Druidic in Nature

Jun 17

That’s right folks, last night on the 6th pull of the evening, Twilight Hope took down Yogg-Saron on heroic. I have to say pulls were just amazing from the first to last. Some screw ups aside, p1 went flawlessly, so did p2 after the couple first pulls, and it all came down to getting the p2-p3 transition go smoothly. And once it did.. well it was one of the most nerv wrecking boss phases I’ve ever seen.

Actually, I could briefly go trough what I do in the three phases. Not a guide but.. guide-ish? Will not go trough everything though (dodge lasers, watch your sanity and brainlink…) just the things for a balance druid.

Phase 1: Guardians of Yogg-Saron

Obviously how you deal with these depends on what kind of strategy your guild uses. We don’t tank guardians right at Sara unless the clouds are in optimal position. So, there needs to be a dps off time. I’ve noticed stopping at ~300k is good and I do not use dots at all. Often the mobs just barely make it to Sara before blowing off so.. better to ease down and lose some dps than have one detonate prematurely.

Phase 2: Tentacles

First of all as ranged your priorities are the Crushers – if those are all down then Corruptors. What comes to Constrictors we use melee to take down those. Nothing much to Crushers, use your standard rotation. I like to pop Starfall whenever there is few any type of tentacles on range to add some dps. And while you’re running to a new Crusher, use Insect Swarm on the tentacles you go past. This should give you some nice 4 piece tier 8 procs. Now I don’t personally have it yet but I’d assume it would be helpful. Treants aren’t so handy in here but they can do some work too. On Crushers they would get annihilated instantly but instead I like to pop them on Constrictors to help freeing people from them and then just continue with the Crushers.

Phase 3: Immortal Guardians

We use the ranged dps to kill guardians and melee focus on boss. First finish whatever tentacles there might be left (should not be many) and go stand in front of him and face away. I did not move or turn from my initial position at all on whole phase and I found it kinda funny how crazy angles you can still shoot the targets, even if it seems you’re not directly facing them. Keep very close eye on your main assist and be ready to swap target when she does. What comes to spell rotation forget Fearie Fire – mobs die way too quickly. Start with the dots, and what is so great about them is that the time it takes you to apply them gives tank precious time to get more steady aggro. No Starfall here either, I bet I would have just aggroed a freshly spawn guardian and got myself killed. Treants however are good to use on Yogg.

That’s about it I think. P3 doesn’t sound so hectic when I explain it like that but man… the amount of guardians spawning and the speed you have to swap to a new again and again was just plain nuts. In addition to that I had no idea at what % the boss was. Nobody on the main tank list was targeting him. So I just kept going with guardians and more guardians for a time what felt like 15min or something. Then the achievements popped on screen and I just kind of freezed for a moment because I had no idea it was coming. In my previous post I talked about encounter difficulty. Yogg-Saron was pretty much what I’d expect all encounters to be.

Very nice fight. Actually I think this is my new favorite encounter in Ulduar (sorry Mimiron). And very nicely done guildies, we rocked that night. Also I would like to give thumbs up to our guild master Aremag who passed his spot to another melee on this raid. You’re a great guy. /hugs

Ah yeah.. loot!

Fragment of Val’anyr – Grats Gynter!
Mantle of the Wayward Conqueror – Grats Moredan!
Mantle of the Wayward Protector – Grats Kharn!
Chestguard of the Fallen God – Grats Brutuzze!
Godbane Signet – Grats Wacka!

To conclude this post I would like to mention few other things. My website host has had some problems so the site has been down pretty much whole yesterday and as I am writing this it still keeps going up and down. Hopefully it will be sorted soon.

In other news the Epic Dolls podcast had a new episode released earlier this week and I really recommend everyone to check it out. Great stuff about gaming relationships and super hilarious are you a casual player part that everyone should hear. Even if you’ve never listened podcasts before I highly recommend checking it out.

I had a little something else planned for todays post but thanks to Yogg kill it got moved. So stay tuned for next time for a little word about history of playing a balance druid.

Jun 14

Raiding, here and now

Nerfs, nerfs and more nerfs. That’s what Ulduar patches seem to be all about – the recent ones focused on Yogg-Saron. Personally I am not happy about it at all, I understand the reasons behind doing it but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Grrr!

Now, first of all I don’t like how they’ve started nerfing the content while it’s still ongoing so to speak. Many have still not killed the end boss, even less had a chance to really look at the hard modes. Why nerf it now? In TBC instance nerfs came a little bit before new content was released and that in my opinion was good system. The guilds that wanted the challenge had cleared the place up by then and it did not feel bad to get nerfs on old content because there was new stuff coming soon and you could move on.

Even without the nerfs we pretty much blazed our way up to end boss. We raid 3 nights a week for 3 hours with exception of one raid being 4 hours. So fairly casual raid times but even so it took only 17 raid nights to get to Yogg-Saron – on heroic that is. That is a totally different pace than what it was in Burning Crusade. I probably should not compare Ulduar and TBC instances but I think those were at really good level of difficulty and hey.. what else would I compare with. Black Temple was, and is, my favorite raid instance. It easily took 2 or even more raid nights to get new boss down. Harder ones took weeks and that was awesome. But now in Ulduar you’d take 3-4 new bosses down in a single night, and once you’ve learned the ropes of an encounter it pretty much becomes trivial to get it done again.

Hard modes are suppose to be the thing to do for those who want more challenge but I don’t think it really works very well. Nobody wants to go for hard modes when you’re clearing the place for the first time. And when you have cleared the place do you feel motivated to do it again with little added tweaks. There is interest I suppose but it don’t think it really feels like an accomplishment of the same magnitude if you would have had to do the boss on hard in the first place. For now my guild is still focusing on Yogg-Saron and we haven’t really tried the hard modes so I can’t speak for myself but I’ve heard others say that hard modes might actually be too hard. Basic Ulduar is too easy and hard modes are just way up there. If so then this is a big problem for the medicore guilds who get left with nothing but the easy mode.

What I think the difficulty should have been is make the 10man be the easy way. Heroic actually be a heroic and something between the current basic mode and hard mode. As the basic is now I don’t think it is very motivating. No more challenge causes lack of interest and that causes people to play sloppy. I don’t blame anyone for that. I do expect everyone to do their best but I understand why silly mistakes happen a lot more now than in previous expansion. Good example for the lack of interest and boredom is how we react to a new boss going down. Before WotLK when a new boss went down you could hear cheering and screaming in vent and taking that group photo with dead boss was a magical moment. Black Temple being my favorite raid I remember smiling for a week after getting Illidan down. Now not really so. Only Sartharion with 3 drakes had the same feeling but everything else no.

Why does Ulduar feel so blah then. We had quite a long time to farm Naxx, Maly and Sarth to get everyone the best gear they could get so maybe we already outgeared the encounters in some way – only leaving the challenge to learning the mechanics of each encounter. Also I think Ulduar got hyped too much in our minds before it got out. It sounded awesome, Blizz said it will be harder than Naxx and holy smokes Batman the pics looked awesome. And then we got disapointed when it wasn’t that much harder. Scenery and bosses are epic but the actual fights are not. There’s also the possibility that we as raiders just have already learned all the tricks of our trade over the years of playing and there isn’t much else Blizz can throw at us. Don’t stand in red/blue thing, if X happens move to Y, stop casting when blabla happens, stop dps at certain percentage etc. It’s not a long list of different stuff.

Are the easy mode encounters ruining the game then? Well no I can’t say that since majority of players are at that level. Obviously medicore and hardcore guilds are not happy but they are in minority. As for myself I am not happy with the current state of raiding but I still feel I’m getting my moneys worth and will keep on going. Hopefully, and oh please make it be, the difficulty keeps going up and once we get to Icecrown Citadel it will be something what TK, SSC, Hyjal and BT were.

Jun 11

Giddy up! Now 10 levels sooner.

This is my first post and all but I won’t go into introductions. For that please check the About page.

And now to business. So, there is going to be changes to the mount system in the upcoming patch 3.2.

Regular land mounts trainable at level 20 (was 30)
Epic land mounts trainable at level 40 (was 60)
Regular flying mounts trainable at level 60 (was 70)
Regular flying mounts speed increased to a 150% gain (was 60%)

First I was rather confused. They did lower the level requirements once already. The training costs and mount prices are going down too. Ergh. I remember when back in the days it was quite a task to collect the money for your mount. For the apperentice training I was farming raptors at Stranglethorn Vale, skinning them and selling either the leather or making wicked leather armor. It took quite a while but the feeling was so great when I finally got my Reins of the Striped Frostsaber. And the next one in line? Sheesh. Killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater for daaaays and making Devilsaur Armor sets for sale. Actually I kind of enjoyed it after I had developed a system for it. I knew their pathing routes, where to camp, where to look next.. even what they had for lunch. For example.. if it smells like ale it most likely was a dwarf. Rusty ale is plate wearing dwarf. You get the idea.

Hrm. Although this feels somewhat of a coffee stain on my WoW Memories album I think this change is a good thing. It brings game more accessible for new people, makes leveling alts more enjoyable and if you start playing on a new server the first big moneypit isn’t so deep at all. What this means for me is easier alt leveling if/when I decide to roll more. Increasing the speed of first flying mount is something I accept without any strange noises. 60% speed was just terrible. You’d pretty much use it only when your destination was either unreachable by land or you would have had to go around rather than just straight at it. And oh heh.. questing at Storm Peaks anyone?

All in all good news. I don’t wish the old times would return but it’s always fun to reminsce how things used to be, eh?