Raiding again, all is well

Raiding again, huzzah!!

update on Blockfire: 17.01%hit, unbuffed 26.5%crit, 527 haste, 12.8% Mastery, avg Ilvl 356.

As I've stated in previous posts, I'm extremely impressed with Blizzards encounter design so far. Here are some observations on encounter's I've done so far and various thoughts on how to play better during them.

Magmaw - fire AOE is king here. When the head is exposed, make sure you use your combustion as early as possible, when the head goes away, all your dots come off so you lose alot of damage.

Omnitron Defense - Watch the energy bars because flight time is a bitch here. Again, I save my combustion for one of the energy pools and the damage buff you can spellsteal before using combustion but I always make sure to have my images up because you will come close to pulling agro.

Halfus Wyrmbreaker - I feel like the biggest thing on Halfus is not pulling aggro. Spreading your dots is dangerous especially if you do it on the whelps, although I can attest to the adrenaline rush of a screen full of yellow numbers. As always, dodging anything that damages your is pro.

Maloriak - Is really easy, I think. Spellstealing the healing buff is nice, and AOEing the adds in the green phase is really easy as long as you keep dpsing maloriak and spread the dots to the adds and then Blizzard. Red phase you all stack up to mitigate fire damage, mage ward is pro here. Blue phase you need to spread out to avoid ice tombing multiple people and use an instant cast to break out people quickly, only takes 5k dmg, if i remember correctly. P3 is nice, you can ring of frost the adds, (never done it, i think i saw it on another video) and avoid the frost orbs and win.

Chimaeron - Is easy as a ranged DPS and especially as a mage. Do mad DPS, blink into the stacked up players, blink back out and continue to do mad DPS.

Valiona/Theralion - A lot of movement on this fight, so you end up scorching more than I would like but as long as your head is on a swivel, keeping an eye on ability timers and such, it shouldn't be a problem.

Twilight Council - This is a tough fight, a lot of movement and a lot going on. The first phase I am normally on Ignacious but I set my focus to the other guy (frost dude) so I can interrupt when the tank has to run out. It's super important to keep them as close to each other the closer they get down to 25% to avoid extra health in P3. In the second phase, I am on the wind guy (whoever is on the right as you look into the room). Our strat is to get the wind debuff as soon as it pops and then get grounded as soon as the earthquake goes off. Once again, it's super important that they both are as close to 25% as possible before taking them under to move to phase 3. Phase 3 is really difficult and it's really important to let the tank grab aggro. I try and have my images up for the start of this phase just because I can squeeze out more damage by saving the images (not using them in p2) and using them to start p3 and invising before they come off. P3 is about spacial awareness. One has to do as much damage as possible without pulling aggro, and while the room grows smaller and smaller because of puddle the boss drops. The boss also casts a chain lightnign that really hurts so being spread apart is really important, there are times when I am not in range of the boss but using all of the room is critical to down this boss.

Cho'gall - Is a tough fight, just tough all around. One thing about being a dps or healer for this fight is that all of the damage is avoidable so your stacks should be nowhere near high enough to hurt you. DPS chogall as hard as possible, 2nd tank picks up the add and kites it to where it's goign to die and the ranged dps kill it while avoiding shadow volley(i.e. General Vezax). There is about 10 seconds to DPS chogall before turning back around and AOEing the adds that spawn. I try and keep a pyroblast if one has procced to get a dot up and then hopefully I can spread an ignite and flamestrike. Phase 2 of the fight is madness, adds spawn (4 in 10man normal) and need to be dps'd down. We dps 2 down and then hit hero, dps the 3rd set down and ignore the 4th. By the time the 4th set spawns, it's normally finished.

Al Akir - On normal, this fight seems like a joke until you get to p3. P1 is all about dodging cyclones and watching the knockback which is easy as a mage. I requested being put as far to the right as possible. It was very nice, the whirlwinds spawned basically right on top of me and I was able to just strafe to the right and avoid having to dodge them completely (or if your a fucking lock you can have your teleport on the edge and not have to move for anything, be it whirlwind or knockback) and could blink forward for the knockback. Blink is exceptional on this fight mainly because you skip right over the icy patch in the middle of the platform. P1 passes extremely quickly. P2 is all about stacking the lightning debuff, when we killed him, we stacked it up to 8 without any problems. We've dropped the stack a couple times and the healers complained because the acid rain stacks started to really add up. P3 is tough because of spatial awareness issues. I suggest moving your camer view to where your looking at your feet. The key to P3 is only moving far enough to avoid the new lightning clouds or you'll run out of room. There is also a lightning rod effect adn that person needs to move HORIZONTALLY away from the group, I think the effect has a 25 yard horizontal effect.

Council of Winds - A super fun fight, IMO. The video on tankspot is exactly correct, controlled DPS is key, everyone moves to the snow boss when he's doing the aoe, then moves back to their assigned platform, dps moves when they kill the boss at the assigned time and all die within a minute of each other.

Nefarion - Only boss I have not killed so far. We should have him down this Sunday or Monday night. A super fun fight where mechanics are more important than individual performance.


I'm going to try and FRAPS all of the encounters so people can see them from a mage's point of view and I'll put a link to each encounter into the mage explanation of the fight's above.

DMC: BROKE

Finally, the Faire is back!!

I've spent over 50% of my liquid gold making decks for various people (myself included, lol) and I've got to say, it's damn expensive. I've bought every stack of any cata herb 100g and under since release and have made 75+ cards. I'm well ahead of my costs after selling a couple of decks and selling some at extremly under-market prices to others in the guild. I just feel like people think I'm lying when I tell them how much it costs to make a single card, so I thought I would share that with my audience (what audience, inoright).

The cards require 30 volatile life (5g-ish per), one high end inscription paper (2g-ish), and 10 of the uncommon inks (which sell for over 250g per and there aren't normally more than one or two for sale). If I bought all the mats required from the AH for ONE card it would, at an extreme minimum, 2652G. Oh yeah, the cards are random so if you have the luck of the dog turd like I do, then you'll make duplicates out the wazoo.



I mill stacks and stacks of mostly cinderbloom, getting 2 or ocassionally 3 pigment per mill, 4 mills per stack, so one stack of herbs ~ 10-12 of the raw, common pigment and an occasional uncommon pigment. I craft all the uncommon ink and then I craft all of the common ink into stacks from the pigment. It takes two pigment per darkflame(?) ink. There is an ink trader in Dalaran that will trade 10 darkflame inks for ONE of the uncommon inks. To sum it up, two stacks of herbs equal about one of the uncommon inks, so it's about 20 stacks of herbs per card.



I've been in the glyph game for a long time and have wrestled up some farmers who will sell huge quantities of herbs/V. Life's for less than market price b/c I can pay them no matter how much they want to sell, this allows me the craft these cards for under 2k per card. It costs me about 16k per card (in theory) to make a deck and they are selling for 25k+ on my server.





A couple of tips to make the DMC: Scribe life a little easier:

• Get to know other inscription people on your server who delve into cards. It's much easier to swap cards around when you know that the person is going to be there next week.

• I don't count any of the uncommon inks/pigments I get from milling into my calculations on cost because they are unpredictable, so I use them as bonus cards when I get enough of the ink.

• Don't be afraid to look at the AH for the price of cards. Stones cards are selling for less then 1000G but the Decks are selling for over 10k. I took the extra stone cards I had, spent 8K buying up cards before the faire and made two decks when I wouldn't have been guaranteed one full deck.

• Watch the prices of the decks, prices will fluctuate wildly based on how desperate people are to unload their decks and recoup the money invested. If your extremely disciplined, trade the decks in and hold the cards until the faire is over to sell at an even higher premium