Remember – Full HD Versions are available at YouTube.

Additionally, the Rawrcast podcast with Ava and myself is now available for download on iTunes and from the Rawrcast page directly. Give it a listen!

Woot! Congrats Dark Nemesis!
Derevka, Bane of the Fallen King

Heroic Lich King 10-Man Down! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Dark Nemesis - Fall of the Lich King

Avalonna will be working on a strat write up in the next few posts, so stay tuned for that.

Arthas was so gracious enough to drop the Royal Scepter of Terenas II, (it doesnt have MP5 anymore it replaced the MP5 with 63 haste) I had to pick it up. Om nom nom!!!

Remember to sign up and send in your questions for Power Word: Fail over at Raid Warning!

Lich King Defeated! Bring on Hard Modes! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

All signs were pointing to “No way in Hell is this happening tonight” when we started. Our Death Knight tank died THREE times on the NRB Jomunger Worms. His health dropped like a rock. We rez him and BAM – down again. WTF, rez him again! He grabs the worm and BAM – he went down like a $3 whore. Well, now the healers are freaking out at this point – what are we doing wrong? We manage to scrape through the fight, and before we can even discuss it, he cracks his mic:

“Huh…..”

“Huh, what? WTF was that all about?”

“I think when I switched presences, it threw my DPS set on. Shit”

Hilarity ensued. Yes, we did indeed tank Heroic NRB in DPS gear. Oh, and it gets better! Our GL (another DK…I see a trend) discovered why his DPS was so low: A Chef’s Hat, while stylish, does nothing for your damage.

The rest of the night was fairly uneventful. Our DPS is pretty wicked, so even after deciding to add a PC healer on Anub as a cushion, we managed to kill him in a little over 7 1/2 minutes – it got slightly hairy at the end, but he died. And of course, no Priest token. We haven’t seen one yet.

So here are some handy dandy tips for your Insanity 25 attempts:

1) Don’t Be Drunk. You laugh, but in our guild, sometimes you have to be clear on that one.

2) Take a Deep Breath. Relax. Nothing can kill an attempt faster than anxiety and frayed nerves.

3) Do a Regular Run First. Yes, I know – it’s a yawnfest. Think of it as stretching before your workout – it’s a warmup. We actually run 2 TotC 25 group and split up mains with alts – it livens things up a bit, and gets our other toons some shinies. Also, on occasionally laggy servers like ours, it’s a good way to test the stability waters and decide if that will be a detrimental factor in any attempts. It’s also a good way to make sure any UI or macro changes you made are functioning properly.

4) We Need them Stinkin’ Rezzes. Insurance is always a great thing. You have Anks, Brezzes, and soulstones – USE THEM. And make sure they are up before the next fight. It does mean some lengthy downtime between bosses, but use it to get any new gear ready, go have a smoke, bio, or just relax. If it’s going to be longer than 20 minutes, go knock out an Ony or VoA if its up.

5) Crack a Cold One. Frost pots in phase 3. Use one.

6) Find a way to fix it!! If you’re doing an Insanity attempt, you’ve already killed Anub, and most likely have A Tribute to Mad Skill. Take the days before the raid reset and your attempt to review your logs from previous wipes. What happened? How could you fix it? If we had done a better job of analyzing, we would have added a 7th healer awhile ago and had this first.

7) Ain’t No ‘I’ in Team, Baby. Sometimes those raid adjustments to fix problems will include switching people in and out. Maybe you need more DPS, less melee, more healers – whatever. If you’re asked to step out for legitimate reasons, don’t take it personally. Progression raiding is done as a team, and achievements like these are a guild activity. You succeed when the guild does, so don’t let your ego get in the way of that kill.

That’s pretty much it. As I said, if you’ve killed Anub, you’re 9/10 of the way there. I’m still not sure why the server first title is tied to this, and not just the downing of Heroic Anub, but that’s a whole other rant.

I will also add we did Earth, Wind & Fire(25) in the beginning of November

Despite the fact that there’s not a whole lot of guilds that have done it, I assure you – it’s not because it’s hard. I’m sure it has more to do with the fact that there’s really no reward for doing it aside from the basic achievement. If you’re bored and out of guild things to do, go give it a shot.

And again, if you want to win a free Lil’ KT or Panderan Monk companion pet, read how here.:

PS – We’re STILL looking for an exceptional Holy Paladin & Disc/Holy Priest! Gear is not an issue – if you have the skills & a relative amount of hard mode experience, we’ll throw gear at you. www.godarknemesis.com

- Ava

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It’s InSaNiTy!!!!!!!!!!!! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

In KT’s Room

310% Black Proto-Drakes!

A couple of tips, some that were also discussed at Matticus.

1. Do Razuvious First – if you wipe doing MC’s don’t kill him, everyone zone out, and reform the raid with a new raid leader. You haven’t been ID’d yet.

2. Have your priests be ready with Guardian Spirit. I had been Disc up until our last few weeks really pushing for Immortal, having a GS ready for a DC on Sapph for a deep breath (watch the DBM timer for the breath, and put it up on the DC’d so your GS buff doesnt wear off— that happened to me 2 weeks ago).
3. DISABLE MODS – No one cares about damage or healing meters on an Immortal Run. It is all about control and being clean. Epeening about your DPS doesnt help the raid.
4. Use Sapph’s room to plan out your KT positioning, the worst thing you can do is chain Frost Blasts and suddenly you have 3 people with Frost Blast and your healers have to pick up your mistake.
5. Go into each fight with a plan, stop before each boss and go over what you need to do. Naxx at this point for you, if you are doing immortal, should be Easy Mode, so stopping to recap what you need to do may seem annoying, but can be helpful. For example, reminding people to stay spread out on Zeliek as to not chain Holy Bolt.
6. Discussion, discussion, discussion. If you fail an Immortal run, continue on as if it still is Immortal (for practice), and the next day have a Forums discussion about what you need to do to fix problem X.

Also… any high DPS Hunters and Ranged interested in joining us for a major push in 3.1, please visit our guild’s website. We are also seeking a couple more healers (no shaman please) to fill out our healing ranks.

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Naxx Immortal is a post from: Tales of a Priest

You’ve cleared 25 Man Naxx and Malygos and you’re making progress (or have completed) 3 Drake Sartharion… 3.1 and Ulduar are a ways off…

My guild has been focusing on these for the last couple of weeks. Up until then, we didn’t put much effort into them as we were mainly pursuing Sartharion + 3 – which we finally got last week. Some people feel the Achievement System is only a check box system- who cares? However, it allows your guild to fine tune and hone its abilities in preparation for Ulduar – then add in the fact if you can get Heroic: Glory of the Raider, you can score yourself a very brag-worthy mount.

The key to many of these achievements is being smart and having strong DPS. I will again refer to a quote from TardFactor “higher DPS is the best MP5 there is”.

Arachnophobia
Matticus did a great write up on Arachnophobia tips, so I really don’t want to usurp any of that thunder. I do have some points to add though: Do loot last if you are worried about time. You can go back and do loot on all 3 bosses before going into the next wing. The bosses/loot won’t despawn in the 20 minutes that it should take to do this Achievement. Or just have the master looter do it from afar. You can assign loot to anyone in the instance.

Momma Said Knock You Out
What we typically do to control this fight is to kill the Followers and leave up the Worshippers. We left the worshipers on our offtank and had a Druid maintank Faerlina. We chose a druid to simply soak up more of her damage during Frenzy. Shamans need to have poison cleanse totems out, and the healers need to be ready to step up healing during Frenzies. Use cooldowns to keep the tank up if needed. Other than that, its simply heal through her increased damage. If your DPS is strong, you shouldn’t be spending much time with Frenzy; she should die quickly.

The Safety Dance
If you have people who have lag/connection issues: sit them out for this fight. The fight isn’t a DPS race, it is purely a “don’t stand in the fire” fight. You could conceivably 2 man this fight: one tank, and one healer. Healers watch the people who are falling behind. (Week to week it usually is the same people.) Be ready to Shield them or snap a COH on them or even Guardian Spirit/Pain Supression. Stay as close to the platform as you can without getting AOEd, the distance between the safe zones is much shorter.

And They Would All Go Down Together
This fight is all about control. Split your DPS into 4 groups. Assign each DPS group to each Boss. Split your healers accordingly. We ran 1 healer on each ranged tank, and then split the rest up on the front two tank groups. Stay with your group: DPS, Healers and Tanks and rotate together. DPS needs to be ready to stop DPSing and just move with their groups if they get too far ahead of the other groups. This isn’t a DPS race, it is all about control. Stop DoTs at 10% and slowly peel them down to 2-3%, you don’t want your DoTs to push one of them over too soon. Once all 4 are at 2-3% and you have split your DPS appropriately take them out.

Make Quick Werk of Him
This is perhaps one of the more cut and dry achievements. Plan and simple: DPS harder. What can you do to make DPS increase. Short answer: Bring fewer healers. We do this with 5 healers. 1 on the MT, 2 on the two OTs. Your healers should be able to spam heals for 3 minutes, so having “only” 5 healers is a non-issue… heck, if you can bring fewer, even better. That is 17 DPS. If you are going to do this fight, be ready to wipe to reset. Use the in-game achievement tracker to see the countdown timer. HOLD on Heroism. The trick on this fight is to know if your BASE DPS fast enough. If you blow heroism in the first minute, you really don’t have a grasp if you are on pace. What you don’t want to do is learn too late that you are going to miss it by 2 seconds, since you have then wasted a week’s reset. Once you hit the 1 minute mark, your raid leader is going to need to make a judgement call- with that baseline DPS PLUS Heroism will you make it? If a wipe is called, EVERYONE must die to clear out the Exhaustion/Heroism Debuff and try again.

Shocking!
This achievement so many guilds struggle on. Heck, we only got this last night, and according to www.WoWProgress.com had it as US Rank 178th and Realm 1st. However, this achievement is simply a “pay attention” fight. That being said, you do need to be ready to adjust if something goes wrong. If someone DC’s, move around them… shift the whole raid away from them and continue on. Further, if they come back online they should stay out of the groups until they get a polarity back. To quote a guildy, “You literally run back and forth depending on what color you get. I’m pretty sure mice do a version of this in lab tests.” Be aware, be aware, be aware.

The Hundred Club
Simple: no Frost Resist armor, no Pally Aura, only Mark of the Wild. The net difference between the damage taken from the AOE DOT is changing from 10-12% resist(MoTW only) to a 18-20% partial resist(MoTW & Aura) . Healers be aware, you will have increased duty on this fight since more damage is going out, however the net difference is fairly negligible. If you are struggling, have some of your hybrid DPS classes (Elemental Shaman and Boomkin) assist on healing and try again.

Just Can’t Get Enough
18 Aboms in Phase 1, once we tried this we found it incredibly easy. Just have your tank proactively pull them, and burn them down fast. Assign 1 or 2 people to DPS the skeletons as they come, and call out the banshees when they come too. Other than that, focus on your 18 Aboms. Keep count. We kill 1 or 2 more than we think we need just to be safe. You won’t get the achievement credit until after KT dies, so be sure you got 18, otherwise you’re waiting another week.

Spore Loser
This is not part of Heroic: Glory of the Raider. This encounter was pretty buggy up until 3.08 and often caused you to fail the achievement by having the spores despawn. Just be sure your tank keeps moving from the spores, and your classes that have passive buffs that do damage to attackers as the spores will aggro on players and attack them. That means Thorns, Molten Armor, Wandering Plague, and the like need to be either turned off or spec’d out of. Our Unholy DK respec’d for this fight. Losing the buff does make for a longer fight, and the damage to the raid by the spores does strain the healers some (on a fight were healing can’t happen a bulk of the time), however we only added about 1 minute to our normal fight time. On this achievement, per WoWProgress.com, we actually tied for US 2nd, and World 4th with a few other guilds. Give the achievement a try, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The Immortal
Having successfully getting The Undying last week, The Immortal is the next Achievement in our sights. I strongly suggest not going for Immortal and these other Achievements at the same time. The Immortal will require a lot of focus and effort, and getting the other achievements first will be a good warm up. (It will also help you see which raiders will be a possible detriment and need Priest Guardian Spirit macros in your Immortal runs). Once we get The Immortal, will share any tips I can glean from that experience.

I hope this write up provides some insight to those out there that are having fun with the Achievement System. With some time, execution and effort, you’ll get these and more.

For those lurkers out there, here is a link to my Armory’s Achievement Progress.

Naxxramas Achievement Tips is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Some tips for those healers who are doing it now.

1. Don’t bring too many healers. 6 even 5 is enough. DPS needs to be strong to take the drakes down, so you don’t have to deal with the crazy empowered Flame Breaths for too long.
2. Healer CD Rotations need to be proactive. Guardian Spirit and Pain Suppression last 10 and 8 seconds, respectively. If you know a breath is coming… cast it a few seconds early. It may very well save your life due to running from flame walls.
3. Control Ventrilo chatter. Too much noise on a very busy fight can cause a cooldown call to be missed.
4. Rotate healing assignments. If you are on the first CD for the Flame Breath, rotate to a new assignment moving the 2nd or 3rd CD for Flame Breath to move to the MT. It makes it much easier on them to watch for the Breath. We had our Disc Priest move from the Sarth Tank to the Drake Tank,a nd I moved from the Drake Tank to the Sarth Tank after the first CD was used. It really made me knowing (visually) when I should pop my Guardian Spirit.
5. Watch Sartharion, not the cast bar. He rears back before taking a breath, actually a split second or two before actually beginning the cast bar, so you get a little bit more time.

Practice makes perfect. Control the fight and it is yours.

Me and my new toy.

3 Drake Sartharion is a post from: Tales of a Priest