Promised myself I’d keep this blog only WoW related; but the last nine months or so I’ve been mainly console gaming. This has a lot to do with my new job, although I did work on the Australian WotLK guide that was out early this year.

Might be back with the new expansion - if I get a new rig. Looking very likely at the moment, fingers crossed ;)

In the meantime happy adventuring!

Fazhira

First things first ? I like Northrend!

Took about 20 days of casual play to hit level 80 following the wow-pro.com guide. I had more than enough rested xp to get through to 80 (breaking every day or two or three) which made it a lot less painful. What I enjoyed was seeing all the new zones and the new dungeon/raid structures.

First impressions ? Blizzard has raised the bar with new format quests, dailies and boss fights. I had a lot of fun doing a lot of the quests while levelling, although I only went through the first five zones (Howling Fjord, Bread Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly Hills, Zul’Drak) and did zero dungeons before I hit 80. No issues with solo questing at all. T5/6 gear in BC took me to 80 quite easily (and sadly I still have a few pieces I have yet to replace with 80 blues) and some of the group quests were easily soloable.

At the moment I’m specced for my weapons rather than looking for weapons to go with my spec. Have gone combat fist/sword; the new rogue talents are very versatile however like most I find DPS to be sub-par even with ‘entry’ level 4pc T7.10 gear.

My first raid as a fresh 80 in a 10 man Naxx I did embarassingly less DPS than the MT (granted, the rest of the raid are Champions of the Frozen Wastes and I’d just only picked up the game, but still..). Thanks for babysitting me :)

Have promised (myself) to not spend too much time playing thus have only casually glanced at the spreadsheets and read up on expertise/hit capping for LK. More later.

IRL stuff caught up with me and I’ve been away from the game for a couple of months. Am now in Sydney indefinitely, which means better ping and weather :) I have a job working in an office that puts out a whole bunch of gaming mags which is awesome.

Looking forward to the WOTLK expansion, which will be in a couple of weeks, and I probably will be back. However, last I checked, WDK has fallen apart at the seams with a bunch of core guys leaving for other servers, selling their accounts and just quitting for other games. I doubt I will be raiding ever again.

Fun while it lasted :)

Anya is an awesome artist!

Sorta running joke I think Leo is an absolute hottie. Nice touch on the T5 head ;) Which reminds me I need to change the banner above.. been a while since I wore those Mag’har shoulders. And um, nice arse ^.~

Thanks you <3

We went back in this week before server maintenance with a slightly different raid composition and didn’t manage to take him down. For some reason it felt harder than our kill attempts. We wiped for about 2 hours.. GG.

Notes on the fight: After that many attempts I feel that CoS should be kept only for Doomfire. On Monday it felt like we were losing a lot of the frontline to Grips due to out of range decursers. Maybe our positioning was messy. Using CoS CD on a Grip meant that in situations when you get feared into a Doomfire or it runs through beneath Archimonde/spawns on top of melee puts unecessary strain on healers which are not usually assigned to frontline when you can’t remove it. Decursing Grips *should* be top priority for decurse classes anyway. Ideally. However having said that it is still situational.. if you don’t get decursed and are about to die you just have to pop CoS and pray for a heal and no immediate fear/doomfire.

Apart from a decurse and CoS, another way to remove Grip would be to pop a Purification Potion.. however it should be noted that it fails quite often. Restorative Potions does the same thing over a period of time but it takes a while before the first tick kicks in so it shouldn’t be used at all for this purpose.

He looks like a giant hermit crab. The fight was pretty straightfoward. More of a healer thing keeping everyone topped up before we pop his Tidal Shield. His Impaling Spine move is pretty cute as well.. the first wipe was pretty funny. We had macroed the /use itemname wrong.. It is actually called Naj’entus Spine and not Impaling Spine.

A timed CoS will save you from taking the 8500 frost damage when the shield breaks. We found wound poison/mortal strike not really necessary as most guilds would have the DPS to take him down quite easily.. although it would speed up the fight for the healers. He heals for approx 1-3% each time without debuffs and he has around 3,600,000 HP.

Didn’t take a screenshot of the kill. Only concern for rogues is the Hateful Strike (like Gruul’s) which hits leather for about 20k damage if you’re really that unlucky that your OT has less HP than you when that happens.

Haven’t been back since - did another round of SSC and TK clears to attune new guild members and have since gone into Hyjal. Finally got [Serpentshrine Shuriken] to replace [Nethershrike]. Also picked up [Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher] from Azgalor but the same thing happened to me that happened to Grimmer before. RL couldn’t master loot token to me so after about 72 hours and a few tickets I finally got it in the mail. Dammit, the excitement is gone already LOL!

Been slackin on the updates! RL work has caught up :(

The guild decided to take a year end break for about 5 weeks, so we’ve just only started raiding again a couple of weeks ago. Things are somewhat back on track though, we continued where we left off with an Archimonde FTK. Took us about 30 wipes to get there but it was an easy clear. The Malaysian lag made it harder than it probably was, well-timed Air-Burst landings might have been a little too late for some of us. Was initially using CoS for a preemptive fear resist (doesn’t really work) but found it to be far, far better used on Doomfires (or if absolutely necessary.. Grips). Both the guild rogues are back to Combat builds now after the Hemo nerf. Which is fun. Combat Potency, how I missed thee!

We went into Black Temple for the first time and chalked up two FTKs on Najentus and Supremus. Pretty easy stuff. Will blog more about the bosses later.

Guild in the meantime having issues with numbers. Due to upcoming holidays/chinese new year/start of new school terms etc we’ve been steadily losing numbers to various AFK reasons so Wad De Kao is recruiting members, preferably BT attuned. Our raid times on Tichondrius are pretty strange as most of us are from +8GMT so raids start at 4:30am server thereabouts.

Hyjal Summit is actually pretty easy(ish) with the right raid.. this week we seem to have crazy mojo. 4 bosses down! And that means Raptor has to get busy with the pot distro for FTKs.. hahaha!

Anetheron was pretty messy - on kill MT died at about 20% and we somehow managed to take turns tanking him while DPS burned him down. He was on me for all of 8 seconds. The Alliance NPCs were tanking. We had 7 or 8 people left up when he died ;) Next kill will be cleaner.. I hope.

Kaz’rogal was a one-shot kill. Easy. Honestly that went by so fast I will probably have to read up again next week. I barely remember the fight.

Azgalor took longer. Day 1 we put in 3 attempts. Today at 3rd we got him to 6% and downed him 4th try. Had a bit of drama when me and Grimmer had doom and died near the tauren camps too far away to register kill so Zerul couldn’t master loot T6 glove token to Grimmer. Apparently the only two people who weren’t showing up on ML list were the rogues! GM sorted it out thankfully ;) I love Tauren Warriors!

Wait.. does that mean I didn’t get rep for that kill?! :(

Next up.. Archimonde. Or maybe Black Temple?

Grats all, especially to Grimmer and Urzoo on new shiny T6 loot! <3