Expectations?

One of the 4th edition campaigns I am running started with the first module for this editions, H1-Keep on the Shadowfell. Since I started with this module and have a few maps in the DM's guide I decided to continue using the maps and locations provided, I have re-created the map provided in the DM's guide Soon to be posted here. I did add my own twist with an overarching storyline that is supposed to get the characters involved.

Edit: Here is a link to the map that I made from the one provided in the DM's Guide.
Winterhaven and surroundings


You see a couple of centuries ago an oracle just spouted out an epic, as oracles sometimes do. In the epic it was described that the royal family was destined to be the end of Orcus, or at least banish him for a millenia. That epic lists out where the hero is expected to go, what he is expected to use and how he is supposed to end Orcus' reign.

Here are some stanzas that the players have already discovered:

From the past, the future's written
Of the blood of ancient kings
They shall be Orcus' destroyer
Through powerful prismatic rings

In their path, shadows fallen
His death, black and painful fated
By his master, unlife granted
until his soul's hunger sated

Mountain's protectors have the answer
To travel the path of glory
Forged by their ancestral spirit
A ring begins the blood's story

Before ancient Shadow's Pillars
Beneath the shadow darkened sun
With heartening strikes on Orcus
The cleansing war has begun

Bright now is their shadowed future
Strengthened by the coming sun
Fear and horror reduced to nothing
In the end the battle is won

Part of the story is a mercenary company that was hired to guard the royal family until the prophecy came to pass. Red Mithril stayed with the family wherever they went, unfortunately There was an incident at the Keep on the Shadowfell that broke up the mercenary company and scattered the few remaining members of the family.

Assuming the characters find all the information they need, what do you think the chances are that the campaign will go as expected?

Didja notice?

I was re-arranging my blog today. I wanted to keep my blog related items up top but also wanted to make my amazon links more visible.

I started thinking about two things.
1. Do any of my readers ( like 3 of them ) know the 20 year history I have with the name Laslo? and...
2. Why do I have D&D amazon links on my blog page if I haven't really talked about it?

I'll start with #1, but in doing so I'll delve a little deeper into my past and my adolescence. When I was in 8th grade, about 30 years ago ( go ahead, do the math ), we were required to have homework or something to read for half of our lunch period. I was fortunate enough to sit across the table from someone who had already been introduced to D&D. He usually had the "Monster Manual" with him and allowed me to peruse the book during our "study" time. The images and the statistics listed for the imaginary creatures intrigued me, it was so stimulating to my imagination that I had to learn more. I got to know another classmate, who was also into the gaming scene, both roleplaying as well as strategy games. I still call him my friend, and we get together once in a while with our wives and other couples. Him, another friend and I stumbled into the roleplaying world of "Basic Dungeons and Dragons" not knowing exactly what we were doing other than playing make-believe.

Years went by, we tried many different roleplaying games. Fantasy Games Unlimited had quite a few games that were unique and interesting. Aftermath, Daredevils, Villains and Vigilantes and Bushido were FGU products we played. We played some Champions, Car Wars, and of course AD&D.

On to college, I was strangely enough assigned to room with a gamer and learned that my college campus has an RPG club that met every week. All it really did was provide a place to meet without having to deal with pededstrians stopping by to ask "What're you doing?". It was in that group, my first character with that group that Laslo was born. The system was a mixture of AD&D and some very well done homebrew rules. Spells were "invented" by the player by combining words to make the spell effect and every character started with a social status background to help determine their place in the world.

Laslo started with mediocre stats and a horrendous social status. I rolled a 1 on a 20 sided die. This didn't make me a bastard child, this didn't make me a slave, this made me the bastard child of a slave. That's right, Laslo's mother had been a slave in the middle-eastern style city of Kaylith and his father was some northern mercenary who just passed through. So by combining the traits of these two fictional characters, Laslo was a blond haired, well tanned short street urchin who grew up thieving from the plentiful merchants of Kaylith. He went on to have many adventures in many places and became one of my favorite characters.

As far as #2? Maybe I'll cover that next time, I'm DMing a 4th edition campaign that I run on a weekly basis that started in the area that is provided in the DM's guide and the first module. I can talk a little bit about it, but my players haven't really gotten into the meat of the campaign yet so I will have to be careful about what I discuss.

No more WoW

I have been quiet here for a while.

I apologize for not providing the promised follow up to our awesome raiding weekend, but I lost interest.

I have basically quit WoW cold turkey, the few times I have logged on was because my wife was in need of some gems cut and once because she wanted some DPS for a pug raid and asked that I log on my mage. What I have been doing with my time has been playing City of Heroes.

I had played this game when it first came out, kept my account going for about 3 months before I grew bored with the repetitive nature of the game.

At the time, if you completed a mission with a group that was the same as a mission in your list, you did not get credit for completing it unless it was YOUR mission that was completed. This was a serious sore spot. Well Cryptic/NCSoft fixed that, now if you complete a mission with a group that you have in your mission list you will be asked if you would like to complete your mission as well. This was a nice simple fix that could have kept me playing way back when I started.

Another issue that was addressed was difficulty. CoX ( City of Heroes/Villains ) is a class based game, depending on which role you chose to file you are allowed to choose from certain power sets and you get a certain size health pool. As in most MMOs different roles have different damage output versus survivability. If you are a tanker you can take a lot of punishment but dishing it out is a little tougher. If you are a blaster (ranged DPS) you can deal a lot of damage, but have to be careful of letting your foes get too close. A defender ( healer/buffer ) can keep themselves alive a bit longer, but have a hard time arresting ( killing ) anything. This led to having some classes very reliant on grouping and others able to easily plow through missions. Now in CoX you can choose your difficulty from among 5 different settings, you start out at level 1 and can go up to level 5. This was definitely a much needed improvement.

There have been many updates and additions since I last played on a regular basis, maybe I will spend some more time at a later date describing more changes.

I went to two raids since my last post.

The first raid we fought and defeated Auriaya then we went back and beat up Ignis.

Auriaya was fun, still a bit nerfed ( yeah, I noticed ). Our plan was to take down her four adds then focus on her. We had three people assigned to AE her kittens that pop in to see what's happening but leave the defender alone. We knew that during the AE the defender takes some damage, so I have to help deal with it. Once it gets to about about five to ten percent, it is my job to taunt the thing out of the group and stun it. Well that didn't quite work right, I did taunt, I did stun but it didn't want to come to me on the taunt. Instead the AE dpsed him down in the raid group, luckily everyone was quick enough to move out of the area before they died. The defender came back only one time before Auriaya died. One other thing we didn't do was move out of line-of-sight of the defender's death spot. I would have expected at least a couple of people to be feared through the void zone, but I don't think one person died to that thing. In the end it all worked out and we got our first progression kill of the evening.

So with Auriaya dead, we went back to the beginning to see Ignis. First of all his trash is challenging ( I don't know what it was like pre-nerf ), and took some strategy. There are patrols at the bottom of the ramp leading to Ignis, these need to be handled one group at a time. There are Molten Colossus(es/i) that get tanked apart. If I remember correctly, they explode when they die. There are also Magma Ragers, they throw out a tornado of fire that we need to avoid. To make these guys easier we had a hunter kite one of them far away from the raid, only feigning once the first one was dead.

This was the first time I had seen Ignis, and I had only read up on him a little bit. It took us six tries, and I think I was the reason we had to do two of those. Once I figured out the adds and we had a second tank ( Karthis ) helping, it became like a dance where everything just started to come together.

We also went a took a quick look at Hodir with the last minutes left to the raid. His trash was challenging, though not as bad as Ignis'. Merely another learning curve. Hodir of course thrashed us after the quick description by the raid leader.

Tomorrow I'll post about Sunday's raid, we did well then too. More progression, let's keep it going.

Post nerf experiences

Well I went back into Uldaur again. As I said in my comments on Karthis' blog ( see the link to the right ) in response to other people's comments, I was going to wait and see what the nerfs looked like. I also made a silent promise to Jacemora to experience it first. Here are my observations on the changes.

First noticable nerf:
XT-002 - The tantrums were noticably shorter, did they NEED to be? I don't know I would have to hear from my healers on that. I know that I really didn't have a lot of problems in tanking its adds. I have also done this fight now on my undergeared mage, in it's old form I would have had to count on my healers during the tantrum, now not so much. The enrage time is noticably longer as well, having DBM tell you one minute to enrage though makes that one more obvious.

Razorscale - I don't know if any of the nerfs are obvious, but then again I think we had this fight down already.

Auriaya - We cleared the instance up to here and got one shot before the end of raid time. We got her considerably farther than ever before. It's hard to tell if its the nerfs or just us understanding the fight a little better, though in support of my previous post I choose the former :)

I was also able to learn two new fights ( to me at least ):
Iron Council - we three shot this fight. The first wipe was attributable to me, I wasn't quite ready for the runes that were put under the bosses and didn't react quick enough. The second wipe was one of the other tanks not seeing a rune under the boss he was tanking. All in all a pretty simple fight, we got the "Heroic: I Choose You, Stormcaller Brundir achievment.

Kologarn - we two shot this, I don't remember what caused the first wipe. Another simple fight for me anyway, I just had to pick up the adds from the right arm and DPS a little bit when the adds were gone. It again seemed to be a pretty simple fight. I have also done this now with my mage. From this side of things I had to pay a little more attention to the lasers, I didn't pay much attention to them while I was tanking adds on my paladin.

Hopefully a few guildies or any other readers will post their thoughts about the changes to these fights.

I still stand by my position that they should have waited another month before "tuning" these fights down. Stay tuned for my comments on the next round of nerfs that you know have to be coming.

Ooh now I have something to write about.

With Ulduar's release I think you could tell by some of my earlier posts that I was very happy to finally be challenged by the game again. I thought that finally Blizzard realized their mistake with Naxx and was going to give the skilled raiders ( and they don't have to be hardcore ) what they were looking for.

Now I assumed after a bit of time, perhaps 2 months prior to the next raid instance release, they would start making the encounters easier and allow some of the less capable people to raid further into Ulduar.

But alas, this is not the case. As posted in this thread http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16474158165&sid=1 Blizzard will start the nerfing early and apparently often. Why just in my previous blog I was complaining about Auriaya, but in the end I hope you got the impression that it was a challenge I enjoyed and embraced and obviously would be going back for more beatings until we overcame the challenge.

According to this thread http://forums.worldofwarcraft.comthread.html?topicId=16473764809&sid=1 the first five bosses and the one that I'm pretty sure we'll beat this week are still too hard. What? We are by no means a "Hardcore" guild, we raid for nine hours a week. Eighteen hours of learning to beat five bosses, is that hard? We by no means expected to skate on through, saving the world from Yogg-Saron in the matter of two weeks of raiding. What we got was what most of my guild expected, a steady challenge of progression through a difficult raid instance.

Why is Blizzard doing this? Were they losing people from the game because they couldn't get through Ulduar? Hell, I've recently gone into Naxx with my alts and there are still people who can't do the fights there. Naxx is more than enough challenge for that group of raiders.

I don't know what Blizzard is thinking, or if they are thinking. I have already canceled my account, it ends in June. At this point I don't know if I will be reactivating it, I was planning on doing that, but now I'm happy I didn't. If the nerfs continue as hard as they have I know I won't.

Blizzard, please slow down on the nerfs, the really casual players will get there eventually. Most of them still need to figure out Naxx.

Ulduar - Auriaya

What a b?*#%h.

This is the way the fight goes, from what I can tell.

Pull her and her posse of panthers.
- On the pull ANYONE in line of sight to the cats get pounced on, I didn't look at the damage, all I know is that I as a plate wearer cannot stand up against all four of her cats at the same time.
- If you gain aggro on the cats from a distance, even if it's not on the pull, they pounce.

Let's assume we do the pull correctly and we get her cats to come to us without pouncing ( we did this by having a hunter MD trap aggro to the main tank who was standing around a corner). Next we have to get the cats divided up among the three add tanks we had for this pull. Now I'm a paladin tank, when I do trash ( which I consider these to be ) I use consecrate. When I did that I got all 4 cats to come take a swipe at me first. THIS HURTS A LOT!!!!

So I started off by avenger shielding along with my bubble-wall, this seemed to work fairly well most of the time. The druid off tank could taunt his extra kitty off me that I hit with my shield.

Let's assume we got the pull down, we have the adds separated out and the tanks are doing well, eventually the 4 adds from the pull die and we have a normal tank and spank, right?

WRONG

Now we deal with the boss, She has this nice AE fear ability called terrifying screech along with a cone attack called sonic screech that is divided among all the people it hits. Ok, we can deal with this, stand in front of her unless you've been feared.

Next she brings out a helper, the feral defender he has 9 lives and has a stacking buff feral essence, that can be applied for each life he has left. If he's killed he leaves behind a void zone, that hurts a lot. If he's killed all 9 times this is considered the hard mode since there will be nine void zones scattered around your fight area. Ok, so we don't kill him, just tank him right? I agree, just tanking him would be the best solution, only he's not tankable, he drops aggro like a hot potato. So instead of being tanked the feral defender jumps around picking people at random to swipe for 4 to 5k damage.

We didn't win the fight, instead we learned and tried different strategies. I'm thinking we will be defeating Auriaya next week, probably on Sunday.

Pally tank wishlist from the first 6 bosses in Ulduar:

Here is my current Gear:
Valorous Redemption Faceguard
Boundless Ambition
Valorous Redemption Shoulderguards
Platinum Mesh Cloak
Valorous Redemption Breastplate
Bindings of the Hapless Prey
Valorous Redemption Handguards
Ablative Chitin Girdle
Valorous Redemption Legguards
Sabatons of Endurance
Sand-Worn Band
Signet of the Earthshaker
Essence of Gossamer
Repelling Charge
Last Laugh
Wall of Terror

Here are some of the items that I am looking for out of Ulduar
Flame Leviathan
Mimiron's Inferno Couplings-These are a definite upgrade over what I am currently wearing, my Bindings of the Hapless Prey can be relegated to my block set.
The Leviathan's Coil-is a better tanking ring Signet of the Earthshaker due to the avoidance, again the signet can go into my block set bag.
Titanguard-This is a very minor upgrade, once tanks who have a genuine interest in it have a chance I may consider taking it.

Razorscale
Dragonslayer's Brace-once these drop to me I completely replace Bindings of the Hapless Prey

Ignis the Furnacemaster
Chared Saronite Greaves-Definitely an upgrade, I give up expertise for hit.
Heart of Iron-Yes Please.
Plans: Indestructible Plate Girdle-More avoidance, definitely a win.

XT-002
Shoulderplates of the Deconstructor Definitely an upgrade and as a plus it moves me one step away from power ranger.
Signet of the Earthshaker-I've already gotten this one, as mentioned earlier it will become a piece of my block set.

Assembly of Iron
Handguards of the Enclave-A block set upgrade and sidegrade for single tanking. If I needed my current gauntlets to keep a T7.5 set bonus I easily would.
Plans: Indestructible Plate Girdle-See my comment above

Kologarn- Cache of Living Stone
Necklace of Unerring Mettle-A sidegrade for single tanking, useful for a block set.
Saronite Plated Legguards-Definitely an upgrade, I think you've caught onto my dislike for block for my main tanking set.

Auriaya
Platinum Band of the Aesir
Cloak of the Makers-The Platinum Mesh Cloak's big brother, easy choice.
Unbreakable Chestguard-Since the Paldin T7.5 Set piece is basically the lower iLvl version of this I would have to consider it.
Plans: Spiked Deathgdealers- A better piece than Chared Saronite Greaves, we get 2 gem slots to make up for 25 stamina ( win! ) and more avoidance instead of the hit.

So that's what I'm looking for in gear. I will probably find a way to keep my 2pc T7.5 set for a while until I get a chance to see some T8. I will be praying for those blacksmith recipes each time I go, I'm betting some will even be a money maker.

A new week in Ulduar.

This time we did Flame Leviathan with the tower of storms up. The tower of storms gives Flame Leviathan an ability called Thorim's Hammer as well as an additional 50% health. It took two tries, but we had a few new people who hadn't seen what the fight is like and the boss had more health so all things considered a nice progression kill for us. He dropped "Mechanist's Bindings","Steamcaller's Totem" and "Freya's Choker of Warding" as well as 2 emblems of conquest.

After Flame Leviathan we paid Razorscale a visit, I was interested in seeing how the changes http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=51489.0 were going to affect our strats. The mole machine placement ended up making me be a more aggressive tank, this was a bad thing. When we had the trash tanked closer together it made it more difficult on the melee DPS whose first responsiblity was to take down the watchers. After getting the message I corrected what I was doing and the trash seemed to die quicker and safer. Another problem that was caused by the tanks ( probably mostly me ) was the range in which we were kiting Razorscale. Apparently the tank was moving too far and making it difficult on the healers to stay in range and keep the tank alive. Our third attempt went wonderfully well, we got things right and we had everyone alive, which was different from the first kill where we only had a resto shaman left standing. Razorscale dropped "Razorscale Shoulderguards", "Saronite Mesh Legguards" and "Collar of the Wyrmhunter" for us.

Then we move onto the whiny brat that is XT-002. I had shared what info I had on the trash with the raid, we promptly one shotted the trash. This time I was given the opportunity to MT the crybaby. Everything seemed to be going well but then during the tantrum I got pounded a little too hard and failed to put up one of my cooldowns and died. I found out later that one of the new healers wasn't quite prepared to the extra damage and had taken his attention off of me for a second to help heal the raid. The second attempt went a lot better, we got him to skip his second tantrum due to damage. Unfortunately we had an issue with the scrapbots reaching him and lost the pummeler tank which caused a wipe. The pummeler tank was a warrior and said he had problems grabbing them, so we switched him back to tanking XT and me back to picking up pummelers. Third time was a charm and XT died once again. XT-002 dropped "Twisted Visage", "Mantle of Wavering Calm" and "Signet of the Earthshaker" for us, I received the tanking ring.

So in one evening we conquered the same Ulduar bosses that we did all of last week. Unfortunately work has claimed my evening time on Friday so I will not be able to attend the next boss fights, hopefully Que Sera Sera kicks but though.

Ulduar as a priest

Ok, I got my first shot at Ulduar on my priest last night with a group of people that have an organized cross-guild raiding group. The group is a lot of people I've run with before and most of them are pretty good. My wife runs with them as well since her guild isn't the 25-man raiding type guild.

For Flame Leviathan I got a chance to ride a motorcycle. It's a pretty basic little vehicle, but fun to zip around. They did this fight on normal mode, so no hard mode experience for me yet.

Since they haven't seen them before they skipped Razorscale and Ignis and went straight for XT-002. One addition to the instance was the trash in his room. On either side of the doors, right in front of the scrap piles are a group of robots. I didn't take good notes, but I believe what we had were two compactorbots, three scavengerbots and two repairbots on both sides.

The Compactorbots were cc-able by root and cyclone. I don't think our hunters tried to trap, I think they were immune to sheep and they were definitely immune to fear. These bots picked someone, apparently at random, and lept on them doing damage then did an AE attack before leaping back to their aggro target. If a clothie got hit by two of these at the same time there was a decent chance they were going to die.

The Repairbots were nasty up close, they did a 23k kick to tanks that tried to tank them. During the fight they hang back and put matrix shields over their friends which reduce damage and healed the target. We found that they were fearable, I'm not sure about other CC so we had the warlocks and priests keep them feared. If one of their shields got put over another bot, just move the bot out of the shield.

The Scavengerbots were nasty in general. Their worst ability is their sawblades. They throw sawblades as random targets, the blades put a stacking dot on the target. Apparently some people saw damage ticking at 5k per second at times. These were our primary kill targets.
We eventually figured out what the mobs did and after that it was easy. As I've said before, it felt great being challenged and overcoming that challenge. Keep it coming Blizzard.

XT-002 on the other hand was not beaten by us tonight. I've seen him get dropped before, but this group hadn't, at least not in 25-man. As a group we made some progress, the problem with the attempts in my opinion was the way the corner adds were handled. The first two tries they put a single DPS for each corner, the mage was able to handle them well with her frost nova and AE them down before they reached the boss, unfortunately we only had one mage. The other corners, especially the close one allowed their scrapbots to reach XT002 and of course it healed the boss.

So an ok night of raiding, I got to see a fight from the healing side of things that I had seen before from the tank side of things. I got to see the trash before people in the guild did, so we can have a little less pain when we see it the first time.

Fun night last night, 2 progression kills for Que Sera Sera.

Razorscale -
We took a page from Matticus and broke up the raid into 2 teams plus a tank/healer in the middle. Me, pallytank, on the right side, Allucard a DK tank on the left side and our warrior tank Demonhunters in the middle picking up the sentinels and picking up Razorscale when she landed. Melee DPS/interrupters were assigned to take down the caster adds. The two sides worked really well and after one wipe she went down with a single shaman standing. I think the next kill will be even smoother now that everyone has seen the fight all the way through.


XT-002 Deconstructor -
What a strange boss. I'll let you experience it yourself to see what I mean. The strangeness isn't in the mechanics of the fight though, those are pretty standard. The jist is that the boss gets tanked, every 25% his heart falls out to be beaten upon. Shortly after that, his friends show up from the junk piles in the corners of the room. His friends consist of scrap bots, bomb bots and pummelers. Scrap bots heal him if they get too close, bomb bots explode for 20k damage and the pummelers just have to be tanked. Seemingly at random through this he has a tantrum where he pounds the ground in frustration and causes raid wide damage of 120% of the raid's health. Remember that during this you have the main tank and add tank still being hit by what they are tanking. Also added in is the bomb, XT-002 about every 15 seconds ( a guess ) picks someone to be a light bomb or a gravity bomb. When the light bomb goes off it does damage to the people near them, when the gravity bomb ticks for 3500 damage and when it goes off it pulls people near the bomb to them.

My role in this fight was to pick up the pummelers, so I was able to wade into the fight for the first 25% and contribute with my measly prot damage until the heart was on the ground and I had to pick up my adds. The pummelers can spawn from any of the 4 corners and there can be 0, 1 or 2 of them each time the heart drops. There were times that a druid off tank picked one up for me and delivered him because I didn't see him spawn, but I think I got better as I went.

We wiped probably about 10 times, I don't count or take screen shots of each attempt like Karthis :) We tried some different positioning, we tried multiple add tanks, we tried bunching people up to be easier for more healers to get bomb people, we tried spread all around.. it seemed we had an endless number of strats. What ended up working was tanking him in front of his stairs with the raid fanned around him. Certain people were assigned to kill the incoming adds and the dps was advised to stick on the heart a little longer so they could do more damage to the boss, but then had to turn and take down the adds quickly.

I feel pretty good about this past week, three Ulduar progression kills and the new Archavon boss in three raid nights. Finally some challenge and again I think everyone had a lot of fun with the challenge. Hopefully we'll have some more progression this week.

Friday night raiding

No Ulduar on Friday, group makeup and internet issues stopped us. But we did get a chance to see the new boss in Vault of Archavon. Here is another hard boss, it's obvious that most of the guild was in need of a challenge.

Emalon the Stormwatcher is a step up from Archavon. He hits hard and hits the raid. This encounter also requires the DPS to be strong and quick. Emalon has 3 abilities: Chain Lightning, Lightning Nova and some empower his minions thing.

The damage you take from Lighning nova is based on your proximity to the boss.

Chain lightning will jump to many targets and the more it hits, the greater the damage.

And when he empowers his minion that is the test for the raid's DPS. The minion will start stacking this buff and once it reaches 10 stacks in 20 seconds it explodes doing 30k damage to the raid, chances are that will kill most, if not all, of the raiders.

So the strat is: DPS Emalon until he empowers a minion at which time all DPS switches to the minion to kill it before the buff stacks high enough to explode. Once the minion dies the add tank then picks up the newly spawned add while the DPS goes back to Emalon. In between that process people need to move away from Emalon when he begins to Lightning nova, this helps the healers some. If you are point blank, right on Emalon, his nova does 15k damage, not too bad if you're a tank with 35k + HP.

Sounds simple right, well there's some positioning involved so that the add tank doesn't take too much damage from the lightning nova but otherwise it's a matter of timely healing and quick reacting DPS. Someone during the raid said that basically we needed 50k DPS on the minion to stop him from exploding including the time it takes to switch targets.

After wiping about 4 times everyone got it down and Emalon joined his element in a puff of smoke. The raid had an excellent time and I know I enjoyed the challenge of learning the new fight, I know there were others that felt the same way as well.

Ulduar: First Look

We only got about 2 hours last night before the instance servers flaked out and we were unable to continue our wipe-fest. The Flame Leviathan.... easy, somewhat interesting. I'm not sure what the hard modes are going to be like but the heroic normal mode was cake.

Following the Leviathan it was decided to take a stab at Razorscale. We wiped each of the 6 times we tried, switching up tank placement and CC assignment as we went. We made progress in my opinion and I liked finally being challenged.

This was my first look at any of the fights in there, a couple of people did some fights in the 10man version on patch night.

Now off to the guild website to discuss our attempts and see what changes we can make.

Whoops.. I stepped away from my blog for a while, actually forgot about it entirely. I'm still trying to get into this "something to say every other day" thing.


Well, Ulduar is out. And with some tentative steps I re-enter the raiding scene. I had taken a much needed break from raiding and a the game as well.

Since we got married a little over 2 years ago we've been making payments on 2 houses, we lived in my house until recently when we moved into my wife's house. So my house was sitting vacant, being kept company by my furniture and dishes and other things we didn't need where we moved to.

We were planning on taking our time and clearing it out in stages, deciding what to do with what and eventually emptying the house and probably renting it. Well along comes an opportunity, a friend of one of the neighbors was interested in renting a house nearby and my neighbor had noticed that we weren't around too much. With the chance to get a renter to defray the costs of owning a second unoccupied house, we decided to become landlords a little early than planned. What this meant is we had to quickly move all of these things we didn't have a place for, so we ended up with a full garage and a living room full of boxes to root through and figure out what was garbage and what deserved some precious space. This has been my 3 weeks away from the game, rapid emptying of a house, doing some required maintenance and categorizing a lot of junk I acquired over the years. There are still boxes there and we're making a point of getting through a few of them a day, but there are other things taking my attention as well.

So hopefully I'll have a report tomorrow, regarding my first night back and tanking in Ulduar.

It may seem obvious but...

Listing of obvious tanking tips

1 - In General

• Keep what you're tanking in front of you, you cannot parry, dodge, block what is not in front of you. ( I've had to teach people this when I'm playing my alts )
• Get crits off your hit table, this means defense 535 in heroics and 540 in raids.

2 - In a group

• Make sure your group knows what you're hitting first - I put a skull on my main target
• Don't pull until your healer is ready, my healer is usually my wife and she's at the point now where her mana regen lets her be always ready
• Make sure your healer is ready, nothing suck worse than seeing your health go down and down and then die, only to find out your healer when afk to get a drink.
  

3 - In a raid

• Communicate with your other tanks, make sure everyone knows who's doing what.
• Make sure you know your role, if you have a question ask the raid-leader. If you're the raid-leader make sure everyone else knows what they're doing.
• Use your consumables, usually a tanking flask like Flask of Stoneblood or Flask of Fortification if you're still a little low on defense. Use food, if you're lucky or can make it yourself you can get a Fish Feast.
  

I'm sure I can come up with more, but these are some of the things on my mind now.