Archive for the “Serpentshrine Cavern” Category

Well I did go to Naxx on a “fun run” with the guild Friday night. 19 of us took out the Instructor, then we headed over to the Abomination wing to smack around Patchwerk. Unfortuantely I was so tired I was falling asleep at the computer, and the 5 minute break that got called really hit me hard. I can count on one hand the nuber of times that I’ve actually dozed off while gaming, and last night was one of them. So I left before Patchwerk, and missed the Tier 3 shoulder drop. Oh boo. Heheh.

Night’s Leo night, and our first attempt on him got him down to the 20s. Each try from there’s been better and better, with us finally getting him just now to 3%. Looks like we’re taking one more shot at him and I think we’re done after this. Whee. /dies.

Edit: Last attempt of the night, once again 3%. At least we’re consistent.

Last night we got Tidewalker down. I’m not sure what happened on Tuesday night, but we had murlocs going to the MT when they should have been heading straight for Uber Pally. He and I talked about it yesterday, and neither of us could see any rhyme or reason why they would have done that. Then again, there were a couple of other odd things Tuesday night that no one could figure out what was going on. Ah well, at least he went down last night.

So we moved on to Leo the Blind, who is my personal “ah crap” fight now. You know, the one fight that no matter how prepared you are, no matter how much research you’ve done, etc., it always seems to take forever to wrap your mind around it. That one. We got through the trash, more or less intact, then took our one shot at Leo for the night, since we were running a touch close to when raid would be called for the night. The raid got him down to 56% or so before wiping, while I lay flat on the floor after managing to dodge the first whirlwind and then get smacked in the face with the Chaos Blast. Noob’d it up? Oh yeahhh. That I did. At least I got to watch the rest of the fight and actually have it register in my head, so now I’m more comfortable with it. And at least I wasn’t the only one that had a noob moment in the fight and ate dirt. Ahh end of raid, when people lose focus and minds are heading towards bed! Whee!

Tonight is ZA, and me not getting the shoulders off the Bear boss yet again. Stingy bastage…

Uber Pally is a pally tank in my guild and a dang good one. We have a few people we consider full time tanks, three in all, and he’s one of them. The other two are Warriors (one being The Boyfriend). After an evening of heads into desks from people dying in SSC from Underbog Colossus attacks, Uber Pally wrote a “How To: Underbog Colossus” article and put it up in the guild strat area. Last night was the first night back in SSC since he posted it. Result? Massive, massive change. Hardly any deaths.

So I now present to you, Uber Pally’s How To: Underbog Colossus!
Since the start of our adventures into SSC Underbog Colossuses have always been a difficult mob for us to beat without someone (or a lot of people) dieing during the fight. Because of that, I am writing this – it is a not terribly brief description of the Colossus, its abilities, and what you should be doing during the fight. If you find this too much to read – skip down to the section with the picture. It along with the paragraphs below it will tell you what to do.

There are many different types of Colossus that you can get. Each one will have one of three main abilities that it does while attacking, and each one will have one of three different on death abilities. Below is a list of the core abilities an Underbog Colossus can do:

1) Frenzy
This is the easy one to deal with. The Colossus will frenzy and attack the main tank harder. Hunters can Tranq Shot the Colossus and all will be well. No one in the raid will have to worry about being attacked providing they do not pull aggro.

2) Spore Quake and Rampant Infection
When the Underbog uses Spore Quake he will do an area of effect attack that hits everyone within a 30 yard radius for 2000 damage every tick for 12 seconds. This means that when he begins his Spore Quake all melee DPS should run to the caster group immediately. The caster group should be out of range of this already as they should be 40 yards away from the Colossus.
Note: You should have the enemy cast bar shown on your screen. This is an option in your advanced options menu. If you do not have it turned on – turn it on. If you do not know how to turn it on. Ask.

Rampant Infection is simply a debuff that needs to be healed through and cleansed.

3) Acid Geyser
Acid geyser is our raid killer. When the Colossus does acid geyser he will select a player within 35 yards of him and do a frontal cone attack on that player. The Acid Geyser will hit the player that is targeted, everyone in front of that player and everyone behind that player. The damage from the acid geyser can not be outranged. This means that if the colossus selects someone that is standing in front of the caster group to shoot acid geyser at, the caster group will get hit, they will take a lot of damage, and most will die.
Note: You should have target of target shown on your screen. This is again an option in your advanced options menu. Make sure it is turned on so that you can see who the Acid Geyser is targeting.

These are the only three abilities the colossus has while he is alive. Other than that he will only attack the main tank providing no one pulls aggro from him. However, the Underbog Colossus also has 3 on death abilities, these are as follows:

1) Toxic Pool
Once the colossus has died a toxic pool may form underneath him. It will do 2000 damage per tick until you get out of it. Once he is dead make sure to get out of the toxic pool immediately if you see it.

2) Adds
The colossus may also spawn adds on death. Let the tanks get at least a little bit of aggro before nuking them down.

3) Refreshing mist
The last option that could happen once the Underbog Colossus dies is that he spawns a refreshing mist. This mist is blue and has large mushrooms in it. If this mist spawns everything is fine, you will not die, just stand around and wait for the next pull. Do not confuse the blue mist with the green mist. The green is not your friend in these fights.

This is a lot to read, remember and react to. So I have made a drawing of the Underbog Colossus fight. Every single colossus that we do will get set up in exactly this manner. Along with this drawing is a bit more of an explanation of what to do during the fight.

In these fights the tank will be in front of the colossus, the Melee DPS must stand behind the colossus and the ranged DPS and healers stand to the Colossuses side. Note the large blue triangle in this fight. This is the area where no one should stand. Ever. This means no pets may stand there, no Melee, no shadow priests, no one. All ranged DPS and healers must stand 40 yards away from the colossus. If you need to be closer than that to do anything you need to do you must stand with the Melee DPS.

If the Underbog Colossus does a spore quake, as stated above, all melee should run out of the area of effect towards the casters (yes, run through the blue triangle ).

If the colossus does an acid geyser he will only target a person from the Melee DPS group – this is because all of the ranged folk are 40 yards away from the colossus. If he targets you – stand still. We will call it out and everyone else will rotate away from you. Once the acid geyser is done he will retarget the tank and all melee DPS must move back into position behind him.

Note: If by chance you are standing in the blue triangle (meaning you are not at least 40 yards away from the colossus) and you get targeted with acid geyser, run! Run to the side and towards the Melee DPS. Make sure to face him away from the rest of the casters as fast as possible or else the will take a lot of damage and most likely die.

That is it! That’s all you need to know. So in summary, follow the picture. Stand exactly where it tells you (note ranged folk must stand at least 40 yards away from the colossus or else they have to stand with the melee DPS) and all will be well.

First off, let me just say migraines are no fun, especially when you found out you get an extra day off and have it ruined by getting the aforementioned migraine. Blerg.

Now for the actual point to tonight’s post (other than to say yes, I am alive): Hunters and The Lurker Below. I’ve seen a couple of searches for “hunter”, “lurker”, and “pet”. There’s a ton of information out there on the fight, a good deal of it linked through WoWWiki. The fight diagram that I used all the time is here, at worldofraids.com. It clearly shows where the adds spawn and where the Main Tank should be standing for an optimal fight. Personally, I ignore the “Raid Position”, as does most of our raid. Now the rest of this is how my guild does the fight. Your mileage may vary.

We’re set up into groups so that groups 3-5 each have one of the outer islands as their responsibility. As you’re looking at the diagram, Group 3 gets the top left island, Group 4 gets the lower left, and Group 5 gets the right island (the one with the hole in it). Each group has a tank, a healer, a dps, and 2 crowd controls. Usually we’re lucky enough to have at least 2 hunters and the rest of the CC being mages. The usual set up with us however tends to be 3 hunters and 3 mages. Anyone who’s CC will go ahead and head out to their island and stay there for the duration of the fight. The tanks and healers spread out on the inner island, staying near where the add will spawn on the inner island. The other two groups are spread out on the inner island with the rest of the raid, making sure to not be near the MT.

“But the pets! Where do the pets go?!” Easy. Set the pet to “Stay” on the inner island, usually directly in front of the outer island you’re on. Standing on the outer islands, you’re still in range to get a Mend Pet off when it’s needed. Since the pets don’t take damage from the Spout that Lurker fires off, you don’t need to worry about healing through it. Just worry about the Whirl he uses. The reason you leave your pet on the inner island is that if it’s out on the outer island with you, it refuses to cross the water and attack the Lurker. Silly fussy critters.

Once someone fishes up the Lurker, the MT picks it up, and then everyone does the DPS thing. For hunters, you go pewpew for two minutes, diving into the water to avoid the Spout when it comes, then popping back up onto your island for more pewpew. If you have a boss mod, like Deadly Boss Mods or BigWigs, you’ll see the timers for when the Spout comes, as well as when Lurker’s close to submerging.

About 10 seconds before the submerge, I go ahead and lay my freezing trap down in preperation for the Ambushers. Lurker submerges, Guardians come up and the tanks pick them up, at which point I put my pet on the one that my group’s tank is on. My partner on the island, usually a mage, sheeps the Ambusher that’s not trapped, and we join in the dps-fest on the Guardian. By the time the Guardian’s dead, my trap’s about to wear off, so I hit my mob with a Scatter Shot. By then, the tank’s up there with the rest of the group, the Ambusher dies, then we kill the sheeped one. The group, except for the other CC and I, has just enough time now to run back to the inner island, slap a bandage on, and take a breath before the Lurker comes back up. The Main Tank picks Lurker back up, Hunter’s Mark and all other dots go back on, and everyone dives as the Spout hits again.

Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s it! Enjoy your purples!

First off, let me apologize if anything breaks, looks odd, or otherwise blows up here. I’m doing some experimenting, and while the majority of my changes are taking place in a safe location, some changes I test here. Usually it turns into a “GAH! BAD! GO AWAY BAD THING!” moment, and quickly vanishes, but just in case, you’ve been warned.

Last night, we proved that we have the Tidewalker fight down. As long as The Boyfriend stays alive, the whole thing is pretty much a cakewalk for us. I have to give major kudos to the healers, as they were on top of things last night. A couple of healers got sent to the Watery Graves right when it could have gotten bad, but quick communication and even faster reflexes kept the tanks alive with barely a bobble. Go team!

The Leo fight still is being learned. Last night was my first night there after our very first single attempt at him. Last week while I was out of town, they got a good couple of hours worth of work in on him. We get to work on him this weekend more for I think a good 3 hour stretch, which will either let us get into the groove of the fight and really learn it, or actually see him downed.

I really regret missing out on those learning nights, because I always feel like I missed out on the process, that I’m somehow behind in “getting” the fight, no matter how much I read up on it or watch other people’s movies. It just takes me back to when I first started raiding with these guys, and they’d been doing the instances for weeks. Then me and my total noob-to-raiding self wandered in with an absolute paranoid fear that I will Screw Things Up and kept muttering to myself “oh pleasepleasepleasedon’tkickmeIswearI’mtryingtolearn.” My Class Leader still laughs at me over those memories, and thank heavens she didn’t think that me asking 500 questions over the night was a bad thing (okay it felt like 500, but was probably more like 10-15). I told her later that I’d tried to keep them as intelligent as I could. Apparently, they were reasonable questions, cos they kept inviting me back.

But it kinda makes me wonder: how many people out there have this problem? That tiny niggling fear in the back of your head that says “Omg wth am I doing here? Please don’t let me get everyone killed.” Or is it just me and my paranoia? (Which is highly possible.)

I have a love/hate relationship with my service provider. When it works, it works very, very well. When it doesn’t work, all hell breaks loose.

The past few days, I’ve noticed an odd slowdown to my wired computer. The laptop running wirelessly has been fine, but the wired computer, my main computer, has been running oddly. It’s been having delays connecting to websites, etc. Once it’s connected, it’s fine. I figured the Mac needed to be cleaned up, so I started backing stuff up, repairing permissions, etc. No big deal. Then last night happened.

It started off with the same weird slowdown. I didn’t bother messing with any of it, and after getting myself prepped for raid later in the evening, I headed offline for a little supper. When it came time to log in, I was faced with even more slowdowns beyond what I’d had before and a 500+ queue that bounced between 10 minutes and 35 minutes. Once I was finally in, I saw the call go out for raid invites, so I sent my tell to the raid leader. Nothing. Sent it again. Nothing. Then it hit me: no one on the screen is moving. Cue the reboot router/modem/computer dance. Too bad that it didn’t work, because 10 minutes later, I had ripped my router out of the loop and plugged straight in to the modem, rebooted everything again, and was frantically IMing the Hunter Class Lead to let her know I was on the way in.

Once I was finally in, I ran to SSC, caught up with everyone, had a ton of manna biscuits tossed at me along with buffs and joined in the killing spree. Hydross and Lurker both got one-shot kills, and I managed to pick up a Nether Vortex along the way. About halfway through the trash to Tidewalker, everyone froze on my screen. Yep, internet fall down and go boom. Another 10 minutes later, still no internet, and I now have a headache from swearing. Why yes, I did call it a night at that point. At least all the raid was doing then was Tidewalker trash runs without actually killing him.

This morning, I plugged everything back in. Yep! Everything’s working fine like nothing happened! Arrrrrrrrgh…

I usually wait to call a boss as “down for good” til we get it down twice in a relatively short time, such as two weeks in a row. Last night, we went in to smack Tidewalker around for our raid time. We cleared trash after having one or two issues, but figured out a couple of strategies for aggro and not getting the raid killed. Every raid group is different, and my guild has it’s own raiding quirks (such as one-shotting a boss, cheering, then going to the next boss and getting owned by the first group of trash). So adjustments are always needed til we get that perfect sync in damage/heals/tankage.

The first couple of rounds on Tidewalker were rough, with everyone working on getting settled down. With a 13% and 8% wipe, we knew we’d get him down. It was just a matter of timing. Where we were having issues was in the transition from the ramp to the tunnel when Tidewalker reaches 25% and the globs start spawning. A few moments discussion, a checking of plans, and we started the last attempt. The transition went well, the pally tank did wonders with adds, and we got Tidewalker down for the second week in a row. Go team!

The most amusing point of the whole night was right after the first wipe on Tidewalker when one of the guys said “Hey wait a sec. All 3 hunters feigned death and lived! Not fair!” Then the rest of the guild chimed in, with the guild leader (and lead hunter’s husband) saying “Who wants to see the hunters die next time?” We hunters were all laughing and shaking our heads as people start saying “Me! Me!” Then The Boyfriend (also a raid leader and Main Tank), wise man that he is, says “In the interest of self-preservation, I’m going to have to vote no.” He got a “good boy” from me, and comments of whips being cracked from the GL.

The hunters jokingly discussed not actually fighting the next fight and doing /sit or /sleep instead, but we wanted to get the kill. Although I do wish one of us had Engineering to have jumper cables to help get people up. I’m not giving up my Leatherworking tho. Too much time and money invested, and I picked up Pattern: Belt of the Black Eagle last night, something that one of the hunters had just been asking about on the boards if any of us had.

Overall a good night. I think we all have a good grasp of the fight now, and how we can best do it. At this point, it’s just going to be working on him to get it fine-tuned and conquer Leo. Man, I love new content!

We’ve been downing Lurker and Hydross in SSC for a while. But it’s seemed like the past couple of weeks, we’ve been having issues with them both, invariably the nights I’ve had to miss because of work or whatever. Spending over an hour flinging myself at a boss I KNOW we’ve spanked every other week for what seems like ages is just highly annoying to me.

So last night, I went into SSC expecting that we’d have issues yet again. Sure enough, I had a couple of moments that I found out exactly how red my face could turn while we were killing trash. Nothing BIG, and one moment where a bunch of us all messed up at once so we wiped, but still enough to get me angry and frustrated at myself. Once everyone regrouped, rebuffed, and bounced to Hydross tho, I’d settled down into my hunter groove and was merrily committing carnage with everyone else. Then it came time for the boss fight…

We pwned him.

One of the smoother fights we’d ever had on him, and by far the best one in weeks. The transitions went smoothly, no one pulled aggro from the tanks, and the adds were killed quickly. The guild cheered, the loot was divided and we raced off to start on Lurker trash. That went pretty well, including the one accidental pull by The Boyfriend who was trying to mark the groups. He got just a litttttle too close and boom, aggro. We picked it up and recovered from it decently, and before we knew it, we were ready to smack around Lurker.

Once again, we pwned him.

I’ve found myself stuck on the island that everyone hates, the one with the hole in the center. I’ve been there for weeks, working with our uber pally tank and whoever else is in the group with us, and honestly, it’s never bothered me being on that island. He and I have got a good rhythm going on, so he never worries about me, and I never worry about him. We killed our adds in record time and were prepped and ready for the Lurker each time he popped up.

So go team, we win at the beginning of SSC. Great one-shots of both the bosses. Tonight is Tidewalker, and with any luck, starting the learning of Leo the Blind. The one attempt we made at him after our Tidewalker kill last week was amusing as hell, and we’re eager to get going on him.

Wohoo! So so so thrilled with the guild! Took 3 tries, and one really really amazingly stupid wipe, but the last try was as smooth as could be. Now onto Leo the Blind!

Tuesday night, my guild went into SSC for a week’s worth of concentrating on content in there. Since we added SSC to the raid lineup, we’d been doing 2 nights of SSC and one night of Gruul’s. But Tidewalker was becoming a pain in everyone’s butt, so the officers decided we’d concentrate on SSC alone this week, and put Gruul’s to an “every other week” run.

We had a bit of a rough start on Hydross, but managed to down Lurker in the cleanest one-shot kill we’ve had in a long time before the end of the night’s raid time. Last night, everyone piled online before raid time, since Doomhammer seems to have redeveloped queues (gag), lined up, and ran into SSC to start in on Tidewalker’s trash. We had a moment right at the beginning with the first group of Naga and wiping on it (Raid Leaders: “…wtf? Okay, who’s breaking the sheep?! And fire is bad! Don’t stand in it! There’s no candy in the fire!”), but things settled down after that.

There was a giggle-worthy moment for me when the last group of nagas, ones with a lovely knockback, was pulled. Normally I’m pretty situationally aware. That time? One step to the left, and I’m watching myself drop into the water, cos I fell through the crack between a platform and the ramp leading to it. At least I knew where the ramp up from the water was. I heard one of the Raid Leaders saying “I can’t get LoS on Siana.” They started laughing when I replied “That’s cos Sia’s a goober and stepped off the ramp.” Note to self: when Tidewalker dies, go back into SSC and explore the ramps leading to him to ensure no more missteps.

The good news is we did find out that an early aggro of Tidewalker via someone sacrificing themselves will kill off a wandering pack of Murlocs, the old formation of the raid we’d had was working nicely, and that we’ll be smacking him down Friday night. Last weekend, they’d gotten him down to 51% before calling the raid. Last night? 25%. The Raid Leaders were very pleased and everyone was celebrating pretty hard at how well we’d done. I sense Friday night, everyone will be logging on in a very bloodthirsty mood. ::grin::

So hopefully, I’ll be posting a nice kill shot of TAG standing in front of Tidewalker very soon. Here’s hoping! Tonight? ZA!