mob shouldn’t have 25% of the health of the boss you’re clearing to — especially when the pack has 3+ mobs like that).

At any rate, XT-002 went down so flawlessly our first attempt we got ourselves a new Nerf Engineering achievement!

Next up was Razorscale, who likewise dropped the first attempt (to be sure, the changes to fireball damage and moving the drill spawns closer together made things much easier) and gave up the Clean Shave achievement as well.

On to the dreaded trash that is Ignis’ lair…  Luckily, by this point we had a tenth member join us but we still had a good half-dozen deaths clearing his room, though we managed to avoid wiping and Kinzie the Rogue eventually managed to clear the bouncing flames of bullshit.

Ignis took a good five attempts or so including a under 1% wipe (gg) but we found our groove and the kill was super smooth and more importantly, we know exactly what to do now which will make for good farming.

 

 

On a side note to Warriors, I respecced my Protection spec slightly for Ignis to grab Piercing Howl, but it proved fairly useless as the snare amount is only useful when they have no or few Heat stacks, but once they get higher values they run faster than you even with daze.  Now, it may be handy for raids using a kite tactic who have the DPS to drop him before Strength stacks too high, but I found a nice system for getting the golems Molten quickly and never had more than 2 golems up at any time except at the end when Ignis was below 10% and I told my healer I was kiting and to focus our MT.

I’d usually start by hamstringing my golem then going back Defensive and running around the nearest flame patch to the far side then inching forward just till I started getting flames ticks, then take a step back.  This ensured the golem was in the flames while I could avoid the damage.  Still, Flame Jets shooting me in the air could screw things up, so when I saw Ignis (my focus target) casting Flame Jets, I’d Concussion Blow if a single golem or Shockwave if I had two, which kept the golem stationary while I was in the air so he’d be stunned until after I landed and thus not move around.  This makes stacking Heat to Molten very quick and is a huge advantage for Warrior’s managing the adds for this fight imo.

That said, we still chose to use three healers (one MT healer, one Slag Pot/Raid healer, and one OT/MT spot healer), which slowed the fight but offered much needed stability.  I would argue that two healers is doable depending on the OT’s incoming damage, but using a Holy Paladin to heal Slag Pot/MT would be very efficient I’d imagine.

Anyway, back on track, about two hours into the raid now we move on and have our hand at Kologarn once again after our brief attempt on Day 2.  After a few attempts, we tried having a few of our ranged DPS stick in melee range of Kologarn’s body, and that worked very well to reduce incidental Eye Beam damage.  Further, while they reported the silence was a fairly long duration, it was infrequent enough to be worthwhile in the long run.  This gave our healers more room to move from Eye Beams, and after four or five practice runs (including not one, but two one-shot MT deaths just after the second armor debuff stacked to reduce by 50%), we took him down.  The key seemed to be making sure both our Paladin tank and I watched our armor debuff stacks and quickly taunted off the other when we hit a double stack, and agroing the earth elementals quickly once they spawned from the arm death.  Otherwise, it just took time for our ranged/healers to practice avoiding Eye Beams and get used to the pattern of raid damage from Shockwave, but all in all it was very smooth.

 

The Stone Tempered Giants that surround Auriaya’s playground can only be described as “WTF HOLY JESUS MY FACE”-esque trash.

Figuring out how to manage these two giants was like the plot line of the latest Matthew McConaughey/Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy.  At first the two were together often but standing side-by-side as equals, probably working together at some quirky advertisement agency and/or bookstore where the boss was a MILF who looked like even her vagina smelled like granola.  Soon, however, their lives get interrupted as two new beautiful and interesting people invade and slowly, before they know it, start to drag these two dearest friends apart. 

“But how can this be?” the would-be onlookers protest, “If they’re split apart by these two blasphemous intruders, they can’t marry and have 2.4 beautiful blond little giants of their own!  Err, we mean kids… white kids, obviously.”

Just as the audience is wondering how they’ll ever get away from their new found interests, suddenly Jennifer Aniston, at the sight of McConaughey taking his shirt off (in a restaurant, movie theatre, and/or church no doubt) morphs into a Cthulu-esque creature and enters a hyper-atomic form of PMS, instantly decapitating her recently discovered love interest (and all other living souls within earshot) with two of her now 17 giant tentacles, and sloshes her way back to McConaughey, gnawing away on the dangling, severed leg of her ex-lover.

That’s essentially what these giants were like at first — a complete clusterfuck of death and mayhem.  Luckily, we eventually figured out there was a sweet spot of distance to keep them and to destroy the orbs and eventually we got it under control, but it wasn’t pretty at first.

Next up was Auriyairiayiyaiyaia (names have been changed to protect the spelling champions), who’s cat posse raped me so quickly the first pull I thought I had broken all of my equipment.

Luckily for me (sort of), I had not, and as others mentioned, the pull was reportedly one of the hardest parts.  However, we used a few crafty tricks.  We had Khrashdin our Paladin pull with Divine Protection and Anranius our Priest throw on Guardian of whatever while Kheelan the Druid channeled zero-threat Tranquility through the wall, while I taunted Aur herself and the raid bunched up to begin.  It worked extremely well and made the pull very simple, which was good because for a few attempts, the fight looked like a bitch.

We won’t name names, but a few people had some… issues… with avoiding the Void Zones left from the Defender’s death.  Luckily, after our fifth or sixth pull, we quickly devised our winning strategy, which was simply managing the timing of events properly.  We’d get the Defender to 20-30% health and stop damage while Khrashdin the Paladin and I kept taunting the Defender as much as possible to try to avoid incidental damage whenever we could.  We then waited for Aur to cast her next Sonic Screech so this way we could still keep the raid stacked up to mitigate the Screech damage.  Once Screech landed, we’d focus DPS on the Defender and try to stun him as he was about to die while the raid ran in all directions to spread out and hopefully avoid the Void Zone landing under too many people.

Then it was a matter of handling the fear (Fear Ward, Berserker Rage, and Tremor Totem all worked well for that), then waiting for the next Screech.  Once that second Screech hit, we moved the whole raid to a new position some distance from other Void Zones and repeated the process once the Defender came back.  I think we had 3 Void Zones up once she dropped, so it went quite smoothly and was very satisfying.

 

 

That was about it, we stopped after four hours for our Day 3 fun and we’ll be heading back soon for some more brand new bosses!