Crimson Halls Review

Tuesday night Zordon sent us to ICC10 for the new Crimson Halls.  We headed for the Crimson Halls first, wanting to take a peek at it…

Trash: D+ (boring, the + is for lich slap)
Mostly a letdown, just gather it up and AE it.  The lich is kind of funny though because he casts an ability called lich slap… lich plz!  hahaha… love that.

It can be shield reflected though, then you get to yell out, “Stop hittin’ urself!”

The commander’s put a bleed debuff on whoever is tanking them that stacks to 3 and was doing 10k dmg a tick.  Pretty nasty, especially if he gets stunned with a bunch of mobs on him.

Blood Princes: A- (hella fun!)
REALLY fun fight, completely mechanic driven and has people doing all sorts of shit!  You have 3 mobs that share an HP pool but only one of them can be dealt actual dmg (that counts towards their HP) at any given time.  When they are the mob with the HP they become ‘empowered’ and hit like a mach truck carrying photon torpedos.  There’s a whirling thing that knocks peeps back, a giant fireball that you have to semi kite, some black clouds that pew pew and buff you and some bombs falling from the sky.

Its like droppin’ a rabbit into a pit of lions fun.  Mainly because of the vortex that gets created and knocks peeps around (the bombs that fall to the ground can do it to).

Queen Lana’thel: B (a mix tape of boss abilities)
First of all… does anyone realize what lana spelled backwards is?  Just thought I’d point that out so you adults can nix your kids from playing such a perverse game.  Someone should start an online petition to make it more ‘kid friendly’.

Its Festergut with a twist.  She has like double his HP but she initially bites someone which increases their DPS by 100% and after 50 seconds they have to satisfy their craving for blood by biting someone else.  If they don’t then they become MC’d and you gotta kill ‘em.  As you can imagine… that’s bad.

In the meantime you will get other debuffs like Mother Shahraz’s Fatal Attraction (only the opposite of it cuz they have to run together instead of apart).  You’ll also get a wonderful continual AE going on like the two trash mobs before Lady Deathwhisper.  Next on the menu for abilities is Lord Jaraxxus’ flame poop ability (but this one is a pretty purple and lasts twice as long).  She will debuff the person closest to her other than the MT and hit them for the same dmg that she is hitting the MT (but its shadow instead of physical).  Overall though its very easily managed stuff…

Until she decides to go vampire bat-form so she can hop into the sky, spinning around and spraying fecal matter like some rabid monkey that’s been hittin’ the pipe too hard.  She hits people with some bolt that explodes, doing damage to them and people nearby which quickly adds up and toasts the raid if you aren’t spread out enough.  This is going to be stupid painful on 25man, not looking forward to it.

If you live through that you get a chance to go back to p1 and start it all over again.

Seems fun though!  We’re going back in this coming Monday to try and take her down.  11 attempts left so I think we have a good shot of getting her down.

Overview: B
The trash in this wing is just that, trash with no interesting abilities or real thought put into them.  They hit hard and can easily wipe you if you just fuck around but not ‘interesting’ (not counting lich slap).  The Blood Princes are a great pick me up and tons of fun.  The Queen is a nice entree with a variety of spices that make you ask, “please daddy, can I have some more?”

ICC10: Plagueworks Wing Review

(Note:  There’s definitely some spoiler info in here so if you don’t care then stop reading where it says Trash.)

Welp, just got done with the Abomination wing on 10man and I must say… fun as fuck.

I would just like to go on record as saying this wing will be nerf’d.  Probably not for 2 weeks though when the next wing opens.  Why?  Because they nerf anything thats can’t be easily PUG’d (read: Lady Deathwhisper Nerf).

The Lady Deathwhisper encounter has seen the following changes in the 25 player normal version: mana pool has been reduced, the health on all adds has been reduced, and Adherents will wait a little longer after spawning before they start casting.

(this is the part where you’d stop reading if you don’t want to know spoiler infoz!)

NEW Discipline Gear List

First of all Merry Belated Xmas (or w/e holiday you celebrate… if none then merry days off work / school / IRL) and a BIG Happy New Years!  May the loot flow like a river and your nerd achievement points rack up like coins falling from the slots.  Don’t forget to eat your black eyed peas today btw!

I remember why I forgot to update the first list.  Because it takes a lot of work and effort into putting all the information into a spread sheet, making sure that info is correct, then transcribing it to a blog post, making it pretty, and the most time consuming part of it all… adding links to those items.

But it is now done.

Click for Updated Discipline Gear List

If you didn’t already click the link then I’ll give you a bit more information about it.

The list uses the stat weights that Bobturkey has come up with.  He has solid math behind it and I very much liked the initial stat weights he came up with earlier this year, which is why I chose to use them again.  I did however deviate from his path a bit.

He gives stamina a weight… I’m completely against this simply because all our gear already comes with stamina.  In The Burning Crusade priests sometimes had to choose between healing stats and stamina, in Lich King this is no longer the case.  In most situations if the item is better because of healing stats… it is also better in stamina.

Gemming… I’m a big advocate of mana regen (because I blow through my mana… fast).  The stat weights however are for throughput so I decided to gem for mana regen (which is how I gear currently anyway).  This should give the gear a nice balanced feel.

If you have ANY questions feel free to reply on the gear list.  I’m sure there are several errors that slipped through (I’m only human…’ish).  Hope you like it and can get some benefit out of it.

Marrowgar Nerf and ICC25 Review

Just like the title says… he got a nerf to his melee damage.  A SUBSTANTIAL nerf.  Last week Conifer and I had issues two healing Mr. Marrowgar just because the damage was so crazy on the two tanks plus you had the random burst on raid.  This week however, no issues at all.  It wasn’t like we suddenly got a bunch of better gear (same gear actually), he just got WAY easier.

Last Friday we went into ICC25 and tried it out, full cleared it which I’m happy to say but it was definitely different compared to ICC10.

Lord Marrowgar:
Oddly enough I did find this considerably easier on 25man.  The concept is exactly the same except you are using 3 tanks instead of 2.  The only difficult part was making sure everyone was covered on healing when he whirlwinds.  We assigned healers to each cardinal direction and that made the fight about 50 times easier.

Lady Deathwhisper:
This was the fight that punched us in the testicles (or ovaries if you are so inclined).  We started out using the strat that I thought was best, having healers on the platform and using healer aggro to suck everything that direction and tanks picking up adds on the stairs.  I know it works… another charter uses it, but it wasn’t going so well for us.  We switched up to a modified version of what Bosskillers.com uses.  On the east side where the two adherents spawn we had 3 melee that would kill one as soon as it spawned, move to the next one, and then go to Lady between waves.  The melee on the west side killed their adherent and moved to whatever showed up from the stairs or mop up fanatics left on their side.

After everyone got used to what was not supposed to be tanked or what was dying to magic vs. physical it went down pretty well.  The ghosts in p2 deal a substantial amount more damage than in 10man (which this fight is cake in).

Gunship:
Thanks to both of our tanks having already done this on 10man we one shotted it.  I’m not even sure if 1/2 the raid knew what was going on.  They’ve since fixed the bug but we had our gunship never land so we lost the loot (master looter wasn’t on the boat) =(.

Deathbringer Saurfang:
This fight is still finger bleeding fun on 25man.  Here’s how we did it…

First we start with the tanks tanking Deathbringer so that he faces the door he is coming out of.  Next we have the melee doing NO AE attacks.  Then we move to ranged positioning.  Everyone had problems getting just far enough away from each other so in comes the buddy system.  Every ranged stands with 1 other ranged.  It guarantees a 2 on every blood nova… BUT, it guarantees only 2 on every blood nova.  Next we put 3 healers, the strongest of the MT healers (helps if one is a paladin with righteous fury going) where Muradin spawns.

This means that when flesh beasts spawn they go running for those healers… but wait, here’s the tricky part.  We have a team at the base of the steps a hunter, a druid, and an elemental shaman.  The hunter plants a slow trap which… well… slows them.  As they come down the steps the druid will typhoon them, knocking them back up so that they never hit anyone.  The shaman goes next with thunderstorm knocking them back up and for good measure we had a destro lock that could stun them if need be.  It worked great.

The only other thing I noticed was that whenever someone gets the mark… it seems best to just let them die immediately.  If they aren’t up then he doesn’t start crazy generating energy.  The HP he gains is certainly a detriment but seemed the lesser of two evils.

Trick Note: We soulstoned one of the pallies and when he got to 30% we DI’d the person with the mark to slow the energy gain.  Neat trick… but probably not all that useful.

Overview:
Lord Marrowgar = Easy
Lady Deathwhisper = HARD
Gunship = Void Reaver (read: loot pinata)
Deathbringer Saurfang = Medium to Hard

Some other good reads for 3.3…

• Bobturkey’s 3.3 Impressions
• Averna’s quirky post

Rez of the Week – Patch Notes (3.3)

There’s been a bit of a drought here.  For Thanksgiving Kahnti flew in to visit myself and some other guildies that live in my town so we partied it up for about a week. Then Delinia’s daughter thought it would be kewl to bring the flying pig flu or some shit (read: minor cold) home from school and share it with everyone.  But I had complications that turned into a nasty sinus infection that led to losing my voice and a smokers wheezing cough. I’m still recovering but I figure I might as well milk it while I got it!

Then I go to check F’ing MMO Champs and their all like… 3.3 isn’t officially coming out tomorrow but since I’m sleeping with Ghostcrawler he told me it was.  Now, you can read the patch notes here OR you can read the edited version brought to you by me.

Without further ado…