God, I can’t believe how clearly I can think at times, and how entirely idiotic I can be at others. What the poo is wrong with me?
Author: Laura Highcove
The Unforgiving Fight
First off, I would like to state how ridiculously tired I am right now. I was tired last night and yet I stayed up making the movie, watching it over and over, going through Avril Lavine song after Avril Lavine song trying to find one that fit because I simply couldn’t sleep. Well I did get some sleep, but now I’ve been up for about an hour and a half (Probably close to 2 hours by the time I post this.) because, well I’m fricking excited. Archimonde is down. The past is safe, and we have added more t6 to our arsenal.
Okay, so Archimonde is a pain in the butt fight. Everyone has to know what they’re doing, and they have to do it. We spent a day last week and Friday unceremoniously throwing ourselves at Archimonde. For one this, this fight beats on your soul a bit more than any before. Besides the obvious reference to soul charge, like Vashj there is no trash. However unlike Vashj, and even Kael’thas, you don’t get a few phases in and then wipe. No, with Archimonde you are wiped out pretty quickly when you screw up, added to that the long graveyard run (Hey at least Hjyal is the closest portal.) back and you’re left with lots of time to contemplate what went wrong, and a frickload of attempts about which to think. What started out as a reasonably fun encounter got really *really* old after almost two nights of wipes.
But we were getting better at least. We used to spiral down after just one death, no matter the class. We got better at recovery, consistently getting to 60% before all hell broke loose. But it was getting late, things were looking down, but yet no one seemed to lose. And then we got our salvation. Our beloved Fishy Azurmahn (I told you I was tired.) spoke with some of the members from Recon who told us that staying *on top* of your other group members (Like permanently attached at the hip.) really helped to control the fires. That seemed to do it for us, so thank you Recon.
So as for the fight itself. We had one person go down fairly early, but we managed to make it through that and keep going. A million fire trails and a ton of air bursts later, I look up and realize that Archi’s at 30%. At that point, the thought dared to cross my mind that we might actually do it this attempt! However, the main focus stayed on that orange nipple. I would be where I was supposed to be, and trust everyone else to do the same.
And then the next fear happened, and we lost two people at once. The soul charge knocked out another, and I thought it was over. Our saving grace being that Archi did not spam out those soul charges. Our healers had enough time to top us off before the next one hit.
I knew people were struggling at this point. I can’t even imagine what was going through the healer’s heads as they performed spectacularly in keeping everyone they possibly could alive. He was below 20%; the end was in sight. A soul charge knocked into us, and my health dipped. Healthstone and bandage on cooldown, I hit a health pot. The next second air burst on the group and I went into the air with 260 health and a panic that if I did not nail this landing, I would be dead.
We lost more people and as I bandaged, he dipped to 10% and broke off of Koi. We had 16 people up. The number of soul charges on Archi that had not gone off…
But up went the bubble. Vent was exploding, my hands were shaking as I poured my full 1:1 rotation into his tree draining butt. It was not until watching the video afterward that I saw that the Elune bubble was on my buff bar as red. But during the fight I had no clue how long we had to dps. Any second I was expecting us to have run out of time. And then at 3% he exploded. My heart stopped for the briefest of seconds thinking we had run out of time and were about the be wiped out, and then the loot popped up on my screen.
…
It was over, and we were still alive.
[Scepter of Purification] to Azshane
[Savior’s Grasp] to Whiteliter
[Helm of the Forgotten Vanquisher] to Amberh
[Helm of the Forgotten Vanquisher] to Devv
I’m going to upload the movie, and go back to bed.
Tier 6 Geto!
So into Hyjal we went, cleared through a few bosses, and decided. Hey, we like progression. Let’s give the next boss a shot. It seemed like a decent enough idea, so we talked to our good buddy Thrall, and lo and behold more trash started spawning. We dove right in, and cleared it out, and Magtheridon’s big brother (Not really.) came out to play with us.
We got him down to about 20% or so, but some shaky healer positions, unlucky dooms without soulstones, and a lot of freaking fire coming out of the sky spelled death for the tank. So we picked ourselves up, brushed ourselves off, and then realized. “Wait…what if the soulstones/battle rezes aren’t up when we get to the boss?” So we decided two wipe twice on trash in order to make sure our revivals were off cooldown.
Truthfully, I was expecting more…hard.
And since Koi did this with the ZA clear, and it seems like a not horrible idea. I give you the winners of the drops off Azgalor’s first kill:
[Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher] to Lelaine
[Gloves of the Forgotten Vanquisher] to Azshane
[Bow-stitched Leggings] to Tzoid
[Design: Inscribed Pyrestone] To Whiteliter
(Unfortunately something about the site won’t let me both link to wowhead for mouseover and color the link purple. Fix that Koi.) Edit: Works on takoumori.com.
So then we raced up the mountain to get more ancient gem veins, and found all these night elves and a huge tree. And there was this guy using life drain on the tree. We went over to ask what was up, and he wiped us out in 51 seconds. (Not that anyone was counting or anything.) We might have to go pay him another visit, along with practicing jumping off the cliff and not dying.
Easy bosses clear
So amidst stumbling around in the darkness that is SSC and TK for attunement purposes, we also stumbled around in BT. From wyrmcaller mobs who oddly enough…call wyrms and seeing Azeroth floating in the sky to dodging the cutest little volcanos with blue fire and getting punted into a corner we downed the next BT boss to stand in our way. Supremus? Yay?
Well yeah, with that out of the way we actually got into some relatively fun and difficult trash. Yay fun and difficult trash! It’s poor for my health as a hunter to have to deal with those stupid dog mobs who can see me at my max range. But yet that has nothing against the rush of adrenaline shooting though my system when I was pulling pats in Shade of Akama’s room only to have a huge thing fade out of stealth right in front of me. Stupid Akama. Let us know when you’re going to be hiding in the middle of the enemy stronghold.
While the melee mourned their missing shaman, we still managed to burn through the encounter like paper. Illidan must be shaking in his boots. Now back to the Teron Gorefiend simulator…
Oh right…pictures. See here’s the thing…I forgot to upload them before coming to work today. Sorry.
Edit:
Hunters and Mains
Why am I having such a hard time accepting Nabith as my main, and the character I want to keep raiding with and perfecting?
Part of it is probably the stigma against hunters in general. In truth there are a ton of horrible hunters out there. The pet aspect makes leveling easy and fun, and thus people who can’t handle classes that are more difficult to level flock to the class. In truth, mastering the hunter class for endgame is no easier or harder than any other class. However, because there are so many, it is much more common for people to run into horribly played hunters than other classes. This negative feel toward bad hunters permeates the attitude toward all hunters in general, and being very sensitive to such things, I have continued to play a class that a vast majority is looking down their nose at.
The other, and probably larger aspect is that Nabith is, as of now, the *only* character I have ever leveled up entirely for myself. Melannie was a priest because priests were hard to come by. Amebil was a warlock because we only had Rosa. Pandemonium was a paladin because we needed healers. (By the time she neared 60 we were really hurting for tanks, so I switched my focus.) Near was a draenei priest because we needed fear ward, and we needed spriests. (Isrio is just kind of a shadow of Near, I don’t really know how to play her, nor do I ever plan on raiding with her.) Now I don’t dislike any of these classes. In fact all of them are fun to play, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I worked hard leveling them up, because then I thought for once, I could actually be useful to the guild, filling one of those hard to fill slots instead of just being another dps. Now I’m not trying to knock dps. Dpsing well takes skill just as much as anything else, but truthfully, dps is a dime a dozen. Whenever we’re trying to put together a raid and we’re short a tank or a healer, I feel like it’s my fault that I don’t have a healer or tank main. Whether or not that’s logical is not really the point, the point is that that’s how I feel. The same way I feel that it’s somehow my fault that I got two excellent upgrades for nothing.
As of now, I plan on keeping my options open for a new main when LK comes out. By that point I plan on having a level 70 hunter, priest, paladin, warlock, warrior, and possibly shaman. I may stick with Nabith, and I may decide to fill a role that is looking thin as we approach LK. We’ll just have to see.
Black Temple!
Well we made our way through Hyjal, getting more people BT attuned, downing Anetheron with literally four people up, and then trotted up to pay another visit to Thrall. This time successfully taking down the mana burning Kaz’rogal.
Afterward, our esteemed RL decided with our shadow resist sets still in the works, it would be best to forgo the fourth boss and head over to Black Temple. 🙂
So we did that, storming the sewers of the famed temple with the the fury and grace that can only be achieved by
Hehe, my shoulders are watching you.
And on through the new trash, which is always one of the more interesting things about a new end game instance. Eventually trash becomes that monotonus annoying bump in the road that happens to sit between you and the boss that will drop loot. But when entering an instance for the first time, it holds a mystery of its own, and it’s always funny how worthless level 70 elites can bring a t5+ raiding guild to its knees, even if only for a moment.
But enough about that. HL Naj’entus was waiting just up the way for us, with his unique and cool looking model. However, the fight with him is boring as frick. “Dps dps dps, ow, I have a 9 foot spine coming out of mine, can someone get that?, bubble HAX! OMG I HAVE 500 HEALTH HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELZ!”
I mean we downed the idiot in three tries.
But then…
~Choirs of angels sing~
New direction?
I read webcomics. I am a sucker for pretty pictures, and for stories, and anything that would combine the two is of course something that would interest me. And as much as I like the “joke a day” comics, I find myself much more attracted to the webcomics that have one major underlying plot (as opposed to just an infinite number of archs) because it’s so much like reading a novel, just with pictures.
The point? I clicked on a new link today, and found myself at a webpage that was set up like a webcomic, but was actually…well he calls it an e-novel. Basically instead of putting up a new comic on some weekly updating schedule, he puts up installments of a book. Each installment usually isn’t as long as a chapter, though some are longer than others. It’s more like each installment is a scene or so.
While I wasn’t interested in the story itself (I don’t like ‘Dark Fantasy’, as he labeled his genre.) the concept of the webpage itself is greatly interesting to me. It also shows me that perhaps there are people out there who will come to a website for something even if there aren’t pretty pictures. (Of course webcomics will probably always be more popular, but his link was an ad on a webcomic site so there’s some correlation.) But this has given me some interesting ideas for my own website, which is made all the easier by the recently added “blog” on the front page.
One of my major issues is my inability to keep focused on one story for very long. I can go through stints of writing on one story for a few weeks, and then have weeks where all I do is read over random stories and maybe write a few lines on the end, or make some changes, and still other times all I’ll work on is the background or details of the world. However, the blog would help greatly in this, in that each “piece” I post is put into a category. That way you could choose the “Demonslayer” category and just see the posts that add to that story. Then once I have posted all of the pieces of a chapter, I can compile the chapter and put it into the already existing structure of my website. But perhaps fact that I won’t have to have an entire chapter done before I post it will encourage me to post more than I have.
Of course the issue still comes out of the fact that I want people to read what I write. I do write for myself. I write what I like and what I want to see, but at the same time there’s nothing better than getting feedback on something I’ve written. (Assuming it isn’t done in a nasty way, I even appreciate constructive criticism.) Not only does it make me feel good that someone else might care about something I’ve put so much time and effort into, but other perspectives and suggestions help to expand my skill.
At the same time, I don’t believe I have nearly enough confidence to actually rent out ad space on popular websites to bring people in. But I do want to bring in some people; more people than are just randomly floating around here because they know me from who knows when. (Not that I don’t appreciate you guys hanging around.) After talking to Ajin, of Misadventures Etc fame, I found out all he really did was post the links on a few forums he went around to, and possibly word of mouth did the rest. Now he’s rubbing elbows with some of the greats of furry artdom. (Though improving his art skill has done a lot toward that end as well.)
I suppose, however, that the first step is…well taking the first step. Posting a piece of story to the blog. Perhaps throwing up the link to this site on a few of the forums I go around to, and see if anything happens.
Playing in the Past
So after our splendid job killing off the leader of the blood elves, we were still without a full raid to tackle Hyjal. It took another downing before we were able to collect a full group with both vials. (Including two priests, yay!) We played around with the trash, and then this weird mob came.
So we killed him. He dropped this cool philanthropy…or philharmonic…quest item! And some trash purples that very nearly went for minimum bid. Bah.
So then we came back the next night and did the same thing again! Only this time a different guy showed up!
This one actually took two tries.
But with that done, we rode our way up the mountain and met this cool orc guy. We’re probably going to chill with him a bit before going farther up the mountain.
By the way, there will be no more throwing of snowballs at the horde’s leader. It’s bad form.
Kael’thas Down
…but not out. 🙂
Okay, let’s see. Solarian went down officially on December 7th. So we had that Saturday, the next weekend, then the weekend before Christmas we didn’t play with Kael due to people doing holiday stuffs, same with the weekend after it, nor did we practice on him the weekend of New Years. So we finally came back to working on Kael last weekend. So this would be our fourth weekend on him, so yeah. Took us a month. /thumbs up
In an attempt to get a little more time on our beloved server’s namesake, I was called up in the middle of watching Monk on Wednesday, with the announcement that we were doing TK. So we cleared out the “rabble” early, leaving us three fabulously open raid nights to wipe to our heart’s content.
But alas, it was not to be. We now had p1->p2 transition under our belts, and Thursday we solidified p2->p3, and started getting p3->p4. Bah, people with their “learning” and “getting better”. We were actually getting to the point where we had free time after p2 to get into position and stuff. It was nuts. Anyway, we made a few changes to adviser kill positioning, and kill order, that seemed to work fairly well.
The kill started out like any other attempt, with a heart wrenching moment in p3 when a tank went down. That lost us a bit of time, but due to the decision that Rosa and Koho had to prove their OPedness, they were left to duo Capernian while the rest of us dealt with the lord of the blood elves and his combustible pets. We tore through shield and egg with the same ferocity, pushing him over the edge to 50% for the first time.
There was a bit of confusion in p5, and some general things that can be cleaned up in future attempts, but as we contented ourselves with simply staying alive, my beloved Kael’thas finally fell.
Dkp was spent, quest items were looted, and I dropped a bomb for one of Kael’s green glowing magic balls. I really just wanted to be the first person to have it. (Plus the neck was a nice upgrade.)
And then we did what any proper and humble guild downing Kael’thas for the first time would do. We went back to Shatt and announced it in the trade channel. I went to turn my trophy to A’dal only to find out that my beloved Kael’thas lives! He hadn’t been working for Illidan all along! (Poor guy has like no friends.) Shock! Awe! Fire! Sha’tar rep++!
And then we hightailed it to Caverns of Time to turn in the vials, get our new rings, and for half the raid to stumble around like blind mice trying to find the entrance to the Hyjal instance.
Once that was done, we played around with some waves of undead, with the “in all but name, leader of the humans” Lady Jaina, before calling it a night around oneish EST.
And I was just lucky enough to fraps the fight (though the video doesn’t start till after The Darkener is down, and there are Omen errors that started popping up the attempt before, and carried over to this one. Either way.
Mindblade Geto!
Yesterday was a horrible day for me, but it ended very well, which is the important thing.
After an agonizing day at work, I came home and read some more One Piece. I’m enjoying it more than I did the anime, mostly because I hate the art style…okay that’s not entirely true. I hate the art style when someone starts crying/yelling, because the faces are just so entirely distorted. There is no “I’m a little sad” in this series. Anytime anyone gets upset, it’s full blown rivers out of every part of their eyes and snot dripping from their nostrils. With the manga, I can just spend less time on those panels, whereas in the anime I had to sit there and go at it’s pace.
Anyway, I was logged onto WoW, I had done my cloth transmutes and was waiting on the Kara group. I was asked to heal on bosses, though I stayed shadow, and White and Mal didn’t even really need me that much. I dpsed the rest of the time. We one shot everything except Netherspite when two people (tank included) got stuck outside the door when we started.
And the lewts you ask?
Nathrezim Mindblade Heh, finally. Now I can stop with the horrible pvp, and four more badges gets me the last upgrade I really need.
Also, for my healing set:
Pauldrons of the Solace-Giver
Pantaloons of Repentence
Signet of Unshakable Faith
All in all, it was a good night. And now I don’t really need to run Karazhan anymore (I guess unless I wanted to improve my healing gear.) but I think it’d be better to let some other people go and get their badges and gear. I’ll work on getting that darn head enchant, and enchanting what healing gear I do have.
