Back on Track

After a horrible Thursday last week we seem to have bounced back. It's a little hard to tell since we changed our schedule for this week , but our Monday and Tuesday raids went pretty well. On Monday, WA went to give TK another shot. We didn't have the tanks online to do Al'ar but did down VR and Solarion. We also got Mag down on Sunday.

On Tuesday night we changed our schedule a little bit to focus on a little more progression for two weeks. Normally we try and kill 4 or 5 SSC bosses, but last night we killed Lurker and went straight to Vashj. All things considered it went pretty well. We started out the attempts fairly poorly and I was worried that we wouldn't make it to phase three at all on Tuesday. We were having the same old problems. Strider DPS was slow, Naga DPS was slow, Elementals were getting through, and Tainted Cores were despawning. Fact of the matter is we still had a couple of people that had no experience with the fight and were not sure of their role. After a couple of attempts where the best we did was to get two barriers down the officers had a quick discussion about how the night was going. We decided to make a couple of changes and give it two more attempts.

We ended up making only one more attempt. We changed the way we did the Tainted Cores and I changed the way I DPSed the Naga/Striders. We did make it to phase 3 in that final attempt and got Vashj down to 20%. We decided to all the raid after that attempt because we used all of our Battle Rezes, a couple of people need to leave, and we wanted to end the night on a good note.

Obviously, we have room for improvement. We need to improve the way we DPS the Striders, Naga, and Elementals. On that last attempt we let one Elemental get through and we had one strider and two naga up when we started phase 3. We also need to get a little bit better at surviving phase 1 and phase 2. We had to use our battle rezes early on healers and such to make the attempt possible. We need to transition to phase 3 a little smoother. A lot of us paniced a little bit and and didn't focus our DPS. We also had some people die to the spore bat puke and just didn't have enough people up to get here down. However I do think that getting Vashj down to 20% with several people down at the start of phase three is a huge accomplishment and shows just how easy the phase is if people can stay alive.

Patch 2.4.2:
It has only been a few weeks since 2.4 dropped and we have a new patch with some interesting notes to discuss. Here are the highlights from my perspective. You can fine the entire patch notes here.

- All 23-hour profession cooldowns are now 20-hour cooldowns. - I Think this a great change. I don't always log in at the same time each day and often forget to do my transmute until late at night. Then I have to wait until it is late the next day to do the transmute. This change will still limit me to only one transmute per day but gives me a lot more flexibility.

-Removed the cooldown from Void Shatter, and the recipe now correctly requires 375 enchanting. - I like that they removed the cooldown, but I am interested in what this will mean for Graypal. He has the recipe learned but is not 375 Enchanting. Will he unlearn it with the patch, Will he still have it but not be able to use it, or will he be grandfathered in to the recipe?

- Void Reaver's Arcane orbs now generate combat log entries. - WOOT!!!! VR became significantly harder after patch 2.4 because Deadly Boss Mods and Big Wigs couldn't track the orbs. Hopefully this will make it possible for those mods to track them again.

- Creature versions of the Polymorph spell no longer heal the affected target. - This may not seem like much but it has the potential to be pretty significant for some people. This could possible change the way we farm Kara and with how many groups. Since I am in a guild that is primarily geared from T5 content we end up plowing through Shade of Aran without concern for interrupts. If we have them great, but we don't worry about not having them. The worst that happens is that we get sheeped, pyroblasted, and then we take him down the last 10% or 15%. We can easily live through the pyroblast because we have such high stam values and the polymorph heals us all to full. With this change it is likely that the pyro blast will kill a couple of us at least.

Toon Update:
Graylo - Nothing really to say here. Just raiding and such. I am working on getting him some Haste gear from badges and ZA though.

Graypal - He dinged revered with SSO last night and was finally able to buy [Seeker's Gavel]. It is a pretty big increase to my spell damage from the crappy green dagger I had. The main question I have now is should I enchant it? I have the mats for the +40 Spell Damage enchant and I could use the skill up, but here is a decent possibility that It will be replaced in the next month or so. My main goal for Graypal now is to get him into a normal Magister's Terrace run so that I can start running it on heroic. I also would like to farm a lot of primal fire so that I can get a couple tailoring items made.

Grayfel - I worked on my lock quite a bit over the weekend. I used up all of his rested XP and got him to level 42. Most of that time was spent in Dustwallow Marsh doing the new quests from Patch 2.3. I must stay they did a great job with those quests. They were fun and well laid out. Also, quite a few of them provided well thought out gear rewards. As someone who doesn't instance much while leveling this is a god send. Some of the pieces are a little strange like the Healing off-hand I currently have equipped, that is just a sign of how lacking the gear is before these quests.