Karazhan: Shade of Aran

Shade of Aran is roughly the 8th boss in Karazhan. Order depends on if you kill him or Illhoof first. We would usually kill him before Illhoof, because once he's dead you can port up to Aran's room from the front door.


Shade of Aran yells: Please, no more! My son... he's gone mad!
On engagement Shade tries to pawn us off with (true) accusations about his son.

Shade of Aran yells:I am not some simple jester! I am Nielas Aran!
Shade of Aran begins channeling his mana into a powerful arcane spell.

Shade of Aran says: I'm not finished yet! No, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve...
Here is where Aran summons four water elementals.

Shade of Aran yells: At last the nightmare is over...
I often felt a bit bad for killing him, but at level this was such an annoying fight. It was entirely too easy for someone with too much lag or twitchy fingers to wipe the raid during the Fire Wreath.


I'm sure I'm missing a few of his speeches since we killed him so fast. But the general idea is there. Shade is a mage boss, and does lots of magey things.

A new boss and an old hangout

Since Darkfall downed Karathress last night, enabling Viljo to get his new pants, we were all set to try Morogrim tonight. We had a few ideas how to make it happen, but given the guild strengths and raid makeup weren't sure how to make it happen.

I think we ended up with a good strategy, but the plan to have a healy pally hold aggro on the Murlocs kept backfiring when he was sent to a watery grave, or whatever. We called it when the trash respawned.

At loose ends, we decided to finish up an aborted Kara run from over the weekend. That was Kuanchichi and Teltanara, and we picked up the run at Nightbane. However we had some troubles getting everyone gathered, and hung out on the terrace for a while until everyone got there. The other ele shaman in Darkfall, has an holy undead priest alt, and I thought this capture of them chatting with our tank Isd was great.



Also - Rahlenti offtanked for the half-run, he'd signed off but we called him and got him to log back in. Then Prince kindly dropped the druid T4 helm. Woot grats!

Kuanchichi now has 145 badges, and after spending some time poking at the badge vendors, I think he has all the onspec PvE badged gear I want for him. Time to consider offspec and PvP gear, or play with theorycrafting the tradeoff between haste, spell crit, and spell hit.

Luck o the Rogue

Last night Darkfall just couldn't muster the healer attendance for a 25man raid. Even if Kuan healed and Telt came instead of Viljo. So, they called it. Since Kuan had been doing dailies pretty solidly to make up for Saturday's mistakes, I swapped to Eeyan.

Turns out the guild leader and raid leader wanted to get some epics on their just-turned-70 pallies. So we got whispered, "fresh Kara?" and decided sure, why not.

We ended up with a couple pugs but mostly guild alts. It was only Eeyan's 4th Kara run ever, and one of those was just for animal bosses. What a relief to kill Attumen and no worry about mana! Then we down'd: Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Curator, Aran. Opera was R&J, which surprisingly enough was incredibly difficult. One of the pugs was an idiot, and the other not on vent, so the idiot got booted after the Opera wipe and replaced with a guild mage who'd just hit 70! ...and did better.

Anyhow the Blizzard gods smiled upon Eeyan. Moroes dropped [Edgewalker Longboots] which replaced his [Master's Treads]. Unfortunately they look like he's wearing galoshes. Maiden dropped [Bracers of Maliciousness] which replaced his [Spymistress Wristguards]. Julianne then dropped [Romulo's Poison Vial], and Eeyan won the roll, and replaced, um, [Core of Ar'kelos]. Then Curator dropped this kickass ring...! [Garona's Signet Ring]. Eeyan rolled a 100 for that. I guess after a 100 they didn't have the heart to say no, but here's my alt (everyone still calls me Kuan in vent) getting 4 epics in a row! I almost felt bad. The guild leader felt bad. After all here's his healy pally wanting gear. But then I decided when one picks up loot that's instantly equipped, that's not really so bad.

Anyhow Eeyan is actually fairly decently outfitted now, and I have to rethink what I was going to do for him. After all, it's no longer urgent to get the Ogri'la bracers, or the badged boots, although they are probably better. And the badged-gear stuff, hm, I should look at replacing the remaining blues. Speaking of blues, Eeyan had started to hit that blue-ring conflict, which level 70 blue ring should he wear, o noes! Now all those are gone, vendored, and he has a lot more bag space.

After we stopped in Kara, we also went on a regular Shattered Halls run to build rep for the pallies and maybe equip the new 70 mage. The mage got the [Runesong Daggar], and Telt got Revered with Thrallmar, so she can finally get that head enchant. So despite no 25 man, it was a fun evening with a lot of progress.

Kara again :)

After Magtheridon last night we were going to run regular Magisters Terrace, just for some rep. However due to a distinct lack of tanks Kuan and Telt got pulled into the end of Kara instead.

The Kara was fun, many badges were had by all. We killed Nightbane, Aran, Illhoof, Prince, Netherspite, and did Chess event too. The impressive part is that Prince and Netherspite were done with only 9 people. So Kuan went from healing on Mag to being the main dps on Prince, as our 2nd prot warrior and fury warrior and possibly a 3rd dps as well died to a combo of shadow nova + infernal blocking us in. I'm particularly proud of Telt on Netherspite. One of our 3 healers went down early and she kept the blue beam person up as well as keeping group heals going.

The loot was quite amusing as well. Kuan got 2 pieces of healy gear. The Cord of Nature's Sustenance from Illhoof and the Heart-Flame Leggings from Chess. The healy stuff is good for Kuan since that (and badges) is the reason that Kuan wants to go to Kara. As we saw earlier sometimes Kuan gets to heal. And it's just really important to be able to heal well when the RL says "you, heal {that tank, the raid, me}."

Telt got Robe of the Elder scribes off of Nightbane, which is, of course, the one thing that Viljo still wants out of Kara. So now my holy priestess has a better dps robe than my mage. >.< Ah well, it was either shard or Telt gets it, so I figured it would be worse to see it sharded... Either way I know I'll never see it on Viljo.

Telt's 'reward' for doing a good job on Netherspite was the Pantaloons of Repentance. I'm quite pleased to get those for her. I had just been wondering where to put the +22 healing quest reward gem for killing Kael, and in those pants is the perfect place.

WoW as a Drinking Game

Or: What I Did For New Year's Eve

DraNgNon and I were questing as Eeyan and Teltanara. We were wandering about Kirin'Var Village getting quest money and motes of mana. It was relatively early in the evening and we were starting to consider our plans for dinner and the evening.

One of the warlocks, who regularly leads the 7pm Kara run, asked if anyone was interested in a fun Kara run. Our raids have been cancelled for the Holidays due to various people traveling and such. The regular groups and schedules don't apply, so we were all joking around about getting a group. Eeyan and Teltanara volunteered to go, because they are keyed and who knows when they'd ever get to go otherwise. Other people were pvp'ing and expressed a tiny bit of interest.

It didn't look like there were going to be enough of anyone to fill out a raid. So we were all just shooting the shit in guild chat. I jokingly suggested that our fun run be a drinking game. We should follow the "drink when your character drinks" rule. Suddenly everyone was interested. They were running off to mix drinks and swapping to needed classes.

Since it was still a fun run Eeyan came along, and because we needed healers Telt came along. We got one of the main warrior tanks and one of the main druid off tanks. The extremely well geared warlock was leading, and a regular tree druid was the 2nd healer. We filled out the run with a couple of dps warriors, a mage, and pugged in a pally.

Everyone got their drink of choice. DraNgNon and I pulled out a bottle of syrah port from the Savannah-Chanelle vineyard. The main tank mixed "the strongest rum and coke ever". Our tree druid and one of the dps warriors are housemates and brought out the beer. The warlock decided that since he was a little bit sick he should drink screwdrivers.

Then suddenly Eeyan and Teltanara were Raiding! Whee! Raiding! Neither Eeyan or Telt had all the mats they needed for raiding, but they weren't too badly off. We tore through Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, and even Nightbane. Curator also dropped to our first try. We got to Illhoof and had a few problems, but as soon as we all got a talking too about focusing on the chains we dropped him. Aran was a also a challenge, but went down after a couple of tries. (Teltanara just barely had enough health, Primal Mooncloth has NO stamina.) We forged on to the chess event, and of course dealt with that easily too.

Now Teltanara cleaned up on the loots here. She got gloves from Attumen, off-hand from Moroes, bracers from Maiden, a random mob dropped the shadow damage neck for her, and boots from Shade of Aran. The soulcloth vest pattern also dropped twice so the main who was a tailor got it and then she was the only other tailor, so she got that too. Eeyan also cleaned up, but not quite as much. He got his t4 gloves, and the shoulders from chess event.

Anyway after Chess we decided to go on to Prince. We swapped out to mains so Viljo and Kuan went instead of Eeyan and Telt. Unfortunately Prince didn't work out quite as well as everything else. It was pretty late at this time, and after several rounds of really bad infernal placement, we called it. (They alternated landing on the ranged or the tank...)

Merry Christmas!

Eeyan and Teltanara now have the heroic key to Caverns of Time. And, the key to Karazhan.

Eeyan got his [Handgrips of Assassination].

Teltanara got the [Epoch-Mender] staff.

won with a 3

Kuanchichi helped down Prince last night and I guess nobody else wanted [Ruby Drape of the Mysticant] becuase he got it with a 3.

Now that means I get to farm some, I spose. I see if I can tap Darkfall's guild bank; the +hit on the cloak means I can replace the +hit enchant on his T4 gloves with spellpower.

But it's even more. Prince yielded 3 badges (!) and now he only needs 2 more to get [Earthquake Bracers] which I will also want spellpower on. Or perhaps +allstats? Hm.

Edit 17:14 PST: the mats list
Gloves - Spellpower
• 6 Primal Mana
• 6 Large Prismatic Shards
• 6 Planar Essence
Cloak - Subtlety
• 4 Small Prismatic Shards
• 2 greater Planar Essence
• 8 Primal Shadow
Bracers - Stats
• 6 Arcane Dust
• 6 Lesser Planar Essence
Bracers - Spellpower
• 6 Large Prismatic Shards
• 6 Primal Fire
• 6 Primal Water

Hm, Kuan needs to go fishing, and farm up some Manas. I think I have the rest on a banker, although I might be light on the Shards.

Alchemy Discovery

Last night, while making mana potions just before the Curator in Karazhan, Viljo discovered the Flask of Mighty Restoration. Hopefully there are some healer types in the guild who want it.

Blizz wants Kuan enhance

[Malchazeen]




...becuase not just the rogue, but also the resto shaman already HAD ONE...

"Raiders", and Eeyan's good deed

Darkfall has cleared Kara again already this week. When I went in, I was emphatic, Kuan will get his T4 gloves damnit!

And, Curator dropped them! I am grabbing the caster gear, so now Wrath of Air is +121 damage and healing, woo! Not that it matters as the Raid Leaders think Kuan should be in melee group. Kuan put spellhit on the gloves instead of spell powar, and is now +68 spellhit. I think that will make a significant difference, and can make up the spell power either on bracers, the badged shield, or the totem from Mech, as soon as Kuan gets one of these things.

We downed Prince with no hunters, and only one mage in the group: Viljo. And Prince dropped the Mage/Lock/Hunter hat, and our lone lock (the GL, Soulshade) already had it. So now both Kuan and Viljo have T4 hat and gloves. Moreover, guild leadership likes us, so we have been promoted to the Raider rank in the guild.

So, there it was, 11pm on Wednesday, and all the Kara runs were done. Darkfall is now starting up a 3rd run with alts and whoever's mains got left out (boo, Eeyan remains 64...)

...which left Kuan and Viljo at loose ends, a little late to start pugging heroics, Kuan with an hour+ on his flask that I didn't want to use up while Viljo ran around like a goofball trying to get the perfect meta gem for the new hat. I ended up talking to an alt of Jataka's, a 55 mage, and then it dawned on me, she probably wanted BRD.

I was right, and in rather short order, Eeyan, Teltanara, Cerantra, Xiaofang (Jataka's alt), and Kuepid were running BRD. Good grief, even when we have that much damage and healing BRD still takes forever! We were in there until 3am, but Eeyan cleared his next 0.5 quest, and helped everyone clear a bunch of theirs! Even with the quest turnin that was only 2.5% of level for him though, so that was his good deed of the week.

Meanwhile, Kuan and Viljo are officially Raiders. That's new for Kuan! ...we raid Gruul, Sunday evening.

Awesomeness!

After an initial delay of an hour, while we tried to find healers for our Kara run, we finally got off the ground. We proceeded to rip Kara a new one and kill every boss on the first time. The only exceptions to this were Prince, which we didn't try because we had a pugged healer and wanted to keep any T4 tokens in the guild, and Aran, which we wiped on the first time.

Our main tank and raid leader was over-joyed because the King's Defender finally dropped for him. Kuan got the Shadow-Cloak of Dalaran from Moroes and Ring of Unrelenting Storms from Random trash. Viljo got the Jewel of Infinite Possibilites from Netherspite. And since we one-shotted Nightbane and we'd both bothered to get the quest leading up to that done and had a Blackened Urn we got that quest done and dinged exalted. So they both got the Violet Signet of the Archmage too!

All of this is just awesome, but it gets even better when we get out of the raid and check out mail. Rahlenti is the awesome, is the wonderful, is the generous, is the excellent! Because he sent each of us enough gold to get our epic flying mounts!! Viljo and Kuan were each short about 1000g and Rahlenti sent us 990G each. So now Viljo is sitting pretty on a Swift Purple Windrider and Kuanchichi has a Swift Red Windrider. And oh my god is flying at epic speed the bestest thing ever!

Kara cleared in two runs

And the first part of it had two raiders PUG'd in.

Kuan's first piece of T4...

...wasn't his gloves, becuase he lost the roll. It was his hat! We downed Prince on the second try. Kara was cleared, before 1am on the Wednesday night.

What is sad that pretty much until he has another piece of T4, the hat is a nerf from the Big Bad Wolf's Head he got on the previous run. Also, all the loot that dropped from bosses was either rogue-y, healy, or enchance-shammy gear. Blizz is trying to tell me something, perhaps.

Since Kara was cleared so early, a bunch of guildies who needed the books for the Nightbane precursor quest popped into heroic Sethekk, then SH. The Heroic SH was a matter of debate, as the party was a tank, a priest, Viljo, and two ele shamans. "Not enough CC, No Way, etc etc." The tank swapped from his Tauren warrior to his Bear (sometimes I wonder about warrior tanks, they roll a druid for variety and then spec Bear) for multi-mob-aggro-holding-joy, and we mowed through heroic SH and took down the first boss with only one death.

I've always been of the opinion that two reasonably coordinated shammies in a 5man were nigh unstoppable. I am thinking that held true here too. With 8 complementary totems boosting the entire party, all that damage plus emergency heals, plus cast-interrupts, really the weak CC wasn't an issue.

Darkfall + Karazhan = Win!

Darkfall has started up a second Karashan run at 4pm. This is great! Now there is less competition for the 10pm spots, and the people who fill them are less likely to fall asleep during the raid.

So last night both Kuanchichi and Viljo went into Kara. There was a little worry at the beginning as Tuesday nights it's sometimes hard for us to find a healer. But Kuan saw that our friend Siertial was on. Siertial is an excellent holy priest, and tons of fun to run with. Anyway Siertial was pulled into the run and off we went.

Attument, Moroes, and Maiden of Virtue were all one shot kills. Our Opera event was the Big Bad Wolf, who kept eating our healers. We got him to about 7% on our first try, and after a pep talk about *running* we killed him the second time around. Sadly Viljo still bit the dust second time around. :(

After that we went on to beat the crap out of the Curator and Aran: both of them went down on our first attempt. So, buffs still intact, we pushed through to Nethersprite. However, due to an unfortunate incident with the green beam, Nethersprite only went down on our second try. Because someone got nether exhausion before they were supposed to and couldn't go back into the green beam Nethersprite healed up to full. :(

After that it was very late, but we had been doing such a good job, we figured we might as well try Prince. First try, with 4 healers, we got prince to 1%. But once the tank died, the rest of us couldn't get those last 15K of health before he killed us all. :( The second attempt I screwed up, and Viljo had more threat than the tank: instant enfeeble-wipe. Third attempt we got him to 6% and again wiped. If we'd just had some better luck with infernal placement we'd have had him down no problem. And of course if it hadn't been after 4am at this point we could have tried again and probably gotten him.

Anyway the evening was definitely a net gain. In roughly 6 hours Darkfall cleared the first 8 bosses of Karazhan. Viljo and Kuanchichi were both there and got nice drops. Kuan got the Big Bad Wolf's Head and Viljo got the Staff of Infinite Mysteries (/swoon). They both hit revered with The Violet Eye and got their ring upgrades. And since Aran was killed they got Medivh's Journal, which will get turned in tonight. Also tonight Viljo will get the +40 spell damage enchant on that lovely staff, and, with that, can stop focusing on getting the Stormcaller from Thrallmar, so more focus can be put on Auchindoun and Lower City rep for Kuanchichi.

The final excellent thing of the evening was that Siertial joined Darkfall! Yay! This makes two good priests that Kuan and Viljo have pulled into Darkfall.

Patch Woes

Patch 2.2 came out two days ago. We were supposed to raid Kara that evening. Now the patch does have some nice stuff, but for us it mostly had UI, sound, and threat problems.

Our raid started at least half an hour last because Kuan, the MT and the MH couldn't move one of their group frames out of the center of the screen. Kuan finally figured it out and helped the others fix theirs too. Of course the MT had already deleted all his addons and repaired WoW in an effort to fix it. After we got that and other things sorted out we went in and tried the first few bosses.

Once we actually got started Attumen wasn't too bad. Despite the fact that Midnight fought our OT half in the ground and I died near the beginning of the mounted phase we still got him down. However it just wasn't happening for either Moroes or Maiden. People were having threat issues, we didn't have enough CC for the adds in Moroes, and the Maiden would randomly run over and kill our MH. So we called the run, which was punctuated by people having to relog pretty regularly to fix addons and ui issues.

Aran and Nethersprite

We went into Karazhan again tonight. It was, once again, tons of fun. Though a little more work this time. After clearing through Curator last Tuesday we headed to Aran with plans for Nethersprite afterwards.

So we wiped on Aran, and then wiped some more. The first two times Viljo died almost immediately. Aran apparently decided that I was annoying and, well, swatted me with a set of arcane missiles or two. After that we kept dying to the water eles, it was especially bad when they happened at the same time as the sheep/pyroblast. After a couple of hours of this we gave up for the night. We had already rezed and repaired and were just not feeling the love, even though we'd get him down a bit more each time.

So we went on to Nethersprite. After a lengthy discussion of how to deal with the beams and a rotation for the blue beam (whee blue beam!) we dropped Nethersprite's ass. Oh yeah, one shotted the big ugly dragon. The dps warrior got a nice ring, and Kuan got some enhance pants. (The enhance gear always seems to drop for Kuan :( )

Dropping Nethersprite, after hours of Aran wiping the floor with us, made us quite happy. So we decided to give Aran one more try. Figuring that worst case we'd at least all rez at the entrance and be ready for tomorrow night. But lo, we have prevailed! With the addition of a new strategy, holding dps so that sheep/pyro happens and is done with before water eles, we were able to take him down easily. Sadly Drangnon had proposed that previously and not been heard, but at least once it was finally tried we got him.

Anyway earlier today, Kuan and Viljo ran heroic Slave Pens so that Kuan could get the last 3 badges for Icon of the Silver Crescent. I was very sad when Boots of Blasphemy dropped and the warlock we were with outrolled Viljo. But all is well! The loot gods have smiled upon me, for: Boots of the Infernal Coven dropped, and apparently Viljo's boots were the crappiest out of the people who could use them, and so the RL decided that Viljo got new boots. :)

Gearing up in Karazhan

So, we are back from our vacation, which was nice and includes lots of pictures of Azeroth. Perhaps we will post them some time in the next week, when we are more motivated. Last night we cycled through our alts - I'll let Clara tell the story in a separate post how Vhaas and Khyrie are almost sort of in a real raiding guild now.

Tonight it was Kuanchichi and Viljo and we hit a reset Karazhan with our new guild, Darkfall. I was nervous about going, my DPS in Kara is still somewhat inexplicably lower than it is in heroics. So first I got Hellzuub to put Major Spellpower on Kuan's Earth Mantle Handwraps. That's how one gets drops to happen right? Put an expensive enchant.

We were short on heals and a good priest friend of ours was hanging out so we convinced her to come along. The guild MT swapped in his resto shaman, and off we went...!

At Attumen... Kuan got Bracers of the White Stag. Leather, but finally, caster bracers that are an upgrade from T1. Then we skipped to Moroes, and Brooch of Unquenchable Fury dropped. An absolute first: Kuan rolled a 99 on spec- and level- appropriate loot. But Moroes also dropped Nethershard Girdle, and Viljo won the roll for that!

We went back to the Maiden, who dropped Totem of Healing Rains... and the Resto shammy with us already had it! So Kuan got that too. She also dropped Bands of Nefarious Deeds, which was apparently not as good as what Woonie, the other mage along with us had, so Viljo got those. Somewhere in there Viljo also hit honored with Violet Eye, and got the nice ring upgrade.

After that it was Opera time, and we ran the Big Bad Wolf. Kuan died early on in the fight but we downed him as well. Once past that, I started to get nervous again, as we headed to the Curator and the last time we'd tried it we didn't do so hot. But we downed him at first try... and Kuan didn't even run out of mana...! The Curator dropped Dragon-Quake Shoulderguards, which were inferior to our resto shammy's, so Kuan got those as well. Yay he no longer has to be leafy to heal! And let's not disregard the Gloves of the Fallen Hero, which Viljo won the roll for against the hunter, who is now grimly convinced that he has to wait until all the guild mages have T4 gloves.

We punched through to the chess event, and cleared that as well. I am still a little confused by that sequence of events, but it didn't seem a problem.

I've been on vacation, so needed to rummage around Kuan's bank. I remembered picking up some healy gear, and got a guildie to make me healy spellthread for Kuan's Molten Earth Kilt. He has Hammer of the Penitent now as well, but is too low on mats for the healy enchant on it. For the curious, I have logged Kuanchichi out in his healy gear.

No more raiding until Sunday, where we pick up where we left off. Whew! There'll be time to farm for mats and gold and Badges. And maybe work on alts, and photos of Azeroth.

Darkfall

I am pleased! Very very pleased! Viljo and Kuan just got out of Karazhan. They are now friendly with the Violet Eye. The group had cleared all the necessary bosses previously, so we cleared trash and made our way to the Prince. It wasn't a bad group, our first attempt, with Kuan locked out, we got the Prince to 47%, but then we had an unfortunate knockback into infernals of the tank. The second attempt an infernal landed on all the enfeebled people. *sigh* And then our healer had to go to bed. But Kara! We've run it!

All of this has happened because last Tuesday Viljo was whispered by Hazemaker, a priest we'd run heroic Bot with. Out of the blue, as Viljo and Kuan were breaking eggs in Skettis, Hazemaker asked if I wanted to join a late night raiding guild. I asked what time and days, and we talked to their raid leader. I told him that Kuan and Viljo came as a pair. Dracon found out that Leif (a former NI member) was there, we mentioned his name and he vouched for us. (He's an excellent player, and happens to be their Kara off-tank.) This took a little too long so by the time we'd figured out that we might as well, because worst case they are asses and we go back to Ancestor Cult, the people who could invite had logged off.

So for the rest of the week we farmed up some gear improvements. Mystic spellthread for both of us. A battleground chestpiece for Kuan, and a badge of justice neck for Viljo.

Yesterday the guild leader was on and invited us in, at Leif's reminder. So we joined Darkfall. We ran a part guild pug of BM yesterday, and then a very very smooth guild run of Heroic Mech today before the Kara run. I'd not previously had the pleasure of running Mech with a priest and warlock. The fears just make Pathaleon go down so smoothly, despite the fact that our tank hadn't run heroic mech at all previously.

So whee! new guild!