Anyhow. Yeah. Long time no post! Don’t blame Star Wars. Sure, we’re playing a little, our characters are a whole level… I don’t know. 26 I think. I like the game but it’s not keeping me from WoW. The kitchen remodel is a worse distraction, we’ve lost hours putting new cabinets up. They look awesome, and once I have the counters in… two weeks from now… the place will look awesome.

Nope, the problem is our other shared hobby/passion. (Not THAT one, perverts out there). Writing. Remember we did NaNoWriMo? Well, despite Christmas and cabinets and Star Wars and everything I kept at it and last week finished the first draft of my somewhat epic fantasy novel. And then went “ugh, this thing needs so much work”. Rev is my content editor/talent manager/first reader/co-writer on scenes that I am sucking at, as well as working on his own writing project. Our free time keeps getting taken up by one of two things:

1. Talk about something we need to change, add, edit, delete, whatever in my story, or his story, or some other story we’ll write later

2. Listen to Writing Excuses and lose all track of time.

Seriously if you want to write fiction – or draw webcomics, or similar creative pastime – go lose a few weeks of your life with these podcasts. 15 minutes long but when you mainline them you tend to realize it’s 11 o’clock at night and you have been steeping in creativity for hours.

We’re serious about this thing. We’re going to a writing workshop at a convention later this year. My goal is to have my book in a state where I can look for an agent this fall, and be working on the followup novel (I’ve got three followup novels planned….). And it takes time and energy I’m not spending in WoW or blogging.

But… where was I? We’re not officially closing up blog. Had a great time raiding this weekend. Some fun times with the guild. Heck, Reversion even drew on the whiteboard last night – a map for me, not a comic, sorry – so who knows maybe we’ll do more Corporate Raiders soon. It’s our two year blogiversary next month and I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel yet.

You guys may or may not find it amusing, but it just occurred to me that my main male character is a bear warrior. Metaphorically, anyway, he doesn’t turn into a bear or anything but it’s what the people in my world refer to his sort of battle magic… I swear being married to a bear tank didn’t have anything to do with it…

Seeya in WoW or out of it.

I’m not in a qq mood though. Haven’t been playing WoW super hardcore this week. We had to finish off NaNo last week and my novel isn’t complete yet. (Since it’s a fantasy epic, the 110,000 words I wrote in November are basically half the story. Yes, my blogging has been low this month because all my words are going elsewhere. Trust me, I made the right choice)

Still, what I’ve done so far has been awesome. The new five mans are super cool. My druid went through once to get my boots and a few VPs. I got my boots Thursday and when I did, made a comment about how Alysrazor had never ever dropped the leather int boots so of course she would now. Loved the five mans except the bit in Well of Eternity at the end when I was trying to turn in a quest to Illidan and he would not stop running around. Seriously, dude, get a Ritalin prescription or something. Ran the first two on Invariant and got her like 4 upgrades. She’ll be LFR ready in a couple days at this rate. The Murozond fight is amazingly cool.

Transmogged Analogue to a nice understated set. I didn’t screenshot it, but I know Repgrind did so the two of you who might care will see it later. I don’t actually like any druid tier except the Conqueror’s Nightsong Hood, which is the most awesome headpiece ever, so I’m sporting that. And probably always will. What doesn’t got with a glowing crescent moon headband?

Darkmoon Fair is cool! I’ll stick to doing that on my mage only. She collects pets, she’s my fisherman (and not maxed level so that fishing daily there is great!). The little minigames were awesome, except the shooting one. It’s hard enough to do as a gnome because you’re the same height as the counter and that’s before a Tauren on a Kodo parks on your head. Grr. The other games were great. Healers will own the Whack-a-gnoll!

And raid: Well. For about an hour Friday night things were looking really really bad, because an hour before raid time Rev and I had no internet. We troubleshot and determined the problem was on our internet provider’s end, and called them up, only to discover that they use their own phone service and so  were completely down.  Hmm. Well, we can always use guild chat to let the raid know we’re having trouble and to find another tank and heals, but since our disc priest lives in the same town as us and has the same isp, they’d probably be down two healers… which is not good.

Around raid time the internet started staggering to its feet, and after several dcs and much muttering, we were ready to go. This was going to be our one solid night this weekend; Saturday we were missing Kerick, Log, Grom, and Slice; I didn’t have a clue who I was going to get to tank for us. But that was tomorrow and this was now. I’d asked everyone to watch the first four fights and know what to do, so we went in and got started.

We one shot Morchok the Not Really A Raid Boss. I got to soak crystals, whee! Nice note to start the night. Went to the ping pong boss. Took a few tries – like, what, four? It really wasn’t bad. Then off to the oozes. We had the mechanics there right away, just had to learn how to handle various combos, and he went down too after a few tries.

Off to Hagara for some ice and lightning. I rather outdid myself with sucking on that fight. Our penultimate pull, I died twice. The final kill, I was dead… that time was just bad luck with getting bounced funny though. We did really awesome with the chain lightning bit. I thought that might take time to learn but we mastered it right away.

Right. So. Now it’s 9 pm, we have two hours left, and we’re standing around going “I dunno what do you wanna do?”

We ended up deciding on Firelands. We want to make Falahla’s staff still, and I don’t think we can ask people to commit to another night for Firelands clear, so we’ll just have to devote a couple hours every week to doing 6/7 in Firelands. It may slow our progression a bit but I am determined to make that staff! She’s on the final collect stage now.

We got half the firelands down, called raid, and went to bed. Came back Saturday, collected some guildies to fill our slots and went back to FL to finish the clear. We had one wipe on Alysrazor. And then she died and dropped my #$%&^#%$% boots. That are not as nice as the End Times quest boots. I hate you, loot gods.

We even made a few Rags attempts before calling Saturday early. Rev and I got to go watch a movie on a raid night! It felt like cheating or something.

Anyhow. TL:DR is that I love 4.3 so far, am slightly worried that the first four Dragon Soul bosses are undertuned, and my HPS have gone through the floor, but Kerick and Toxic can make up for me so I just need to get used to the new normal of me not owning meters.

Anyway. Apparently Dragon Soul has some easy bosses. Repgrind says so and they’re 4/8 now – sheesh! I’m studying up now. Even sent messages to my raiders who haven’t done them telling them to watch the first 4 fights. We are looking really bad for Saturday night so we need to hit it hard Friday.

Guys, who told you you were allowed to be absent one night the first week of a new patch? Those bosses don’t kill themselves! Noses to the grindstones, people!

Just kidding. It’s nice to be looking forward to WoW playtime again!

Part 2 here – the gauntlet

So here we are! Through the gauntlet, and ready to take on a huge dragon.

Couple things before starting. First, running up the ramp to where the void boss usually lives will start the event. Don’t go up until you’re ready.

Second, if you die and run back, there’s a nice glowy portal that brings you here.

Don’t try to run in manually, you can’t get across the chasm. After some period of time, the portal goes away and the gauntlet respawns. My guess is it’s something like an hour after you first clear the gauntlet – so yes, you might have to clear it again. It took me several days to beat the boss so I think I ran the gauntlet four times.

Now, take a minute to look at the fighting area. You’ve got the ramp and platform, and you can also run around in the area in front of the ramp a bit. Don’t get too far away or he’ll despawn and that sucks.

When you’re ready, go up the ramp. Tarecgosa goes with you, and then Thyrinar appears. He stuns Tarecgosa and now you get to fight him. he starts at 50% health, but that 50% is going to take a while.

Be in boomkin form when you go up the ramp. As soon as he goes active, pop Barkskin, dot him up, and blast away with cast spells. Be ready. When he flies over to the other side of the platform, get to the ramp. When he breathes fire, run down the ramp and don’t let the fire hit you. Hot yourself up at this time, and lay Wild Mushrooms near the bottom/middle of the ramp.

Pro tip: run down one side of the ramp. That way the fire only hits one side and you can go up. Also don’t cut to the other side as you leave the bottom of the ramp. The fire will follow you and block the bottom. Cut toward the same side the fire is on until the beam is off the ramp and then run in a circle around it to get to the other side.

After the fire is done, he starts shadow bolting you again, but more importantly an add spawns at the bottom of the ramp. These adds suck. But there’s a way to handle them. They spawn at the bottom of the ramp, run up the ramp, look around, and come hunting you. If you’re at the bottom, you can dot them up, blow your wild mushrooms, and they will either be dead or nearly there when they come back.

When you can’t kill them this way, they have a couple nasty abilities. A Silence, a Fire Nova, and a nasty melee hit that can daze you. Don’t forget about Entangling Roots or Nature’s Grasp as a way to get them off your back.

The adds spawn… fast. Somewhere I read every 30 seconds but I think it’s more for druids because we don’t have to worry about the self-heal thing that all the other classes have to deal with, thanks to us not having an offensive dispell.

Anyway. Add is dead. Run up the ramp – check your health! – and dot up the boss. Barkskin might be back up. Use it on cooldown. Watch for Starsurge procs, and use them when you can. Don’t hard cast Starsurge or use Starfire, they’re just too slow. You’re more likely going to be healing yourself.

The first two add spawns sync nicely with fire, but the third one seems to spawn a good ten seconds before the fire. Beware of that. After that I didn’t notice a pattern.

You might get your treants to help you with adds, or they might just sort of wander around shaking their fists at the boss.

The key to this fight is movement, and keeping your dots and hots going. And your mana up. Innervate early and often. Don’t let the fire hit you. Get the adds dead. Rinse, repeat.

My successful fight took 15 minutes and some of my attempts took nearly as long. This is a long, long fight. Be prepared. You will probably wipe a few times learning to handle it.

I actually had Reversion helping me toward the end by sitting over my shoulder and watching my procs and cooldowns – “Barkskin’s back, use it!” “Starsurge, starsurge!” “Add spawning, get the mushrooms down!” It helped me. If you have a friend or partner who plays WoW and can sit there with you, and you won’t kill him for this sort of thing, it can be really valuable to have another set of eyes.

(Rev editorial: It is a nasty little fight. Doing it in a spec you are not already pro with is hard. You have a lot of procs and abilities to use and the difference between Barkskin at a critical time or 15 seconds later because you did not notice it was off cooldown… well that is life or death on this fight. If you find you aren’t using some things you might just macro, grasphing roots, barkskin, starfall, and inervate to something you spam so you can’t possibly miss using them. Also be sure to space those mushrooms out as you run up or down the ramp. If you have spare mouse buttoms you might map the shrooms to a click. It makes them a lot easier to use while moving. Use those ramp runs to be dropping shrooms or healing, or both. If you are not used to shrooming remember this: it takes time to drop them and then blow them. Don’t aim them where the add is. Aim them where he is going to be in a little while. If you just space out all three around the center of the ramp it is almost always the right place.)

Doing this chain improved my boomkin skills a huge amount. I’m still a Resto druid, but now I can do some decent DPS, too.

If you’ve got any questions about any part of this chain, please feel free to ask me!

OH – don’t forget to click the clickable thing near Tarecgosa after Thyrinar is defeated, or you won’t get the quest completion, which would kind of suck.

Good luck, and have fun!

Ok. So you’ve got your gear reforged, gemmed, enchanted; your buff food and flask; your keys bound to useful stuff; and your mage slave waiting around at the Nexus entrance to Arcane Brilliance you. Now what?

Enter the Nexus and you’ll see a big blue dragon there – our buddy Tarecgosa who we met outside. When you talk to her, she’ll start the gauntlet. Now, the gauntlet isn’t that bad, but I found it really confusing the first few times I ran it, so I’m going to do a whole walkthrough here.

Like everyone who runs the Nexus, she heads down the hallway to the left. Partway down she casts invisibility on you so the big sentry doesn’t see you. Keep with her and when you get to the room at the end of the hall, start attacking the big arcane sentry.

You’re going to dot him up with Moonfire and Insect Swarm, then look at the two doors you didn’t come in. A little magic-eater-dog thing is going to come in both doors. Guess what? Hibernate works on them! Pop Nature’s Grasp to root them when they touch you, and Hibernate one. Dot the other, then kill it with Wrath. Note, these guys have a really really nasty silence. Definitely keep one asleep while you kill the other.

Once dog 1 is dead, kill the other dog, then kill the sentry. All this time the sentry is doing an ability you will want to avoid. When there’s a big glowing ice patch under your feet, move. Get off it. Don’t stand there. It hurts.

If you get low, pop out of boomkin and drop a few heals on yourself.

When the sentry dies, Tarecgosa gives you a chance to rest – heal yourself up now – and then leads you down a corridor of mists. Stick with her and don’t stand in the mist.

You’re going to come down to the next corridor. In the normal Nexus, this is where the frozen people are. This time you’ve got another Sentry plus dog pair to handle. Just do it the same way as before. Hibernate one dog, kill the other, keep the Sentry dotted, heal yourself, kill the other dog, kill the sentry.

Tarecgosa will play with the Sentry while you kill the dogs.

Now that the sentry is dead, start heading down the corridor. Halfway down, this happens:

Yeah. Two big nasties. She freezes you and lies to them. They disappear and she runs ahead.

Now the first couple times this happened, I got really confused. See, there’s a slow effect on you after you come out of the ice, but you can more or less catch her at the end of the hallway. She runs up the next ramp and if you follow her, you’ll probably die, because things are coming up behind you to nom your face. Let her go on ahead, while you go to the end of this corridor and turn around to deal with the new threat: not two but three puppies. They spawn right where you were frozen and run for you.

See this image? This is what happens if you don’t move from where you were frozen. They spawn right there and you have no time to get set.

Hibernate one, pop your Nature’s Grasp, let one get rooted, and then move away and kill the third. They’ll still silence you but you can handle it this way.

I forgot to screenshot this next bit. As you go up the ramp there are frozen spirits in ice cubes, and mists. There’s basically 5 spirits to a “chamber”. Enter the chamber. AOE. When the mists disappear, go to the next chamber. AOE. The bits to worry about here are, these guys hit really hard. Don’t worry about mana, nuke ‘em. Starfall kills them dead but Hurricane works well too. Also, they respawn when the mist forms, so don’t stay behind in a chamber – keep moving forward.

When you get past these, you’ll be up where Whatsername usually is, the splitting mage chick. Telestra. You know her. Anyway, instead, our buddy Tarecgosa is there, with a pair of arcane sentinel guys. Kill the first sentinel, avoiding the ice, and then the second.

Now Tara leads you around the corner and you find an ice wall. She’ll deal with it, and you get to deal with a great big named fel puppy demon this! Piece of cake. Dot him up, avoid his breath of fire attack, boom, he dies. I am serious about avoiding the fire breath thing though, it hurts if you don’t. When he’s casting, just get behind him, he doesn’t move once he starts casting.

Now – the funnest part!

Tarecgosa flies off and leaves you alone to make your way across the chasm. But you can’t use flight form inside! So just hop on that little platform. It’s a vehicle, but don’t worry, you don’t have to use vehicle abilities. It just takes you to the next guy to fight. There’ll be a big dragon on a big platform with four floating orbs. Nuke him, and click the orbs as your platform goes around. They give you a shield against his big damage attack although it doesn’t completely prevent damage. When you kill him, you have a new empty platform. Don’t jump yet – heal your wounds first. Then jump.

Two little adds will spawn, rising up on platforms. Hibernate one! Hibernate is awesome and this is the first time, like, ever, that it’s been so very very useful. Kill the other, then kill the hibernated one.

Then jump to one of the little platforms. Rinse and repeat your way across the chasm.

When the big scary dragon dude shows up, don’t panic, just jump to the next platform, kill the last dragon that you have to face, and jump to the ground. When you do, Tarecgosa will make her way to you and kill all the dragons on the ground. You don’t have to fight them!  Just try to avoid attention til she gets there.

That’s it, that’s the whole gauntlet. Now it’s time to face the boss… or it will be in Part 3!

Now what?

First, don’t just fly off to Coldarra right away. You’ve got serious work to do. Now, if you regularly Boomkin, this may be no big deal. If you’re like me and rarely touch the stuff, it will take you a few tries. You’ll save time and gold in the long run by taking some steps up front

Gear – with luck you’ve been picking up some dps gear in your raids after the mages and locks pass. A pair of solid trinkets will make a big difference, and if you’ve got options in your other slots, that’s good. If you have picked up your Boomkin 2 set, or can get it, I thought it made a nice little dps increase when I used it. Your resto set bonus are going to be useless so if you’ve got alternate pieces for those slots with better stats, then go for it.

Once you’ve picked out your dps set, save it – you might be working on this for a few weeks. Then go to the reforger. Here’s the scoop: the stuff you fight in there tops out at level 85. That means all that spirit – that converts to hit and probably has you way over hit cap – can go. I know, it’s unnatural to reforge spirit, but what you really want is haste and crit. This fight is all about your dots and hots, so pump up the haste! Mastery is basically useless, you won’t be spending much time worried about your Eclipse rotation, so that’s the other stat to dump.

Check your enchants! I had some pieces in my set that had old enchants, or no gems, because it was offspec gear. Spend the money and get your stuff done right.

Spec – listen to me here. You’re doing this in full Balance spec. Your dots won’t hit hard enough in resto, and the dragon is flying way, way overheard so no feral either. But you don’t want a cookie cutter Balance spec. You are almost never going to be standing there casting direct damage spells at the boss – and if you are, it’s Wrath, or a procced Starsurge. So look for talents that boost Moonfire, Insect Swarm, and Wrath. Take a hard look at survivability talents – I took 3 points in Perseverance for this fight, because most of the damage you take is spell damage and that 6% reduction adds up.  I did not take Solar Beam – yeah the interrupt is nice but on such a long cooldown it wasn’t worth it. No Owlkin Frenzy – you are in caster form most of the time.  I also skipped Gale Winds but that one is arguable.  I recommend picking up Blessing of the Grove and Heart of the Wild from the Resto tree.

Glyphs – don’t do what I did and realize a week into this that you’re using resto glyphs. Go buy boomkin ones! The set I used was

Prime glyphs: Insect Swarm, Wrath, and Moonfire

Major Glyphs: Barkskin, Starfall, and Monsoon

Minors: whatever you want, but not Typhoon.

Typhoon is going to be a good friend to you on this fight. You want it on a short cooldown but not – I repeat not – glyphed out of the knockback. The knockback is your friend.

Buffs:  buy a stack or two of fish heads and some flasks of  intellect. Also mana pots or health pots or both. Bandages if you have the skill (I don’t, I admit, I fail). You might even want a few Volcanic Potions but save those until you know the fight well.

If you have a really, really good mage friend perhaps she will park outside the Nexus and cast Arcane Brilliance on you every time you die and run back. I didn’t bother, but it would be a nice little perk. She might even give you cookies so you can eat on the gauntlet phase.

Abilities: I had to redo my bars a little bit to make things I needed accessible. Your major damage spells are going to be Wrath, Moonfire, and Insect Swarm. You’ll get Starsurge procs so have that somewhere easy to use. You’ll use Typhoon  a lot, and you want your Wild Mushrooms and Detonate Wild Mushrooms on the keys. I also suggest having Hibernate on your bar, mostly for the gauntlet but you may need to sleep an add for a second at some point.

You want Barkskin and Nature’s Grasp in easy to reach spots. I had mine mapped to F1/F2 and also F11/F12, for easy access. Innervate – use it early and often! Starfall is a nice damage boost, and your treants should be somewhere easy to get to.

Whew! What else? Why, your hots – but if you’re a real resto druid raider you’ve probably got those bound to mouseclicks in Vuhdo or Grid or whatever. I’ll assume you have access to those in your balance spec, because if you don’t it’s gonna suck. If for some reason you need to map the heals to keys: prioritize Lifebloom, Rejuv, Regrowth, Healing Touch. Nourish isn’t going to cut it.

Yay! You’re ready to go! Make sure your gear is repaired. There’s a repair guy at the Transitus Shield in Coldarra if you need him. Then, hop a boat or zeppelin and get to the Tundra – or fly from Dalaran if you’ve moved back to mageville. You’ll get a cut scene, meet Tarecgosa, and be told to meet her inside the Nexus. Go on in – and note, you cannot be in a group of any sort at this point. When you talk to her, she’ll start the gauntlet event, so be ready.

Next Time: The Gauntlet!

Log’s going to be out Friday, but available Saturday. That means right now we’re out two tanks, one healer, and two dps. I’ve invited a few fill ins but haven’t gotten replies from all of them…. I’d say it’s probably not going to be a good raid night. Up to you guys what you do. Saturday looks a bit better and I bet you can get a clear  in then!

Rev and I will be back next week with our serious pants on and we’ll work on putting the smackdown on some bosses. Of course we need to talk about 4.3. Looks like it’s coming soonish. But we really want to get Falahla’s staff, and that’s going to require a lot more Firelands clears. We’ll need to figure out how to best spend time and we’re open to suggestions.

Saturday I was working on the Legendary staff questline in the Nexus. I’ve finally got it figured out enough to get through the gauntlet but the dragon…. ugh.

So after the first time I engaged the boss I zoned back in and found a portal that took me back to where you fight the dragon (it’s where you kill Anomalous, the Void Boss, in Nexus). Cool! I don’t have to do the gauntlet every time! I knew that the gauntlet part respawns eventually so I had incentive to try hard. Well… I did. My best attempt I got him below 30%. Ugh.

Anyway after a wipe I came back and the portal wasn’t there – and neither was the friendly dragon, or any other part of the gauntlet. Well, I’ll run back. The empty Nexus seemed vaguely spooky. I got to the place where usually you fight across bridges over the chasm. In this version of the Nexus, there’s these floating platform disks you hop from one to another of. You kill a dragon on a big disk, hop onto that disk, then two little dragons appear on little disks, you kill them, hop on a little disk, fly to the next big disk. It’s pretty straightforward. The key thing is you have no control over the disks, they just appear.

Well, the disks were all empty. I hopped onto the first big disk  – and the little dragons appear, realize they aren’t supposed to be there, and fall all the way to the bottom and despawn. Now I’m stuck. I finally decide to try to use the “leave vehicle” button and click on the next platform as I’m falling. This actually works for the first platform, but then the platforms beyond my new perch are too far away and I fall. Oh well, I think as I slowly drift downward. I’ll die and maybe the portal will be back.

Except I don’t die. I land in… well, let me show you.

A glowing blue realm. Absolutely featureless, like a prison of ice. Above I could see the place I’d fallen from. On the floor, there was one of the little platforms, and it was clickable.

It levitated! I moved slowly around the room as it took me for a ride.

I got close to the bottom of the platforms. This view was really, really cool.

And then it took me past the big platforms. I could jump onto the very closest one to the door where you start – so I did. And then there I was stuck at the beginning of the chasm.

I tried a couple times to get across but ended up having to hearth out and try again later.

Coming soon: A Resto Druid guide to getting this gosh-darned staff quest done. Maybe. Or a Resto Druid’s Guide to Getting Through the Darn Gaunlet, Already. That part I can write.