We Think They May Hate Us Now
Last night before Kara resets and we’re going to try Shade of Aran for the first time. Nervous? Yep. So we decide to go to Chess first. A pretty shield drops, and also:
How much phat purple loot can one hunter walk away with before he gets guild-kicked? We’re not sure, but it’s getting close.
So we cannot put Aran off any more, and on our first attempt we get him down to 11%. Two more tries and we get elementals, fire rings and arcane explosions all on top of each other. Pfft, whatever. Last try we get him down to 5% before the last gurgle escapes from our throats. Poopy.
How did damage look for Aran and Chess trash and our Aran wipe?
As usual, Doomilias pushes us hard to maintain our top spot. If you’re interested in rogues, you should read his blog.
Kruncs of Cho'gall on 31 Jul 2007 at 3:48 am #
Bad first Kara experience tonight: 5 wipes and Midnight nor Autt even went down.
Kruncs of Cho'gall on 31 Jul 2007 at 3:49 am #
two notes: 1) i topped dps with 21% ^-^ 2) was 50% our guild, and 50% other guild that invited ours.
Stephanie on 31 Jul 2007 at 4:06 am #
What mod is it that is giving the breakdown for the stats? I must have it!
Doomilias on 31 Jul 2007 at 4:50 am #
and BRK pushes me just as hard. grats on your week of loot, for this you may never experience again!
steph, its called ratingsbuster.
Traz on 31 Jul 2007 at 7:36 am #
I’m telling you… July is the Month of Hunter Loot. Watch it all go down hill from tomorrow.
Gratz again Big Red ^^
Pedxing on 31 Jul 2007 at 8:18 am #
Don’t use anything but Arcane, Multi, and serpent during the onion, I mean fire rings. If Shade moves and you try to fire off a steady shot, you will realign yourself with him and blow everyone up.
KABOOM!
I learned this the hard way.
But at least pets are no longer effected.
Toolio on 31 Jul 2007 at 1:09 pm #
If this is the month of hunter loot, I’ve been left out in the cold. Not looking forward to August!
Zemulos on 31 Jul 2007 at 1:42 pm #
You know, we have two kara groups running atm. Yet I can’t get people together to reliably show up for gruul’s lair? Go figure… Anyway, both groups are clearing shade. I used to think shade was a dps fight. But he’s not. Everytime his health has been higher than his mana and we try to burn him down? Wipe. Well, we are now able to one or two shot him each week. Here’s the method. At 50% health STOP DPS. Keep rogues and your warrior interrupting, but be careful the warrior doesn’t autoattack when interrupting. Heal to full and wait out his mana. It’s boring I know, but do it. AFter polymorph, heal up and resume dps. Assign a feral druid/rogue someone for the elem tank. At 40% when teh adds come, that assigned person targets one and all others use assist (F-key) and burn down each one he targets. EXCEPT the warrior with shieldbash needs to stay on the shade and NOT dps the adds. Someone HAS to be on the shade to see when flame wreath is coming. AFter all adds dead, finish him off. This is the EASIEST and most reliable strategy.
Kruncs of Cho'gall on 31 Jul 2007 at 1:53 pm #
RatingBuster (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/4991/)
Hathorn on 31 Jul 2007 at 3:21 pm #
All I know.. is that I was Number 2, and I have sucky Feral gear. For instance, one of my Trinkets increases my spell damage and healing by 280 for 12 seconds. I only use it because of my mad kitty spell damage.
Of course.. I can’t get anything else to drop for me
Guy on 31 Jul 2007 at 3:52 pm #
Alright.. so it took you 8 weeks to get something that took me 8 months to get.
Awesome.
Yeah.. I’m a little jealous. But my pants and gloves still rock anyone’s!
Anyway, grats on the phat lewt.
Now get SW stats already!
And all of you need to start doing more 25man content. Trust me, it’s a blast, I never laughed so hard on a raid than my first night in SSC.
We got Lurker last week, and I’m sure we’re going to down Hydros this week. Exciting stuff!
Aran is a little bitch. We do it opposite of Zem, we make it a DPS race. We usually don’t kill him before he drinks, but we get him down enough to make it pretty easy after that. We banish and fear the elementals and then focus fire them.
After we come out of being sheeped everyone pops their health stone after the nuke, then the druid(s) pop tranquility to top everyone’s health off. It’s easy mode from there.
GL all!
-guy
PS: Yes, I will continue to one up you as long as I can, but if you get my bow before me I just might cry.
Doogie on 31 Jul 2007 at 4:48 pm #
Last night, I went to SSC for the first time.
With the tank of our SV run.
And no one else.
I got ganked by six elite fish.
It was grand.
I have screenshots. That place looks awesome.
That is all.
Brigin on 31 Jul 2007 at 4:53 pm #
zemulos, thanks for posting your strategy. I have a couple of questions.
1. How many tanks do you usually run with to kill Aran?
2. When you say interrupt, do you interrupt arcane, frostbolt and firebolt?
Anonymous on 31 Jul 2007 at 6:10 pm #
2 things ….
why separate your dmg and Hobbes? do that on another page of the meters imo. that way the dps ego’s will be aligned properly.
2nd, steady shot rotation on Aran should never blow u up …u can turn all u want but don’t take a step.
Kara = ZG …. move on(u don’t need to finish Kara to do SSC and TK)imo but up to u of course
Secndworst
Hunter Class Leader
Stormreavers, Shadow Moon(US)
brast on 31 Jul 2007 at 6:19 pm #
I would suggest interupting frostbolt and fireball for Aran, but let him cast arcane missles.
1) It is a channelled spell in which he expends the mana at the beginning. Interupting this in the middle of casting does not save you any time in the race against his mana.
2) It is easy to heal through. I seem to recall it being a 4 sec channel and does about 4000 damage in total. That is easy for the healers to keep up with.
If you lock out of his schools of magic, he is actually not a complete slouch in melee dps. If your tank has a 2h equipped for the dps race, it will hurt. I’ll take arcane missles instead.
BRK on 31 Jul 2007 at 6:25 pm #
why separate your dmg and Hobbes? do that on another page of the meters imo. that way the dps ego’s will be aligned properly.
We like to keep them separate to ensure we’re using Hobbes properly. Used as a efficiency and effectiveness tool, a damage meter is a great for determining the where flaws in raid workings occur.
If the boomkins and mages are fighting for dps-supremacy, you can bet your tank is doing a good job at generating threat. If they are down-ranking spells and the hunters and rogues are running away with the top positions, you probably have a threat-generation issue which you must correct.
We see no such similar benefit for combining hunter/pet damage data.
Zemulos on 31 Jul 2007 at 7:22 pm #
I take two tanks to each of our kara groups. One prot warrior, and one feral druid. For shade, there is no reason to not go zerk stance/battlestance and two hander plus pummel. Two prot tanks with shield is still fine too though. Interrupts are better than dps for a portion of this fight. Due to dps not having to hold back, tanks will not be highest on the threat meter anyhow, unless your dps is weak.
Ah, all the strategies online also point at letting arcane missiles through and stopping firebolt, fireblast. I disagree. All arcane bolts together can add up to about 8-9k damage on a single player barring crits. Fireball and frostbolt equal 1.5k less damage per target. The mana usage thing is true, you are not stopping his mana by stopping arcane, but in my strategy, I don’t want to stop his mana usage anyway, I just want people to survive and not run the healers oom.
Shade only melees if all three of his spells are inerrupted in succession. Let one in three spells get through, just so he stays positioned in the center and you aren’t all running around to get him back there.
Flame wreath. One poster said you can turn all you want. That is inaccurate. Turning will set off the wreath. You can auto attack, but don’t move or turn, don’t feign death, don’t accept a battlerez or soulstone rez in the wreath either. Hardest part is this, when the elems are out and you’re in wreath… you just have to take it. Bandage yourself if possible, wait for heals and stand still til wreath goes away.
Last note, when avoiding blizzard, if your healers get that aoe silence thing. Make their asses bandage you. That’s what our pally does
Zemulos on 31 Jul 2007 at 7:29 pm #
P.S. Guy’s strategy works only if you have very strong dps. It DOES work, but not unless you have the gear and experience to make it work. And Guy, you find fear to be effective on the elems? You can only fear one at a time as they are too spread out to mass fear them. And banish… I like it, but don’t find it necessary. Fear has just underperformed for my groups, but I’ve heard it works. I’d rather just have FF on a target right away though personally.
Guy on 31 Jul 2007 at 8:34 pm #
Zem,
Between lock fears, banish, priest fears and warrior fears it’s pretty easy to focus fire and cc the elementals while continuing to interrupt. Just spread out your people around him and make sure they’re ready to pick up a target. Use each players own form of CC on them instead of trying to mass CC them with an AoE fear or whatever.
This is a fight where I don’t envy the raid leader as he/she has to mark the targets fast enough and know which targets have what form of CC so they know which is going to get the FF next.
Also.. It’s been my experience you can pivot in your flame wreath, jump, FD, /dance whatever you want as long as you don’t cross the fire. I know it was bugged for a long time where not even a pet (or snake) could be used but I think they’ve pretty much fixed it now to where you just have to make sure you don’t go outside the circle.
On top of it all, you have one guy with a raid icon over his head that you run to every time there’s a blizzard. I hate being that guy.
Feist on 31 Jul 2007 at 8:55 pm #
Aran is one of the few fights where a Marksman hunter is far more useful than BM spec.
Silencing Shot, while not living up to it’s name, can interrupt his casts, and that is job number one for anyone in your raid able to do so.
More to the point, Aran is a Melee DPS - and especially Rogue showboating fight, so let Doom have his fun.
the key thing is to have 2-3 short cooldown interrupts (Rogues, Warriors, Shaman), and ideally another 2 or 3 occasional ones (Mage counterspells, Silencing shots, whatever).
Assign each interrupt a school of spells to kick off - Fire or Frost, and they should ONLY interrupt spells of that school - ideally near the end of the cast. Don’t interrupt arcane casts as the mana cost is upfront - just call out the target for healers to respond quickly.
CC the elementals as much as you can w/ Fears/Banishes/your tank who isn’t going to be doing much damage anyway most likely (Aran is untankable), but have your DPS ignore them - they’ll despawn after a minute anyway, and bring a druid along to cast tranquility right as you come out of Polymorph - beyond that, it’s a straight up DPS race and Healer mana endurance test - you as a hunter shouldn’t need to stack stam at all for aran.
Oh, and make sure the entire raid sees this:
http://shadeofaranchant.ytmnd.com/
Feist, 70 Rogue, Mok’Nathal
Zemulos on 01 Aug 2007 at 2:23 pm #
You know, I didn’t used to think that turning set off wreath also, but it has really been our groups experience that it does indeed set it off. I have done it myself just by being turned with a steadyshot. Perhaps your form of cc is good times, guy, but I think overall you might play with a stronger group of people than most here. I have SOME uber people in my group, but I also have some that need to be directed where to point and click, even though they are epicced out with nice dps to boot. Go figure. So most of my boss strategies are made to fit the partially retarded group. I think I have every stoner in Anvilmar server in my guild. The less I give them to think about, the better off we are. We oneshot almost every boss in Kara now, because I’ve learned to accept that I have to think for them sometiems
But WTF is up with Nightbane? We had 3 wipes before killing him this past week. Each wipe consisted of him randomly attacking someone FAR below me on aggro (I was tanking). Threat meter was reset every fight and nightbane was set as master target. Random aggro was really pissing me off. In addition, people were complaining of not being able to see the charred earth animations.