That’s right, Mr Bigglesworth in the house!

Anyway, last night marked my first raid in WoW since pre-tbc, where I was up to Twin Emps in AQ40. As with most things that I’ve achieved in any game in the last 5 years, my major motivating factor was Dan. By motivating factor I basically mean he made me come,  on the acceptance that I didn’t know anything about any of the fights (never did Nax in vanilla) and wasn’t willing to read up on them. What can I say, I’m lazy. I figured he was either being nice to me because he knew I’d never see it otherwise, or he was desperate for the help, so either way I decided I’d go along and dip my toes in the proverbial ocean that is WoW raiding once again. though I guess really with it being a 10 man I was basically just doing UBRS with larger production values.

So, it was mainly a guild run for them, with a couple of extras. I knew 3-4 people going along so I wasn’t too worried about making an idiot out of myself. Clearly this was going to happen, but what I mean is that basically I didn’t care if these people thought I was an idiot. Some of the bosses had already been downed by someone, so I’m not sure if this is the normal order of bosses or not, but this is what we did:

Heigan the Unclean

I’d actually seen people ranting on forums about this boss before, mainly about the idiots in their guild being unable to stay out of the sludge/lava/bogies, so I knew I wasn’t going to be much use here. As predicted, the first attempt I died pretty quickly, and lay there for a few minutes watching other idiots follow my lead. Not knowing exactly what was happening, and only receiving a very short textual explanation of what was going to happen, I didn’t worry too much about this. The second attempt I made it into the second phase at least, but again died when running back and forth. This time however I’m pretty sure it was due to my lag rather than being a complete idiot, as I ended up dead without ever entering the green stuff. At least not on my screen. He dropped on this attempt, so I didn’t get to try again. I’m sure if I get to do Nax in the future I’ll have this nailed. I spent enough time lying on the floor watching everyone else do it anyway…

Loatheb

Or Loltheb as it reads to my eyes…

This guy was fairly uninteresting to be honest. You stand there and spank him for a bit, then every so often he spawns a spiky hovering ball thing. I was told that it would be announced on vent which group should run to the spiky balls when. Very convenient, considering I wasn’t on vent. So I tried my best to watch the other members of my group and follow them when they ran away. Easier said than done when there’s a bazillion things exploding all over the boss, I managed ok though. Standing near the spiky balls seems to give you some sort of buff I think, but I have to say I didn’t even bother checking to see what it did. The boss died on the first attempt, with no real problems or anything interesting to mention. My DPS sucked, as was to be expected.

Instructor Razuvious

Stupid name, stupid armour (baby blue? come on) and stupid helpers. We sort of half wiped at first because some idiot DKs (not it actually wasn’t mine!) pet agroed them before intended, but most of us managed to run away in time. He has two helpers, which seemingly can be controlled by using these big purple crystals at the side of the area. So the two tanks controlled these guys, and then used them to tank the boss I think. I don’t know if he did any special moves or owt, I didn’t notice anything going on. I just stood there and pewed (that’s a technical term). He died swiftly, and then we killed his two little helpers too.

Gothik the Harvester

This fight involves splitting up the two groups in pens, separated by a gate. Gothik is chilling up on his balcony, all like “you noobs aint got nuttin on me, stop frontin” or something. A bunch of mobs spawn in waves, which you kill until he gets bored and decides to come sort you out himself. We wiped the first time because we didn’t have enough people on one side. I switched sides for the second attempt, and magically we killed him with no problems. Ergo it was pretty much me who killed him. Anyway, I digress… He teleports either side of the gate a few times, then eventually the gate opens and you get to ream him until he drops. There was also disco dancing:

The Four Horsemen

The four whores men? bwahaha….. yeah…hmm…

So I’d seen this fight when Nax first came out in Vanilla WoW, and have always wanted to do it. Needless to say I had the last laugh. Alan Partridge references aside, I was very excited for this fight. I won’t go too much into the dynamics of the fight, because I barely understand them completely myself, and anyone that cares will already know anyway. Suffice to say I ended up running between two of the four a lot, trying to watch debuffs, and dying quite a lot. I think we wiped about four times, surprisingly it wasn’t normally my fault either. I was quite pleased with myself. Unfortunately on the fight that we did down them I died after the first one died. Hopefully I’ll get to do this again and will make it through the whole thing. It was cool to have done it though, I was very pleased.

Grobbulus

This is the final boss we attempted, and ultimately failed to kill. We got him down to about 6% on the last attempt I think, which was quite annoying. This fight involves the tank leading him round the outside of the room, the DPS following behind, and everyone trying to avoid the weird plague cloud things. To further complicate things he will randomly mark someone with a debuff, which after 10 seconds or so will cause a bunch of damage to you and create your own little plague cloud at your feet. I found this not to be so bad as a DK, with the anti magic and reduced damage buffs, along with my self heal, I could minimise the damage caused by them. I’m not too sure why we wiped on the last attempt, a combination of being people too close to clouds and various other things I think. I was quite disappointed not to have killed him.

That was all the bosses we did. I managed to score myself a Cloak of Darkening. Not strictly a DK piece, but it was an upgrade over what I had, and it was another DK I was rolling against anyway I think. Overall I had fun, though my DPS was a fair bit lower than I would have hoped. I’ve never done DPS in anything larger than a 5 man before, so I think I was a bit slow on the uptake, keeping up with my rotations with lots of mobs about, and selecting the right targets to DPS straight away. I’m sure that’ll all come with a bit more practice though. A good start!

Thanks for the F5’s losers!

This week has seen some pretty solid progress for my little DK. Firstly I finally managed to make the 5,000 gold I needed to buy my epic flying skill. I can now zoom around at a ridiculously high speed, but am sadly very low on funds across my entire account. Being able to fly fast has helped me pick up a few more points in my mining skill too, I am currently sitting somewhere around the 430 mark. Not far to go now. My Jewel crafting is still lagging a bit behind, I think I’m up to about 220, but I’m really not in any rush with that.

In heroic related news, I did Culling of Stratholme for the first time ever this week, on heroic. I haven’t done it on normal. I’m not sure quite what I think about the instance, there seemed to be lots of running back and forth, along with mobs spawning in areas you’d already cleared etc. I got a bit disorientated and a little bored with killing the same one-hit mobs over and over. However the bosses seemed fairly cool, and I liked the scripted feel to it. Even if the friendly NPC was a little slow keeping up.

What I DID like was being turned into a person. I have to say I was pretty hot. We managed to get The Reins of the Bronze Drake also, which I didn’t win, but I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Seems this was pretty decent, what with this only dropping if you make to the boss within a certain time limit I think, and we weren’t really trying for it. I imagine this was down to my imba DPS mainly.

In other news, I helped Dan do some of the Tier 0.5 quests on his rogue. I quite enjoyed this as it’s been a good few years since I did any of these. During this I also unlocked smelting of Dark Iron, and went and made him some bars in BRD:

so I guess I got something out of it too!

Lastly, I managed to win a roll on Orb of Deception whilst killing Onyxia. I don’t think I ever saw it drop when I was doing Ony for real back in vanilla WoW, so this was pretty cool. Dan also got the Tier 2 helmet for his lv60 rogue, so that’s useful for him.

That’s all folks!

So, what have I been up to lately that doesn’t have a blog post all of its own…

Firstly, my epic flying skill fund is sitting at around 4,200g now, so not too far away. This has been made mainly from post-80 questing, and running a few instances and old world raids/dungeons.

I’ve been helping Dan’s rogue (pictures above) with various old world things, running instances for quests, doing the level 60 5 mans for his Shadowcraft set, and various other bits and bobs. This has kept me busy over the weekend, and distracted me from the mind numbing grind of trying to make 5,000g and get mining levelled. My mining is currently 408 by the way.

Below is a screenshot of the achievements I’ve racked up this weekend:

Missing the ones for ZG and Onyxia.

If you know me, you’ll know this is actually pretty damned impressive. For one I’ve still yet to succumb to the lures of leveling an alt, and secondly I usually log on for like an hour and doss around, then go back to watching TV.

Now, onto serious business. During the ZG run the Swift Zulian Tiger dropped. This was the first time I’ve gone on a ZG run since before TBC, and I know my friends have done it quite a few times. I was hesitant to even roll… because I knew what would happen. Yes, I won the tiger mount! I have to say I’m totally stoked, because I’ve had a crappy week and it was awesome to get something that few people on the realm have. I do feel kind of bad too though, and now have several friends who hate me just a little bit…

Fuck ‘em, haters

So after that we went and did Magister’s Terrace heroic. The guys were kind enough to run me through the normal version first, so I could do the quest to unlock the heroic version. Anyway, we had the white emu thingy drop, which of course I refrained from lotting on. Two mounts in one evening is not bad work I reckon!

I think that’s about it as far as updates go for now. My next goals are to do the rest of the WotLK 5 mans, as many heroics as possible, upgrade my weapon and various other gear pieces and to work out what class I’m leveling next (so many options!)

*beep beep*

Above image totally unrelated to the rest of the post, but I discovered the other day if I use Army of the Dead after I have popped Dancing Rune Weapon then my hovery weapon dude will summon his own set of ghouls! 16 minions on the screen at once is almost too many. Almost.

Anyway, onto the meat of the post…

This past weekend I took my first step into a heroic instance, ever. I never did any at 70, because as soon as I hit 70 I was leveling another character, meaning none of them ever really did anything at 70 other than PvP. Having not even done the level 80 normal instances, and wearing a mixture of mid-Northrend quest blues and random greens, I was a little worried how my character would stand up. I have to say I was almost a little disappointed, I was expecting it to be a bit harder. Though maybe that’s due to the people I was playing with making it easy…

These are the ones we did:

The party setup was Darknight (Blood), Darknight (Unholy), Paladin (Prot), Paladin (Retri) and Priest (Holy).

So the Nexus seemed pretty much the same as the normal version, at least I don’t remember many differences. I think there was one random boss (or pseudo boss?) that spawned down some hallway and we managed to MPK ourselves by agroing him and getting whirlwinded (yes that’s a word, shut up) while fighting other mobs. I don’t even think it was my fault actually, but it probably was.

Anyway, the rest of the instance went fine…

We also did a run of Violet Hold on heroic. Again, I can’t remember any specific differences here, maybe we fought different bosses, I’m not sure. It all went smoothly anyway. Fighting dragons is always fun.

Next came Utgarde Pinnacle and Peak. I’m going to address these two together, because I’m not 100% sure which of the bosses were from which instance. I think most of the ones I have screenshot’s for were from Utgarde Pinnacle, but I won’t say so unless I’m wrong.

I particularly liked this hall of big naughty monsters. I’m a big fan of anything that feels scripted, and it was nice walking into the room and thinking “ooh, I bet I get to fight all of them in turn”. Unsurprisingly, I was right. There was red globby laser beams too, which is always a plus. All the angry wildlife specimens went down without a hitch.

Next (or possibly before, I don’t even remember) we had this guy:

Now you always know it’s going to be cool when the dude has a drake hanging out next to him. You also know he’s going to ride it, and there’s probably going to be some sort of (potentially annoying) gimmick to it. So from what I observed, he flew off (why do bad guys love flying off so much in games?) and spawned a bunch of waves of angry men, who seemed to quite literally be coming out of the walls. We killed them, and when Mr Boss got within range of these conveniently placed giant harpoons we shot him.

Note to all evil bad guys: if your master plan involves flying around on a drake to kill us, don’t place harpoons in front of where you’ll be flying

So we shot him a bit, he spawned some men, we killed them, we shot him some more, eventually he got upset and decided to come deal with us himself. So from what I observed he had some sort of Whirlwind type move where he chased after someone in the group, I think this may have been the person second on the hate list. Either way, I kept well clear, I value my life. So as per usual, our nub Retri Paladin got himself killed ASAP (so as to not dwarf everyone else’s DPS I assume…) followed not long after by the tank. I wasn’t really paying enough attention to see why they died, but I think it was the whirlwind type deal. It ended up with me, the other DeathKnight and the priest. With hate bouncing back and forth and a few cooldowns being used we managed to kill him ok. Was quite a fun fight.

Finally, we have this dude:

Not a great picture I know, but he’s sat there on his throne. Again, I don’t really know for sure quite what was happening here, he seemed to have 4 Viking ships or something in his room (hire another interior decorator please) which he’d occasionally run over to and do something, which inevitably resulted in us all losing a bunch of HP. We actually wiped to this guy twice, my personal deaths seeming to come from big floaty blue globes, which I guess I was supposed to avoid but I don’t really know.

So I was informed that when he goes near one of the ships to keep away from him, or something similar, and the third attempt be downed him without any problems. I’m not really sure (that seems to be something I say a lot huh?) what prevented him from casting the Bane thing, but whatever it was we did it, and the fight was a lot easier because of it. This resulted in the following achievement:

So that’s my experience of heroic instances so far. I’m hoping to get through a lot more of them over the coming weeks, as I’m determined not to miss out on the content that is accessible to me, like I did in TBC.