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!

Friday Fun Night – Doing the Dragon Soul

Last week’s Friday Fun Night was held in Dragon Soul, which most of the raid hadn’t seen since the end of Cataclysm.  Our purpose there was to finish up the Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider achievement to get our Twilight Harbringer drakes, maybe for transmog gear, but definitely for fun.  I invited Chewy’s rogue, Stunnah, to come along to finish up his Fangs of the Father daggers that we never got to complete back in Cata.  Along with Stunnah, we had Slice, Lyss, Zari, Bocat, Van, Vaunt (Tyledres‘ fresh level 90 warlock that she leveled up in our guild) and our fellow Frostee friends, Navi and Lushnek.  Almost a blogger’s paradise, looks like Stunnah and Lushnek need a blog, ya?

We started the night with a quick clear of Heroic Throne of the Four Winds to complete the last achievement for Navi’s and Lush’s Glory of the Cataclysm Raider meta, then it was a quick port to the Caverns of Time to begin our Dragon Soul run.  Navi and Lush already completed the Dragon Soul meta with their guild back in Cataclysm, but they still came along and offered to help us with DS.

Morchok was first and we left him on normal so that the Don’t Stand So Close to Me achievement would be easier to get for those that needed it, but we burned him down so fast that we didn’t even get a black blood phase.  Maybe we could have done him on Heroic, but I wasn’t sure if bringing out Kohcrom would complicate things, since we were only going with one tank for the night.

We then went to Warlord Zon’ozz and did him on normal to get a clean Ping Pong Champion.  We only needed 10 bounces, but because of a few dps that didn’t move behind Zon’ozz, I think we ended up bouncing the Void of Unmaking at least 12 or 13 times, lol.

Next was Yor’sahj the Unsleeping, who we did flip to Heroic to give those who needed Taste the Rainbow! a better chance at more color combinations having four oozes up.  I already had the achievement, just needed the Heroic kill.

As we made our way to Hagara the Stormbinder, Navi whispered me about the Holding Hands achievement, which we didn’t have, and said that it was her favorite one to do.  She even said that we didn’t have to kill the boss to get it, so I figured we’d go for it and then wipe afterwards to kill her on Heroic.  Navi and Lush positioned us for the achievement and we made a cool looking lightning chain in the shape of a U, which I forgot to take a screenshot of. ><

Ultraxion, the bane of the extra button pushing (or Ultra-Zion, as someone in the guild called him in the past, like he was from the Matrix movie lol), was next.  I might be mistaken, but I think we tried to do this on Heroic back when DS was current as this was supposed to be the second easiest Heroic fight after Heroic Morchok.  We came close before, but just couldn’t get him down.  This time though, it was much easier…even though some people still died to Hour of Twilight or Fading Light, lol.  We only had 2 or 3 Hour of Twilights to worry about, so Minutes to Midnight was also easy to get.

The corrupt Tauren, Warmaster Blackhorn, was next up.  We tried to get Deck Defender for some, but we let a Twilight Barrage explode on the ship, so we just downed him on Heroic instead.  It was cool to see Blackthorn’s mount, Goriona, land on the ship too, a neat addition to the fight on Heroic.

We were gonna do Spine and Madness of Deathwing on Heroic, but Lushnek mentioned that in order to do it, we would have to have done all the bosses on Heroic, which we did not do for Morchok and Zon’ozz.  So instead, we did them both on normal and started Madness on Alexstrasza’s platform to knockout the second part of Chromatic Champion.

All in all, it was another fun night raiding old content.  We’ll definitely be back here for at least another two weeks, maybe more (Stunnah needs 45 more Elemental Gem Clusters and a Deathwing Kill to finish up the legendaries).  I think most of us need Zon’ozz on Heroic and the final two platforms, Nozdormu and Kalecgos, for Chromatic Champion left to get our mounts.  And even though Spine and Madness of Deathwing on Heroic are not needed for the meta, I’m pretty sure everyone wants that sweet title, Savior of Azeroth, off Madness.  Thanks again to Navi and Lush for coming along and helping us with our kills and achievements and I’ll see everyone this Friday for more Dragon Soul raiding. =)

Friday Fun Night – Shadow Wolves Raids T11 and T12

Lyss and I had a discussion a couple of weeks ago about organizing a fun guild night where we would do things like raid old content or farming dino bones on the Isle of Giants, all while chatting it up and laughing on vent.  We wanted to do this to bring in more guild interaction on our off raid nights and to also break up the monotony of wiping on progression bosses, week in and week out *cough*Horridon*cough*.  The last time SR did a fun night like this was back in January, where we raided T11 and in one night, killed Heroic Cho’gall, Heroic Al’Akir, Heroic Nefarian and even Sinestra.

Our first fun raid night was scheduled two Fridays ago, with the intentions of finishing up the T11 achievees for the Glory of the Cataclysm Raider.  We had 9 SR peeps sign up for the event (me, Van, Bocat, Slice, Lyss, Shirl, Zari, Adoe and Shadeey), and so I asked Navi earlier in the day if she wanted to come.  She said she was still missing a lot of the T11 achievees, so it was a definite yes for her.  Adoe and Shadeey weren’t able to make it to the raid that night, so Navi brought in Lushnek and Exray from her guild to fill out the remaining spots.

We started the night with Bastion of Twilight and left it on Heroic the whole way through.  Halfus ran over me like a truck and I died once, but came back quick to finish the fight.  I honestly think we ended the fight not releasing any of the drakes…maybe that could have helped out a little, lol.

Two of the few achievements I had left for the meta came on the next fight, the twin dragons Valiona and Theralion.  We barely got the Double Dragon achievement as we killed the last Twilight Fiend just in time before the Twilight Realm team died.

The Ascendant Council was next;  I remember reading about how this was the hardest Heroic encounter back in Cataclysm.  They didn’t stand a chance to our army of 90s.

We tried to get The Abyss Will Gaze Back Into You on the Cho’gall fight, but with the additional adds and all the bad going out to deal with, we couldn’t keep the corruption levels low enough.  So we avoided that achievement and just killed him for those who needed the Heroic kill.

A few people hadn’t seen the Sinestra fight before, so after explaining a little bit of the fight and handing out assignments, we managed to one-shot her, getting some people their Dragonslayer titles.

Next up was Blackwing Descent.  Again, we did the whole raid on Heroic and it went pretty smoothly, except for a couple of hiccups on Heroic Nefarian.  We did have another close achievee call by just getting Nef to 50% before he landed in Phase 3 to get Keeping it in the Family.

Oh, and I finally got the best temporary title in the game during the Heroic Maloriak encounter.  I managed to stay alive this time around, helping those that needed the Aberrant Behavior achievement and not getting blown up by the adds and bad.  Looking at this title makes me feel like I just killed some of Gru’s unfortunate friends from Despicable Me, lol.

We ended the night working on the Stay Chill achievement in Throne of the Four Winds, but it was getting late and we had trouble getting our stacks up, so we left it for the next fun raid night.

– – – – – –

So last Friday, we headed back to T11 land.  Our raid comp was a little different from the prior week, with Chewy coming in on his Drak shammy, Smutt, in place of Shirl.  Navi said that Exray wouldn’t be able to make it, and so we brought in another fellow Frostee, Luxygaga.  We started in BoT again, this time doing everything on Normal, even Cho’gall, to make the run quicker and the achievement easier to get.

We then went to BWD to get the last part of Achieve-a-tron for Van and killed Atramedes for some transmog gear for Navi.

Then it was off to Tot4W again to finish up the meta.  We tried different strats to get everyone the correct amount of Wind Chill stacks and after a few attempts, the achievement was finally ours.

And with that, my meta was complete.

The reward for completing this meta is another directional Wind drake mount, the Reins of the Drake of the East Wind, which is a really nice-looking red drake.

We finished Tot4W by killing Al’Akir on Heroic for those who needed the “of the Four Winds” title.

Since we finished T11 so quick, Lyss suggested that we go to T12 for a quick Firelands run to get the “Firelord” title.  I had gotten my title in an OpenRaid run last year and I remembered how crazy and hectic that fight was, especially to see a Leggy Rags running around, so I was eager to hear what the rest of the group thought about it when we got to him.  Luxy mentioned before we got to Firelands that she solo’d Alysrazor earlier in the week farming for the mount and that we wouldn’t be able to see the Firebird, but we decided to go through with it anyways.  One by one, each Heroic boss fell; Shannox, Beth’tilac, Rhyolith, Baleroc and Staghelm.

I did want to test out something with the Baleroc fight.  With such high health pools in MoP, I wanted to see how high I could stack my health on the gatekeeper.  I was already at 700K HP before the fight started and hoped to hit 2 million HP by the end, but I didn’t quite reach it.  I got pretty damn close to it, though, Like a (Mini-Raid) Boss!

In order to see Heroic Rags, you have to kill every other boss on Heroic, so when we got to his Lair, of course Rags was nowhere to be found.  So we flipped the raid to Normal and just burned him down quick, no pun intended.  We even had Seeds, Sons of Flame and Scions all at the same time as we transitioned into phase 3. =P

It was nice to blast those achievements out of the way and I had a good time hanging out with everyone.  We’re planning to do Dragon Soul achievements this Friday and maybe we can also get some Firelord titles too.  Thanks again to the Frostees for joining us for the runs and grats to everyone on their achievements!