Monday, June 7, 2010

Week of the Yo-Yo

Well this week has been all over the place.
Our weekend raiding started poorly with only 14 people online, It's as most would guess that on hearing the news of our transfer many people left the guild our just stopped coming online. So with 25s ruled out we took a team for our stronger members from those on into 10man for some hard modes and achievements.
Our first point of call was getting the achievement for Deathwhisper, that fight is really a pain for anyone not favored by the RNG gods. We had many unsuccessful attempts when we would ether get nothing but Deformed fanatics or she would change one of our five into something we already had 1% or so before phase 2.
Eventually we managed to push phase 2 with 6 adds up 2 of which were Deformed that I was kiting while two of our DPS changed specs to tank the remaining adds and the boss. Our group on the final attempt ended up with two Pally tanks a Warrior tank, two melee DPS, two ranged DPS and 3 healers earning us.


From there we cleared the usual hardmodes for Gunship, Frestergut and Rotface since some people needed upgrades from them. We then moved to Putricide for his achievement and proceeded to one shot him with the lack of the slow making very little difference to the fight.


We then tryed for Blood Princes hard mode but the melee heavy group was stacked against us and we quickly called it and moved to take out Bloodqueen's HM instead.
The fight was very easy with the 20% buff to help out, I imagine the damage she does would have been very painful to heal had it not been for it. However with the buff up the hard mode was an easy one shot.

From there we moved to the final wing and set out to get the Valithrias achievement.
We had tryed a few times but never really bothered to stick with it so doing it was simply a matter of making sure we had a dedicated person to collect portals when not DPSing. The part that made the fight particularly interesting was the lack of a hunter for the first time in our kills of her. We instead had our Balance Druid step to the plate and for not having any idea what to do for it he performed very well and quickly got the hang of it. On the topic of the fight one tip that I have found very handy for the Blazing Skeletons is to move towards them and taunt as the spawn then move back to your position with the Abom, the Skeleton will come towards you for a short moment when he would have started his cast giving your DPS a few more seconds to bring him down.


Our final kill for the night would be Sindragosa and again we were hit with many of the same pains we had last week with people not moving for Blistering Cold fast enough or running with the marked target in phase 3 and getting multiple tombs.
Eventually we had a really strong run with everyone still alive well into phase 3, when people started to drop we lost my co-tank to a Frostbreath as I ran back from helping on a multitomb that also took out one of our healers. It was down to the wire she was almost dead but we had lost most of our raid with just myself one DPS and a healer up. Then at around 1% with my passing 9 stacks our healer got tombed and as a result we lost our one DPS. I popped everything I could and just moments before my death both the healer and Sind dropped dead leaving me as the only survivor of a very lucky attempt. I was glad for my frost resist ring I had crafted because I am sure that if i wasn't for it the damage would have eaten me down just enough over time that I would not have made it.


The next night we went back to try our hand at the Lich King and get 3 among us their titles. While we were making quick progress it quickly became aparent that a few people were not quite on their game. We were making it regularly into phase 3 despite 3 people never having done the fight before, the problem was that each attempt got messier and messier. In the end we called it as it was clear that peoples heads were not in the fight, myself included.
My problem was that we had moved the computers into the lounge for the long weekend and my partner was beside me playing Modnation which we had brought that evening, it was hard to concentrate with that playing in the corner of my eye.

The heavy drop down from the high of all those achievements came the next day when my partner logged into game and quickly call me onto my machine. One of our officers had stripped the bank clean of thousands in mats and taken all our gold then left guild. I problem was really my fault of how I had set up the ranks, an officer alt has all the same rights as an officer just a rank lower. The issue in this is that the officer could and did create a new character promote him to officer alt rank and use him and the other two toons to tag team our bank. Wondering if this was a result of the poor raids lately or if he had been hacked we ran him through armory to find him wearing nothing but PvP gear and Shadows Edge in a guild with a name similar to , it was obvious that he had been hacked and a ticket went out immediately. Although the ticket was elevated to the next level withing 30min the biggest concern is whether we will get our items and gold back before we transfer servers in a weeks time, it doesn't seem likely but it was included in the ticket and hopefully we can get the gold back at least. I am just thankful that the large majority of valuables were removed for liquidation earlier that week.
The officer in question did eventually post on forums letting us know what was happening on his end and as you would guess he did not have an authenticator. In the next guild officers will be required to have one and our settings for officer alts and officers will be better thought out.

On an unrelated side note, this weekend I finally got myself a new screen. Gone is the stock 20' screen with VG cables that caused so many headaches for me and my graphics card, now I have a 23' HD capable LG with 2 milli second response and a DVI cable to play on. My only issue was turning it on for the first time. It was night time and i spent ages looking for why the thing had no power, I couldn't find any switches and then when running my hands over it looking for one the thing came to life, the dam thing was touch sensitive and I didn't even click to it.

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