Running Challenge Modes with the CMN and SR

Sorry this post is a little dated by a week or so, but I wanted to post some our screenshots and achievements with Challenge Modes lately.  I think the most interesting part about this latest string of runs is that each one involved a different lineup.

Here is a Gate of the Setting Sun run that we got bronze in.  This is the original Challenge Mode Noob (CMN) group of me, Navi, Lush, Luxy and Karn.

Luxy, Arv, Lush, Karn, Navi and friends in Gate of the Setting Sun

Another bronze medal was earned in the Siege of Niuzao Temple.  We didn’t have Karn this time, so I brought in Zug to join us.

Arv, Zug, Luxy, Lush and Navi in Siege of Niuzao Temple

The hardest Challenge Mode of the bunch, Shado-Pan Monastery proved to be just that.  Navi invited another fellow Frostee, Souglyy, to join us for the run.  We had a rough time with this CM and didn’t medal, but we pushed on and still finished it through.

Arv, Navi, Luxy, Lush and Souglyy in Shado-Pan Monastery

We wanted to do another, but Souglyy was feeling tired, so Luxy asked another friend, Ut, who came along and brought his pally, Makemebad.  This time we hit up Stormstout Brewery, which I missed on a previous run that the Frostees had with Zug and Adoe.  This time, we got a Bronze.

Makemebad (Ut), Arv, Luxy, Navi and Lush in Stormstout Brewery

Later that night, we had another go at a CM I missed, Scholomance.  This time, Navi asked their warrior, Fallnapart, to come along.  We came close to getting another Bronze, but just fell short.  I did get the Challenge Conqueror achievement for completing all the Challenge Modes.

Luxy and Arv in Scholomance

We tried our hand again in Scarlet Halls, a Challenge that we didn’t medal in.  Short again a dps, Navi asked one of their warlocks, Azadelta, to come.  Three brezzes!  This time we were successful in getting a Bronze medal.

Luxy, Arv, Lush, Aza and Navi in Scarlet Halls

Zug was feeling the CM bug one Monday night, so he got me, Adoe, Shadeey and Slice to group together for a Gate of the Setting Sun run, the first Shadow Rising CM run in a long time.  We ended up running it three times in a row, each time getting faster and faster.  On the last run, we were making good time for Silver and were surprised that we didn’t get it after killing Raigonn.  The reason:

Yep, two freakin’ mobs, lol.  We quickly ran out of the instance and ran back in and took care of a few adds that we skipped at the beginning to finally claim our prize.

Shadeey, Zug, Arv and Slice in Gate of the Setting Sun (Not Pictured: Adoe)

This past Monday, the original SR Challenge Mode team of me, Zug, Adoe, Sorak and Slice decided to go back to Gate and improve on our Silver and go for the Gold.  On our best attempt, we completed the run in 16 minutes, 4 minutes shy of the Gold.  We would have had more attempts at it, but with all the resetting we were doing, some of us got the “You’ve entered too many instances recently” message or were having login issues.  So we left it at that for the night.

Navi mentioned on her blog that I might be getting CM burnout from running on two teams, but honestly, I’m enjoying it.  Different compositions call for different strategies and you’ve really gotta think quick on your feet to adjust.  With the CMN team, we’ve got at least two brezzes from Navi and Lush, so you have a little leeway if someone goes down.  With the SR team, we have no brezzers, so you really have to pop CDs and blessings at the right time to keep everyone alive cause you can’t really afford to be a man down if you want to make good time.

But no matter what, I’m determined to help both teams reach their goals, whether to get all Silvers for the mount or even Golds for the transmog gear. =)

PvP and Arena Fun

An interesting thing happened over the weekend.  We actually did some pvp with the guild, lol.  Saturday night, Psynite and Slice were chatting it up in guild chat and someone mentioned about running some BGs as a group.  I was messing around on an alt trying to get a second farm going, but I quickly abandoned that and switched over to Arv to tag along for some BGs.  Adoe and Lyss also joined and so we had a nice 5-man group ready to pvp.

Our first BG was Silvershard Mines.  I noticed that the northern cart was close to the depot, so I made a run for it as soon as the gates dropped.  I was accompanied by a few Hordies and there was only one Alliance there to challenge us, so we quickly took control of the cart right as it entered the shaft for a nice achievement.

We ended up winning that BG pretty decisively.  I’m not sure what it is about Silvershard, but I’ve won it in every group I’ve been with.  Crazy luck maybe?

We had a couple of games in The Battle of Gilneas, which went really well and also turned out to be both Horde victories.  I decided to go Prot with my pvp gear on to protect and AoE around the flags, which turned out really well.  The Alliance could not assault a flag that I guarded. =)

Next up was Warsong Gulch.  For capture the flag BGs like this and Twin Peaks, I usually go Prot and volunteer to be the flag carrier.  Right off the bat, I raced over the Alliance base and quickly ran back, ready to capture it.  It didn’t take long, as our Horde flag carrier kill group quickly downed the Alliance flag carrier for a quick capture.  As Slice mentioned that night, the Alliance quickly gave up and didn’t bother trying to cap our flag from that point on.   They pretty much hovered in the middle, trying to get Honor kills instead.  That seems to be the norm, though.  I ‘ve been in many Horde groups where we would also lose the first flag and everyone would just give up.  I’ll at least make a game out of it; I’ll keep running after the flag even if we’re down 2-0.

It didn’t take too long to cap the other two flags, the Alliance tried to slow me down on the third, but I popped my trinket and sped up the ramp for another quick capture and another achievement for finishing in under 7 minutes.

The next BG was another Silvershard Mines match.  Like the previous SM game, the Horde dominated and we were capturing carts left and right.  We had such a big lead that I even had time to run around to find the Restoration and Berserking buffs for an achievement.

And I even escorted a cart from the spawn point all the way to the depot.

Those final achievements finally pushed me in the 17,000 club too.

Our last BG of the night was Arathi Basin, which we didn’t win.  We couldn’t overcome the Alliance resources and they pretty much controlled 3 out of the 5 territories the entire match.  Still, winning 5 of 6 BGs was a pretty successful night for us.

Adoe, Lyss and Slice decided to call it a night after the AB game, so Psynite asked me if I wanted to do some 2v2 arenas with him.  The last time I did any arenas was with Slice and Adoe towards the end of Cata.  I’ve been wanting to get back into them, as this is the easiest way to cap your Conquest points for the week.  So I dropped the team I was on with Adoe and joined Psy’s Morphlings.

Before Psy joined SR, he was an avid pvper back on his other server.  He mainly ran as either a paladin or a hunter and I think he mentioned he did 2s, 3s, 5s and even rated BGs, so he has a lot of experience.  Sorak invited his Rogue over to Drak to help fill our raid dps when we were short peeps and has done an awesome job getting raid ready with all the gear he’s been getting.  He’s been pvping on his Rogue a lot lately, and even though it was new to him, he still tears up the charts, lol.

While waiting for our first arena match, I bought the last two Malevolent pieces I needed to complete my set, the bracers and cloak, with the Honor points I accumulated that night.  I didn’t get to gem or enchant several of my pieces before the matches started to roll in.

Our first handful of matches were…..bleh.  I was rusty and it showed.  I was popping my trinkets at the wrong times, blowing my CDs on the wrong target and was just getting owned.  I was worried that Psy was thinking he made a mistake pairing up with me, lol.  But we kept at it and eventually started to get some wins in.  I took a break about halfway through our matches to gem/enchant/reforge my gear and it definitely made a difference.  Psy noticed it too, as my burst was quicker and damage higher, which increased my confidence.

As double dps, we had to rely on a lot of burst and damage on one player, throwing in CCs when we could.  We tried different strats on the start, from going in stealth with Psy cloaking the both of us to me running in like a madman to bait the other team from coming out of stealth.  Once a meat shield, always a meat shield, right? Lol

We found success against teams with double dps too, Death Knights seemed the squishiest, so we always targeted them first.  We did go up against add odd pairing, a Hunter and a blood DK, who was sitting at 480K health.  We tried to focus down the DK, but he was doing some crazy self-healing and the Hunter eventually picked us off one by one.  We met the same group a few matches later, this time we burned the Hunter down and slowly killed the DK.  I’d like to try going prot once, but I doubt I’d last as long as a blood DK.

Teams with healers gave us the most difficulty, especially ones with Holy Paladins and Resto Druids.  I hate Holy Pallys in BGs because they’re so hard to kill and they are just the same in arenas.  We did find success against Disc Priests and Mistweaver Monks.  In the monk fight, I got caught up in their disarming ability, which was pretty annoying, but I don’t think their team was well geared because they went down fast.

Psy and I played enough winning games to reach the 1800 Conquest point cap for the week, the other 400 points have to come from rated BGs, which I don’t see myself getting into unless I can find a group, lol.  Our win-loss record may be abysmal, but hey, it was our first night running together.  =P

I was able to snag the Tyrannical helm with my Conquest points to go along with the Tyrannical gloves I got off Nalak last week.  Psy said that the Tyrannical weapons are really good and he hopes to get one in a couple of weeks.  I’ll probably work towards that too, Starshatter is ok, but unless I get a two-handed drop from ToT, the Tyrannical one is my best bet.

Thanks guys for an awesome pvp night and thanks to Psy for getting me excited about doing arenas again!

Friday Fun Night – Twilight Harbingers

Lyss, Arv and Van on Twilight Harbinger Drakes

After having a week off from doing our Friday Fun Nights, we finally finished the Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider meta and got our drakes last Friday.  Grats to everyone that got them!  The mount looks awesome and the model looks like Alexstraza’s dragon form.

All that was left was to complete Madness of Deathwing, starting on Kalecgos’ platform.  We had most of our FFN regulars (me, Lyss, Slice, Stunnah, Van, Bocat, Vaunt and Luxy) and brought in Zug’s sis, Galanna too.  It was a quick run and it only took us an hour to do.

Vaunt and Bocat still need a Madness kill on Ysera’s platform for their drakes and Stunnah is halfway done with the daggers, so we’ll probably be doing DS for a few more weeks.  Thanks to everyone for coming to these DS runs and helping out get these awesome mounts!

Friday Fun Night – Saviors of Azeroth

This past Friday night, the guild went back into Dragon Soul to work on more achievements towards the Glory of the Dragon Soul meta.  We had most of the FFN peeps on: myself, Lyss, Slice, Van, Stunnah, Bocat, Shirl and Vaunt.  Yep, that’s two pallies, two priests and 3 warlocks…I’m glad this isn’t our regular raid comp, can you imagine the competition for tier tokens? ><  No Navi and Lush time around, so I invited Luxy to come along and Lyss brought a warrior friend, Critixix, who turned out to be an alt of Njeri, our long time guild hunter back in Wrath when we raided ICC.

We decided to leave the entire raid on Heroic, so we could do both Heroic Spine and Madness of Deathwing.  Solo-tanking Morchok and his twin was easy and so was Yor’shaj; we even left up two sets of blobs and those who needed the remaining combinations for Taste the Rainbow got that completed.

I guess we really like playing Ping-Pong on Zon’ozz’s fight, we just kept bouncing that Void Orb back and forth so much that a second one spawned right before we killed him.

Hagara, Ultraxion and Blackthorn went smoothly and then it was time for Deathwing.  We had a couple hiccups on Spine; on one attempt, we got to the final tendon, but we had too many people on one side and Deathwing rolled over and threw everyone off.  Another attempt, Van let Blood Corruption: Death run its full duration on someone to see if it would really wipe the raid…which it did. ><  The next attempt went much smoother and we finally got Heroic Spine down.

For Madness of Deathwing, we started out on Nozdormu’s platform to knock out another part of Chromatic Champion.  Everything was going great until we hit phase 2, when the Congealing Bloods came out.  We didn’t realize that they would heal Deathwing up 1% for each blood that reached him.  We tried to brute force it by burning Deathwing down while ignoring the Bloods, but we couldn’t catch up on dps and I eventually got smashed tanking the two Elementium Terrors and eating too many tetanus stacks.  The second attempt, we focused on the Bloods first, killing as many as we could and then the Terrors and used Lust after we cleared the platform.  Soon after, Deathwing fell and Heroic Madness was complete.

For killing Madness of Deathwing on Heroic, you’re rewarded with a pretty nifty title, Savior of Azeroth.

So all that’s left for the meta is doing Madness with Kalecgos’ platform left to start on and then we should have our mounts.  Looking forward to this Friday to finish this up!

Goin’ to the Con!

After a couple of weeks of anticipation, a broken F5 button and lots of luck, I managed to snag tickets for Chewy and myself to this November’s Blizzcon!  We tried to make it out to California earlier than that, but we couldn’t get tickets to the San Diego Comic-Con this year.  I think Blizzcon will be a good replacement for our Cali convention fix, lol.

Last Wednesday was the first night that the tickets went on sale, which is also one of SR’s raid nights.  We were working on the Council of Elders and I told the guys ahead of time that I would be taking a break for a couple of minutes during the raid to try to get the tickets.  We wiped a few minutes before 10:30 pm on one of our attempts, so I took this moment and went afk from the game to get ready to buy tickets.  I began spamming the F5 buttons on both my desktop and laptop to refresh the ticket purchase page and when I got through, I ended up 9000-ish and 12000-ish in queue.  I called Chewy to ask was place he was in and he said he was in the lower 8000s.  We then started calculating what place we needed to be in to get into the store, based on the percentage of tickets left and how far we moved up in the queue.  We deducted that we needed to be in the 4000-5000 range for a shot at the tickets, which was confirmed as the store closed with Chewy left at around 3000 and me 4000 in line.  I felt pretty bummed not getting the tickets, but that didn’t last long as we managed to kill the Council of Elders for the first time that night.  I guess you could say I took out my disappointment on the Council by solo-tanking them all, lol.

So yesterday was our last shot at getting tickets, this time the tickets going on sale at 1pm.  I called Chewy minutes before to make sure he was ready but I couldn’t get a hold of him.  I was worried that he’d forgotten and thought our chances of getting into the store had gotten slimmer.  Not wanting that to discourage me, I focused on that F5 button and smashed it as fast as I could and when I finally got through, I was surprised that I ended up 2600 in queue!  I pushed the keyboard and mouse away from me for fear that I would accidentally close out the window when Chewy finally called me.  He had phone issues, but was online to purchase tickets, although he was 6000 in queue.  I told him what place in line I was and he then excitedly started talking about what we would be doing in Cali and I stopped him quick because I didn’t want me to jinx me, lol.  Twenty minutes later, I was the proud owner of tickets to Blizzcon 2013! Woot!

This is my first Blizzcon I’ll be attending, so I’m pretty excited.  I think it’ll be awesome to be there live for the new announcements, like maybe the next WoW expansion, Diablo expansion or even the new Titan project.  And lots of swag to buy too, Chewy’s already said he’s gonna be spending a lot on that, lol.  I’m also looking forward to meeting some of the Blizzard crew, WoW Insider staff and my fellow bloggers who will be in attendance. =)

Hmmm, all this Blizzcon ticket talk….maybe I should start making my plane and lodging arrangements now, huh?