Wednesday, January 30, 2008

No crying in kara

That's right. None, whatsoever. BBB had this gem which i completely missed but is so true. I'm so tired of planning my entire week around Kara, or another event, only to find we dont have enough people to do it. Even though we have 20+ people in the guild who are kara keyed. Then waste time until 2am doing trash pulls and trash bosses which I won't get anything out of it, except wasted consumables and repair bills. Then I'm tired of the one time I'm not there the A team going out and downing the hard bosses. Thanks guys, you rock. Now where's my place?

Friday, January 25, 2008

Kara for hunters

So i've been in Kara a while, and a post on Blog Azeroth has preached that we should preach what we practice. Okay, fine. Here's what I know about Kara from a hunter perspective.

Gear

I've already talked about pre-Kara gear. Basically you want the best stuff you can get. There are some things that most hunters should get.
1) Stalker helm of second sight. This is from the longish quest chain in SMV. Its the best helm you'll get south of Kara.
Enchant - Glyph from CE, need revered.
2) Crystalforged War Axe. This is a very common axe in AH, expect to pay a few hundred g for it, max.
Upgrade - consider the S3 axe from Arena for only 1000 arena points (thats about 4 weeks of 2v2). Huge upgrade.
Enchant - Savagery (+80 AP) or +35 agi. I went with savegery, i may be wrong in that.
3) Valero's Longbow or equiv. Also a very common AH item. I found it while questing.
Upgrade - many! I did the crystalforged crossbow from Ogri'la. It will take several months to finish the quests and get to revered, and finally to get those crystals. But its a substantial upgrade. That or hope the wolf rifle or xbow from attuman drops.
Enchant - Definately a +35 crit scope, costs about 350g.
4) other stuff. So many! Do the best you can with a good mix of +hit, RAP, int, agi, sta. I got a few pieces of S1 gear and a bunch of AH stuff. I had a hard time with group/instance stuff but there are alot of instance quests that reward you with nice blues, provided you can get a competent group together. Whatever you get, make sure it's enchanted. You can get shoulder enchants from alder/scryers using the holy dust they give you, essentially its free. Dont forget everyone gets a ring when they enter kara, and the ring increases over time. Plus the badges of justice (although the badge rewards for hunters are practically non-existant).


Numbers

There is no right rule, and honestly i can't even remember my pre-kara gear. But i was floating around 6000 health, 4000 mana, 60ish +hit, 20% crit, 1200 RAP. Now i'm only slightly better, but my +hit is higher, my health/mana pool is larger, my mana/5 is greater, and I'm #1 in damage meters. When i started I was definately in the middle of the pack as far as DM goes. So yeah everyone's gear has improved in the months we've been in kara, but you could argue that my gear has improved the most. I also worked the hardest. Strong correlation. Lots of gold helps, too.


Inside Kara:

Bosses

Attumen is the first boss you'll encounter. He's optional but a good idea. He's a gear/raid check, and drops a decent T4 bracer and the beloved crossbow. Here's the deal. You have 25 minutes from first trash clear to down the boss, otherwise trash respawns occur. Because of the circular nature of the region, the boss will definately pull the early trash mobs if they respawn. So you can not wipe at all. If you wipe, then allow the early trash to respawn and clear again. If your raid doesn't have sufficient skill/gear to down Attumen, there is no point going forward because all other bosses are harder.

For hunters, a few things of note. First be careful with your pet. During trash clears, they will periodically fear everyone nearby, so pop TBW whenever you can. Also equip the PVP trinket and use it when you get feared. Between these two, you should be unfearable. Pull the trash well away from others closer to the boss, so the fear doesnt accidently add. Even well geared raids can wipe here if they are lazy about the trash clear.

The boss himself is very easy, just takes a long time. Get real close to your tank, hit him with MD when the fight starts, and step just outside of melee range so you are both close to your tank and able to fire your weapon. Do a standard arcane/steady/autoshot rotation. Drink pots when you are at half mana. In fact, do this for all bosses. If you worry about OOM, switch to aspect of viper, otherwise use aspect of hawk. (I'm a little higher in mana/5, so I do a multi/arcane/steady/auto combo until i can't do it anymore). I'll also through a scorpid sting on the boss to help the tank out. When midnight is at 5% health, the two (attumen and midnight) will combine. The danger here is the aggro clear. So hit tank with MD again, and be suer you are close to him. Phase three is just like phase two. Rinse and repeat. It will take 2-4 minutes to down this boss.

Moroes

Go up the stairs, and be ready for trash pulls. The timer here is 1 hour I believe. You'll have some AOE pulls, so when the tank pulls these, drop an explosive trap, back off, and launch a volley (assuming tank is paly). You can easily wipe here due to the pet and inproper targetting. Generally i get as close to the top of the stair as I can and attack mobs on the same step, so as not risk targetting mobs on the dance hall floor. You can leave your pet on passive here, the mobs will die so quick the pet wont be useful.

To the left is Moroes. Clear trash, be aware of the very hard hitting Ghostly stewards, which come in pairs. Do scorpid sting, and go balls to the wall dps, FD if you need to. Burn your CDs if you can (ie rapid fire).

Moroes and his adds (from wowwiki)

Hunters can chain-trap one add indefinitely. This is made easier by survival talents or the Beast Lord Armor set bonus. They can also kite.

However, given the importance of high damage output in this fight, it is not always a good idea to trap or kite for a long time. If the hunter is busy trapping, he can't put out as much damage. It may be best to pull a target into a trap, drop a second trap, and trust in an off-tank to pick up the trap target before the second trap breaks.

Hunters can use Misdirection to help the off-tank maintain threat on Moroes.

Hunters can drop a Freezing Trap on any (player) priest that is keeping a target shackled. If the shackle breaks, this will give the priest time to re-shackle the target instead of taking hits.

Hunter pets specced for armor and stamina can tank kill targets, so long as they get heals.

This is all largely true, however my uber-pig couldn't tank the adds well at all, there wasn't enough healing to go around. If you are hunter heavy you can through two or three high armor pets on an add, and work as a team to freeze-trap another. But by and large the best approach is two priests shackling adds, an OT tanking moroes, and the MT tanking two adds (usually healers). Intially I will do the following in such a case. Lay a FT down at a designated priest. MD the MT for the first add. Watch and wait while MT adds go to MT, and the shackle adds get shackled. If the shackles are resisted, the FT should work. If that doesnt work, turn growl on and have pet tank the add briefly (but at this point you are pretty much SOL). Burn down the two MT adds quickly while playing backup CC for the priests. If you can get all this down in the beginning, it should be cake.

Dwarves are particularly useful here as they can get rid of the garrotte attack of Moroes (once). Usually we have holy palys to help w/ garrotte. I almost never die from garrotte, but instead due to the initial startup dance. Once two adds are shackled and the MT can handle two adds plus maybe moroes, you can do it.


Maiden


Maiden is an optional boss. The trash clears should not prove difficult for you as a hunter. Occassionally the trash will seduce the party and that could be problematic. But generally just sit back and dps. When you get to maiden, there are a few things you need to know. First, positioning. Have everyone hug the wall and pick one pillar per person. Be smart and get close to a healer for what's to come. Grab healthstones (cookies) and a restorative pot

MT will start the event, and move to the exact middle of room. When she gets there, start dps. The only thing you have to worry about is Holy Fire, it will kill you in seconds. The resto pot or any type of debuff (outlined in wowwiki) will cleanse it. During repentance you cant move, but your pet will still take damage. At end of repentance, throw a mend pet on it. As long as you can cleanse holy fire you wont have issues. Your tank/healers may but that's not your problem. If the tank dies its a wipe as usual.


Opera

One of three events: Oz, BBW, or R&J. We almost always get Oz for some reason.

Oz is somewhat like Moroes where you have a bunch of stuff you have to do at once. Your primary job is dpsing the kill order (Dorothy, Toto, Roar, Straw, Tinman). Roar and Straw you can swap. The second job is helping tank Straw. Put a immolation trap by the mage, and hit the mage with MD, first thing. Second, send pet to Dorothy. Every CD, drop another trap on Straw. Burn down the kill order as quick as possible. When you get Tinman (or whoever) down last, Crone will spawn. You can eat/drink if you are quick right after tinman goes down. Crone will need to be aggroed, so try a MD to tank here. More impt, watch out for cyclones, move out of the way at first. When she appears its sometimes best to do nothing and see which way the wind is blowing (meaning the cyclones).

BBW (Big Bad Wolf). Pretty easy. DPS the wolf, if you are LLRH, kite the wolf by wall hugging the stage. Don't let him get too far away or he will cut accross. Stay alive as long as possible, dont draw aggro.

R&J. Not much for you to do here except dps. If you are MM it will help for silencing J. The main issue here is interruptign her big heals. if you can't do that the the fight is significantly harder. You really need a rogue or warrior here. Once she's down, R comes in, he goes down, they rez, and you need to take them both down at the same time. We only did this once and I wasn't around to see it successful. Pray you dont have this event.

Curator.

This is where ranged dps becomes very useful, and is a gear check for the raid.

Killing the Curator is basically a gear check. It's not a coincidence that this boss drops the first class set tokens - they really want to be earned. There's not much strategy or room for fancy maneuvers - either the raid has the required DPS and the necessary mana endurance, or it does not.

The fight consists of four possible phases. Most of the fight consists of two alternating phases: a Flare Phase (which lasts 90 seconds) followed by an Evocation Phase (which lasts 20 seconds). Once the Curator's health drops below 15% it enters the Enrage phase, when it stops summoning Flares and Evocating, but melees and casts Hateful Bolts more rapidly. If it is still alive ten minutes after the pull, it enters the Berserk phase and wipes the raid in a few seconds.


Use the wowwiki macro for targetting flares. Your main job is downing flares asap. We found it useful to have all dps on flares until evocation starts, at that point have one dps down the last flare while everyone else is on curator. Positioning is critical again, don't get too close to each other. Its helpful to have Hawk eye to get the extra 6 yards of range. (Deadly boss mod helps here again) Good raids can down him in two-three evocations. At the end he enrages and really starts to increase damage. Scorpid and burning CDs is a good idea here, we will wipe half the time (when we wipe) during enrage. Generally if you can down curator you have enough dps to take down remaining bosses. You just need skill to learn each boss.

Shade

Shade is all about positioning and knowing what he does. The main points for hunters are to watch the phases (use the deadlyboss mod addon). These are:

1) Blizzard. Best thing to do is stay close to middle of room and dps when you can. More important thing is to stay ahead of the blizzard, which goes clockwise. Do not plant and dps here.
2) Flame wreath. Very simple. Don't move, for any reason.

3) Arcane explosion. He'll draw you to the center. At this point you run quickly back to the door (you should stay near the door always during this fight, unless moving around due to #1 and #2). DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR PET (hit passive).

Interrrupts are again critical, you really need a rogue to pull this off. Once you get the fight down it's easy (I guess, the raid has done it but not in my presence).

Illhoof

For hunters its pretty simple, just dps Illhoof. When chains appear, target them again with macro, and dps them. You may want to get close to illhoof so you can visually see the chains.
I haven't cleared this boss (the raid has). There are other strategies such as targeting his imp companion or the trash spawn imps.

Prince

Again this is a easy fight for dps. Positioning is important. We did him successfully by tanking him in the far corner from the door. Take a left and go straight back. Tank should have him facing a wall. The main issue is the spawns, which you have no control over. Do your CDs when he hits 60% health, go really hard until 30% health. Throw scorpid sting on MT (important!). Hope you get lucky with the spawns. We downed him once.

End

That's all I know about kara, that's as far as I got. Hope this is useful.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Gear upgrades and PVP/PVE

Its a real struggle at first to get the PVP gear. The best bet is to look over your gear list, and plan upgrades to season 1 stuff first. Hit AV as much as you can until you get HP for the upgrade. With luck your upgrade will require AV marks too. If not you will have to play/lose other BGs. On our server Alliance doesn’t win much AB, WSG, or that other one that i never play. We win 90% of AV though. Even if you lose and do decent, the honor is good enough. But maybe your server has a particular BG that your faction dominates in.

Finally note that you will perhaps lose alot when first trying arena. Our 2v2 team went something like 0-40 at first until we got down to a bracket where other similiarly skilled/geared players were. Now we win at least half of games and its much more enjoyable. So dont give up, you’ll still get your arena points even if you go 0-10. Eventually you’ll figure out winning strategies to help you. Consider respecing, I always respec MM for arena, the concusion shot is too huge to miss.

On welfare epics. PVP epics are NOT easy to get. Nor are they meant to suplant T4 raid epics. They can get you in the door of Kara, though, to get those. Do not go into kara with a full set of PVP gear and equate that with well-geared. You are not. You are minimally geared, and still should be fine. Look forward to opportunities to get gear to increase your dps/healing in raids. As a serious raider and PVPer, neither set of gear is easy to get. They are probably about equal in the time commitment scale. It probably takes me 20 hours of PVP to get a piece of gear. I raid probably 10 hours a week, but often I wont see an upgrade. So it’s a toss up. If you are a new 70, by all means try to get that S1 and S3 stuff if you are looking forward to raiding. But don’t mistake PVP gear for PVE gear, they are very different. (except maybe for tanking). We had two warriors leave the guild because they couldn’t understand that their full set of PVP gear meant they should be knocking on Prince’s door as a DPS spec. Nope, doesnt’ work that way.

What new stuff would you like to see?

I'm pretty much a hardcore raider, i spend at least half of my game time raiding Kara.

The fact is, blizz has poured alot of time into end-game progression. Granted many will never get to 70. But its not an impossible task, and believe me when you hit 70 you will start thinking 'what next'. There is a whole other game beyond 70 that Blizz has done great with. IMO the game probably would have died a long time ago w/o end-game content.

That being said, our server (a backwater to be honest) hasn't even seen BT or MH. The most uber of guilds is struggling through SSC. So, yes, its pretty hard to get 25 people that are sufficiently geared to try the 25 man raids. Its nice that they are releasing a new T7 25 man, but I'll never see it most likely (or maybe after WOTLK). And easily 95% of the user base will also never see Sunwell. So i think blizz has done the right thing, in focusing on lower end content such as ZA (that was huge), and the new awesome quests in DWM (that was also huge), and finally in easing 20-60 leveling (also huge). So, really the game is significantly better than it was 6 months ago, or a year ago.

I think they nailed it just right. For example, how would people feel if there was none of the above fixes, there were no dailies, no arena, just an endless progression of 25mans? Everyone would hate it, we'd be bored silly. Even the hardcore raiders (because you can only do kara or others a few nights a week). So would would you add if you were developers? I'd like to see BGs with randomized maps (or at least allow switching of horde and alliance start positions). I'd like to see new arenas (just another few is fine). I'd like to see more dailies and more epic mount grinds (call me crazy). I'd like to see another profession or two, ideally a secondary profession. I'd like to see kara or gruul level 5mans (heroics do not count, the likelyhood of getting T4 or T5 gear from them is very small). Sure, throw in another class or two. What would you like to see?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Skettis griefing

Skettis is a horid place where every single 70 on the server spents at least an hour of their playtime. (Ok prob more like 30 min, but maybe an hour). So the place is jam-packed of people. For the escort, you have to find the guy, get your group together (because smart people alway do this in a grp so they can get the quest done sometime that night, just to reduce queue times). Anyway, the ninjaing described happens *a lot*. So this is a great response to said ninja.

BBB has had similiar issues with ass-hatery in Skettis. I swear the entire population of ass-hats on the server is camped at Skettis.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

No more tameable ghost wolf

Aww, blizz, why did you do that? Makes me sad! Time well wasted has a excellent roundup. (From BBB and WowInsider)

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Ice block baby

From the comments in WOWinsider regarding the ice block buff mages get.


It's ALL about the Ice Block... from me to my fellow mages...

C'mon

Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby
Mage

Hey Alliance!!

All right stop,
Collaborate and listen
Ice Block is back, I've not been respec'n
Something grabs a hold of me, protecting
Safe from damage, not by deflecting
Will it ever stop? Yo -- I don't know
Turn off the ice block and I'll go...
To the extreme I rock a n00b like a vandal
Light up a foe and nuke the Horde like a candle.

Dance, Port to a foe and BOOM!
I'm killing your toon, but not with a curse of doom
I'm deadly, when I use a macro
What I crit for, you don't want to know...
Love it or leave it, You better get out of my way
Or you'd better stun me, mages don't play
If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my boomkin revolves it

Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby, Mage
Ice Block Baby, Mage
Ice Block Baby, Mage
Ice Block Baby, Mage



Now that the BG is jumping
With the bass kicked in, the Alliance are pumpin'
Quick to the point, to the point no faking
I'm cooking Tauren like a pound of bacon
PoM Pyro them if they're not quick and nimble
I go crazy when I hear a hunter's whistle
Wearing a Brewfest hat with a souped up 'fro
I'm on a roll and it's time to go solo
Rollin' in my Mechanosaur 5.0
With my top down so my hair can blow
The NE girlies on standby, Waving just to say Hi
Did you stop? No -- I just ported by
Kept on pursuing, lookin' at the map
I busted a left and I'm heading to the next cap
That cap was destroyed...

Yo -- so I continued on to Drek'Thar...


Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby,
C'mon
Ice Block Baby, Mage
Ice Block Baby, Mage C'mon
Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby, Ice Block Baby
Ice Block Baby

New hunter spec?

I'm strongly inclined towards this spec, 42/19 MM/SV. Not sure how bad it will hurt dps, but if it helps in arena/bosses its worth it.

Monday, January 7, 2008

Feral leveling guide

Seem useful!

Another guide here.

Ten Ton Hammer has a very useful guide for LWing to get feral armor.

Here's
a leather gear list focusing on +str from Wowhead. I always forget about WoWhead.

In particular this chest piece looks great, from a new quest in DWM.

Friday, January 4, 2008

The Ancient Ones kara recruitment

The Ancient Ones is now recruit for their kara group. We are looking for any and all specs, except MT (OTs are welcome to apply though). We have been doing Kara for 3 months and have progressed to Shade. We want to form a second group and are looking to start Gruul soon, when Kara is on farm by A group. What we are looking for are people who can show up on time and not be afraid to put in 5-6 hours of game time in raid, and who are keyed and reasonably geared for Kara. Keying is your responsibility. We will not key you, but we can help with getting keys. You should have the best end-game 70 gear you can get, mostly quest/instance blues, and arena gear is a plus. We use DKP loot system. You will have to undergo a trial kara run before admittance and access to the loot. We don’t roleplay and are a relaxed group. See below for details.

========================copy and past this to email and mail to gibbie99 at yahoo.com===

The Ancient Ones

Guild/Kara Group Application

Character Name:

Server:

Armory URL:

Class/spec:

Your Date of Birth:
(We strongly encourage you to be above 16 since raids are very time intensive and people who have to go AFK for 5+ minutes will be dropped)

Are you kara keyed? If not which phase of attunement are you?

Are you willing to run a raid for 5-6 hours at a stretch, bring required pots, and able to contribute to the group?

Do you have the required mods? (KTM and DBM)

Location: (City/state/country). Many of us are on west coast or central time zone.

Fill in this sentence with their, they’re and there.

_______ going to the pond to go ice skating, as soon as they gather _____ mittens. They’ll see us _____.

Incomplete applications will not be considered. Please email to gibbie99 at yahoo.com

/*
 
*/