Blacksmithing, Reborn

Rejoice, fellow Blacksmiths, Patch 5.2 and the Isle of Thunder has finally given us a daily cooldown for our profession and the ability to learn new recipes!  These new recipes allow us to create PvP armor and new “Reborn” weapons; weapons that were learned back when Blacksmithing had the Weaponsmithing specializations, which was even more specialized to Hammer-, Axe- and Swordsmithing.  These specializations were removed at the beginning of Cataclysm because of their complexity, so if you didn’t have the plans before, you were out of luck making these weapons….until now.

Making these Reborn weapons requires several bars of a new reagent, the Lightning Steel Ingot, 2 to 3 bars of Living Steel and 3 Spirits of Harmony.

To begin making the Lightning Steel Ingot, you first have to obtain a quest item, a Strange Metal Ingot, from Itoka, the Master of the Forge, located on the Isle of Thunder.  He first becomes available once your realm opens up Stage 4 of the Isle.

Once you have the quest item, you turn it in by reading one of the books in the Thunder Forge, which is located just north of Itoka.

Completing the quest rewards you with your first Lightning Steel Ingot and the Notes of Lightning Steel.  Opening the Notes provides you with the plans to create more Lightning Steel Ingots as well as the six “new” weapons I previously mentioned.  They are:

• Drakefist Hammer, Reborn
• Fireguard, Reborn
• Lionheart Blade, Reborn
• Lunar Crescent, Reborn
• The Planar Edge, Reborn
• Thunder, Reborn

The Reborn Weapons

These Reborn weapons are of rare quality and have an item level of 463, which would be perfect for fresh level 90 toons.  They are Bind on Equip, so you can craft these for your friends and fellow guildies or even sell them on the Auction House.  You can also mog these weapons if you prefer that instead.  Here are previews of each of the Reborn weapons.

EDIT: I just found out that you do need to use the anvils at the Thunder Forge to create any of the Reborn weapons.  Guess you have to make the trip out there after all, lol.

Drakefist Hammer, Reborn – this one-handed mace with spirit can be useful for Holy Paladins, Elemental/Restoration Shamans, Balance/Restoration Druids, Priests and Mistweaver Monks.

Fireguard, Reborn – this one-handed sword with agility can be useful for Rogues and Brewmaster/Windwalker Monks.

Lionheart Blade, Reborn – this two-handed sword with strength can be useful for Retribution Paladins, Blood/Unholy/Frost Death Knights, and Arms/Fury Warriors.

Lunar Crescent, Reborn – this two-handed axe with strength can also be useful for Retribution Paladins, Blood/Unholy/Frost Death Knights, and Arms/Fury Warriors.

The Planar Edge, Reborn – this one-handed axe with strength can be useful for Protection Paladins, Protection Warriors and Frost Death Knights.

Thunder, Reborn – this two-handed mace with agility can be useful for Guardian/Feral Druids.

Once you’ve created a Reborn weapon, you automatically learn how to create its upgraded version, which requires the Reborn weapon and additional Lightning Steel Ingots, Living Steel and Spirits of Harmony to make.  These upgraded weapons are epic quality and have an item level of 476.  They are:

• Drakefist Hammer, Reborn gets upgraded to Dragonmaw, Reborn
• Fireguard, Reborn gets upgraded to Blazeguard, Reborn
• Lionheart Blade, Reborn gets upgraded to Lionheart Champion, Reborn
• Lunar Crescent, Reborn gets upgraded to Mooncleaver, Reborn
• The Planar Edge, Reborn gets upgraded to Black Planar Edge, Reborn
• Thunder, Reborn gets upgraded to Deep Thunder, Reborn

And you can even upgrade these weapons one more time!  Once you’ve created these upgrades, you automatically learn how to create its final version, which requires the Reborn weapon and even more Lightning Steel Ingots, Living Steel and Spirits of Harmony to make.  These upgraded weapons are still epic quality and have an item level of 502.  They are:

• Dragonmaw, Reborn gets upgraded to Dragonstrike, Reborn
• Blazeguard, Reborn gets upgraded to Blazefury, Reborn
• Lionheart Champion, Reborn gets upgraded to Lionheart Executioner, Reborn
• Mooncleaver, Reborn gets upgraded to Bloodmoon, Reborn
• Black Planar Edge, Reborn gets upgraded to Wicked Edge of the Planes, Reborn
• Deep Thunder, Reborn gets upgraded to Stormherald, Reborn

….yeah, I’ll be crafting Lighting Steel Ingots for a while, just to learn all these new plans, lol.

So what weapon will I make first?  I like the look of the Lionheart Blade out of the six Reborn weapons and I probably won’t see a two-handed strength weapon drop for Arv unless I start running LFR as Retribution, so that’ll be the first weapon that gets made.

The Lightning Steel Ingot Cooldown

To craft all these Reborn weapons and to learn all the new plan is going to take a lot of Lightning Steel Ingots.  Creating a Lightning Steel Ingot requires 10 Ghost Iron bars and can only be made once a day.  At first, I thought these special Ingots could only be created at the Thunder Forge, but you can actually create them with any anvil you find, which is very convenient.  Thank God they are not like making the Dark Iron Bars from Vanilla WoW, which requires you to use the special Dark Iron Forge in Blackrock Depths to be smelted.

For every Ingot you make, you learn a new armor plan, either for PvP or PvE, similar to how Tailors learn their new plans from their Imperial Silk cooldowns.  So far, the only PvE plan I’ve learned is the Holy Paladin ilvl 522 boots, the Haunted Steel Greaves.  I have a handful of PvP plans learned, a couple of ilvl 458 Paladin ones (Crafted Dreadful Gladiator’s Ornamented Legplates and Crafted Dreadful Gladiator’s Scaled Helm) and some of the ilvl 458 Death Knight Crafted Dreadful Gladiator’s Desecration set. Crafting the PvP only requires Ghost Iron Bars, none of the precious Lighting Steel Ingots, whew.  The Death Knight set looks really cool, I’m tempted to make the set for Arv for transmog once I get the rest of the plans.

So, fellow blacksmiths, we finally get a second chance to create some old-school weapons and upgrade them to fit the current content.  Get those hammers ready and keep the anvil hot, we’ve got lots of work to do!

Ma Ma Ma My Monara

As if the trash leading to Horridon wasn’t annoying enough, now we have to deal with this bitch, lol.

After dispatching Jin’rokh Tuesday night, we moved on to deal with the Tormented Spirit trash like we normally do when we noticed a giant quest marker hovering over the first set of stairs.  Walking towards it, we were presented with a quest, Requiem for a Queen, that asked us to put someone named Monara to rest.  Here is a description of the quest:

A chilling breeze sweeps across your body, bringing with it a haunting drape of sadness. Your soul sinks as you hear the faint, melodic cries of Monara, the last Queen of the Mogu.
Her sweet requiem creeps through the air, bending and shaping itself into a spectral hand, reaching for your heart. As it grabs hold, you see a brief flash of Monara’s last moments… her brutal murder by the hand of Lei Shen.
Song turns to sadness and Monara weeps, wailing louder and louder into the darkness.

We then realized we encountered something we haven’t seen since the days of raiding back in Wrath, the weekly raid quests.  Remember when we were tasked with killing Flame Leviathan, or Lord Marrowgar or the snow giant before Lootship or keeping Donovan alive during the Lady Deathwhisperer fight for the week and you got bonus Badges for it?  Yep, these weeklies are back, and for completing the quest, you are rewarded with the Spoils of the Thunder King, which contains gold and either a Blood Spirit or Mote of Harmony. No bonus Valor though, booooo.

So where do you find Monara?  She hovers over the platform after the first set of Tormented Spirits, where the giant Golem usually is.  Be aware of her Shadow Nova ability, which will blast anyone within a short-range of her a ways back.  We learned this the hard way, as most of us got knocked off the platform to our deaths.  After a few attempts and multiple deaths, someone read a forum post that said Monara can be pulled all the way back to Jin’rokh’s room to make killing her easier.

So our normal 20-30 minute Horridon trash turned into close to an hour of frustration.  And that frustration was made worse as we didn’t make significant progress on Horridon himself.  I hate this boss, lol.

Wednesday night, we decided to change it up a bit and do a quick clear of Terrace to get some upgrades that people could use.  And since most of us were swimming in Elder Charms from doing dailies on the Isle of Thunder, this would give us a better chance at getting those upgrades.

To throw a little fun into the mix, Lyss and I gave anyone who healed the Enchanted Plant and kept it alive during the Tsulong encounter 500 gold a piece, for a total of 1000 gold.  I threw a couple heals on the Plant and even Shadeey got into the action by bandaging it in between phases too, lol.  Easy achievement is easy.

We made quick work of the rest of Terrace, one-shotting the whole raid and some people got a few upgrades.  I even got my normal version of my Sha-touched weapon, Kilrak, Jaws of Terror, from the Sha of Fear to replace my raid finder one.  But I won’t be using though, the one-handed axe I got from Jin’rokh, the Worldbreaker’s Stormscythe, has better stats and a much higher ilvl.  I might need to revisit it laster to see if socketing Kilrak with the legendary gem and upgrading the weapon in 5.3 will make a difference.

After Terrace, we made our way back to Throne of Thunder to work on Horridon a bit.  As we were getting ready to kill the respawned Horridon trash, Wok noticed that Shirl was on the Isle of Giants and he asked if she was killing Oondasta.  She said yes, but the raid she was in had just wiped and were reforming for another shot at the giant T-Rex.  We made a quick decision to head out there for some possible ilvl 522 gear and grabbed Zari along the way.  We made it just in time and killed the beast, with most folks getting their first kills and achievements and even loot.  With 11 of us from the guild in on the kill, we even got the guild achievement too.

So back to ToT we went, killing the trash quickly and Monara again, this time wasting no time and brought her straight into Jin’rokh’s room.  We didn’t get to complete the weekly quest again, even though the giant quest marker sat on the stairs taunting us.

We refined our strategy a little bit on Horridon and we made good progress as we were constantly getting to the fourth door.  We made it past the fourth door once, but by then most of the raid was dead.

Maybe it was the upgrades and/or the Oondasta kill, but to me, the feeling last night felt more enjoyable as we made significant progress and we got lots of loot.  We’re getting close, hopefully we can kill this damned triceratops next week. =)

Heart of Fear Complete!

What an exciting week of raiding for Shadow Rising!  Not only did we manage to get a new boss kill this week, we cleared up Heart of Fear and got two new kills!  Congrats guys on a job well done!  This is reminiscent of the night we finished up Mogu’shan Vaults where our first Elegon kill was followed-up by a Will of the Emperor kill to complete the raid.

This puts Shadow Rising as the only guild on Drak’Tharon with a complete clear of both Mogu’shan Vaults and Heart of Fear on normal mode 10 man.  Woot woot!

Rocked the Un’sok

We starting the raiding week wiping all Tuesday night and some more Wednesday on Amber-Shaper Un’sok.  It took a good amount of attempts to get everyone acclimated to the Mutated Construct driving and the timing on the different abilities.  We tried a couple different strats, including stacking Destabilize on Un’sok as high as we could, before pushing him into phase 2.  But in our kill attempt, we deployed the signature “SR brute force” strat by pushing through each phase without worrying about rolling the Destabilize stacks on either Un’sok or the Amber Monstrosity in the first two phases and making sure that every Amber Explosion was interrupted.  We saved our Bloodlust for phase 3 to maximize dps, especially for those who were already Mutated.  Un’sok went down with only seconds left on the Berserk timer and I think Wok, Van, Lyss and I were the only ones left standing, lol.

For my troubles and with a lucky Elder Charm of Good Fortune roll, I got a pretty sweet one-handed sword, the Scimitar of Seven Stars.

I wasted no time and after the raid was over, I quickly upgraded it to the 500 ilvl version.  Just a couple more Valor points and I should be able to upgrade it once more to 504.

Eliminating the Empress

Honestly, I don’t remember much of the Grand Empress Shek’zeer fight, it was kind of a blur to me, maybe I was tired lol.  All I remember is that it was a tank and spank fight; Wok and I tanking the Empress and then the both us getting spanked and owned by the adds, lmao.

The ranged and healers did a really good job in handling the Dissonance Fields and Zug threw out his banners to help with the damage when the Fields died.   Wok and I did a tank swap at every 4 stacks of Eye of the Empress, if you get a fifth stack, bad things happen (more on that in a bit).

The problem we were running into was when the adds came out.  In phase 2, the Empress goes and hides and sends us 2 Reavers and 6 Windblades split into two groups for us to deal with.  The damage that they deal on the tanks is pretty insane, you have to utilize every CD you have and healers have to give everything they’ve got to keep them up.  We even had Adoe kite a few of them for a bit just so Wok and I could get some breathing room.  Once Wok and I got the adds under control, the rest of the raid made their Amber Traps from the Sticky Resin on the floor so we could trap the Reavers.  After all the adds are killed, the Empress comes back out and the cycle starts all over again.

Because of our dps, we were able to get the Empress down to 30% and into phase 3 before we got another wave of adds.  This phase got really hectic and I really don’t remember all of the abilities the Empress does, but she still continues applying that Eye of the Empress debuff on the tanks, so tank swapping is still needed.  Remember when I said that bad stuff happens when you get 5 stacks of the debuff?  Yeah, you get mind-controlled by the Empress and it doesn’t wear off until you are killed.  It happened to Wok when he accidentally taunted off me and he turned and started going to town on the rest of the raid.  All is not lost, though.  I called over vent to kill Wok and have him brezzed quickly.  The dps took him out quick and Wok was able to come back in time to taunt the Empress off me.  The funny thing was Zarm thought it was a wipe when Wok got MC’d and actually stopped healing for a bit.  Silly Zarm, it ain’t over until the fat panda sings (good thing Sorak’s mic was turned off, ha!).

After that quick recovery, it was just a matter of time before the Empress went down, no flirting with the Berserk timer either!

In the pic above from left to right is: Adoe, his pet Gurgie, Sorak, Zarm, Van, me, Zug’s big daddy, Liyhe, Zug, Lyss, Wok and Shadeey.

An awesome week with my awesome guildies, what more can you ask for?  =)  Next stop, Terrace of Endless Spring!

Mogu’shan Vaults Complete!

After weeks and weeks of working in Mogu’shan Vaults and getting stuck on the roadblock that is Elegon, Shadow Rising finally killed him and the Will of the Emperor Wednesday night.  Congrats guys!

Gone, Gone, Gone Elegon!

I honestly don’t see why this guy isn’t the final boss of MSV, lol.  But I was excited that we killed him in our second attempt of the night!  The raid has to be near-perfect in executing all aspects of this fight to beat the enrage timer, which we were 40 seconds away from in our kill.  I won’t go through much detail on the fight and Khizzara has a great post about it here, but I’ll summarize a couple of things that we did.

Phase 1 - We quickly pushed Elegon to 85% while only getting two Celestial Protectors up.
Phase 2 – We had Adoe, Zug, Wok and Van on the left side of the room to dps down the Energy Charges, while Sorak, Shadeey, Lyss, Slice, Zarm and I took down the Charges on the right.  We managed five waves of Charges, giving us a 50% damage bonus against Elegon.
Phase 3 – We brought all the Cosmic Sparks to the center console and once the platform came back, Wok took Elegon while I grabbed the Sparks and used Holy Wrath to stun them and had the dps finish them off on the platform.

For the second cycle of Phase 2, we went with only four waves of Charges to make sure that we had enough time to dps Elegon in the burn phase.  We saved our Bloodlust for the burn phase and as our raid team fell one by one, we finally killed Elegon with only Wok, Van, Sorak and me left standing.  Whew!

Elegon dropped the 2-handed sword, Starshatter, and I got lucky with my Elder Charm bonus roll and looted the 1-handed axe, Elegion, the Fanged Crescent.

SR Breaks the Will of the Emperor

The Will of the Emperor fight is a much easier fight than Elegon, I think it took us 4 or 5 attempts while Elegon was like 50-60 attempts or something like that, lol.  The fight is all about add management and the tank’s ability to Dance with the Bosses™.

There are three types of adds that spawn throughout the fight and should be prioritized in the following order:

Emperor’s Courage – these medium-sized adds spawn from either the west or east side of the room and focus on a tank on the opposite end.  If they reach a tank, they will place a debuff on them that will slowly cause the tank to be immobile.  These adds should be dps’d from behind, as the huge shield they carry prevent all damage from the front.

Emperor’s Strength – these large-sized adds spawn halfway between the sides and the center of the room.  They can be essentially tanked by anyone, as they do no melee damage to whoever has aggro on them.  These mobs perform a circular smash in front of them, which is visible on the floor and should be avoided, otherwise you will be hit for a high amount of damage and stunned for a couple of seconds.

Emperor’s Rage – these smaller-sized adds spawn in the north side of the room and will fixate on a random raid member.  These adds are affected by all forms of CC and only do moderate damage.

After a minute and a half from the start of the fight, the two bosses, Jan-xi and Qin-xi, appear and must be picked up by the tanks immediately.  Jan-xi and Qin-xi both share a health pool, so the dps can attack either, no matter where you are in the room while controlling the adds.  We took towards the southwest and southeast corners of the room, to give room for the dps and healers and to avoid the bosses’ attacks.

Each boss will perform a Devastating Combo, where they will swing their weapons in arcs.  They will swing in arcs to their left, right and in front of them.  Every time you are hit by an arc, you will not only take massive damage, but also get a 10% armor debuff that stacks.  Both bosses will also do a Stomp during the Devastating Combo, which will do damage and stun anyone around them for a couple of seconds.  Both bosses will do five arc swings/stomps during Devastating Combo and are random.  From what I saw last night, the boss will generally perform an arc swing to the left or right first.

If you manage to “dance” with the boss successfully, you will gain an extra ability called Opportunistic Strike, which gives you a special button in the middle of your screen.  You can only use it once and it will instantly do 500,000 to the boss.  It’s important to get these as much as you can as it will help the dps tremendously.

During the fight, the room will fill up with Titan Gas, which will do AoE damage to the raid and increase the damage of the adds and bosses.  It will also increase the damage of your melee dps and tanks, so this is a good time to pop all defensive and offensive CDs as well as Bloodlust.  This will last for about 20 seconds and will happen four times, with the last one remaining in the room until the bosses are killed.

Since Wok and I were on Jan-xi and Qin-xi the whole time, it was important that we got as many Opportunistic Strikes as we could.  The first few attempts I did horrible, only managing 1 or 2 Strikes per attempt, while Wok was killing it with 5 and 6.  We had a really good attempt where we both had 5 and 6 strikes and I think I managed to get off 7 on our kill.

So, MSV is finally complete!  Now we can work on getting our mantid on and get us a Grand Empress Shek’zeer kill in Heart of Fear!

Shared Topic: Three Must-Haves

This week’s Shared Topic from Blog Azeroth comes from Mataoka who asks:

…with the new patch, and all the new things coming, what are three things that you will absolutely not leave behind? Consider these three objects your virtual backpack- the twist is, a tiny story to go along with each item.

I have A LOT of things, lol.  If I don’t get bigger bags soon or more storage space, I won’t be able to add anything new anyways.  The three must-haves listed below all represent a different aspect of WoW that I enjoy.

Aesir’s Edge

I kind of touched on why this sword is important to me here, even to this day.  It’s a reminder to me of the one aspect of WoW that I love the most: raiding.  This sword is what fueled my passion to learn how to raid and become a good raider.

The Flag of Ownership

Arv and Adoe give the Alliance….Two Thumbs Down!

The flag also represents another aspect of WoW that I’ve been enjoying recently, PvP.  For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how to use this TCG item.  I would kill countless mobs, trying to stick this flag into their bodies to no avail.  Then I figured out that this could only be used in a PvP setting.  So I started to do a little PvPing back in early Wrath just to use this flag.  And I was having a good time using it, lol.  I took a break from PvPing for most of Cataclysm, but I picked it up again after D3 came out and most of my guildies were burned out from Dragon Soul.

D.I.S.C.O.

Dance, Garrosh!

The third and last thing I would take with me would be the D.I.S.C.O.  This represents the third aspect of WoW that I enjoy: having fun.  I like the TCG items that others can interact with.  This fun toy can be helpful in breaking up the monotony in between pulls and/or wipes in raids, waiting to cap the flag in a BG, or just having a party with everyone’s favorite faction leader, like in the pic above, lol. =)