Oxheart makes everything better (almost)

Ooooh shiny!

Last night isn't considered a set in stone raid night for our little casual 10 man ICC group, but we had most of the people on so we tried to make a push for Sindragosa. All we had was trash, free frost emblem mini-boss, then the Dreamwalker.

We tried out a couple new DPS we recruited over the weekend and they definitely held their own. We tried a new strategy for Dreamwalker and instead of two tanks and splitting DPS in half, we used our paladin tank and I switched to kitty for some rusty feral DPS. Only wiped once and it was because mob priorities weren't 100% clear.

Easiest way to handle the adds that we saw is:

Suppressors (Hunter kite Blistering Zombies) > Blazing Skeletons > Gluttonous Abominations > Risen Archmages

After the second attempt, she went down with no deaths, easy and clean kill. So next we had the good old...spi

OH YEAH! [Oxheart] dropped! It kind of caught me off guard, but its become almost a perfect solution to my hit/expertise woes. The weapon of course has a boat load of expertise which allowed me to swap out my neck for this. So now I'm sitting at 11.5% expertise and 7.53% hit which is awesome! I'm using the wrathful neck and bracers which is making my threat stats suffer a little bit, but I haven't had any issues whatsoever with TPS so I guess Oxheart really does make everything better!

der room. Luckily someone in guild chat was nice enough to mention that you don't just stand in the middle of the room until the end of eternity killing wave after wave of spiders. We made our way to the other side of the room and once the gate (door?) opened we happily stepped out onto the Frost Queen's terrace.

Let me just take this opportunity to complain about the two 3.2M HP mini-boss dragons you have to kill before you engage Sindragosa. I'm guessing it's a lore thing which I don't mind, but 3.2 million HP each...ugh!

Anyways, we took sometime explaining the strategy and everyone seemed to understand. Honestly we probably could have killed her sooner, but we were trying to handle frost tombs in the middle of the room, and the frost bombs kept spawning practically right underneath the tombs making them nearly impossible to LoS. Per suggestion of a friend in a different guild that was hanging out in vent, we moved the frost tombs to the stairs that lead out onto the terrace and I have to say it really simplified the frost bombs. Our priest kept having computer issues and between having to wait for him to reboot and since it was already pass 10:30, we gave it a couple more attempts (one of which we saw phase 3 and the boss to 21%), we called it.

I'm fully expecting this new reset to make a run for Arthas and start putting in attempts there. Go go Kingslayer incoming!

Round 2: Professor and that's just the beginning

We showed Professor who was boss after our less than successful run in with him on Friday. Completely opposite composition from Friday, we had the same rogue we brought last week, except this time he was the ONLY melee! That's the funny thing about casual raiding with friends, never really know who is and isn't available. So I'd like to say we one shot Professor but no, not quite. We actually ended up wiping for around an hour. The DPS just was not there. We even had a couple of really nice transitions to phase 3 with no oozes out, but couldn't get him down before we'd be overwhelmed by the debuff or slime pools. Finally (our savior) warlock logs in and we sub out our under performing mage.

Smooth sailing one shot right after that! Amazing how much one person can change an encounter like that, but I guess that's the nice part (bad part?) about 10 mans. So not only do we one shot Professor, but Mr. Warlock brought his A-game and we one shot (progression mind you, first time kill) Blood Princes! Everyone did such a fantastic job in their roles. Our hunter only missed one disco ball, which you can't really blame him, he handled them all except that one perfectly. Our OT did a fantastic job keeping Prince "huge fireball" (new cataclysm mage spell?) Taldaram out of vortexes and what not. And like I said our Warlock...absolutely awesome job picking up the shadow orbs and keeping aggro on Prince Keleseth. We run with a holy Paladin (girlfriend), a resto Druid (the hunter mentioned above's wife), and a MS resto/OS elemental Shaman (friend of mine from high school). They all did a really great job and congrats to the guild on 9/12.

We weren't done yet though. We had every intention of beating Blood-Queen Lana'thel and after a few attempts and trying to figure out why people were dieing on her 5 second air phase she went down!

Now that we are 10/12 we are hoping to sneak in some time tonight and see if we can get Sindragosa down. Should be interesting.

Complete Banner, What happened on Professor last night?

Firstly, I'm pretty happy with the way the banner has turned out. It only took a few steps, required only free software, and the result was much better than I expected.

Mostly to give credit where credit is due, but also because I like the process and haven't messed around with graphics much here's how I went about it:

1. Wow Model Viewer (http://www.wowmodelviewer.org)
   
   I started messing with the "Load Character from Armory" feature. I wasn't happy with the Tauren form because it was too tall and to be honest my gear doesn't really look that great, haha. I kept coming back to the bear form model though because obviously it's the most fitting and I think Blizzard really did a fantastic job with the new models.
   
   This is where my girlfriend saved the day with positioning the model like it is above. We cropped out most of the body so we could get close enough to the face and then I hit a road block. Clearly we know which one of us in the relationship is creative; I'm completely lost, she comes along and shows me a unique way of looking at the bear model face, she stops giving input, and I'm back to being completely lost.
   
   
2. Paint.net to the rescue (http://www.getpaint.net)
   
   Can I just say I love this software! I'm an avid user of MS Paint and believe it or not I actually use it quite frequently at my job to show people why they fail at reading directions, but Paint.net is just a whole different animal. I started off with just the bear face on the right and planned on the blog title taking up most of the extra space to the left:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   While messing around with the "Magic Wand" which by the way really is magic if you were wondering, I selected the bear face and went up to Effects > Artistic > Ink Sketch and voila a cool comic book effect. Well the comic book effect on the bear face got me thinking about how I'd like the title to show up so I googled "paint.net speech bubble" and downloaded a fantastic plug-in for Paint.net that was created by dpy called appropriately enough dpy's pack.Couldn't have been easier to add the text and speech bubble to the image.
   
   
3. Finishing Touch (thanks WoWWiki)
   
   Paint.net, as I'm sure most rich-featured graphics software, has the ability to layer things really quite well so I brought the image in and when Paint.net nicely asked if I wanted to re-size my canvas or crop the image - I chose the latter.
   
   Finally I adjusted the opacity on the face/speech bubble layer and that my friends is the finished product you see at the top.
   
   Pat myself and of course my girlfriend on the back, haha, I'm happy with it.
   

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Last night our ten man got together and I was pretty stoked because we had some really solid DPS. Flew through the first 6 bosses and dinged exalted with Ashen Verdict as soon as Festergut went down, promptly got my new tanking ring and headed over to Professor for what was shaping up to be a 7/12 clear.

Problem with our ten man composition last night? We had two, count em, two ranged DPS. A hunter and mage. I figured we would be just fine because we could have melee switch off to the oozes, boy was I wrong. It was taking too long to get professor to phase three. The green ooze - at least every other spawn got to it's intended target for explosion shenanigans and things really seemed doomed mid phase 2. Against all odds, we managed to get to phase three and even had a clear transition with no ooze out. I drop out of the abomination I was piloting around the room, switch to bear, and rocket boots my way over to the table for a clean pick up of the Professor. I taunted and I went down like a sack of bricks..seriously..no clue. Luckily our druid healer was quick to get me up and we somewhat recovered. The DPS was actually pretty solid and we got the boss to 20,000 health, I'm guessing our paladin tank died, because I was still tanking, and the boss healing back up to 12%, BUST!

Had to call it, after a couple more attempts we lost our rogue and didn't have a range to replace him with, but come Sunday it's Round Two!