Kingslayers, All

After months of clearing out different amount of bosses in ICC, Knights of the Serpent and NightMarish Dreams finally downed Arthas.

Knights of the Serpent:
Signu - Prot Warrior
Sealedfaith - Resto Druid
Restitution - Resto Shaman
Speeddemon - Fury Warrior
Razulisback - Destro Warlock
Madamedeath - Shadow Priest

NightMarish Dreams:
Coterize - Destro Warlock
Fentwin - Survival Hunter
Kimyoko - Protection Paladin
Magetrink - Arcane Mage

Vengeance

Tanks - Vengeance
Imagine the tooltip for Vengeance read "Your damage scales with the rest of your raid as if you wore dps gear instead of tanking gear." That's pretty much it.

Knights of the Serpent Recruiting

Knights of the Serpent (Terenas-US) is recruiting a few members to raid 2-3 nights per week for 3 hours each night. Most of the members of the guild can fill multiple roles, we just need more people who can be reliable.

Please fill out the questionnaire below if you are interested:

Drunk and Half-naked

"We view Arms as a soldier, like a career military infantryman. Think Gladiator. We view Fury as the wild berserker from up in the hills. Think Braveheart or Conan. It's easy to argue that bleeds or mobility fit one or the other depending on your point of view. Arms feels tactical (in the sense of having an answer for various situations) and Fury feels reckless. The Arms warrior has pet names for all his weapons, while the Fury warrior shows up for battle drunk and half clothed."
- Ghostcrawler

Flame Leviathan Short Man Guide

Today, I present to you, a guide for taking out Flame Leviathan with 3 or 4 people. 3 is fairly easy. 4 is cake. If you do the trash without losing any vehicles, and you one-shot FL, this can be done in about 30-45 minutes.

Why:
Split about 175g
2 item level 219 pieces of gear or Abyss crystals
Assorted bars and eternals (I've seen the stuff below)
- 20x Saronite
- Titansteel bar
- 5-8 eternals
- 15-20 Volatile Blasting Trigger

What you need:
2 geared people
1 or 2 filler people

What you really want to bring:
Enchanter (to DE epics)
Engineer (to de-engineer)

Clearing Trash:
The easiest thing to do here is have the two geared people drive Demolishers and the other people in choppers. Have the choppers drive around with speed boost and round up just about everything they can get before getting to the giant spider-like robots. Demolishers should just use the #1 attack until a Colossus gets into range. Then, switch to the #2 attack (pyrite). Try to pull the spider bots individually, and take them out fast with #2. When the flying mobs spawn, switch to the passenger seat and use the anti-air cannon (#2) to get them down fast. Repeat until you get to the last 2 Colossi.

Preparing for the pull:
Before you pull the last two Colossi, you should have the extra people get into the passenger seat of the Demolisher. Have one Demolisher in the left corner and one in the right corner. Have the passengers shooting down pyrite (and refreshing your energy) as you take out the colossus.

Taking him out:
Once FL comes out, just spam #2. Make sure you keep it stacked to 10. Passengers will need to chain in more pyrite in order for you to keep the debuff up. He will start to pursue one of the Demolishers. Back up as far as you can into the corner . Do not try to get away, just keep unloading the pyrite.

Driving a Demolisher alone:
If you are 3manning this, you will have 1 demolisher that has no passenger. If you run out of pyrite, switch to the passenger seat to chain some more in. Do this as soon as your last pyrite is fired and only grab in one new pyrite. Doing so will give you time to get back into the driver seat and fire off more pyrite before the 10-stack wears off. One caveat is that the Demolisher has very little HP with no one in the drivers seat, so don't attempt this if he is actively hitting you.

Some tricks/tips:
If you wipe, you'll have the full set of vehicles very close for the next attempt. Drive all the vehicles just inside the perimeter.
Doing the above will give you somewhere to go if FL destroys your ride.
Paladins can Divine Shield to give them time to get to another vehicle
Priests can shield, PoM, Renew, and Holy Nova (I think dispersion works also).
Warriors can Shield Wall (if you remember to put a shield on and get in Defensive Stance).

So there you have it. If it's the weekly raid quest, you don't have to find much of a group anymore. Any way you look at it, it's quite a bit if extra cash or mats for not a whole lot of effort, but a whole lot of fun.

If you have any questions or additional tips, please leave them in the comments.

New Tricks for the Old Guild

Last night, my little guild cleared the first wing of ICC in 2.5 hours. This might not sound like too much of a feat, but let me explain.

This was the first time Knights of the Serpent has fielded a full 10-main raid since the early days of Naxx. This was the first time six of the ten had even attempted Marrowgar. We were two healing it. We had a couple undergeared dps.

The end result was no more than 3 attempts on any fight (2 on Marrowgar, 2 on Deathwhisper, 2 on Gunship, and 3 on Saurfang).

I was so proud, happy, and excited of/for our two healers. I was very doubtful that they'd be able to pull it off because I had seen the difficulties 2 healers have on the first two fights. They both stepped up to the plate to show me that they are epic healers.

My bear offtank did a supurb job with his assignments. He was quick to pick up any stray mobs. Best of all, he was perfect on taunts for Saurfang. I was doing quite poorly on my taunts and it led to a wipe once.

The DPS consistently performed excellently. I was surprised that our undergeared DPS contributed so greatly.

This guild used to be one of the top 25-man guilds in BC. Our goal for LK was to be one of the top 10man guilds on the server. We may be getting a late start, but I'd say we're on our way.

Congrats to everyone on the loot you received. Thank you for making your old raid/guild leader proud.

Old notes: Fixing Block

Back in July of last year, I spent a lot of time researching how I felt block should be fixed to make it useful and not overpowered. I never got around to actually writing the article, but I thought my notes might be of some interest to someone. I basically came up with a way to fix block, then used CharDev to test out what the results would look like in BiS gear.

Fixing Block:

Warriors and Paladins need 40-50% block rating and 10-15% dodge and 10-15% parry

Blocking needs to block a percentage of incoming damage.
- Same level has 50-75% damage reduction (50 is base, with SBV max contribution 25%)
- +5% for each level below
- -5% for each level above (60% vs raid bosses)
- SBV contribution scaling ends at 3000 SBV


BiS DK (25-man buffed) avoidance gear:
2 piece T8 (shoulders/chest)
26000 Armor (?)
47000 HP
31% dodge
20% parry

BiS Warrior (25-man buffed) block gear:
32000 armor
39000 hp
24% dodge
17% parry
52% block (2156, 18% DR)

Essentially, the DK was my control. Mostly wearing avoidance gear, but gemmed for stamina. The DK had 51% avoidance from dodge and parry (before diminishing returns). The Warrior has 41% with 52% block (geared exclusively for block rating). Against raid bosses, the warrior would be mitigating about 53% of the damage. The Warrior has much less health, so the extra mitigation did not seem to be that imbalanced.

I lot has changed in the game since then (DK health nerf, Warrior health buff). So, this is really more of record of my thoughts back then.