Run away, little girl
This weekend, I switched from BigWigs to DeadlyBossMods, just so I can say I have tried it. I liked many elements of it, but still am kinda peeved that you cannot move the boss health frame unless you’re actually fighting said boss. That’s just poor design, you should have a test mode for all bars. I actually made an Auriaya video that I need to cut and render, and I am ashamed of my UI, I tell ya, ashamed!
One of the features of DBM is that it plays the voice from Big Bad Wolf to run away whenever you need to. Which seems to be a running theme in Ulduar as tank, because there are very few moments you ever stand still. Tank and spank? Not very much! So far only XT-002 Deconstructor and Kologarn had their tank and spank moments. But I ran and ran and ran on every single other boss we tackled this weekend.
Daughters of the Horde are now 8/13 in Ulduar in our 3rd raid ID, which is excellent progress. I am not counting Algalon, that’s out of reach for us casual scrubs, and that’s fine. But we’ve only done 18 hours of raiding in Ulduar and have killed 8 bosses and gotten the first piece of T8 for one of our raiders (grats, Sawyer!) so overall, I am very happy.
On Saturday, we did all the mandatory bosses to get to Hodir, with pretty decent success. We had a few new people in the raid, so Flame Leviathan took a lot longer than he really should. We wipe on trash, that was our running theme. Also, we charge on the ramp and then fall through Ulduar. There’s not much underneath Ulduar, I will say. FL himself proved to be no problem, and same with XT-002 Deconstructor. Kologarn is really no big deal for us at all it seems. More of a big deal is the Auriaya trash, we had quite a few special moments there. Imagine 10 girls yelling ‘Don’t touch the balls! Squish the balls!’ Haha. 
I managed to snag the two first pieces of Ulduar gear for myself. The pretty amazing Mark of the Unyielding off Kologarn, and Archaedas’ Lost Legplates off Auriaya. I am very torn on the latter. I would have to give up Essence of Gossamer or the Valor Medal of the First War to be able to wear them. Above all, I would have to give up the 4 pc T7 bonus losing the pants. I could swap in my T7 helmet to keep the bonus, but it’s inferior to the Tempered Titansteel helmet. Decisions, decisions. What do you other tanks reckon, are they worth swapping gear for or should I wait until Hodir gives me my token?
We had Auriaya on the second pull, and then just like the previous raid, wiped our way through Hodir trash to Hodir himself. I had made myself two pieces of Icebane, belt and boots, and had farmed normal Halls of Lightning until Loken finally dropped Seal of the Pantheon. That took freaking forever, I have no intention of going there again for a while. We used a single tank, me, and the second tank went for a DPS spec. On Saturday, we got him to like 60% in our best try. We had problems with healing the raid through Frozen Blows.
On Sunday we headed straight through to Hodir and I tried my best to pull very slowly and carefully. It took a while, but we managed to not wipe at all, so that’s worth it for me. It reminded me of slowly having to pull through the ballroom in Karazhan, careful not to get adds from any snowdrift. Then back to Hodir. First few tries were shaky again, but on the third try we nailed it. We stacked the buffs better (zomg, Stormcloud), people moved (for the most part) and pre-HoTing for Frozen Blows seems to have worked quite well. Collective Twitter advice for the win.
Instead of trying to tackle another Keeper, we went back to kill the optional bosses we skipped. Razorscale went well enough. Our first try was problematic, the second try we got a helpful strategic tip from Drebian, a mage from a guild we’re friends with, and we got it easily the second time then. Unfortunately, Ignis didn’t work for us at all. I did just about every adds tank mistake in the books: broke roots, had a system crash, after the system crash my G13 didn’t work so molten constructs were just sitting rooted, accidentally targetted Ignis and kept taunting him off the MT while my add ate the healers, and so on and so forth. Many deaths in the crotch pocket, and all in all not very satisfying. Because we were getting frustrated, we did Assembly of Iron instead. After initial issues with the pull, we finally got it. I had an off-day, I think, my interrupts often did not land, and it felt like I should work on hit rating because Shield Bash missed quite a bit. Life as only interrupt made for sad times. Still, we got it, and in the last frantic moments of Stormcaller Brundir’s life, I managed to interrupt Lightning Whirl while finding my Iron Boot flask in my bags, to get that achievement, hooray.
All in all, it was a mixed bag. The joy in taking down yet another boss in there, paired with some great mobility on Hodir, followed by some of the weakest tanking I have done in a long time. But you can only learn and grow by looking at your own mistakes critically and working on fixing them.
As next decision, I have to figure out how we can kill Hodir on the first day, and which Keeper to pick as second target. I am tied on either Freya or Thorim. Both require sharp DPS, but I don’t really know which one would be best to tackle. Any advice welcome.
Call of the Crusade (10 player)
Lockdown!
1000 Dungeon & Raid Emblems
Epic
Pony Up!
Heroic: Emalon the Storm Watcher
Heroic: Koralon the Flame Watcher
Needy
500 Stone Keeper's Shards
Explore Storm Peaks
Good Grief
Archavon the Stone Watcher
In the 10 man, I would say Thorim. It takes a little practice just to get to know the gauntlet and the arena, but given you’re slightly short on time, it has the big benefit of not having much of a trash clear.
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Pick whichever one drops the loot you most want
I think they’re similar in terms of difficulty and both will take a bit of practice. Freya does have more trash but may be a slightly easier fight in 10 man imo.
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In reference to the Archaedas pants, I have them and I love them. I think they are superior to the T8 pants, hands down. They lack defense, but I have the tanking trinket from Thad10, so I can afford to lose some defense. And I am an expertise junky, so the fat chunk these pants offer up is just sexy. I advise you to definitely try to squeeze them into your tanking set if you can.
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Freya has much more trash to fight through, but both Bosses are more about the fight before the fight. Once you get to fighting the actual boss it’s pretty much over. For Freya it definately is. Thorim and can still wipe you if the tanks aren’t quick taunting off each other.
We found Freya easier than Thorim, but both are easier than Mimiron, at least when we were learning Ulduar.
As for the pants, I try to avoid Expertise if I can, but since every piece of offset gear is made for DKs/Warriors, I have it in spades anyway.
Honorshammer´s last blog ..Speaking Another Language
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For Frozen Blows I solo Tank Hodir and here is what I do:
Maximize Frost Resist (I have chest, treads, belt, ring) and with no defensive trinket I can still stay capped at 540. 3 pieces should be mroe than enough for 10 man. My tank gear is not that impressive (Dozenz, US Server garrosh) and when I first killed him I had only one gear that was ilevel 213 or above (Boundless Ambition)
But more imporantly…
Save shield block for frozen blows. Pop Last Stand for first Frozen blows, shield wall for second, Valor Medal of the First war for 3rd, and by 4th Last stand should be back up (glyphed for 2 min last stands).
For the final last stand I use Enraged Regen as well to assist with heals….could also pop it during Valor use as that is the weakest of the cooldowns I use.
Also keep Hodir tanked by a cozy fire. It keeps you from getting frozen in place from the Frost Nova like ability (and keeps healers healing from having to dispel) and you don’t have to wory about the stacked debuff.
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I didn’t realise you were in an all-girl guild, how cool is that!
Freya/Thorim, I’d go for Thorim first probably, I think it has a slightly easier learning curve but they’re very similar difficulty really.
I like those legs but… expertise (ie. threat) is not something I really need. I’m only just over 540 at the moment, so whist the legs’ avoidance is awesome I’m not sure I’d want them because of the defence complications.
I presume you checked the whether using defence yellow gems, defence cloak enchant, plus defence elixir would do the trick?
Gravity´s last blog ..Dodge 3.2
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admin Reply:
July 14th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I can actually make it work, using the Seal of the Pantheon plus a def gem in it. I gave it a try in a heroic yesterday. They’re pretty nice, but I’ll stick to my 4 pc bonus for the time being when tanking in Ulduar.
And yeah, all girls, all proud.
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Wow, I found a blog that’s raiding at almost the same level as me! We have the ten-man keepers on farm mostly, and will be doing our third round (and the first real one if you ask me) of Vezax tries tonight.
My tip is Thorim, as long as you manage to sort out what adds do what it’s sort of trivial – survival in the arena is fairly easy on ten-man so the gauntlet people can take their time. P2 is a DPS race but it’s pretty lenient as long as you have decent healage/tankage. Freya requires tonnes of coordination, Thorim is just “don’t stand in the fire”.
Good luck on your progress!
Vorla´s last blog ..Sartharion with three drakes up
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admin Reply:
July 14th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Sounds like great advice, thank you!
And yay for successful casual raiding.
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Love the look of your whisper tabs. Text at the top is HUGE. Now I need to configure mine that way.
Also noticed the “storm cloud on me” on the demon. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that before, but I don’t have chat bubbles on. Hmm..
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Valkure Reply:
July 14th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Oh and.. healing has been a nightmare in the Arena on Thorim. But I too think Thorim is a good choice before Freya.
Valkure´s last blog ..Healing Assignment Redux
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The problem with the Tempered Titansteel Helm is that it has such a huge amount of stamina on it that in this EH-driven world of progression raiding it is just too hard to give up. It is genuinely better than Ulduar 10 drops, which is just ridiculous.
I feel your pain on the trinket issue. I recently took the plunge and ditched my Essence of Gossamer. It was a wrench to see my unbuffed health dip below 30k again. I made up for it by making myself a little mini-cooldown button by macroing together two trinkets and my herbalism heal – this gives me 5k of health (2k of it over 4 seconds) and 5k armour. I hope this will be useful on melee-type bosses. For magic-damage bosses I will swap my stamina trinket back in.
On the boss issue – one thing to consider for Freya is that you will get four emblems (the trash bosses drop easy emblems too). This might help your gearing up. The only hard thing about Freya is the three adds which have to be killed together – if your dps is on the ball, or you have a dps leader who can call out the targets over vent, you’ll be fine.
I found Thorim pretty easy (my job was the tunnel tank then helping tank the boss). The tunnel itself is not much harder than the UP heroic gauntlet before Skadi (although the boss AoE comes faster), and if your dps is awake then the healer mobs can be burst down pretty fast, allowing you to zerg the second mini boss really quickly and clear up the melee mobs later.
Everblue´s last blog ..Avoidance changes in 3.2
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We definitely found Thorim easier then Freya. There was a bit of a learning curve on the waves of adds on Freya. Weirdly enough we one shot Thorim on our first try on him (10 man). I’d just make sure you have an interrupter in the gauntlet and you should be gtg.
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