Heroic Manastorm

Yesterday we went into the high-security prison Arcatraz to solve the last heroic trial (tenacity). The mission objective: to rescue Millhouse Manastorm. The trash was hitting hard as expected and the odd aggro range from Arcatraz trash needs to be adressed properly. The first boss was a joke with my shadow resist gear: I resisted around 3/4 of his shadow damage, that's even more then on Pandemonius. Our group setup was tank, healer (holy paladin), hunter, shadow priest and warlock. In the sum up we had zero problems finishing it and no wipes at any bosses. I think we sharded every single drop, even the epic dagger from Harbinger Skyriss, but got our quest done at least. As it is still possible to summon people in that can talk to Millhouse as well, we asked around and summoned some friends in to compelete the quest as well. BTW, that Millhouse guy really must be on some arcane crystal steroids.. he sure is tall for a gnome.

Now that i solved all three heroic trials, the Naaru gave me a 4th one: Trial of the Naaru: Magtheridon. That will be easy, we'll do it tomorrow. =) After the last quest you'll get the key for the Tempest Keep raid instance. Talking about attunements, did you see Blizzards easter egg for today? Check out the Black Temple Attunement chart. I thought it was very funny considering the discussion about attunement requirements recently.

I also got myself a new tanking ring: Band of Impenetrable Defenses, which is really good compared to others out there. I'm still amazed how good the Elementium Band of the Sentry is, but that one eluded me since quite a while and i did not really took the time to grind Arcatraz for it, as other upgrades were more important.

The Sun Eater

Yesterday night we went to heroic Mechanar again. The time/badge ratio is just the best from all heroics and Pathaleon drops some nice warrior stuff. As the elevator door can still bug on you (Blizzard announced it will finally be fixed with the next patch - they said that two times before tho), it seems to help when all release at the same time after a wipe. We used this "method" through our last two runs and it worked fine. When we killed Pathaleon, i could jump for joy... he dropped The Sun Eater for me, finally! =)
Because of the additional dodge rating, this sword IMO is superior to the King's Defender from Karazhan. Of course the +hit is nice but maximizing mitigation is trump.

Before doing the heroic run, we ventured into Karazhan up to Curator. After we could convince the robot to bend the gallery rules for us, he was nice enough to grant me my T4 gloves: Warbringer Handguards. Now we need to work faster towards the prince, so it's possible for me to have a shot at the first set bonus (although its not that great).

If you want to track heroic keys for your guild, there is a new tool at Antiarc's WoW Armory Tools. It will query the Armory and give you a list that looks like this... quite nice.

Imprisoned in the Citadel

Yesterday night we set up a group to do the Trial of the Naaru: Mercy in heroic Shattered Halls. Once you step through the door at Grand Warlock Nethekurse, a timer will start. There are three prisoners to be rescued, the first will be executed after 55min, the next 10min later and the last in another 15min. To finish the trial it will be sufficient if you manage to save the last one, which gives you 80min in total from gauntlet to dead Kargath. It might be a good idea to set a custom timer, as when you die, the "timer-debuff" is gone. There is another quest you can pick up right before the sewer entrance, called Imprisoned in the Citadel. To finish this one you need to save the first prisoner. We did not make it to solve that quest (who let the dogs out?!?), but from what info i could find it does not look like it's leading anywhere.

The bosses don't really change in SH heroic. They only hit harder and use their abilities more often... that was about it as far as i realized. The last Orc from the gauntlet is an additional "boss" in heroic, named Blood Guard Porung. I was lucky and got Spaulders of Slaughter from him. The last boss dropped... an epic gem, yay. After i finished the trials of Strength & Mercy it's only the Tenacity trial in Arcatraz left. So far it's still possible to summon people in after you finished the last boss off and all can complete the quest. Maybe we'll work on it over the next days. After the initial three trials, you'll get a 4th before you can obtain the key for the Eye: Trial of the Naaru: Magtheridon

After reading this topic on the forums i had to check out the place myself. In Nagrand (50,13) is a small hut in the mountains, inside the hut are a handful of zombie babies from different races. Glowing eyes, scary toys... this place sure has an evil aura. If you see the sandbox, I'm sure the "pet" was alive ones and they ate it.

Two more topics that catched my attention: First a blue statement telling us rare spawns replaced chests in Outlands. Thinking about it, i only saw chests in the Draenei starting area, else only in instances. The other one is about fixing sound problems. After WoW introduced more sound channels i have problems as well from time to time. It seems WoW sound is overloaded and tries to use more channels then available, resulting in eg. combat sounds not being heard - very annoying. I'll try what is suggested in the thread and see if that helps.

Nielas the Ghost

Our adventures in Karazhan are going quite well. We established a fast enough pace to go from Attumen the Huntsman to the chess event in one night. The side-entrance enables us to go back the next raid and start with the Shade of Aran (after bashing down the annoying magic immune eels), who is the ghost of Nielas Aran (the father of Medivh). This fight is a *lot* of fun (heh, finally i can go DPS *g*) but boils down to everyone knowing exactly how to react in the different situations. If you have a handful of people with you that visit him for the first time, it takes a moment until all get into the right "swing" and you can have some good attempts on him. As we operate two Karazhan raids at the same time and intend to mix people around, so everyone knows to play with everyone, we only had two serious raids with attempts on him yet, after bringing "new" people up to speed on the encounter. Our best go was 13%, so i assume the next time we visit him, when all people saw the fight before, hes dead meat... oh wait, then again hes a ghost. ;)
One thing we experienced was, that some people had trouble to spot the Blizzard. If you got problems with that as well, make sure your spell detail level is not turned down to low, as then you'll only see half of the Blizzard what other people will see. And of course it's always Blizzards fault *insert comment about lame wordplay here*

I was able to upgrade some of my gear as well. During our recent runs i could snatch the Wrynn Dynasty Greaves and the Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable. In total i know have 12.8k HP while being very close to 75% damage reduction against bosses. Very nice, on the right way I'd say. ;) Talking about gear, what's recently wrong with the Blizzard Armory? My profile was last updated one week ago... do they only update during maintenance now? Slackers!

On the note of socketed gems in gear, did you know you can eg. insert a heroic BoP gem (like the one we got yesterday in heroic Mechanar *grumbles*) into a BoE item and still give the item to someone else or sell it? More info in this thread. Talking about heroic dungeons: Yesterday i finally got the opportunity to test my 300+ Shadow Resistance gear. Most of it are TBC greens "of Shadow Protection". We tried it on the first boss in heroic Mana Tombs and i resisted around 50% of his damage - makes the fight much easier. Now i need to test it in heroic Arcatraz on the shadow damage boss there.

As a closing tip: If you run as many mods as i do, sometimes you might run into the limitation of the allocated memory. There will be some major changes on memory usage of mods and the UI with 2.1.0 but it's already possible to use part of the functionality. If you set the memory threshold to "0" (zero), WoW will use as much memory for mods as is needed. While some rogue addon could eat up all your memory, it's very unlikely and if you reach a set threshold WoW will exit anyway. So I strongly suggest to change it like this; will become the default setting with next patch anyway. It's also possible to test the new memory garbage collecting function, you can use a macro with

/script collectgarbage("setpause", 110)

If you're ineterested in further info about the changes, read here.

...on with the show!

Remark in advance: The idiots at blogger won't accept "broken" html tags anymore, which does mean i can't use itemlinks in my blog anymore until they will enable this again. It's not even possible to report it as a bug, as they removed that function as well. stupid.

Since i was able to get a better look at Karazhan, i have to say this is a great fun raid instance. The atmosphere is very fitting and the different encounters are diversified. After a few raids i finally turned honored with the Violet Eye, which enables the smith in the stables to repair my items. This is really needed, as the next vendor to repair your stuff is where your hearthstone is bound. O.o

The funniest encounter so far was the Opera event. It's a random "play" (from three possible), so far we only got the Big Bad Wolf. A hillarious fight: One player turns into the Little Red Riding Hood and has to kite the wolf around the stage. "Run away little girl, run away!"
What we have laughed during this event... I can't wait to see the Wizard of Oz play. I also was lucky and got Eternium Greathelm from the dead wolf.

Yesterday we went back in heroic Shadow Lab to finish the trial quest. The last time we had trouble with only one healer (being a priest) as she took too much damage on the 2nd boss - not her fault, the fight is just too chaotic. We dared to go with only one healer again yesterday, but this time took a paladin. He was able to keep us up and survived quite a beating. Seems to be the perfect choice for the mainhealer in this fight. With the additional DPS, while only having one healer, the rest of the instance was quite easy. The last boss just needs 2-3 goes until all get it right, if they have never been there before. We killed Murmur and finally got our quest item. One trial down, two (Arcatraz & Shattered Halls) to go... then another one with Magtheridon, but whos counting. ;)
This heroic run enabled me to get 33 heroic badges and buy myself the Azure-Shield of Coldarra. At least now i can be a little bit more picky about which heroic instances i run, as the rest of the stuff i can buy with heroic badges is only very minor upgrades, if at all.

heroic Shadow Lab

As a quick pre-comment: I went back into the raiding game. I joined Impact recently. Before TBC i raided a few times with them and they are a nice bunch of people. Currently we try to run two groups for Karazhan and as soon as people are geared up enough we'll peak into Gruul's Lair.
After our last Karazhan raid a group of us decided to adventure into heroic Shadow Lab. It takes much longer in heroic then on normal, so bring enough time and don't start in the middle of the night, like we did. :)

In SL there are some things that got changed for heroics. The first two rooms at the first two bossed are the greatest pain. The warlocks near Ambassador Hellmaw are four now and beware, they cleanse each other. So it will be necessary to keep them crowd controled out of LOS from each other or a loose one can free others. I recommend using a warrior tank who stance dances for the fearing Felguards, they hit hard enough to one- or two-shot people if the tank gets feared. We had good success with using a hunter to kite them a moment and then feign, should the tank get feared. Ambassador Hellmaw has nothing new to show, just his fear seems to be longer.

The next room with the large groups (up to six mobs) requires good planning and use of CC abilities, especially as they cause more damage on heroic. If you have a priest, he should MC a mob even if hes the main healer. The acolytes (sp?) have powerful healing spells, so he can heal with them as well. We had trouble to kill Blackheart the Inciter with only one healer, so i suggest to take an off-healer with you as well. The fight is just too chaotic and one healer will struggle to keep the group up.

The next interesting challenge causes Grandmaster Vorpil. The voids will spawn much faster and his hellfire does more damage. So jump from the platform after a teleport in a split second or you take huge damage. One new trick he learned is that he'll banish a random player, can even hit the tank. As this fight is a faster time race on heroic, we found the best tactic for us was to have the tank in DPS gear (as Vorpil hits like a wuzz) and DPS him down fast. Should the voids become too many, we tried to kite him down south and when he teleports us, take him north afterwards. In total this should give you enough time to kill him.

Murmur is a nice awareness check in heroic. His touch will now work like a magnet for the other group members, so you have to spread out quickly again or else you'll take damage from your team mate exploding. Beside his Sonic Boom, he now got another AoE ability which will hit you, if you don't run back into the circle fast enough after the sonic boom. So basicly you spread out inside his circle. Watch if you get yanked from a touch and when the sonic boom comes, you run out and directly after the cast you run back in. As this fight is very boring in normal, they should have done this for normal as well - finally makes it a challenge. Unfortunately we were so tired when we reached him, that we wiped at 4%, 5% etc. After a few tries we decided to call it and get some sleep. Next time we'll take revenge. ;)

I just discovered that ItemSync seems to have problems catching all items from eg. chat. Some items it just can't remember. As the author is busy and did not fix that problem yet, i decided to switch to AtlasLoot Enhanced for the moment. Basicly it's a database with loot lists for the various instances or faction vendors etc. I tried it and very much like it... it's quick to check for certain drops and it keeps extra lists for heroic as well. In addition i upgraded my Atlas. AtlasLoot Enhanced will integrate itself into the Atlas maps, but as not all maps are in Atlas, you're better off using the own interface to check for drops. As there are several beta versions and older versions floating around, here are the two i installed (those work together perfectly):
AtlasLoot_Enhanced_v2.04.00_Beta4
Atlas 1.9b1

Heroics & Armory

As there are no upgrades for my gear in the normal instances and it became boring to run them over and over, I decided to focus more on heroic instances. So far i went to Slave Pens, Underbog, Steamvault, Old Hillsbrad, Mechanaar and Mana Tombs in heroic mode. The goal is to gather enough badges to "buy" the Azure-Shield of Coldarra from the heroic vendor. I'm at 20/33 badges so far... not that many runs left, counting in you gain between 3-5 badges per successful run.

It's very important tho to gather a good group, as else heroic will end up in a wipe-fest. I like heroic, despite the fact that some encounters should have some fine-tuning. While it's fun to have a few encounters like Bog Lords or Tavarok, it's quite insane that a one second lagspike can just wipe your party. For those that have not been there: these mobs hit a full-decked tank for 10k+ so the tank needs to be on full health all the time if you want to survive it. Because it's the same bosses, it can be hard to determine which drops come from heroic mode. Itemization is sometimes a bit questionable in heroic mode - risk versus reward is not always good. The thing that sucks the most is the occasional epic/unique gem, epic in quality it does take up the epic loot slot at the last boss. Means you get a gem, that's your "epic" reward. I use filter rules for itemlevels (internal) to look stuff up. While these lists, which i doubt are complete, are not entirely from heroic mode, most drops are:
heroic blue drops
heroic epic drops

In addition there could be more quests involved in heroic dungeons. So far it's only a few quests, like the trials of the Naaru, which requires you to run a few instances in heroic as part of the attunement for the Eye (lvl 70, 25 people raid instance) or a quest you pick up in heroic Slave Pens for attunement to Serpentshrine Cavern (lvl 70, 25 people raid instance). The Shattered Halls trial is supposed to be 45min baron on drugs. You need to run from the gauntlet part to the end in 55 min on heroic to make it. There should be more new minibosses or quests to spice up heroic a bit more. I lack like 1.5 Shattered Halls runs to grab my last heroic key. If i get the chance nowadays, i run instances on heroic. Should you need a tank for some crazy heroic adventure, give me a holler. ;)

Did you have a closer look at the new Armory feature Blizzard started the beta service for? Basicly it's a large database with *all* character data. Only stuff missing is the things in your bags and bank. Else *everything* is shown.. talents, reputation... everything. Your gear is saved a few times a day when you log off.. So while it provides a snap-shot, it's not sure you were wearing your main gear or just leisure clothes. Opinions about this database are split. While it has some useful features, like a proper guild member look-up, some PvPers are angry as they want their specc to be a "secret", as much as that's possible. In my opinion Blizzard should add a bit of functionality for guilds, like attunement tracking and such, and maybe add opt-out functionality for those that want their specc to be a secret. Then it could become a very useful tool. If you want to look at a profile, mine can be found here: Thulf at the Armory