The King Beckons

This is it. We are finally up to the final boss in Wrath. I had played through Warcraft 3 and I loved Arthas as a character. When I controlled him as a human as he fell from grace, to killing his father, and destroying all of Azeroth as leader of the Scourge. It was an amazing experience. I own 2 copies of the Arthas novel. One that I read and other one is a collector's edition that my best friend had bought me. When Wrath had come out we both landed on howling fjord and one of the first quests given to you was to enter the spirit world. In the distance you see the Lich King and of coarse I had to walk up to him. He spots me and instantly kills me in 1 shot. It was one of the more epic moments in Wrath.

I leveled up to 80 and killed a bunch of his lieutenants, and gear out in epics to enter his citadel. I took out his guards and now I have entered his throne room and challenge him to the death. And death is exactly what he gave me and my 24 guild mates. I didn't think I would be doing what I am doing right now. I am the main tank for the lich king. As a paladin throughout vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade I would tank but no one would take me seriously for progression encounters. When Wrath came out I was good at my job. After quiting the game for a while I never thought I would be in a position where I would be standing toe to toe taking blows from the lich king but here I am. My best friend plays a druid tank and he is so jealous because he quit the game as well but wants to experience the Lich King.

So here we are, Last Hope vs the Lich King. We have been trying for a couple of raid nights to bring him down. Like other ICC bosses he is relatively complicated and has a lot of stages. Phase 1 is pretty easy. I tank the Lich King where he stands and he summons a whole bunch of minions. The stronger minions get tanked by the off tank and if you get a disease you run to the off tank and get cleansed. Once you hit 70% he forces you to the edge of the room while he casts remorseless winter. We have a small problem in this transition phase because he will spawn Spirits that have to be tanked. The problem is regardless of if I taunt or hit him with a hard attack he seems to one shot somebody around him. It is frustrating because it seems that they kill somebody as they are materializing and don't have a hit box that I can attack.

Phase 2 is currently where we are stuck. I have the best gear that I can possibly have minus a shield and he hits for about 30k a swing. He also will cast Soul Reaper on me which is 60k shadow damage after 5 seconds. While he hits hard the healers do a pretty good job of keeping me alive. What wipes the raid is the Valkyr's and the defile. The Lich King will summon 3 valkyr's that will pick up a random person and drop them off the edge of the platform if they aren't dpsed down. Our problem is to get them going in the same direction and stunning them enough before they get to the edge. The other problem is defile. It picks a random person and puts a black circle under them. If anyone is standing on the circle it grows. Often times it will kill the people standing on them and grow further so that other people are standing on it and thus wiping the raid. We're slowly but surely figuring out how to handle this encounter and we are showing progress. We still have one more transition phase and phase 3 to contend with before the boss goes down.

I really like the guild that I am in but one thing that I hate is the DKP system. There is never going to be a perfect dkp system but there are things that a dkp system should account for. The way it works currently is you get dkp for showing up and if there is an item that drops that you want then you can bid on the item. The problem is that it is a blind dkp bid. You have no idea what other people are going to bid and you can bid all your dkp, part of it, or the bare minimum. This is one of the most annoying systems ever invented. I believe that a dkp system should reward the people who deserve items. If you show up regularly you get dkp and you have priority on that item if you have enough. You spend the dkp you get the item. Because you spent the dkp you have less then before so you might not get the next item you want if someone else shows up about equally as you do. I have never ever missed a raid ever since I joined this guild. A lot of people show up whenever they want or hardly at all.

I have 100 dkp and items are usually between 5 -30 dkp. If an item I really want drops and every other tank wants it how much should I bid. I have no idea. If the next highest tank has 80 dkp do I bid 81 this way I am guaranteed to beat them. That seems kind of absurd to bid almost everything I earned since I joined the guild for one item. When I talked to the officers about it they acted like that is what you are supposed to do. I looked at them like they were insane. So to get 1 highly sought after item I have to basically use all my dkp to the point where I won't be anywhere close to getting another item for a while unless no one wants it. As a tank this isn't that big of a deal because I only have 2 other people to fight for. If I was a dps I would probably go crazy in this system and possibly gquit. Trinkets are an item that benefit a lot of classes and specs but there are so few of them that are very good. When they do drop there is a mad dash for them and the people who win them often times don't have any dkp to spend for a long time. If you are smart with your dkp certain slots just never get filled because its not worth lossing all your dkp over.

It is hard to find a balance between spending your dkp wisely and just wanting an item so badly that you pay a ridiculous amount. The thing I hate most about this system is that it rewards the most greedy and not necessarily the person who most deserves it. We had a tank who didn't show up regularly that one day just blew all his dkp on some tier tokens and just leave. It was a highly sought after items and the people who did show up regularly didn't want to blow over 40 dkp on it. He made out like a bandit and the guild is left there scratching their head. While the officers don't like this idea no one is willing to change the system to something that works a bit better. I believe gear should have priority on people who show up regularly and have a set price attached to it. Its hard to find a balance between giving gear to people who deserve it and have new people who show up get geared up as well. The thing I notice is that gear is plentiful. Most slots get filled up pretty quickly and new people get geared out relatively fast. We can still give those people gear but find a way to reward the people who show up with Priority on the highly sought after loot without giving themselves an aneurysm figuring out how much dkp to spend.

Frost Queen

There is a time in a tier cycle where things start becoming smooth. On our last raid reset we were able to clear out 2 wings on Tuesday and the rest of the farm content on Wednesday with an hour left in raiding. This gave us a lot of time to work on our latest challenge, Sindragosa. We spent the last hour on Wednesday, all of Thursday and Monday working on this boss.

Like any boss encounter the first couple of times are very sloppy. Sindriagosa is basically Sapphiron 2.0. Phase 1 consists of basic Dragon mechanics. Stay away from the front to avoid cleaves, and frost breaths. Stay away from the tail to avoid tail smash so basically everyone is dpsing her hind leg. In addition to this there is a raid wide frost damage aura and every 30 seconds she will pull everyone close to her and do Blistering Cold. The raid has about 5 second to move away before she does Blistering Cold which will kill anyone but a tank. During this phase she will randomly cast Unchained magic on the ranged/healers forcing them to stop casting for a few seconds so they don't take to much Backlash damage if their stacks get to high. The melee have their own version of this called Permeating Cold, where each attack will has a 40% chance to make them take damage over time also stacking They will have to stop attacking after 5 or so stacks or they will take to much damage This is also a very hard fight for me as a tank when it comes to threat. As melee Permeating Cold forces me to stop dpsing every so often. Also every Frost breath that I don't resist will put a 2 minute debuff on me reducing my Melee swing time by 50% a stack. This is all while wearing my frost resist gear which has no threat stats on it whatsoever. Every 90 seconds or so she will enter the air phase.

In her Air phase she will randomly select 5 people that will get frost tombed. Unlike the Sapphiron encounter the people who get tombed have to be broken out. The purpose of the tombs is to hide behind from from bombs but again unlike Sapphiron where it was one big bomb in the center you get 5 of them in random locations so you will have to adjust your line of site to the bomb. Originally we would have 5 people line up in a row and try to bring them down to 40% before breaking them out. The problem with that is people have an issue with throttling their dps so they would break out early before the last frost bomb went off and the other frost tombs were still close to 100% by the time she landed. We adjusted our strategy to have 3 people at the bottom of the stairs and 2 right behind them. This allowed us to go crazy and break out the first 2 and by the time the 3 in the front were close to dying she would have cast her last frost tomb and start landing.

Once she gets down to 35% she enters phase 3. After a few attempts we were consistently getting past the first 2 phases without and issues. The last 3 raid nights we spent just trying to get past this final phase and we still haven't been able to defeat her yet. She remains grounded on this phase but she starts doing Mystic Buffet. It's cast every 10 seconds and increases your magic damage taken by 15%. She will also casts frost tomb on 1 random person in the raid. We would assign that person to be close to her head but far enough away from cleave range. Everyone would run behind it to drop their debuff before it got to high and we would swap tanks back and forth while we also dropped our debuffs. During this phase we would have a ton off issues. The first frost tomb would be in a good position but during the second frost tomb we would have multiple people getting frost tombed or frost tombs going down to quick for people to loose their buffs. Slowly we would just loose people during this phase and we got to a point where there were to many people down to complete the encounter. We'll head back into it this week and get her down.

They have released the patch notes for 3.3.3 as well as confirming a whole bunch of other mini patches before the release of cataclysm. Looks like we will have the Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5 as well that promises some new loot and a bunch of trinkets to look forward to. We will also be taking back Gnomergon and thwarting off the Twilight Cult. With it as well tanking stats are changing a descent amount for Cataclysm. First defense is going to be completely removed and you will get uncrittable by going into "tank mode" such as putting up Righteous Fury. This will be good if you are ret/arms/dps dk and don't have a secondary spec but you have some gear for tanking. You can now enter an instance and do well enough to get you through a dungeon or heroic.

Also parry is getting a pretty interesting change. Instead of being a clone of dodge it will reduce the swings damage by 50% and the next one by 50% as well. Because there is no more defense we won't increase our miss, dodge, parry, or block by a small amount because of it. Usually once you get beyond 540 defense you would gain about 10% avoidance due to miss and dodge/parry. Blizzard wants to reduce avoidance across the board. Right now a good tank can have up to 60% avoidance. That is only 40% of the time where you actually take damage. To challenge us they have to make the boss hit extremely hard or add a magical component to the attack table. In cataclysm we'll probably be closer to 15-20% dodge and about 5% miss. We'll be parrying 50% of the damage and when we block we will mitigate 30% of the hit as well. So as a tank we will be constantly be getting hit but we'll be mitigating more damage instead of just avoiding it. This will allow healers breathing room and us as tanks to better gauge when to use cooldowns.

I'm liking a lot of what Blizzard has planned with Cataclysm. A stat that excites me is mastery. Every class/spec will gain something different with mastery. It will probably end up being 3 different thing s as well. With retribution it will probably be strength, crit, and possible reduced cooldown time. With protection it will probably be armor, dodge, and some form of damage reduction. So regardless of what you play it will always be good for you. Bosses wll also scale in different tiers. Probably the first tier of raiding you will need 5% hit to cap, and probably have a 3% crit suppression. When you get into the next tier it will probably be 8% hit cap and 5% crit suppression while the bosses get expertise so the tanks loose 2% dodge and parry. This makes gearing less about pure "power stats " and keeps you desiring more as you move on. While I am really enjoying IceCrown Citadel I want the next expansion. I want to see all the world changes and I love getting upgrades. I am sitting at mostly 264 gear right now so there won't be much upgrades coming in the next month. The idea of exploring new dungeons and gearing up for new raid content is exciting. How long do you think we will have to wait?

Raiding Bites

IceCrown has been out since mid December so it has been over 2 months of raiding t10 content. In the beginning it has been a bit of a struggle taking down new bosses. During this weeks reset we have become so efficient that we had cleared almost all farm content in one night. It feels like each boss is like riding a bike. It is a bit difficult at first but once you get it right it is something you are a master of every time you go at it. I noticed it in our 10 man Putricide when our dps was so good that we didn't even dps the first add before we got past phase 2.

I have in me what I like to call the tanking mentality. Tanks who love to be tanks want to control the flow of the raid. I've noticed in a lot of the guilds and alt runs I have been in it is usually the tank who is talking in vent calling out orders and explaining the fight. They control the pulls, pace, and positioning. I haven't been in the guild long at all but I have already been a very vocal part of the guild. I think it is appreciated but I can't tell if I am stepping on any toes. I usually run in head first on pulls, mark all the kill targets, and yell out whenever anything has to be announced. When the guild leader isn't there I will assign Tank assignments and people will listen for the most part. I have all but taken over our 10 man group. During my second week I was asked to be the off-tank for that week. I now do all the invites and control the run. I don't think the people in the group mind because its easy to just relax after 25 man raiding and do what you are used to without having to deal with managing the raid.

Probably the one thing I hate the most is the DKP system. There are flaws in almost every DKP system out there. You have to find a balance between rewarding people for showing up for raid while not making it impossible for newer people to get upgrades. Also you have to give incentive for people to keep coming back without having inflation being a huge issue. I'm not sure if the perfect system exists. In Last Hope we do silent bids. The good thing about the system is that as long as you have the dkp you can bid whatever you want and have a chance of getting the item. The problem is that you can end up blowing your entire dkp load because you are so nervous about not winning the item. Then you are at a loss for the next set of upgrades that you want. Also people who aren't there as much can come in can take items that a veteran who bids a reasonable dkp amount for the item he wants. I see a lot of people getting stressed out including myself.

This week we cleared all the farm content leaving us with plenty of time to work on new bosses. We spent almost the entire raid last night working on Queen Lan'athal. For this fight I am usually the off tank taking delerious slashes and the Blood Mirror. The first couple of times we did the fight it was complete chaos. People with Path of the Darkfallen were constantly dying. Whenever the boss went into the air we lost half the raid. The fight has a very tight dps requirement and the only way to beat the enrage timer is by getting bit by someone who has been bitten. She will bite one person within 30 seconds of starting the fight. That person will bite 1 person. Those 2 people will bite 2 other people. Those 4 people will end up biting 8 people. Before the enrage timer you will have 16 people with the damage buff. During our first few attempts we were just calling out for who was going to get bit next. We discovered that it wasn't going to work and we would have to have a very specific bite order. We forced 1 person to be third on aggro to get the first bite and everyone knew their assignments after that. We got her to 6% last night and we'll have her dead by tonight.

Our next target is Sindrigosa and the Lich King won't be far behind.

The Dream Raid

The new 3.32 patch just came out and with it the final wing of IceCrown Citadel has been released. With it comes the 3 final bosses of Dreamwalker, Sindrigosa, and the guy the expansion was named after Arthas the Lich King.

In our 25 man raiding group we are still a bit behind. We have been trying pretty hard to get Professor Putricide down. It's always impressive to go from it being almost impossible to get to Phase 3 when we first started fighting the guy to getting their consistently. We had to change up our strategy a bit and it seemed to help out a lot. We used to move the entire raid from one side of the room to the other side of the room and that had hurt our dps a lot. We discovered that if we keep everyone on the right side of the room where the green slime spawned we were able to group up on the slime better burn him down and get back on the boss and bring him into phase 2 before we started working on the second add. We also maximised our dps by keeping the boss close to the abomination while he was drinking the ooze to get him to phase 3 a lot quicker. We were able to bring him down to Phase 3 constantly but we were having a lot of issues there. We were having a lot of sub 10% boss wipes and it was frustrating. We got him all the down to 1% before we had to stop for the night so we weren't able to claim victory as early as we wanted.

The following raid night we didn't have our best composition for Putricide so we went over to the Frostwing halls to try out our hands on the new bosses. Dreamwalker was our first challenge and this is a fight I was very much looking forward to . During PTR testing I was checking out a lot of videos of the new bosses and Dreamwalker sounded very different. To defeat the Dreamwalker encounter you have to heal the boss from 50% health to 100%. Throughout the encounter adds will spawn from different doors throughout the room that have be tanked and burned down while your healers bring the dragon to full health. Since the boss has so much health and healers have a limited mana pool there is a portal that healers can take where they can get a stacking buff that makes mana a non-issue and increases their healing output.

This isn't a hard execution fight. We go through a few attempts to get a feel for the encounter. At around the 6 minute mark the encounter has a soft enrage in which adds come out at a pace that is almost impossible to manage. At this time we would have the boss's health around 90%. The logical solution would to be throw more healing at the problem which is what we did. We upped our healer count to almost 9 at one point. The more healers we had the worse our attempts. We didn't have the dps to burn through the adds and by the time the soft enrage happened we were around 80%. The final kill shot happened when we actually only had 3 healers dedicated to healing Dreamwalker. The problem we ran into was the more healers you put through the portals the more likely it is that their buff stacks would fall out. When we dedicate only 3 competent people to go through the portal they were able to get immense stacks of the buffs that far outweighed having extra healers.

Before raid had reset last week we had went back in and attempted Putricide again. We still didn't have the best group set up but we didn't have anything else to work on so we went with what we had. We had fought the boss so many times that almost everyone was a pro at knowing what to do. People weren't getting hit with mailable goo or standing in Proximity bombs. We got our Phase 3 tank rotation in order and we finally got the boss down. With 2 bosses down in the week reset we were pushed up to a solid 3rd on the server.

As far as progression goes we are doing pretty well but as a guild we have been having our issues. I've been in 4 hard-core raiding guilds since the beginning of WoW. Each of them have had the same set of problems that seem to constantly repeat themselves. In a Dream Raid we would have 30 consistent raiders logging on every night, ready at raid start time to pull the first mob. Each of those members would be fully prepared with max level gems, enchants, gear, and consumable that they can realistically achieve. Each of those members reads elitist jerks and has a deep understanding of their main-spec, off-spec and abilities of all other classes in raid. They have read over the strategies for all progression bosses and watch multiple videos from different view-points of the encounter that they are about to face. Everyone would have an amazing connection to the WoW server with almost no lag and have computers that constantly push over 30 frames during a 25 man encounter. During raid times there are no real life tasks that have to be taken care of that would have people waiting.

Oh what a sweet dream that would be. Unfortunately it is a dream and these are real people we are dealing with. I know a bunch of people who actually fit into that Dream Raider mold. They know how to maximize their role, theory craft all the time, and show up to every raid fully prepared. You never get 25 people who fit the mold though. The last couple of weeks in Last Hope we have been having issues. Just last night we were 24 manning a lot of the bosses. Each night we raid there is always something going on. Usually its not having the right mix of players. We have good competent people but we often times have to many healers and not enough DPS. We are constantly pulling in applicants who don't know the fight or who can't pull their weight in progression content. The common theme in most guilds is people showing up on farm night to get loot and badges but not showing up to wipe on new bosses. We raid 4 nights a week for 3 hours each. We should be spending the majority of that time working on a new boss but often times can't because we lack the people. On Tuesday we have over 27 people on . On a Thursday that number dips to around 23. We have to constantly ask people to switch to their off-spec and I feel bad asking our shaman who spent 6 months on acquiring Val'nyr to go enhancement and play a spec he doesn't want to.

We have a lot of good players log on every night. There are 20 constant people and a list of about 15 people who rotate in every night. It is frustrating for the 20 people who show up to have to deal with the missing few. Tempers get high and yelling happens from the Officers and they want to punish the people who don't show up. In the end it is usually the 20 constant people who get punished because they are actually there to receive the punishment. They log in ready to raid ICC but have to run older content in order to keep it "random" to force people to not only log in on Tuesday. Those people still don't log in the next night and we lost a night that we could have been using to learn and defeat another boss. It is usually the people who don't care that just want loot. The rest of us want to move forward and fight the Lich King. The loot happens naturally through that process. Life is sometimes a bitch. Things come up. We have family, friends, and obligations that we cannot get out of. We feel bad because the other 24 people are relying on us but the real world has to come first.

In the end we are still doing well. Our raiders do a good job at their task. IceCrown Citadel was not meant to be an easy raid. It does take time to learn and in time we will get there and defeat the Lich King. Once we do we will start working on hard modes and continue raiding unless something Cataclysmic happens.

Council

It's been a few weeks since I have joined my latest Raiding Guild. It's interesting how you go from being nervous about performance and how you act in guild, to being comfortable joking around with your fellow guild mates. I have proved myself to the guild and they know what I am capable of. They have come to rely on me and know I can do the take at hand.

It's interesting to see what is most important in the raider depending on your role. After playing tank, dps, and healer its interesting to see what makes you good at those specific roles. As a healer your most valuable asset is your ability to prioritize your job. A lot of damage goes out in most encounters and its your job to figure out what the best heal to use is, what time to use it, and who to use it on. Healing for me is the hardest role to play. I look at the health bars and I want them all to be at 100%. During the encounter you have to decide if its smarter to get the raid back to 100% or use that global cooldown on the the Tank. Good healers are amazing at how well they can manage their mana and keep everyone alive. Finding that balance is what makes the healers so good.

A DPS most valuable attribute is his ability to time his abilities and know his rotation. A healer is going to decide what button to push when the global cooldown is available. A DPS knows exactly what button to push and at what time 3 GCD's from now. He'll be so adapt at his timing that he will be able to react to the bosses abilities without missing a beat. Usually a skilled dps will know what alternate abilities to use if they have to move out of fires or get away from the boss so there dps doesn't dip to much. These people are the ones maximizing their gear, going through spreadsheets, and reading elitist jerks to be number 1 on the recount or WMO.

Then we have the Tank role. This is my favorite role. To be a good tank your best attribute is situational awareness. As a dps I have gone into encounters and not have any idea what to do on the boss and I still did really well. That's not gonna fly so well when you are a tank. While building threat is what you are measured on its how you play the battlefield that makes you a good tank. Being able to pull a boss and position him correctly to make the dps's job easy. Being able to very quickly pick up adds as soon as they spawn. To knowing when to use your cooldowns to make the life if your healers easier. Some fights are easy for a tank because there isn't a lot going on. Most fights require you to be smart and know whats happening and being able to adapt to that situation is why I play the tank. Also its the tanks who usually end up being the leader of the group. A healer looks at his green bars, and a dps looks at his rotation. A tank looks at everybody and everything and can call out and adjust as things happen.

Every role is important and when one side of the holy trinity is weak its going to affect the other 2. You can tell who is good at their role and who is a mindless button masher. What a person chooses to play as their main spec speaks a lot about who they are as a person. While it's never smart to assume anything about a person but when you talk to people and see their characteristics they usually fall in line with what they are playing.

It seems that I always get the unique roles in raid. I am the slime kiter in Rotface and the abomination in the putricide encounter. These are pivotal roles in both the encounters and it's important to do those jobs well. I was half surprised to be picked to do these jobs because I am a recruit into the guild. On the other hand it makes sense for me to be picked for the role considering a paladin is a much better ooze kiter then a warrior, and I was the offtank available the night we attempted putricide. Pro-tip for anyone doing the abomination. You can use both your eat ooze ability and mutated slash if the boss is close enough.

Last Tuesday the Crimson Halls had opened up. With it brought 2 new encounters. The Blood Prince Council is a very cool boss fight. Blizzard just loves throwing so many random things into an encounter as possible. It's my job to tank Prince Taldaram during the encounter. Their is an orb that moves around between the 3 princess that give them empowered abilities. On the first one he will force all melee to move out during his Empowered Shock Vortex. When fighting my target we have to follow an Empowered Ball of Flames so it doesn't 1 shot its target, and for Keleseth the tank needs to run around and collect Dark Nucleus so that his Empowered Shadow Lance doesn't 1 shot him. On top of that their are balls that if they hit the floor will do a ton of damage to the entire raid. It's a lot of things to consider for the raid but when it comes together its a beautiful thing.

We haven't gotten a chance to work on Blood Queen Lan'athel but I've been watching videos and it doesn't seem overly hard to execute. There isn't as much going on during the fight as Blood Prince Council but its all about dps. During the encounter she will bite people and increase their dps by 100% for a limited time. Once that time is up they have only one option and that is to bite someone else and give them the same buff. About 4 minutes into the fight you will run out of people to bite giving this boss a soft enrage timer. On top of that there will people linked together who have to move together and a debuff which forces you to run to the walls. Hopefully we can get putricide this week in 25 man and have some attempts left to give this boss a shot.

The Citadel Awaits

It's been a few weeks since 3.3 has hit. It has been an incredible patch. I am really liking the way Blizzard has decided to deal with loot. I think what keeps most people playing at the highest level is getting new loot. I know for me it gives me an incentive to get in there and become the best geared I can be. When I had last left Bladez he was geared in almost all 226 gear from Ulduar. I had stopped raiding and there was no real point in playing him because I had the best I could get without raiding full time. Now that the new patch came out I saw all this gear that I could get readily since Emblems of Triumph were dropping from heroics. Also I could get Emblems of Frost for even better gear but with a bit more restriction on how much I could get at a time. This is incredibly smart of Blizzard. I see myself logging on in the morning before I go to work just to get my heroic daily in before I set off to work.

That being said I absolutely love the new Dungeon Finder system. Being able to click one button and be instantly transported to a heroic dungeon with everyone knowing their assignments is great. No more days of searching through a list of no healers, 6 death knights 2 hunters a rogue tryping to put a group together is over. I've made it my personal challenge to finish every instance before my dungeon finder debuff wears off.

Ofcourse it wouldn't be a good patch without a full raid instance to defeat. Every time a new raid comes out I'm excited to see what new boss mechanics the raid team can come up with. My hard work paid off and I am in one of the top 5 guilds on the server as one of the tanks. I thought this would be almost impossible to do after being gone for so long. Most guilds have their tanks set since you only need about 3 of them out of 25 people. If you do get in you are probably gonna be benched if their regular guys show up. This usually means you keep falling behind on the gear curve and sitting out is never fun. I was prepared for it though but it hasn't really happened much.

I have just been very lucky when it comes to gear. In the first 25 man raid I ran the main tank already had the 264 plate tanking legs and the other tank didn't want it so I was able to upgrade my legs super fast. The second week I was in for ICC 25 man none of the guilds regular tanks were online. This is pretty surprising for a Tuesday since it is loot pinata day. The 3 tank initiates were the tanks for the night and it was raining tank gear. I lost the roll on the bracers but luckily the helm dropped off the second boss and I was able to snag that up. On top of that I got the shield, weapon, and cape out of the 10 mans. When 3.3 came out I was at 33k unbuffed health. By the time I got accepted to last hope I was at 40k health. Now with all these amazing upgrades I am at 44.5k health unbuffed at over 55k raid buffed.

The thing about gear though it sometimes feel likes overkill when you don't have anything that you need it for. 50k is not necessary for a heroic where he healer never even hits a button. Progression is what its all about. Icecrown is the final content of this expansion pack and as such the requirements are high. Bosses hit for over 30k, dps checks are high and healers have a lot to take care of. Luckily Last Hope succeeds in all these areas. We know how to coordinate well, how to move, and how to do our jobs while dealing with all the factors the boss throws at us.

The first 4 bosses are pretty unique but we make it look easy. Within an hour we clear them out as if we have been doing it for months. This last week the new plague wing opened up giving us 3 new bosses to try at. Festergut is supposed to be the new patchwerk. You have 5 minutes to burn the boss down while dealing with high healing and making sure everyone gets inoculated. DPS is where our guild shines at. I've heard this boss is incredibly difficult for most people but we killed him on our second attempt. Rotface is another story.

I've had the pleasure of playing the pivotal role of being the kiter of the big slimes. The fight isn't overly difficult in terms of execution. Everyone stand in the center of the room. If he turns and faces you then go through him so you don't get hit with slime spray. If you get a mutated injection run out to me and wait for it to combine with another ooze that I kite around the room. Its pretty simple especially at the beginning. The injection happens every 12 seconds and once 5 oozes combine they explode and the raid just has to make sure they don't get hit with it. The problem is that as the fight continues on the rate of mutated injection goes faster. At 30% it happens every 6 seconds so there are a ton of oozes and it gets chaotic and hard to control. We've had so many attempts where he is below 10% but ooze control is difficult and it ends up killing key people.

Next week we will be trying out the final boss which is Professor Putricide. This boss is supposed to be incredibly difficult and you only have 15 attempts on him per week. In 2 weeks we will have another wing open up and new bosses to take down. I am pretty excited to have a new home and new challenges that await. It'll be awesome to see what the citadel holds and what new loot awaits. My goal is to one day be at 60k health raid buffed.

Bladez is Back

So it has been a while since I have played World of Warcraft seriously. Last July I had switched my job at work from a primarily evening shift to a day shift. This didn't work to well for my raiding guild since it started raiding at midnight. I was also getting burned out from raiding constantly. Ulduar was on farm, people weren't showing up for raids, frustrations was high and it was a great time to pursue other interests.

During my break 3.2 came out and I found myself leveling up 2 alts. I got both my warrior and my shaman up to lvl 80 and pretty well geared out. Without being on a raiding schedule I was able to have fun, join pugs and get tons of gear but still go out when I wanted to. I had for the most part ignored Bladez considering I was still overly geared for anything I wanted to do and there weren't any big upgrades unless I wanted to raid full time. I also spent weeks at a time not logging into the game at all.

Then a few weeks ago patch 3.3 came out and it was calling my name. 3 new 5 man instances, a brand new raid and the new Dungeon Finder. On top of that everything was dropping emblems of triumph which rewarded gear that was better then what I had. Although I enjoy playing my alts and gearing them up, Bladez is who I love playing. I enjoy tanking and I love doing it on a Paladin. I started using the Dungeon Finder and was chain running heroics. There were so many upgrades to get and I was so overgeared for heroics that I wanted to push myself and the healer but taking 3-4 pulls at once. I survived almost everyone of them to. instances that used to take 45 minutes I had shaved down to 15-20 minutes. Often times the debuff for using the random heroic finder was still ticking down while we were fighting the last boss.

I had the itch to raid again. I was able to get into a few pugs doing ICC and it felt amazing tanking progression content again. I decided to find a new guild to call home. There is a sad feeling when you don't feel like you belong in the game. There is plenty to do but you don't have a team you rely on and they rely on you. I decided to app to Last Hope which has a raiding schedule that fits better with my lifestyle and is constantly pushing the latest content. I put in an app to the website but was told that I have to up my level of gear. At that point I had 33k unbuffed health and I hit the floor running.

I started chain running heroics, pugging raid content, and crafting epics. Since the patch came out I have gotten 75 emblems of frost and over 230 emblems of triumph to max out my tanking gear. Luckily during my crazy heroic runs a battered hilt had dropped and I was able to sell it for 25k. This helped fund my need to enchant and gem all my new gear. I also took this time to max out both Shieldz and Giaz alchemy so that I can transmute my own gems.

Now I am sitting at 40k health unbuffed with a Gear score over 5k and an average item level of 240. There is nothing I can do now outside of running a daily heroic for 2 emblems of frost and getting accepted into a raiding guild. Icecrown Citadel looks awesome and I can't wait to be kicking the asses of new bosses.