A very late weekend update

Saturday was very productive, both from a WoW and real life perspective. The morning was all chores - mowing the grass, doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, etc.

The afternoon led to some 2s play that was simultaneously pretty good and very frustrating (seriously, hunter comps are auto-lose). After a couple games though, we decided to try out ... LFR?

So, each raid has 4 difficulty levels - Looking For Raid, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Of those 4, LFR is the only one where you cannot pick and choose who you go with. It just puts you in a queue, similar to doing 5 man dungeons. LFR is gated, so only the first 6 or so bosses are available at this point (they release a new wing of Hellfire into LFR each week). We went through that and most of it was pretty easy, though there was a fight or two that was messy; my brother got an upgrade or two and said he had fun! Nice.

Emboldened by my success in LFR, I joined a Normal raid for Hellfire later that night. Previously I had cleared the first three bosses but had been unable to get past Kilrogg in two different groups. The leader of this group made it clear from the beginning that this was not a "learning" raid. He was here to clear the instance and if you couldn't keep up (DPS or mechanics-wise) you were getting the boot. "It's not personal, it's just business." Of course, people say this all the time ... very few are able to actually follow through on it.

We got to Kilrogg and he went down easily; in fact, I'm not even sure we had a single person die. It was great! At that point I knew I had a good group. We continued on with a wipe here and there and before I knew it, had done all the bosses that were available in LFR.

Soul Remnant is for the legendary ring quest!

Admittedly, I have not watched videos on most of the fights in Hellfire. I had no idea what the next bosses were going to do, outside of reading a quick explanation in Blizzard's built-in Raid Guide. Nevertheless, I managed to not get kicked out of the group! Some other people did though, including the off-tank. We got through all the bosses except for the last one; at that point it was rather late and the leader called the raid (we had wiped ~3 times on Mannoroth, the second to last fight). Some of the other bosses:

Xhul'horac - kill the two guys on the outside first!

Mannoroth rises ...

... the beginning of the fight ...

... he dead!

Despite using every single bonus roll I had accumulated, I was unsuccessful in getting any set pieces. #sadface I did get a couple of other upgrades, though nothing monumental. Actually, funnily enough, I got a weapon upgrade ... except the only problem was that it was a 1her. And I don't have an off-hand. So at one point after a wipe while we were waiting to find another person, I hearthed to my garrison, took the portal to Warspear, and bought the PvP conquest offhand (iLvl 700). Of course, since I didn't want to keep that, I had to go back every 2 hours and re-sell it (only had to do this one other time during the raid).

I did try to get into a couple groups for the last boss on Sunday, but I didn't have a ton of time and those groups were being picky. Of the handful that were doing Archimonde, 2 required you to have the achievement for already beating him! Still, it's a complicated fight, so I guess I understand that (people did the same thing for the last boss in Highmaul on Heroic). I did get into one group, and then after one attempt they broke up - bleah. Here's the guide video for the fight, crazy, huh?!

Diversify your portfolio

Friday was a pretty uneventful night, so I ventured into the most recent raid - Hellfire Citadel. This was my second foray in on Normal. The first time I was with a guild that was making its first attempts and we got the first two bosses down before I had to leave.

This time was another partial guild run, but with a different group. We got the first 4 bosses down before running into the buzzsaw that is Kilrogg Deadeye. Some of the bosses were pretty cool. There was one that summoned giant deathly purple blobs that you had to dodge:

Here they come!

In fact, that boss drops tier tokens! He didn't drop a Druid token, but still, pretty cool! That's the first tier gear boss I've killed in ... oh, I don't know, 6 years-ish?

The gold "You won!" is from my bonus roll - gold is a loss, in this case.

I've been using a variety of PvP gear (660 and 700 ilvl), which is pretty solid. My iLvl is around 682, so I got a couple of nice upgrades on this run. And at the end, I hearthed back to my Garrison and found this in my mailbox:

Thanks Postmaster!

Apparently it had been on a corpse that I never looted. I sold it, because I will have the PvP belt fairly shortly which is a higher iLvl anyway. I also managed to get an upgrade from a garrison mission - not only was this one of the few slots I needed to upgrade, but it even has a socket! Now that is winning.

Awww yissss.

Honestly I really enjoyed raiding. I definitely fell into a funk for several weeks where I was so focused on doing all the daily stuff (profession, pet, garrison, AH, other random dailies) that I never got around to actually playing the game. Raiding is definitely something I enjoy, and I am kind of disappointed I never checked out BRF. I'm hoping to get through Hellfire on at least Normal!

Are you killing Kazzak every week on every character? Because you should be.

And not just for the #selfie opportunities.

No, I'm not dead, just playing with filters!

Kazzak drops loot once a week for every character you have. He requires a raid to kill, but that's pretty easy to find with the LFG tool. There are usually 1-3 groups running every time I have checked. Submit your name for acceptance, get accepted, chill in your garrison spamming "1" for a summon (don't actually spam, ask nicely!), click the table some gracious stranger dropped for the food buff, and then DPS / heal until he's dead. It takes maybe 5 minutes total.

Why should you do this? Well, most of all it's kind of fun. But if you're the type of person who hates fun, here are two other reasons to do it:

So much chat spam from loot pinatas!

1) He drops ilvl 705 gear. This matters a lot if you raid or do PvE content. If you PvP, maybe it only matters for completeness or transmog's sake. It is the easiest/cheapest way to get gear of that ilvl. That trinket in the screenshot is pretty sweet!

2) He drops 5-15 Felblight. Felblight is the new crafting material in 6.2, replacing Savage Blood in the new recipes. The price has already dropped significantly, but is now holding steady around 3-400 gold each. Even at just 300 gold each, 10 Felblight is almost 12k gold a month for one character. Do it on two characters and you just paid for a WoW token in just 10 minutes a week!

Alright, alright ... I admit, it's really just about the #selfies:

He dead.

How to get carried like a pro

In most of the groups I've been in for Highmaul, I am competitive for the top spot in DPS. Every once in a while though, you see someone in the group who vastly outgears the content. Then you see stuff like this:

This was at the beginning of the fight, when everyone had just popped their cooldowns. This was the first time I'd ever seen anybody that high. He ended the fight at a cool 38k dps; the funny part about this mage is that he was there specifically with a guildmate, Douding, who couldn't pull his own weight. I never saw another DPS carrying an under-geared friend, but there were a number of other folks with great gear. One of them was even a feral druid!

The sad thing about this group was that we downed one boss, Brackenspore, and then on the very next boss, I was too focused on my cooldowns at the start and wasn't paying attention to ground effects. I died 5 seconds into the fight and then got kicked when they wiped, ha.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise though. I then found a group that was led by several guild members who were 10/10 Mythic in BRF. What does that mumbo jumbo mean? BRF means Blackrock Foundry, which is the raid zone after Highmaul; it drops better gear. 10/10 means that they had defeated all 10 bosses and Mythic describes the level at which they were successful. Mythic is the difficulty level above Heroic, which equates to gear that is 710 ilvl! With their help, I was finally able to defeat the final boss of Highmaul on Heroic:

There are several things worth noting about this picture. First is that I earned Ahead of the Curve - I'm not sure why, since BRF has been released. There are some groups that require members to have AotC before accepting them (to ensure you've done the fight before), so that will make it easier to get into groups. Second, my dps is only 10k because I died halfway through the fight (not exactly my fault; someone let an effect too high and then I didn't get heals when it went off), which was a little disappointing because the previous two attempts I was one of the last DPS alive. And yea, you read that right - even with some folks who vastly outgeared the content, we wiped twice! They removed multiple people each time, so I was glad to have made that cut.

And the third and final point, the one that I think is the most impressive ... is the top two DPSers? They were both tanks!! Well, the paladin had tanked the first two fights and switched to DPS with Brunz switching to tank, but he had been in the top 2 regardless. The tank putting out 46k dps is crazy! I am generally able to put out ~25-27k depending on how melee friendly the fight is ... so the tank is basically worth two of me. And tanking. This still blows my mind!

There have been some questions about PvP progress, so I'll do an update on that next week.

Money or gear?

I did my weekly attempt at Highmaul over the weekend (all in the name of upgrading my ring for PvP). This time I figured I might as well try to do Heroic as far as possible so that I might get some gear upgrades out of it. I mean, given the choices between getting gear and not getting gear ... you'd be crazy to choose not gear, right?! Right. The first group I was in was a little odd. Most groups choose to run with 2 tanks, but this one had 3. No worries, the leader said, the third is just around in case we need him (??). He'll go dps, the leader said, until then. The first boss was quite easy and we 1-shotted him. The 3rd tank put out less than 10k dps. That is horribly, astoundingly bad. Even tanks should be putting out that much, if not more. A piece of gear dropped that would be an upgrade for me ... and of course, I rolled a 10. No worries, the 3rd tank won it! The second boss we had to attempt twice because the tanks didn't know what they were doing and didn't bother to ask before the fight. The 3rd tank, again, put out less than 10k dps. Another upgrade dropped for me! ... aaaaaand the 3rd tank won it again. Awesome. We wiped twice on the third boss before I left. The tanks didn't know what they were doing and there were far too many DPS who weren't pulling their weight. I managed to join a group for the third boss and we successfully 1-shot him ... and then everyone left! This was something that happened on pretty much every boss, regardless of how well we did. I suppose it is mostly people looking for a particular piece of gear? Through group-hopping I managed to down the fourth and sixth bosses as well. I got three upgrades, including a weapon! The interesting part of all of this is that one of my bonus rolls actually yielded a piece of gear (that would be the fourth potential upgrade). It was 'forged' so it got an extra 6 iLvl, taking it from 670 to 676. The reason it is interesting is that the piece of gear that I won is actually BoE. Which means I can sell it on the AH. There were a couple of the 670 variety on the AH for ~13-14k, but none that were 676. So basically the question becomes - do I want a gear upgrade for PvE or do I want more gold? I've got almost 200k gold and nothing to really spend it on at the moment. On the other hand, it's not like I'm trying to be on the bleeding edge of raiding and my gear is totally fine for what I'm trying to do. I'm not sure what to do!

Epic ring quest line

I've gotten pretty close to full PvP gear over the past couple weeks. I still need the belt and one trinket and then I'll have full 690 PvP gear ... except for my ring. One of the rings I've been using this whole time is the second stage of the epic ring quest line, ilvl 680. Not only is it fairly close to 690, but it also has the right secondary stats that I want, so I've been putting off buying a replacement for Conquest. Unfortunately, none of the other PvP rings have that same mix of stats, so I started to look into what I actually need to do to upgrade it.

The next part of the quest line requires you to kill the last two bosses in Highmaul, the raid content that was available upon release of WoD, and collect 125 Abrogrator Stones (these can be collected slowly from your Garrison or more quickly from running Highmaul). Sunday rolled around and I had some free time so I decided to give Highmaul a shot. I watched videos on the first two bosses while looking for a raid group in LFR. I got accepted so quickly that I didn't even have time to finish the first video, which made me even more nervous.

Things went pretty smoothly though. The mechanics for most fights were pretty simple and straightforward, and we always had people dropping out before each new boss so I had a couple minutes to try and research each fight beforehand. It turns out my gear is pretty good for the Normal setting of this raid! Normal drops ~655 gear, Heroic drops ~675, and Mythic drops ~685 gear. The PvP gear I have is all 660 so few things were actually upgrades. I managed to hold my own though in terms of DPS, even leading the charts for one fight!

The bonus roll you see in that picture is a pretty cool feature. Each week you can "buy" up to 3 bonus roll chances with either gold, apexis crystals or ... a third thing that I cannot remember (you can also get 1 bonus roll a week from your Garrison's War Mill). After every boss, you have the ability to use one of those bonus rolls in an attempt to get a piece of gear. I used 4 for the day and got only one piece of gear - a necklace that ended up not being an upgrade. The rest of the chances produced an insignificant amount of gold (~25). Some of the bosses also have a chance to drop BoE gear which, if you win, can be sold on the AH. I managed to win one piece and sold it for 4,500 gold.

It took us 3 attempts to down the second to last boss, we wiped once on the final boss, and then the group broke up. Later that night I tried to find a group that was going to kill the last boss. After two wipes, the third time was the charm and I had managed to clear all of Highmaul in a single day!

One interesting thing is that the size of the raid is elastic. The second group I was in was a 10 man, while the first was a 15 man. The difficulty of the zone scales to the size of your group!

I'll need to run Highmaul 2-3 more times to get enough Abrogrator stones, but I'm feeling pretty good about finishing that level of upgrade! The next upgrade has a nice buff that occasionally procs to give you an extra 10% of your main stat.

Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!

Boy do I. The first Monday back after the Holidays is always rough. Bleah.

On the bright side, I had plenty of time to play World of Warcraft over the weekend(s) and accomplished a variety of things. The first goal was upgrading my ring!

This meant accumulating almost 5,000 Apexis crystals and running through three different Heroics. The crystals was pretty easy - not only do you get a small amount from various work orders, but there's also a daily quest for either 800 or 1,000. These quests basically just require you to kill some mobs in a certain area (there are clickable items that aid in your "Assault" as well), and the one that rewards 1,000 requires a group since the mobs are elite. You can easily find a group in the LFR tool, generally there are several going at a time. I found this interesting because you get grouped with people from other realms and yet you're not in an instanced dungeon; you're running around in the open world. Sometimes the daily quest is even for Ashran, the new PvP zone; unfortunately, I haven't had much luck with the queues for Ashran so I've stayed away (only tried twice).

The Heroics were intimidating. First time through as a tank always is, for me at least. I read through the dungeon journal and watched a couple of videos and it went pretty okay. Two of the dungeons I had already done, Blood Slag Mines and Everbloom, but one was totally new - Grimrail Depot. Out of all the dungeons I've done so far, this is by far my least favorite. Some of the trash mobs hit really hard (Gunners - they have a channeled spell that does a ton of health unless you move out of the way) and the second boss is just ... weird. I probably just don't "get" the fight yet, but you essentially have to hide during his gunner phase otherwise you just die. Lame. At any rate, I made it through those just to find out that then you have to go to a fourth heroic!

The best part of this whole quest line (outside of the awesome epic ring) is that Khadgar's lines are pretty darned funny.

Oh Khadgar, you silly goof!

And then, of course, you get your brand new ilvl 680 ring. It's nice that you can have one for each spec, as long as you're willing to spend some additional gold. 

The tanking ring

The next part of the quest chain requires you to go to Highmaul, which is the only raid out currently. Supposedly you can do this through LFR, so we shall see!

Raidin' it old school

As part of Blizzard's celebration of World of Warcraft's 10 year anniversary, they re-did Molten Core. It's still a 40 man raid, but now the monsters are level 100+. As a reward for completing MC, you get a sweet looking mount, an epic hat (iLvl 640), and a tiny little fire elemental pet. Of course, to take part in the new MC, you need an iLvl of 615.

There are several ways to get there. Quest rewards from Nagrand that get upgraded are usually 615. Gear rewards from Garrison missions are usually 615 as well. In fact, once you get a follower's iLvl above 615, you'll start getting tougher missions that offer better rewards:

iLvl 630 robes from a 615 mission

The third option is doing heroic dungeons. This requires ilvl 610 which took a while, but on Friday I realized I had finally hit that mark! I already knew I wanted to do Upper Blackrock Spire first, since you get an epic follower for completing this heroic. Of course, when I went to queue, I was met with this:

Woops!

Turns out that you need to complete the Silver Proving grounds before you can enter a heroic. I was a little nervous about this because last time I had attempted Bronze it was really tough. Turns out that it was mostly a gear problem:

I actually found the DPS one to be tougher than the Tank, mostly because I kept getting stunned by the floating globules. I beat the tank on the first try, but the DPS took me three tries. I was pretty nervous about my first Heroic being one that I had never even tried on Normal before, but it went pretty well. I'm not sure whether if changed UBRS around a bunch compared to how it was in Vanilla, but I didn't remember most of what we went through. Likewise, the epic follower that you get for completing UBRS tugs at some memories in the back of my head, but I can't quite grasp them. I won a couple of items and hit the 615 mark. So Saturday I hopped into queue for MC. I thought it might take a long time, but after only about 5 minutes or so the queue popped. At first it was really exciting, just being back in MC brought back a lot of fun memories. I got a little crazy with the screenshots, you'll have to forgive me:

Don't worry, eventually I hid the Raid parties

Poor Majordomo Executus.

Correction: poor Ragnaros!

We did wipe several times though. A combination of a bunch of people who have never played before doing content they had never done and trying to rush as much as possible. It took about 2 hours overall. And because I know you were dying to see the new mount:

Good puppy!