PTR update, blog update and VoA soloing

There was a new patch deployed on the PTR yesterday. MMO-Champion and Wowhead both listed a massive amount of changes. However, most of these changes appeared to only be tooltip fixes for previous changes. A bit later during the night we got the official notes (which might go down in history as the least interesting PTR patch note reveal ever) which confirmed that all the changes listed on MMO-Champion and Wowhead were just tooltip fixes and not actual interesting changes.

They aren’t tweaking things around as much now. It looks more like they’re just finalizing some things and this might mean that we’ll see patch 4.0.6 go live soonish. Don’t quote me on that though. 🙂

What’s with the lack of activity on the blog?

I’ve been raiding a lot with the guild and therefor haven’t had as much time to write stuff and also there hasn’t been a lot to write about in general. Currently our guild has completed 9/12 bosses in the current tier of raiding (most of it in 25-man as well as 10-man). Only the three end-raid bosses remains and two of them have been practiced on enough that I’m confident they’ll go down very soon.

Currently I’m writing on some new guides that will go up soonish.

Vault of Archavon: hunter-style

Archavon

Last night I decided to try and solo Archavon in Vault of Archavon 10-man. It was no problem at all. I used my regular SV raiding spec and my tenacity turtle pet without any tier 5 set bonus.

All you need to do during this encounter is:

Avoid the spikes he throws at you.
Bandage yourself now and then (preferably right after the spikes so you have a few seconds of safety).
Always keep up Mend Pet and enough Misdirection, of course. Don’t use Feign death to reduce threat (you want to have it available when you need it).
Archavon will sometimes pick up the tank (your pet) and head straight for the person with the second-most threat. To counter this you should always be as far away from Archavon as possible so he has some running distance to cover to get to you. It’s important to not Feign Death right away here since the pet will be out of combat for a few seconds. Wait for Archavon to reach you and then Feign, your pet should be back out by this point and the boss won’t reset.

Emalon

After that, I thought it might be fun to try something else… My friend and guildie Grimar joined me in attempts on Emalon where we both wore 2x tier 5 for the set bonus. I had my turtle on all the adds and Grimar tanked the boss with his parrot. Unfortunately we couldn’t keep our pets alive even with the amazing healing that the set bonus provides, because we had to switch targets to the exploding adds now and then which caused us to have a bit of a dps-loss for a bit and then our pets would just die.

Koralon

Then we decided, against good wisdom, to try out Koralon! Grimar went back to using his cat for extra dps and I had my turtle tank it alone. There was lots of AOE damage on us and on our pets and since we were the only two people there, all the fire patches he laid down landed right on us, which caused a lot of damage even though we moved out of them right away. So since we were both in SV spec and not in MM (which has some nice self-healing abilities with Chimera Shot) we slowly dropped down to almost no hp at all. We wiped a few times but in the end we triumphed after having managed to time the bandaging perfectly and moved out of all fires quicker than a cat jumps out of water. I ended up with 2560 health left on our last attempt, cutting it quite close. 🙂

I believe with a Marksman spec, Koralon will be much easier and possibly soloable.

Toravon

Did we try Toravon?… Well, if you’re asking that question I assume you haven’t been there yourself. There’s crazy amounts of AOE damage and you need to have tanks taunt-off each other which gets kinda tricky with hunter pets.
In short; No, we didn’t do Toravon. 🙂

Random blue (Source)

Next expansion.
WoW: Peace and Harmony.
Log in is a field of flowers with a tauren and a night elf hugging.

I approve of this idea.

Cheers,
Gav