I haven’t done much raiding after a major patch before so I really didn’t know what to expect come Tuesday. I knew about all the talent changes and what not from playing on the PTR. I made it a point to heal one last dungeon as a Tree to say good bye to it. I had the unfortunate luck of running with a really horrible tank and the experience was made all the more sad. I had one last dance with my Sproutling.
The servers took their sweet time coming up on Tuesday – like they always do on a major patch. You would think Bliz would have perfected this after all these years. But, alas, they haven’t. My day leading up to the realms coming back consisted of eating Mexican food with BFF, taking the dog for a ride, watching a lot of Bleach episodes and napping. A nice day had it not have been a near constant checking of the forums to see when the realms would be back up.
When it did come back I was greeted with new talents and no guild tab. To see who in my guild was on at any one time I had to /who – kind of odd but not the worst thing ever.
I got my hunter up first. I got a new BM spec and started running around Azeroth taming all the animals I didn’t have room for before. (Still no Spirit Beast – why do you mock me, Locque?!) I went and got a color changing Gundrak raptor and called it HoneyRaptor since I am huge Yogscast nerd. The next one I got was a silvery white Corehound that I named Toshiro after the Captain of Squad 10 in Bleach. I then traversed to Outlands and got a Violet Dragonhawk called Orihime (after another Bleach character). I made a raid and got a tiger from ZG, too. (My BFF thinks I’m a nerd for doing that since the tigers in SVT are the same skin but it matters to ME.) Once I have a Spirit Beast, I will be happy until I can have a Fox.
It took a few days to really get used to the Focus system. I was doing 4-5K in heroics as MM and then hit rock bottom at 1900. I felt just horrible so I read up on it. Apparently, BM is spam Arcane Shot and Steady Shot for Focus so you can continue spamming Arcane Shot. It took a while to get used to a simple rotation after the larger MM one but I managed to be around 4K again. I also picked up my T10 gloves and the 264 cloak and belt. I still need the other T10 but I’m not entirely sure if I want to put that much work into with less than 2 months to go.
I logged over to my Priest to get her settled for what I thought would be raid night. I decided to get my secondary Shadow spec back since my crazy ass Arena spec wasn’t something I could duplicate with the new talent system. There’s no way I can have both Penance and Mind Flay both like I used to. /cry
I got my Disc spec going next. I’m sure mine is a little different from everyone else’s. I totally forsake the Holy tree instead choosing to put 3 points into the Shadow tree for that extra 3% haste. My BFF got on his Priest and we had a “heal off” in Ironforge. Chakra looks damn cool! I made him follow me to the training dummies so I could pop my wings. It does kind of blow that I have to attack something to get my “bonus”. I think they changed up the animation on the wings a little bit from the PTR – they seem prettier now, more translucent and fluttery.
We didn’t raid on Tuesday night so off I went to H TOC to try out my new spec. I took Atonement since I would be Smiting anyway. It doesn’t heal every time. It procs very sporadically but when it does crit it will proc a Divine Aegis. The Divine Aegis buff on the buff bar has changed – it will tell you exactly how much it will absorb and how much it has left to absorb if a hit has been taken on it. Renew will also proc Divine Aegis now, unlike on the PTR where it does not.
Come Wednesday we were all ready to start raiding again. Everyone had their talents, glyphs and gems sorted out so off we went to ICC. We had a few stragglers so Locru put up his summoning stone. Try as we might, the damn thing would not work. Then we had to figure out who was in phase with another person to go outside to summon. Finally, everyone was present and standing at the ready by Tirion and Varian. We go to buff – apparently Blessing of Kings and Gift of the Wild are the same buff. You cannot have one and the other – you can only have one! WTFBBQ… And Blessing of Might gives you Mp5 now but still doesn’t stack with Mana tide totem.
We started pulling trash up to Marrowgar with no problems. We get to that last “room” in front of the boss when suddenly ALL of the big bone guard guys spawn. No one was even in that other room so we thought we’ll just leave them there and it will be OK. Not so! Those two wandered straight up into our room and started to wreak havoc! We had 3 of them up at one time – not fun at all to try to heal through 3 Disrupting Shouts in a row for several minutes. We got them down and on we went to Marrowgar – who we downed with out any issue.
The next trash packs died easily and we pulled Lady Deathwhisper. Then it began to be very obvious that something was wrong . Her Death and Decay was not showing up on the ground. Our mods were yelling at us to get out of the bad but we could not tell where it was exactly. There was the barest hint of green on the ground but it had no discernable shape or size. Her mana pool seemed to fall rather drastically, as well.
We got up to the next, um tier, when we noticed the drakes flying around ICC were bugged out and flapping their wings spastically. They were moving at the normal speed but their wings were flapping like a humming bird’s wings.
Then began our Gunship Odyssey. We thought it would be a good idea to do heroic Gunship since we have Kingslayers now. It got changed to heroic and this is where our problems really started. Everyone got their rocket packs and assignments were made of who would be in the cannons. I got knocked off the boat by a cannon blast so we knew it was on heroic – thankfully I got teleported back. Unfortunately, the away team didn’t make it back to our boat in time and they died. Normally this is not a big deal since their bodies get teleported to Deathbringer’s Rise so we can rez them. This didn’t happen. There were no bodies to be found anywhere on the platform or on our boat. Our guys released and tried to run back into the instance but could not since we were still in combat. We looked around – the Horde ship was completely gone and the loot box had spawned on our ship. We discussed this for a few minutes when it was decided on for everyone to jump off the side of our ship to get us all out of battle.
We jumped and managed to get back into the instance and up to Deathbringer’s Rise. There was no boat – it had disappeared with our loot. Once we zoned in, we were immediately back in combat. We were all in the process of opening tickets when someone stumbled into a hidden NPC on the Rise. It was called “martyr” something and started to attack us. We finished it off but still no boat. We switched it back to normal and then heroic again. The boat came back with our loot and on we went to Saurfang (heroic) – failing miserably. Back to normal it went since this was not to be progression night but just a quick run to test out new talents and specs. We downed him no problem.
The Plague wing went off without a hitch. We one shotted everything, including Professor Putricide with no deaths. The Blood wing went just as well – no bugs to report and no deaths. On to Dreamwalker we went. The little gauntlet thing bugged out at the Val’kyr. She said her line about summoning her reinforcements but never rez’d the dead guys to fight us. We didn’t get our Justice Points or rep, either.
I am absolutely horrible at the portals on Dreamwalker so I went Shadow and Lunassa got to portal hop in his Disc spec. I got a quick run down of the kill order and bumbled my way through that fight – tossing heals and bubbles to the tank if I saw Bright was getting behind on the healing. We saved Dreamwalker and got loot no one needed.
On we went to the horrible spider gauntlet. This is the most pointless thing in all of ICC. Was it really necessary? I totally get the little frost whelps going up to Sindy but random Nerubian spider things after 3 wings of not having any spiders at all? Makes no sense at all. Bad design, Bliz.
Amazingly, none of the frost whelps bugged out and they all ended up on the ground when they died. We pulled the big dragons before Sindy with no drama and we bugged her out by running back out the gate. This is when the projected textures really started to make a difference. Lady D is a push over even with people standing in D&D for the full duration. Sindy is still the hardest fight in ICC and take away us being able to see all of her frost shit on the ground was just a recipe for disaster. We could not see anything on the ground at this point – no spell effects at all. We could not see every Paladin’s Consecration but some people could see Bright’s but no one could see Treston’s or Chris’s. This wasn’t as big of an issue as no one seeing the icy shit on the floor to avoid or the icy cloud stuff Sindy shoots at you during the air phases. This made for very frustrating wipes because we all know this fight and we can all do it and have before. We called it for the night.
The next day wasn’t any better but we managed to down her after a few tries. I am guessing we got used to not seeing anything and just let instinct take over that part of our brains. Whatever it was I am glad we got the bitch down. The attempt in which we got her down my stack of instability got up to a staggering 20. I was the only healer up so there was really nothing I could do other than blow every CD and hope for the best.
We got up to Lich King. I had honestly never noticed Bolvar in chains up there on the throne with Arthas until someone pointed it out. Of course we all had to run up and take a look at him before we could do anything else. We buffed up and I got to talk to Tirion this time (squee!) to start it. We wiped.
We have some slow people and I usually beat others back inside so I go to rez Dijie since her body is still there. I send her a rez but the whole death thing is bugged out. She had rez’d at the graveyard with a sliver of health and was on her own flying mount heading to the entrance. I sent her the rez and she took it. Bad move because it dismounted her in mid air and she plummeted to her death. But, her body was still at Lich King’s platform so I sent her another rez but it didn’t work this time so she had to run in. Luckily, the ghost gryphon worked and she was able to fly in like normal.
We tried again. We wiped again a lot of times. Sometimes we would rez normally and other times we would be alive in the Graveyard. Sometimes half the raid would rez normally and the other half would be alive in the Graveyard. There was no predicting how you would rez Some people would get all the way back to the top and not be able to see anyone else in there. They would have to hearth or leap to their deaths to get back to the same place as the rest of us.
I think we got Arthas down on the 10th or 11th attempt in about 3 hours. It was so FUBAR and bugged that we would go ages between attempts just to get everyone back and ready to go. It was so frustrating.
All the frustration was forgotten at ths point
Priest and Pally Wings FTW!
I was ready for the achievement this time!
We've come a long way, Tirion.
The Nonchalant Priest 