Ulduar - Thoughts from a Tree

Fianna had it's first real success in Ulduar this week. The previous weeks since the new raid has been out, we were only able to down Flame Leviathan. This week we brought down XT-002, Razorscale, and Ignis. We probably would have gotten Kologarn had we a little more time, but as always our guild has a strict end time and we called it before we beat him.

My overall impression of Ulduar is somewhat mixed. At first I felt like the place was just too hard, but I'm actually leaning toward the oposite now. This content is supposed to keep us occupied until the next major content patch, but our guild burned through three new bosses this week, and actually one shot or two shot all three. Kologarn was the only one that really gave us trouble, and mostly that was because we were just doing it wrong to start out. I hope the rest of the content is interesting enough to last. Then again, there are lots of hard modes to try if we get bored with the normal content.

Flame LeviathanFor this fight, I usually pair with our elemental shaman, Mirna, and drive a demolisher. This is pretty fun, though I would like to try each of the other vehicles eventually. Overall the Flame Leviathan encounter is pretty fun - but I have a feeling the trash clear is going to get really old really fast. Because of the trash, this first encounter takes quite a lot longer than the next few we tried. Still, I think it is an interesting break from typical boss fights and I applaud Blizard for trying something new.

Needless to say, I have no healer-specific thoughts for this fight.

Drops:

• [Ironsoul] - Congrats to our main tank Nodonn!
• [Lifespark Visage] - Congrats to our boomkin, Shapa!
• [Energy Siphon] - So, this really dropped last week, but I wanted to say how excited I am that I got it, because mana is a bitch in Ulduar!

XT-002 Deconstructor

XT is the next one we went after, and I'm sorry to say I spent almost the entire fight with my face in the dirt. I got myself killed by a light bomb pretty much right off the bat. However, we were running with three healers. We learned due to this mishap that we indeed can (and therefor should) run that fight with only two healers. With the wonderful new convenience of duel spec, it's easy to do this. Not only will that make the fight shorter, it will actually make healing easier anyway because more DPS means more chances to skip "Tantrums" - because it's possible to DPS XT fast enough that he goes back into his open heart phase before doing a tantrum.

Note: We forgot to take a picture of XT :(

Drops:

• [Gloves of Taut Grip] - Congrats to our honorary member, Kanomira!
• [Conductive Cord] - Congrats to Violetress, who was a great first time pug!

Razorscale
This boss was a lot of fun, and went really smoothly. In fact, I think we one-shot her tonight, though we did wipe on her about 15 times last night. Tonight it just clicked with the group make-up we had, and everything went right. I think three healers and 5 DPS works on this one, but if you can manage it you should probably go with 6 DPS since she does have an enrage timer that can be a problem if your DPS is not good enough. But if you can down XT, you can probably down her without too much trouble.

Tree healing for Razorscale was great. This fight, like many others in Ulduar, requires a lot of mobility, which made my healing buddy Celyanna, a holy paladin, very unhappy. There really isn't anything too challenging in this encounter as far as healing goes, as long as people follow one of the basic rules of raiding: Stay out of the fire!

Drops:

• [Breastplate of the Afterlife] - Congrats to Celynna on this excellent holy paladin piece!
• I don't recall what the second piece of gear was, but I think it went to our rogue PuG. His name was also really crazy and I'd have to check my friends list to find it, but he put out good DPS and was overall a valuable edition to the team, especially due to his previous experience in the dungeon.

Ignis the Furnace Master

I had so freaking much fun on this fight. Usually our guild runs with two boomkins in addition to me, and I think normally I won't have quite as much fun as I did tonight because of that. Tonight I was the only druid, and as such it was up to me to root the adds as our (awesome) pally tank kited them around. I stayed out of tree form and healed the pally tank and also spot healed the raid while the other two healers concentrated on the main tank. We didnt have a mage to break the adds, but our two elemental shamans did a great job with it. Really, I can't say enough how flawlessly this went. We one-shot this boss with most of us never having done the encounter before. And I got to feel really important :)

Drops:

• [Gloves of the Smoldering Touch] - These went to our rogue PuG again, whose name is hard to type.
• [Drape of Fuming Anger] - This actually went to off spec, and was picked up by Celynna. Yay for gearing up his ret set!

Kologarn

This fight really sucks. It sucks more when the tanks don't know they need to be swapping the boss back and forth and are eating 20k+ damage spikes. We cycled through three main tanks before we figured that out. Our last attempt was really good, and I'm convinced we could have downed this bad boy if we had more time.

Overall this was a great run and I had a blast. We got really lucky with PuGs, and our usual PuGs upped their game to make tonight a great success. I especially wanna give a shout out to Evilboo, a long time friend of a few folks in the guild who met up again for the first time in quite a while. We need to run together more often!

Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts for people in small guilds who are trying to organize raids, and some idea on how to make that work. But that's it for tonight folks, hope you all have as much fun raiding Ulduar as I have!

Best. Guild. Ever.

Honani takes to the skies!

So, Saturday was my birthday. I went home to my family for the weekend and was off WoW. When I returned Sunday night, I discovered my guildmates had conspired to purchase for me an absolutely AWESOME birthday present: My epic flight training!

I just wanted to post this as a shout out and thank you to my awesome guild. You guys are so much fun, I love the small family atmosphere we have and wouldn't trade it for any kind of epic raiding team. I'd much rather pug a few spots and run 10 mans than loose the awesomeness that is Fianna. Thanks again for a great birthday!

Making Money as a Lowbie

I'm once again working on speed testing one of Jame's guides, and as such I have handicapped myself by starting on a brand new server with a brand new character. I wanted to share some thoughts about how I've already made over 100 gold without doing a damn thing, and Mokrana is only level 21.

How? Well, first off I picked up skinning as a profession. This gets gold from nothing, basically. It takes pretty much zero extra time, and generates leather which can be sold. I also picked up herbalism, but I'm allowing it to fall behind and not going out of my way to pick up herbs. But I still got a bit of a boost from it.

I also am NOT doing first aid, because frankly as a class with a heal I see no point. Some people still level it, but never will on classes that can heal themselves. But this does mean I have a bit more cloth lying around.

Most importantly, I have an auctioneer alt. Some of you might think, well that's cheating, she spends time on that toon that isn't showing up on her main toon. But the reallity is that while my auctioneer may have a significant time clocked on her /played, I actually waste very little time on her. Here is how it usually goes:

1. Mokrana mails all her crap that could possibly make money to the auctioneer, including: Cloth, leather, herbs, other trade goods, food materials, and greens or other BoE gear. It helps if you have an idea of what makes good money (such as [Spider Silk])
2. I log into the auctioneer something like once a week, check the mail. My addon "Postal" opens everything automatically and puts it in my inventory.
3. I go to the auction house and hit my addon "Auctioneer"'s scan button, and leave the computer to go do something else for the 10-20 minutes the scan takes.
4. I come back and use the very very simple "Simple Auction" function of Auctioneer to quickly post any sellable items I may have. I check as I go briefly to make sure I'm not selling something for less than the vendor price. I could probably make more money if I spent some more time fiddling with prices, but honestly the point is to make the most money in the least possible time spent - we want to spend time on leveling, not making money!
5. I log out, then come back on in a few days and open the auctioneer's mailbox. Postal automatically transfers around 50 gold to my bags. If there are any unsold auctions, I either repost them (if I think they will sell) or just vendor the crap.

It's simple, fast, and most importantly, easy! With this, Mokrana already has 16 slot bags and enough money to get her mount at level 30. Remember, if you want to use this strategy, you'll need the addons Auctioneer and Postal. Both can be found at Curse.com.

Howling Fjord and Other News

Well, Deedlet has completed yet another chapter of her leveling journey. As you can tell by the title, I decided to skip the rest of Outland and travel to Northrend. I will go back and complete Outland sometime, and will write the addon version of those guides if need be, but right now I am very excited about Deedlet's progress and learning to tank, so I decided to head to Northrend for better gear.

In other news, I've been exploring Ulduar on my main character, Honani the tree druid. It looks to be a very fun raid, but so far it's really hard! Flame Leviathan is a joke, but our guild couldn't down XT-002 when we tried on Sunday. Granted we only did around 5 attempts before calling it, and only that one night, and we had some rather stupid PuGs with us. Darrgoe, I know you read this, you better not make us PuG a crappy tank next time! ;)

I've also purchased dual specs for both Deedlet and Honani. Deedlet has ret and prot, and Honani has tree and boomkin. So far I really like both of Deedlet's specs, but Honani is a kind of crappy lazer chicken. Hopefully my good friend Shapa can help her get better, he kicks butt!

Last but not least, I thought I'd make a little list of my goals and projects, like Jame did in his most recent blog post:

• Complete the gear update for my Tree guide (short term)
• Complete that GIMP guide - I know I'm taking forever at it! (short term)
• Speed test Jame's Horde Leveling Guide Chapter 1 (short term)
• Write my "retro raiding guide" (medium term)
• Get Deedlet to level 80, while testing the current guides (medium term)
• Write a fishing/cooking leveling guide (long term, if no one else does it!)
• Speed test the rest of Jame's Horde leveling guides (long term)
• Save for epic flyers for both Honani and Deedlet!

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of Deedlet in Howling Fjord, so you folks don't get one for this blog post. I'll make it up to you and include pictures of my Ulduar exploits next time!

Horde Leveling Addon - Nagrand

Hey folks! Deedlet just cleared out Nagrand, and all the major group quests to boot, including Durn and Ring of Blood. She needed groups for those two, but solo'd all the other group quests in the guide. Yay for prot pallies!

She also got two new awesome experiences tanking. One was for Sethekk Halls, and went pretty well... she even got a [Libram of the Eternal Rest] which buffs her consecrate a little. She did well there, but got her face eaten off in Utgarde Keep. We couldn't finish :( but it was still a really good experience, and she's got some better gear now and hopes to go back soon!

This section of the addon went very smoothly, as most of what Black Cat coded has. I'm going to award it it's first star of quality on the WoW-Pro website. Next up is Blade's Edge Mountains - unfortunately I am going to have to write that section from scratch! So it may be a bit longer between updates.

*Link to Updated Nagrand Addon File*

Deedlet rains death on the ogres of Nagrand!

Horde Leveling Addon - Terokkar

Not much to report today, but Terokkar is down, and Nagrand is next! Haven't got a lot of chances to practice tanking. I am very excited that duel spec is coming out this week along with the patch. This means I will be back on my main, a tree druid named Honani, exploring the new content with my guild. It also means that Honani will be able to become a lazer chicken at will to DPS, and Deedlet can level as ret again if I want her to (though I'm getting used to prot!).

*Link to updated Terokkar Horde Leveling Addon*

I also hope to speed test the next section of Jame's guide with Mokrana soon, so stay tuned!