Ulduar, progress report

"Secrets of Ulduar" patch 3.1 was released to the live servers yesterday, with a new VoA boss and the opening of the Ulduar raid dungeon.... and OH so much more content!

I'll start with a brief rundown of the extras....

DUAL SPEC
This is SOOOO good. All talents were wiped due to some major alterations to the talent trees, so everyone had to respec. Once this was done, I paid my 1000g for dual spec and set up my secondary spec. This is great for raiders who have good secondary gear (or epic like me =P) because with a click of a button and 5 second cast, I'm no longer a protection pally (6th on the server, I may add!).... I'm a HOLY pally! Only down side to this is that your mana is completely wiped out. If you have drink with you (and this is now essential - I'll explain later) it's no problem at all. You can choose which primary and secondary spec to have dependant on your class so it's opened up a whole realm of raiding possibilities, especially on raids like Naxx where on a lot of bosses you only need 1 tank. I'm not spending another 1k gold on my priest yet because he doesnt even have full epic for his main spec gear.... but once I've got some spare gold (a week or two I'd guess) I'll do it then for ease of questing.

MANA REGEN
A bugbear for me as a prot pally, my out of combat mp5 (mana per 5 seconds) was always poor, with my in combat mp5 being terrible but with the right attack chain, I rarely ran oom. With patch 3.1, Blizz have decided that Out of combat mp5 should be lowered. A lot. My OOC mp5 is now 1/3 of my previous value, so I *have* to drink in between combats. This slows me down quite a bit, because my primary attack is a real mana hog. In combat, they've kept the mp5 the same (I think!) but with the alteration of certain spells, I'm now struggling with mana in fights. Time will tell what effect this really has.

ARGENT TOURNAMENT
Oh.My.God. This is FUN! In the NE corner of Icecrown, you'll now find a partially built tourney area with all factions present, horde and alliance. There are a few starter quests, with five dailies as well, which you gain Silver Covenant rep for and tokens which you need to hand in to "level up" on the tournament chain. You're given a jousting lance and pointed to a horse to ride, then learn how to use it in some of the starter quests. For an achievement, you can then beat another player in a joust duel. I think I've figured out a good tactic so far, as I've already won 3/3 duels =) As this proceeds and I open up more of the content, I'll update. Seriously though.... it's FUN!

OTHER STUFF
There's a new fishing daily in Dalaran (at last!) and various other bits and pieces of fun and enjoyment for all, something that seems to have been missing for a while from WoW.


And now for something not really completely different......
(Spoiler warning!)

ULDUAR
First day of the patch and straight in!! My guild seemed to want to try for 25 man Ulduar, but with only 18 or 19 people on, it wasn't happening. SO, me and 7 friends, plus two other guild members tried for 10 man instead. After much faffing around getting everyone on my ventrilo server, we finally got inside and were gobsmacked by the sheer size of the place! You start in a neutral encampment, surrounded by vehicles: Motorbikes, Siege engines and Demolishers. After buffing up and discussing what we thought tactics probably were, we started the event. The defense shield protecting the encampment dropped and we all jumped on vehicles. You get 2 of each, with gun turrets on the bigger vehicles too.

Your first job on these is to annihilate the MASSIVE army of stone dwarves, giants, collosi and other varied nasties in the enormous area outside the camp. Being stupid and not really having paid enough attention, I got separated from the rest of the party and I got a LOT of damage. So, I bimbled (very slowly) on my siege engine back to the starting zone in the hopes there's be a repair place. No chance. I turned round to go back to the party, only to have a graphics bug and next thing I know find myself driving off the side of the cliff. Oops.

The rest of the group slowly got knocked down too and we eventually wiped. On trash. This didn't happen in the earlier raids, so we were quite shocked, but thought it was probably just getting used to the vehicles and what we could do with them.

We took down all the towers spawning the annoying non-elite adds and the various towers that buff the boss we were coming up to (if we'd left them, it would have been the "hard mode" that has been added to some bosses). There was a crash and the enormous gates at the end of the HUUUUUUUGE hallway burst apart, revealing the first of the Ulduar bosses: FLAME LEVIATHAN. Unlike every other boss I've come across, Flame leviathan is a TANK. A *MASSIVE* tank. We charged in and slowly wore him down while he was bashing the hell out of us with his nasty 100k+ attacks (the vehicles can take a lot of damage 1.4mill on the siege engine) and got him down to about 65%..... not bad for a first try.

Attempt number 2:
We got a little smarter this time and learned from our first failed attempt (Rawdy read a little more about the tactics). we took our vehicles down and realised we have to run away from the boss, but he also needs to be slowed using some of the abilities of the vehicles. Ran around, nuked like mad (still only stoped him once) and wiped on about 50%

Attempt number 3:
Oh yes, we tried again. Something many guilds aren't prepared for is that this is HARD. Expect wipage time and time again. It's not just "taking off the training wheels", it's being thrown in with the sharks with a blunt stick to kill them with. Saying that though, our uber group (gear doesn't matter on this fight unless you're dps - explanation later) learned our lessons well. We got the kiting of the boss sorted perfectly this time and the devastators launched their passengers at his turrets. This causes him to stop moving once they're nuked and you get 10 seconds to batter hell out of him before he restarts - with no speed buff. After much tactical running away and even more tactical nuking, we finally kicked his sorry metal ass. 2 drops, a cloth bracer and a plate bracer...... being the Main Tank, I got dibs on the plate bracers laughing all the way to the next boss with much cheering and back-patting.

This boss is without doubt the MOST FUN I've ever had in game. It's hard, but not so hard it's impossible but it really is so funny running around on the vehicles screaming that you're being chased!

Anyway.... off to the next boss. Ignous. From the name, you can probably figure out he's a firey mofo. To get to him, you have to kill several pairs of trash mobs which, you may think, is simple. Quack quack oops..... Trash needs tactics now. They have to be taken down in pairs, they have ridiculous hp and OMG do they hit hard. They also have some nasty little powers which can mess the group up if not prepared for it. After a few wipes on the trash, we finally got to ignous. rawdy called out the tactics we knew and we went for it. Boom. Wipe. OUCH.

He has a lot of nasty surprises in store which I won't divulge here because I want to make sure I know them all first =P

We figured some bits out but the healing was struggling to hold us up so wipe number 2 happened real quick after. We rezzed and went back in, but 2 of the group had to go so we spent a while trying to fill the gaps. No dice.

Oh well.... we've been in on day 1 and killed the same number of bosses that one of the biggest guilds on the realm (Nightfall) managed: 1. Tonight we'll be back in there kicking more ass because we've worked out more tactics for Ignous. Hopefully they'll work, but you never know. we may wipe over and over for weeks on the bosses in the first section, but we'll get it eventually.

I'm now sat at work and the only thing I can think about is getting home, logging on and enjoying my evening with friends. What more could you want?