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Icecrown Citadel: The Journey to the Lich King

mj1124 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:18:00 GMT

Week 2 of our march through ICC was very rewarding in many ways as we worked through the Plague Wing.

With Week 1 showing promise to some of our top raiders with 1 shots on Lady D, Gunship, and Suarfang, the group was excited to see the progress that could be made after the "warmup" bosses. Yet when we downed the guardian 'Stinky' and reached Festergut, the first of 3 bosses in the new wing, we as a group struggled with the mechanics of spores, transition healing, and taunting off stacks with tanks. Everyone seemed overly excited through the fight, but too many little mistakes and 14 wipes later we called the raid.

Week 2 the Progression group brimming with confidence that we can down anything with the teamwork we have, ran another run through Icecrown Citadel. With 1 shots on the first 4 bosses, we can say that we now have the first 4 on farm. We reached Festergut and on our first try, wiped again because of spores not reaching their places in time and heals not making the healing transition.

Attempt #2 went smooth and also rough. When the 3rd inhale went in, the the whole raid went low on HP, but all heals spammed out AoE at the best possible timing and because of the spores being ran correctly to give out the buff stacks, everyone lived through the first set of Gases and the cycle repeated. The tanks, using their C/D's properly, gave the heals enough time to react between blasts, which allowed all the DPS to stay up and not only DOWN festergut, but beat the enrage timer by 1 full minute. (If you don't already know, he is on a 5 minute enrage with crazy amounts of HP, which means DPS kicked major ass). Great loot dropped and throughout the raid people were getting upgrades to everything, personally Arcanomos got exalted with Ashen Verdict and got a new ring/title, others are very close to it as well.

Our trip over to Rotface did not go as smooth as we hoped, our best attempt got him to 64% and while we were really trying, the amount of coordination that occurs throughout the fight is very high, plus alot of individual damage goes out to different people, putting alot of extra stress on the 3 heals we carry for this group, 2 heals really but we have a dual specced shammy for certain fights such as this. For some reason slimes wouldnt combine, plague missiles were flying, and kiters...well couldnt kite, we wiped maybe 10 times and decided to break away from him.

To mix it up we took a shot at Dreamwalker, more for a glimpse at the fight not so much a serious attempt. Needless to say everyone was everywhere and it was pretty much everyone for themselves, many many adds constantly coming all with raid killing abilities, all the while healers trying to heal 6million HP on the dragon. Tried 2 times, but didnt get very close at all.

Overall though, I considered this weeks shot a success because we progressed passed festergut. Week 3 of progression is coming up and we hope to down Rotface and make our way to Proffesor Putricide.

Group Composition;

2 Tanks, 2 Heals, 5 DPS, 1 DPS/Heals

Tanks:
DK: Blaksunshine
Warrior: Sekmhet

Heals:
Druid: Chadalick
Disc Priest: Optimumprime or Holy Paladin (Pugged)

Off heals / Ranged DPS: Warcron

DPS:
     Melee:
           DK:       Warzorz
     Ranged:
           Mage:   Arcanomos
           Hunter: Erranttroop
                        Relkash
                        Aruadha

Positions are posted because these are not set in stone, if you want to be a part of this group, show you are better to fill in a position over another person in their role. For example, we have 5 ranged and could exchange 1 for a melee, or if there is a higher dps ranged to join, the lowest dps would switch out for that week. This is not an untouchable group, and people should constantly be trying to be a part of this Guild Leading group.

New CoGM !!!

mj1124 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:46:00 GMT

Congratulations to Sekmhet on being voted the new CoGM role for DoT !

After long voting with it being a close race, Sekmhet won the vote by 1 over Rudely who beat out Erranttroop by 1 vote. We all hope Sek continues our tradition of being a good leader and helpful to the rest of our guild.

Sekmhet has been with the guild for over 8 months and has been with the guild for many guild raid firsts and has contributed more time and help than could be asked of him. His leadership, humor, and inability to purchase a microphone make him a true example of DoT. As GM I personally feel the guild made a great choice in choosing him, and while there were many great choices, Sek has proven yet again that doing the little things for people and giving his time to others pays off.

Thank you again for being so awesome and I hope that you always remember you were the first person ever in this guild to be Guild Voted into a CoGM spot :D

On another happy side note of the voting, Innerlight was made officer during this process. A Master of pvp and dueling, Inner has many followers to do well in this aspect of the game, and therefore through the number of votes he had recieved, we decided in the leadership that he should join the ranks of Apostle.

Onyxia Glitch Cleave and other fails of the night

mj1124 — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:46:00 GMT

Wednesday night we guild raided the weekly Patchwerk, werk werk as usual. Great group overall, probably could have easily cleared Ulduar if it had stuck together after Naxx, anyways, Patch. Go to kill him to do the weekly AND to do our guild shot at the undying achievement, where no single person can die during a raid boss fight. Burned Patch down and some people got the Make Quick Werk of Him achieve.

Go to frogger, no one except Arc dies, twice on slimes, should have been an omen. Get to Grobbulus and its explained when you have the cloud debuff on you to go to the outter ring so all the dps arent standing in it. Well 1 or 2 people laid clouds all around the center and even when trying to blink through it, Arc was felled by poison clouds, immediately ending the achievement shot, BUT the weekly was done, so with no reason to do Naxx, we headed to Ulduar.

Ulduar was funny to start as we had both shamans without the achievement for blowing up the FL turrets, so we decided to go for it. We launched them in the air onto the FL and it was shorted out but somehow 1 shaman was killed while on it. We pyrited it down and moved onto XT. XT was 1 shot as well and a ton of people got nerf engineering and nerf gravity bombs.

Headed to Kologarn and it was a AMAZING save of a 3rd healer from Bosh healing after druids went down to keep raid alive after our 2nd try. Then as we all know...the raid ended at Cat lady, in all fairness we had 2 people not in vent and we didnt stay grouped together for the pull. Not wanting to end on a bad note, we said lets try another raid, Ony10's easy right?

Onyxia, is a douchebag first of all.

Now that thats out, We wiped on Ony the first shot with no whelp control and healer dying right away. Bad start. So we go a 2nd time. For NO reason at all on the pull when shes following the tank to the wall, she somehow cleaves backwards and kills both healers again. Wipe insues. On that wipe we were at least able to laugh at, so we went again, and again whelps overwhelmed. At that point it was getting a bit rough, yet no one said anything, I think probably because they began to focus more after dying so much.
This pull at 2 different times we had a few whelps join the party, but Sek as the OT picked them up and were AoE properly without raid disruption. Ony was downed VERY quickly when the melee controlled the adds and because we had a smart shammy or 2, tremor totems kept anyone from being feared into eggs. Gear dropped for people, Arc lost the bag yet again, and it was a happy night after lots of bad luck.

Moral of the night: Arc fails as a mage tank, likes to get pounced by cat lady, and has no idea where his iceblock button was on Grobbulus. Outfucking standing GM if I must say.

Shouldn't be News...

mj1124 — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 06:13:00 GMT

Think about how many raids there are in WoW, lots right? ok Now take the number of raids we on avg post in the calander to be done as a guild, thats a shit ton of raids left over huh?

Still apparently there is not enough options for some in guild and this requires attention here.

1. The Weekly Raid for the 10 emblems, is ALWAYS posted on the calander, and I am on at night when the new raid is up in Dal. We will try to start doing this on Wednesdays that way you dont have to wait til the end of the week to do it, and if you can't make wednesday, then you have the rest of the week to do it. NO ONE should be getting saved on Tuesday, Tanks and Heals should NOT be getting saved before the guild does their run, as we shouldnt be pugging something we need.

1b. Because of the number of good raiders we have, we will be setting up 2 groups for the weekly now - minus Marrowgar when he is the weekly, sign up for one at least, this past week of the 20th, we had 3 different guild runs of OS10...which means as a guild we had almost 30 people knock out the raid, we could probably have just gone and done the 25 man of OS.

2. If you come to a raid, don't do your own thing, especially if you get called on it multiple times for the same thing and its wiping us over and over, pay attention or let someone in guild have your role that would like to be productive. If you join the guild and bail because you think its not going well, and go level an alt or do something else, expect a demotion as this guild is not about just ditching the people here, were here to have fun, dying isnt fun, but being a prick and ditching guildmates isnt fun either.

3. This really isnt a problem actually but im reitterating it, if you sign up for a raid and you can't make it, please send an in game mail to me, it just helps with planning, the guild is really good about taking care of this, in fact, im probably the worst about being late, but hey im still somewhat loved right?

Hodir, you are a cold cold sunuvabich

mj1124 — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:08:00 GMT

Yes, we hate him more than possibly any raid boss since Hoggar, and as a guild we haven't beat him, mainly due to people not moving, aoe heals not reaching everyone, tanks losing aggro, it seems all the things that a role can fail at, happen at one boss.

The boss has a 10 minute enrage timer which pretty much means a wipe. So it is imperative that your dps is killing the boss and not contantly breaking people free of Flash Freeze. Now periodically during the fight small snowstorms will start falling from the ceiling, and after a few seconds large falling ice will drop to the ground doing massive damage (10k+) and knockback.

Now these little snowstorms are especially important because at Flash Freeze, there are 2 special ones.

Every Flash Freeze there will be 2 special snowstorms that will drop. It is important to note that these 2 storms can appear right on top of each other. So it may look like there is only one at times.

When these appear you need to run up NEXT to them, but NOT ON TOP OF THEM!!! They are about to drop massive blocks of ice “of frosty doom” ™ which will knock you away from them, which is very very very bad. Once they drop, 2 mounds of snow appear. Once they have dropped, you then immediately run and get on top of these fluffy mounds of safety goodness!! <3 They will make you immune to the Flash Freeze. Now sometimes if you are too far on the edge you will get the Flash Freeze anyways, but it’s not a big deal because the snow you’re standing on will get rid of it immediately.

Lastly the boss has two other tricks up his sleeve. He will periodically cast frost novas (dispellable) around the raid and will also buff himself with an uber damage buff. His hands will get all glowy (you cannot miss it) and he stops doing physical damage and does all frost damage. They can still be avoided (dodge/parry), but armor no longer does jack.

How to live through it? If we have a Prot Warrior tanking, he can turn on his spell reflection turn his back to the boss. The Prot War will do like 20k+ damage per Reflection easy. The reason he turns his back is for a dps boost. He will avoid a lot of the damage if he is facing him through avoidance. But since he will not take any damage with reflection up, you don’t want to dodge or parry these attacks. By turning your back to the boss, every hit will land, or in this case, be reflected back at the boss. Turn back around once Reflection is off though.

Important buffs to know in the fight, break these guys out for w/e you are looking for,

Allies:

Mage: Brings dps to the table and also creates campfire zones where casters can stand still without gaining Biting Cold stacks.
Boomkin: Brings dps to the table and also buffs your dps to do more damage.
Priest: Heals for you (or maybe he smites and does dps… *shrug*) and also dispells the AoE frost novas the boss periodically casts.
Elemental Shaman: Brings dps to the table and also buffs your dps to do more damage.

If you are a healer you probably want to know the attacks you are looking out for,

Boss Abilities:

Flash Freeze – It can be avoided by getting on one of two snow mounds that appear right before it is cast. Remember to avoid the falling ice before they are formed or you may be knocked too far away. If it is not avoided then dps must break people free from their prisons.
Biting Cold – It can be avoided entirely by standing next to a fire created by the Mage NPC if it is out, but otherwise you must rely on moving and/or jumping to keep this debuff down to 1 stack.
AoE Frost Nova – It is periodically cast and cannot be avoided except by spreading out well. It can be dispelled.
Frozen Blows - The boss will do *massive* damage versus the tank. His physical hits become “Frost” damage bybassing armor, hitting significantly harder. It is best to use a Prot War so they can reflect the damage back at the boss. But other options like a DK tank with AMA and IBF could work.
Falling Ice – Similar to Gruul, a small swirl of ice and snow will begin to fall to the ground. You must get out of this area (similar to a void zone) or a massive block of ice will fall upon you knocking you back and doing massive damage to you as well (10k+).

Guild First 80 Raid: Obsidian Sanctum 10

mj1124 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:33:00 GMT

I am very proud to say our guild has moved into the Wotlk raid content, and moved in with great success. Our first stop was OS10, no drake. With 8/10 guildies it was a good start to the 80 raiding experience.

Breezing through the mobs, total we only lost 2 people in mobs, exluding the 1 time someone pulled a group RIGHT after we cleared another, but we can omit that part :)

First drake was cake, DPS em down and only 1 died in first fight. Moving to the 2nd drake where we again do NOT enter the portal we lost no one downing her quickly and healers did a great job healing through the whelp adds. The 3rd drake, we rinse and repeated entering the portal and downing his elite add. No deaths on this boss.

Sartharion the final boss was done in 2 attempts, the first try was a little as I knew it would go, people not running from the flame wall, Tank moving Sarth around instead of keeping him still and not fire breathing the raid, it was a wipe, but everyone put up a good fight on it regardless, had him at half health.
2nd try, an 1 of our pugged healers last tries as they had to go for their guild raid, I had macros built for which side the flame wall was coming from. Not 1 person died from Flame Wall, GREAT JOB by the guildies! With Kel tanking Sarth off, Sek was able to tank all the adds perfectly and allowed the DPS to stay up and down Sarth, it took longer than Im used to, but then again it was everyones first time on these toons cept myself, pale, and our pugs. Regardless, the lack of HIGH dps really didnt matter, TOO much is focused on HAVING to have amazing gear for raids, not enough is put on how good the people are at teamwork, which is probably our guilds best quality, and that group definitly proved it.

Raid Drops: Healing trinket, stacks spirit, Thot 1 of our 3 healers won.
T8 piece DK/Rogue/Druid dropped: Kel won, he grabbed tank hands
and the 22 slot bag and jewel bag that always drop, went to Frejhya and Evalina

Outstanding job overall by everyone that went. Next sunday we will ATTEMPT OS+1 drake up, immediately followed by Naxxaramas 10. Please be prepared on the bosses for Naxx if you plan on attending.

NOTE: If we have 15 sign up for OS10, we will pug 10 for OS25 instead.

Kara what?

mj1124 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:16:00 GMT

Karazhan, multiple groups have now gone and fully completed Kara. While Group 1 breezed through, only with a mishap on Aran with all but 1 dying, and people learning the final boss fight. It was smooth and easy achievements for the most part. Epic Clear.

Group 2 ran well up to the blue dragon, but after people crossed lines, it was a quick rehealed dragon to a wipe. 2nd go was a easy clear. The group almost hit a snag when they reached the chess fight. Coming down to a 2 left alive in raid against 5 pieces, with Roxogore as the King piece and Omage healing with a bishop, Roxo's attacks killed their king faster than they could take him down. Reaching the boss, we had a few issues with a certain shaman's goof ups but as they were a leading DPS of the raid it was cool :), a rogue thinking he could stealth around the boss also caused a wipe, we took our shots at the boss, after a couple wipes with people not understanding his shadow nova, we downed em.

Bosses considered farmed. Great job on the entire guild.

There and Back again, Zul'Jin's Demise

mj1124 — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:08:00 GMT

Zul'Jin, troll warlord, old ally of the horde, and ruler of the Amani troll tribe is now downed.

In only the guilds 2nd try, SHORT handed again, we started with the infamous bear boss.
Insta Failed.
Knowing previous success the group agreed to build up the confidence and go with the bird boss, after downing the bird on the groups first try, we used the 2 tank tactic on the bear. Working to prefection he was downed on that attempt.

The raid then was stuck at either going to the Lynx where we had an epic fil attempt, or go to the dragonhawk boss whom we didnt try yet, in consensus we went to teh Dhawk. The dragonhawk boss is a simple fight but everyon has to be aware of random bombs, which unfortnately, didnt work so well, a quick wipe on our first try. A 2nd go on him however and everyone moved around the bombs like Pacman. Downing the boss and hyped on the victories, we took on the final animal boss, the Lynx. Utilizing Kelhus and Sekmhet's tanking, we were able to split heals and quick dps the boss down on our FIRST try, NOTE that in this fight I focused mostly on the totems, which are definitily a raid wipe, at 9k health each totem, without a 80 dps on em they must be the raid dps focus at the end.

The Hex Lord was our final obstacle before the Zul'Jin. As built up and psyched as we were, this match was actually the 2nd easiest, down his 4 adds and he was cake, randomly stealing our abilities, he stole Sek's power and constantly used Whirlwind, Xia healed the MT through it and the raids DPS did the rest, with Talu keeping heals up on the raid, no one died on him.

The grand finale was the warlord himself, Zul' Jin stands atop a ziggurat with the 4 animal spirits you had previously fought, once the pull starts he goes into a warrior mode with his attacks. The raid couldnt handle his grievous throw (instant damage + 2.3k dmg every 2 seconds untill the toon is fully healed, random target). Wiped within 20 seconds and the raid didnt look hopeful. After reviewing the pull and each phase of the fight, the raid went at him again. Pushing phase by phase, tackling each animal spirit appearing with its own battle tactics and abilities. Heals went on their A game and Kelhus managed to hold aggro through the battle untill the 2nd phase when Arc pulled and of course died because of it. Arc used a Raid Warning to call for a Battle Rez and Talu's BR was up at that moment, Arc immediately joined in the DPS race, whom ultimately got the kill shot.

Zul'Jin ultimately met his demise among the short handed raid, and not only did it happen as a guild first, but it happened with everyone standing in the end. Too much gear dropped to list, but a big point was we had room for more AND we D/E 4 drops. Outstanding group to complete a guild first for a now farmable ZA raid! Congratulations to everyone that was a part of it.

8 then turned to 6 Manned Zul Aman

mj1124 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:51:00 GMT

This past sunday the 25th we took a shot at a guild run on a tough BC 10 man raid, Zul Aman, using 6 people, only 2 of which were 80.
Things learned, MORE dps must go around on the bear boss, even though on our best attempt we had him at 98k, 1 or 2 more dps at even lvl 70 would have downed em, since we had 8 originally but when it got down to 6 we didnt have the dps to do it so we needed heals to conserve mana better. Not bad shots at him though.

The group moved to the eagle boss, which after 2 wipes, was an easy knockout for the group after the understanding of running under the cloud. The drop was a chest piece of Healadin gear,

Chestguard of Hidden Purpose, wowhead.com/?item=33216

theres the name and link of it, pretty sweet stuff, since one of our own was healing, Xia got the piece.

After that we took a shot at the Lynx boss, but with not enough DPS the boss proved too tough without more numbers to group. This will be the focal point of our next ZA run after we down the bear.

All in all a fun run, and the raid provides a short lockout period with excellent gear upgrades for anyone not 80. Good job to all that went and I look forward to future runs!

New Guildie Requirement

mj1124 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:46:00 GMT

Ok so if you DON'T already know, to help cut down on time we crack down on thieves in our guild I have implemented the rule that if you add someone to the guild you send them an in game mail with instructions on viewing the rules and verifying them to me, Arc, even though it does take a little bit of time, we have very few rules AND this allows them to be promoted for the first time as well, if someone cant do just that, they probably don't fit in with our crazy guild to begin with.

The in game mail that you need to send can be copy pasted from our guild info, go to the social icon, then the guild tab, then click on the red button that says guild information, send em that in a mail and let me do the rest.
- Arcanomos