Author: Carach

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And we’re off….

So, Battle For Azeroth has kicked off, and with a bang. I am very impressed with everything I’ve seen in the expansion so far. The opening cinematics were beautiful, the new zones are amazing, and the quests are fun with only a few of the “Go get me 2 of these and 4 of those” sorts of thing. There is even a funny escort quest, which I generally dislike, where you have to escort a drunk man to a new town. Some of his dialogue made me laugh out loud.

At the end of Legion, I was more or less maining a Death Knight and had decent success with him. Before the artifact weapons started getting their final power boost, I was able to tank +15 mythics and even finish them within the timer at least some of the time. For this expansion, at least to start, I am going to be maining a protection warrior. I didn’t play my warrior all that much in Legion but I have been playing a “baby” warrior when there wasn’t much left I wanted to do and I really enjoyed it so I decided to play it more seriously.

The guild is going well and we more or less hung together through the end of the expansion slump and we have an intact mythic group ready to go once we all get to 120 and are geared up. We should definitely be ready with mythic+ opens up in a few weeks.

To end the first day of the expansion, we took a run through one of the new dungeons, Shrine of the Storm. We didn’t have much of a clue as to what we were doing, but we made it through with no deaths and got a couple folks their second piece of Azerite gear.

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Death Knight Guides

It probably won’t come as a surprise that I watch a fair number of videos about WoW. I play enough characters that I need to rely on the work of other folks to figure out what the best gear, stats, rotations, and so forth are.

Other than Icy Veins, a great site for all this stuff, a new favorite of mine is Preach Gaming on Youtube. A couple of months ago he started posting class guides for every spec for 7.2.5 and beyond. What I really like about his guides is that he explains how things like talents, artifact weapon traits, and abilities all interact. This gives a good grounding for not only what talents you should take in different situations, and different situations call for different talents, but WHY you should be taking them.

Since I found them useful, I thought I would post them here where folks can find them more easily. He posted them in alphabetical order, so I will do the same, starting with Death Knights.

 

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Tomb of Sargeras (LFR), Raidbots, and SimCraft

With the second wing of Tomb of Sargeras open in LFR, chances are improving to get two and four piece set bonuses from tier gear.  My guild, Învictus, isn’t able to run Tomb of Sargeras on normal yet, not enough people, so those of us who can, run Tomb on LFR. The problem is that for many of us, we already have gear with an ilevel higher than what the base level is in LFR (885). Despite this, it is still worthwhile to run Tomb on LFR for the following reasons:

  • Running with your guildies. This one should be obvious.
  • There is a chance to get upgraded gear. I have seen drops in LFR for Tomb of Sargeras titanforge up to 915, which is pretty danged good and likely higher than most gear any of us have other than legendaries and artifact weapon.
  • Set bonuses. As I mentioned at the start, it is getting easier to get set bonuses and have more options for forming them to make the best of your gear. Even if the gear you get is a lower ilevel than what you currently have, the set bonus could make it an upgrade. For example, on my monk, I just got two pieces of her tier gear. One piece is 5 ilevels less than the gear I had equipped and the other is 15 ilevels lower. (I got unlucky on getting any sort of upgrade.) You might think that I would be taking a hit of I equipped the tier pieces, but you would be wrong. Despite the lower ilevels, the tier pieces should give me about a 1% increase in dps. (The ret spec on my paladin sees a 3% increase in dps for a similar loss in ilevels.)

You may be wondering how I can know it is a 1% increase, and that brings me to SimCraft and Raidbots. SimCraft is a program you can download that allows you to run simulations on your character to see what sort of damage you could, in theory, be doing against a given type of boss.  There is also an addon that works with it that allows you to copy and paste a data string with your character data from the game into the program. This allows you to more easily run sims on different combinations of gear.

Raidbots does all the SimCraft does, but rather than being a program on your computer, which will take up system resources if you try to run the simulation while still in the game, it runs in the cloud and it runs much faster than SimCraft does on my computer. The downside, if you want to call it that, is there is sometimes a queue of folks using it (I’ve seen it as high as 150 or so) but the servers get through it pretty quickly. You can also copy and paste the output from the SimCraft addon into Raidbots to compare sets of gear easily.

Raidbots has a lot of features that are worth playing around with but don’t get too caught up in it. It is just a tool to help you pick the right gear for your character, not something to start stressing over. Always remember the game is supposed to be fun.

You can find the SimCraft addon on Twitch and you can find Raidbots at raidbots.com.

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Învictus In Halls of Valor, Mythic +2

In what I believe was our first full guild mythic+ run, we took on Halls of Valor +2. For 3 of the 5 boss fights, things went smooth, but two gave us some headaches.

For the first boss, it took us a few tries to get a handle on the dragons that drop lightning on the bridge. I think in the future if we stand between pillars we will be able to get out of it quicker and then pull the boss to where the lightning was dropped as it doesn’t appear to drop twice in a row in the same spot.

For Odyn, it took us way too long to realize that it wasn’t Odyn’s AOE attack that was taking us out but rather spells cast by the add that Odyn summons not long before he draws everyone in and casts his AOE. Once we figured that out and focussed him down AND interrupted his spell casting, we finished the fight easily.

For the future, we may want to decide ahead of time in what order people are interrupting so as not to waste them.

Despite not beating the timer, we had a lot of fun, well I had a lot of fun, figuring out what we needed to do and then doing it.

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Învictus Saturday Guild Run

Since Învictus had already completed our 7 dungeon runs for the guild challenge, we decided to try doing a mythic instead for our guild run on July 8th. Sadly, only 4 members were online at run time, but we decided to try and 4-man one, Darkheart Thicket.

The run went very smoothly from my, the healer’s, point of view with just a bit of hectic action on some of the bigger trash pulls and on the third boss. The downdraft is quite strong and it was difficult to not hatch the eggs around the side.

We finished with no wipes and I even got a small upgrade of a relic.

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Învictus Wednesday Guild Runs

We are definitely making progress on our guild runs. Tonight we had more than enough people for a guild run so we split into two groups to knock out our guild dungeon challenge faster. With seven guild members showing up for runs we are pretty danged close to having enough to start doing normal raids and pugging the last two folks we would need.

Between the two groups, we completed all seven of the dungeon runs and made 2800 gold for the guild bank to offset repair costs.

The dungeons we ran were:

  • Black Rook Hold – one group did regular, the other heroic
  • Darkheart Ticket – one group ran this twice on regular
  • Neltharion’s Lair – regular
  • Violet Hold – regular
  • Lower Karazhan – heroic
  • Court of Stars – heroic (Unfortunately we didn’t get credit for this one. One of our guildies had an emergency just before the last boss so wasn’t present when it was killed, so we only had two members for that boss.)

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July 1st Guild Runs

We had our regularly scheduled Saturday guild runs last night. I actually remembered that we could fly to the instance rather than just using the group finder so we were able to run heroics, which not all the party members could qualify for (though they did by the end of the night).

We ended up doing three runs: Darkheart Thicket, Neltharion’s Lair, and, nobody’s favorite, Eye of Azshara. The runs were all pretty smooth and by the end of the night, we were able to do our last run via the group finder to get a bit more of a bonus.

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Guild Runs

Now that Învictus has a couple semi-regular runs going, I’d like to find out what days (and times) are good for people to do guild runs. My goal is for the guild to eventually (sooner rather than later) start doing 10-man raids, but to do that, I need to know what days work best for people.

Please complete the poll below. If a time of day isn’t specified, assume that it is the time of our current scheduled runs, 7:15 pm server time.

(Maximum of four choices)

Guild Run Days

View Results

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Legendaries and Legendaries, Oh My

With the release of Tomb of Sargeras, the new legendaries have been released with an ilevel of 970, compared to 940 of previous legendaries. Also released was a method to raise the ilevel of existing legendaries to the new level, 940 to 970.

I spent time after my LFR runs yesterday trying to get enough writhing essences, you need 50, to upgrade one of my legendaries. You get the essences from raid bosses and the caches you get for completing the sets of world quests.

I had gotten a number of essences from my LFR runs and I had a couple sets of world quests to complete, three actually. The second set I completed was in Stormheim, and imagine my surprise when I got this from my cache.

Even after getting that, I still had to finish my last set of world quests in Suramar to finally get the last essences. Once I had my 50, I turned that quest in and used the reward item to upgrade my other legendary chest piece for my tank spec.

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LFR – The Gates of Hell

Yesterday was the first day when the first wing of the Tomb of Sargeras raid was open, the Gates of Hell. I have raided in the past, the way back past of Burning Crusade, and I got to where I enjoyed 10-man raiding (Karazhan and Zul’Aman). I had done larger raids a couple of times but found it too confusing to be enjoyable.

Despite this, I decided to queue up for an LFR run in the Gates of Hell. I believe it ended up being a 25-man raid (if I was counting correctly) and it really was a lot of fun. There wasn’t a ton of trash to fight through, which was nice, and the bosses were interesting. (It does make me wonder how “nerfed” the bosses are for LFR compared to even normal mode.)

I did get a piece of tier gear from the final boss. Sadly it is about 15 ilevels below my current gear, though Pawn shows it as a slight upgrade from my Holy off-spec. I will definitely need to do some research about how set bonuses figure in gear rankings, i.e. how much do set bonuses offset a lower gear level.