My first Tier 1 dungeons

Sorry for the slowdown in posts, I'm taking a class at night and it's taken away some of my time towards the end of the semester.  My job has also gotten a little busier as well so writing posts during downtime at work has been getting a little more difficult.  But here I am anyway with another post...

My chloromancer hit 50 sometime last week, finally.  And over last weekend I got a decent amount of time to play him and meet a few of my guildies who had already been 50 or even had a second character to 50.

We did a few T1 dungeons, we had a cleric MH, me as my chloro, a rogue dps and then we had a rogue and a warrior sharing tanking responsibilties.  The warrior was just getting into tanking and getting into T1s while the rogue had gone through the T1s at least once as DPS and within the week had started tanking.  I'm not sure if they really meant it or were just being nice, but my groupmates/guildies were very forthcoming with praise.  Saying that I was doing really good with my heals or that my cleansing was great and quick and the cleric never needed to cleanse or if I got out a timely combat rez I was told "great job".  It was a good feeling, I felt like I was really contributing to a team effort and that without me they might not have succeeded.

The T1s we visited were King's Breach, Lantern Hook and Foul Cascade.  None of the dungeons were completed without deaths but when there were deaths there was no finger-pointing or whining ( by me or anyone else ).  The fights we had problems with were approached like the puzzle they were.

Last month I posted a walk-through for normal King's Breach.  But in the expert version things are little different.  One of the nice things about the expert dungeons is the additional boss(es) that we didn't see in the normal dungeon.  It makes the instances at the same time familiar and new.  The changes for KBx, as the dungeon is abbreviated, is that the manticore boss becomes the manticore bossES. In normal there was a chance for either manticore, now you get both.  We also get an additional boss named Konstantin.  Strangely  I had been invited by a guildie the previous day to kill just Konstantin since his group earlier in the day had given up on him.

The instance was smooth, the only real problem we had was with the manticores.  The rogue tank had a strategy where he would try and get wedged into a particular tree trunk to avoid the knockbacks and the rest of the group could just stay at range.  We tried variations on that strat probably 4 times before someone else spoke up and said they had done it by having the whole group in the tree trunk.  We wiped once on that strat and the second try we got it right.  One trick the rogue tank used was to put his teleport beacon in the spot we were all stacked so that if he happened to get knocked back he was able to quickly return to the stack.... SUCCESS!!!

Konstantin, actually a very interesting fight.  Konstantin is in a crypt, this crypt has a metal floor with thousands of holes in it and the floor has a nice arc pattern to it.  When you start fighting him spikes come up through the holes in the floor, but only in parts of the pattern part of the time and then other parts of the pattern other times.  There isn't a set pattern to when they come up, all you get is a warning of puffs of air coming through the holes that are going to get spiked.  The first time I had done it the person teaching the fight told me to worry about the spikes first and dps when possible.  The spikes seemed to do about 3k damage, I had about 5k health, so two times getting hit with spikes without getting a heal was bad.  After two tries we got it done though.  The trick was that the spikes only did damage when they came up, so after they appeared you could move onto the spiked area without getting hurt.  This gave everyone a bit more time to DPS/heal and gave the fight a nice dance feel, like Heigan in Naxx.

A video I found on You Tube, not mine.

A different take on the Konstantin fight was what I saw the next day with the rogue tank.  He had the group stay outside of the crypt and he went in and pulled Konstantin out.  He kited him in front of the entrance and I guess there's a point where Konstantin enrages or something, but when that happened the rogue teleported either to his beacon or just straight ahead depending on which ability was on cooldown.  It made the fight more than easy for the rest of us as we didn't have to worry about spikes and the tank avoided extra damage.

Enough babbling for today, maybe Monday I'll have something put together about Lantern Hook and/or Foul Cascade.

King's Breach - Rift instance

I finally got into a group in King's Breach, the instance in Scarwood Reach.

  I was asked to DPS as they already had their healer, so I got a chance to learn how to play my warlock build.  The instance had the usual trash you would expect in an instance, easily gathered up and dps'd down.  I had my dominator soul second to my warlock soul all ready to squirrel things but there didn't seem to be any reason to CC. 

There are three boss locations in King's Breach, at the last spot you get to fight two bosses, one after the other.  Our tank seemed to know the instance so we moved fairly quickly and he was nice enough to give us a heads up for any special mechanics. 

We cleared out the trash from the first area, and after we had killed the last group the first boss came out to fight.  She was "Hunter Suleng", she seemed to be typical tank-n-spank with adds that spawned during the fight.  It seemed to be an easy fight, some of the trash that lead up to her probably hit harder.  In the same area as this boss is a life-bomb, you need to get three of them.  In this run the first life bomb was inaccessible, it seemed to be stuck behind a clip plane, though I hear that sometimes it is accessible. 

The second boss was Ravalos, he's a large crocodile that has a front cleave and a tail sweep.  On top of his melee attacks he puts a circle of some form of attack on the ground, you have to move out of it or you'll be asking your healer to heal when he shouldn't have to.  There's a decent amount of crocodile trash as well for those who have the butchering profession. 

We continued on through the area and ended up at the last boss fight location.  At this location you get one of two random bosses either Mondrach or Autoch, both of them are griffins, we got Autoch who's main annoyance is a charge ability.  Our tank had everyone stand in an alcove in a tree stump and he pulled the boss to us.  This kept the boss from charging anyone and made the fight relatively simple, I'm not sure if the additional damage to the group made healing any more difficult to the healer.  Following Autoch a Shadehorror Phantasm spawns in the same place he was standing.  He casts an AE void bolt so at the start the tank had us LoS the boss then we all started on him.  During the fight he spawns adds and at the same time becomes undamageable, the adds are elites but seemed to be easy enough.  It was a fun run, I'm sure it was made easier by the knowledgable tank.

I've actually enjoyed some PVP

I've got my chloromancer in Rift to lvl 34. I'm playing him on a PVP server, totally against my normal inclination.  From some of the posts I had read prior to launch I wanted to have a chance to play in that environment.  You know the one, where you're constantly on the lookout for your next assassin?  I know if my Bartle test had come up "killer" I would be looking at the zones as "target rich", but that's not me.  Instead I look around every corner and try and find some companionship while questing through the "kill x of y".
Apparently I made a bad choice with playing a mage on that server, some posts say that they are the worst to play in PVP.  I found this out when I stumbled upon what I guess was someone with Champion as their main soul and got thoroughly pwned.  I kept at it though, even attacking him first a couple of times, hoping to get a drop on him, but to no avail.  I soon gave up on trying to take him down, but it didn't discourage me from trying other PVP targets as I went about questing.
When I was 29 in Scarlet Gorge I spent a whole hour with my group trying to find our way to the "Fallen Cascade" instance which happens to be deep into enemy territory at the north point of Scarlet Gorge.  None of us knew for certain where the instance was nor how to get there, but we kept trying.  Eventually one of us prevailed through corpse hopping and we all benefitted from the teleport that group members get when any of their group enters an instance.  Sometimes this felt frustrating, but the pride in overcoming the challenge was worth the frustration.

All things considered I'm enjoying the PVP aspect in the game a little bit more than I have before.  I'll probably keep going with it and see what the end areas are like with both factions fighting over territory and quest hubs.

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.