Will and Zor'lok down!

Last night Darkfall had an excellent raid. We'd killed the first five bosses in Mogu'Shan Vaults on Tuesday, and even had a bit of time left over for attempts on Will of the Emperor. So last night my plan was to kill Will and then head over to Heart of Fear and kill Imperial Vizier Zor'Lok.

The Will of the Emperor kill went pretty well. We changed up when we hit lust because that fight is so long. Having it twice was pretty sweet. I also got my act together and was a lot better at dodging the Devastating Combos. I'm still in need of practice, but I'm now getting far more strikes to use than I am getting smashed. And that really helps, given just how hard hit the tanks are in that encounter.


Imperial Vizier Zor'lok was a pain to kill. We'd worked on him before Christmas and almost killed him then. So I wasn't actually all that worried about getting him dead. No, the pain was that he bugged (hah!) out. We had a wipe on the third platform, and he kept his two mind controlled people and just stood there. They tried to get out of the MC by logging in and out and I tried kicking them from the raid. Nothing worked until I reset the whole instance. So we had to clear that trash twice; fortunately it's not horrible trash merely annoying.

After my pain and learning with dodging Devastating Combos on Will it was amusing to see people having trouble with the Attenuation on Zor'lok. Both are pretty clearly telegraphed, but still tricky to dodge if you get behind a little bit or don't see the telegraph soon enough.

Update

Sorry for the long hiatus, but between work and my family visiting for Thanksgiving both DraNgNon and I have been quite busy. I know all three of our readers were sad. :P

*Raiding*
Darkfall continues to raid. We're 4/6 in MSV, and working on Elegon. We're also still trying to a 25man going. Last week we actually managed to get a 25man formed and had decent success with the Stone Dogs, however, between the server going down, disconnections, and people not being as observant as they should be we didn't get Feng dead. Dropping fire in the ranged group is just as fatal on 25 as on 10, but there are a lot more people available to be unobservant enough to do it.

Monday nights are still fun runs. We are working on the Cataclysm meta achieves. There were a lot of raids in T11, so it's taken a bit to make sure that we get all the necessary heroic and non-heroic achievements. Currently we're only missing Four Play from Glory of the Cataclysm Raider. We did kill Al'Akir with the feedback buff on him, but the achievement is currently bugged. I had been worried about getting the Omnotron achieve, but it is so easy to stomp those raids when you've got a full raid of 90s with current raid gear. On normal the trons died before the second boss activated.

This past Monday we hit up the first few bosses of Heroic Firelands. Possibly it would have been easier if we'd hadn't been doing 25man with only 15 people. But we still did get the first three bosses down. (Shannox, Beth'tilac, and Rhyolith) Alysrazor, however, really does need closer to a full raid, what with all the different things to kill.

*Alts*
Khyrie and Tylara are 88. They have gotten access to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and are spending some quality time leveling up their professions. We parked them for a bit until Morn and Kuan reached revered with the Shado-Pan and bought the Grand Commendation of less rep slogging. Eeyan and Telt are chillling in Valley of Four Winds and will probably be the next ones to get some love. Viljo and Ikoli are just barely into Jade Forest, but will shortly make the Hozen their friends.

What with all the raiding, and dailies, and pvp, and valor to get it's really hard to make time for the alts. It is important to make time though. I suspect that if I don't start doing fewer dailies my last wisp of sanity is going to blow away.

*Pets*
I've gotten a battle pet team up to level 20. Fang, Clever Girl, and Ember are now trouncing their way through Outland. Kairon, my long neglected hunter, is chaperoning them around. If the pets get too much bigger I'm going to have to level him to keep up with them.

I have some vague ideas that I want to smash through the old Vanilla raids. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly inspect what pets drop where in the vanilla raids, but MC is pretty easy to smash, so I figure it'll be speedy with Kuan and Morn.

I am eagerly awaiting for Pet Theory to be updated. I have to admit that some of my pet battling enthusiasm has slipped away without this addon to make the UI reasonable for finding out what pets I am missing in what zones and what quality pet I already have. Possibly I'll be forced to update it myself if it doesn't get fixed soon.

Stone Dogs and Feng and Sha

Last night was a pretty good raiding night. Darkfall killed the Stone dogs and Feng the Accursed in Mogu'Shan Vaults. We also had the good luck to have Sha of Anger alive in Kun-Lai Summit without a raid already forming to kill him.

Or raid on Tuesday had been mostly a bust. We'd killed the Stone Dogs for the first time last week. But that was a comp without the annoying Jasper Guardian. This week we had Cobalt, Amethyst, and Jasper, so there was a lot of crap on the floor to dodge while still staying near your chain buddy. Anyway Tuesday we'd made some progress on killing them while dancing around with the chains, but unfortunately we ran out of time before we actually killed them.

Last night we got back in there and on our second pull we squeaked out a win. A few late deaths meant that a second after the dogs enraged the entire raid but the monk healer was taking dirt naps. Between dots and the time it took for the dogs to run over to him, the monk had just enough of a chance to Touch of Death them. It was ridiculously epic.

We collected loot and headed onwards to Feng. We'd worked the kinks out of the first two phases last week, but were having trouble with the transition from second to third phase. Specifically we were headed into phase three with many stacks of draw flame on Feng and it just wasn't possible to live through that plus Arcane Velocity, or Resonance for that matter. We'd come up with a strategy tweak before end of raid last week, that I'd change the times I put down Nullification Barrier so that we'd not get stacks of evilness from the last draw flame before the phase change. However we'd not had a chance to really put that into effect before we had to end for the evening.

Last night we still had our excellent setup for the first two phases. We blasted through them, and found that the new strategy for dealing with draw flame worked white well. And then we had a Resonance right after a Velocity, and the raid dropped dead. So we had a couple of tries where we worked out making sure that the resonance didn't kill us while keeping close enough together for Velocity. A boss location change plus everyone turning on their range tracker and a little bit of everyone being aware and then the boss was dead!

And extra plus good was that Kuanchichi won the roll on a fabulous helmet from the Stone dogs and Mornara got an extra loot roll win of some lovely tanking wrists from Feng.

After I made everyone line up for the boss death screenshot of Feng we exited Mogu'Shan Vaults and flew around Kun-Lai Summit for a bit. Fortunately the Sha of Anger was up, and no one else was forming a raid to kill him. I promoted everyone to raid assist and through advertising in Org, Shrine of Two Moons, Valley of 4 Winds, and in Kun-Lai itself we managed to fill the raid. We even pulled in several guildies who hadn't been in the raid. With 12 or so Darkfall people in on the kill we got the Guild achieve for killing him!

Sadly he dropped nothing but gold for me, but I'm ok with a lovely guild achieve!