Karazhan Attunement

My “cliff notes” on Onyxia Attunement were such a hit I couldn’t resist posting the same for Karazhan. Just like with Onyxia, I can’t take any credit for this, although I may add my own observations as I go through the process. This is just a straight copy and paste from wowwiki (which has been real slow lately - anyone else having that problem?)

Here’s a link to the full post with a condensed quest listing.

1. Travel to Karazhan in Deadwind Pass. You will receive 2 quests here. Complete those two quests in the direct area and you will be sent to Dalaran. (Amanna - these two quests are solo-able, especially for druids. In collecting the water samples, I prowled through most of where I needed to go. Just be careful in both cellars - the mobs seems to have a very large aggro range).
2. Travel to Dalaran, speak to the guy you need to (he’s on the north side of the bubble) and you will be sent to Shattrath. (Amanna - yea, the north side way down by the water. Kind of not real obvious).
3. Go and speak to Khadgar in the center of Shattrath (who you started the tour with and who you decided which faction you wanted to be) and he will send you to get the first key fragment from Shadow Labyrinth. The first fragment is near Murmur. A guard will spawn when the container is opened, and the key fragment is found on his corpse. (Amanna - you do not have to kill Murmur to loot the container. As you face Murmur, go around him (it?) to the left and the container is on a ledge. The guard that spawns is easily killed).
4. Go back to Khadgar in Shattrath and he will give you a quest to get the 2nd and 3rd key shards. The 2nd key shard will require you to travel to The Steamvault in Coilfang Reservoir and is located in the deep pool of water near the first boss. You will find it in the corner at the bottom of the pool.
   • The second key part is soloable for mages, druids and rogues.
   • Note- Since the 2.0.7 patch, there is a guard that spawns (70 elite) instead of the key being in the box. You must kill him and loot the corpse. Can be solo’ed, but best done as a duo/trio.
   • Amanna - Easily soloed by us Druids. See my notes here.
5. If your group has the key or a rogue with 350 lockpicking for Arcatraz then skip this and go straight to 6. If not, then follow this.
   • First you must obtain the quest from Area 52 called A Heap of Ethereals, from Nether-Stalker Khay’ji.
   • Next you’ll get Quest:Warp-Raider Nesaad. Go and kill Nesaad (28, 79) and return to Nether-Stalker Khay’ji.
   • Then you will be sent to Eco dome mid-realm where you will be given the task of collecting 10 surveying equipment boxes. Return to the quest giver.
   • You will then be sent to Nexus-Prince Haramad in Stormspire who will ask you to locate triangulation point using his device (Co-ords 66,33) and then deliver to Dealer Hazzin at the protectorate watchpost.
   • Then you will be asked to discover Triangulation point 2 (co-ords 28,41) and hand in to Wind Trader Tuluman at small trading point back across the bridge.
   • Then you will be asked to go kill Culuthas, a level 70 elite demon at 53,21 (very easy, can be 2 manned if not solo’d) to complete the full triangle and to recover the Ata’mal Crystal.
   • Take this crystal to Nexus-Prince Haramad and you will be ambushed by 3 blood elves… dont worry, the Ethereals annhiliate them for you.
   • Then take the portal where Nexus-Prince came from during the blood elf attack to Shattrath and speak to A’dal in the Terrace of Light in Shattrath.
   • Now you will be given the quest to obtain the Arcatraz Key shards. The Top Half of the Arcatraz key can be located in The Botanica of Tempest Keep (left floating island) and drops from Warp Splinter, the final boss.
   • The Bottom half of the key drops from Pathaleon the Calculator in The Mechanar of Tempest Keep (right floating island). Be warned: If you wipe on the last boss of The Mechanar or the waves of mobs before him, the door will bug and will not reopen even when you run back. To avoid this, take a warlock for soulstone or you’ll have to page a GM and hope they get back to you quick enough and are willing to portal you to the other side.
   • Once you have both key shards take them back to A’dal in Shattrath and you will have your Arcatraz key.
6. The third fragment of the Karazhan key can be found in The Arcatraz of Tempest Keep. You aren’t required to kill any bosses if your group chooses not to and you will find the key shard in the room where you first encounter voidwalkers. This room is the first room you come to after you go up the “glass” ramp in the first boss room. As you enter the voidwalker room, the shard is found to the immediate right in the corner of the room.
   • Note- Same as the second key, this one requires a group to kill the guard. 2 rogues to keep the patrolling voidwalker distracted while a druid (feral) and another rogue kills the guard (the first rogue distracting joins the fight) can make things easier. Still stealthable, just challenging. (Amanna - well, I didn’t try to stealth it but went in with a guild group. We cleared as we went and bypassed first boss. You can get to the key fragment in around 1/2 hour or so.)
7. Now you have the 2nd and 3rd key fragments, return to Shattrath, hand them in and you will be sent to The Black Morass in the Caverns of Time and you will need speak to Medivh to activate your key.
8. First you have to complete the Old Hillsbrad instance in Caverns of Time. (Amanna - this isn’t a very hard instance; it’s rated at lvl 66-68. A decent group, especially with some high levels, can complete it in an hour and there are some decent drops to be had. Plus, Blizz did a great job on CoT and this instance in general - they both are some of the best times I’ve had.)
9. Turn in Old Hillsbrad and you can now run the Black Morass event. This event will require you to kill elites that spawn from portals while protecting Medivh while he opens the Dark Portal. From every 6th portal a boss will spawn. After the 18th portal the Dark Portal will open and the task is complete. You can now speak to Medivh and claim your Master Key to Karazhan. At this point return to Khadgar in Shattrath. Note: In order to enter this instance of the Caverns of Time, you need to have completed the Durnhold Keep event in Old Hillsbrad. (Amanna - just like Old Hillsbrad, an easy run with a group of 70s, but great atmoshpere and a lot of fun. Well done Blizz. Be sure to talk to not only Medivh, but the NPC at the entrance. You’ll get a quest to go back to Andormu for some nice rewards.)
10. Once you have returned to Khadgar you will be sent back to Karazhan where your Karazhan quests will begin!
11. GRATZ!

You are now attuned to Karazhan!!

Shadow Labyrinth

I went on a run through The Shadow Labyrinth, or Shadow Labs, last night. I had just got on and was looking for something to do. A guild member was looking for dps help and I was looking to get my kitty some combat experience, so it was a fit. The group came together pretty quickly and we were on our way.

This time around, we had a solid group. 2 Pallies, 1 Warrior, 1 Mage and me in feral cat.

I had heard and read a lot of grumbling about this instance so I was very interested to see what it was like. I had heard it was about a 2 hour instance. What I didn’t factor in is that it was my first time in along with one of the other party members. Three+ bleary-eyed hours later (getting to bed at 1 a.m. this morning), we finished up. My opinion - overall, I loved the instance.

While Shadow Labs can be a humbling instance, I think it is thoroughly enjoyable. I loved the scripts for the bosses, the layout flowed well, and gameplay overall was very fun. Unlike Sethekk, in Shadow Labs I found the mobs to be relatively easy and the bosses very hard. The scenery and atmosphere works together very well with the areas where the mobs are “worshipping” the boss just outright fun to watch. I also think the animation effects and wandering patterns are some of the best I’ve seen also.

We started off pretty good and downed the first boss, Ambassador Hellmaw, with no problems. He was nice enough to drop the Idol of the Emerald Queen for me. While I don’t do a lot of healing, this is a very nice idol to compliment the druid Lifebloom, which I used a lot last time I healed. There was nothing particularly special about the boss other than a lot of fears - but then getting feared isn’t exactly a one-time experience in this instance.

Heading around the corner, we got a Purification Staff drop off one of the trash mobs. It was the “of the Beast” flavor if you follow the link. The stats on it were almost identical to my Staff of the Four Golden Coins, but the feral attack power increase was a bump, so it was immediately equipped. It’s always fun to get a drop in an instance that you can use right away.

So I was off to a good start with two good drops. That ended up being the majority of my bounty for the night, but I was very happy with two good drops (also got a few Spirit Shards and some sellable BoE items).

Around the corner was Blackheart the Inciter. This big, two-headed, monster of a mob was the first in an almost church-like setting with various mobs in pews bowing and worshipping him. What a spectacle. It was actually fun to start pulling the different sets of mobs out of the pews and mowing them down. Blackheart himself was a challenge and we did wipe twice on him before downing him. Every 30 seconds or so he casts a full party mind control debuff that makes you all attack each other for around 10 seconds or so. There are some good strategies on wowwiki, so be sure to follow the link to be prepared. We did eventually get him down. Nothing exciting on the drop.

You then come around the corner into another long chamber with mobs marching and paying homage to a boss. In this case it was Grandmaster Vorpil, probably the most fun fight during the run. Once you’ve cleared your way to Vorpil, the strategy we used was for our tank to kite him down the long hallway we had just cleared up. During that time, everyone had DPS on him. Once he gets to the end of the hallway, he teleports the entire group back to his platform. You have to get off the platform immediately, as a Rain of Fire starts coming down that can do some serious damage. Our tank then kited him the other way down a hallway while we were dps’ing all the way. We did get teleported a second time, but was able to down Vorpil shortly after the second teleport. I believe we only wiped once downing this boss.

During the entire fight though, Voidwalkers start to spawn. I didn’t realize this last night, but from reading wowwiki, they heal Vorpil if they make it to him. Strategy suggestions are to down the Voidwalkers as they start to appear. We just ignored them and they never seemed to be an issue.

Vorpil gave us another “meh” drop.

We then made our way to the final boss, Murmur. Murmur has without a doubt the coolest animation I have seen yet in the game and made the experience in his chamber completely immersive. We cleared up to Murmur no problem, but just could not get him down and after three attempts gave up. Nature resistance seems key here which we had not brought. Murmur also has one of those abilities where he powers up then releases damage. Wowwiki suggests getting out of the blast radius (Duh!) and I can tell you this is a very good idea. What I found was that it was very hard to get out of radius in time. Probably just a timing issue that will get better, but it was very frustrating.

With our gear at 0%, we ran back in one last time so everyone could get the First Key Fragment on the Karazhan attunement quest chain. We then bid each other farewell, and (mercifully) called it a night.

So, my thoughts and observations on my first feral cat/dps run in a higher end BC instance?

It was a lot of fun and I did feel like I was contributing. I was main dps assist for the tank so I just always targeted the mob he was on and helped bring them down. Until I got killed in a couple key fights, I was basically tied with our Mage for second on the damage meters. Being level 69 and not having great cat gear yet, I felt pretty good about the experience and my contribution.

What could have gone better? Two things:

1. Put simply - I died a lot. It’s important to remember that you don’t have the armor or the hit points that you do in bear form, and you break a lot easier and faster. This wasn’t a huge problem in mob pulls, but in boss fights, the special abilities made me feel much more vulnerable than I do as tank.
2. It’s much more important as dps support to be on the correct mob. If you’re on the wrong mob and draw aggro, you’re probably going to die and without the dps support you’re giving the tank, you may cause your group to wipe. This did happen once last night and really drove home the point. I got in the habit of hitting the function key for our tank, then the “F” (assist) key after every kill to make sure I was on the same target as our tank. I don’t do a whole lot of macros, but that sure sounds like one I should create.

So, all in all I had a great time even though I’m a little tired this morning. I would love to hear everyone else experiences - especially how you keep yourself alive in cat form in tough instances.

Gear enchants - Rings

I was getting ready to start writing a 4 part feral talent build for PvE. In the midst of poking around on wowhead looking at more info for my “Enchants by Slot” series, I noticed there are enchantements for Rings. Okay, call me a n00b, but I never realized this. Intriqued, I shelved the talent research and forged on into the land of ring enchanting. Well, once I went through the research there really aren’t that many ring enchants, and only enchanters can enchant their own rings. Still cool. Looks like it’s all new in Burning Crusade, and since I’m not an Enchanter, I guess I’m not a n00b after all. At least not on this issue…

(Standard language and disclaimers follow. Get used to these as you’ll be seeing them on every post in the series. Am I trying to put you to sleep? No. Do I get paid based on word count? Nay again. I’m just trying to set the stage for the information that follows. And not knowing when or how someone may find this post, you need to make sure they are set straight right from the start).

I’ll be presenting slot enchantments along the following guidelines:

1. I’ll be focusing on upper-level enchantments. Probably more than just the highest level, but I will definitely be disregarding many lower level enchantments. Typically this will mean enchantments requiring 250 skill or better. Faction rewards and crafted items will be evaluated on their merits regardless of reputation or level.
2. Based on blog feedback, I’ll expand my inquiries beyond feral druids and discuss enchants of interest to resto and balance Druids.
3. I’ll be avoiding resistance enchants. It just doesn’t make sense to enchant items with resistance vs. using a potion, except for very special occasions.
4. I’m going to fit all the enchants I find interesting into our three main specs, even if some look out of place. It’s just simpler that way. Feel free to pick and choose and debate what belongs where.

You can’t do simple research on enchantments by slot. Since the slot it affects is in the text of the enchantment, you have to look at all enchantments and ferret out the ones you want. You can however, get two simple lists of Enchanter enchantments and crafted items (i.e. made or applied by an Enchanter) and “use” enchantments (i.e. spellthread, armor kits, etc.) that can help the process. Click the links for the two lists.

There are also “temporary” enchantments that I did not include in this research. Click the link if you’re interested.

Amanna, enough with the crap - get to the good stuff. (I’m not categorizing the enchants this time around since there aren’t that many.) Remember all of these enchantments can only be applied to the Enchanter’s rings.

Enchant Ring - Spellpower - up to +12 to healing and damage spells.
Enchant Ring - Healing Power - up to +20 to healing spells.
Enchant Ring - Stats - +4 to all stats.
Enchant Ring - Striking - +2 to weapon damage. Not sure how many of you still actually fight with your weapons, but if that’s your gig, then here ya go.

Moonkins and Karazhan

(Amanna says - this is Cybeline’s first post, and an interesting one at that. Please give her a warm welcome via comments).

I’ve been to Karazhan before but always as the Tree of Life to fill a main healer spot. It was enjoyable to take Tree form out for a spin and to test out the deep resto talent form — I’ve always had a deep balance spec — but I could barely contain my excitement when the assignments for Wednesday’s Kara runs came out and I was slotted for dps.

The moonkin was set loose in Kara! Woot! Or should I say, “Hoot!”

Good preparation for any instance run is key to success and for Kara it is even more so. Remember to bring plenty of reagents for Gift of the Wild because chances are good that you’ll be buffing both groups. Get mana pots, whether you make them yourself, have a supplier, or buy them off the auction house. When you think you have enough, put even more in your bags. Trust me, you are going to need them especially if, like me, you save your Innervate for the healers. Finally, make sure you bring plenty of vendor water and/or ask the mage in your raid for lots of conjured water. I don’t normally need to drink much while questing or 5 man instancing, but for Karazhan it is a good idea to keep the mana bar topped off as often and as quickly as possible so you don’t slow down the progression of the raid.

So I’ve got my reagents, my mana pots, my drinks, my key to Kara, and my +damage trinkets are set to hot buttons. I’m ready to boom it up.

The first several pulls in the instance are bread and butter trash mobs. The priests have the hard work in keeping targets shackled until it’s time for focus fire on their target, so my job here is to listen to the raid leader’s instructions and burn down the right target, carefully keeping my threat below that of the tanks. (During one trash pull in between Attumen and Moroes, I did have a series of chain crits that pulled aggro from the tank…gotta love the way Nature’s Grace facilitates chain critting. Luckily I am in an awesome guild.)

The first boss battle — Midnight and Attumen — didn’t pose any particular challenge to the moonkin. Again, listening to the raid leader and making sure to keep Moonfire and Insect Swarm ticking away on the focus fire target were my goals here in addition to staying flexible. If healing fell behind or if a downed guildie needed a battle rez or if I needed to help decurse the melees, I needed to be ready to drop down to caster form as fast as possible.

More bread and butter trash mobs lie in wait between Attumen and Moroes…but this time there are some AoE pulls to deal with. For those pulls, I stayed in caster form. The mage or warlock in the group are going to burn the mobs down really fast and they are going to need lots of healing. So I slapped on some Lifeblooms and Rejuvenations as soon as the AoE started in order to boost the main healers.

There are also a few mobs in this section that cause party members to get tipsy and when they get tipsy, they need lots of healing. Here I stayed in caster form too in order to quickly give a boost to healing if needed.

And then we were on to Moroes and his party of four. This boss battle is definitely more challenging than the first with the garrotes that Moroes puts on selected party members. My goals remain the same for this fight as with Attumen, but it’s a long one so in addition I kept a very close eye on mana consumption. Here’s where having those all mana pots came in handy. I didn’t wait to get into a desperate mana situation before taking remedial measures; once I hit 50%, I downed my first pot and kept on dpsing. (My innervate had already gone to a healer.) I did get dangerously low on mana by the time we were taking out the final target. Moroes was long gone at this point and the target was getting low on HP. So instead of using another pot, I put up a couple DoTs and then ran in for a bit of melee to help finish the last mob off. (Elune’s Touch procced a few times, too, though I rarely rely on it for mana regen.)

The march through Karazhan continued after the downing of Moroes; on to the Opera Event!

More of the same here with the exception of a few pulls where this moonkin’s heart was warmed considerably. (Have I mentioned that I am in the best guild?) This is where the raid encountered some Skeletal Ushers and we paused for the leaders to do some strategizing. Extra tanking was needed and there was some talk of using me as an offtank. Eventually the decision was made to have one of the paladin healers take the offtank position while I was to be a main healer until the first target went down and freed up the paladin to return to healing.

For me, this is what the moonkin brings to the raiding table. Players can battle over whether or not a moonkin can top the damage charts; sometime I do top the chart and most times I don’t, but I’ll sidestep that issue. Flexibility and versatility is what I bring to the raid. In one night, I burned down targets, I offhealed and main healed, I innervated healers, I battle rezzed, and I almost was called on to do some offtanking.

Beyond the sense of accomplishment and the thrill of raiding with my big feathery owl, I carry with me the warm fuzzies from comments made by guildies, among those being the expressed desire never to leave home without a moonkin, the delight in the massive healing crits (I think the moonkin aura helped with that!), and especially the praise from my guild master on how nice it is to have a moonkin in the raid.

P.S. We did end up making it to the stage where we found Romulo and Julianne waiting for us. We made two runs at them before the raid ran past its scheduled end, so the doomed lovers will be waiting for us when we reenter Karazhan again. Parting is such sweet sorrow!

Shattered Halls

I got to go on my first Shattered Halls run last night. I was excited to go - I’d heard it was a good instance and I had a couple quests for completion inside. It was also predominantly a guild run, so I was among friends. I was a little nervous though, as I had also heard that SH was a tough instance, and I was main tank.

I’m happy to say the run went well. We finished just under 2 hours, so pace was on par. We didn’t have any wipes, but did have a few deaths here and there mostly on bosses. I’m also very pleased to report I tanked the entire instance with no issues. It was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

For as much as I had heard this was a tough instance, we really didn’t encounter too many problems. Could be we had a great group (or maybe just a great tank??!!??). Our group composition was me as tank, a paladin as off-tank, another pallie as healer, a mage and a hunter.

Everyone did a great job - heals were well-timed and I didn’t die once (always a good thing). It was nice having a pallie as an off-tank; not only was he a very capable tank, but he could also heal himself, taking a lot of stress off the main healer. The mage did a good job on crowd control and dps. I’m not sure what spec the hunter was as he was the only non-guildie in the group, but he did a good job of pet control. Everyone was pretty good at watching aggro. There are some big pulls in here and if you start blasting away too quickly, things can get out of hand quickly.

I’m not going to go into instance strategy per se here as the wowwiki link has all of what I would say in the general instance overview. If you read that as prep, and have a good leader, then I don’t think this instance should pose too much of a problem for your group.

This is a great instance for Honor Hold rep - I made Honored during the run. There are a lot of elites and they all seem to give 12 rep, trash is 1 rep and the bosses were a couple hundred. All in all, I’d guess you’d easily get 1,000 - 1,500 rep for a run. The two quests I had, Pride of the Fel Horde and Turning the Tide, gave 250 and 500 rep respectively, along with decent gold. The feral rewards for Turning the Tide weren’t upgrades for me, so I took the Mantle of Vivification, which was a decent upgrade for my healer set.

During the run there were plenty of opportunities to practice my tanking abilities. This instance offers several 5 and 6+ mob pulls so the stakes are high and good execution of strategy is imperative. I had several revelations throughout the run:

• Faerie Fire as a pulling mechanism works quite well. However, it doesn’t do squat if a party member has pulled aggro off one of the mobs you had under control. Therefore, always make sure to keep your eyes open and have plenty of rage saved to have options for getting that mob back under control.
• Swipe is a great way to keep multiple mobs under control, especially if other party members are focus-firing on your main target. On one large pull, the group leader asked me to keep 3-4 mobs under control. With the main target in the middle of that group, I just FF’d the target, hit a Demoralizing Roar when they got close to collect them up, then started spamming Swipe. I was able to keep all 4 mobs under control for the entire fight (obviously, the rest of my party had the discipline to only attack only my main target. Swipe alone won’t keep a non-main target under control if someone else starts bashing on it).
• People always say rage management is key, and I definitely agree. However, I have to say that rage generation has not been an issue for me in most of the 70+ instances; it certainly wasn’t during this run as in most fights I had 70+ rage for the majority of the fight. I think where good rage management comes in is 1) at the start of the fight where you only have leftover rage or Enrage to jump start the fight; make sure you have a plan that correlates with the amount of rage you actually have, and 2) effective use of cooldown abilities. In particular, I’m thinking of Growl (10 second cooldown) and Challenging Roar(10 minute cooldown). These are your safety nets for getting a runaway mob back under control and if they are on cooldown your job is harder.
• Don’t forget about your job. Your job is to keep multiple mobs under control, not do damage and definitely not to keep just this one mob under control. It’s too easy to get fixated on that ugly brute standing right in front of you and let other mobs wander off. Spam some Swipes every once in a while. And if one of your mobs wanders off, go pick him up! You’ve already got good aggro on your main target, hit the tab key to get the wanderer targeted, go after it, hit it a couple times, then re-group.
• Remember Frenzied Regeneration? You can really help your healer out by popping this in a big fight. Two of the boss fights last night, I had no trouble holding aggro and was generating a ton of rage. Due to adds, our main healer was having to heal a couple other party members besides me. Pop a FR, and while it might not keep you alive, it should take some pressure off that healer and help their mana situation. With only a 3 minute cooldown, this ability can be used often throughout a run. Just be sure to communicate to the healer you are firing it off so they factor that into their heals.

So there are my observations tanking last night. It was a very fun run and I felt very satisfied with my performance. I would recommend you read the wowwiki overview and most of it seems right in line with our experience. We didn’t do anything tricky with the final boss - Kargath Bladefist - as far as positioning. We were all in the ring and the one pally was focused on the incoming adds, with help from the hunter. The downside was that Bladefist didn’t burn down real fast so we had to withstand about 4 of his “ping pong” attacks where he hits everyone in the ring for around 1000 damage. At the end I believe we only had one member down.

The best part was Bladefist dropped Wastewalker Gloves, part of a rogue set but a definite upgrade for my kitty (and highly rated on the gear list). Since I was the only leather wearer in the group, it was a no-brainer. Nice loot for me!

Druid epic Flight form guide

With all the posts on the 2.1 patch, I had yet to see one with a linked mention of the Druid Epic Flight form. Being the curious sort, and armed with a dangerous case of spring fever, I took a few minutes to google the topic. I didn’t spend a lot of time going through the results, I was really just looking for a simple walkthrough to get an idea of what will be involved in this.

Here’s a link that has a pretty good walkthrough. Actually, it doesn’t sound that bad, except for two steps in the process: 5000G for epic mount flying skill and a Heroic run of Sethekk Halls (=grinding rep with Lower City). Other than that, it appears the majority of this quest series can be soloed.

Things I hate about PuGs

Let me count the ways:

1. They don’t know you and aren’t in your guild, so if it takes them 20 minutes to get ready they don’t really care.
2. “Sorry gtg“.
3. They usually seem more interested in screwing around than getting through the instance.
4. One word - NINJA.
5. Every once in a while someone will just go dark for 5 minutes or so, do nothing, then come alive again. No apologies, no explanations. WTF??!!??
6. Average instance run time with a PUG: Normal run time X 2.5.
7. Party members who get the drop they want off the first boss and split.
8. Pullers who start the next pull before everyone’s ready.
9. Pullers who think they can pull and can’t.
10. People who leave the party on the first wipe.
11. “Sorry - I can only play for 1/2 hour“.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, so help me out via comments! Feels good to get that off your chest, doesn’t it? Amanna is here to help.