World First!

Cloudy Day got a world-first last week – 7-man 4 Horsemen. The strategy we used was different than what I had originally planned for, but we did down them in about 10 minutes. We also did the rest of the instance with only 8, so we picked up the achievement for that too. Now all I need is 3D Sarth-10 and a few Naxx achievements to get my proto-drake before 3.1!

Also, I wasn’t able to raid last weekend, but we downed 2D Sarth-25 – only a couple things left for us content-wise. I’m looking forward to finishing up, maybe getting a Twilight Vanquisher title before 3.1. Pretty exciting stuff.

Mage and Molten Armor changes in 3.1; itemization and how to fix it.

The new changes to Spirit in the PTR prompted this post. I’ll try and cover everything that needs to be covered – feel free to leave comments/questions, I’ll be happy to answer.

Check after the break for my musings on our class in 3.1! Keep in mind that all I say is based on the CURRENT PTR build, and not any speculation on what’s going to happen in teh future.

Achievements; why I’m not fire spec; PvP, specifically arenas.

Sometimes, I just get a bunch of ideas that I want to blog about, and end up making these big posts that cover a lot of different topics. This is one of those posts.

With current endgame content being such a joke, I’ve been doing as much as I can to both maximize my DPS and also just try and pass time till Ulduar finally comes out. I cover a few of the things I’ve been doing below.

Ch-ch-ch-changes….

It’s been an eventful week. First, I got the H-Malygos key on mage, then 20-manned Sarth the next night (getting the achievement and Illustration of the Dragon Soul), 2-shot Malygos (got the necklace from the key quest), and downed KT (we didn’t do too well on the achievement on the first night).

After downing KT (our last boss of the night), I got talked into healing a 10-Malygos on my druid – a dubious proposition at best as I’m not the best healer. Then I found out we were 2-healing it, which was even scarier. That said, though, we did manage to pull through and one-shot him.

Two days later, I finished H-HoS on druid, which was the last thing I needed for Champion of the Frozen Wastes on him. Nice to even have a title – having one that good is a nice bonus.

Last night, a guildie put together a group to go for the Undying run which I was involved in. As this was our first-ever organized try at a no-death run, I wasn’t too hopeful, but we made it all the way to KT without any deaths…and, well, I’ll let the picture speak for itself. (Lit actually died on the Frogger boss. He doesn’t deserve that title!)

Lit doesn't deserve it. He died to Frogger. Hahaha.

Yeah, I’m still in a bit of shock. There were some heart-attack moments. Among them:

1. Heigan. Nobody really died or got close to death, but just having 10 people running from deadly floor slime is a scary concept.

2. Razuvious. Not only are the mind controls scary sometimes, one of the adds died when Raz was still at 80%. I thought it was a wipe, but our DPS pulled through, our tanks shield-wall tanked it, and we did it.

3. Thaddius. It’s Thaddius – scary in and of itself. One of our healers said he was lagging on a polarity shift, and that was a bit nerve wracking.

4. Spider Wing/Sapphiron. Not that any of these fights were seriously dangerous with 3 healers, but it was about this time that I really started thinking “Wow, we’ve downed 3 quarters of Naxx, still haven’t broken the Undying thing.” I was actually shaking during these, and was so nervous I was talking a lot on Vent…like, a LOT. Ask anyone who was there!

5. Kelthuzad. …Yeah. He kept on ice-blocking healers. Bad situation, lol. And honestly…his health seemed like it was going down so slowly….I was just absolutely freaking out. Heart attack every time a healer got ice blocked.

Took a victory lap around Dalaran on Endbringer’s mammoth with Lit – was great. Nice to show that off.

Dual-spec and how it affects mages

I copied my character over to the PTR a couple weeks ago to play around with all the new features, and I have to admit that so far, I like what Blizzard’s done. They’ve really tightened up the gameplay experience, and they’ve largely left mages alone, which I’m rather excited about.

The dual-spec feature is VERY cool. Blizz gives you a whole new set of actionbars to go along with your secondary spec, meaning no more retooling your bars when you respec. Add in the second set of glyphs that it keeps around, and it’s a really nice system. Only thing I’m worried about is whether it’ll play nicely with the Talented addon, which is one I’ve come to rely on. Also, I’m kind of hoping they let it tie in with their gear manager (which I couldn’t find in game yet), so that I can put on gear with extra hit automatically if I respec Fire or something.

As for specs, I’m thinking about going either PvP Frost or deep Fire with my secondary spec. Even though Scorch is getting nerfed and locks are getting a Scorch-like talent, it’s still nice to have someone who can do that in raid – and it’ll be an easy way for me to do DPS benchmarks, too. As for PvP Frost? I’ve never played as Frost, and I’d like to try it sometime. What better time than when it won’t cost me too much to test it out?

As far as my druid goes, I haven’t really decided what I’m going to do for dual-speccing. I was thinking Feral, since I don’t see many feral tanks these days, but we have awesome tanks in guild right now and I don’t think I could help out too much. Balance that with me having a lot of caster gear since I’m Resto, and I might as well go for Balance as a secondary spec. We’ll see.

In its current iteration, the dual-spec feature costs 1000 gold – reasonable, in my opinion, considering the high availability of gold right now. I’ve got 2k gold waiting to be spent, and I figure it’ll be nice to have the free respecs on both my mage and druid.

What I’ve been doing

Been kinda busy with school recently, so I haven’t had time to post recently.

I got my druid to 80 a couple weeks ago, as I believe I’ve said, and he’s been gearing out rather nicely. I actually managed to 2-heal Naxx yesterday – it was a bit scary and I screwed up pretty badly on KT – but we got everything down, mostly one-shots. I’m still trying to adjust to healing – it’s not that it’s hard, it’s just so different from DPS. Might try to level my tank next, or something.

I also have pretty much decided that Arcane is gonna be the way to go for a good long while yet. Probably gonna end up staying Arcane for 3.1 – although Fireball does have merit, I can’t see it gaining a clear advantage yet – plus you need a lot more HR for it. You’re better off not having to sacrifice your best in-set gear for hit, IMO. Maybe once they fix Ignite so it doesn’t get eaten sometimes, I’ll go back – really, I haven’t decided for sure yet. We’ll see how the tree shapes up as PTR builds continue.

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Attempting WORLD FIRST: 7-man Regular Four Horsemen

I did my own strat for this one. Obviously I’m not gonna post it until after CD puts in some attempts, but I think I’ve got a good team going in to give it a shot.

Why did I do it? Well, it’s simple really. I saw that <PvD> on our server had the world-first 8-man on Four Horsemen, and I was kind of inspired by that – that a group from Gul’dan US, one of the most low-pop servers in game, could still get a world first. Acting off that inspiration, I wrote the strat for 7-man later that night, and got the people together last night. Gonna do the attempt next week. Hopefully things go well! =)

UPDATE: We weren’t able to get the group together last week. I’m trying for next Tuesday – we’ll see how it goes.

Currently hot topics – Fireball Spam

To make it easier for readers, I’m providing a list of my current most popular posts.

Top posts are now listed to the right. =)