Bash My Face In

For the past days, an hour each morning, I’ve been chain farming Ahune, The Frost Lord in an attempt to get the Icebound Cloak. It’s the best tanking cloak outside of raiding, which I don’t really have time to do. I currently have the Platinum Mesh Cloak, so this would be quite an upgrade. Unfortunately, since there’s a shortage of tanks, Blizzard decided it would be a great idea to lower the drop rate of the Icebound Cloak in order to keep tanks queuing for the boss.

I understand where they’re coming from, but it’s a low blow by Blizzard, I think stormforce1234 sums it up best:

Come to think of it this is a brilliant move by Blizzard…towards the end of xpacs tanks tend to be hard to come by and what better way to ensure that there are fast queues for the daily runners than to place a carrot on stick in front of the proverbial horse tank

Thank you Blizzard for mistreating a class that is already overworked, underappreciated and often verbally abused for bad runs beyond their control.

Yep.  Good ol’ Butterbean invading Sarama’s blog to give a shout out at you guys and let yall know who I am real quick.

I’m a Warrior from the Rexxar realm on alliance.  Currently I’m in the 2nd ranked Alliance guild for raid progression on Rexxar.  I have known Sarama for years, and he was even nice enough to give me my own blog for my own madness to be unleashed there.  He gave me permission to write on his blog here as a guest poster since he is very active in work and real life stuff and I’m…well, I’m unemployed and have nothing better to do! *insert cheesy grin and two thumbs up here*  I’ve currently got about six level 80 toons that I hop between here and there, but my main is currently my warrior, which I am currently mainspec fury with an arms offspec for pvp, however, i change that back and forth to prot here and there, so I still have some tanking glyphs in there because I’m about how Sarama once was and very financially unstable in-game (only, I have 2 epic flyers on two of my toons, so take that, Sarama!)

So yeah, enough about me.  I suppose you want some sort of content, so since I’m mostly a raider, figured I’d give you guys my views on the new raid instance, Ruby Sanctum.

Ruby Sanctum is actually very similar to Obsidian Sanctum, only you have to kill the minibosses before you can challenge Halion.  There is no Halion +3 or anything.  Thats what you have the Heroic switch for.  The minibosses in here are fairly tank and spank with their own little twists that add some minor challenge.  You have one that summons mirror images of himself, you have another that has an air phase where you have to stay away from the people with arrows over their head, and then you have another than summons adds that should most definately be killed swiftly and interupt their casts (rogues, deathknights and warriors come in handy there with their interupts).  The minibosses are simple, but interesting, and that is always nice.

Halion himself is actually the ball-buster here, as you would expect.  He is a boss with 3 phases (as you come to expect anymore) and each phase has its own little twist.  In each phase, you have a mark to deal with which, when cleansed, will leave a circle of fire (or shadow) on the ground that has a radius dependant on how long you had the debuff.  In phase one, he has a meteor that comes down and sends a trail of fire across the combat area that you have to avoid, and in heroic mode, it summons a fire elemental add that must be AoEd down on top of halion.  In phase two, there are orbs that float around and will periodicaly create a beam between the two that will one shot anyone if it touches you.  In normal mode, there are 2 orbs, and in hard mode, there are 4, which makes it form a cross rather than just one straight line.  In phase, three, you have one group of people in his physical realm and another in his twilight realm, basically dealing with phase one and two all at the same time, only each group has to keep him at roughly the same amount of life or he starts healing and doing more damage, and it just gets ugly and causes a wipe.  In all, it is a relatively simple fight once you learn the mechanics and adjust accordingly, and it is also pretty fun to do and you get some nice 277 (or 271…cant remember) loot out of it, so I would suggest giving it a go.

At any rate, I’ll be back sometime and give ya’ll some more stuff to read, maybe some laughs, who knows.  And if you are interested in learning this fight, I also have a detailed fight explaination on my blog (It’s not a Bean), that Sarama has posted a link to on the side of his page, so check it out if the information I gave you here feels a little vague to you.  I can imagine in a few weeks to a month this will be completely pugable, so to all the raiders or part-time raiders, start educating people, and I’m out.

I’ve been doing a lot of raiding lately.  In fact, this week I had every raid instance saved.  Naxxramas 10/25, Ulduar 10/25, Obsidian Sanctum 10/25, Vault of Archivon 10/25, and Onyxia’s Lair 10/25.  I guess that’s not all of them, I didn’t manage to find a group for Eye of Eternity.  For some reason, nobody ever wants to do that instance.  Is it hard or boring?  Is the loot pointless?  I’ve seen videos of the fight on youtube and I thought it looks like a fun fight.

I forgot to take a lot of screenshots, but I did manage to take a couple.  Here are some shots of Onyxia and Sartharion’s dead bodies.  I did get into the raid as DPS, but that’s mainly because there were better geared tanks in the raid.