Monday 27 April 2009

Finished WoW 3.0.9

Last night I finally joined a guild run to Malygos, and we downed him on the second attempt. So I've now "finished" pre-3.1 WoW, at least as far as raid content goes.

Good stuff about the fight



I'm (possibly excessively) impressed by how the Aces High daily prepares you for phase 3 of the fight. Although it's rather different in a group setting compared to the solo quest it does save you from the initial "What do all these buttons do?" moment. I also really like the setting and the pre-pull quotes, you really get a feeling of confronting a powerful creature in his own domain and how that may not be such a good idea.

Bad things about the fight



The Vortex ability is a complete pain to heal, what with only shamans having one instant-cast heal. Still, we're better off than paladin's I suppose (unless I'm well out of date with regard to paladin spells). I also find phase 3 completely disorientating, but perhaps I'll get used to that.

As a footnote, one of the good things about being so far behind my guild in terms of gearing and general raid attendance, I was the only needer for Ice Spire Scepter when it dropped. Two more blues to go...

Sunday 19 April 2009

Why I love my guild

WoW has slightly lost its lustre recently. The gear upgrades are slowly coming in, but my main objective has been to finally gather the 5000g needed for my epic flying mount, which has made the game seem more like a chore at times.

In the meantime my secondary goal has been to finish off the remaining heroics that I'd not yet completed. I had some luck in the last couple of days in that two of my remaining three targets (Halls of Stone and Oculus) were the daily heroics so groups for them were suddenly popular.

Obligatory HoS anecdote - our guild (and probably most people in general) are rather overgeared for heroics at this point, to they tend to be reasonably easy. One early pull suddenly got interesting, then serious - it looked like we'd rescue it for a while but then we wiped. It turns out we'd somehow managed to pull 3 groups, and then aggro a patrolling giant. But only that level of problem, or some of the crazier achievements, keep these runs challenging.

Oculus was well worth doing the once, but did show why people avoid it when possible. Myself and one other member of the PUG I was in hadn't been there on normal difficulty either, which made the experience harder still. We wiped several times on the final boss, beyond the point that probably be tolerated by an average PUG, but did eventually succeed. The one saving grace of the instance appears to be that not only is it much easier than average to get to the last boss from the entrance following a wipe, but also (since your drake is doing the fighting, and if you have enough bag space) you need not be taking gear damage for failed attempts.

Finally to the point of this post - having finished Oculus, rather late in the evening, I noticed in my achievements list that my remaining incomplete instance - Drak'Tharon - was only missing a kill of King Dred. I mentioned this in passing in guild chat, to which one of our nearly-always-online players replied "Well let's go and kill him then" and offered to bring his tank, our raid leader volunteered to dps on one of his alts and a second dps slot was quickly filled. We had to do some badgering to fill the last dps slot (which bizarrely seems to be the hardest spot to fill these days), but in relatively short order had a solid group together and proceeded to clear the place.

My guild - always willing to help (even when it's quite late at night).