Tag Archive: heroic

Raiding for real

Since my last blog post, I’ve pondered a lot about what it means to raid. Or rather, what it means to different people, and what we all take from it.

Personally, I play the game to raid. I don’t draw much entertainment from PvP (because you suck, Qieth!), I’m not so fond of arenas (because you suck, Qieth!) and I don’t enjoy running around gathering achievements (because you su- ah, nevermind!). Don’t get me wrong, I love getting an achievement that gives a cool reward, like a title or a mount, but I’m not going to run around and hug critters for 10 achievement points.

So I play to raid. Lots of people do that, but we all approach raiding in different ways.

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Blizzard introduced a curious little system with Cataclysm, one that I trust that you are all to familiar with now. In order to queue up for instances – normal and heroic – you need to attain a high enough item level. If you don’t have that, you can’t queue up. You can still enter the instance manually, say with a group from your guild, but you will need to fly there yourself.

I think that the idea of this system is brilliant. Heroics are hard, and there should be some sort of lower limit before you can enter. You might have a lot of trouble if you try to do a heroic in full greens, so it is an excellent measure for players to gauge if they are ready for heroics.

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How we do Lich King heroic

People have been asking for a video of Lich King heroic for a while. So I recorded yesterdays kill and strapped on some awesome music – enjoy!

I consider myself an expert on Lich King heroic. Sure, I’ve only killed him once, but I have wiped on this fight more than any other in the game. After 200+ wipes, you pick up a few things here and there, and I’d like to share that with you guys.

This is not an easy encounter, and as you wipe and try again over and over, you’ll tweak your rotation, your movement and your general style on the fight.

I am going to assume that you know the general tactics for this fight – there is no need for me to go through them cause, after all, the main way to be useful on Lich King is to know what the hell you’re doing!

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The Lich King has fallen

It has taken us probably, what, 2-3 months of hard work, sweat, blood and tears. Mostly tears. And a lot of gold. Also, we spent a lot of hours that we could have used on putting our genetals into other peoples genetals. But it wasn’t all for nothing!

Tonight, after another four hours of wiping, on our very last try for the night, Arthas Menethil, The Lich King, died on heroic 25 man. This week, we finally had several phase three wipes, and after some agonising 20% wipes to the enrage timers, he fell down and took a mouthful of ice to the face!

If you want to see the log from the fight, you can find it here! It should go to show that moonkins aren’t really that useless *wink*

Our guild is the 424th guild to kill him, and our world rank is now 397! That’s not bad, considering we were around rank 398 when we were at 11/12 HC. In any case, we are all very happy about getting him down.

Oh, by the way, regarding Invincible’s Reins

Quick Quip: So, I have a stream..

If you have been following my Twitter, you will probably have noticed my occasional spam for my guildie’s Justin.tv channel, where you can see us raiding. I decided I wanted to give it a go myself, for the fun of it, and to offer an alternative to the melee point of view on Stoke’s channel.

So I made a stream. I had it up during our Ruby Sanctum/ICC run tonight, and reached the staggering numbers of 30 viewers online at the same time. 30! Uhh. I guess it’s not bad for a first night of streaming. I will be putting it up whenever I feel like there is something worth showing – our raids, most likely, or if I am forumwhoring or making a blog post, and I want to give you a bit of insight to my “creative” writing process.

At the moment, the quality of the stream is “okay”. For a graphics whore like myself, “okay” is not good enough. Sure, it’s watchable, but its not nearly as good as I want it to be, but I need to figure out how to send in a higher quality without dropping too many frames. If anybody is a streaming wiz, let me know, I could use a hand to tweak the line.

Anyways, I hope you will stop by. 25 man raids are happening on thursdays, sundays and thuesdays, with the occasional 10 man raid on wednesdays, always between 20.00-00.00 CET (that’s Europe, guys!). I will post on Twitter if I am streaming outside of these times – like, when I’m blogging – and alternatively, you can follow my channel if you are often using Justin.tv. You can also see past broadcasts, so if you *really* want to see tonights Ruby Sanctum and ICC HC raid, you can find them in the archive.

Cheers! Check out my stream on justin.tv/Qieth!

Hard mode is hard

Last week, our guild finally managed to kill Lich King on 10 man heroic. This was due to an amazing effort over several weeks to get to know the fight and beat him down, and we had spent 2-3 hours on him each week. We did have a few weeks where we didn’t try him, but the 10 man group probably spent a full 4 weeks, 3 hours a week, and finally had some progress.

And let there be no mistake: Hard mode is hard. Looking at the tactics and a video, it might seem easy enough, but actually executing the tactics for such a complicated fight is more difficult than I’d care to admit.

I don’t want to sound elitist, but we are at a point where all normal-modes feel rather easy. Too easy, perhaps. But I suppose this is the natural progression when you are going for the hard modes; You get better gear, and as you get more accustomed to each of the encounters, everything seems to run more smoothly. That’s how its supposed to be. There are still some of the hard mode encounters that are very difficult; Deathwhisper and Sindragosa to name a few, while others feel extremely easy, like Festergut, Rotface or even Putricide.

But going from normal to heroic is a definite step up the difficulty-ladder.

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