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!

This past week, New Moon started trying something new. We have decided to offer an Alt night every two weeks for Karazhan. This past Thursday was the first Kara Alt Night. The problem was that our guild is short on healing alts.

I leveled most of the way to 70 as a Retribution Paladin. It is a terrific leveling tree and it’s the way to go for speedy leveling as a Pally. In my mid-60’s, I changed my spec to Protection to be the tankadin I am today.

To allow our main healers to bring alts to Kara, I decided to change my spec to Holy, just for this run. I was lucky enough to be collecting Healadin gear in Kara ever since I went in there, so gear wise I was in good shape. I was also secretly hoping that the gear would hide my inexperience in main healing, and it did a fair job at making me look good.

I had a little bit of a hard time remembering my new spells, namely Divine Illumination, Divine Favor and Holy Shock; other then that, I felt pretty good about my performance. However, it was awkward being in the back. A tankadin is always front and center. My instinct was to run in and whack-whack-whack. As a healer, you will be in the rear most of the time, away from the action. It was a change, but the best place to adjust to that as a Pally is in Kara. I say that because I would still toss the occasional Exorcism during fights, as well as a Hammer of Wrath if people didn’t need healing at the time. Heck, I was even able to look around more and cast Hammer of Justice on the pesky mob that went after a caster, giving the tanks time to get that mob back. And I can’t forget the best part of all … bubbling. I would occasionally get the affections of a nasty. There’s nothing like bubbling and continuing to heal without missing a beat.

As I said, I managed to hold my own, until we hit bosses. The length of those fights started giving me mana issues. 70% seemed to be the magic number. Around 70% through the fight, I would go out of mana. Now remember, I’m technically over geared for Attumen, Moroes and Maiden with over half of my healing gear coming from Karazhan, so I was surprised by the mana issues. I think I need to chat with some healadins to see if I’m missing something on mana regeneration/conservation. I know better use of the Holy Paladin Talents would have helped, but I don’t think that would have been enough.

All-in-all, I felt pretty good about the night. I think Holy is a fun tree to get deep into and I enjoyed main healing, at least in Karazhan. I think I could do Holy every once in a while; and now, having tried all three trees as a main spec, I can finally say that I’ve done the Paladin Trifecta. But for the time being, I’m back in my tanking clothes ready for the front line again. That’s where my heart and the Light tell me I belong.

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!

Well, this has been a proud Raiding week for New Moon.  We took down the Shade of Aran for the first time, and next we decided to go up against Prince Malchezaar.  We made our way up to his balcony and went to work.  We worked, and we worked, and we worked some more. 

 But, perseverence was the word of the day.  After something like 7 tries, Prince was downed by the crack team of Arzen (Protection Warrior playing the role of a Fury Warrior), Grimix (Super Mage), Zophia (Super, Super Mage), Cadeus (Stabby, Stabby Rogue), Ktarye (Totum Slinger), Zinshara (Controller of all things Demonic), the Healing Trio of Haliot, Savita and Taelina, and me doing the Holy Tanking thing.

This was an interesting fight.  Prince in and of himself is not difficult to tank, or to DPS for that matter.  Beating him is all about placement and attentiveness.  You need to watch your threat, get the heck out when Enfeeble hits you and you need to dodge infernals while you’re doing that.  Healers have the tough job of keeping people up, but if you play it right, they only need to worry about the tank most of the time.  On most attempts, I would pull him right.  We would either lose melee DPS first, in which case our damage was gimped, or I would drop during Phase 2, in which case the raid would wipe.

On the kill fight, we decided to change it up and pull left.  We got good positioning, good Infernal drops, and good communication.  Can you say “clock work”?  Like the well oiled machine we can be, Price dropped quickly and without any casualties.  People got out when they needed to and communicated well.  We didn’t give up and we finally executed in near flawlessness.  In the words of Hannibal Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

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!!