Light’s Defender

So, as I mentioned on my last and much overdue post, New Moon continues to work on Karazhan, with the occasional visit to Zul’Aman. As I think through what has happened during the last couple of months, I think it’s safe to say that we’ve managed to get more comfortable with Aran. I wouldn’t say he’s on farm status or anything like that, but we are more likely to beat him down nowadays.

Aran challenges the worst of our skills in New Moon. The fight requires coordination, focus and quick reflexes. Of everything we do, those are where we are most lacking. That may explain some of our troubles in Zul’Aman, but more on that some other time.

On an up note, New Moon downed Nightbane a couple of weeks ago for the first time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to see it, but kudos to the team nonetheless. It’s a big accomplishment to down him.

The only boss left for New Moon to kill is Netherspite. We’ve only hit him once, and didn’t get very far. I hope that we will have time to focus on him in the near future. I’d love to be able to say that we’ve beaten every boss in Karazhan, plus I really need some new shoulders. I’m still using Kaylaan’s Spaulders and they are looking a bit beat up these days.

Speaking of loot, I’ve picked up Ribbon of Sacrifice for my healing set, the King’s Defender as an additional option for a tanking weapon and Gilded Thorium Cloak from Aran for my tanking set. I’ve also purchased the Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor. (Boy, those are some sweet pants!!) Lastly, Moroes still refuses to drop his dodge trinket for me. I think it’s personal now.

New Moon has made some new friends on the Scarlet Crusade server. The Red Shirts is a guild that is similar to New Moon in make up, personality and size. The hope is that by working together, our two guilds can run some 25-man raids. We’ve had a couple of false starts over that last couple of weeks, but if the stars align, we may hit Gruul’s Lair this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed because I’d love to see that content.

Okay. That’s enough for now. I’ll post more soon. Thanks again for sticking with me!

I’ve been in Karazhan enough times. We pretty much have everything up to The Curator on farm status. And I’ve gotten every piece of Tanking loot through The Curator, bar one …

…Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch.

This is one sweet little trinket. It’s one of those “Oh Sh*t!!!” kinda items. One little rub of the pocket watch and you can control time. I say that because you can suddenly see most of the swings coming at you in slow motion (in your own mind, of course) and you become a dodging fiend for a short while, avoiding many of those swings. This gives your healers or whoever else time to get back into it without losing you in the process.

I’ve see this item drop once for New Moon. Since the middle of 2007, going in almost every week, only one stinkin’ time!! The one time it did drop, Barinath won the roll. He is the Master Tankadin in our guild, and I congratulate him on picking up one of the most coveted tanking items in all of Karazhan.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty comfortable with my gear. I’m uncrittable, uncrushable, have a fairly high level of stamina and armor, as well as a number of pieces of situation gear that I can use as needed. This is not about not being able to progress without it, this about principle now.

This trinket has dropped once, as I said; but every other piece of weaponry and armor has dropped multiple times, some of them a ridiculously high number of multiple times. I guess I don’t understand why Blizzard doesn’t normalize the drop rates on bosses. Is it for exclusivity? That seems odd. I can understand the white items should drop more often then green, green more often then blue, etc; but when a boss only drops epic gear, they should all have a fairly similar drop rate. In fact, the same thing has happened to me with the Spaulders of the Righteous, but that’s for another post. My point is that we should all have an similar opportunity to get gear that we can use. Making it easier for some items and harder for others of equal quality just seems unfair.

Ok, I guess that is enough. /end rant

On an upbeat note, I’ve finally maxed out my Fishing Skill. That means that I know have a max skill in Mining, Fishing, Cooking and First Aid. I have 9 skill points to go in my Blacksmithing training, and I’m hoping to have that done soon as well. Slowly but surely!

New Moon stepped back into Karazhan last night once again. This time, we were starting with The Curator and working our way past that as time allowed. We cleared the trash up to Curator pretty easily, though we did have a few deaths along the way. I think the Curator was a sign of things to come. We just didn’t have our stuff together. It took us three tries to finally down him; and the entire time our Raid Leader, Grimix, kept telling people that we needed to DPS the flares faster. We should have that fight down by now. I guess he’s not on farm status just yet.

He dropped Gloves of the Fallen Champion which no one else really needed but me, so now I have the Justicar Handguards. I think I have more gloves then Amelda Marcos had shoes.

We continued to be sloppy on the Library trash (me included), which was frustrating at first. But after a few “encouraging” words from Arzen (Protection Warrior) we tightened up a bit. We cleared just enough trash to get us to Aran so we could have some additional tries at him.

Aran is a DPS fight with controlled execution mixed in, so everyone was either DPS’ing or healing. I was trying to do a little bit of both. It was clear that we had a good DPS crowd last night, because we were taking his health down pretty quickly in comparison to other nights. Our problem was that some of our cloth-wearing members kept getting killed early on in the fight. On the first two attempts, we would lose either our Priests or Warlock before we would even reach the pyroblast or the elementals. That was just not going to work if we hoped to get to the end.

We faired a bit better on the 3rd attempt. We did a great job of keeping Aran’s health bar even with or lower than his mana bar. That ensured that we could deal with the elementals and not worry about the polymorph happening at the same time. And sure enough, the elementals spawned with a good chunk of mana left on Aran. Off we went to control the elementals. One was banished, one was perma-feared, one was tanked by me, and the other was downed by most everyone else. Somewhere during the elemental fight, we started losing people. First Arzen went, and then the polymorph hit with the elementals still up. Good thing the last 2 were banished/feared. That helped quite a bit. After the Pyroblast, the elementals despawned 5 seconds later.

I don’t know how people dropped, but we lost Zophia, then Savita, then Grimix and Alin. After that, Ktarye and Zinshara dropped. That left me (Tank?), Cadeus (Rogue) and Kyllyn (Priest). With Aran down to 1% health, the next thing I hear is “Heal yourselves! You have no healers!” We had lost Kyllyn, and then Cadeus dropped right after. I was alone. Me and Aran, a duel to the death. But whose death?

Sorry, I felt like being dramatic. Luckily, Kyllyn kept sending some heals my way in spirit form, and Cadeus had poisoned Aran before he died. That really helped. I hit Aran with everything I had. Consecrate. Exorcism. Hammer of Wrath. Judgment of Righteousness. I even bubbled right before a Flame Wreath and used Lay on Hands on myself.

That last 1% seemed like an eternity. He had about 8,500 health left and I was at full health with about 16,000. You’d think I had the upper hand there, but I was doing around 200 damage per attack while he was doing 1200. The outcome you ask?

And then there was one … me.

Aran down!! Congratulations New Moon!! Nicely done!

We did Chess for some relaxing fun after that fight. That netted me the Triptych Shield of the Ancients for my healing set, and after that we called it a night. Monday will be uncharted territory for New Moon. Prince, watch out!!

Well, New Moon took another crack at the Shade of Aran on Monday.  Things didn’t go quite as well as we would have hoped.  We made four attempts before we started to get respawns, and none of those attempts came close to our best of 24% health.  It seems to me that we need to do two things; (1) we need to better control Aran’s drop of health and mana so that we don’t get polymorphed right around when the elementals spawn, and (2) we need to figure out an effective strategy for dealing with the elementals.  Additionally, we need to figure out how to keep people alive during that fight.

My opinion is that most of the things in that fight are, for the most part, avoidable.  The only thing that is not, is the pyroblast he does after the polymorph.  My sense is that not everyone is sufficiently on their toes to avoid what can be avoided.  No one should be taking so much damage in there that they die within the first 2 minutes of that fight.  We keep learning that the higher we go in the tower, the more unforgiving these bosses seem to be.  The Shade of Aran is no exception. People need to be at 110%, me included.

After we exahsted our attempts on Aran, we decided to give Maiden a try.  She was a bit overdue.  Let me tell you, that fight went like clockwork.  Haliot (Holy Priest) did an amazing job of hopping in and out of Maiden’s consecrate just in time to break her Repentance.  That allowed him to keep our tank Arzen (Protection Warrior) up and I was able to just focus on cleansing her Holy Fire and backup heal as needed.  I’m glad to say that I lost no one to Holy Fire in that fight.  Sadly, Hal kicked the bucket on her last Repentance, primarily because she delayed her Repentance so long that his shield was down and he was fully exposed.  By then, she only had 5% health left to her name, so I helped heal and we won the day.

Maiden gave up the Barbed Choker of Discipline and the Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden.  Arzen had the choker already and he had his T4 gloves compared to my Felsteel Gloves, so he was gracious enough to let me have both items since they were major upgrades for me.  Thank you Arzen!!!

After Maiden, we took a quick crack at Attumen for the badge.  That fight was a non-event.  Easy as pie, as well it should be by now.  He dropped the Gauntlets of Renewed Hope, and being the only Paladin in the group, I picked those up as well. I was using some crappy “of Intellect” green in my healing set. So crappy that people laughed when I showed it to them. I’m glad I have some real healing gloves now.  That was my lucky day for drops; three upgrades, two of which were tanking upgrades (thanks to the generosity of others).

Tonight, we will take another crack at Aran.  I hope we can warm it up in there and take him down with a little focus, skill and luck.

New Moon went into the tower known as Karazhan once again. Our goal today was to see how quickly we could move through the place. Additionally, we were scheduled to attempt Moroes, Maiden and if there was time, Opera as well. Our group consisted of Arzen (Protection Warrior), Savita and Kyllyn (Healer Priests), Zinshara (Warlock), Ktarye (Elemental Shaman), Grimix and Zophia (Frost Mages), Ariose (Hunter), Alin (Rogue) and me.

We got started later then scheduled, but not by much; so off we went after Moroes. Honestly, we took him down like clockwork. We lost Alin during that fight. It was to a garrote, as I recall, but we did fine finishing him and his guests off. Moroes dropped the Idol of the Avian Heart and the Signet of Unshakable Faith. No one needed them, so I got won the Idol and Alin won the signet. One Void Crystal for me and two for Alin. Not too bad.

After that we took a stab at Maiden. Again, clearing the trash was pretty straight-forward. And as a reward for our speediness, the Boots of Elusion dropped again. Since both Arzen and I already have them and there were no other plate wearers in our raid, they got sharded. Grimix got two glowing Void Crystals for his winning roll.

We finally got to Maiden and as usual, it was Arzen’s job to tank. My job was to deck out my healing gear, keep Blessing of Sacrifice on Arzen, cleanse Holy Fire, and heal Arzen while everyone else is in Repentance. Seems simple enough, but wait ….

On the first attempt, it started going downhill pretty quickly and it was all thanks to yours truly. Maiden decided to throw out Repentance very early on in the fight. So early that it caught most of us off guard. The good news is that I had Blessing of Sacrifice on Arzen. The bad news that by the time I realized what had happened, I did not have enough time to get my heal off and lost Arzen. That lead to the inevitable wipe.

On try two, things started off pretty good. I kept Blessing of Sacrifice going and cleansed Holy Fire quickly enough. Unfortunately, at one point, one of our healers got Holy Fire. I cleansed it before she died, but a Repentance followed right after with enough damage to take her out. One healer down, we keep going. Things started getting hectic. Ktarye did his best to fill the healing void. In another case of bad timing, Holy Fire goes off just as I’m casting the blessing on Arzen, so I couldn’t cleanse it fast enough. That caused us to lose our other priest. Now I have to help keep Arzen up with Ktarye.  Neither of us being specced for healing makes that a challenging job on a boss fight.

The fight goes on and you’ll never guess who got the next Holy Fire while I was in mid-heal. Ktarye. I couldn’t cleanse it fast enough and with Maiden down to like 15%, I’m now the only healer left alive and I’m running low on mana with my potions on cooldown. Everyone that’s left starts going to town. I do my best to keep Arzen up. Heal after heal, and the inevitable happens. I run low on mana.

The good news is that at this point she is at like 7%, the bad news is that I can’t heal anymore. Arzen hits Shield Wall and I notice that I have enough mana for my Hammer of Wrath. If you can’t heal, then do what you can.  So I did and sent the hammer flying on its merry way. That along with some spectacular DPS from the team and Maiden went down with quite a few of us down too. I think that was the most stressful encounter I have had yet in the game. That is at least true as a healer.

Anyway, so Maiden drops the Bracers of Maliciousness and the Totem of Healing Rains. The bracers go to Alin and the totum to Ktarye. Nicely done, guys!! Time is looking good, so we keep going on to Opera.

Trash goes fairly smoothly, we get to the event and Oz is our performance of the day. I had a little trouble picking up Tinhead and Tito tonight for some reason. I did what I always do, but it was just not good enough this time around for some reason. We lost Savita early on. It’s always tough to lose a healer, but we still were able to drop them. It took some fancy kiting of Tinhead to give the Kyllyn and Ktarye (and me as well, I guess) time to regenerate some mana ahead of the Crone.  After we mana up, we finish Tinhead and take on the Crone.

The Crone goes down, and she drops the Blue Diamond Witchwand, which went to Savita and the Earthsoul Leggings that got Grimix another two Void Crystals. Congrats you two!

Beleive it or not, we downed three bosses and still had a little time left, so we went after Attumen for good measure. He was a piece of cake. He dropped the Worgen Claw Necklace and the Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation. The gloves went to Alin and the necklace became 2 Void Crystals for Savita.

For me, I walked away with a Void Crystal and 7 Badges of Justice.  That’s not really bad.  Plus, I think tonight we made New Moon history.  This is the first time that I can recall us dropping four bosses in Karazhan in one night.  Congrats New Moon!!  But looking at everything that these bosses dropped for us tonight, I have to ask ….

Where’s all the tanking gear???