Rant of the week. Tier tokens.

Today, Im going to rant a bit about tier tokens.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these lil’ buggers. Love to have em, hate the way blizzard seems to drop one that cant be used by our raid makeups.

Perhaps its raid composition, perhaps it’s the groups lumped into who can roll for each tier token – but most likely both.

Call it bad recruitment or raid makeup, but here is an example of one of our raids – last nights to be precise:

6 Death Knights (4 Blood, 2 Unholy)
5 Druids (2 Feral, 2 Boomkins, 1 Tree)
4 Rogues
1 Mage
3 Warriors (2 Prot, 1 Fury)
2 Shaman (Both Resto)
2 Paladins (1 Prot, 1 Holy)
1 Hunter
1 Priest (Holy)

It probably shows a decent distribution of the more popular classes in the game. DK, Druid and Rogue. We were lacking the sign ups to have a more varied group, so this is what we had to (quite successfully) roll with.

If you know the tier tokens you know exactly where this rant is heading…

3 Tier token types, 3 or 4 classes per token.

For some reason, the token that has 4 classes on rolls in Death Knights, Druids, Rogues and Mages. That’s 16/25 people in the group after the same tier tokens! In a more balanced raid group, this would not be a problem, but even in 10-mans we have this same distribution problem.

Whats worse, until a few of weeks ago we had no raiding Hunters, Paladins or Warlocks… and in the space of one week we seen 8 tier tokens drop. ALL CONQUEROR. (1 x 25 man OS, 2 x 10 man OS, 1x VOA and 2x 10man Naxx groups.)

I seriously wonder if it wasn’t a case of GM vengeance. Our guild leader put in a complaint after a couple of runs of seeing only these tokens drop when we didn’t have anyone that can use, and they just gave her the slopey shoulder “visit our forums!”. Whatever…

Anyway, I don’t know how other guilds raids are distributed but I think that they should consider splitting that “Of The Champion” (I think) tier token in two.

Its obvious DK’s in their overpowered state are going to be the most popular, and no raid group is ever going to get the perfect distribution of players unless they have 25 hand picked raiders in a raid guild and they’re always available. Druids seem to be everywhere just now, rogues were always popular purely because they are fun, and there are a number of mages about despite us seeming to have a defecit of raiding ones.

If its just us – then there are surely others in a similar position, even if it’s a different distribution of classes (say all hunters warlocks and paladins) in which case perhaps a more “class sensitive” drop rate would be appropriate. E.G if 50% of the raid is in token A’s roll range, 25% is in B’s and 25% is in C’s – then have that be the ratios in which the tokens drop… because having 100% on 8 items when theres 0% able to roll is retarded.

And yes… this is coming from someone who happens to have picked up most of his tier tokens almost first time every time they have dropped. (7.5 gloves + shoulders, seen the pants drop once and chest drop once.) So if you think im bitching cos Im not getting gear, thats not the case :p

On a lighter note… got a yummy chest piece off Heigan last night. Just hope the 7.5 chest is still an upgrade because its been an objective of mine to get the Full Frostfire set since the days of raiding Molten Core, and Ill cry if I have to roll over someone to downgrade into it :p.

-V

Dual speccing, good for mages?

So, I hear that training the ability to Dual-spec is going to cost in the region of 500-1000 Gold.

This sounds fair enough. For hybrid classes this is a damn good investment – especially if they plan to do a lot of solo or PVP work alongside their tanking or healing duties, but my concern is: is it worth it for a mage?

For myself, once I settle into a spec, I don’t tend to change unless there are major nerfs to a spec, or buffs to another that justify some experimentation. I think I have had half a dozen major respecs over the life of my mage. From Levelling in fire to frost at about 50 which I continued into raiding MC until TBC came out. Half way through outland I became Arcane, and when I started raiding I became arcane frost (40/0/21 spec I believe). I leveled as frost through Northrend then Went frostfire for raiding, changing to Arcane when the spec got buffed, and since then back to Fire.

If I done PVP I could take arcane as a spec for that, as it still has many powerful instant nukes – and my main spell for PVP always ends up being Arcane Missiles because players cant escape it…

For grinding mobs, frost is/was very powerful (at least until the Blizzard snare Nerf – not tried it since.)

I am sticking to fire or frostfire for raiding (I am mid decision on how to spec for the raids, but its going to be a fire/frost combination with either fireballs or frostfire as the primary nuke.)

If Dual speccing was introduced a month ago – I would have been a fool not to take it as I have spent a good 500g+ in the last week or two due to jumping about specs due to Blizzards flip-flopping with Arcane, to the point where its damage output is consistently lower than what I was originally doing with frostfire. /facepalm. Its been fun and educational but it mightily pissed me off.

I think for the time being my mage is a raid + farm junky. Fire or Frostfire is a viable soloing/grinding spec (quick nukes and good AOE ability due to empowering my blizzards.) aswell as the highest DPS spec I have access to.

For me… I don’t see me coughing up, at least not until I find an excuse to run with a second spec.

It is a different story for my priest however… a) she does inscription, b) I originally wanted to heal, but am not shadow for leveling and if I ever get her into raiding, it will likely be as a shadow priest. I will most likely be doing regular respecs to fill in the roles needed – and I have the ability to do it on the move. For her, I will definitely be coughing up – even if it ends up being holy or Discipline that I change between for different fights if I end up healing.

There is no argument that dual speccing definitely benefits hybrids more than anyone else (If a priest can be considered a hybrid) more than the pure classes, which feel severely nerfed right now I think. (Mage + rogue + warlock+hunter.) you have an alternative to your norm for grinding/raiding/pvp’ing, but that’s about it.

-V

Dual specs incoming at last?

Im sure this info is all over the place now, but here is what info I have gathered from my fellow bloggers on dual specs. (Subject to change or wiping at any point in time, especially if it looks good.)

• Level 80 players only. (May change later.)
• Two specs only (May change later. Great for true hybrids that may want to tank, heal dps, PVP etc etc.)
• Respeccing will take place at a Lexicon of power (In citys or summoned by a scribe, much like Soul Wells or perverted wardrobes/summoning stones.)
• Your secondary spec will be saved, and you can view it at any point in time. (My interperetation of how this will work: what your current spec, glyphs and hotbar layout is will be saved as your alternative spec, for a quick change back later.)
• Glyphs will be displayed along with your talent tree now as they are tied.
• Glyphs will change along with your spec. (If saved)
• Hotbars will change along with your spec. (If saved)
• Gear wont be “saved” as such, but blizzard will be including its own version of Outfitter/Item rack which will allow you to quickly switch between saved gear sets.
• Hunters will get an ability to access stables remotely with a cooldown. (Primarily for when dual speccing into or out of Beast mastery to swap your exotic pets in and out.)
• Pets talent trees will reset every time you change spec, instead of it being remembered. An inconvenience, but as compensation pet respecs are free.
• And, for me: The biggest change to smile about – When doing your talent points – you need to “save” to apply the changes. Yey! No more 50G cock ups when you mis-click a talent you don’t want. (It will still happen, but you can review your talents before accepting)

The changes are more suited to hybrid classes, but everyone will benefit, be it a change in attack style, (for me, arcane or frostfire builds, or maybe frost for aoe grinding them shoveltusks or boosting in lower level instances.) for PVP or for a specific encounter.

It will take setting up, and some changes are again, something that should have been done at the launch of Vanilla WOW – not 4 years down the line, but overall – I think this will help us out a lot.

Damn. Now I really want to get a group of 5 druids going as a leveling group for fun :p can all hop between tanking, melee, casting or healing whenever we feel like it! Hehe. (Well, 4 druids and a rogue would be more flexible, but still!)

-V

More on 3.09

Im probably coming across as a whiney biatch whenever I am talking about the latest changes. I do apologise.

There are some changes I like (See BRK's latest comments on BM changes!)

Whilst I do agree that there have been a lot of changes since "vanilla WoW" - I think the game is in a much better state today than it was back then. Gameplay is smoother, encounters more interesting, content is more thoroughly thought out, scenery, graphics and indeed, most classes have done nothing but improve over time, I think that lately there have been too many changes snuck in at the last moment without mentioning.

Explosive shot stealth Nerf + Arcane Barrage stealth Nerf being the two that are on my mind right now.

A slight drop in DPS is not the end of the world, but as proven with my ramblings over the last few posts - it does paint a dark picture for those involved when (mis)handled in the manner it was.

Communication from Blizzard is good... but that doesnt mean we, the community, will forgive such slippages that dont even get mentioned until some player outs them with in game tests, and asks what happened.

Where is Hello-kitty island anyway...

-V

3.09 testings.

Went into game last night and tested my shot rotation with the changes.

Overall there was only a small drop in my damage between from my Arcane blasts stacks effect on my arcane missiles. Arcane barrage got a severe kick in the teeth though.

On a target dummy not burning cooldowns I went from about 2400-2800DPS to 1800-2200DPS.

I ended OS 25 with 2700 DPS, normally I would be getting closer to 3300.

Suffice to say in the end I decided to re-try Frostfire (2000-2400 on the dummies without cooldowns)

It seems pretty inconsistent at the moment, ill see how Naxx goes if Im in this week. I had 3.3k after the arachnid quarter as arcane pre-patch. Shall see how Frostfire goes with my new gear. I am tempted to return to arcane, but I have already respecced and re-glyphed twice to try to get a decent rotation, spending some 200G and intend to give it a chance.

I ticketed Blizz about – at the very least they should have offered a free respec with the changes… A little QQ… But come on – the changes screwed over the spec I was using, or at least I think it did… this in turn forced me to spend hours checking and chopping and changing glyphs and talents, I just wanna scream.

Just gotta wait for the opinions from others to flood into the blogs I follow, maybe someone will come up with a work around that doesn’t involve the arcane blast AND arcane missiles glyphs (I like my healy evocation and my super mage armour L)

I wonder if they plan to do anything with the other mage specs. Mages to tend to pull rather low DPS for their gear levels compared to most other classes. (e.g DKs in same gear levels doing double the damage :p but that’s to be expected, it’s a hero class after all.)

-V

P.S – The Ice Stone has melted!

Blizzards constant shanges sending them down the tubes?

Today, Im gonna ramble.

I mean properly ramble :p

Browsing blogs and viewing peoples opinions on patches 3.09, and 3.1, and talking to friends in game *waves*, are Blizzard digging themselves a hole?

Siha, at Banana shoulders recent post talks about some of the changes being implemented to Paladins.

Summary: Untested, inconsiderate, premature.

Mages?

They want to nerf the PVP capabilities of the arcane mage. Ok, I can see that. They don’t want to nerf PVE. Ok, I can see that too, they are overpowered.

2 Minute evocation back to 4 minute evocation?

Class becomes UNPLAYABLE.

It only clicked when reading SpicyTunas blog and chatting with friends over Teamspeak, the way Arcane is played is hard and fast, burning evocations and mana gems like crazy to keep on casting.

I trigger my evocation when I hit about 4k Mana, then a gem when im back down about 6k from my Mana cap (I have 21k mana raid buffed). I usually always end up around 1-3k mana when my evocation is up again.

I don’t usually get time for a third evocation unless it’s a technical boss fight that involves a lot of moving around (ergo, not casting, regenerating mana on the move and not needing it as badly anyway! (441 Mana regen in combat 556out of 5SR for me. (I think))

If I need a mana potion in a boss fight, its going badly. This is with a 2 minute evocation.

Again… 4 minute evocation? That leaves me stood there for two minutes wanding… screw that! Frostfire here I come again I think. Arcane is no longer feasible for PVE again if this is true and goes ahead.

Replenishment requirements:

Guess what? We have cleared 10 man naxx repeatedly, and are half way through 25 man naxx, without a single “replenishment” class in the guild that raids. When the mana regen changes go ahead, even with the new additions of replenishment options, we wont have any (Im NOT nerfing 1k off of my dps to give people back a pitiful amount of mana from frost…) The changes to be frank, may very well screw over our raiding viability, despite the quality of the members.
Im sure there has been outcry on the forums, but we all know blizzard Nerfs first and “fixes” later. Just look at hunters.

Poor bastids had a perfectly reasonable spec get nerfed into the ground, then have Blizz turn round, apologise for making a mistake, and promise to repair BM back to a reasonable level. All through the PTR testing for this, BM hunters were crying out that it was too much, but nobody cared up in Blizz HQ. (And looksie, some of those fixes come with 3.09 - untested...)

There is a good 11 Million players on WOW, maybe more – that’s a good 1 Million + per class on average. Every time your class gets nerfed to the ground the players have 4 options.

- Suck it up, biatch. (Many players are not bothered about operating at 100% or ar oblivious to their capabilities anyway)
- Reroll another class
- Respec to something else
- Quit playing.

Many will suck it up, perform poorly in comparison to others, and then probably end up taking one of the other 3 options out of desparation.

Rerolling? How long for? Your no longer at end game, your missing the end content with your raiding friends, your behind the curve, your gonna get replaced before you get to 80. To boot, its guaranteed that at some point the class you just were will get buffed back up to OP for a period.

Respec? An action, we have all seen. Beast mastery went from being the biggest chunk of hunter specs to the lowest. (Another blogger put up a chart on pre 3.08 and post 3.08 hunter stats, Ill try to find it.) Ok, kudos to them. How many of these hunters decided to just stop playing instead of re-rolling? Well – to put it bluntly, I know 2 active hunters, both pissed off with the way their class is just now. They don’t play them very often. (One has given up now I think about it.) Hunters used to be one of the most common classes, now I barely ever see them - especially in raids.

Quit playing? I don’t see me doing this any time soon, im too much of an altoholic to let such changes affect me. I love the game for the adventure and social aspect, and the challenges of trying my best whenever I can, BUT… Look at SWG. Blizzard are seriously heading towards NGE status. Classes are becoming unrecognizable, changes are becoming bigger and bigger, and some changes are being stealthed in without even a patch note or warning. This is bad business. Very bad. Communication is king, and GhostCrawler cant reach everyone by simply spamming a forum. (Many posts will be picked out and relayed by reliable bloggers, and wow insider, this is the only way I get such information - but I do get some 200 items a day into my feed reader to go over...)

Are they getting desperate? Is activision digging in their claws too deeply? Some of the changes are things that have been QQd over for 4 years, such as hunter ammo pouches.

Result: Blizzard are removing them completely. No hunter I have spoken to is actually in favour of this. They have had their character a long time, and have accepted the inconvenience of 4 bags, and ammo costs. At most they think maybe Blizz should have added a bag slot specifically for ammo, so that hunters get the normal 5 bags. They fully expect this change to break their class before they fix it. Bag space is great, but its only a problem if your unorganised in the first place.

As per my recent post on this change… What about the warlocks? They have to carry a couple of bags worth of soulshards (even with a soul-shard bag, they often need spares for raiding.) or a dedicated bag, putting them in the same situation as hunters.

Sure, they have their perverted wardrobe to summon people now – that saves them a couple of shards, and looks pretty funky – but they still have to carry shards to pop one up every time someone has to run off for repairs, reagents, gear change, respec, or is too slow to get summoned by the summoning stone outside instance.

(Big bonus though – you can go straight into the instance and summon everyone from there! No more Tauren on proto drakes getting in the way…)

They still need to create soulwells, soulshards, firestones, use shards for some spells and abilities, and have a backup since it can be hard to gather them in raids. Especially in pugs where you often get kicked if your DPS isn’t too high, and the speed mobs go down to AOE your basically going to be standing there draining souls and doing no DPS otherwise you miss the opportunity. DPS = poo, out on arse you go. Simple changes could be as little as allowing shards to be double stacked, or stacked in 5’s – but Im willing to bet that they would sooner do away with shards entirely, or put them on a currency or rune type system so they don’t take bag space at all. (Or as mentioned for hunters, make it a separate consumables bag so you can still carry all the normal crap we all do.)

Anyway, that’s my rant. (For now.) Im not really pissed off, (Except maybe that I have spent about 2 hours a week for the last month re-testing shot rotations in anticipation to yet another arcane nerf.) I still enjoy the game immensely - I wouldn’t be addicted to it if I didn’t. I’m enjoying the challenges, socializing and playing with all my characters, but in all honesty, I see Blizzivision making some critical errors as the game advances that I am positive will drive players away.

I would put money on the population dropping to about 8 Million by July, as players bleed off – even with new raid content incoming. Too many people are family/group players, who would stop playing if a friend/family member/spouse does – so although you may only lose 5% of the hunters who cancel their account with a bad change (50,000 people = a good half a million £ a month of your profits blizz…) – they would take at a guess, one person each with them to another game. (Looksie, you just lost a million a month in subscriptions.) Theres 9 other classes out there waiting to get targeted...

Be smart about it…

-V

3.09. More changes, more testing to be done. *harrumph*

Just caught some info on patch 3.09 which is due to go live this week, and as a result:

More theory crafting and rotation tests.

/facepalm

Why do you do this to me blizz? All I wanna do is provide good DPS for my comrades!!!

Ok, let’s get into it.

Here’s the changes:

Spells:

1. Arcane power damage bonus halved, and cooldown halved. (10% bonus damage, 1min CD -Needs confirmation. This could be painful on the mana bar, since Arcane Power causes your spells to cost more mana… if it’s the same mana consumption, you now have this triggered every minute eating through your mana faster…)
2. Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power = 15s cooldown, POM = 1.5s cooldown. (Means you cant POM something within 15s of using an AP, and I’m not sure, but does this mean POM activates the global cooldown? … That doesn’t sound like it’s a very useful spell any more, except for Pom pyro PVP players. (Say that 10x as fast as ya can!))
3. POM cooldown reduced from 3Min to 2Min – nice for PVP mages!

Glyphs:

1. Glyph of Arcane Missiles = +25% crit damage to arcane missiles (old glyph added 5 yards to the cast range)
2. Glyph of Mana gem = 40% bonus mana when chomping on a gem, was 10% (Nice!)
3. Glyph of Arcane Blast – Damage bonus reduced from 5% to 3%. (Has this not already been implemented??)

Looking at the above, I think I would be a fool not to take the Arcane Missiles glyph, this has 2 effects:

1. I lose my Glyph of Mage Armour, or my Glyph of Evocation. Both fantastic glyphs. *pouts*
2. If the experimentations with shot rotation prove that Ill be using Arcane Missiles more, then I will most likely need to talent into Arcane Missiles. Dang! I only used that on a missile barrage proc previously

Currently rotation:

Arcane Blast x3 (54% damage bonus (45% on arcane missiles with the current bug that stops the Arcane Blast Glyph affecting Arcane Missiles.)
Arcane Barrage (consumes the damage bonus, hits hard.)
Arcane Missiles any time that arcane barrage procs, followed with a Barrage tap.

I predict that with the change:

New rotation:

Arcane blast x3 (39% bonus damage with glyph instead of 54% L )
Arcane Missiles (consumes the buff, hopefully the glyph bug will be fixed or its only 30% bonus damage from the buff.)
Arcane barrage tap, then repeat.

What do I expect to see?

Overall I expect to see a drop to my DPS – this is expected, Arcane is overpowered in comparison to the other specs, and this is Blizzards attempt to bring it down to size. The drop in DPS will come from less damage bonus from stacking Arcane Blast, and the cast time for Arcane Missiles when we don’t have a Missile Barrage proc. On the other hand, I think this will be a bit more mana efficient since less spells are being spammed out.

One thing I would try to pay particular attention to: Clearcasting procs…

+50% crit chance on a clearcast spell, and the spell costing no mana. If you are very very lucky your 3rd Arcane Blast will trigger this. In that event, your Arcane missiles costs 0 mana, has (in my case) an 80% crit chance, a 39% damage bonus and when it crits: it crits for 275% damage instead of 250% - which could prove vurry nice… (I may be off with the % here, but I think talented arcane does 250% crit damage instead of the usual 200% talented damage, and 150% untalented crit damage.)

If after testing, the Arcane Blast glyph is still not working for arcane missiles, and this rotation proves the best: I’m going to drop the Arcane Blast glyph. That 9% bonus damage is never going to get seen unless I keep my current shot rotation. Keep the mana regen or heal-ocation glyphs as they are fantastic utility. Unfortunately this will be un-testable until the patch goes live.

I have read that some opinions are that this is a PVP nerf without affecting PVE – but as far as I can see it, the effect on PVP is not that huge. (Little less burst damage, but more availability of it) an Arcane Powered POM PYRO is still more than feasible – you just have a 1.5s cooldown on the POM before you can activate AP (lob an Arcane barrage at the target maybe between activations? Assuming AP is not on the GCD)

3.1 Changes

Over at Wow-Insider they are detailing all the predicted 3.1 class changes.

There are a lot of neat and interested changes, that I may go over once they have finished dishing them out. The biggest one people are noticing:

Hunters no longer need ammo pouches, or ammo supplies. Woo! Bag slot!

But... Wheres the warlock soul shard goodness?

Sadpanda for warlocks?

-V

Huntering

So, my hunter hit 64 last night, and I have to say, I have been having a wail of a time with her. I have a number of alts on the go at the minute and don’t get to focus on anyone often, but I have been experimenting with my hunter.

I have 4 pets.

• Primary DPS pet: Cat (King Bangalash skin.) – Level 61

• Tanking/Grinding pet: Ape (Ucha Skin? (light brown, Un’goro crater cave monkey) – Level 61

• Retired Pet: Moth (pale one from Dranei start area.) – Level 58

• New toy: Devilsaur (White + pinkypurple striped one from Un ’goro crater) – Level 62

First thing you might note is that nothing is my level… This is due to me loving the Gorilladin AOE grind, up until about… 61. I then leveled my Cat up, had a little play around with the moth, then set out for an exotic to try out.

MY first stop was MC with a guild + pug group, but due to the seeming incompetence of a lot of the group, and their inability to follow instructions (or leave a group of 3 of us stand at the side playing with a corehound) I failed to get one. (High level hunter misdirecting onto me and a resto druid healing me. Worked a treat but someone ALWAYS came up thinking they would tank it, or that it would be helpful to stick their daggers in – despite repeated beggings and temper tantrums from me and the other hunter :p)

I wasn’t frustrated… honest.

Anyway, dropping that idea I opted to give a devilsaur a spin. Ive seen plenty about, and disliked the look of them, and the way they move. After a quick browse through petopia with my wife (she started a hunter and I was giving a little tutorial and guide through familys, talent trees etc etc. ) I stumbled across a pretty nice looking White one. (Me and my white pets :/ ) I had not seen this devilsaur before, and decided I would set off to try and tame one (It didn’t appear to be a rare.).

After a lengthly fight I land in Un’goro and start my search.

And I searched…

And searched……

What is it with these damned things? You turn your back for one second and they bite your ass off, but when you are actually LOOKING for one… None in sight, not even King Mosh.

I decided I would just grab a random pet for protection whilst I continued my hunt (at level 63 I was not exactly overpowered for some of the mobs in the zone. Especially if Mosh set about me without my noticing, and me being petless....)

I mouse over my mini map at the tracked beasts. “Devilsaur” blips up.

YESS!!!! I figure if nothing else Ill get practice at taming one that I don’t want to keep, so I ride over to it, and lo and behold… a 60 ft tall Devilsaur is stomping off in the opposite direction – and it’s the skin I am after!

I ride ahead, I drop a trap in a clear spot and am about to concussive shot it for the pull when it aggroes on me. Oh crap! Fear Beast! But before it gets off hes in the trap – I bang Tame Beast and close my eyes…. Then I open them and about fall of the chair in hysterics.

60 Ft Ice cube anyone?

Go get one!

-V

Edit: Hmm, I appear to have lost about 50% of this post, I will probably add the rest into a fresh post later.

Malygos bites the dust.

Smellygos downed.

I was pugged in to do Eye of Eternity (Normal) with some friends from another guild since I was not locked this week. Some 10 tries later, the big boy bites the dust.

Some notes on some of the tactics for when we hit it:

Phase 1:

• Tank kept the dragons head away from group. (Positioning on platform was not a big concern)
  
• Death Knights had a macro to yoink+root the sparks, although I did end up having to root a few.
  
• After vortex, everyone runs south whilst tank picks up Malygos.
  
• Everyone always stands in an electric field for damage bonus. If possible, double stack the fields.
  
• It took on average 3-4 minutes to get him into the air.
  
• Everyone went all out with the DPS when he took off, taking him to between 40% and 45% before he flies away. (At this point I evocate for phase 2.

Phase 2:

• Stay in bubbles, run to new ones as soon as they appear UNLESS a deep breath is imminent.
  
• 2 of the disc-folk will land, they’re tanked and spanked.
  
• 2 best melee take the disks, and go up to attack said disc-folk whilst the ranged attack from afar.
  
• Each time one dies, it drops a disk – and people hop on and get safely in the air.
  
• Once all disk-folk are dead, Phase 3 begins.

Phase 3:

Got here 3 out of the 10 times.

• First time was a quick wipe
  
• Second time we hit the enrage (were missing some DPS from a bad phase 2.)
  
• Third time we entered the phase with 3min 24 on the clock, and we got him down with about 30s left, and 2 down – so I would hazard a guess that in order to succeed here you need 3 minutes.
  
• As an aside, people tried to stick together, whilst 2 people healed.

To conclude: It was a very good trip, and gave me a good heads up on the requirements for the fight. I don’t think we have enough DPS that’s willing to attend at present. I am in the top 3 DPS in the guild as far as I am aware, and I was 4th on the damage meters (Highest DPS though, so it’s certainly viable) I can only think of a half a dozen people that would output enough damage for this fight in the guild, although as mentioned – highest DPS doesn’t = top slot on damage meters, its all about up-time... Or something like that!

Overall, it was a fun 2 hours :)

-V

Velk stars in: Once upon a Naxx wipe.

So there we were, in the Military quarter of Naxxramas watching the Instructor patrol around his initiates, barking commands at them, whilst our group hides round the corner out of sight and plans its attack.

For some unknown reason, in my boredom I cannot resist the overwhealming urge to stick on my pink Lunar Festival dress and cast Mirror image, screaming "Its time for a sexxy party!"

Not the smartest action when planning out how your going to ambush a powerful enemy. But I digress...

Those blasted mirror images... would you believe it they just took off straight for the Instructor, leaving me partying solo in a pink dress with some rather... perturbed guildies staring at me, as the Instructor flays my clones and comes running right for us...

Oh how we laughed... I have not heard so many people literally in tears of laughter on Teamspeak as we had that night. It wasnt done on purpose, but it will be damned hard to resist doing it again! I wish I had FRAPS...

-V