Heroic ToC

Well Heroic ToC is definitely a humbling experience, I don't think I've wiped so many times, ever. At the moment I'm up to 4 clears of this place and got the achievement for completing it but that was with an amazing amount of wipes on the Black Knight and I'm running out of gold for repairs so it looks like I need to do some dailies >.<. But, and this is a big but, this place is worth it, the drops are pretty amazing, so far I've managed to get a nice pair of mail shoulders and a scarlet kris for Withthose and a nice tanking ring for Aztrid. I received some other bits and pieces but they're not suited to tanking. I'm building up ret and holy sets of plate gear, you never know, it seems a shame to waste this gear on DEing and I might want to use it one day.

Strats:
Create 2 macros:
Macro 1
/focus aztrid
/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton1
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton2

Macro 2
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton4

and bind these next to each other, the first macro sets your focus onto the main toon, in this case Aztrid, it then assists the focus and then then clicks your mounts 1 and 2 button. So what's so great about this? Well my little padawans, when your main changes mounts the team will automatically refocus and assist the main and click the appropriate spell.

The second macro gets your shields up, you really want to be mashing these buttons one after the other.

Champions: Park your team all bunched together inside the star point on the floor opposite to where the mobs enter and get them off /follow. Get 3 shields up. With your main target a mob and hit the first macro button which will cast shield breaker and run back to your team, as the mob gets closer they will all be casting shield breaker and then automatically start hitting thrust when the mob is in melee range. Repeat till the 3 sets of 3 are complete, when you nearly finished with them make sure all your mounts are healthy, otherwise get a new mount. OK so the champions charge over, the strat is very similar to what you did with the first 3 waves but I find that having the main hang back a bit and cast shield breaker works really well. Your main then can just do shield breaker duty and keep trampling the dismounted mobs while the team is pummeling them. Works really well.

Drakes! WOOT!

The team have their drakes and yes they look magnificent lol. Each drake farming run went very smoothly except for the last one, I got cocky and thought I was so leet that nothing could even touch me in this instance (given that I rarely dropped below 80% health I can be forgiven for believing that lol), anyway back to the story, on the last run I park my shammies, totems out and pull Meathook, but I pull him too close to the shammies and somehow they all died, I wasn't watching them as it never occurred to me to look out for them as I've never had an issue with Meathook, I think this boss must have some sort of cleave, so they died and Meathook was at 5% maybe, he was nearly roasted anyway so I finished him off on the pally, rezzed the team, buffed up, drank and still managed to get the last drake with 1 minute to spare.....I guess I am pretty uber lol.

Culling of Stratholme - magma totem ftw!

Remember a few posts ago I detailed my utter failure in CoS? I went in again yesterday expecting another failure, well noone in the team even got below 80% health, amazing! Magma totems are the key here, I have on my standard set of totems 3 magma and 1 tow as I find that the magma are more useful in more situations that the other fire totems for their aoe damage. I just dropped those whenever and they ate up all those undead adds, very nice. I didn't do the instance in 20 minutes and so didn't get the achievement/drake because I let Arthas die a few times which ate up time but all the bosses were trivial. Next time (today) I know what to do so maybe I'll be drake farming soon :P

WoW Faction change service

Back in the day - pre bc, I remember creating my first character. Naturally I created a human male warrior and named him Talloch - may he rest in peace /cry. It never occurred to me to create a horde char, they were so damn fuggly! I was no good as a warrior and so created a female human mage named Ameggy - I was much better at maging so I reached level 60 reasonably quickly and became a GM of a really nice levelling guild but mages got hit with the nerf bat and became vending machines. I found it hard then to get groups, I became a bit of a server whore and jumped around a fair bit thinking that it was the game mechanics that were causing my fellow players to be such unwelcoming asshats, I finally landed on Tichondrius (pvp). One day a horde destro lock fell out of the sky and blew me away in around 3 seconds. I realised then that locks were where it was at and maybe it was time to checkout what horde was all about too, I was so sick and tired of Alliance, the constant mewling, cant find a group and losing at AV. BC came out a few weeks later so I stood in Ironforge completely naked and screamed 'Burn in HELL you Ally filth!' and rolled a BELF Lock two seconds later named Sminky - I chose Sminky so that it would strike terror in the hearts of all Alliance!!. I've never looked back and bemoan the wasted time on alliance. I played my lock for ages and still do even though I box now, I love it although I found that the name Sminky wasn't having the desired affect on alliance so I changed her name to Pheardotdead and truly became the terror of av with countless seeds of corruption and topping the damage chart time and again mwahahahahaha - very enjoyable.

I spent 2 years in the Alliance on different servers (5) and have spent approx the same time on horde on around 3 servers. Horde is a completely different culture, there's more cooperation, easier to find groups, more willing to trade, less judgemental, more helpful. There's just something about the faction that attracts more mature players, of course there are exceptions and being such a server whore I can name quite a few. Never on horde have I been in a group on the final boss and the healer shouts 'LEARN2PLAY' and logs, that kind of thing was not a rare occurance in alliance pre bc, with groups just exploding with teen testosterone. I don't know what ally is like now, but it only seems to be ally who I get rude gestures from and level 1 horde alts having a go at me for boxing. Horde just accept me.

Faction change? Only to bring Ameggy over to the dark side

Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle

A couple of days after my last post I entered Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle with trepidation, this instance has been a killer for me as I've never made it past the gauntlet. I did once on normal and then wiped on trash trying to shoot Skadi down. The big issue here was the constant movement and mana drain. This time I completed the instance - yay! So what was different? I don't think it was gear, although I am much better geared than on my last attempt, I think the major difference is the new totem sets. Now that you can drop an entire set of totems with one button you can drop them without even thinking about it. I had 3 magma + 1 ToW and that just burned through the ads with chain lightning. Awesome.