I have been a bad person of late, not responding to (m)any comments of late, for which I sincerely apologize. I’m currently writing this post as a break from working on a project for my Video Games as Literature class. Things should be less hectic as of Wednesday!
That said, I had to talk a bit about Heroic Ragnaros, recruitment, Blessing of Frost, Majik and a couple of other topics.
Heroic Ragnaros
We pulled him once on Thursday night. We got Baleroc down for the first time that night, had a third kill of heroic Majordomo and still had time left in the raid. So we pulled Heroic Ragnaros (and I frapsed our infamous FIRST attempt, too!). We didn’t do too badly, in that we didn’t die instantly. ;) We did die to sons hitting the hammer, though. I think doing the nerfed version of regular Ragnaros for so long meant that we were expecting the sons to melt as they normally do. Hot tip: they don’t die so easily!
We spent Sunday night, our last night of the raid week, working on Heroic Ragnaros. 20 pulls on heroic, then one pull on normal to kill him.
According to WoL, the best pulls lasted four minutes and two seconds, four minutes and three seconds and four minutes and four seconds.
For anyone familiar with the heroic Ragnaros fight, that’s a pretty clear sign that the Molten Elementals and/or Molten Seeds kicked our asses. And you would be correct.
It was pretty clear that at least some of the group hadn’t watched the L2R video I’d linked in the forums and didn’t really understand the concept of all grouping up for Molten Seeds. On the one hand, bad preparation. On the other, at least they understood that grouping up for Molten Seeds is normally a bad thing? (Silver linings, Kurn, silver linings.) Still, we eventually got away from the Molten Seeds with just a couple of deaths, but it’s the Molten Elementals that would then catch up to us and brutally murder us.
Someone had suggested using a moonkin’s Typhoon to knock them back. I was going to respond that it probably wouldn’t work when Hestiah, who was asked to go moonkin for the occasion, answered in raid chat:
For some reason, this had me howling with laughter. I mean, absolutely cracking up. It continued for a couple of minutes, too. Oh, man.
Anyway, so yes, the current sticking point is the Molten Elementals. It didn’t help that we had 2 healers and a tank in their DPS offspecs, either. Of course, we don’t always GET to Phase 2, because sometimes, the sons reach the hammer and KABOOM, we are all dead. We had some AMAZING saves, though! Great work by so many people. (Seriously, a 1/7 split is not a lot of fun, though.)
What now? Well, we’re gonna do another week of heroic farming, I do believe — try out some apps, get some gear, get the heroic Baleroc achievement for people who weren’t in for the first one… and then maybe work a bit more on Ragnaros. Ultimately, we don’t know if we’re going to push him, but I think that we’re just going to run out of time before 4.3 comes out. What we will do is spend two resets and get people their Glory of the Firelands Raider achievements. Heroic Baleroc again will finish off the hard achievements, leaving us with things like Bucket List, Not an Ambi-Turner and the others.
I do worry about Alysrazor’s achievement, though. I can’t do anything about the air team, but I’m thinking I’ll use a sacrificial lamb method to have people mark a couple of SAFE places to stand for the tornadoes. So we’d go through P1 and then, when the tornadoes come out, have people mark the ground with safe marks. So to the left of a right-moving tornado, or to the right of a left-moving tornado. And then wipe it and do it again. Doing the achievements on normal mode will make things a lot easier, like we’ll be able to really lock down the initiates on Alysrazor and kill them before Brushfire comes out. We can hopefully get the hatchlings to eat worms quickly and burn them down and use CDs to go through tantrums so that Lava Spew is out of the equation. Then the tornadoes. And hopefully, the air team will have done a good job of not eating clouds. And then kill her during her first ground phase.
That’s the plan, at any rate.
So after we get the meta achievement… then what?
Well, more heroic farming, but I figure we’ll have, at most, one or two more resets after we finish the achievements. So a couple more nights on heroic Ragnaros or do we kill him on normal and give people some time off to recuperate before 4.3 hits?
To choose to work on Heroic Ragnaros, when Beru’s guild, Monolith, just got him down last night after 388 pulls… well, it kind of seems foolish, doesn’t it? It took them over two months. I’m pretty sure we won’t have two months until the next patch.
But shouldn’t we still go down fighting? That’s what we did in Tier 11 content. We pushed heroic V&T and got them down just five days before 4.2 dropped and we even played with heroic ODS, which we didn’t get down.
The time people put in on the Heroic Ragnaros fight, though, makes it seem as though it’s not an achievable goal unless we don’t go to Dragon Soul right away. And that’s the difference right there. Do we bash our heads on something that is likely not to be achieved? Or do we rest our raid crew and prep for 4.3?
Having said that…
Apotheosis Recruitment
Apotheosis is still recruiting! We’ve had some snazzy apps — an enhancement shaman and shadow priest will be starting their trials with us this week. We have an interesting elemental shaman app and I’ve been going back and forth with a hunter.
We could still use a mythical retribution paladin and any spec of warrior, so if you’re one of those and can attend 75% of raids that take place on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, from 9pm ET until midnight (invites at 8:45!), apply now!
Blessing of Frost
Then, there’s Blessing of Frost! We didn’t record last week because Majik had no power, due to a snowstorm and such. We can’t record today because Majik has actually lost his voice. Last night, during the raid, was hilarious. He honestly couldn’t speak, and took to threatening me in raid chat. (We will ignore the fact that I was probably taunting him about being unable to speak.)
So we’re going to let his voice recover and aim to have a new episode of Blessing of Frost out on Wednesday at some point, maybe Thursday at the latest. (We’re going to try to record on Tuesday.) It’s made all the more hilarious because MAJIK HAS IMPORTANT THINGS TO SAY!!! So, uh, yeah. Tune in this week (probably!) for a new episode of Blessing of Frost. :)
Majik Gets a Crazy Idea
And in case you’re missing your weekly dose of Majik (and who would?), he has decided to set up a blog.
Majik’s Missives is a blog where Majik will talk about his gaming life. Not just WoW, but TF2, League of Legends, reflections on older games, all that kind of stuff. He’s actually a pretty decent writer, so definitely check out his first post. He’s got a couple of others already written up and will be posting them throughout the week.
And on that note, my dear readers, it’s back to my Video Games as Literature project. Have a great Monday. :)
Going back and doing normal modes to get the meta-achievement worked for us, though Alysrazor and the Whirling Doomnadoes of Death kind of sucked. By the time we got it without any flaws and downed the boss, raid leader was all ‘yay hooray we’re not retarded!’
Hi !
About elementals, when they are close to each other, they get a buff. This buff not only increase their damage drastically but also make them immune to any form of controls, slows or movement action like bumps from moonkins or shamans.
That is why you have to burn them down quickly before they reach your raid. As an advice to your raid, during the time between the pop of the seeds and the appearance of the elemental, each should keep up their powers : runes, focus, etc… As a hunter for example, I always have full focus bar to be able to empty it with multi.
Another advice is to make a macro with /tar Molten elemental + your multi-target spell. They can be pretty hard to target with the big hitbox of Rag.
Last thing is to scatter everyone when they arrive. Let the dps ahead of the raid to be able to reach with spells, the healers and tanks can be further. When they come, dpsers have to kite them as long as possible and scatter.
It’s of course easier to do in 10-man and If I’m not mistaken you raid 25, but anyway…
We also have our mage or a really heavy melee-aoe player getting a BOP just before Rag cast the seeds. That will prevent him to be targeted by a seed and he will be able to aoe at will in the middle of the elementals : they have no aggro, they target the player their seeds popped on.
Good luck with RagHM, it’s a long way to learn that fight if you go that way.
About Alice Achievement : focus on the tornados the first week, and on the rest the second week. Brush fire is the only thing I miss to get my purple pigeon because we decided not to wipe after a perfect tornado phase (it took us 1h30 to get it, in 10-man) and some idiot walked in a fire… Since, people take fires every week… I hate them. :D
Dyna – yeah, Alysrazor has me worried… Maybe tonight, if we focus, we can avoid Lava Spew, the clouds or Brushfire so we don’t have to worry about those during our achievement weeks? hahaha!
Nefernet – Thanks so much for your comment! Yeah, I know about the buff, like with Maloriak’s adds. Terrible! haha! The trouble we’re having is with the burning quickly. I think people were too worried about moving and where we’re moving to.
The BOP is a great idea. I’ll definitely try that on our mages!
Unfortunately, we’ll have to get everything pretty much all at once because we have a roster of more than 25 people. We have 31 raiders and have a few applicants, so it’s all or nothing for us!
Fire, man. It’s everywhere!
Thanks again for your comment, very helpful!
Getting VnT down was made easier by some snazzy rogue appearing from nowhere tO chill with tikari in the shadow realm, iirc!