Secrets of Shadowbolting

I only managed to record this on 10 man as the fight was easier than anticipated and I did not manage to get the full recording of 25. None the less, the fight is very straightforward.

From a tank’s perspective it seems to be a straight tank and spank for the Main tank- the only time when this may change is if one of the melee gets the Legion Flame debuff which drops fire on the ground. Readjustments around this may be needed.
During the fight there will be 2 types of adds spawned around the room – Mistresses of Pain and 3 Infernals. The offtank needs to do their best to hang onto these as they can melee cloth for over 30k if they are not tanked. They will occasionally run and charge people but will return to the off tank. Mistresses spawn from portals – Infernals spawn from volcanos. The Infernal spawn point at the Volcano base CAN kill any dps who is standing on top of the area they spawn.

NOTE: Warlocks can banish the Infernals. They can not banish the Mistresses. If you are having problems burning the mistress down before the Infernals come out, having a warlock along to banish one of the Infernals can reduce raid damage as the Infernals have a channeled AOE spell they cast at their feet. In this video we had 2 warlocks and we ended up banishing the last few infernals when Jarraxus was almost dead so we could focus DPS on the boss.

Healers – This is a very healing intensive fight. One member of the raid will have a debuff called Incinerate Flesh and they get a red bubbly effect around them. This person must be healed for at least 60k to remove this debuff before 12 seconds have passed. If not – the entire raid gets a ticking debuff that tends to wipe the raid.

Melee DPS -
Fel Inferno should be interrupted. It is a channeled AoE that will tick for 3.5k every second for 6 seconds. This seems to be on a 10 s casting cooldown. Also there will be chained lightning – you must spread out so that this does not chain too far.

Ranged DPS – Spread out. The Fel Lightning that hurts the melee will hurt you too. If you get the Legion Flames, you drop fire where you walk. We found it best to head to the outer edge of the arena if this buff was on a player and head central towards Jarraxus if you had the Incinerate Flesh to ensure the healers could reach you.

**this was a little more difficult in 25 man and started getting a little more chaotic at the end but was still a good strategy**

Work on Mistresses and Infernals when they are out and boss when you have time.

So, simple strategy:

Main tank tanks him, OT picks up adds. Ranged works on adds, melee works on boss. Melee must interrupt his Fel Inferno. Everyone spreads out to avoid the chain lightning effect. Legion Flame means you are dropping fire at your feet and move to the edges of the arena or in an open space away from your other raid members. Incinerate Flesh on a raid member needs to be the primary healing target. Mistresses and Infernals need to be offtanked and they will charge people but the damage is not too terrible.

Yes we have managed to kill Sarth 3 drakes. No, Last night was not one of those attempts. For whatever reason, (new tank, too many people dead, MT squished etc etc) between the 2nd drake landing, AOEing adds, Twilight Torment and the 3rd drake landing is when it all goes to the crapper.

On certain fights when the waves were nice, Tenebron was down before Shadron landed. Adds dropped pretty quick.We just were not getting Shadron down as much as in the past and thus were unable to stay alive long enough without someone important (healers/tanks) squishing. Expensive night….

It goes something like this…

This you may be able to still get through.

This means dead.

We had 3 locks, each one of us in a different spec. H is 0/53/18 spcced heavily into demon buffs and fire damage and runs with an imp, T is 0/52/19 and runs with a felguard and I’m affliction in a 53/0/16 build. H and I have pretty similar gear, T is a bit behind us.

I find it interesting comparing the spells we use and the differences in each of them. My fire damage is lower than the demo/detro locks so I focus more on shadow…but they hit a lot harder….some of the largest parts of our damage come from the AoE of the adds and staying alive. It was entirely possible to fluctuate between 2700-5700 dps in any given fight based on
1. when we wiped
2. how much AoEing we had done
3. if we were alive or dead and the raid was still going

21 wipes is a lot. We eventually took out Vesperon and just downed the first 2. I’m saving these numbers for comparison…and because I’m curious how the spec changes in 3.1 are going to affect everything…..We shall definately be finding out sooner rather than later…..

Last night we took a trip through sunwell. This is really one of the prettiest instances I have seen. Lots of very nice scenery. We varied from anywhere between 18-25 people throughout the raid, all of us were 80 and 25 man geared. This was not an easy instance. We were able to brute force a few fights but we still had some serious wiping on Felmyst and the twins…and now for the pictures and commentary

The first bit of sunwell is massive amounts of trash. Doing this as 80 was fairly painless – just AoE down. Each pull was 5-7 people, the priests would keep casting renew on themselves so we had to either burn them first or have people on top of that to spell steal. I can see how obnoxious this was at 70. There’s pats, adds and all sorts of stuff going on and a TON of trash. What took us 20 minutes (we stopped to summon people in a few times) would have easily taken an hour or more in 70 gear.

The first boss is kind of a tank and spank times 2 and here we got lucky. I was the first one ported into the shadow realm and while as a 70 you may not be able to pull threat off the guy inside, as an 80 affliction warlock it’s pretty easy. We had no tank in there and we didnt have any healers initially so it’s pretty easy to figure out what happened. Kalecgos’s inside form died, Vuur got squished and we learned to put a tank in there and keep them up. We dropped them both pretty close to evenly and he was down.

See? Happy dragon. we saved him.

We cou;ldn’t save this one though. Brutallas beat her up and we just had to watch.

He looks like burning. We kind of had an idea what this fight was like. Our druid tank with her 40k health was ready to go and our DK back up tank was also ready to go.

So. Our druid tank squished due to Stomp (Deals ~20,000 damage. Reduces the effective armor of the targets hit by it (only seems to hit the tanks) by 50% for 10 secs. Removes Burn debuff if the target has it. ) and then taking a Meteor Slash (Deals 20,000 Fire damage split between enemy targets in a cone in front of the caster (as of 2.4.1, unlimited range). Increases Fire damage taken to all targets affected by 75%. Stacks to 100, duration 40 secs. ).

Fight goes like this. Druid pulls and everyone goes DPS happy. Druid Tank squish, Vuur squish. Brez tank while Dk holds him. Druid tank is back on top. Druid gets squished. Mage squishes. Druid tank is brezed (we had 5 battle chickens and 3 trees at this point). Druid taunts. Meteor slash, Druid squished. Hunter squish. Dk picks up. druid brezed. meteor slash, druid squish (yes that’s 4 tank squishes – druids are not good with 50% armor reduction). Brutallus is at about 10% here and we just burn him at this point.

Felmyst pops up at this point and goes flying around

This was a very busy fight and we had at least 5 wipes here. Basically Felmyst comes down and is a tank and spank. Occasionally people get either encircled in a purple sphere and the raid needs to get away from them or people get some nasty poisons on them that need to get mass dispelled. Phase 2 fel goes into the air and targets a couple of people who then start trailing noxious green vapors that skeletons pop out of. The people with the poison need to get away from the raid until the target swaps. Skellys need to be burned fast as then Felmyst takes a breath and covers 1/3 of the floor with cloud poison. If you are in it – you get mind controlled and gain insane haste, damage and other nasty things. The raid has to kill those people MCed and stay away from the 2 breaths. Fel then lands and can be burned again. We had some serious issues at first staying out of the mist and figuring out where it was landing. I was squished by a mind controlled ret pally and rogue…

Once we got Fel down, we picked up our dead and continued on.

We didnt know this at the time, but this staircase and the whole way to the twins is a gauntlet. Most mobs are from the front but you will get some adds from the back as you go through.

All I saw was people killing things. I figured it was safer to stay back and just AOE. I still don’t know exactly what that pull looked like.

We just AoEed everything in sight. 5 battle chickens, 1 mage, 1 warlock, 2 ret pallys and a couple rogues made short work of them.

It was quite a long gauntlet and I kept getting distracted by the scenery and the background.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the twins are right through that door.

There is a very small platform to stand at up on top. Our ranged was supposed to stay up there and as we’re almost ready to go our tank falls down and starts up the event. Needless to say this was wipe 1.

I was learning how to warlock tank the fire chick and where to move. I ended up getting a dedicated druid on me and was wearing my naxx frost resist gear for the extra stam as affliction is pretty squishy.

After a few attempts we were down to about 16 people and were getting eaten alive by all the damage and debuffs due to such a low number of people. By this point in time I had learned to kite the fire chick in a circle and ensure I got shadow damage to remove the fire debuff. We found out that even at level 80, 18 stacks of Flame Touched -( A stackable debuff causing 300 Fire damage every 2 seconds. Stacks up to 20 times or a maximum of 6000 per 2 sec. Can only be removed by being hit with Shadow damage from either Twin. ) on a squishy lock really hurts and can be a bit tough to heal through.

We’re either going back tonight after Naxx or attempting again next week. Now that we have seen a lot of the bosses we have a better understanding of strategy and what we need to do to get beyond this point.

Last night was a good attempt on Sarth with 3 drakes up. It was a completely different attempt than the last time I was in there as the atmosphere was completely different. We had about 10 wipes getting Vesperon, the last drake, down to 35% before deciding it wasn’t happening and going back to 2 drakes.

As usual, there was a bear tank keeping sarth up front and alive and moving him around. The rest of the raid in the back waited the 30 seconds for Tenebron. He was warrior tanked along the back of the encounter while a pally tank stood with the healers in the center of the rectangle in the safe spot from waves coming from the right. Ranged and melee was spread out closer to the hole made by the left wave until the tank firmly had Tenebron. From here it was a tank and spank, heroism was popped and he was burned while the raid avoided the lava waves and void holes. Ten was slowly moved along the left side so the tank could pick up Shadron as he landed as Tenebron was not always dead before Shad landed. While the tank is holding both drakes, the raid AOEs the whelps and fire adds down.

Shadron is DPSed down straight and the portal is initially ignored. As the waves keep coming, Shad is slowly kited across to the right side so the tank is ready when Vesperon adds. Once Shad is down, the raid takes the portal, kills the add to lose the buff and then pop out and work on Ves. This is where things get tricky as the pally tank is still collecting adds, the fire damage is making the fire cyclone – the meteors from above, hit on average 6-8k. That and Twilight torment made the raid take a lot of damage and we ended up losing too many people in this phase. Had all gone well – one attempt we did get him down but there were only about 5 people left standing – we would have popped in the portal, taken out the add and then burned sarth.

The biggest difference between the raid last night and previous raids was definitely the laughter. People were there to have fun and enjoy themselves. At the end of each attempt, the raid leader would call out “we had X avoidable deaths due to Flame wall/void zones”. This number spiked as high as 10, as low as 4. There was no name calling, no finger pointing unless your total count of times you died due to flame wall/void zone was ridiculously higher than the majority of the group. This was pointed out, asked if there was anything that could be done to help, clarify any part of the strat and resolved and then people moved on.

The biggest difference that I see in this new guild is that it’s mostly women. There are husband/wife teams, mother/daughter teams and everyone gets along and finds things to joke about to keep everything lighthearted, fun and enjoyable. At the end of the day it’s really just a game. People make boneheaded mistakes but it’s the ability to laugh it off, admit they were wrong and move on that really shows the strength of the person. Sure it was a little frustrating at times and yes, a couple people did wipe us – the DK who accidentally taunted Sarth who flame breathed the raid to death, the add tank dying by standing in a void zone, the drake tank dying by getting hit with every type of debuff possible and taking too much damage to heal. This is normal, stuff happens, people take responsibility and move on with out finger pointing and blaming others for their mistakes.

I’m excited to see this continue and hope that it all works out. Sarth with 3 drakes is a complicated fight, there’s a lot going on and a lot of potential for mishaps but being able to make it through and persevere with all our sanities intact is a goal worthy of achieving.

I got Pru, my DK, in on another Naxx run over the weekend. She’s slowly getting gear and is definitely getting easier to play. To me death knights are similar to warlocks in the most backwards way. Most of the casts are instant, it’s a lot of dots, watching timers, kind of like a warlock except you’re more watching coolodwns and dots instead of dot timers. I just downloaded RuneWatch addon which I’m going to hopefully be testing more in the future.

A bunch of us brought our bears to Naxx, for some reason whenever we had them out we always got the boss kill. It was amusing.

They fixed it! I played around with the new portal yesterday in Oculus as people had to repair. It’s much better than the dissapointment of last week when they introuduced a 2 min cooldown on the summon and no portal. talk about annoyance.

At least now we get our pretty red portal and (I haven’t quite tested the multiple summons) it sticks around for the full 2 minutes.

Nifty.

I also got to work yesterday and finally picked up my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. Heroic Oculus? So not my friend. The pug group I found (Immature DK, holy pally, prot pally, mage friend) wasn’t so bad…until the last boss. My gear durability was at 0% for a few rounds but the great thing was it didn’t matter. It’s a stupid dragon fight. 1 red drake, 2 ambers, 2 greens and lots of deaths later while we worked out how to play together and get our strategy correct we went from getting Eregos from 70% to 2%….2 tries later we downed him and there was much rejoicing.

What Oculus means to me:
You know all that cool gear you worked so hard to get? Yeah. Those purples and blues and stuff? That’s cool. Throw it all back in your bags. You won’t be needing that here. How well can you listen, pay attention and coordinate? Not well? Enjoy your fall.
Oh, so you learned how your new little pet works? Cool. Do that for a few minutes without anyone doing anything stupid. Easy right? So you got a boss down, here’s another talent. Go dive off the side of your dragon a few times until you figure out how not to die.
Go smack yourself in the head. It’s really easy. You win.

Useful things to know:
Green drakes MUST always keep a stack of 3 poisons up to ensure they have enough health to heal others
Amber drakes need to start slow so they do not pull aggro and time stop after Eregos comes back from his Arcane trip so the healers can get their 3 stacks up.

Avoiding those orbs is key to living.

Very busy night, but the overall win was totally worth it. It kind of felt like small progression. New boss, new strat, lots of tries, wipes, deaths…..but we got it at the end.

It’s been a busy week. From finishing Naxx….

Naxx was fun. It was great to run with a competent group of people and see the fights and people working in unison. Was it perfect? Of course not. It’s a learning curve and a relatively new guild still learning how to work together. There was a lot of dead people, a lot of learning but we’re building the guild cohesion. Every raid is a new step.
KT is somewhat complicated, but following directions and assigning general locations for people worked pretty well. Healers were given corners, groups were given healers to spread around. tanks were either given boss or add duty. This fight is all about damage mitigation, ensuring that interrupts happen, if you are affected by anything you don’t take down anyone else in the raid and if someone around you if affected you get away. again, staying alive>>single dps burst and death.

To getting Malygos down in a 10 man…

Finding 10 competent people is much easier than finding 25. When you can hand pick your 10 and have people know what they are doing (even if they have never been there before) says something about the level of players. It was my first time in, I had never seen the fight aside from videos I had watched online and reading up on the fights, but I was alive at the end and I helped us get him down. That’s enough for me. Now I know more about the fight and can help train other guildies on how to be better. The simplest way to describe Maly?
1. You need to stay alive. Yes the vortex is annoying and it screws up all your plans, but know where the next spark is, where you are stacking sparks and don’t dps the boss until the tank has him again just to be safe. The boss will fall but if you’re dead, you’re not helping. Be smart.
2. After the sparks have been stacked, the dps has done it’s job, the healers have kept the tank topped off to avoid getting smushed like a ripe banana, you get to phase 2. Top Melee is going in the air as we burn people down. Ranged and everyone else is running for their lives taking down the scions. STAY IN THE PINK BUBBLES. really. it’s simple. You have raid warnings knowing when he is about to cast that awful buff, make sure you are in a pink bubble. Easy.
3. After killing the scions and getting to phase 3, it’s just like the daily. Keep 25 combo points always in case you are targeted so you can pop your armor. If you are dpsing – 112 is the order. You do not need to build more than that. If the heals aren’t coming in and you’re dying? heal yourself. You have the ability to. There is no reason anyone should die in this phase.

To wiping awfully on Malygos on a 25 man…

in 25 man anything, you can hide a couple of crappy players. However, we had some issues as a guild that I know are being worked on and improved. There was some immaturity coming out that was detrimental to the positive attitude trying to be fostered and not everyone had done their research and it showed. Couple wipes without getting Malygos beyond 70% and the raid was called for the day. The biggest problem was
1. the landing and the tank staying alive. The tank takes a TON of damage on initial landing and then shortly after as well. Keeping him up is very important, even if you have 3-4 Ots that can step in at will.
2. Stacking the sparks. The sparks increase dps, standing in sparks increases group dps. Stacking sparks makes it better. Letting sparks hit maly is bad. Sparks can be frost trapped, death gripped, rooted..all sorts of CC to slow them down. There is no reason that a few people keeping an eye on sparks should not be able to stack them all together and then burned in the same location every time. This requires awareness, some smarts and coordinating with the tank so you have the most time to get the spark where you want it.

to randomly finding a reindeer pic I missed…

Everyone loves reindeer. And they are cute. end of story Vuur as a gnome? Maybe not as much. Thank god I’m human.

Naxx can be quite entertaining.. One of my former guildies got the Critter Gitter achievement while in Naxx and I really wanted to do the same. One of the best places for this is right before Patchwerk. There’s a couple of box piles with rats all around them. It also looks pretty funny to have your rat army out and ready for the boss fight. Too bad they only last 3 minutes.

In other news, I had my first Saph kill the other night – this was on 10 man. The frost resist set was definitely necessary here but we got through.

Last night the guild finished up Saph and KT and we wiped a few times on Malygos. One thing I have found is that my uber vista gaming tower sucks at 25 mans. It just can not handle the graphics overload. To make my raid experience less painful, I will go to great lengths to hook up my mac laptop to my gaming mouse and a 24″ widescreen and raid on the mac. I feel this is working for now while I attempt to upgrade the vista box to 64 bit in an attempt to make it run smoother. At least I don’t disconnect every fight like some of my guildies….That was quite painful watching 2-4 people disconnect every fight.

I’m interested in some of my new fellow warlocks. One is also raiding affliction like me and the other is a destro/demo hybrid. The affliction lock is usually ripping up the charts – he also has much better gear than me and has his t7 set bonus…The demo/destro hybrid usually starts high and then falls off and I can sometimes end up ahead of her depending on the fight. I did some reading up on the builds last night and definitely for he short fights – destro hybrids are the way to go. The longer fights is where afflocks shine and there has been much discussion that while initial rotation is pretty important, keeping your dots up is really the most important thing. I know I get in a pattern at times where I occasionally clip dots which is bad. I’m doing a little more research but at the moment I am very interested in getting my last 2 badges so i can get the t7 robe for the set bonus. I want to see how much of a difference that makes.

next raid i’m running my own wws and checking out the rotations of everyone.

Sel also got her explorer title… more on that on a different post.

What could be better than baby murlocs? After days of camping the Clam vendor for a Siren’s Tear to make my Wispcloak I have heard more baby murlocs and regular murlocs speaking than ever before. in fact, I’m getting quite talented at speaking Murloc… In fact, i’m going to learn how to do the Demoralizing Mmmrrrggglll . It makes me laugh every time I see it.

We killed Dios….we were in Molten Core running around, beating on things and then we read the requirements to summon Ragnaros and were like.. ok, onto bigger and better things….

like Maexxna! We have been struggling with the spider lady for a while, but she finally bowed to our command and was squashed.

…finally

So while working on my druid’s explorer title, I’ve come across a couple of interesting parts of the game that look unfinished like they were supposed to be either dungeons or instances or new zones but were never fully completed. Below is a couple of interesting spots I have found so far in the Eastern Kingdoms.

An entrance to the Emerald Dream. Found in the Hinterlands, this lovely dragon and portal sit up north with just an elite group of 62s I believe running around. The portal will not take you anywhere, but looks like it has potential….

The original location of Dalaran. Very scenic, great for a picnic lunch on the Lordareon lake.

The fortress of Grim Batol stands tall in the south east of the Wetlands. A beautiful fortress guarded by red dragonkin, there is currently no entrance available to this dungeon.

There is also the Greymane Wall in the south of Silverpine forest that looks like it has an entire new zone behind it. You can’t get through, but there are some humanoid refugees standing in front of it.