A Druid, a Hunter, and a Core Hound Go to Strat Dead
“What do you want to do? Can we go see Northrend? Can we? Please?”
“If the boat is working, you bet.”
A resto druid guildie of ours made it into the beta, and we were going to show her the ropes. Why didn’t she respec Feral and go tear it up herself?
“‘Cause she’s a Resto, d@mnit.”
You wanna argue with that? We don’t.
But the Northrend continent was down. The server is up, but no traveling to Northrend. What to do? Well, we could take out Strat Dead.
Core Hound gave that place a beat-down. It turns out that Lava Breath works like a ranged “cone” attack, grabbing those 3-5 trash-packs all at once. Of course, Core Hound is level 69 and those 58+ elites didn’t dent him at all.
We took down Nerub’enkan and got our Dungeon Set Zero boots! Yeeha!
The Baroness mind-controlled the “hunter” part of BRK, but left Core Hound alone. Smart girl.
Maleki went down like a sack of bricks, and we intentionally aggro’d that five-pack to the left of him. We hate that five-pack; it used to induce fear in our soul. Core Hound ate them for lunch.
/urp
When we got to the gate it wouldn’t open.
“Aren’t we supposed to clean out the Ziggerauts?” our druid said.
/doop
We went back, cleaned out the Ziggys, voila! Open gate.
Abominations? Easy, peasie. But…
“Um, honestly, I don’t have a clue how we’re going to do the massive wave of non-elite skeletons,” we announced. She laughed.
You know how all the +Spell Damage and +Healing gear has been melded into +Spell Power? Well, it turns out that a Resto Druid packs a pretty mean Hurricane when their +Spell Power = 2000. (Her bonus to healing was >2000, so we’re assuming her +Spell Power is similar; we could be totally wrong on the actual number. But she wiped them out, all of them.)
With the non-elites smoldering on the road, we took down the big elite skeletons, Core Hound’s Lava Breath keeping them all on him the entire time as we DPS-cycled through them.
Baron Rivendare, foshizzle, in all his pre-Death Knigget glory.
“For Baron, just Hurricane the first wave of skeletons. We’ll kill him quickly; he only has 40k health.”
So, of course, we grabbed aggro from Core Hound. /ashamed
But a quick Feign Death and reposition resulted in us smooshing Baron before the second wave of skeletons caused any problems.
We beat the timer with three minutes left when Baron hit the deck! We would’ve had more had we not been noobs and actually killed the acolytes in the Ziggys at the appropriate time and not had to run back.
No, his mount didn’t drop, thank goodness. Can you image the horror if it had?
“We got Baron’s Dreadstead!! We’re winners!”
“It’s Beta; we’ll never see it in real-WoW!! We’re the world’s biggest losers!”
“I hate you!!”
“NO! I hate YOU!!”
It’s much better that we just vendored everything. /nod
When we ignore that we’re level 74 and Core Hound is level 69 and we had a Tier-5-geared resto druid with us, we can recognize that this little experiment was a beautiful thing. Why?
It all “worked”.
To understand the deep meaning of this, you have to have experienced the beta, where very little works. Core Hound’s Charge worked. His Lava Breath worked. His 75% AoE-damage mitigation worked. There was no lag, no bizarre terrain black holes, no broken mobs… nothing to impede our use of our new pet, spells, and talents.
This was testing old and stoic content with the new talents and spells of WotLK, and Core Hound and the pet talents worked beautifully. This was our first real experience – as underwhelming as the content may be – with the new hunter stuff.
It was glorious.
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22 Responses to “A Druid, a Hunter, and a Core Hound Go to Strat Dead”
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“(Her bonus to healing was >2000, so we’re assuming her +Spell Power is similar; we could be totally wrong on the actual number. But she wiped them out, all of them.)”
Spell power will be less than what +healing currently is.
From mmo-champion:
“Healing characters will see their bonus healing numbers on the character sheet decrease, however, all healing spells have been modified to receive more benefit from spellpower than they received from bonus healing, with a net effect of no change to the amount healed by their spells. Some talents have had to be rebalanced to accommodate this change, but the amount healed will remain roughly the same. In addition, some talents will provide only healing spell power. “
Good old stratholme days!! :’)
i think i might be visiting Baron Rivendare in a couple of hours!
There’s also the training dummies available in Dalaran, Org and SW, which are considered raid level bosses. In my experience, go to the Azeroth city (Org or SW) because the Dalaran ones will be heavily used.
But they ain’t as exciting as a Strat run
Your druid probably has the equivalent of about 1000 spell power, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
2000 is terrifying – that’s what people will be running around with after killing Arthas.
Man, I feel your pain on the beta woes… so much is broken! It’s no fun to be flying triumphantly through SMV having tamed some new pets, only to be dropped unceremoniously to my death for no particular reason.
S-T-O-I-C
I think you mean static? Damn spell checkers won’t tell you if you’ve used an incongruous word, as long as it’s spelled correctly.
If I’m wrong just /ignore me, though I can’t see how you can mean stoic.
-Hunter Zaraya-
The most fun I can remember having was a L70 Strat run…2 hunters, 2 mages and a rogue. We tore that place up….took down Baroness with no MC’s and had about 5 minutes on the timer, even when taking our time.
Ketaralethar – L70 Hunter, Stargazer Clan – Elune
Ket on Northrend Server (beta)
So with all this PTR and Beta stuff, I assume you are not raiding anymore “for reals”? Kind of sad, I really hoped for some hunter perspective of MH and BT, where I am in now.
Dead Strat is easy for a well-geared (Kara and Badges) hunter to solo. We have a hunter in our guild who grinded Dead Strat multiple times a day to get the Baron’s mount. After 2-3 weeks and 60-ish runs, he finally got it!
Speaking of the Spell Power adjustments, does this mean there is no more +Spell Damage for specific schools like fire, ice, arcane, etc.?
Strat is easy to solo at lvl 70. You made it sound to hard.
It’s good that they’re finally getting things implemented without bugs, like lava breath and other new spells and abilities. Good because considering they just announced the official release date (Nov. 13), they had better bust out a new gear to get things finished.
Question: I know you’ve mentioned the stutter-step for things like lava breath and the chimera skill, is that fixed in the beta? I’m on the ptr, and it’s still messed up (as far as I can tell, with the terrible amounts of lag).
To Borri:
No, he made it sound interesting. And considering it was dead strat, that in itself proves what a good storyteller he is
.
Yes, it is around 1000 spell power/healing now. BRK used the number 2000ish because that is what I had before the changes. He didn’t pay attention to me when I was crying to him about it getting cut in half with the changes. He was too busy showing me his rhino, core hound and what-the-hell-ever sort of wolf that thing was….
Anyway, yes, BRK could have solo’ed that place with his pet, other than perhaps the exception of those tons of non elite skeletons. I really healed him very little, I actually started casting spells to do dps out of boredom. It was fun to watch the core hound in action.
Shianti’s player
@Borri
I think the word you are looking for is “Dramatic”.
I love doing live and undead Strat, took many of my guildies through there for their epic mount, as well as my pally.
Kinzlayer don’t you mean Scholomance for the epic mounts? Warlocks and Paladins have to go to Scholomance not Stratholme.
@ Irwin – You just gave me hope to keep soloing Strat UD for the Deathcharger’s Reigns! I’ve done about 10 runs so far. Time to keep going!
Jageria of Uther Alliance
41/20/0 Hunter
Oh, and btw, I soloed Strat UD in about 25 minutes w/ a lvl 80 Death Knigget specced fully in the Unholy tree. Talk about fun!
Stoic: adj, unaffected, indifferent.
@Fathgar: You need Holy Water for part of the pally epic mount chain, so yeah, at least 1 visit to Strath is necessary.
I regularly run Strat solo on my Feral enchanter for shards and a chance at the reins.
It’s ironic that it all worked perfectly on the test as that place wastes a lot of my time with it’s instability. Often, Rammstein does not spawn so the final doors stay closed or the Aboms randomly respawn all over again and still the doors stay shut.
Oh, and a /Barkskin – /Hurrricane takes out the skelly zerg with a ferals +20 spell damage.
Sorry, but this is a non story really. I and many friends have solo’d the timed event at level 70.
@Nick S.
My mage on Murmur (Premade realm) geared with Naxx and Chamber of the Aspects loot, 25 and 10 man mix… still some PvP gear on.. but either way. 1900 Spell Power. No where near close to Arthas gear
Yeah, nothing like a strat run for fun and profit (gogohunterdisenchanting). You can beat the place way faster than that, druid stealths, you run to a boss, FD, pop up-eat-kill boss, run to next boss and FD all the adds you’ve pulled. Baroness is MUCH easier if you mdismiss your pet as she can’t mind control if there’s only one person and she’s nice enough to cast (mostly resisted) spells at you at range. In kara/badge gear you can simply DPS baron through the skellie-heals in under 2 waves. DE everything and sell the shards/eternals, laugh all the way to the bank.
If only my pally could FD…
I am sure this had already been posted, but her spell power would be about 700.
The HEALING part of the spellpower got reduced, the spell power did not change. Spell power is generally a third of the current healing power.