Dragon Factory

We will be doing a raid lockout next week so that we can see the Lich King encounter and give it a try.  Then we’ll go back to wiping on Sindragosa.

http://www.wow.com/2010/06/06/24-hour-downtime-this-tuesday-for-72-servers-to-make-them-catacl/

Heads up guys!  ”In prep for cataclsym” Blizzard is doing 24 hours of server maintenance to Scarlet Crusade (among others).  I’m guessing they must be doing some hardware work among other things.

2nd attempt, excellent job guys.

HEAL'D!

Who’s house?

The site was updated this morning with a bugfix patch. Please let me know if you spot any problems.

Teq is busy working on his healing gear, so he asked me to post something on the home page to keep things active and lively.  Today I’m going to talk about the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter.

Image shamelessly taken from wowwiki

It’s not immediately obvious from the picture here, but Valithria has a boo boo.  This is almost what you would call a reverse boss.  It’s an escort quest that never really goes anywhere.  If you’re thinking a dragon should be able to take care of herself, you’d be right.  In this case you need to heal her up to full health before she’ll be able to escape her bonds and fend for herself.  There’s no real boss here, just lots and lots of adds.

Healers

This fight was made just for you!  Oh boy are you going to be busy, there’s so much going on!  First off you’ll need to assign some roles for this fight.  In most cases there will be 3 healers, and for this fight it’s especially important.  One of the healers is going to be a dedicated healer on Valithria, one will float between raid healing and healing Valithria, and the third will focus primarily on raid healing.  All three healers will need to keep an eye out for Dream Portals.  Dream Portals will appear every 30 seconds and contain green orbs that you need to collect to get a stacking buff, this stacking buff boosts your healing and mana regeneration, so it is very important to hit every wave of portals or the stacking buff will drop off and you’ll likely fail the encounter.  Each portal will only accept one person, so the healers need to each enter a different portal.  A small green glowing dot appears on the ground before the portal spawns, so you will be able to position early.  You do all that right and you’ll win the day.

DPS

So many adds, so little time.

Assign 2 dps to handle Suppressors, one on the left, and one on the right.  Suppressors apply a debuff to Valithria that makes the healers job impossible.  The top priority of those 2 dpsers is to kill Suppressors.  The rest of the time they should be helping out on other adds.
Everyone need to kill Blazing Skeletons fast since they literally lay waste to the raid.
A ranged dps should be assigned to kiting zombies.  Hunters and frost magi work well for that sort of thing I’m told.
Ranged DPS should focus on Abominations.  You know the big fat guys.  Pew pew them.
Melee DPS should focus on Archmagi.  Stabbinate them.

Tanks

One goes left, one goes right.  Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!  Each tank will take one side of the room.  Lots and lots of adds in this fight, I hope you like AoE tanking.  Stay away from the Zombies as they apply a stacking armor and nature damage debuff, if you must aggro them, try to kite, but a range dps should be kiting them if possible.  You’ll primarily be tanking Abominations, Archmagi, and Blazing Skeletons.

Archmagi have a frost volley that you should interrupt.  They also mark the floor where an ice column will appear.  The ice column knocks people around.  Can you fly? No, so it is a good thing to dodge.
The Abominations have a gut spray.  It’s quite icky, so point them away from the raid.  When they die they spawn little slimy worms, so prep your AoE threat for that.

The whole raid

Don’t stand in front of Abominations.  Unless you like slime and death.  In that case go for it.
Don’t stand on the ice column marks on the ground.  Unless you can fly.  In that case go for it.
Don’t stand in the mana voids.  Unless you don’t have mana.  In that case go for it.
Don’t get too far away from your healers, it’s easy in this room, but don’t do it.  Unless you are invincible.  In that case go for it.
The fight is on a soft-enrage timer, you start getting too many blazing skeletons to deal with and you die.

That’s all I’ve got.  Hopefully if you have any comments or corrections you’ll help out a murloc and post em for me.  Hope to talk to everyone soon!

Yer Pal,

Sherloc

The cataclsym Alpha has kicked off and MMO-Champion is on the case, bringing you screenshots and data mining. Check out the images of Orgimmar!  The new enchantments must have been real hard for the devs, “ummm just double everything.”  Lot’s of cool info, very worth checking out.

Small site change I just wanted to let people know about.

For blog posts and forum posts you have to reply in the blog on in the forum.  Previously you could reply on the activity stream on the “activity” page.  This breaks the flow of information and splinters conversation.  It looks like by turning it off a few posts have gone away, and I apologize for that, but I feel going forward it will lead to fewer splintered conversations.

Thanks

MMO-Champion posted a story this morning about raiding in Cataclysm. You should read it.  There are very big implications in it.

Read the rest of this entry →

Congrats to everyone who helped DF get 2 firsts tonight.    Let’s keep gearing up and smashing through.  The Lich King will fall.

I’m curious how people feel about the Celestial Steed. In the realm of “paid content” it seems to be fairly harmless, and on an individual level I don’t see anything wrong with being able to pay for things that you want. Is there $25 dollars worth of value here? Does the fact that over $2 million dollars have been spent on this bother anyone?